Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘It’s kind of Mrs Pennecuick, but I’ll only stay the weekend, Julie. There’s all the clearing up to be done at home’ (a gulp) ‘and ’sides, I made up me mind.’ This was a sentiment which Rose had not had a chance to express for thirty-three years.

  Juliet sat up all night, working, smoking, and fruitfully dreaming, and sometimes looking slowly around her silent house where a rescued starling, almost recovered, dozed in his cage, and some rhododendrons which Clemence had left for her, glowed crimson in the shadows. Outside, in the summer stillness, the thorn thickets were motionless in the young moon’s light, and Juliet’s tortoise’s head was tucked into his richly patterned shell, and she was as happy as a creature living without the usual springs of human happiness can be.

  Her mother was seen off to London on the Monday morning by Clemence, Juliet and the smallest children, whose half-term at their nursery school it fortunately chanced to be.

  The childen showed a flattering liking for Rose, who had novel and, to them, attractive alternative names for dogs and horses, and they fell as if starved upon the ice creams she insisted upon buying them.

  Clemence, led by Frank, discouraged ice cream, unless made at home. But she was so relieved that Rose did not want to live at Wanby that she permitted the ice creams as a kind of thanks-offering, and smiled on the purchase of five of the most expensive to be had. Rose leant out of the carriage window and waved farewell to two small, smiling faces, licking and waving like automata.

  Little dears, she thought, settling back into her corner seat. There, I never waved to Julie. And her thoughts ran guiltily on. Poor old George . . . It don’t half seem funny to be – the word came shockingly into her mind – free.

  25

  Quickly, so quickly that Frank sometimes commented upon their pace, more years rushed by.

  Hugh was in his first term at Cambridge and compared notes with Juliet during vacations.

  Alice had declined formal education, and announced her intention of being an old-fashioned girl. ‘Prehistoric, you mean,’ said Edith, who was ardently feminist, and aiming at a place at the Margaret Fuller. Joshua, born four years after Piers and thereby breaking the planned two-yearly pattern, was five, and known, under protest from his elders, as Josh. Clemence was gradually, but steadily, putting on weight; Frank growing baldish; and Juliet, on her next birthday, would be thirty-eight.

  She had had some small but distinguished successes in the past twenty years – the most notable a paper in The History of Ideas: An International Quarterly Devoted to Intellectual History, published in Pennsylvania.

  Her name was becoming known in the narrow world of scholarship which yet covers the widest conceivable fields, but it was only known; it was not respected. A faint aura of ‘crank’ and ‘obsessionist’ hung about it, for every paper she submitted, however faultless in mathematical logic, dealt with the one subject; and, to other scholars, that subject belonged to the half-world of popular superstition and marvel, where accuracy had no place.

  Some months before her thirty-seventh birthday, she had finished the fourth and final draft of The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion.

  But she told no one. She was very tired. She put her pen down gently on the table beside a vase of windflowers and bluebells gathered by Emma that afternoon in the woods; slowly shut the pages of her manuscript; and let her head, with its burden of greying, thinning hair, drop onto her folded arms, and, her mind swimming with incredulous triumph and also with a kind of sorrow, fell asleep.

  ‘I suppose, as usual, none of us will be able to make head nor tail of it,’ was Edmund’s comment, on hearing of the paper in The History of Ideas.

  ‘I understood quite a lot. It’s a kind of account of how she came to build up the theory in her book – literally, the history of an idea. Not exciting, but fairly lucid,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Isn’t that thing finished yet?’ demanded Edmund. He now had three more collections of poems to his name, and a firmly established favourable reputation. He was a frequent visitor to the House, and a guest at all the birthday parties. He had descended, at the age of fifty, onto the pretty bosom of a kind little shop assistant, twelve years younger than himself. He was happy in her devotion and awed admiration. Circumstances had emptied of tenants the top floor of his old quarters in Luton, and with the rent from his cottage, payment for his occasional work as a locksmith, and a small but steady income from his poetry, they lived there in that almost forgotten state, modest comfort. He would not take money from his Maida; he liked her to spend her salary on clothes and scent.

  ‘Where is Juliet tonight?’ Alice asked idly. ‘Didn’t I hear something about going out with Arthur? Mrs A won’t like that.’

  ‘Alice, where do you pick up all this gossip?’ her mother demanded.

  ‘People confide in me,’ and she rolled her lovely eyes.

  Frank went across to the window and drew back the curtains. ‘She’s back,’ he announced. ‘Her light’s on.’

  ‘It must have been just coffee at the Golden Pig,’ from Alice. ‘And it’s not even ten yet. Poor old Juliet. I don’t expect she’s ever been to a dance in her life.’

  ‘How is Rose?’ Edmund asked. He liked Juliet’s mother; they joked, on the rare occasions when they met on mutual visits to the House, about her fears of riding on his motorcycle at Clemence’s wedding.

  ‘Oh – putting on too much weight. Juliet goes up to see her every month,’ Clemence said.

  ‘Does she like being in that place?’

  ‘I think so. She seems happy enough,’ said Frank.

  ‘I’m always so glad,’ Clemence said, ‘that she’s had fifteen years of real enjoyment. She goes to the movies, and takes holidays at Blackpool. And all her friends . . . It was a mercy that awful man died when he did.’

  ‘That’s what you’re all going to say about me,’ Edmund said.

  ‘Of course we are, old chap. But before you leave us, have some turnip wine. I’m going to,’ from Frank.

  ‘Christ,’ said his friend, softly, ‘doesn’t the very conjunction of the words put you off? “Turnip” – solidity, stupidity – and “wine” – golden vine leaves, sunlight, gaiety, rubies . . . No, thank you, I will not have some turnip wine. Haven’t you any whisky?’

  ‘He keeps it for illness – oh damn, there’s Josh,’ and Clemence hurried from the room.

  Pilar was no longer with them. At forty, she had married a St Alberics greengrocer, prosperous and uxorious, who admired her exotic prettiness and accent; and she was comfortably settled. She and her husband, Pilar weeping copiously, had attended Sarah’s funeral five years ago, accompanying the family group from the House, and glowing with gratification between her tears.

  Clemence found Josh already soothed by the pleasant-faced Norland nanny who had replaced Pilar. She went slowly downstairs, thinking that she would have liked to do everything for Josh herself, but with a large house to supervise, and the affairs of the other children to overlook and largely to direct (for Frank grew yearly more occupied with the AIEG), there was no time for revelling in bathing, soothing and walking Josh; barely time to read to him every night for fifteen minutes, but this Clemence insisted on.

  Her conscience about Juliet was clear: she had done her very best, even to gently discouraging (and Clemence was not a gentle person) the constant smoking and the wearing until actual shabbiness of the gnomish capes in sandy tweed, and the straight stone, dun or khaki dresses.

  ‘If only she would use lipstick,’ she said once to Frank, in irritable frustration, ‘not very bright, but pink – it would make such a difference. She could look really striking, if she’d only bother.’

  ‘She’s got something in her head more important than looking striking.’

  Three months after Juliet had finished the fourth and final draft of The Law of Coincidence, her mother died. Of a stroke, and very quickly, in the expensive and comfortable private home in which Frank had maintained her on Juliet’s money s
ince the upkeep of Rose’s flat had proved too much for her. Juliet was even paler than usual at the funeral, and said afterwards to Frank that she was glad she had seen her mother only a week before she ‘went’.

  That night, alone in her house with her books and the animals (usually injured in some way and restored to health by herself), she sat thinking about her mother’s life.

  The manuscript of the final draft lay on the table, carefully written in the square hand she had learnt at the comprehensive nearly thirty years ago. She lay back in the one comfortable chair in the room, letting the warmth and quiet seep into her spirit.

  Her cat dozed on a mat knitted for it by Emma; Billy-bird, Bertie-bird’s successor, slept in his cage under cover of one of Juliet’s old sand-coloured skirts; she had adopted him when her mother had entered the home. Hrothgar, her raven, drowsily glowered on his perch.

  Juliet’s thoughts were vague and sad: she remembered her mother’s timid affection and how she had never put herself forward in any way. Funny – mused Juliet – Poor Mum . . . She felt, for once in her life, aimless. There was nothing to do. Her thesis was finished. Years of unceasing work, unconscious and conscious, were ended. There it lay on the table: finished.

  She looked slowly round at the shelves filled with her books, and her eyes lingered on those dealing with natural history. It was not in her nature to look at clouds, grasses, running water, without learning how they appeared, grew, ran. Frank had seen with regret the shelves filled with works which were informative, but not imaginative.

  But on glancing into them, he had noted that their authors were mostly Victorian, or of the more popular type, the facts therein related with an awe suggesting, yes, the raw material of poetry, and also the atmosphere of an age only beginning to question the existence of the one he himself thought of as the Star Maker. I suppose, he had mused, returning a volume on snow crystals to its place, that’s all I can hope for now. And there are the animals.

  Juliet moved restlessly; she, who was usually either so still or skimming like a bird, got up, after a moment’s rather desperate staring around, and went to the drawer in her table. She opened it, and took out a square parcel shaped like a book. It was loosely folded in thick, alien-looking paper and string. She stood holding it for a moment, then slowly lifted it and breathed in a faint scent: spice, cinnamon, ginger, dry grey-green leaves nameless in the West which grew in hollows in the endless desert. The smell of the East.

  26

  Late in the afternoon of Juliet’s thirty-eighth birthday, preparations were lazily beginning, in a late heatwave, for the picnic tea under her oak tree.

  ‘It’s dry, Josh. The water’s all gone away.’

  Nanny, wearing a bikini and wishing she had worn instead a cool white dress like those of Josh’s sisters, patiently followed the little boy through the grass, long ago cropped for a second growth of hay, and the fading marguerites. He was naked but for a sunhat and sandals, and making for the ditch.

  ‘Where has the water gone, then?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ Nanny fanned herself with a dock leaf. ‘The sun dried it up.’

  ‘But where has it gone?’

  ‘I don’t know, Josh, you ask Juliet, she’s the bright one around here.’

  ‘There will be mud,’ he muttered hopefully, and they meandered on, until deflected by a passing butterfly.

  Alice and Edith were coming out of the house carrying baskets of crockery and food; Hugh, naked as Josh but for shorts and a large Peruvian hat, followed bearing the birthday cake.

  ‘Anything dottier than this I can’t imagine,’ he said. ‘Everything’ll melt.’ He was addressing Edmund.

  Maida had, as usual, refused with tightened lips and a bright little smile, to accept Clemence’s warm, written invitation to the birthday party.

  ‘Our school mag had a ravvy notice of your Warning Water,’ said the voice of Emma behind Edmund. ‘Normally Esme Skelton – she’s our editor – chooses such utter blether. All brain and no music.’

  ‘Thank you, love,’ Edmund said gratefully. ‘Help me get this thing spread out, will you? I’m terrified of crumpling it.’ A large white cloth was part of the ritual.

  ‘There’s the postman,’ called Alice, kneeling to unload her basket.

  ‘How do you know? And who’s going to fag across two fields in this?’

  ‘Saw the van through the trees.’

  ‘I don’t expect it’s anything – a hundred and fifty shopping days to Christmas, or something. Hugh! It will melt if you leave it there . . . here, in the shade, where there’s a breeze.’

  ‘The wasps will get it.’

  ‘Oh blow – so they will. I’ll have to ask Juliet . . .’

  Emma ran across and tapped at the shut door. A chorus of chirrups and squeaks and one familiar pig-like snort were the only answer. But at that moment Juliet herself came slowly through the thorn thicket beyond the house, followed by a young black retriever, panting with long pink tongue exposed, and drooping head.

  ‘Hullo. Hullo, Robert, poor hot boy, then – I say, is it all right if we leave the cake in your house? It’ll melt if it stays outside . . . but you aren’t supposed to see it.’

  ‘The door’s unlocked.’

  The rule that no one entered Juliet’s house without her permission had stayed unbroken for twenty years.

  When Emma emerged, having paused to gossip with Claudine the hamster and Hrothgar the raven, Juliet was lying back in a rattan chair on the paved space under her tree, where the cloth was to be spread. Her eyes were shut, her face leaden. Robert was resting, with his nose across her knees.

  ‘I say, are you all right?’

  ‘’Course,’ her eyes opened. ‘It’s the heat.’

  ‘Shall I get you some lemonade?’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’ Her hand began slowly stroking the dog’s satiny head, and Emma went away.

  ‘You know,’ she confided to Alice in an undertone as they unpacked mugs and plates, ‘she only had two cards by post this morning – rather sad. One from Piers from school – he’s good like that – and one from her old Arthur.’

  ‘Not signed by Mrs A,’ in a drawl.

  ‘Oh Alice, don’t make things out of nothing – it’s so – so female,’ Edith cut in irritably.

  ‘Thought you were all for the female, dear sister,’ in an even slower drawl.

  ‘Not that sort. Did you see Josh’s card? He painted it.’

  ‘Juliet loved it,’ Emma put in hopefully. She had once been told in a casual way, by her father, of his lifelong plan for Juliet, and, moved by the confidence, she ‘kept an eye open’ for any signs of humanity in their protegée.

  ‘Oh rubbish – Juliet never loves anything. What was it? Mud, I bet.’

  ‘Yes, all brown with a kind of green squiggle in the middle. He said it was a fish – “not dead, but very ill”.’

  The three laughed, looking across the meadow to Josh and Nanny, wandering near the hedge.

  ‘Nanny looks nice in that thing,’ Emma said, who made it a habit to be agreeable, and was heartily despised for it by her sisters.

  ‘Too fat, and bikinis are vulgar too.’ Alice touched her billowing lawn skirt.

  ‘And designed to attract men—’

  ‘We’ll leave the jam till last, shall we, because of the wasps?’

  Nanny and Josh were lazily approaching, Nanny having set Josh to pick buttercups; and he, satisfied that the mud had ‘all gone away’, contentedly pulled off the flower heads and was now intent on arranging them in the mugs.

  ‘No, Josh. Just in that one, in the middle. People don’t want to drink flowers.’

  ‘Bees do. Drink them.’

  ‘Here, give them to me . . .’

  The languid afternoon stole on, as if Time were walking on tiptoe. Juliet had gone into her house and her door was shut. At a quarter to five, when the fire was burning well and the big brass kettle beginning to sing, Frank’s bicycle drew up at the outer gate. He pa
used, to investigate the letterbox, then came on, with one letter and a parcel.

  He was greeted with waves and faint cries.

  ‘Do buck up, Dad, we’re gasping.’

  ‘We’re melting.’

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, the mud has all gone away and I put buttercups in the mugs.’

  ‘Hurry up and wash, darling,’ from Clemence, lying in a garden chair wearing the palest of lilac dresses printed with grey flowers, chosen for her by Alice.

  ‘I’ll just give this to Juliet, and be with you,’ indicating letter and parcel in the basket.

  ‘She’s in her house.’

  ‘Seems off-colour, I thought,’ Edmund muttered as Frank came up. ‘I’ll take that,’ putting a hand on the bicycle.

  ‘She has been for weeks – I was wondering if she oughtn’t to see someone.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be any use. The spring’s gone and she’s running down. You’ll have to face it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Frank, turning at Juliet’s door with letter and parcel in his hands.

  Edmund shrugged. ‘Exactly what I say. Most people have families, or ambitions, or sheer necessity, or a good constitution to keep them alive. She hadn’t anything but that extraordinary obsession of hers, and now she’s finished it – worked it out of herself – and she’s . . . collapsed. As I said. The spring has run down, and she’s going with it.’

  ‘Oh nonsense. It’s the heat.’

  Frank glanced irritably at the things in his hands. ‘Where’s this from – Qu’aid? That’s that extraordinary place in the desert. We wrote to them about irrigation and got something back that might have been written in the eleventh century – and the parcel’s from there, too.’

  ‘Perhaps Arthur’s on a package trip and sent her a little prezzy,’ said Alice, who had come floating up to peep.

  Her father absently patted her shoulder, and went up to Juliet’s door and rapped on the highly unsuitable pixie knocker given to her by her mother.