The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark Page A

Fleet Street, in honour of which he had purchased a pair of luxurious pig-skin gloves; he displayed these proudly. There was an air of a resistance movement against the world at this poetry meeting. Poets seemed to understand each other with a secret instinct, almost a kind of prearrangement, and it was plain that the poet with the gloves would never show off these poetic gloves so frankly, or expected to be understood so well in relation to them, at his new job in Fleet Street or anywhere else, as here.
        Some were men demobilised from the non-combatant corps. Some had been unfit for service for obvious reasons—a nervous twitch of the facial muscles, bad eyesight or a limp. Others were still in battle-dress. Nicholas had been out of the Army since the month after Dunkirk, from which he had escaped with a wound in the thumb; his release from the Army had followed a mild nervous disorder in the month after Dunkirk.
        Nicholas stood noticeably aloof at the poets' gathering, but although he greeted his friends with a decided reserve, it was evident that he wanted Jane to savour her full joy of it. In fact, he wanted her to invite him again to the May of Teck Club, as dawned on her later in the evening.
        The poets read their poems, two each, and were applauded. Some of these poets were to fail and fade into a no-man's-land of Soho public houses in a few years' time, and become the familiar messes of literary life. Some, with many talents, faltered, in time, from lack of stamina, gave up and took a job in advertising or publishing, detesting literary people above all. Others succeeded and became paradoxes; they did not always continue to write poetry, or even poetry exclusively.
        One of these young poets, Ernest Claymore, later became a mystical stockbroker of the 1960's, spending his weekdays urgently in the City, three week-ends each month at his country cottage—an establishment of fourteen rooms, where he ignored his wife and, alone in his study, wrote Thought—and one week-end a month in retreat at a monastery. In the 1960's Ernest Claymore read a book a week in bed before sleep, and sometimes addressed a letter to the press about a book review: "Sir, Maybe I'm dim. I have read your review of . . ."; he was to publish three short books of philosophy which everyone could easily understand indeed; at the moment in question, the summer of 1945, he was a dark-eyed young poet at the poetry recital, and had just finished reading, with husky force, his second contribution:
     
        _I in my troubled night of the dove clove brightly my__
        _Path from the tomb of love incessantly to redress my__
        _Articulate womb, that new and necessary rose,__
                            _exposing my ...__
     
        He belonged to the Cosmic school of poets. Jane, perceiving that he was orthosexual by definition of his manner and appearance, was uncertain whether to cultivate him for future acquaintance or whether to hang on to Nicholas. She managed to do both, since Nicholas brought along this dark husky poet, this stockbroker to be, to the party which followed, and there Jane was able to make a future assignment with him before Nicholas drew her aside to enquire further into the mysterious life of the May of Teck Club.
        "It's just a girls' hostel," she said, "that's all it boils down to."
        Beer was served in jam-jars, which was an affectation of the highest order, since jam-jars were at that time in shorter supply than glasses and mugs. The house where the party was held was in Hampstead. There was a stifling crowd. The hosts, Nicholas said, were communist intellectuals. He led her up to a bedroom where they sat on the edge of an unmade bed and looked, with philosophical exhaustion on Nicholas's side, and on hers the enthusiasm of the neophyte Bohemian, at the bare boards of the floor. The people of the house, said Nicholas, were undeniably communist