Selina was extremely slim. The question of weight and measurement was very important on the top floor. The ability or otherwise to wriggle sideways through the lavatory window would be one of those tests that only went to prove the club’s food policy to be unnecessarily fattening.
‘Suicidal,’ said Jane Wright who was miserable about her fatness and spent much of her time in eager dread of the next meal, and in making resolutions what to eat of it and what to leave, and in making counter-resolutions in view of the fact that her work at the publishers’ was essentially mental, which meant that her brain had to be fed more than most people’s.
Among the five top-floor members only Selina Redwood and Anne Baberton could manage to wriggle through the lavatory window, and Anne only managed it naked, having made her body slippery with margarine. After the first attempt, when she had twisted her ankle on the downward leap and grazed her skin on the return clamber, Anne said she would in future use her soap ration to facilitate the exit. Soap was as tightly rationed as margarine but more precious, for margarine was fattening, anyway. Face cream was too expensive to waste on the window venture.
Jane Wright could not see why Anne was so concerned about her one inch and a half on the hips more than Selina’s, since Anne was already slender and already fixed up for marriage. She stood on the lavatory seat and threw out Anne’s faded green dressing-gown for her to drape round her slippery body and asked what it was like out there. The two other girls on the floor were away for the week-end on this occasion.
Anne and Selina were peeping over the edge of the flat roof at a point where Jane could not see them. They returned to report that they had looked down on the back garden where Greggie was holding her conducted tour of the premises for ‘the benefit of two new members. She had been showing them the spot where the bomb had fallen and failed to go off, and had been removed by a bomb-squad, during which operation everyone had been obliged to leave the house. Greggie had also been showing them the spot where, in her opinion, an unexploded bomb still lay.
The girls got themselves back into the house.
‘Greggie and her sensations’: Jane felt she could scream. She added, ‘Cheese pie for supper tonight, guess how many calories?’
The answer, when they looked up the chart, was roughly 350 calories. ‘Followed by stewed cherries,’ said Jane, ‘94 calories normal helping unless sweetened by saccharine, in which case 64 calories. We’ve had over a thousand calories today already. It’s always the same on Sundays. The bread-and-butter pudding alone was—’
‘I didn’t eat the bread-and-butter pudding,’ said Anne. ‘Bread-and-butter pudding is suicidal.’
‘I only eat a little bit of everything,’ Selina said. ‘I feel starved all the time, actually.’
‘Well, I’m doing brain-work,’ said Jane.
Anne was walking about the landing sponging off all the margarine. She said, ‘I’ve had to use up soap and margarine as well.’
‘I can’t lend you any soap this month,’ Selina said. Selina had a regular supply of soap from an American Army officer who got it from a source of many desirable things, called the P.X. But she was accumulating a hoard of it, and had stopped lending.
Anne said, ‘I don’t want your bloody soap. Just don’t ask for the taffeta, that’s all.’
By this she meant a Schiaparelli taffeta evening dress which had been given to her by a fabulously rich aunt, after one wearing. This marvellous dress, which caused a stir wherever it went, was shared by all the top floor on special occasions, excluding Jane whom it did not fit. For lending it out Anne got various returns, such as free clothing coupons or a half-used piece of soap.
Jane went back to her brain-work and shut the door with a definite click. She was rather tyrannous about her brain-work, and made a fuss about other people’s wirelesses on the landing, and about the petty-mindedness of these haggling bouts that took place with Anne when the taffeta dress was wanted to support the rising wave of long-dress parties.
‘You can’t wear it to the Milroy. It’s been twice to the Milroy … it’s been to Quaglino’s, Selina wore it to Quags, it’s getting known all over London.
‘But it looks altogether different on me, Anne. You can have a whole sheet of sweet-coupons.’
‘I don’t want your bloody sweet-coupons. I give all mine to my grandmother.’
Then Jane would put out her head. ‘Stop being so petty-minded and stop screeching. I’m doing brain- work.’
Jane had one smart thing in her wardrobe, a black coat and skirt made out of her father’s evening clothes. Very few dinner jackets in England remained in their original form after the war. But this looted outfit of Jane’s was too large for anyone to borrow; she was thankful for that, at least. The exact nature of her brain-work was a mystery to the club because, when asked about it, she reeled off fast an explanation of extreme and alien detail about costing, printers, lists, manuscripts, galleys and contracts.
‘Well, Jane, you ought to get paid for all that extra work you do.’
‘The world of books is essentially disinterested,’ Jane said. She always referred to the publishing business as ‘The world of books’. She was always hard up, so presumably ill paid. It was because she had to be careful of her shillings for the meter which controlled the gas-fire in her room that she was unable, so she said, to go on a diet during the winter, since one had to keep warm as well as feed one’s brain.
Jane received from the club, on account of her brain-work and job in publishing, a certain amount of respect which was socially offset by the arrival in the front hall, every week or so, of a pale, thin foreigner, decidedly in his thirties, with dandruff on his dark overcoat, who would ask in the office for Miss Jane Wright, always adding, ‘I wish to see her privately, please.’ Word also spread round from the office. that many of Jane’s incoming telephone calls were from this man.
‘Is that the May of Teck Club?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I speak to Miss Wright privately, please?’ At one of these moments the secretary on duty said to him, ‘All the members’ calls are private. We don’t listen in.’
