Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means

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 go 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 an all-drowning pitch:

_There were angels dining at the Ritz__

_And a nightingale sang in Berk'ley 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 vulgar, 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 realising 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.

"Jan-_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.

"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. Selina 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 slit of the little open window. He was exhorting them to get up quick.