The Girls of Slender Means

by Muriel Spark

  ‘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. She 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 open slit of the little 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 window-panes, 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 F.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 from 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 storeys 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 unrecognized 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 house-shaking 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 lessons, 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 al-ways stood. This was now a platform open 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.

  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 washroom. 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 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 who 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 pick-axes, 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 brick-work, 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 recognized her face as t
hat 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 jeopardize 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 wash-rooms. 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, skilfully 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.