Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘She could o’ gone to one of them places without any old lady’s money. She got five of them A levels, most unusual they said, up at her school. Wanted her to go on there, on some grant, but I wasn’t ’aving it, wasting her time when she could o’ been earnin’ good money. Why, I seen adverts for bits o’ sekerteries for three thousand a year and more. And more. I ask yer.’

  He almost snatched the refilled cup from his wife, sipped, then set it down on the bedside table, growling: ‘Burn yer blasted mouth, now.’

  ‘Oh George, you’ve spilt it! I just polished that.’

  ‘Then you can polish it again. Give yer summink ter do.’

  ‘I got things to do.’

  ‘Go and do ’em, then,’ Mr Slater instructed without a trace of ill-temper, but Rose was leaning back in the pink mini-armchair.

  Frank persevered. ‘Yes, she’s an unusually clever girl – outstandingly so. But about this money. What I want to make certain of is – if she does inherit something handsome, and if Miss Pennecuick’s relations contest the will – er – make a fuss . . .’

  ‘Oo’ll make a fuss? What right ’ave they got? Old girl leaves it to Julie, it’s hers by right. That’s the law, isn’t it? I’d like to see anyone sticking their pissing nose into her affairs!’

  ‘Now, George. That’s ugly,’ Mrs Slater said placidly. ‘Language . . .’ And to Frank’s surprise Mr Slater muttered, ‘Oh all right . . . sorry. But just let anyone try doing my girl out of her rights, that’s all. Not that we need it, mind—’

  ‘Well then, if we’re doing all that well, p’raps you’ll see your way to me havin’ that cork lino for the kitchen,’ his wife said, with an effect of tartness.

  He waved a hand impatiently: ‘I don’t want nothing to do with any money, mind yer. But if you come ’ere to find out if we’ll stand by our own, course we will. Stands to reason. I don’t like ’er much—’

  ‘George! What a thing to say!’

  ‘—but she’s me own flesh and blood, and ’sides’ – here was thrust out, gaunt, and harder than tempered steel, the expression of one of those bedrocks of the British character that has not been destroyed – ‘it wouldn’t be fair.’

  He brought his fist down slowly, with impressive effect, upon the already crumpled Daily Mirror. Rose twitched the paper off the bed, murmuring, ‘I want a read of that, looks like it’s been in the dustbin already,’ while Frank stood up, divided between a desire to laugh, and incredulity at such a pair having produced Juliet.

  ‘Are you in touch with Juliet?’ to Rose.

  ‘Phones regular once a week.’

  Then she hesitated and Frank wondered if she was about to refer to Juliet’s lies. But, after a stealthy glance at her husband, who was glaring at the Daily Mirror as though compelling it back onto the bed, she only ended in a murmur: ‘Keeps in touch, I will say that.’

  Frank made a little bow to Rose and turned to leave.

  She accompanied him.

  ‘You mustn’t take too much notice of him,’ she said, as they stood by the front door. ‘His bark’s worse than what his bite is . . . I wish Julie’d get married or even engaged, that’s what I’d really like . . . All the other girls . . . She’s a funny one, and no mistake. I don’t s’pose she’s got anyone down there?’

  ‘Not so far as I know, Mrs Slater,’ gently.

  ‘No . . . I didn’t s’pose so. Oh well, all come out in the wash. Good morning. Thanks for coming . . . I s’pose you couldn’t fancy a cup of tea?’

  He shook his head smilingly, thanked her with more words than he would have used to most people, and, catching sight by good luck of a cruising taxi, hailed it, and directed the driver to King’s Cross.

  His mind was full of the awfulness of marriage. These thoughts were more insistent than the reflection that his interview with Juliet’s parents had gone better than he had anticipated. But he suddenly felt a wish to talk it over with someone. He decided to take Clemence out to lunch: she was such a good listener.

  St Alberics, like every other place in England large enough to call itself a town, had recently opened a restaurant for ‘natural’ foods, and this, of course, was the one to which he took her.

  She, soberly pleased at being pounced upon as she was leaving Dr Masters’s surgery at ten minutes to one, did not like the Cool Cucumber, but did not, of course, say so.

  She surveyed the trays of glowing grated carrot and pearly rings of raw onion, and the bowls of chopped cheese set beside cartons of natural yoghurt, without any vulgar rising of the salival juices. There were also those little wooden barrels full of nettle wine and dandelion wine. She would have relished a glass of rosé.

  But he was handing her a wooden spoon and fork and a beech-wood bowl, which she had to fill with a meal; cold, moist, and good for you.

  In comic despair, she studied the back of her host’s head, shapely below its curtain of thick, curling, shoulder-length hair. What would happen, she wondered, if she slammed bowl, spoon and fork back in their racks, and demanded to be taken somewhere where one could eat the kind of food she liked?

  But of course she would do nothing of the kind.

  ‘I saw Juliet’s parents this morning,’ he announced when they were seated and he had poured out two generous glasses of dandelion wine. ‘The most extraordinary pair – I don’t mean eccentric, I mean extraordinary in having produced Juliet.’

  He attacked a mound of shredded vegetables, while giving her an account of his visit and of Juliet’s lies. (She suppressed an impulse to burst out: How do you really feel about her, Frank? )

  Instead, ‘What was the point of going to see them?’ Dutifully chewing raw carrot. ‘I mean, how does that help her?’

  ‘I want them on my side – her side, that is.’

  There was a trace of defiance in his voice. He was now more anxious than ever that his interest in Juliet should not be misinterpreted.

  Clemence’s clear blue eyes met his own with their usual calm, and the defiance subsided. Good friend that she was, she always understood: she was ‘the thousandth man that sticketh closer than a brother’ – but never so close as to be a nuisance, he thought.

  She, meanwhile, wanted to exclaim: But she told Aunt Addy! and She must be thoroughly untrustworthy, and, fatally, Frank, how can you care about what happens to such a little liar? And of course she exclaimed not at all, but assumed a gentle, questioning expression which encouraged him to continue.

  Which he did.

  ‘You see’ – he spoke slowly and with concentration – ‘there’s this something, some problem she has; I gather from hints she’s dropped that it’s something to do with coincidence – scientific. Anyway one or two books have been written in the last few years about coincidence but she’s only lately got hold of those, she told me. She’s been thinking about it, this question, ever since she could think at all, in a vague kind of way, not really knowing what she was puzzled about—’

  Yes, I must face it. He’s Off Again, the Thousandth Man was thinking dismally. But it’s in a different way, this time.

  ‘—and now the question, whatever it is, absorbs her to the exclusion of all other interests.’ He drew a carton of yoghurt energetically towards him and reached for some very brown sugar.

  ‘But what is it, Frank?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. Haven’t you been listening?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘Have some more—’ He pushed the carafe at her.

  ‘No thank you. I – I haven’t quite—’ She held up her glass. ‘But if she doesn’t know, and can’t tell you because she doesn’t, how can you help her by seeing her parents?’ She glanced at her watch.

  ‘I can get their support if the Barrows make a plea of undue influence over Great-Aunt’s will and—’

  ‘And what? (Frank, I’m sorry but I must go. We’ve got someone really ill, one of what Edward calls his “heavies”, coming at two-fifteen sharp . . .’)

  ‘And I can guarantee quiet and soli
tude for her to work at her problem.’

  ‘But that means – adopting her. Or . . . something.’

  Clemence, standing up to slip unaided into her coat, turned to stare at him. Or something? Not . . . her stomach seemed to turn over.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, in the tone she had heard from him only two or three times in the twenty years of their friendship. ‘I believe she’s a genius, and I’m going to see that she gets her chance.’

  ‘Well, dear. What kind of a day?’ her grandmother asked, when she got home that evening.

  ‘Oh, so-so. Frank took me out to lunch.’

  ‘Raw salad and that unnatural cutlery?’ Mrs Massey said tartly. ‘Why couldn’t he have taken you to the Santo Alberic and given you something eatable? He can afford it. He really is one of the most trying . . . no, the most trying man I’ve ever known. And so silly.’

  ‘But sweet, Grandmamma. And kind. And – and good, too.’

  Mrs Massey made the sound written as h’mph. The qualities her granddaughter had named did not attract her in the male.

  ‘Of course, if that’s what you like, dear.’

  ‘It’s the best basis for . . . the kind of marriage I want.’

  Clemence was leaning forward, holding her large capable hands out to the fire, and looking into its flames, and she now repeated the conversation at lunch.

  ‘Do you – er – think any progress has been made?’ Mrs Massey ventured to ask at last.

  ‘Absolutely none, I should think,’ was the quiet answer, and then she burst out: ‘It’s absolutely the end having some dotty idea for a rival!’

  ‘Really the best advice I can give you, dear – and I’ve seen a good deal of the world, you know – is to find someone else, and quickly. I’ve always said, and I say it now: the best cure for A is B.’

  ‘But I want Frank,’ Clemence said.

  13

  ‘I’ve found another coincidence for you, a really good one,’ Frank said to Juliet, on a walk they were taking some days later. It was suddenly high spring; emerald leaves and pink and white blossom tossing in a tearing, cool wind, and the sun silver-white in the changing sky.

  Round came her head, with the eyes full of light. She said nothing.

  ‘Yes, in some book of memoirs – can’t remember whose. A man had bought his wife a superb painting of a grasshopper by some very famous painter, Picasso, I think; and that night when she went to bed she found a grasshopper struggling and buzzing under the bedclothes. I thought it very odd indeed, and just up your street.’

  ‘Pure.’

  ‘What?’ He was not quite sure that he had heard the muttered word correctly; it was so unexpected.

  ‘Nothing. That’s interestin’. I – I liked what you told me about the robin, too. Superstitious, course – Christ, and all that – but I liked it. Dunno why.’

  No, thought her would-be mentor, you don’t know why, and for a very long time you won’t.

  Juliet’s road was going to be immensely stony and immensely long, and perhaps at the end of it all his cautious feeding into her of the nourishment he believed a human creature must ingest in order to be human (if these treasures were not in the spirit from birth) might have been wasted.

  ‘There’s two robins!’ exclaimed a voice at his side almost unrecognizable from excitement. ‘And we was just talking . . .’

  ‘Yes. It is the mating season, dear,’ he said gently. It then occurred to him, with one of those flights of fancy more usual in women than in men, that perhaps for Juliet there never would be a mating season. It was the kind of thought for which, among other qualities, Clemence wanted him for her husband; such perceptions complemented her own sober and unimaginative temperament.

  ‘You goin’ off to the Cowshed now?’ Juliet asked, as he paused at the crossroads, one road leading to St Alberics, and the other back to Leete.

  ‘Yes. As usual, I’ve got to see a man . . . I only came up to drag you out for a walk. You’d sit stewing over those books all day if someone didn’t, and there’s no one else to.’

  ‘It’s better stewin’ than what it is sittin’ with poor old Auntie. That does get me down, if you like.’

  Miss Pennecuick had taken to her bed, and did not seem likely to rise from it again.

  He looked at her curiously. Did she have no feeling of affection towards the woman who had rescued her, and given her solitude and silence so that her strange powers could develop?

  ‘Yes. It must be very tedious,’ he said drily, moving in the direction of the small shop selling ice cream and cigarettes that adorned the otherwise charming break in the lonely little roads. ‘I left my bicycle here. See you later this week.’

  ‘All right’ – and she turned back slowly down the Leete road.

  ‘Juliet?’ he called, as he rode past her a moment later. ‘Don’t be too long, will you? You know how it upsets Great-Aunt if you aren’t there when she wants you, especially lately.’

  ‘Oh all right. But it’s a dead bore.’

  The thin voice floated after him, its discontented note contrasting with the bloom over tree and hedge.

  When he was out of sight, she dawdled. The wind lifted her hair and sent it flying out behind her, and the chill air had brought colour into her face.

  The white grasses of winter had mysteriously vanished, the last bronze and copper leaves had blown away, and emerald, emerald had everywhere replaced the dun and pallor. The air bit, but it smelled sweeter than any scent that man could concoct; the wild rosebuds, long and pointed with deep pink, were lifting themselves in the hedges.

  Juliet wandered on, slowly on. For once her brain was quiescent, and that mathematician’s inner picture of the world which is ‘presented in the form of inter-related quantities’, was replaced by one presented by her senses. Not fully, not with the mysterious splendour that brings tears (as Frank’s friend the poet would have seen it with his inward eye) – only faintly and, compared with his vision, a ghost-like entity. But she felt the difference: it came upon her like a revelation; she experienced an emotion almost completely unfamiliar, and only dimly present in the past while she was talking to the pet bird in her former home, or watching wild creatures at play. The world of Nature, Mother of all the Goddesses and of Man, broke through the framework imposed by science, and with it there came a new happiness.

  She wandered slowly homewards, seeing everything, breathing each waft of cold sweet air, treading with pausing feet the dry road already lightly filmed with summer’s dust.

  So when Sarah, shaking with indignation and almost purple with rage, saw from her place by the gate in Hightower’s wall her mistress’s detested protegée ‘dawdling along as if tomorrow would do’, she broke into a shrill tirade:

  ‘Where you been, you wicked little beast, you? Bone-selfish, that’s what you are, crawling home like some snail, and that poor dear nearly out of her mind wondering where you was. You know’s well as I do the doctor says she got to avoid all excitement. All excitement, he said.’ Sarah was now tottering beside Juliet, as the latter began to hurry along the path leading to the house. ‘That’s what he said, and Mr Frank ought to know better, taking you out when she’s about as bad as she can be—’

  Juliet broke into a run, flinging an expletive over her shoulder, and Sarah uttered a gasp of outrage, while beginning a shaky attempt to run herself.

  The front door was open. Juliet rushed through, across the hall where Pilar, polishing, gaped at her, and up the stairs, two at a time. The unfamiliar happiness she had just experienced was fading; in seconds, it would be forgotten. All she wanted was to get the interview with Auntie over, and get back to her table and books.

  She rapped loudly on the door, hearing as she did so a peculiar sound, a kind of loud gasping. She opened the door violently, her anger rising, and darted across the room to the bed and stood there, silent and sullen and trembling with rage.

  ‘Wh – wa – wh – late – wh—’ choked a voice out of the face almost unrecognizable from
age and agitation. ‘I – wh—’ The eyes behind the spectacles were fixed in a piteous glare upon her face. ‘Oh have you – I – got so—’

  ‘So what? I’m late!’ she burst out. ‘I only been for a walk, haven’t I? Anybody’d think I been taking drugs or something – off with some boy – only for a bloody walk, and you knew it, and it was your Frank called for me. There’s never a minute’s peace in this place, it’s worse than what it was at home—’

  ‘Juliet’ – in a cracked, sobbing voice – ‘baby—’

  ‘Yes, that’s about it – “Juliet baby” – and treated like one, too. Makes me sick – I’m going on seventeen, not a kid of nine. I can’t get a minute to meself, not to think, that’s what I want to do, think. How can I think, with you after me all the time, worrying and moaning?’

  Miss Pennecuick uttered a loud cry, and lifted a violently shaking hand as if in fear of a blow, while tears rolled down her face; her heartbeats were shaking her nightdress.

  ‘That’s right – now blub. Oh, I’m off, I can’t stand no more of this—’ and Juliet turned and ran out of the room, swerving to avoid Sarah who, breathless, had just reached the door.

  ‘You wicked girl!’ as Juliet swept past. ‘After all she’s done for you!’ Her voice was lost in the slam of the door.

  Juliet tossed back her hair angrily when she stood in the welcome silence of her room, and muttered an ugly word; but the sight of her work table, with books and instruments arranged upon it in the order that was never changed, immediately soothed her.

  With strong satisfaction, she saw the figures, spread on a sheet of paper, on which she had been working when Frank’s knock interrupted her; and, pulling the chair towards her with one foot, she sat down before them. The May airs floated, sweet with the scent of blossom, through the window: she did not notice them, nor lift her head to listen to a distant cuckoo’s cry.

  With both hands held against her skull, so large beneath the masses of hair, she sat, staring unseeingly at the paper, motionless as stone.

  ‘What is it?’ she called faintly, in answer to a dramatically loud knock on her door. She did not start nor look up.