The Girls of Slender Means Read online

  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 nearest her said, through his thick spectacles, ‘An Alexandrian poet.’

  ‘Anew 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 Deutsch land.

  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 organizations 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 standing 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 σπάνδαλον, 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 bas
ement 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 wall-paper 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 ballroom 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.

  On the floor above the dormitory were the rooms of the staff and the shared bedrooms of those who could afford shared bedrooms rather than a cubicle. Those who shared, four or two to a room, tended to be young women in transit, or temporary members looking for flats and bed-sitting rooms. Here, on the second floor, two of the elder spinsters, Collie and Jarvie. shared a room as they had done for eight years, since they were saving money now for their old age.

  But on the floor above that, there seemed to have congregated, by instinctive consent, most of the celibates, the old maids of settled character and various ages, those who had decided on a spinster’s life, and those who would one day do so but had not yet discerned the fact for themselves.

  This third-floor landing had contained five large bedrooms, now partitioned by builders into ten small ones. The occupants ranged from prim and pretty young virgins who would never become fully-wakened women, to bossy ones in their late twenties who were too wide-awake ever to surrender to any man. Greggie, the third of the elder spinsters, had her room on this floor. She was the least prim and the kindest of the women there.

  On this floor was the room of a mad girl, Pauline Fox, who was wont to dress carefully on certain evenings in the long dresses which were swiftly and temporarily reverted to in the years immediately following the war. She also wore long white gloves, and her hair was long, curling over her shoulders. On these evenings she said she was going to dine with the famous actor, Jack Buchanan. No one disbelieved her outright, and her madness was undetected.

  Here, too, was Joanna Childe’s room from which she could be heard practising her elocution at times when the recreation room was occupied.

  All the flowers of the spring

  Meet to perfume our burying;

  At the top of the house, on the fourth floor, the most attractive, sophisticated and lively girls had their rooms. They were filled with deeper and deeper social longings of various kinds, as peace-time crept over everyone. Five girls occupied the five top rooms. Three of them had lovers in addition to menfriends with whom they did not sleep but whom they cultivated with a view to marriage. Of the remaining two, one was almost engaged to be married, and the other was Jane Wright, fat but intellectually glamorous by virtue of the fact that she worked for a publisher She was on the look-out for a husband, meanwhile being mixed up with young intellectuals.

  Nothing but the roof-tops lay above this floor, now inaccessible by the trap-door in the bathroom ceiling — a mere useless square since it had been bricked up long ago before the war after a girl had been attacked by a burglar or a lover who had entered by it — attacked or merely confronted unexpectedly, or found in bed with him as some said; as the case might be, he left behind him a legend of many screams in the night and the skylight had been henceforth closed to the public. Workmen who, from time to time, were called in to do something up above the house had to approach the roof from the attic of a neighbouring hotel. Greggie claimed to know all about the story, she knew everything about the club. Indeed it was Greggie who, inspired by a shaft of remembrance, had directed the warden to the hoard of mud-coloured wall-paper in the cupboard which now defiled the walls of the drawing-room and leered in the sunlight at everyone. The top-floor girls had often thought it might be a good idea to sunbathe on the flat portion of the roof and had climbed up on chairs to see about the opening of the trap-door. But it would not budge, and Greggie had once more told them why. Greggie produced a better version of the story every time.

  ‘If there was a fire, we’d be stuck,’ said Selina Redwood who was exceedingly beautiful..

  ‘You’ve obviously been taking no notice of the emergency instructions,’ Greggie said. This was true. Selina was seldom in to dinner and so she had never heard them. Four times a year the emergency instructions were read out by the warden after dinner, on which nights no guests were allowed. The top floor was served for emergency purposes by a hack staircase leading down two flights to the perfectly sound fire-escape, and by the fire-equipment which lay around everywhere in the club. On these evenings of no guests the members were also reminded about putting things down lavatories, and the difficulties of plumbing systems in old houses, and of obtaining plumbers these days. They were reminded that they were expected to put everything back in place after a dance had been held in the club. Why some members unfortunately just went off to night clubs with their men-friends and left everything to others, said the warden, she simply did not know.

  Selina had missed all this, never having been in to dinner on the warden’s nights. From her window she could see, level with the top floor of the house, and set back behind the chimney pots, the portion of flat roof, shared by the club with the hotel next door, which would have been ideal for sunbathing. There was no access to any part of the roof from the bedroom windows, but one day she noticed that it was accessible from the lavatory window, a narrow slit made narrower by the fact that the wall in which it was set had been sub-divided at some point in the house’s history when the wash-rooms had been put in. One had to climb upon the
lavatory seat to see the roof. Selina measured the window. The aperture was seven inches wide by fourteen inches long. It opened casement-wise.

  ‘I believe I could get through the lavatory window,’ she said to Anne Baberton who occupied the room opposite hers.

  ‘Why do you want to get through the lavatory window?’ said Anne.

  ‘It leads out to the roof. There’s only a short jump from the window.’

  Selina was extremely slim. The question of weight and measurement was very important on the top floor. The ability or otherwise to wriggle sideways through the lavatory window would be one of those tests that only went to prove the club’s food policy to be unnecessarily fattening.

  ‘Suicidal,’ said Jane Wright who was miserable about her fatness and spent much of her time in eager dread of the next meal, and in making resolutions what to eat of it and what to leave, and in making counter-resolutions in view of the fact that her work at the publishers’ was essentially mental, which meant that her brain had to be fed more than most people’s.

  Among the five top-floor members only Selina Redwood and Anne Baberton could manage to wriggle through the lavatory window, and Anne only managed it naked, having made her body slippery with margarine. After the first attempt, when she had twisted her ankle on the downward leap and grazed her skin on the return clamber, Anne said she would in future use her soap ration to facilitate the exit. Soap was as tightly rationed as margarine but more precious, for margarine was fattening, anyway. Face cream was too expensive to waste on the window venture.