The Girls of Slender Means (12 page)

    Above their heads, set in a sloping ceiling, was the large square outline of the old, bricked-in skylight. Men's voices, the scrabble of ladders and loud thumps of bricks being tested, came down from this large square. The men were evidently trying to find a means of opening the skylight to release the girls, who meanwhile stared up at the square mark in the ceiling. Tilly said, "Won't it open?" Nobody answered, because the girls of the club knew the answer. Everyone in the club had heard the legend of the man who had got in by the skylight and, some said, been found in bed with a girl.

    Now Selina stood on the lavatory seat and jumped up to the slit window. She slid through it to the roof with an easy diagonal movement. There were now thirteen women in the wash-room. They stood in the alert, silent attitude of jungle-danger, listening for further instruction from the megaphone on the roof outside.

    Anne Baberton followed Selina through the slit window, with difficulty, because she was flustered. But a man's two hands came up to the window to receive her. Tilly Throvis-Mew began to sob. Pauline Fox ripped off her dress and then her underclothes until she was altogether naked. She had an undernourished body; there would have been no difficulty for her in getting through the slit window fully clothed, but she went naked as a fish.

    Only Tilly sobbed heavily, but the rest of the girls were trembling. The noises from the sloping roof ceased as the firemen jumped down from investigating the skylight on to the flat roof area; footsteps beat and shuffled there, beyond the slit window, where throughout the summer Selina had lain with Nicholas, wrapped in rugs, under Orion's Belt and the Plough, which constituted the only view in Greater London that remained altogether intact.

    Within the wash-room the eleven remaining women heard a fireman's voice addressing them through the window, against the simultaneous blare of megaphone instructions to the firemen. The man at the window said, "Stay where you are. Don't panic. We're sending for tools to uncover the brickwork over the skylight. We won't be long. It's a question of time. We are doing everything we can to get you out. Remain where you are. Don't panic. It's just a question of time."

    The question of time opened now as a large thing in the lives of the eleven listeners.

Twenty-eight minutes had passed since the bomb had exploded in the garden. Felix Dobell joined Nicholas Farringdon on the flat roof after the fire started. They assisted the three slim girls through the window. Anne and naked Pauline Fox had been huddled into the two blankets of variable purpose, and hustled through the roof-hatch of the neighbouring hotel, the back windows of which had been smashed by the blast. Nicholas was as fleetingly impressed as was possible in the emergency, by the fact that Selina allowed the other girls to take the blankets. She lingered, shivering a little, but with an appealing grace, like a wounded roe deer, in her white petticoat and bare feet. Nicholas thought she was lingering for his sake, since Felix had disappeared with the two other girls to help them down to the first-aid ambulances. He left Selina standing thoughtfully on the hotel side of the roof, and returned to the slit window of the club to see for himself if any of the remaining girls were slim enough to escape by that way. It had been said by the firemen that the building might collapse within the next twenty minutes.

    As he approached the slit window Selina slipped past him and, clutching the sill, heaved herself up again.

    "Come down, what are you doing?" Nicholas said. He tried to grasp her ankles, but she was quick and, crouching for a small second on the narrow sill, she dipped her head and sidled through the window into the wash-room.

    Nicholas immediately supposed she had done this in an attempt to rescue one of the girls, or assist their escape through the window.

    "Come back out here, Selina," he shouted, heaving himself up to see through the slit. "It's dangerous. You can't help anybody."

    Selina was pushing her way through the standing group. They moved to give way without resistance. They were silent, except for Tilly, who now sobbed convulsively without tears, her eyes, like the other eyes, wide and fixed on Nicholas with the importance of fear.

    Nicholas said, "The men are coming to open the skylight. They'll be here in a moment. Are there any others of you would be able to get through the window here? I'll give them a hand. Hurry up, the sooner the better."

    Joanna held a tape-measure in her hand. At some time in the interval between the firemen's discovery that the skylight was firmly sealed and this moment, Joanna had rummaged in one of these top bedrooms to find this tape-measure, with which she had measured the hips of the other ten trapped with herself, even the most helpless, to see what were their possibilities of escape by the seven-inch window slit. It was known all through the club that thirty-six and a quarter inches was the maximum for hips that could squeeze themselves through it, but as the exit had to be effected sideways, with a manoeuvring of shoulders, much depended on the size of the bones, and on the texture of the individual flesh and muscles, whether flexible enough to compress easily or whether too firm. The latter had been Tilly's case. But apart from her, none of the women now left on the top floor was slim in anything like the proportions of Selina, Anne and Pauline Fox. Some were plump. Jane was fat. Dorothy Markham, who had previously been able to slither in and out of the window to sunbathe, was now two months pregnant; her stomach was taut with an immovable extra inch. Joanna's efforts to measure them had been like a scientific ritual in a hopeless case, it had been a something done, it provided a slightly calming distraction.

    Nicholas said, "They won't be long. The men are coming now." He was hanging on to the ledge of the window with his toes dug into the brickwork of the wall. He was looking towards the edge of the flat roof where the fire ladders were set. A file of firemen were now mounting the ladders with pickaxes, and heavy drills were being hauled up.

    Nicholas looked back into the wash-room.

    "They're coming now. Where did Selina go?"

    No one answered.

    He said, "That girl over there—can't she manage to come through the window?"

    He meant Tilly. Jane said, "She's tried once. She got stuck. The fire's crackling like mad down there. The house is going to collapse any minute."

    In the sloping roof above the girls' heads the picks started to clack furiously at the brickwork, not in regular rhythm as in normal workmanship, but with the desperate hack-work of impending danger. It would not be long, now, before the whistles would blow and the voice from the megaphone would order the firemen to abandon the building to its collapse.

    Nicholas had let go his hold to observe the situation from the outside. Tilly appeared at the slit window, now, in a second attempt to get out. He recognised her face as that of the girl who had been stuck there at the moment before the explosion, and whom he had been summoned to release. He shouted at her to get back lest she should stick again, and jeopardise her more probable rescue through the skylight. But she was frantic with determination, she yelled to urge herself on. It was a successful performance after all. Nicholas pulled her clear, breaking one of her hip-bones in the process. She fainted on the flat roof after he had set her down.

    He pulled himself up to the window once more. The girls huddled, trembling and silent, round Joanna. They were looking up at the skylight. Some large thing cracked slowly on a lower floor of the house and smoke now started to curl in the upper air of the washrooms. Nicholas then saw, through the door of the wash-room, Selina approaching along the smoky passage. She was carrying something fairly long and limp and evidently light in weight, enfolding it carefully in her arms. He thought it was a body. She pushed her way through the girls coughing delicately from the first waves of smoke that had reached her in the passage. The others stared, shivering only with their prolonged apprehension, for they had no curiosity about what she had been rescuing or what she was carrying. She climbed up on the lavatory seat and slid through the window, skillfully and quickly pulling her object behind her. Nicholas held up his hand to catch her. When she landed on the roof-top she said, "Is it safe out here?" and at the same time was inspecting the condition of her salvaged item. Poise is perfect balance. It was the Schiaparelli dress. The coat-hanger dangled from the dress like a headless neck and shoulders.

    "Is it safe out here?" said Selina.

    "Nowhere's safe," said Nicholas.

    Later, reflecting on this lightning scene, he could not trust his memory as to whether he then involuntarily signed himself with the cross. It seemed to him, in recollection, that he did. At all events, Felix Dobell, who had appeared on the roof again, looked at him curiously at the time, and later said that Nicholas had crossed himself in superstitious relief that Selina was safe.

    She ran to the hotel hatch. Felix Dobell had taken up Tilly in his arms, for although she had recovered consciousness she was too injured to walk. He bore her to the roof-hatch, following Selina with her dress; it was now turned inside-out for safe-keeping.

    From the slit window came a new sound, faint, because of the continuous tumble of hose-water, the creak of smouldering wood and plaster in the lower part of the house, and, above, the clamour and falling bricks of the rescue work on the skylight. This new sound rose and fell with a broken hum between the sounds of desperate choking coughs. It was Joanna, mechanically reciting the evening psalter of Day 27, responses and answers.

    The voice through the megaphone shouted, "Tell them to stand clear of the skylight in there. We'll have it free any minute now. It might collapse inwards. Tell those girls to stand clear of the skylight."

    Nicholas climbed up to the window. They had heard the instructions and were already crowding into the lavatory by the slit window, ignoring the man's face that kept appearing, in it. As if hypnotised, they surrounded Joanna, and she herself stood as one hypnotised into the strange utterances of Day 27 in the Anglican order, held to be applicable to all sorts and conditions of human life in the world at that particular moment, when in London homing workers plodded across the Park, observing with curiosity the fire-engines in the distance, when Rudi Bittesch was sitting in his flat at St. John's Wood trying, without success, to telephone to Jane at the club to speak to her privately, the Labour Government was new-born, and elsewhere on the face of the globe people slept, queued for liberation-rations, beat the tom-toms, took shelter from the bombers or went for a ride on a dodgem at the fun-fair.

    Nicholas shouted, "Keep well away from the skylight. Come right in close to the window."

    The girls crowded into the lavatory space. Jane and Joanna, being the largest, stood up on the lavatory seat to make room for the others. Nicholas saw that every face was streaming with perspiration. Joanna's skin, now close to his eyes, seemed to him to have become suddenly covered with large freckles as if fear had acted on it like the sun; in fact it was true that the pale freckles on her face, which normally were almost invisible, stared out in bright gold spots by contrast with her skin, which was now bloodless with fear. The versicles and responses came from her lips and tongue through the din of demolition.

    _Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already:__

        _whereof, we rejoice.__

    _Turn our capacity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south.__

    _They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy.__

    Why, and with what intention, was she moved to indulge in this? She remembered the words, and she had the long habit of recitation. But why, in this predicament and as if to an audience? She wore a dark green wool jersey and a grey skirt. The other girls, automatically listening to Joanna's voice as they had always done, were possibly less frantic and trembled less, because of it, but they turned their ears more fearfully and attentively to the meaning of the skylight noises than they did to the actual meaning of her words for Day 27.

    _Except the Lord build the house: their labour is but__

      _lost that build it.__

    _Except the Lord keep the city: the watchman waketh__

      _but in vain.__

    _It is but lost labour that ye haste to rise up early, and__

      _so late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness:__

      _for so he giveth his beloved sleep.__

    _Lo, children . . .__

    Any day's liturgy would have been equally mesmeric. But the words for the right day was Joanna's habit. The skylight thudded open with a shower of powdery plaster and some lop-sided bricks. While the white dust was still falling the firemen's ladder descended. First up was Dorothy Markham, the chattering debutante whose bright life, for the past forty-three minutes, had gone into a bewildering darkness like illuminations at a seaside town when the electricity system breaks down. She looked haggard and curiously like her aunt, Lady Julia, the chairwoman of the club's committee who was at that moment innocently tying up refugee parcels at Bath. Lady Julia's hair was white, and so now was the hair of her niece Dorothy, covered as it was by falling plaster-dust, as she clambered up the fire-ladder to the sloping tiles and was assisted to the safe flat roof-top. At her heels came Nancy Riddle, the daughter of the Low-Church Midlands clergyman, whose accents of speech had been in process of improvement by Joanna's lessons. Her elocution days were over now, she would always speak with a Midlands accent. Her hips looked more dangerously wide than they had ever noticeably been, as she swung up the ladder behind Dorothy. Three girls then attempted to follow at once; they had been occupants of a four-bed dormitory on the third floor, and were all newly released from the Forces; all three had the hefty, built-up appearance that five years in the Army was apt to give to a woman. While they were sorting themselves out, Jane grasped the ladder and got away. The three ex-warriors then followed.