The Girls of Slender Means Read online

  Nicholas, reminding himself that poise was perfect balance, accepted this statement as a rational response. ‘Who are the Ethical Guardians?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘They stand for the ideal of purity in the home. They keep a special guard on reading material. Many homes in our town will not accept literature unstamped by the Guardians’ crest of honour.’

  Nicholas now saw that the Colonel had understood him to hold ideals, and had connected them with the ideals of his wife Gareth. these being the only other ideals he could immediately lay hands on. It was the only explanation. Jane wanted to put everything straight. She said, ‘Nicholas is an anarchist.’

  ‘Ah no, Jane,’ said the Colonel. ‘That’s being a bit hard on your author-friend.’

  Selina had already begun to realize that Nicholas held unorthodox views about things to the point where they might be regarded as crackpot to the sort of people she was used to. She felt his unusualness was a weakness, and this weakness in an attractive man held desirability for her. There were two other men of her acquaintance who were vulnerable in some way. She was not perversely interested in this fact, so far as she felt no urge to hurt them; if she did so, it was by accident. What she liked about these men was that neither of them wished to possess her entirely. She slept with them happily because of this. She had another man-friend, a businessman of thirty-five, still in the Army, very wealthy, not weak. He was altogether possessive; Selina thought she might marry him eventually. In the meantime she looked at Nicholas as he conversed in this mad sequence with the Colonel, and thought she could use him.

  They sat in the drawing-room and planned the afternoon which had developed into a prospective outing for four in the Colonel’s car. By this time he had demanded to be called Felix.

  He was about thirty-two. He was one of Selina’s weak men. His weakness was an overwhelming fear of his wife, so that he took great pains not to be taken unawares in bed with Selina on their country week-ends, even although his wife was in California. As he locked the door of the bedroom Felix would say, very worried, ‘I wouldn’t like to hurt Gareth.’ or some such thing. The first time he did this Selina looked through the bathroom door, tall and beautiful with wide eyes, she looked at Felix to see what was the matter with him. He was still anxious and tried the door again. On the late Sunday mornings, when the bed was already uncomfortable with breakfast crumbs, he would sometimes fall into a muse and be far away. He might then say, ‘I hope there’s no way Gareth could come by knowledge of this hideout.’ And so he was one of those who did not want to possess Selina entirely; and being beautiful and liable to provoke possessiveness, she found this all right provided the man was attractive to sleep with and be out with, and was a good dancer.

  Felix was blond with an appearance of reserved nobility which he must have inherited. He seldom said anything very humorous, but was willing to be gay. On this Sunday afternoon in the May of Teck Club he proposed to drive to Richmond, which was a long way by car from Knightsbridge in those days when petrol was so scarce that nobody went driving for pleasure except in an American’s car, in the vague mistaken notion that their vehicles were supplied by ‘American’ oil, and so were not subject to the conscience of British austerity or the reproachful question about the necessity of the journey displayed at all places of public transport.

  Jane, observing Selina’s long glance of perfect balance and equanimity resting upon Nicholas, immediately foresaw that she would be disposed in the front seat with Felix while Selina stepped, with her arch-footed poise, into the back, where Nicholas would join her; and she foresaw that this arrangement would come about with effortless elegance. She had no objection to Felix, but she could not hope to win him for herself, having nothing to offer a man like Felix. She felt she had a certain something, though small, to offer Nicholas, this being her literary and brain-work side which Selina lacked. It was in fact a misunderstanding of Nicholas — she vaguely thought of him as a more attractive Rudi Bittesch — to imagine he would receive more pleasure and reassurance from a literary girl than simply a girl. It was the girl in Jane that had moved him to kiss her at the party; she might have gone further with Nicholas without her literary leanings. This was a mistake she continued to make in her relations with men, inferring from her own preference for men of books and literature their preference for women of the same business. And it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

  But Jane was presently proved right in her prediction about the seating arrangements in the car; and it was her repeated accuracy of intuition in such particulars as these which gave her confidence in her later career as a prophetic gossip-columnist.

  Meantime the brown-lined drawing-room began to chirp into life as the girls came in from the dining-room bearing trays of coffee cups. The three spinsters, Greggie, Come, and Jarvie. were introduced to the guests, as was their accustomed right. They sat in hard chairs and poured coffee for the young loungers. Collie and Jarvie were known to be in the process of a religious quarrel, but they made an effort to conceal their differences for the occasion. Jarvie. however, was agitated by the fact that her coffee cup had been filled too full by Collie. She laid the cup and swimming saucer on a table a little way behind her, and ignored it significantly. She was dressed to go out, with gloves, bag, and hat. She was presently going to take her Sunday-school class. The gloves were made of a stout green-brown suède. Jarvie smoothed them out on her lap, then fluttered her fingers over the cuffs, turning them back. They revealed the utility stamp, two half-moons facing the same way, which was the mark of price-controlled clothes and which, on dresses, where the mark was merely stamped on a tape sewn on the inside, everyone removed. Jarvie surveyed her gloves’ irremovable utility mark with her head at a slight angle, as if considering some question connected with it. She then smoothed out the gloves again and jerkily adjusted her spectacles. Jane felt in a great panic to get married. Nicholas, on hearing that Jarvie was about to go to teach a Sunday-school class, was solicitous to inquire about it.

  ‘I think we had better drop the subject of religion,’ Jarvie said, as if in conclusion of an argument long in progress. Collie said, ‘I thought we had dropped it. What a lovely day for Richmond!’

  Selina slouched elegantly in her chair, untouched by the threat of becoming a spinster, as she would never be that sort of spinster, anyway. Jane recalled the beginning of the religious quarrel overheard on all floors, since it had taken place in the echoing wash-room on the second landing. Collie had at first accused Jarvie of failing to dean. the sink after using it to wash up her dishes of stuff, which she surreptitiously cooked on her gas-ring where only kettles were lawfully permitted. Then, ashamed of her outburst, Collie had more loudly accused Jarvie of putting spiritual obstacles in her path ‘just when you know I’m growing in grace’. Jarvie had then said something scornful about the Baptists as opposed to the true spirit of the Gospels. This religious row, with elaborations, had now lasted more than two weeks but the women were doing their best to conceal it. Collie now said to Jarvie, ‘Are you going to waste your coffee with the milk in it?’ This was a moral rebuke, for milk was on the ration. Jarvie turned, smoothed, patted and pulled straight the gloves on her lap and breathed in and out. Jane wanted to tear off her clothes and run naked into the street, screaming. Collie looked with disapproval at Jane’s bare fat knees.

  Greggie, who had very little patience with the two other elder members, had been winning her way with Felix, and had enquired what went on ‘up there, next door’, meaning in the hotel, the top floor of which the American Intelligence was using, the lower floors being strangely empty and forgotten by the requisitioners.

  ‘Ah, you’d be surprised, ma’am,’ Felix said.

  Greggie said she must show the men round the garden before they set off for Richmond. The fact that Greggie did practically all the gardening detracted from its comfort for the rest of the girls. Only the youngest and happiest girls cou
ld feel justified in using it to sit about in, as it was so much Greggie’s toiled-at garden. Only the youngest and happiest could walk on the grass with comfort; they, were not greatly given to scruples and consideration for others, by virtue of their unblighted spirits.

  Nicholas had noticed a handsome bright-cheeked fair-haired girl standing, drinking down her coffee fairly quickly. She left the room with graceful speed when she had drunk her coffee.

  Jane said, ‘That’s Joanna Childe who does elocution.’

  Later, in the garden, while Greggie was conducting her tour, they heard Joanna’s voice. Greggie was displaying her various particular items, rare plants reared from stolen cuttings, these being the only objects that Greggie would ever think of stealing. She boasted, like a true gardening woman, of her thefts and methods of acquiring snips of other people’s rare plants. The sound of Joanna’s afternoon pupil liked down from her room.

  Nicholas said, ‘The voice is coming from up there, now. Last time, it came from the ground floor.’

  ‘She uses her own room at week-ends when the recreation room is used a lot. We’re very proud of Joanna.’

  Joanna’s voice followed her pupil’s.

  Greggie said, ‘This hollow shouldn’t be there. It’s where the bomb dropped. It just missed the house.’

  ‘Were you in the house at the time?’ said Felix. ‘I was,’ said Greggie, ‘I was in bed. Next moment I was on the floor. All the windows were broken. And it’s my suspicion there was a second bomb that didn’t go off. I’m almost sure I saw it drop as I picked myself up off the floor. But the disposal squad found only the one bomb and removed it. Anyway, if there’s a second it must have died a natural death by now. I’m talking about the year 1942.’

  Felix said, with his curious irrelevancy, ‘My wife Gareth talks of coming over here with UNRRA. I wonder if she could put up at your club in transit for a week or two? I have to be back and forth, myself. She would be lonely in London.’

  ‘It would have been lying underneath the hydrangeas on the right if I was correct,’ Greggie said.

  The sea of faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  ‘We’d better be on our way to Richmond,’ Felix said.

  ‘We’re awfully proud of Joanna,’ said Greggie.

  ‘A fine reader.’

  ‘No, she recites from memory. But her pupils read, of course. It’s elocution.’

  Selina gracefully knocked some garden mud off her wedge shoes on the stone step, and the party moved inside.

  The girls went to get ready. The men disappeared in the dark little downstairs cloakroom.

  ‘That is a fine poem,’ said Felix, for Joanna’s voices were here, too, and the lesson had moved to Kubla Khan.

  Nicholas almost said, ‘She is orgiastical in her feeling for poetry. I can hear it in her voice,’ but refrained in case the Colonel should say ‘Really?’ and he should go on to say, ‘Poetry takes the place of sex for her, I think.’

  ‘Really? She looked sexually fine to me.’ Which conversation did not take place, and Nicholas kept it for his notebooks.

  They waited in the hall till the girls came down. Nicholas read the notice-board, advertising second-hand clothes for sale, or in exchange for clothing coupons. Felix stood back, a refrainer from such intrusions on the girls’ private business, but tolerant of the other man’s curiosity. He said, ‘Here they come.’

  The number and variety of muted noises-off were considerable. Laughter went on behind the folded doors of the first-floor dormitory. Someone was shovelling coal in the cellar, having left open the green baize door which led to those quarters. The telephone desk within the office rang distantly shrill with boy-friends, and various corresponding buzzes on the landings summoned the girds to talk. The sun broke through as the forecast had promised.

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  6

  ‘Dear Dylan Thomas,’ wrote Jane.

  Downstairs, Nancy Riddle, who had finished her elocution lesson, was attempting to discuss with Joanna Childe the common eventualities arising from being a clergyman’s daughter.

  ‘My father’s always in a filthy temper on Sundays. Is yours?’

  ‘No, he’s rather too occupied.’

  ‘Father goes on about the Prayer Book. I must say, I agree with him there. It’s out of date.’

  ‘Oh, I think the Prayer Book’s wonderful,’ said Joanna. She had the Book of Common Prayer practically by heart, including the Psalms — especially the Psalms — which her father repeated daily at Matins and Evensong in the frequently empty church. In former years at the rectory Joanna had attended these services every day, and had made the responses from her pew, as it might be on ‘Day 13’, when her father would stand in his lofty meekness, robed in white over black, to read:

  Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered:

  whereupon without waiting for pause Joanna would respond:

  let them also that hate him flee before him.

  The father continued:

  Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away:

  And Joanna came in swiftly:

  and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God.

  And so on had circled the Psalms, from Day 1 to Day 31 of the months, morning and evening, in peace and war; and often the first curate, and then the second curate, took over the office, uttering as it seemed to the empty pews, but by faith to the congregations of the angels, the Englishly rendered intentions of the sweet singer of Israel.

  Joanna lit the gas-ring in her room in the May of Teck Club and put on the kettle. She said to Nancy Riddle:

  ‘The Prayer Book is wonderful. There was a new version got up in 1928, but Parliament put it out. Just as well, as it happened.’

  ‘What’s the Prayer Book got to do with them?’

  ‘It’s within their jurisdiction funnily enough.’

  ‘I believe in divorce,’ Nancy said.

  ‘What’s that got to do with the Prayer Book?’

  ‘Well, it’s all connected with the C. of E. and all the arguing.’

  Joanna mixed some powdered milk carefully with water from the tap and poured the mixture upon two cups of tea. She passed a cup to Nancy and offered saccharine tablets from a small tin box.

  Nancy took one tablet, dropped it in her tea, and stirred it. She had recently got involved with a married man who talked of leaving his wife.

  Joanna said, ‘My father had to buy a new cloak to wear over his cassock at funerals, he always catches cold at funerals. That means no spare coupons for me this year.’

  Nancy said, ‘Does he wear a cloak? He must be High. My father wears an overcoat; he’s Low to Middle, of course.’

  *

  All through the first three weeks of July Nicholas wooed Selina and at the same time cultivated Jane and others of the May of Teck Club.

  The sounds and sights impinging on him from the hall of the club intensified themselves, whenever he called, into one sensation, as if with a will of their own. He thought of the lines:

  Let us roll all our strength, and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball;

  And I would like, he thought, to teach Joanna that poem or rather demonstrate it; and he made spasmodic notes of all this on the back pages of his Sabbath manuscript.

  Jane told him everything that went on in the club. ‘Tell me more,’ he said. She told him things, in her clever way of intuition, which fitted his ideal of the place. In fact, it was not an unjust notion, that
it was a miniature expression of a free society, that it was a community held together by the graceful attributes of a common poverty. He observed that at no point did poverty arrest the vitality of its members but rather nourished it. Poverty differs vastly from want, he thought.

  *

  ‘Hallo, Pauline?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Jane.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I was resting.’

  ‘Sleeping?’

  ‘No, resting. I’ve just got back from the psychiatrist, he makes me rest after every session. I’ve got to lie down.’

  ‘I thought you were finished with the psychiatrist. Are you not very well again?’

  ‘This is a new one.. Mummy found him, he’s marvellous.’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to tell you something, can you listen? Do you remember Nicholas Farringdon?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Who’s he?’

  ‘Nicholas … remember that last time on the roof at the May of Teck … Haiti, in a hut … among some palms, it was market day, everyone had gone to the market centre. Are you listening?’