‘Felix!’ yelled Mrs Dobell. He was coming out of the hotel adjoining the club, with his olive-greenish khaki uniform dusky with soot and streaked as with black oil. He had been investigating the back premises of the club. He said: ‘The brickwork of the walls looks unsteady. The top half of the fire-escape has collapsed. There are some girls trapped up there. The firemen are directing them up to the top floor; they’ll have to be brought through the skylight on to the roof.’
*
‘Who?’ said Lady Julia.
‘Jane Wright speaking. I rang you last week to see if you could find out some more about —‘Oh yes. Well, I’m afraid there’s very little information from the F.O. They never comment officially, you know. From what I can gather, the man was making a complete nuisance of himself, preaching against the local superstitions. He had several warnings and apparently he got what he asked for. How did you come to know him?’
‘He was friendly with some of the girls at the May of Teck Club when he was a civilian, I mean before he joined this Order. He was there on the night of the tragedy, in fact, and—’
‘It probably turned his brain. Something must have affected his brain, anyhow, because from what I gather unofficially he was a complete …‘
*
The skylight, although it had been bricked up by someone’s hysterical order, at that time in the past when a man had penetrated the attic-floor of the club to visit a girl, was not beyond being unbricked by the firemen. It was all a question of time.
Time was not a large or present fact to those girls of the May of Teck Club, thirteen of them, who, with Tilly Throvis-Mew, remained in the upper storeys of the building when, following the explosion in the garden, fire broke out in the house. A large portion of the perfectly safe fire-escape which had featured in so many safety-instruction regulations, so many times read out to the members at so many supper-times, now lay in zigzag fragments among the earthy mounds and upturned roots of the garden.
Time, which was an immediate onward-rushing enemy to the onlookers in the street and the firemen on the roof, was only a small far-forgotten event to the girls; for they were stunned not only by the force of the explosion, but, when they recovered and looked round, still more by the sudden dislocation of all familiar appearances. A chunk of the back wall of the house gaped to the sky. There, in 1945, they were as far removed from the small fact of time as weightless occupants of a space-rocket. Jane got up, ran to her room, and with animal instinct snatched and gobbled a block of chocolate which remained on her table. The sweet stuff assisted her recovery. She turned to the wash-rooms where Tilly, Anne, and Selina were slowly rising to their feet. There were shouts from the direction of the roof. An unrecognized face looked in the slit window, and a large hand wrenched the loose frame away from it.
But the fire had already started to spread up the main staircase, preceded by heraldic puffs of smoke, the flames sidling up the banisters.
The girls who had been in their rooms on the second and third floors at the time of the explosion had been less shaken than those at the top of the house, since there some serious defect in the masonry had been caused indirectly by a bombardment early in the war. The girls on the second and third floors were cut and bruised, but were stunned by the sound of the blast rather than the house-shaking effects of it.
Some of the second-floor dormitory girls had been quick and alert enough to slip down the staircase and out into the street, in the interval between the explosion of the bomb and the start of the fire. The remaining ten, when they variously attempted to escape by that route, met the fire and retreated upward.
Joanna and Nancy Riddle, having finished their elocution lessons, had been standing at the door of Joanna’s room when the bomb went off, and so had escaped the glass from the window. Joanna’s hand was cut, however, by the glass from a tiny travelling clock which she had been winding at the time. It was Joanna who, when the members shrieked at the sight of the fire, gave the last shriek, then shouted:
‘The fire-escape!’ Pauline Fox fled behind her, and the others followed along the second-floor corridors and up the narrow back staircase to the third-floor passage-way where the fire-escape window had al-ways stood. This was now a platform open to the summer evening sky, for here the wall had fallen away and the fire-escape with it. Plaster tumbled from the bricks as the ten women crowded to the spot that had once been the fire-escape landing.. They were still looking in a bewildered way for the fire-escape stairway. Voices of firemen shouted at them from the garden. Voices came from the direction of the flat roof above, and then one voice clearly through a megaphone ordered them back, lest the piece of floor they stood on should collapse.
The voice said, ‘Proceed to the top floor.’
‘Jack will wonder what’s happened to me,’ said Pauline Fox. She was first up the back stairs to the wash-rooms where Anne, Selina, Jane, and Tilly were now on their feet, having steadied themselves on learning of the fire. Selina was taking off her skirt.
Above their heads, set in a sloping ceiling, was the large square outline of the old, bricked-in skylight. Men’s voices, the scrabble of ladders and loud thumps of bricks being tested, came down from this large square.. The men were evidently trying to find a means of opening the skylight to release the girls, who meanwhile stared up at the square mark in the ceiling. Tilly said, ‘Won’t it open?’ Nobody answered, because the girls of the club knew the answer. Everyone in the club had heard the legend of the man who had got in by the skylight and, some said, been 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.