The Girls of Slender Means

Out of the deep have I called …

The other three took the ladder, one of them, a surprisingly slender girl called Pippa, whose non-apparent bones had evidently been too large to have allowed her escape through the window, shouted back, ‘Hurry up, Joanna.’

‘Joanna, the ladder!’

And Nicholas shouted from the window, ‘Joanna, get up the ladder.’

She regained her senses and pressed behind the last two girls, a brown-skinned heavily-sinewed swimmer and a voluptuous Greek exile of noble birth, both of whom were crying with relief. Joanna promptly started to clamber after them, grasping in her hand a rung that the last girl’s foot had just left. At that moment, the house trembled and the ladder and wash-room with it. The lire was extinguished, but the gutted house had been finally thrown by the violence of the work on the skylight. A whistle sounded as Joanna was half-way up. A voice from the megaphone ordered the men to jump clear. The house went down as the last fireman waited at the skylight for Joanna to emerge. As the sloping roof began to cave in, he leapt clear, landing badly and painfully on the flat roof- top. The house sank into its centre; a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it.

9

The tape-recording had been erased for economy reasons, so that the tape could be used again. That is how things were in i945. Nicholas was angry in excess of the occasion. He had wanted to play back Joanna’s voice to her father who had come up to London after her funeral to fill in forms as to the effects of the dead. Nicholas had written to him, partly with an urge to impart his last impressions of Joanna, partly from curiosity, partly, too, from a desire to stage a dramatic play-back of Joanna doing The Wreck of the Deutschland. He had mentioned the tape-recording in his letter.

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 recognized Joanna in the Deutschland.

 

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 psycho-analyst who had written to say he