found in bed with a girl.
Now Selina stood on the lavatory seat and jumped up to the slit window. She slid through it to the roof with an easy diagonal movement. There were now thirteen women in the washroom. They stood in the alert, silent attitude of jungle-danger, listening for further instruction from the megaphone on the roof outside.
Anne Baberton followed Selina through the slit window, with difficulty, because she was flustered. But a man’s two hands came up to the window to receive her.. Tilly Throvis-Mew began to sob. Pauline Fox ripped off her dress and then her underclothes until she was altogether naked. She had an undernourished body; there would have been no difficulty for her in getting through the slit window fully clothed, but she went naked as a fish.
Only Tilly sobbed heavily, but the rest of the girls were trembling. The noises from the sloping roof ceased as the firemen jumped down from investigating the skylight on to the flat roof area; footsteps beat and shuffled there, beyond the slit window, where throughout the summer Selina had lain with Nicholas, wrapped in rugs, under the Plough, which constituted the only view in Greater London that remained altogether intact.
Within the wash-room the eleven remaining women heard a fireman’s voice addressing them through the window, against the simultaneous blare of megaphone instructions to the firemen. The man at the window said, ‘Stay where you are. Don’t panic. We’re sending for tools to uncover the brickwork over the skylight. We won’t be long.. It’s a question of time. We are doing everything we can to get you out. Remain where you are. Don’t panic. It’s just a question of time.’
The question of time opened now as a large thing in the lives of the eleven listeners.
*
Twenty-eight minutes had passed since the bomb had exploded in the garden. Felix Dobell joined Nicholas Farringdon on the flat roof after the fire started. They assisted the three slim girls through the window. Anne and naked Pauline Fox had been huddled into the two blankets of variable purpose, and hustled through the roof-hatch of the neighbouring hotel, the back windows of which had been smashed by the blast. Nicholas was as fleetingly impressed as was possible in the emergency, by the fact that Selina allowed the other girls to take the. blankets. She lingered, shivering a little, but with an appealing grace, like a wounded roe deer, in her white petticoat and bare feet. Nicholas thought she was lingering for his sake, since Felix had disappeared with the two other girls to help them down to the first-aid ambulances. He left Selina standing thoughtfully on the hotel side of the roof, and returned to the slit window of the club to see for himself if any of the remaining girls were slim enough to escape by that way. It had been said by the firemen that the building might collapse within the next twenty minutes.
As he approached the slit window Selina slipped past him and, clutching the sill, heaved herself up again.
‘Come down, what are you doing?’ Nicholas said. He tried to grasp her ankles, but she was quick and, crouching for a small second on the narrow sill, she dipped her head and sidled through the window into the wash-room.
Nicholas immediately supposed she had done this in an attempt to rescue one of the girls, or assist their escape through the window.
‘Come back out here, Selina,’ he shouted, heaving himself up to see through the slit. ‘It’s dangerous. You can’t help anybody.’
Selina was pushing her way through the standing group. They moved to give way without resistance. They were silent, except for Tilly, who now sobbed convulsively without tears, her eyes, like the other eyes, wide and fixed on Nicholas with the importance of fear.
Nicholas said, The men are coming to open the skylight. They’ll be here in a moment. Are there any others of you who would be able to get through the window here? I’ll give them a hand. Hurry up, the sooner the better.’
Joanna held a tape-measure in her hand. At some time in the interval between the firemen’s discovery that the skylight was firmly sealed and this moment, Joanna had rummaged in one of these top bedrooms to find this tape- measure, with which she had measured the hips of the other ten trapped with herself, even the most helpless, to see what were their possibilities of escape by the seven-inch window slit. It was known all through the club that thirty-six and a quarter inches was the maximum for hips that could squeeze themselves through it, but as the exit had to be effected sideways with a manoeuvring of shoulders, much depended on the size of the bones, and on the texture of the individual flesh and muscles, whether flexible enough to compress easily or whether too firm. The latter had been Tilly’s case. But apart from her, none of the women now left on the top floor was slim in anything like the proportions of Selina, Anne, and Pauline Fox. Some were plump. Jane was fat. Dorothy Markham, who had previously been able to slither in and out of the window to sunbathe, was now two months pregnant; her stomach was taut with an immovable extra inch. Joanna’s efforts to measure them had been like a scientific ritual in a hopeless case, it had been a something done, it provided a slightly calming distraction.
Nicholas said, ‘They won’t be long. The men are coming now.’ He was hanging on to the ledge of the window with his toes dug into the brickwork of the wall. He was looking towards the edge of the flat roof where the fire ladders were set. A file of firemen were now mounting the ladders with pick-axes, and heavy drills were being hauled up.
Nicholas looked back into the wash-room.
‘They’re coming now. Where did Selina go?’
No one answered.
He said, ‘That girl over there — can’t she manage to come through the window?’
He meant Tilly. Jane said, ‘She’s tried once. She got stuck. The fire’s crackling like mad down there. The house is going to collapse any minute.’
In the sloping roof above the girls’ heads the picks started to clack furiously at the brick-work, not in regular rhythm as in normal workmanship, but with the desperate hack-work of impending danger. It would not be long, now, before the whistles would blow and the voice from the megaphone would order the firemen to abandon the building to its collapse.
Nicholas had let go his hold to observe the situation from the outside. Tilly appeared at the slit window, now, in a second attempt to get out. He recognized her face as that of the girl who had been stuck there at the moment before the explosion, and whom he had been summoned to release. He shouted at her to get back lest she should stick again, and jeopardize her more probable rescue through the skylight. But she was frantic with determination, she yelled to urge herself on. It was a successful performance after all. Nicholas pulled her clear, breaking one of her hip-bones in the process. She fainted on the flat roof after he had set her down.
He pulled himself up to the window once more. The girls huddled, trembling and silent, round Joanna. They were looking up at the skylight. Some large thing cracked slowly on a lower floor of the house and smoke now started to curl in the upper air of the wash-rooms. Nicholas then saw, through the door of the wash-room, Selina approaching along the smoky passage. She was carrying something fairly long and limp and evidently light in
