The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online

the attainment of self-confidence.__
     
        Even Dorothy Markham stopped her chatter for a few seconds every morning at eight-thirty and evening at six-thirty, in respect for Selina's Sentences. All the top floor was respectful. It had cost five guineas. The two floors below were indifferent. But the dormitories crept up on the landings to listen, they could hardly believe their ears, and saved up each word with savage joy to make their boy-friends in the Air Force laugh like a drain, which was how laughter was described in those circles. At the same time, the dormitory girls were envious of Selina, knowing in their hearts they would never quite be in the Selina class where looks were concerned.
        The Sentences were finished by the time Jane had shoved her remaining piece of chocolate well out of sight and range. She returned to the letter. She had T.B. She gave a frail cough and looked round the room. It contained a wash-basin, a bed, a chest-of-drawers, a cupboard, a table and lamp, a wicker chair, a hard chair, a bookcase, a gas-fire and a meter-box with a slot to measure the gas, shilling by shilling. Jane felt she might easily be in a room in a sanatorium.
        "One last time," said Joanna's voice from the floor below. She was now rehearsing Nancy Riddle, who was at this moment managing her standard English vowels very well.
        "And again," said Joanna. "We've just got time before supper. I'll read the first stanza, then you follow on."
     
        _At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,__
        _And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those__
        _Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes__
          _A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.__
     
    4
     
    It was July 1945, three weeks before the general election.
     
        _They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams__
        _On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams__
        _Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams__
          _And quiet is the steep stair under.__
     
        "I wish she would stick to _The Wreck of the Deutschland__."
        "Do you? I rather like _Moonlit Apples__."
        We come now to Nicholas Farringdon in his thirty-third year. He was said to be an anarchist. No one at the May of Teck Club took this seriously as he looked quite normal; that is to say, he looked slightly dissipated, like the disappointing son of a good English family that he was. That each of his brothers—two accountants and one dentist—said of him from the time he left Cambridge in the mid-1930's, "Nicholas is a bit of a misfit, I'm afraid," would not have surprised anyone.
        Jane Wright applied for information about him to Rudi Bittesch who had known Nicholas throughout the 1930's. "You don't bother with him. He is a mess by the way," Rudi said. "I know him well, he is a good friend of mine." From Rudi she gathered that before the war he had been always undecided whether to live in England or France, and whether he preferred men or women, since he alternated between passionate intervals with both. Also, he could never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Father D'Arcy. Rudi explained that the latter was a Jesuit philosopher who had the monopoly for converting the English intellectuals. Nicholas was a pacifist up to the outbreak of war, Rudi said, then he joined the Army. Rudi said, "I have met him one day in Piccadilly wearing his uniform, and he said to me the war has brought him peace. Next thing he is psychoanalysed out of the Army, a wangle, and he is working for the Intelligence. The anarchists have given him up but he calls himself an anarchist, by the way."
        Far from putting Jane against Nicholas Farringdon, the scraps of his history that came to her by way of Rudi gave him an irresistible heroism in her mind, and, through her, in the eyes of the top-floor girls.
        "He must be a genius," said Nancy