‘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 all-drowning pitch:
There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley 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 realizing 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.
‘Jane-
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
‘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. She 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 open slit of the little window. He was exhorting them to get up quick.
‘There’s been an explosion in the garden.’
‘Greggie’s bomb,’ Jane said, grinning at Tilly. ‘Greggie was right,’ she said. This was a hilarious statement, but Tilly did not laugh, she closed her eyes and lay back. Tilly was only half-dressed and looked very funny indeed. Jane then laughed loudly at Nicholas, but he too had no sense of humour.
*
Down in the street the main body of the club had congregated, having been in one of the public rooms on the ground floor at the time of the explosion, or else lingering in the dormitories. There, the explosion had been heard more than it was felt. Two ambulances had arrived and a third was approaching. Some of the more dazed among the people were being treated for shock in the hall of the neighbouring hotel.
Greggie was attempting to assure Mrs Felix Dobell that she had foreseen and forewarned the occurrence. Mrs
