The Girls of Slender Means (11 page)

    "What's the time?" said Jane.

    Tilly was weeping, with a sound that threatened a further outburst of screams.

    "Just on six," said Anne.

    Selina looked at her watch to see if this was so, then walked towards her room.

    "Don't leave her, I'm getting help," Jane said. Selina opened the door of her room, but Anne stood gripping Tilly's ankles. As Jane reached the next landing she heard Selina's voice.

    "Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity ..."

    Jane laughed foolishly to herself and descended to the telephone boxes as the clock in the hall struck six o'clock.

It struck six o'clock on that evening of July 27th. Nicholas had just returned to his room. When he heard of Tilly's predicament he promised eagerly to go straight to the Intelligence Headquarters, and go on to the roof.

    "It's no joke," Jane said.

    "I'm not saying it's a joke."

    "You sound cheerful about it. Hurry up. Tilly's crying her eyes out."

    "As well she might, seeing Labour have got in."

    "Oh, hurry up. We'll all be in trouble if—"

    He had rung off.

    At that hour Greggie came in from the garden to hang about the hall, awaiting the arrival of Mrs. Dobell who was to speak after supper. Greggie would take her into the warden's sitting room, there to drink dry sherry till the supper-bell went. Greggie hoped also to induce Mrs. Dobell to be escorted round the garden before supper.

    A distant anguished scream descended the staircase.

    "Really," Greggie said to Jane, who was emerging from the telephone box, "this club has gone right down. What are visitors to think? Who's screaming up there on the top floor? It sounds exactly as it must have been when this house was in private hands. You girls behave exactly like servant girls in the old days when the master and mistress were absent. Romping and yelling."

        _Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:__

        _What if my leaves are falling like its own!__

        _The tumult of thy mighty harmonies__

    "George, I want George," Tilly wailed thinly from far above. Then someone on the top floor thoughtfully turned on the wireless to an all-drowning pitch:

        _There were angels dining at the Ritz__

        _And a nightingale sang in Berk'ley Square.__

    And Tilly could be heard no more. Greggie looked out of the open front door and returned. She looked at her watch. "Six-fifteen," she said. "She should be here at six-fifteen. Tell them to turn down the wireless up there. It looks so vulgar, so bad ..."

    "You mean it sounds so vulgar, so bad." Jane was keeping an eye out for the taxi which she hoped would bring Nicholas, at any moment, to the functional hotel next door.

    "Once again," said Joanna's voice clearly from the third floor to her pupil. "The last three stanzas again, please."

        _Drive my dead thoughts over the universe__

        _Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!__

    Jane was suddenly overcome by a deep envy of Joanna, the source of which she could not locate exactly at that hour of her youth. The feeling was connected with an inner knowledge of Joanna's disinterestedness, her ability, a gift, to forget herself and her personality. Jane felt suddenly miserable, as one who has been cast out of Eden before realising that it had in fact been Eden. She recalled two ideas about Joanna that she had gathered from various observations made by Nicholas: that Joanna's enthusiasm for poetry was limited to one kind, and that Joanna was the slightest bit melancholy on the religious side; these thoughts failed to comfort Jane.

    Nicholas arrived in a taxi and disappeared in the hotel entrance. _As__ Jane started to run upstairs another taxi drew up. Greggie said, "Here's Mrs. Dobell. It's twenty-two minutes past six."

    Jane bumped into several of the girls who were spilling in lively groups out of the dormitories. She thrust her way through their midst, anxious to reach Tilly and tell her that help was near.

    "Jan-_ee__!" said a girl. "Don't be so bloody rude, you nearly pushed me over the banister to my death."

    But Jane was thumping upward.

          _Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;__

    Jane arrived at the top floor to find Anne and Selina frantically clothing Tilly's lower half to make her look decent. They had got as far as the stockings. Anne was holding a leg while Selina, long-fingered, smoothed the stocking over it.

    "Nicholas has come. Is he out on the roof yet?"

    Tilly moaned, "Oh, I'm dying. I can't stand it any more. Fetch _George__, I want George."

    "Here's Nicholas," said Selina, tall enough to see him emerging from the low doorway of the hotel attic, as he had lately done on the calm summer nights. He stumbled over a rug which had been bundled beside the door. It was one of the rugs they had brought out to lie on. He recovered his balance, started walking quickly over towards them, then fell flat on his face. A clock struck the half-hour. Jane heard herself say in a loud voice, "It's half past six." Suddenly, Tilly was sitting on the bathroom floor beside her. Anne, too, was on the floor, crumpled with her arm over her eyes as if trying to hide her presence. Selina lay stunned against the door. Selina opened her mouth to scream, and probably did scream, but it was then that the rumbling began to assert itself from the garden below, mounting swiftly to a mighty crash. The house trembled again, and the girls who had tried to sit up were thrown flat. The floor was covered with bits of glass, and Jane's blood flowed from somewhere in a trickle, while some sort of time passed silently by. Sensations of voices, shouts, mounting footsteps and falling plaster brought the girls back to various degrees of responsiveness. Jane saw, in an unfocused way, the giant face of Nicholas peering through the slit of the little open window. He was exhorting them to get up quick.

    "There's been an explosion in the garden."

    "Greggie's bomb," Jane said, grinning at Tilly. "Greggie was right," she said. This was a hilarious statement, but Tilly did not laugh, she closed her eyes and lay back. Tilly was only half-dressed and looked very funny indeed. Jane then laughed loudly at Nicholas, but he too had no sense of humour.

Down in the street the main body of the club had congregated, having been in one of the public rooms on the ground floor at the time of the explosion, or else lingering in the dormitories. There, the explosion had been heard more than it was felt. Two ambulances had arrived and a third was approaching. Some of the more dazed among the people were being treated for shock in the hall of the neighbouring hotel.

    Greggie was attempting to assure Mrs. Felix Dobell that she had foreseen and forewarned the occurrence. Mrs. Dobell, a handsome matron of noticeable height, stood out on the edge of the pavement, taking little notice of Greggie. She was looking at the building with a surveyor's eye, and was possessed of that calm which arises from a misunderstanding of the occasion's true nature, for although she was shaken by the explosion, Mrs. Dobell assumed that belated bombs went off every day in Britain, and, content to find herself intact, and slightly pleased to have shared a war experience, was now curious as to what routine would be adopted in the emergency. She said, "When do you calculate the dust will settle?"

    Greggie said, yet once more, "I knew that live bomb was in that garden. I knew it. I was always saying that bomb was there. The bomb-disposal squad missed it, they missed it."

    Some faces appeared at an upper bedroom. The window opened. A girl started to shout, but had to withdraw her head; she was choking with the dust that was still surrounding the house in clouds.

    It was difficult to discern the smoke, when it began to show, amongst the dust. A gas-main had, in fact, been ruptured by the explosion and a fire started to crawl along the basement from the furnaces. It started to crawl and then it flared. A roomful of flame suddenly roared in the ground-floor offices, lapping against the large windowpanes, feeling for the woodwork, while Greggie continued to shrill at Mrs. Dobell above the clamour of the girls, the street-crowd, the ambulances and the fire engines. "It was ten chances to one we might have been in the garden when the bomb went off. I was going to take you round the garden before supper. We would have been buried, dead, killed. It was ten to one, Mrs. Dobell."

    Mrs. Dobell said, as one newly enlightened, "This is a terrible incident." And being more shaken than she appeared to be, she added, "This is a time that calls for the exercise of discretion, the woman's prerogative." This saying was part of the lecture she had intended to give after supper. She looked round in the crowd for her husband. The warden, whose more acute shock-effects had preceded Mrs. Dobell's by a week, was being carried off through the crowd on a stretcher.

    "Felix!" yelled Mrs. Dobell. He was coming out of the hotel adjoining the club, with his olive-greenish khaki uniform dusky with soot and streaked as with black oil. He had been investigating the back premises of the club. He said: "The brickwork of the walls looks unsteady. The top half of the fire escape has collapsed. There are some girls trapped up there. The firemen are directing them up to the top floor; they'll have to be brought through the skylight on to the roof."

"Who?" said Lady Julia.

    "Jane Wright speaking. I rang you last week to see if you could find out some more about—"

    "Oh yes. Well, I'm afraid there's very little information from the P.O. They never comment officially, you know. From what I can gather, the man was making a complete nuisance of himself, preaching against the local superstitions. He had several warnings and apparently he got what he asked for. How did you come to know him?"

    "He was friendly with some of the girls at the May of Teck Club when he was a civilian, I mean before he joined this Order. He was there on the night of the tragedy, in fact, and—"

    "It probably turned his brain. Something must have affected his brain, anyhow, because what I gather unofficially he was a complete ..."

The skylight, although it had been bricked up by someone's hysterical order, at that time in the past when a man had penetrated the attic-floor of the club to visit a girl, was not beyond being unbricked by the firemen. It was all a question of time.

    Time was not a large or present fact to those girls of the May of Teck Club, thirteen of them, who, with Tilly Throvis-Mew, remained in the upper stories of the building when, following the explosion in the garden, fire broke out in the house. A large portion of the perfectly safe fire-escape which had featured in so many safety-instruction regulations, so many times read out to the members at so many supper-times, now lay in zigzag fragments among the earthy mounds and upturned roots of the garden.

    Time, which was an immediate onward-rushing enemy to the onlookers in the street and the firemen on the roof, was only a small far-forgotten event to the girls; for they were stunned not only by the force of the explosion, but, when they recovered and looked round, still more by the sudden dislocation of all familiar appearances. A chunk of the back wall of the house gaped to the sky. There, in 1945, they were as far removed from the small fact of time as weightless occupants of a space-rocket. Jane got up, ran to her room, and with animal instinct snatched and gobbled a block of chocolate which remained on her table. The sweet stuff assisted her recovery. She turned to the wash-rooms where Tilly, Anne and Selina were slowly rising to their feet. There were shouts from the direction of the roof. An unrecognised face looked in the slit window, and a large hand wrenched the loose frame away from it.

    But the fire had already started to spread up the main staircase, preceded by heraldic puffs of smoke, the flames sidling up the banisters.

    The girls who had been in their rooms on the second and third floors at the time of the explosion had been less shaken than those at the top of the house, since there some serious defect in the masonry had been caused indirectly by a bombardment early in the war. The girls on the second and third floors were cut and bruised, but were stunned by the sound of the blast rather than the houseshaking effects of it.

    Some of the second-floor dormitory girls had been quick and alert enough to slip down the staircase and out into the street, in the interval between the explosion of the bomb and the start of the fire. The remaining ten, when they variously attempted to escape by that route, met the fire and retreated upward.

    Joanna and Nancy Riddle, having finished their elocution lesson, had been standing at the door of Joanna's room when the bomb went off, and so had escaped the glass from the window. Joanna's hand was cut, however, by the glass from a tiny travelling clock which she had been winding at the time. It was Joanna who, when the members shrieked at the sight of the fire, gave the last shriek, then shouted: "The fire-escape!" Pauline Fox fled behind her, and the others followed along the second-floor corridors and up the narrow back staircase to the third-floor passage-way where the fire-escape window had always stood. This was now a platform to the summer evening sky, for here the wall had fallen away and the fire-escape with it. Plaster tumbled from the bricks as the ten women crowded to the spot that had once been the fire-escape landing. They were still looking in a bewildered way for the fire-escape stairway. Voices of firemen shouted at them from the garden. Voices came from the direction of the flat roof above, and then one voice clearly through a megaphone ordered them back, lest the piece of floor they stood on should collapse.

    The voice said, "Proceed to the top floor."

    "Jack will wonder what's happened to me," said Pauline Fox. She was first up the back stairs to the wash-rooms where Anne, Selina, Jane and Tilly were now on their feet, having steadied themselves on learning of the fire. Selina was taking off her skirt.