Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘No fear,’ emphatically.

  ‘The servants will be off any time now – and I must see about a caretaker.’

  ‘Won’t that old – won’t Sarah stay? Caretake, I mean.’

  ‘Sarah has money now. Anyway, she’s too old, and she would be frightened.’

  ‘I could stay with her.’ Juliet leant forward amidst the remnants of her breakfast. ‘Oh, come on,’ as Frank shook his head. ‘Why can’t I? It’s quiet, and there’d be no one to bother me.’

  ‘You would have to shop for yourself, and probably cook and Sarah would certainly “bother” you,’ Clemence put in quietly. ‘To say nothing of loneliness, and possibly vandals.’

  ‘There’s that chippy down at Leete, I could eat there, and who’s afraid of vandals?’

  Frank shook his head, and glanced at the clock.

  ‘When are you getting married?’ Juliet demanded suddenly.

  ‘In July – and there’s a great deal to do first. Why do you ask?’ he said.

  ‘Cos – I was thinkin’ – p’raps . . .’ The thin voice faltered and she looked down at the table. ‘P’raps I could – you know. I got all this money from Auntie, haven’t I? I could pay you something per week and stay with you – live in your house, I mean. We get on all right, don’t we?’

  Well, thank the Lord, Frank offered up silently. Could anything have come about more simply? And that ‘We get on all right, don’t we?’ touched him.

  ‘That’s a splendid idea, isn’t it?’ to Clemence, who said with what she felt was an overdone heartiness that it was ‘just the job’, adding that Juliet could stay with herself and her grandmother until the wedding.

  ‘Your gran won’t like that. I get on her wick.’

  ‘Yes, I think you do, a little,’ Clemence admitted. ‘But my grandmother is kind as well as sensible, you know, and I’m sure you can put up with each other for a couple of months.’

  ‘S’pose so. Can I have a room to myself?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a nice little spare room overlooking the garden.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. And – p’raps she’d like me to pay you a bit, too?’

  ‘Oh, all that can be arranged later.’

  ‘I must go and tackle Sarah,’ said Frank and went hastily out of the room.

  The two who were left remained in silence.

  Clemence was thinking that Frank had set out with her to buy her ring and ended up at Hightower arranging life for Juliet and old Sarah.

  Juliet’s mind drifted back into its usual state. The actual world was once more shut out: she knew where she would be for the next two months, and the only snag would be that old cow, Mrs M. Well, she could always get away to her room. Overlooking the garden, that would be all right. There’d be trees, perhaps. There came another vivid vision of those dead leaves, silhouetted against the sombre sky.

  Frank returned, and hovered at the door, plainly in need of self-expression.

  ‘Foreigners,’ he said, ‘foreigners – I know all that’s said about English xenophobia. But really, one has only to try getting anything settled with a group of them, and one understands the prejudice. The fuss! And the emotion!’

  Clemence was laughing.

  ‘They haven’t even started packing. The women seem to think it’s obligatory to cry every five minutes. The men sulk. I must find Sarah.’

  ‘Can’t you leave her until tomorrow?’ (My day off is being wasted. )

  ‘Oh I may as well do her, while I’m here. Then we’ll go straight on to lunch – at a proper place,’ smiling at her. ‘Sarah won’t take ten minutes.’

  He was off. Juliet, with a silent gesture of farewell, disappeared; and Clemence was left to rest in the window seat and reflect that it was not every young woman who would have the courage to ‘take on’ Frank Pennecuick.

  Frank found Sarah muttering angrily, still tear-stained, and resolved on extracting the last drops of dignity and drama out of her departure from the house where she had lived for fifty years.

  It took him nearly an hour to get her to accept the fact that she would live with her sister in Ware, and leave Hightower to be made over to some institution, preferably connected with agriculture or, better still, research into Frank’s Edible Grasses. ‘We all know you’re fond of weeds, Mr Frank, but to think of grass on the dining-room table what I kept so’s you could see your face in it.’

  ‘The table won’t be here, Sarah. The furniture will be sold—’

  ‘Oh Mr Frank, your great-aunt’s table!’

  Then he had to telephone a neighbour of Sarah’s sister at Ware, and announce her arrival.

  He put his head round the dining-room door; Clemence was still in the window seat where he had left her.

  In the irritability caused by the footlings of the past hour, it occurred to him that she might have employed the time in sorting Aunt Addy’s clothes for bestowal on Oxfam, Help the Aged, and Action in Distress. Then he noticed her uncharacteristically dreamy expression and thought, Bless her, I suppose she’s happy. And so am I, of course, if only one could get on with things. Of course I’m happy.

  ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he said. ‘Now for lunch and our rings.’

  ‘Oh – are you having one too?’

  She slid off the seat with grace and came smiling across the room. She neither wanted to hear what had been happening nor to ask a few soothing questions. She had been wondering how many children they would have, and thinking, Dammit, this is my day.

  ‘I am. It’s one of the things I believe in, for chaps; fairer on the single girls too.’

  Clemence was a little dismayed to hear that there would be any single girls, but did not comment, and, on hearing that they were to lunch at a nearby roadhouse famous for its food and pretty to look at, her spirits rose.

  ‘Most of the stuff’ll be poison,’ he said, as they drove away in her car, ‘but I’ll find something . . . even I can’t feel exultant on carrot juice.’

  ‘Do you feel exultant?’

  ‘Very, my dear.’ He drew a finger gently down the cheek nearest to him and she shivered enjoyably.

  ‘Frank,’ she said in a moment.

  ‘What?’ rousing himself from what, she was certain, was not a speculation about how many children they might have.

  ‘We don’t want to talk business over lunch. Can I just hear what’s going to be done to your house if three people are going to live in it?’

  ‘Oh – Juliet will have her own house. We don’t want her around all the time – we’ll want to be by ourselves.’ Clemence glowed. ‘I’ll get permission to add a bathroom and a loo to that perfectly sound shed where I keep all my tools and do my carpentry, and she can live there – it’s only two hundred yards away at the end of the meadow by the hedge.’

  ‘Not even meals with us?’

  ‘Not unless she’s invited. I’ll fit her up a simple cooker.’

  This, thought his betrothed, accelerating cheerfully, is too good to be true.

  She heard him murmur, as she went ahead of him into the Trattoria del Santo Alberic, ‘She’ll like that – a house of her own.’

  19

  Juliet did not see the departure of the Spaniards on the following day; she was to meet Clemence at the crossroads at twelve and be driven to the Masseys’ cottage, and she left Hightower at eleven, suitcase in hand, and missed the tears, lamentations, cursings and forebodings as the five climbed into the car grandly hired by Antonio, conscious of their having between them five hundred pounds.

  Sarah, whose departure for Ware had been postponed until today, began to cry, and told Pilar she was a good girl. She promised to send cards to them all at Christmas.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ they all shrieked as the car moved away, and Pilar added in a tearful scream, ‘’Ave ’appy days.’

  ‘Fat chance of that,’ murmured Sarah, ‘I never did get on with Lucy.’ She turned back into the hall and sat down beside her luggage. Her nephew would be here in half an hour to drive her to Wa
re.

  And Mr Frank, when he came this afternoon, would find everything in order; all doors locked, all keys on the hall table. She wished that he had granted her wish to go round the place with him for the last time (her tears welled again) but there you were, He was the master now, and Miss Addy gone. She had never thought that there Juliet would say goodbye to her – no manners, and only to be expected. Oh well, I’ll be over for the wedding.

  In the great shadowy hall, silence and emptiness were beginning stealthily to impose their reign. Sarah’s lids drooped. That was nice of Pilar, saying that . . . Sarah dozed.

  ‘Don’t bolt your food like that, my dear, when once indigestion does set in, it is very difficult to cure.’

  ‘Can’t be helped, Grandmamma. Edward wants me back at one sharp. Mr Shadwell’s coming at two.’

  ‘And why can’t that chit make her own way here? It’s only five miles. Now you’ve got hiccoughs.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Clemence was pulling on her blue linen coat.

  ‘I suppose she’ll get me my tea,’ discontentedly. ‘If she isn’t paying anything she might do something to earn her keep.’

  ‘Oh Grandmamma!’

  Clemence turned back from the door and knelt beside her grandmother, looking up into the pretty and discontented old face. ‘I’m so happy. Won’t you try to put up with her for two months? I’ve got to—’ She swallowed, and Mrs Massey pounced.

  ‘Yes, my poor dear, you’ve got to put up with her for life. Run along, of course I can cope with her. I’m just a cross old woman and I can get my own tea . . . And you never know, she may fall off a bridge,’ she ended with a wicked chuckle.

  Clemence hugged her briefly and hurried away, feeling strongly that Juliet was not the sort that fell off bridges.

  Oh good, there’s a proper table, was Juliet’s first thought as she surveyed her new room. It was smaller than the one at Hightower, but she liked its sparse, choice furnishings, and the window looked onto a small garden glowing with flowers and ending in trees that screened some old cottages.

  When she was seated at the table, her books before her, she looked out at the brilliant yellow-green leaves with a feeling of satisfaction: that tap at the door which had disturbed her solitude at Hightower need not be anticipated here, because Mrs Massey was too old and fat to get up the stairs that easy, and probably wouldn’t try, and Miss Massey was out at work all day.

  She sat, hour after hour. The shadows began to stretch into the endlessness of a June dusk; her eyes were sometimes on the delicate mass of symbols on the page before her, sometimes her gaze wandered among the leaves.

  ‘Juliet! Aren’t you starving?’ Clemence opened the door, without the feared tap. ‘We’re just going to have supper. It’s nearly half-past seven.’

  ‘Is it? I never noticed.’

  ‘Another time, if you get hungry, just rummage in the larder. It’s all ready if you’ll come down.’

  Clemence went downstairs looking at her ring, which was gold, and made in the shape of two clasped hands, one with a frill at the wrist and one with a man’s cuff. They held an impressively sized diamond.

  Frank had chosen a plain, heavy signet in the same metal. To look at the ring soothed her feelings, which were still sore at being told that she would have to arrange the details of her own wedding.

  ‘My dearest girl, I’m very sorry but I’ll have to ask you to do everything . . . I’ve got to get rid of Hightower, or it will hang over us like a thunderstorm—’

  ‘Couldn’t you leave that until after we’re married?’

  ‘I could. But that would mean our first weeks together would be continually interrupted, and we don’t want that, do we? My mind’ – and he smiled – ‘will be on other things . . . and there’ll be Juliet’s place at Cambridge to fix up, too.’

  In her less optimistic moments, Clemence saw Juliet, immensely distinguished in some unimaginable way, but still unable to organize an ordinary workaday life, still living with the Pennecuicks when she was seventy.

  ‘But you’ll come with me to see Aiden, won’t you?’ she said. The Reverend Aiden Blount was vicar of St Mary’s, at Wanby, where they were to be married. He had been there for nearly thirty years and had known them both since they were children. This gave a comfortable feeling to the proceedings, and he would also be prepared for any oddities in Frank’s attitude towards the ceremony. ‘Even he,’ Clemence could not help adding, ‘might wonder a bit if I turned up for the interview without a bridegroom.’

  ‘I’ll be there all right on the day, dear, don’t worry. And I’ll write to Edmund asking him to be best man.’

  ‘Oh. What . . . what a good idea.’

  Edmund Spencer was that friend of Frank’s already referred to as an eccentric and a minor poet.

  With the supporting framework of Hightower’s daily routine removed, Juliet relapsed into a kind of concentrated dream; forgot to eat, sat up all night, spoke to her housemates only when she remembered to.

  Mrs Massey would have relished a wedding with two hundred guests, six bridesmaids and a matron of honour. Clemence, when her grandmother had cautiously hinted at the joys of such a ceremony, had only said rather distractedly: ‘Grandmamma, so long as I have a white dress and there’s enough to eat and Edmund doesn’t lose the ring – is he ever going to answer Frank’s letter, do you think? – I don’t care what happens. I can never get at Frank nowadays.’ (This was in mid-July: the wedding was fixed for the thirtieth.)

  ‘Oh why? Is he so wrapped up in—?’ glancing ceilingwards, beyond which Juliet was presumably seated at her work-table.

  ‘Grandmamma, you know he hardly ever sees her except when I’m there too. No, he’s so busy interviewing the AIEG—’

  ‘All those initials, so confusing . . .’

  ‘Association for the Investigation of Edible Grasses—’

  ‘Oh, those cranks.’

  ‘He hardly gets a minute to himself, much less to talk to Juliet – or even me.’

  ‘Is he going to hire a proper suit, is what I want to know.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, Grandmamma, that’s a detail.’

  ‘Quite an important one, if you’re going to wear white.’

  ‘He said – he’s got a brown velvet suit—’

  ‘Brown velvet? ’

  ‘—that he’s hardly worn.’ Clemence, remembering that the suit had been made to please Ottolie, stumbled over the words. ‘And Moss Bros clothes don’t suit him.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose brown velvet might look all right – we must just hope the Press and TV don’t turn up.’

  ‘Why on earth should they? We aren’t anybody.’

  ‘Oh – local rich man choosing to live in converted cowshed. That kind of thing.’

  ‘That would be’ – a pause – ‘the last straw.’ There were a good many straws on Clemence’s back. The conversion of the carpentry shed into a house for Juliet had devolved upon her, with its interviews with painters and builders, and with the writing of letters to local councils. And, although she had her grandmother’s assistance in shopping for the few contemporary gadgets Frank would consent to their possessing, this was not as enjoyable as it might have been. Mrs Massey suggested purchasing every toy of civilization that was on offer, while Clemence had to state, over and over again, ‘Frank doesn’t want us to have that.’

  No washing-up machine (up flew two small black-gloved hands in dismay); no deep-freezer. He says, what do we want with a deep-freezer? We’re only fifteen miles from adequate shops, and I have a car, and he has a bicycle. No electric polisher. We both have all our arms and legs, my love. No electric blanket. We have each other. No devices for grating, crushing or peeling vegetables; none for mixing cakes.

  ‘Doesn’t he realize that you’ll be worn out, my poor child, besides never having a moment for social life?’

  ‘He doesn’t want any social life.’

  ‘I dare say not. But you do, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, Grandmamma . . . I don
’t know. I just live from day to day.’

  Mrs Massey gave a disapproving sniff, and the choosing, the arguing and rejecting went remorselessly on. I-can-always-buy-one-when-the-children-come became Clemence’s secret vow as gadget after gadget had to be refused.

  No carpets.

  But here she struck.

  ‘Frank, that place isn’t going to be warm enough even with thick matting – for babies. The air will still be too cold, and I shan’t feel like staggering out into the snow to buy carpets.’

  ‘Well, all right, but don’t let’s put the beastly germ-infested things down until the baby’s actually here. Buy ’em now and put ’em in store.’

  ‘Yes, dear.’ Adding in a gloating, creamy voice that slightly alarmed him, ‘Nursing mothers mustn’t be worried.’

  A fleeting shadow, a hazy half-glimpsed vision, passed over his mind: himself gasping for life under a swarm of very small children. But he dismissed it. Clem was so sensible. Surely. Surely . . . ?

  Purposeful and organized activity on the sensible one’s part got affairs moving; and three days before his wedding Frank stood with Juliet in the long rays of a July evening, contemplating her completed house.

  She was pale from what must be described as ‘concentrated dreaming’, and her eyes were still full of its light. With hands in the pockets of her jeans she stood peering in through the half-open door, and he knew better than to ask, ‘Do you like it?’

  After a long stare, she went slowly up to the door, and the shade of the mighty oak fell over her small figure as she entered her house.

  She looked slowly around: the floor of the long, low-ceilinged place was covered by thick, pale-yellow Japanese matting in a design of whorls and bars; the brick walls were whitewashed; a cane screen shut off one-third and hid a bed; and the oil heater was of the newest design. A sturdy table and chair and rows of bookshelves completed the furnishings. Her stare went straight to the table and she nodded suddenly; then it went to the walls, where there was one picture.

  ‘Oh – there’s . . .’ Her voice died off.

  ‘Yes – the Möbius ring from Hightower. I thought you’d like to have it.’