The Girls of Slender Means

by Muriel Spark

  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 cough. 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 hypnotized, they surrounded Joanna, and she herself stood as one hypnotized 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 he 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 captivity, 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 débutante 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 chairman 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.

  Joanna had jumped down from the lavatory seat. She was now circling round, vaguely wobbling, like a top near the end of its spin. Her eyes shifted from the skylight to the window in a puzzled way. Her lips and tongue continued to recite compulsively the litany of the Day, but her voice had weakened and she stopped to cough. The air was still full of powdered plaster and smoke. There were three girls left beside herself. Joanna groped for the ladder and missed. She then stopped to pick up the tape-measure which was lying on the floor. She groped for it as if she were partially blind, still intoning:

  So that they who go by say not so much as, The Lord prosper you: we wish you good luck in the Name of the Lord.

  Out of the deep have I called …

  The other three took the ladder, one of them, a surprisingly slender girl called Pippa, whose non-apparent bones had evidently been too large to have allowed her escape through the window, shouted back, ‘Hurry up, Joanna.’

  ‘Joanna, the ladder!’

  And Nicholas shouted from the window, ‘Joanna, get up the ladder.’

  She regained her senses and pressed behind the last two girls, a brown-skinned heavily-sinewed swimmer and a voluptuous Greek exile of noble birth, both of whom were crying with relief. Joanna promptly started to clamber after them, grasping in her hand a rung that the last girl’s foot had just left. At that moment, the house trembled and the ladder and wash-room with it. The lire was extinguished, but the gutted house had been finally thrown by the violence of the work on the skylight. A whistle sounded as Joanna was half-way up. A voice from the megaphone ordered the men to jump clear. The house went down as the last fireman waited at the skylight for Joanna to emerge. As the sloping roof began to cave in, he leapt clear, landing badly and painfully on the flat roof-top. The house sank into its centre; a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it.

  9

  The tape-recording had been erased for economy reasons, so that the tape could be used again. That is how things were in i945. Nicholas was angry in excess of the occasion. He had wanted to play back Joanna’s voice to her father who had come up to London after her funeral to fill in forms as to the effects of the dead. Nicholas had written to him, partly with an urge to impart his last impressions of Joanna, partly from curiosity, partly, too, from a desire to stage a dramatic play-back of Joanna doing The Wreck of the Deutschland. He had mentioned the tape-recording in his letter.

  But it was gone. It must have been wiped out by someone at his office.

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

  And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

  Nicholas said to the rector, ‘It’s infuriating. She was at her best in The Wreck of the Deutschland. I’m terribly sorry.’

  Joanna’s father sat, pink-faced and white-haired. He said, ‘Oh, please don’t worry.’

  ‘I wish you could have heard it.’

  As if to console Nicholas in his loss, the rector murmured with a nostalgic smile:

  It was the schooner Hesperus

  That sailed the wintry sea,

 
‘No, no the Deutschland. The Wreck of the Deutschland.’

  ‘Oh, the Deutschland.’ With a gesture characteristic of the English aquiline nose, his seemed to smell the air for enlightenment.

  Nicholas was moved by this to a last effort to regain the lost recording. It was a Sunday, but he managed to get one of his colleagues on the telephone at home.

  ‘Do you happen to know if anyone removed a tape from that box I borrowed from the office? Like a fool I left it in my room at the office. Someone’s removed an important tape. Something private.’

  ‘No, I don’t think … just a minute … yes, in fact, they’ve wiped out the stuff. It was poetry. Sorry, but the economy regulations, you know… . . What do you think of the news? Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?’

  Nicholas said to Joanna’s father, ‘Yes, it really has been wiped out.’

  ‘Never mind. I remember Joanna as she was in the rectory. Joanna was a great help in the parish. Her coming to London was a mistake, poor girl.’

  Nicholas refilled the man’s glass with whisky and started to add water. The clergyman signed irritably with his hand to convey the moment when the drink was to his taste. He had the mannerisms of a widower of long years, or of one unaccustomed to being in the company of critical women. Nicholas perceived that the man had never seen the reality of his daughter.. Nicholas was consoled for the blighting of his show; the man might not have recognized Joanna in the Deutschland.

  The frown of his face

  Before me, the hurtle of hell

  Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

  ‘I dislike London. I never come up unless I’ve got to,‘ the clergyman said, ‘for convocation or something like that. If only Joanna could have settled down at the rectory… . She was restless, poor girl.’ He gulped his whisky like a gargle, tossing back his head.

  Nicholas said, ‘She was reciting some sort of office just before she went down. The other girls were with her, they were listening in a way. Some psalms.’

  ‘Really? No one else has mentioned it.’ The old man looked embarrassed. He swirled his drink and swallowed it down, as if Nicholas might be going on to tell him that his daughter had gone over to Rome at the last, or somehow died in bad taste.

  Nicholas said violently, ‘Joanna had religious strength.’

  ‘I know that, my boy,’ said the father, surprisingly.

  ‘She had a sense of Hell. She told a friend of hers that she was afraid of Hell.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that. I’ve never heard her speak morbidly. It must have been the influence of London. I never come here, myself, unless I’ve got to. I had a curacy once, in Balham, in my young days. But since then I’ve had country parishes. I prefer country parishes. One finds better, more devout, and indeed in some cases, quite holy souls in the country parishes.’

  Nicholas was reminded of an American acquaintance of his, a psycho-analyst who had written to say he intended to practise in England after the war, ‘away from all these neurotics and this hustling scene of anxiety’.

  ‘Christianity is all in the country parishes these days,’ said this shepherd of the best prime mutton. He put down his glass as if to seal his decision on the matter, his grief for the loss of Joanna turning back, at every sequence, on her departure from the rectory.

  He said, ‘I must go and see the spot where she died.’

  Nicholas had already promised to take him to the demolished house in Kensington Road. The father had reminded Nicholas of this several times as if afraid he might inattentively leave London with this duty unfulfilled.

  ‘I’ll walk along with you.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not out of your way I’ll be much obliged. What do you make of this new bomb? Do you think it’s only propaganda stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘It leaves one breathless with horror. They’ll have to make an armistice if it’s true.’ He looked around him as they walked towards Kensington. ‘These bomb-sites look tragic. I never come up if I can help it, you know.’

  Nicholas said, presently, ‘Have you seen any of the girls who were trapped in the house with Joanna, or any of the other members of the club?’

  The rector said, ‘Yes, quite a few. Lady Julia. was kind enough to have a few to tea to meet me yesterday afternoon, Of course, those poor girls have been through an ordeal, even the onlookers among them. Lady Julia suggested we didn’t discuss the actual incident. You know, I think that was wise.’

  ‘Yes. Do you recall the girls’ names at all?’

  There was Lady Julia’s niece, Dorothy, and a Miss Baberton who escaped, I believe, through a window. Several others.’

  ‘A Miss Redwood? Selina Redwood?’

  ‘Well, you know, I’m rather bad at names.’

  ‘A very tall, very slender girl, very beautiful. I want to find her. Dark hair.’

  ‘They were all charming, my dear boy. All young people are charming. Joanna was, to me, the most charming of all, but there I’m partial.’

  ‘She was charming,’ said Nicholas, and held his peace.

  But the man had sensed his pursuit with the ease of the pastoral expert on home ground, and he inquired solicitously, ‘Has this young girl disappeared?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t been able to trace her. I’ve been trying for the past nine days.’

  ‘How odd. She couldn’t have lost her memory, I suppose? Wandering the streets …?‘

  ‘I think she would have been found in that case. She’s very conspicuous.’

  ‘What does her family report?’

  ‘Her family are in Canada.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s gone away to forget. It would be understandable. Was she one of the girls who were trapped?’

  ‘Yes. She got out through a window.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think she was at Lady Julia’s from your description. You could telephone and ask.’

  ‘I have telephoned, in fact. She hasn’t heard anything of Selina and neither have any of the other girls. But I was hoping they might be mistaken. You know how it is.’

  ‘Selina …‘ said the rector.

  ‘Yes, that’s her name.’

  ‘Just a moment. There was a mention of a Selina. One of the girls, a fair girl, very young, was complaining that Selina had gone off with her only ball dress. Would that be the girl?’

  ‘That’s the girl.’

  ‘Not very nice of her to pinch another girl’s dress, especially when they’ve all lost their wardrobes in the fire.’

  ‘It was a Schiaparelli dress.’

  The rector did not intrude on this enigma. They came to the site of the May of Teck Club. It looked now like one of the familiar ruins of the neighbour-hood, as if it had been shattered years ago by a bomb-attack, or months ago by a guided missile. The paving stones of the porch lay crookedly leading nowhere. The pillars lay like Roman remains. A side wall at the back of the house stood raggedly at half its former height. Greggie’s garden was a heap of masonry with a few flowers and rare plants sprouting from it. The pink and white tiles of the hall lay in various aspects of long neglect, and from a lower part of the ragged side wall a piece of brown drawing-room wall-paper furled more raggedly.

  Joanna’s father stood holding his wide black hat.

  At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,

  The rector said to Nicholas. ‘There’s really nothing to see.’

  ‘Like my tape-recording,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Yes, it’s all gone, all elsewhere.’

  Rudi Bittesch lifted and flicked through a pile of notebooks that lay on Nicholas’s table. He said, ‘Is this the manuscript of your book by the way?’

  He would not have taken this liberty in the normal course, but Nicholas was under a present obligation to him. Rudi had discovered the whereabouts of Selina.

  ‘You can have it,’ said Nicholas, meaning the manuscript. He said, not foreseeing the death he was to die, ‘You can keep it. It might be valuable one
day when I’m famous.’

  Rudi smiled. All the same, he tucked the books under his arm and said, ‘Coming along?’

  On the way to pick up Jane to go and see the fun at the Palace, Nicholas said, ‘Anyway, I’ve decided not to publish the book. The typescripts are destroyed.’

  ‘I have this bloody big lot of books to carry, and now you tell me this. What value to me if you don’t publish?’

  ‘Keep them, you never know.’

  Rudi had a caution about these things. He kept The Sabbath Notebooks, eventually to reap his reward.

  ‘Would you like a letter from Charles Morgan to me saying I’m a genius?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘You’re bloody cheerful about something or other.’

  ‘I know,’ said Nicholas. ‘Would you like to have the letter, though?’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘Here it is.’ Nicholas brought Jane’s letter from his inside pocket, crumpled like a treasured photograph.

  Rudi glanced at it. ‘Jane’s work,’ he said, and handed it back. ‘Why are you so cheerful? Did you see Selina?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She screamed. She couldn’t stop screaming. It’s a nervous reaction.’

  ‘The sight of you must have brought all back to her. I advised you to keep away.’

  ‘She couldn’t stop screaming.’

  ‘You frightened her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I said keep away. She’s no good, by the way, with a crooner in Clarges Street. You see him?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a perfectly nice chap. They’re married.’

  ‘So they say. You want to find a girl with character. Forget her.’

  ‘Oh, well. Anyway, he was very apologetic about her screaming, and I was very apologetic, of course. It made her scream more. I think she’d have preferred to see a fight.’