Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means

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 recognised Joanna in the Deutsch- land .

_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 psychoanalyst 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 his 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 on-lookers 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 enquired 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 neighbourhood, 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 wallpaper furled more raggedly.

Joanna's father stood holding his wide black hat.

_At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows__