On the floor above the dormitory were the rooms of the staff and the shared bedrooms of those who could afford shared bedrooms rather than a cubicle. Those who shared, four or two to a room, tended to be young women in transit, or temporary members looking for flats and bedsitting rooms. Here, on the second floor, two of the elder spinsters, Collie and Jarvie, shared a room as they had done for eight years, since they were saving money now for their old age.
But on the floor above that, there seemed to have congregated, by instinctive consent, most of the celibates, the old maids of settled character and various ages, those who had decided on a spinster's life, and those who would one day do so but had not yet discerned the fact for themselves.
This third-floor landing had contained five large bedrooms, now partitioned by builders into ten small ones. The occupants ranged from prim and pretty young virgins who would never become fully wakened women, to bossy ones in their late twenties who were too wideawake ever to surrender to any man. Greggie, the third of the elder spinsters, had her room on this floor. She was the least prim and the kindest of the women there.
On this floor was the room of a mad girl, Pauline Fox, who was wont to dress carefully on certain evenings in the long dresses which were swiftly and temporarily reverted to in the years immediately following the war. She also wore long white gloves, and her hair was long, curling over her shoulders. On these evenings she said she was going to dine with the famous actor Jack Buchanan. No one disbelieved her outright, and her madness was undetected.
Here, too, was Joanna Childe's room from which she could be heard practising her elocution at times when the recreation room was occupied.
_All the flowers of the spring__
_Meet to perfume our burying;__
At the top of the house, on the fourth floor, the most attractive, sophisticated and lively girls had their rooms. They were filled with deeper and deeper social longings of various kinds, as peace-time crept over everyone. Five girls occupied the five top rooms. Three of them had lovers in addition to men-friends with whom they did not sleep but whom they cultivated with a view to marriage. Of the remaining two, one was almost engaged to be married, and the other was Jane Wright, fat but intellectually glamorous by virtue of the fact that she worked for a publisher. She was on the look-out for a husband, meanwhile being mixed up with young intellectuals.
Nothing but the roof-tops lay above this floor, now inaccessible by the trap-door in the bathroom ceiling— a mere useless square since it had been bricked up long ago before the war after a girl had been attacked by a burglar or a lover who had entered by it—attacked or merely confronted unexpectedly, or found in bed with him as some said; as the case might be, he left behind him a legend of many screams in the night and the skylight had been henceforth closed to the public. Workmen who, from time to time, were called in to do something up above the house had to approach the roof from the attic of a neighbouring hotel. Greggie claimed to know all about the story, she knew everything about the club. Indeed it was Greggie who, inspired by a shaft of remembrance, had directed the warden to the hoard of mud-coloured wallpaper in the cupboard which now defiled the walls of the drawing room and leered in the sunlight at everyone. The top-floor girls had often thought it might be a good idea to sun-bathe on the flat portion of the roof and had climbed up on chairs to see about the opening of the trap-door. But it would not budge, and Greggie had once more told them why. Greggie produced a better version of the story every time.
"If there was a fire, we'd be stuck," said Selina Redwood who was exceedingly beautiful.
"You've obviously been taking no notice of the emergency instructions," Greggie said. This was true. Selina was seldom in to dinner and so she had never heard them. Four times a year the emergency instructions were read out by the warden after dinner, on which nights no guests were allowed. The top floor was served for emergency purposes by a back staircase leading down two flights to the perfectly sound fire-escape, and by the fire-equipment which lay around everywhere in the club. On these evenings of no guests the members were also reminded about putting things down lavatories, and the difficulties of plumbing systems in old houses, and of obtaining plumbers these days. They were reminded that they were expected to put everything back in place after a dance had been held in the club. Why some members unfortunately just went off to night clubs with their men-friends and left everything to others, said the warden, she simply did not know.
Selina had missed all this, never having been in to dinner on the warden's nights. From her window she could see, level with the top floor of the house, and set back behind the chimney pots, the portion of flat roof, shared by the club with the hotel next door, which would have been ideal for sun-bathing. There was no access to any part of the roof from the bedroom windows, but one day she noticed that it was accessible from the lavatory window, a narrow slit made narrower by the fact that the wall in which it was set had been sub-divided at some point in the house's history when the wash-rooms had been put in. One had to climb up on the lavatory seat to see the roof. Selina measured the window. The aperture was seven inches wide by fourteen inches long. It opened casement-wise.
"I believe I could get through the lavatory window," she said to Anne Baberton who occupied the room opposite hers.
"Why do you want to get through the lavatory window?" said Anne.
"It leads out to the roof. There's only a short jump from the window."
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 publisher's 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 marvelous 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 three 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."
"Good. I would know if you did, I wait for the click before I speak. Kindly remember."
Jane had to apologise to the office for him. "He's a foreigner. It's in connection with the world of books. It isn't my fault."
But another and more presentable man from the world of books had lately put in an appearance for Jane. She had brought him into the drawing room and introduced him to Selina, Anne and the mad girl Pauline Fox who dressed up for Jack Buchanan on her lunatic evenings.
This man, Nicholas Farringdon, had been rather charming, though shy. "He's thoughtful," Jane said. "We think him brilliant but he's still feeling his way in the world of books."
"Is he something in publishing?"
"Not at the moment. He's still feeling his way. He's writing something."
Jane's brain-work was of three kinds. First and secretly, she wrote poetry of a strictly non-rational order, in which occurred, in about the proportion of cherries in a cherry-cake, certain words that she described as "of a smouldering nature," such as loins and lovers, the root, the rose, the seawrack and the shroud. Secondly and secretly, she wrote letters of a friendly tone but with a business intention, under the auspices of the pale foreigner. Thirdly and more openly, she sometimes did a little work in her room which overlapped from her day's duties at the small publisher's office.
She was the only assistant at Huy Throvis-Mew Ltd. Huy Throvis-Mew was the owner of the firm, and Mrs. Huy Throvis-Mew was down as a director on the letter heading. Huy Throvis-Mew's private name was George Johnson, or at least it had been so for some years, although a few very old friends called him Con and older friends called him Arthur or Jimmie. However, he was George in Jane's time, and she would do anything for George, her white-bearded employer. She parcelled up the books, took them to the post or delivered them, answered the telephone, made tea, minded the baby when George's wife, Tilly, wanted to go and queue for fish, entered the takings into ledgers, entered two different versions of the petty cash and office expenses into two sets of books, and generally did a small publisher's business. After a year George allowed her to do some of the detective work on new authors, which he was convinced was essential to the publishing trade, and to find out their financial circumstances and psychological weak points so that he could deal with them to a publisher's best advantage.