Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  Only once, during the train journey with Frank, did Juliet awake out of her thoughts to watch a bird glimpsed for a moment through the window.

  ‘There’s a bird keepin’ still in the air. Never saw that before.’

  ‘It’s a hawk, I expect – yes,’ as the train carried them on. ‘Did you notice the tiny head?’

  She shook her own. ‘Only noticed it was keeping still, like.’

  ‘Hovering, it’s called.’

  She said no more and some minutes later the train drew into Cambridge.

  Juliet did not notice Cambridge: the pale, austere classicism of the colleges and the lawns of richest green spread before them, and the shadows that added to their grace – all passed her by.

  ‘You comin’ along with me?’ she asked Frank as they emerged from a superior restaurant, fortified by a good lunch and an excellent champagne.

  ‘Good heavens, no. You aren’t a child or wrong in the head. Why? Nervous?’

  A pause.

  ‘Not exactly nervous, I’m not. This woman I’m going to see – what did you say her name is? She the head?’

  ‘Juliet! I told you all that only an hour ago.’

  ‘I know,’ smiling dazedly up at him, ‘but me head feels funny.’

  ‘That’s champagne,’ he said resignedly. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it, it was smashing,’ said his embryo Einstein reassuringly. ‘How do I get there?’

  ‘Her name is Mrs Saltounstall—’

  ‘What a mouthful,’ Juliet interrupted predictably.

  ‘And mind you get it right. It’s the most aristocratic name in America – Sal-toun-stall. And you go past those lights,’ pointing to the traffic signals, ‘and down that long road where the trees are. Then first left, and there it is.’

  ‘First left, how’ll I know which it is?’

  ‘Because it’s as big as the Crystal Palace,’ he snapped. ‘(Oh no, you wouldn’t remember that.) It’s huge and a funny shape and it’s mostly glass. And now get along, you mustn’t be late. Good luck.’

  ‘All right – keep your cool,’ and with a careless wave, she was off. ‘See you four o’clock at the station,’ over her shoulder.

  Frank went off to sit overlooking the River Cam on the Backs to regain his cool.

  Juliet idled on. She was wearing one of the neutral-coloured dresses she affected and her hair caught the sunlight. One or two tourists glanced at her with interest.

  There had fallen upon her, helped by the champagne, one of those states which she knew well, in which the real world seemed unreal and as if seen through a sheet of glass. And as she moved slowly through the lively crowds, there grew with it another sensation, one that was not familiar; as if her longing to find the secret governing the law of coincidence had become – not visible – but present in these ancient buildings and streets; as if all her passion to learn and Learning itself were floating like some spicy fragrance in the air.

  It’s better than the champagne, she thought dreamily, and then there was a flashing dazzle before her eyes and the fragrance had vanished, and that great glass building must be the college. It had many little windows indicating students’ quarters, so small as to be not unlike the cells of nuns four hundred years ago, and a wonderful swoop of roof and walls, suggesting the wings of a mighty bird.

  The Principal’s room, being paid for by American millionaires, did not suggest nuns. It was furnished and coloured, though Juliet did not notice, with what may best be described as crushing modesty. The carpet, the few ornaments, were all but priceless, in terms of money; sweet-scented woods, porcelain thin as flower petals, the pink and yellow and magenta of Korean art, were blended into a startling harmony. All this made a setting for the small white-haired woman seated at a desk.

  Could Frank have seen Mrs Saltounstall enthroned, he would have remembered the American pioneer scholars who studied their Latin in wooden huts by candlelight while the wolves howled outside, and he would have said that Learning needed none of these mock-modest trappings.

  Mrs Saltounstall looked with a pleasant smile towards Juliet, advancing down the forty-foot room.

  ‘Miss Slater. Good afternoon. Sit down, please. That’s right.’ Blue, narrow eyes beneath the drooped eyelids raked Miss Slater like searchlights.

  Not nervous. Oh, anything but, and Mrs Saltounstall experienced a familiar irritation. How she disliked girl ‘characters’ with a tendency to assert themselves! All that mattered was working, getting a First, and adding prestige to the Foundation. Odd appearance, too. But we’ll see.

  ‘Now, Miss Slater. You have five A levels and were at the Hawley Road Comprehensive School in North London. Why do you want to come to Cambridge?’ Her tone had changed; she shot the question.

  ‘I don’t want to, not reelly,’ answered, unhesitatingly, a flat voice with cockney vowels. ‘I’d sooner work out what I got to think out by myself. But Mr Pennecuick, that’s my guardian, he said at Cambridge there’s people who’ll listen when you tell them what you try to explain – you see, at the comp’ – she leant forward slightly – ‘they were ever-lasting on about exams.’ She came to a stop.

  ‘And so shall we be here. If you get a place,’ Mrs Saltounstall answered her. ‘Make no mistake.’

  Juliet stared at her, rather desperately.

  ‘But can’t you help me? ’Cos if you can’t, I don’t want a place. Let some other girl have it what does.’

  ‘If you tell me what it is you are working on, we shall – progress,’ Mrs Saltounstall said. She was slightly off-course. The girl had many of the marks of the adolescent exhibitionist, but there was another quality, hard to define even for this expert, which precluded the verdict.

  ‘I want . . .’ pause, and a struggle reflected in the sallow face. ‘I want to find out what makes coincidences.’

  ‘Indeed. Well, no doubt you know that Arthur Koestler and Sir Alister Hardy, who is working at Oxford, have both written on the subject?’

  ‘I read The Roots of Coincidence – it didn’t get anywhere,’ Juliet said rapidly. ‘It had a lot of interesting ideas but it never got anywhere. See – what I want to make is a – a theory of coincidence, and a law. Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That’s why I – would like to come here. On second thoughts,’ she added.

  Mrs Saltounstall allowed herself a faint smile.

  ‘Well, you have your remarkable A levels. As for your law of coincidence, we will see if our Atomic Physics don can help.’

  She paused, and picked up the internal phone to call the secretary. ‘We cannot have you up here for three years, floundering about in theories of coincidence, you know.’

  There was a silence. Through a long window Juliet saw the broad silver of the river.

  ‘If I . . . get a place . . . will I have to do things?’ she demanded suddenly.

  ‘You will certainly be offered a full programme—’

  ‘Mr Pennecuick, my guardian,’ Juliet interrupted, ‘he said there’ll be a lot of theatre societies and playing hockey and all that. I won’t have to do any of that, will I? Because I don’t want to.’

  Mrs Saltounstall was meditating a little lecture on the necessity of some relaxation when the Atomic Physics don was ushered in by the secretary.

  Mrs Saltounstall turned to her.

  ‘Miss Lipson, this is Juliet Slater, who is applying for a place here. Can you spare twenty minutes? You can both sit in that corner,’ indicating a darkish nook and a bamboo sofa beneath a great shrub of rose geranium.

  Miss Lipson, an Englishwoman and an honours graduate of Cambridge, was accustomed to what she thought of as ‘American ways’ at the Margaret Fuller. She picked up Juliet with a cool green eye and led her to the sofa, to which she pointed with a long white finger. She had seated herself, and was parting delicate pale lips to speak, when Juliet leant forward and began, rather loudly:

  ‘J’oo know anything about coincidence?’

  ‘What do yo
u mean?’ Miss Lipson asked, a little tartly, but interested by the face leaning towards her and deciding that the principal would not have asked her here to give her time to a time-waster.

  Within half a minute of Juliet’s explaining, so far as she could, what she did mean, the two young women were talking together in a language that only a few people in the world could have understood.

  The languid educated voice and the flat cockney one flowed on: answering, questioning, correcting, until the speakers came up against some mathematical law standing solidly in the path of the conclusion they had reached; now running down some algebraic highway or geometric lane leading nowhere, now soaring amidst Boole and the New Physics. But always returning, in grotesque contrast to the eremitic terms in which they talked, to small examples; little domestic or everyday incidents in the actual world that was seemingly spread outside the airy spider-work fabric of unbreakable law amidst which their talk had been climbing.

  ‘Have you come to any conclusions?’ Mrs Saltounstall had walked down the length of the room and was standing over them.

  Miss Lipson got up gracefully and Juliet did the same without the grace.

  ‘I think there may be something in what Miss Slater has been saying—’

  ‘She understands!’ Juliet cut in loudly. ‘First person what ever has, what I’ve met.’ (Her grammar went headlong.) ‘So if there’s any more here like you, Miss,’ turning to Miss Lipson, ‘I’d like to come.’

  Mrs Saltounstall said, ‘You may go now, Miss Slater. You will hear our decision after you have sat the entrance examination. Miss Lipson, would you kindly stay for a moment?’

  The secretary led Juliet to the door.

  The principal sat down at her desk and, indicating that Miss Lipson should take a chair, looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘A remarkable grasp of every branch of mathematics, including much of the higher branches which she has taught herself during the last year. Remarkable. I have not met it before except in very advanced mathematicians. She is up to anything we could teach her here.’

  The slow voice had been austere, but the gaunt cheeks were faintly flushed.

  22

  ‘There was a woman there. She understood!’ Juliet burst out, hurrying up to Frank at the agreed meeting place on Cambridge station. ‘I talked to her, nearly an hour must have been, and she—’

  ‘Get in – get in – you nearly missed it. Where have you been?’

  ‘Sittin’ in one of the little parks. Thinkin’ . . . Why’ve I got to take their old exam?’ settling herself in a corner seat as the flat fields began to rush by. ‘I don’t want all that history stuff.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, foreseeing much toil ahead, ‘the examination is only weeks away. We’ll just have to work in shifts and sit up all night—’

  ‘You can’t help me with me science subjects. None of you’d understand.’

  ‘No, but Edmund and I can help you with your English, Clemence with your history. Er – won’t you need to revise your scientific subjects at all?’

  ‘No,’ was the simple answer, and she turned to watch the country flashing past, saying no more until they alighted to change at Norwich.

  *

  ‘Well – how did it go?’ Clemence asked, when Juliet had hurried across to her house and shut herself in.

  ‘Oh – well, I think – I didn’t get much out of her – you know she’s almost inarticulate.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clemence said, thinking how much worse Juliet would have been if she were articulate.

  He glanced at her sharply. ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘Well, yes, a bit. It’s nothing, dear, only something Grandmamma said. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Well, come here and be cuddled and tell me all about it.’

  It transpired that Mrs Massey, settled by Frank with a comfortable income and a new flat in town, three new caps of striking design and some very expensive scent, had launched on her granddaughter a lecture on the unwisdom of parenthood.

  All the views of over-population she had picked up from the radio and television – all of which disguised her own very strong dislike of the prospect of becoming a great-grandmother instead of living in unruffled comfort and gaiety – were brought out and stated with solemnity.

  ‘Well,’ said Frank at the end of the recital, ‘we must see what can be done.’

  Frank and Clemence, working separately and each for an hour at a time, hauled Juliet (there is no other word for their labours) through English history from Aethelred the Unready to Elizabeth II, finding her flawless on dates and bored with anything to do with people or the imagination.

  Edmund, returning so soon with reluctance from his lair, applied himself conscientiously to dragging her through a resurrection of what she had, presumably, learnt about English literature at the comprehensive. Edmund’s ear for vowel and consonant was exquisite, and he faced a pupil neither capable of hearing that ‘With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering’ was a beautiful line, nor of understanding when he explained why. She committed that ultimate sin against the poetic Holy Ghost by asking, ‘Why can’t they say it so’s you can understand?’

  ‘Don’t you like any of it, Juliet?’ he demanded, pale with hidden irritation.

  ‘That bit about trees I like,’ she said haltingly – ‘“branch-charmed by the earnest stars” – what’s that mean, “branch”? That’s what trees have.’

  ‘What?’ He had gone off into an angry reverie – such a waste of time!

  ‘“Branch-charmed by the earnest stars.” I like it. What’s it mean?’

  ‘I’m damned if I know – precisely,’ he said at last. ‘It’s an example of what I call poetic obscurity in the good sense. Who wrote it? (I know, but you tell me.)’

  ‘John Keats, 1795 to 1821,’ came the unhesitating answer. But when he tried her with Eliot’s ‘In which sad light a carved dolphin swam’, with its final superb, ponderous, Anglo-Saxon-suggesting past participle, he met with, ‘They say dolphins have got intelligence,’ and gave up.

  ‘We’ll just have to pray she doesn’t get plucked on aesthetic appreciation,’ he said gloomily to Frank, who was thinking with satisfaction about the trees and the dolphins.

  On the day before the examination Clemence said casually to her husband that she did not feel up to escorting Juliet to Cambridge.

  ‘Not ill, are you, dear?’

  ‘Oh no, just not up to it.’

  ‘And I’ve got this meeting . . . It’ll have to be Edmund.’

  ‘Can’t she go alone?’ Clemence looked up at him with a calm expression; she was lying back in a long chair in the sunlight. The hour was just after breakfast, and from within came the reassuring muted sounds of a ‘daily woman’ clearing up. ‘She isn’t a child,’ she added.

  (Here it was; the first argument over Juliet. Mild, indeed, but an argument.)

  ‘I know, but she might want to blow off steam to someone.’

  ‘Juliet? Blow off steam?’ Clemence tried to maintain the calm expression.

  ‘Clem’ – he hesitated – ‘I hoped you were getting used to her.’

  ‘I am used to her. I just don’t feel up to going to Cambridge and back. It’s very hot. And – I – I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘All right then, dear. I’ll see Edmund.’

  Victory, thought his wife, as he swung off. Hardly any trouble at all – though he did forget to kiss me . . . Perhaps he didn’t forget.

  She went slowly through her morning’s tasks: the telephoning and the supervising. But by lunchtime this solemn creeping about and pondering every action was swept away by a sudden feeling of hunger. She began to laugh, and finished off the afternoon at her usual pace.

  Frank was met that evening by a hug and a savoury smell of cooking, but Clemence did not leave with Juliet on the following morning for Cambridge.

  Edmund escorted Juliet as far as the doors of the Foundation.

  Surrounded by hastening crowds of what he sourly thoug
ht of as young females who would have been better employed at the summer sales, he paused at the soaring edifice of glass and marble.

  She was darting up to the entrance as he said: ‘What about lunch?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere – you enjoy yourself. See you,’ and with the nearest she could come to a teasing smile she disappeared through the doors with a crowd of other would-be students. The American ‘r’ was loud on the dry, sunny Cambridge air.

  ‘Good luck,’ he called. She did not hear.

  He sauntered down the long tree-shaded road. And now I will enjoy myself. Beer first.

  He had the beer; and spent the rest of the day sitting on a bench in a shabby little public park opening off a backstreet of ancient houses, next to an old man feeding sparrows.

  Mercifully, the old man was silent, except for a ‘Good day to you,’ when he shuffled away; and Edmund, having lunched off a lump of cheese and two cold sausages, found, as a bonus, that his neighbour had left behind a sizeable piece of cake which, on being tasted, was found to be excellent and served him for dessert.

  He became absorbed by this small, untidy world of birds, squirrels, litter and silence; and fell into a half doze, half dream from which he was aroused by the bells of Cambridge chiming four. Hurrying through the streets still crowded with loitering tourists, he wondered, for the first time since that morning, how Juliet had ‘got on’.

  He was waiting by the station bookstall and beginning to feel apprehensive about her non-arrival, when she came in sight. With her was a tall girl with red hair.

  ‘This here’s Sandy,’ she announced, jerking her head at her companion. ‘Sandy, this is Edmund.’

  Sandy said ‘Hi, Edmund’ with a glorious smile, and looked away towards an approaching train.

  ‘She’s been helping me,’ Juliet said. ‘I was walkin’ along, see, saying to meself out loud, “Who the hell wrote Paradise Lost?” and she came up behind me.’

  ‘And I said “Milton, you clot,”’ gurgled Sandy.