The Girls of Slender Means

by Muriel Spark

  She had finished by the time the supper-bell rang. She folded the letter with meticulous neatness, having before her eyes the pencil-line features of Charles Morgan’s photograph. Jane calculated that this letter by Charles Morgan which she had just written was worth at least fifty pounds to Nicholas.

  George would be in a terrible state of conflict when he saw it. Poor Tilly, George’s wife, had told her that when George was persecuted by an author, he went on and on about it for hours.

  Nicholas was coming to the club after supper to spend the evening, having at last persuaded Joanna to give a special recital of The Wreck of the Deutschland. It was to be recorded on a tape-machine that Nicholas had borrowed from the newsroom of a Government office.

  Jane joined the throng in its descent to supper. Only Selina loitered above, finishing off her evening’s disciplinary recitation:

  … Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence.

  The warden’s car stopped piercingly outside as the girls reached the lower floor. The warden drove a car as she would have driven a man had she possessed one. She strode, grey, into her office and shortly afterwards joined them in the dining-room, banging on the water-jug with her fork for silence, as she always did when about to make an announcement. She announced that an American visitor, Mrs G. Felix Dobell, would address the club on Friday evening on the subject, ‘Western Woman: her Mission’. Mrs Dobell was a leading member of the Guardians of Ethics and had recently come to join her husband who was serving with the United States Intelligence Service stationed in London.

  After supper Jane was struck by a sense of her treachery to the establishment of Throvis-Mew, and to George with whom she was paid to conspire in the way of business. She was fond of old George, and began to reflect on his kindly qualities. Without the slightest intention of withdrawing from her conspiracy with Nicholas, she gazed at the letter she had written and wondered what to do about her feelings. She decided to telephone to his wife, Tilly, and have a friendly chat about something.

  Tilly was delighted.. She was a tiny redhead of lively intelligence and small information, whom George kept well apart from the world of books, being experienced in wives. To Tilly, this was a great deprivation, and she loved nothing better than to keep in touch, through Jane, with the book business and to hear Jane say, ‘Well, Tilly, it’s a question of one’s raison d’être.’ George tolerated this friendship, feeling that it established himself with Jane. He relied on Jane. She understood his ways.

  Jane was usually bored by Tilly, who, although she had not exactly been a cabaret dancer, imposed on the world of books, whenever she was given the chance, a high leg-kicker’s spirit which played on Jane’s nerves, since she herself was newly awed by the gravity of literature in general. She felt Tilly was altogether too frivolous about the. publishing and writing scene, and moreover failed to realize this fact. But her heart in its treachery now swelled with an access of warmth for Tilly. She telephoned and invited her to supper on Friday. Jane had already calculated that, if Tilly should be a complete bore, they would be able to fill in an hour with Mrs G. Felix Dobell’s lecture. The club was fairly eager to see Mrs Dobell, having already seen a certain amount of her husband as Selina’s escort, rumoured to be her lover. ‘There’s a talk on Friday by an American woman on the Western Woman’s Mission, but we won’t listen to that, it would be a bore,’ Jane said, contradicting her resolution in her effusive anxiety to sacrifice anything, anything to George’s wife, now that she had betrayed and was about to deceive George.

  Tilly said, ‘I always love the May of Teck. It’s like being back at school.’ Tilly always said that, it was infuriating.

  *

  Nicholas arrived early with his tape-recorder, and sat in the recreation room with Joanna, waiting for the audience to drift in from supper. She looked to Nicholas very splendid and Nordic, as from a great saga.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ said Nicholas sleepily, while he admired her big bones. He was sleepy because he had spent most of the previous night on the roof with Selina,

  ‘About a year. I daresay I’ll die here,’ she said with the conventional contempt of all members for the club.

  He said, ‘You’ll get married.’

  ‘No, no.’ She spoke soothingly, as to a child who had just been prevented from spooning jam into the stew.

  A long shriek of corporate laughter came from the floor immediately above them. They looked at the ceiling and realized that the dormitory girls were as usual exchanging those R.A.F. anecdotes which needed an audience hilariously drunken, either with alcohol or extreme youth, to give them point.

  Greggie had appeared, and cast her eyes up to the laughter as she came towards Joanna and Nicholas. She said, ‘The sooner that dormitory crowd gets married and gets out of the club, the better. I’ve never known such a rowdy dormitory crowd in all my years in the club. Not a farthing’s worth of intelligence between them.’

  Collie arrived and sat down next to Nicholas. Greggie said, ‘I was saying about the dormitory girls up there: they ought to get married and get out.’

  This was also, in reality, Collie’s view. But she always opposed Greggie on principle and, moreover, in company she felt that a contradiction made conversation. ‘Why should they get married? Let them enjoy themselves while they’re young.’

  ‘They need marriage to enjoy themselves properly,’ Nicholas said, ‘for sexual reasons.’

  Joanna blushed. Nicholas added, ‘Heaps of sex. Every night for a month, then every other night for two months, then three times a week for a year. After that, once a week.’ He was adjusting the tape-recorder, and his words were like air.

  ‘If you’re trying to shock us, young man, we’re unshockable,’ said Greggie, with a delighted glance round the four walls which were not accustomed to this type of talk, for, after all, it was the public recreation room.

  ‘I’m shockable,’ said Joanna. She was studying Nicholas with an apologetic look.

  Collie did not know what attitude she should take up. Her fingers opened the clasp of her bag and snapped it shut again; then they played a silent tip-tap on its worn bulging leather sides. Then she said, ‘He isn’t trying to shock us. He’s very realistic. If one is growing in grace — I would go so far as to say when one has grown in grace — one can take realism, sex and so forth in one’s stride.’

  Nicholas beamed lovingly at this.

  Collie gave a little half-cough, half-laugh, much encouraged in the success of her frankness. She felt modern, and continued excitedly, ‘It’s a question of what you never have you never miss, of course.’

  Greggie put on a puzzled air, as if she genuinely did not know what Collie was talking about. After thirty years’ hostile fellowship with Collie, of course she did quite well understand that Collie had a habit of skipping several stages in the logical sequence of her thoughts, and would utter apparently disconnected statements, especially when confused by an unfamiliar subject or the presence of a man.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ said Greggie. ‘What is a question of what you never have you never miss?’

  ‘Sex, of course,’ Collie said, her voice unusually loud with the effort of the topic. ‘We were discussing sex and getting married. I say, of course, there’s a lot to be said for marriage, but if you never have it you never miss it.’

  Joanna looked at the two excited women with meek compassion. To Nicholas she looked stronger than ever in her meekness, as she regarded Greggie and Collie at their rivalry to be uninhibited.

  ‘What do you mean, Collie?’ Greggie said.

  ‘You’re quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of its own. We do miss what we haven’t had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of the warm limbs at night, the absent —‘

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Nicholas, holding up his hand for silence, in the pretence that he was tuning-in to his empty
tape-machine. He could see that the two women would go to any lengths, now they had got started.

  ‘Open the door, please.’ From behind the door came the warden’s voice and the rattle of the coffee tray. Before Nicholas could leap up to open it for her she had pushed into the room with some clever manoeuvring of hand and foot like a business-like parlourmaid.

  The Beatific Vision does not appear to me to be an adequate compensation for what we miss,’ Greggie said conclusively, getting in a private thrust at Collie’s religiosity.

  While coffee was being served and the girls began to fill the room, Jane entered, fresh from her telephone conversation with Tilly, and, feeling somewhat absolved by it, she handed over to Nicholas her brain-work letter from Charles Morgan. While reading it, he was handed a cup of coffee. In the process of taking the cup he splashed some coffee on the letter.

  ‘Oh, you’ve ruined it!‘ Jane said. ‘I’ll have to do it all over again.’

  ‘It looks more authentic than ever,’ Nicholas said. ‘Naturally, if I’ve received a letter from Charles Morgan telling me I’m a genius, I am going to spend a lot of time reading it over and over, in the course of which the letter must begin to look a bit worn. Now, are you sure George will be impressed by Morgan’s name?’

  ‘Very,’ said Jane.

  ‘Do you mean you’re very sure or that George will be very impressed?’

  ‘I mean both.’

  ‘It would put me off, if I were George.’

  The recital of The Wreck of the Deutschland started presently. Joanna stood with her book ready.

  ‘Not a hush from anybody,’ said the warden, meaning, ‘Not a sound.’ — ‘Not a hush,’ she said, ‘because this instrument of Mr Farringdon’s apparently registers the drop of a pin.’

  One of the dormitory girls, who sat mending a ladder in a stocking, carefully caused her needle to fall on the parquet floor, then bent and picked it up again. Another dormitory girl who had noticed the action snorted a suppressed laugh. Otherwise there was silence but for the quiet purr of the machine waiting for Joanna.

  Thou mastering me

  God! giver of breath and bread;

  World’s strand. sway of the sea;

  Lord of living and dead;

  Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

  And after it almost unmade… .

  8

  A scream of panic from the top floor penetrated the house as Jane returned to the club on Friday afternoon, the 27th of July. She had left the office early to meet Tilly at the club. She did not feel that the scream of panic meant anything special. Jane climbed the last flight of stairs. There was another more piercing scream, accompanied by excited voices. Screams of panic in the club might relate to a laddered stocking or a side-splitting joke.

  When she reached the top landing, she saw that the commotion came from the wash-room. There, Anne and Selina, with two of the dormitory girls, were attempting to extricate from the little slit window another girl who had evidently been attempting to climb out and had got stuck. She was struggling and kicking without success, exhorted by various instructions from the other girls. Against their earnest advice, she screamed aloud from time to time. She had taken off her clothes for the attempt and her body was covered with a greasy substance; Jane immediately hoped it had not been taken from her own supply of cold cream which stood in a jar on her dressing-table.

  ‘Who is it?’ Jane said, with a close inspective look at the girl’s unidentifiable kicking legs and wriggling bottom which were her only visible portions.

  Selina brought a towel which she attempted to fasten round the girl’s waist with a safety-pin. Anne kept imploring the girl not to scream, and one of the others went to the top of the stairs to look over the banister in the hope that nobody in authority was being unduly attracted upward.

  ‘Who is it?’ Jane said.

  Anne said, ‘I’m afraid it’s Tilly.’

  ‘Tilly!’

  ‘She was waiting downstairs and we brought her up here for a lark. She said it was like being back at school, here at the club, so Selina showed her the window. She’s just half an inch too large, though. Can’t you get her to shut up?’

  Jane spoke softly to Tilly. ‘Every time you scream,’ she said, ‘it makes you swell up more. Keep quiet, and we’ll work you out with wet soap.’

  Tilly went quiet. They worked on her for ten minutes, but she remained stuck by the hips. Tilly was weeping. ‘Get George,’ she said at last, ‘get him on the phone.’

  Nobody ‘wanted to fetch George. He would have to come upstairs. Doctors were the only males who climbed the stairs, and even then they were accompanied by one of the staff.

  Jane said, ‘Well, I’ll get somebody.’ She was thinking of Nicholas. He had access to the roof from the Intelligence Headquarters; a hefty push from the roof-side of the window might be successful in releasing Tilly. Nicholas had intended to come to the club after supper to hear the lecture and observe, in a jealous complex of curiosity, the wife of Selina’s former lover. Felix himself was to be present.

  Jane decided to telephone and beg Nicholas to come immediately and help with Tilly. He could then have supper at the club, his second supper, Jane reflected, that week. He might now be home from work, he usually returned to his room at about six o’clock.

  ‘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 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 all-drowning pitch:

  There were angels dining at the Ritz

  And a nightingale sang in Berkeley 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 vulga
r, 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 realizing 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.

  ‘Jane-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.