A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym Page A

and I looked forward to the experience like a kind of treat. On the day I was to go, Mary rang up and said that she would come with me. It was too soon after her last session for her to give blood, but she had thought I might feel strange, not having been before.
    We were to attend the afternoon session and Sybil made me eat a particularly large lunch. She seemed to think that it would enrich my blood and make it all the more valuable to some dying person.
    ‘I was very much afraid I shouldn’t be able to get away,’ Mary chattered as we met at the bus stop. ‘Mother was in one of her restless moods, but eventually I got Miss Prideaux to come and sit with her so she’ll be all right till I get back. In fact, Miss Prideaux very kindly promised to give her her tea so I really needn’t hurry back. I’ve got them some crumpets, and Mother always likes those.’
    I saw old Mrs Beamish with the butter running down her chin, licking her fingers.
    ‘Here we are, said Mary brightly, ‘this is where we get off.’
    The hospital was next door to a church and the blood donors’ centre was in the crypt. We went down some steps and along a passage whose walls were adorned with eighteenth- century memorial tablets. It seemed fitting that we should be going into a kind of charnel house to give our blood, but the room we entered was all bustling efficiency, lit with strip lighting and hygienically clean. Only the patches of damp on the greenish distempered walls gave any hint that we were in a crypt. Several people were lying on beds, others sat on chairs clasping bottles which bore different coloured labels. Two men in white coats sat at a table receiving the donors as they came in, and joking as they made out cards and took drops of blood from pricks in our fingers.
    As we waited I studied the people round me, who were of all types and ages, trying to decide whether they all had some air of nobility in common. I came to the conclusion that while some were young, the majority were of the burden-bearing type, middle-aged and tired-looking, the sort of people who would take on yet another load in addition to all the others they already bore.
    Soon my turn came and I found myself lying on one of the beds while a nurse rolled up my sleeve and fixed a kind of tourniquet on my left arm. Then a disconcertingly young looking doctor pricked me with a needle, fixed a tube and told me to squeeze the block of wood I was holding. I lay back and stared at the ceiling preparing to meditate until the right amount of blood should have gone out of me.
    But suddenly there was a disturbance at the door. Raising my head a little I saw that a tall rather mad-looking woman in a bushy fur coat and red hat was arguing with the men in white coats.
    ‘I really cannot wait in the queue. I am Miss Daunt,’ I heard her say in a loud ringing tone. ‘My blood is Rhesus negative, the most valuable kind. I have a letter from the Regional Director.’ She seemed to fumble with a paper, then raised her voice. ‘ This precious blood,’ she read, ‘that is the phrase used. And you expect me to wait here behind all these people! Why somebody might be dying for want of my blood while I sat here waiting! How would you feel if that were to happen?’
    I did not hear the men’s answers, if indeed they gave any—I supposed they might have a kind of professional indifference to death—but Miss Daunt apparently gained her point and soon appeared on the bed next to mine, flinging off her coat with a gesture and baring her arm triumphantly.
    ‘This precious blood,’ she murmured, and began muttering to herself, first about her blood and then about irrelevant things which I could only half hear—a quarrel with somebody about a broken milk bottle and what they had said to each other. It seemed like a ‘stream of consciousness’ novel, but I was relieved when she stopped talking for I had been afraid that she might address me. Virginia Woolf might have brought