The Girls of Slender Means (2 page)

    The next day everyone began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things.

    Many citizens felt the urge, which some began to indulge, to insult each other, in order to prove something or to test their ground.

    The government reminded the public that it was still at war. Officially this was undeniable, but except to those whose relations lay in the Far Eastern prisons of war, or were stuck in Burma, that war was generally felt to be a remote affair.

    A few shorthand-typists at the May of Teck Club started to apply for safer jobs—that is to say, in private concerns, not connected with the war like the temporary Ministries where many of them had been employed.

    Their brothers and men-friends in the forces, not yet demobilised, by a long way, were talking of vivid enterprises for the exploitation of peace, such as buying a lorry and building up from it a transport business.

"I've got something to tell you," said Jane.

    "Just a minute till I shut the door. The kids are making a row," Anne said. And presently, when she returned to the telephone, she said, "Yes, carry on."

    "Do you remember Nicholas Farringdon?"

    "I seem to remember the name."

    "Remember I brought him to the May of Teck in 1945, he used to come often for supper. He got mixed up with Selina."

    "Oh, Nicholas. The one who got up on the roof? What a long time ago that was. Have you seen him?"

    "I've just seen a news item that's come over Reuters. He's been killed in a local rising in Haiti."

    "Really? How awful! What was he doing there?"

    "Well, he became a missionary or something."

    "No!"

    "Yes. It's terribly tragic. I knew him well."

    "Ghastly. It brings everything back. Have you told Selina?"

    "Well, I haven't been able to get her. You know what Selina's like these days, she won't answer the phone personally, you have to go through thousands of secretaries or whatever they are."

    "You could get a good story for your paper out of it, Jane," Anne said.

    "I know that. I'm just waiting to get more details. Of course it's all those years ago since I knew him, but it would be an interesting story."

Two men—poets by virtue of the fact that the composition of poetry was the only consistent thing they had so far done—beloved of two May of Teck girls and, at the moment, of nobody else, sat in their corduroy trousers in a café in Bayswater with their silent listening admirers and talked about the new future as they flicked the page-proofs of an absent friend's novel. A copy of _Peace News__ lay on the table between them. One of the men said to the other:

    _And now what will become of us without Barbarians?__

    _Those people were some sort of a solution.__

    And the other smiled, bored-like, but conscious that very few in all the great metropolis and its tributary provinces were as yet privy to the source of these lines. This other who smiled was Nicholas Farringdon, not yet known or as yet at all likely to be.

    "Who wrote that?" said Jane Wright, a fat girl who worked for a publisher and who was considered to be brainy but somewhat below standard, socially, at the May of Teck.

    Neither man replied.

    "Who wrote that?" Jane said again.

    The poet nearer her said, through his thick spectacles, "An Alexandrian poet."

    "A new poet?"

    "No, but fairly new to this country."

    "What's his name?"

    He did not reply. The young men had started talking again. They talked about the decline and fall of the anarchist movement on the island of their birth in terms of the personalities concerned. They were bored with educating the girls for this evening.

2

Joanna Childe was giving elocution lessons to Miss Harper, the cook, in the recreation room. When she was not giving lessons she was usually practising for her next examination. The house frequently echoed with Joanna's rhetoric. She got six shillings an hour from her pupils, five shillings if they were May of Teck members. Nobody knew what her arrangements were with Miss Harper, for at that time all who kept keys of food-cupboards made special arrangements with all others. Joanna's method was to read each stanza herself first and make her pupil repeat it.

    Everyone in the drawing room could hear the loud lesson in progress beating out the stresses and throbs of _The Wreck of the Deutschland__.

            _The frown of his face__

          _Before me, the hurtle of hell__

      _Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?__

    The club was proud of Joanna Childe, not only because she chucked up her head and recited poetry, but because she was so well built, fair and healthy-looking, the poetic essence of tall, fair rectors' daughters who never used a scrap of make-up, who had served tirelessly day and night in parish welfare organisations since leaving school early in the war, who before that had been Head Girl and who never wept that anyone knew or could imagine, being stoical by nature.

    What had happened to Joanna was that she had fallen in love with a curate on leaving school. It had come to nothing. Joanna had decided that this was to be the only love of her life.

    She had been brought up to hear, and later to recite,

          . . . _Love is not love__

          _Which alters when it alteration finds,__

          _Or bends with the remover to remove:__

    All her ideas of honour and love came from the poets. She was vaguely acquainted with distinctions and sub-distinctions of human and divine love, and their various attributes, but this was picked up from rectory conversations when theologically-minded clerics came to stay; it was in a different category of instruction from ordinary household beliefs such as the axiom "People are holier who live in the country," and the notion that a nice girl should only fall in love once in her life.

    It seemed to Joanna that her longing for the curate must have been unworthy of the name of love, had she allowed a similar longing, which she began to feel, for the company of a succeeding curate, more suitable and even handsomer, to come to anything. Once you admit that you can change the object of a strongly felt affection, you undermine the whole structure of love and marriage, the whole philosophy of Shakespeare's sonnet: this had been the approved, though unspoken, opinion of the rectory and its mental acres of upper air. Joanna pressed down her feelings for the second curate and worked them off in tennis and the war effort. She had not encouraged the second curate at all but brooded silently upon him until the Sunday she saw him stand in the pulpit and announce his sermon upon the text:

    ... if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

    And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

    It was the evening service. Many young girls from the district had come, some of them in their service uniforms. One particular Wren looked up at the curate, her pink cheeks touched by the stained-glass evening light; her hair curled lightly upwards on her Wren hat. Joanna could hardly imagine a more handsome man than this second curate. He was newly ordained, and was shortly going into the Air Force. It was spring, full of preparations and guesses, for the second front was to be established against the enemy, some said in North Africa, some said Scandinavia, the Baltic, France. Meantime, Joanna listened attentively to the young man in the pulpit, she listened obsessively. He was dark and tall, his eyes were deep under his straight black brows, he had a chiselled look. His wide mouth suggested to Joanna generosity and humour, that type of generosity and humour special to the bishop sprouting within him. He was very athletic. He had made it as clear that he wanted Joanna as the former curate had not. Like the rector's eldest daughter that she was, Joanna sat in her pew without seeming to listen in any particular way to this attractive fellow. She did not turn her face towards him as the pretty Wren was doing. The right eye and the right hand, he was saying, means that which we hold most precious. What the scripture meant, he said, was that if anything we hold most dear should prove an offence—as you know, he said, the Greek word here was oKÀVÔA\\OV, frequently occurring in Scripture in the connotation of scandal, offence, stumbling-block, as when St. Paul said. . . . The rustics who predominated in the congregation looked on with their round moveless eyes. Joanna decided to pluck out her right eye, cut off her right hand, this looming offence to the first love, this stumbling-block, the adorable man in the pulpit.

    "For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell," rang the preacher's voice. "Hell, of course," he said, "is a negative concept. Let us put it more positively. More positively, the text should read, ‘It is better to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven than not to enter at all.'" He hoped to publish this sermon one day in a Collected Sermons, for he was as yet inexperienced in many respects, although he later learned some reality as an Air Force chaplain.

    Joanna, then, had decided to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven. By no means did she look maimed. She got a job in London and settled at the May of Teck Club. She took up elocution in her spare time. Then, towards the end of the war, she began to study and make a full-time occupation of it. The sensation of poetry replaced the sensation of the curate, and she took on pupils at six shillings an hour pending her diploma.

          _The wanton troopers riding by__

          _Have shot my fawn, and it will die.__

    Nobody at the May of Teck Club knew her precise history, but it was generally assumed to be something emotionally heroic. She was compared to Ingrid Bergman, and did not take part in the argument between members and staff about the food, whether it contained too many fattening properties, even allowing for the necessities of wartime rationing.

3

Love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories. Love came first, and subsidiary to it was money for the upkeep of looks and the purchase of clothing coupons at the official black-market price of eight coupons for a pound.

    The house was a spacious Victorian one, and very little had been done to change its interior since the days when it was a private residence. It resembled in its plan most of the women's hostels, noted for cheapness and tone, which had flourished since the emancipation of women had called for them. No one at the May of Teck Club referred to it as a hostel, except in moments of low personal morale such as was experienced by the youngest members only on being given the brush-off by a boy-friend.

    The basement of the house was occupied by kitchens, the laundry, the furnace and fuel-stores.

    The ground floor contained staff offices, the dining room, the recreation room and, newly papered in a mud-like shade of brown, the drawing room. This resented wallpaper had unfortunately been found at the back of a cupboard in huge quantities, otherwise the walls would have remained grey and stricken like everyone else's.

    Boy-friends were allowed to dine as guests at a cost of two-and-sixpence. It was also permitted to entertain in the recreation room, on the terrace which led out from it, and in the drawing room whose mud-brown walls appeared so penitential in tone at that time—for the members were not to know that within a few years many of them would be lining the walls of their own homes with paper of a similar colour, it then having become smart.

    Above this, on the first floor, where, in the former days of private wealth, an enormous ball-room had existed, an enormous dormitory now existed. This was curtained off into numerous cubicles. Here lived the very youngest members, girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty who had not long moved out of the cubicles of school dormitories throughout the English countryside, and who understood dormitory life from start to finish. The girls on this floor were not yet experienced in discussing men. Everything turned on whether the man in question was a good dancer and had a sense of humour. The Air Force was mostly favoured, and a D.F.C. was an asset. A Battle of Britain record aged a man in the eyes of the first-floor dormitory, in the year 1945. Dunkirk, too, was largely something that their fathers had done. It was the air heroes of the Normandy landing who were popular, lounging among the cushions in the drawing room. They gave full entertainment value:

    "Do you know the story of the two cats that went to Wimbledon?—Well, one cat persuaded another to go to Wimbledon to watch the tennis. After a few sets one cat said to the other, ‘I must say, I'm bloody bored. I honestly can't see why you're so interested in this game of tennis.' And the other cat replied, ‘Well, my father's in the racquet!' "

    "No!" shrieked the girls, and duly doubled up.

    "But that's not the end of the story. There was a colonel sitting behind these two cats. _He__ was watching the tennis because the war was on and so there wasn't anything for him to do. Well, this colonel had his dog with him. So when the cats started talking to each other the dog turned to the colonel and said, ‘Do you hear those two cats in front of us?' ‘No, shut up,' said the colonel, ‘I'm concentrating on the game.' ‘All right,' said the dog—very happy this dog, you know— ‘I only thought you might be interested in a couple of cats that can talk.' "

    "Really," said the voice of the dormitory later on, a twittering outburst, "what a wizard sense of humour!" They were like birds waking up instead of girls going to bed, since "Really, what a wizard sense of humour" would be the approximate collective euphony of the birds in the park five hours later, if anyone was listening.