The Seven Stars

by Anthea Fraser

  Overhead, the dappled shade of the apple trees cast patterns of shadow on her half-closed eyelids, though in the still heaviness of the Sunday afternoon the leaves were barely moving and even the crickets' grating cry seemed muted.

  In the dark interior of the shuttered house she could hear the sounds of Grandmère stamping about her kitchen, swearing at the cat and the stove, clattering pots and plates, as she assembled her speciality, Civet de Lapin au thym, for the family meal this evening. Everyone would be there, Elise Daubigny's wiry black hair was showing signs of grey and her small bony frame had started shrinking but her will was as strong as ever and not one of her large sons would have had the courage to defy a maternal edict. Altogether there would be twenty-three people of three generations gathered in Juliette's honour around the long table on the terrace, spread already with a starched tablecloth so white that looking at it in the strong sunlight was almost painful.

  The dark little mews house in London which had insidiously become Juliette's prison seemed strangely insubstantial in her mind, like a nightmare from which she had drifted back into this comfortable, drowsy state.

  I've left him for ever, she said to herself, shaping the words with her lips as if to reassure herself that this, at least, was no dream. It's all over. I've escaped.

  She had planned it with infinite care, so that he could have no suspicion. She had packed an item at a time, always with an excuse ready to explain if need be why she should be going into the cupboard where the suitcases were kept.

  Then, when he had gone to his weekly meeting at the headquarters of the computer company which employed him to work from home, she had broken a window, hoisted her luggage through it and fled. She had left no note; he would be able to see what she had done on the surveillance cameras when he came home. She had been icily calm until she reached the airport; then she had started shaking so much that she couldn't hold the medicinal glass of brandy she had prescribed for herself.

  ‘Tu ne lui as pas dit?' Elise Daubigny had said, her thick black brows shooting up almost to her hairline, when her granddaughter explained briefly the reason for her sudden visit. 'You haven't told him?'

  She was astonished, but so pleased that for once in her outspoken life she didn't say too much. She nursed a consuming hatred for the English who in the name of freedom had destroyed her native city of Limoges and killed her parents, and it pained her to think that Juliette, her favourite among the grandchildren (largely because she didn't see her often enough to notice the flaws she regularly pinpointed in the others) was making the same mistake as her mother in marrying one of the swine. And Juliette was very like her mother, with the same creamy olive skin, oval face and delicate features; if her eyes had been brown instead of dark blue, she would have been Marguerite all over again.

  Elise's mouth still twisted with bitterness when she thought of Marguerite, the precious only daughter in a family of boys, who had defied her widowed mother by going to work in England, been fool enough to marry a perfidious Englishman with blue eyes like Juliette's, and had come home sick and heart-broken — as Elise had bluntly warned her that she would — only to die.

  That was fifteen years ago, and Marguerite's memorials were a plaque in the family vault and this child who, apart from her eyes, had little that was English about her appearance. She was pretty like her mother, and foolish like her mother too, courting inevitable disaster with an English husband when there were honest Frenchmen like her third cousin Valery — Elise liked to keep marriages within the extended family — who had only taken plump, stolid Anne-Marie when it was clear he couldn't have Juliette.

  It was three years since she had last seen Juliette, and it was all too clear what that marriage had done to her. The sparkle had gone; she was nervous, too thin, and sorely in need of good food and good wine and the soothing village tranquillity in which Ambys had basked for the past six hundred years.

  `If you had not left him, he would have killed you. They are all murderers, these English. Like your father,' she said mercilessly. 'Here in France you will recover.'

  So Elise, who was up every morning by half-past six, and who disapproved of sunbathing, or indeed almost any form of leisure apart from sitting down outside the front door in the cool of the evening and commenting acidly on the antics of one's neighbours, had left la petite to sleep late this morning, and spread the rug under the tree herself so that Juliette could rest after a proper nourishing lunch of Elise's good soup, bread from M. Moreau's bakery and the cheese that Mme. Bouchet made herself with milk from her little herd of goats.

  Banished from the kitchen, Juliette lay in the orchard with her eyes half-closed and thought about the past and the future.

  Juliette had run away from Jay Darke once before. She had loved him as long as she could remember, but as student life drew to a close she found herself becoming more and more uneasy about his possessiveness.

  She couldn't explain, even to her own satisfaction, why she shouldn't be happy enough to be possessed; there was certainly no one she had ever met who was as fascinating as Jay, no one else who had such crazy, off-beat, brilliant ideas. He was clever as well as having the sort of dark, dangerous, Heathcliff looks which meant that there were plenty of girls at university who would have been more than ready to take her place, if Jay had ever shown the slightest interest in anyone except Juliette.

  He never had. He depended on her, confided in her; `my other self’, he called her, only half-mocking, and the phrase had started to haunt her. She felt stifled, sometimes, as if he was leaving no space for her own personality.

  With his First in Artificial Intelligence, he had accepted a golden 'hello' from a computer firm in Sheffield. Juliette, with her sound degree in French and Italian, allowed him to believe that she was job-hunting in Derbyshire. She could never have told him about her misgivings; he had only to fix her with his compelling hazel eyes and she knew she would weakly capitulate.

  Her father was more than happy to assist her in deception. Harry Cartwright was a tough-minded, hard-nosed self-made man who, if he didn't precisely worship his creator, was certainly pretty satisfied with what he'd made out of the raw material.

  There was nothing wrong with the raw material, in fact; Harry had a good sharp mind and, if not exactly handsome, he was what they termed locally 'well set up' with a stocky build, fair hair, a pugnacious jawline and dark blue eyes which had misled more than one young woman into thinking him romantic.

  A miner's son, Harry had grown up in a cottage with an outside privy in the Peak District village of Burlow; the house he had now was still in Burlow, but it had four bathrooms, three of them en suite. In his uncertain youth, he had modelled himself on the men he saw cutting the big deals, the men with the flashy cars and the big cigars, the hard men who knew how to handle themselves and ruthlessly carved him up the first couple of times he was brash enough to take them on. But Harry was a fast learner, quick to adopt the style as protective coloration for the business jungle, and now, in the way of these things, the clichés had become the man himself.

  He saw nothing wrong with that, played up to the image, even. He'd always known what he wanted, and he'd got it, too. He'd made only one serious error — losing his head over a tasty little French au pair who might as well have come from another planet for all she understood about being the wife of an up-and-coming man in Derbyshire — but he'd put that right afterwards with Debbie. She knew how to enjoy herself, did Debbie. He liked that in a woman.

  Being unreflective himself, he was wary of intellectuals and never quite knew what to make of Juliette, his clever only child. He loved her of course — and God help anyone who mucked Harry Cartwright's daughter about — but he understood her not at all. He certainly didn't understand her infatuation with Jay Darke, going as far back as their schooldays in Burlow.

  Darke, where Harry was concerned, was a weirdo, too clever by half He hadn't liked the Darke parents — the father a fly-by-night who had callously abandoned the famil
y when the boy was eight, the mother a wispy woman who sighed a lot — and he disliked everything about Jay, from the length of his hair to the way he kept himself rigidly aloof from lesser mortals.

  ‘Darke by name and dark by nature,' was another of Harry's pronouncements, but he had long ago given up hope that his daughter — flattered, like any woman, by unswerving devotion — would see sense. Hearing her say that she wanted to do a translator's course in London and that she didn't want Darke to know her whereabouts was the best news he'd had since Lomex dropped their opposition to his takeover bid.

  Juliette was almost superstitiously careful about covering her tracks, and it took Jay three years to find her, working from home in a flat in Putney which she shared with three other girls. They were out all day; it was lonely work, translating trade publications into French, and by now the novelty of being independent and living in the capital had worn off.

  There had been a number of men in her life, but somehow none of them managed to exorcise the ghost of her first love. They might be kinder, or more demonstrative, or less demanding, but the long association with Jay, rich with shared experience, made these new relationships seem shallow, superficial. As one after another they faltered, she found herself increasingly reluctant to begin again on the long, wearisome process of personal discovery — hip-hop or Hindemith or Haydn, pasta or potatoes, rages or sulks — when at heart she knew it was never going to come to anything anyway.

  So when Juliette opened the door and saw Jay standing there, with his hair short now but so sweetly familiar in every other way, looking quizzical rather than angry — as he had every right to be — she had fallen into his arms with a sob of relief.

  There was no need to ask about his tastes (Hindemith and pasta) or try to discover his true nature. Juliette knew it already, knew all about his perfectionism and his rages. She knew better than anyone how to handle them; after all, she had been talking him down since she was eleven years old. His possessiveness, which still troubled her, was a compliment, after all. They belonged together. She knew Jay as she knew herself.

  Or so she had thought.

  Harry accepted their engagement with resignation. Debbie, a buxom bottle-blonde with whom Juliette had nothing except Harry in common, threw herself into arranging a wedding suitable for Harry Cartwright's daughter.

  Jay had been surprisingly accommodating. 'Don't worry,' he had said, when she apologised for the number of local councillors on the guest list. 'Why should I care about one day, when you're mine for the rest of our lives?' And Juliette, God help her, had thought that was romantic.

  Mercifully, her French relations refused en masse; Juliette shuddered at the thought of Grandmère and Debbie in the same overswagged marquee. She submitted to all the horrors docilely enough. It was by way of being her parting gift to her father since she could see that in her married life with Jay he was unlikely to have much of a place.

  What she hadn't quite realised was that neither would anyone else.

  She had offered to come back to Sheffield, though not Burlow. Certainly not Burlow, with its small-town atmosphere. But Sheffield would be all right; her translating could be done anywhere, and with the gilt of London wearing thin, she was rather looking forward to picking up the threads of her earlier life, from university and even from school. There was Kate Cosgrove, for instance, one of her school friends; she was a solicitor in a top Sheffield practice now and running for parliament as a Liberal Democrat in the constituency round Burlow. And there was dear Abbie Bettison, her first-ever best friend, married to one of the local farmers. And Dave and Jan Brooks, good mates from university…

  But Jay, without telling her, had fixed up a job with a multi-national computer firm in London. Well, she was hardly in a position to complain about lack of consultation, and they were almost doubling his salary which was already twice what she earned herself. When he explained that he had fixed it so that he too could work from home, what could she say but 'Wonderful!' For a bride to display dismay at the amount of time she would be spending with her new husband was hardly tactful. In any case, she told herself, if it got too much she could look for an office job.

  Jay had found a tiny mews house for them in Westbourne Grove, with a garage that was just big enough to house Jay's little Golf gti. It had one bedroom upstairs, which Juliette used as a daytime study. Jay had his computer equipment downstairs, at the back of the main room which opened on to the mews, so it was unreasonable of her to mind that she could never decide to go out without telling him.

  If she came down, to pop out for an errand, perhaps, he would say, 'Great! I'm just looking for an excuse for a break. Let's go and grab a coffee.' They shopped at the supermarket together, and he was even happy to browse around the dress shops, and pay the bills for her clothes. She'd had a credit card, in her maiden name: 'Why bother to renew it?' he had said. 'You don't earn enough, my love, for the sort of things I like to see you in,' and she'd agreed that she might as well cancel it. Fool that she was! They had a joint account too, only he so regularly paid for everything that she didn't even carry her cheque book.

  When Juliette tried to explain to him that the girls' lunches she arranged with her former flatmates — the only friends she had in London — were just that, Jay laughed and accused her of sexism. 'I'd like to think Laura (or Carrie or Jess) was a friend of mine, too,' he would say, looking hurt, and after that she couldn't really stop him.

  `I couldn't stand to see that much of anyone,' Carrie had said, laughing, at one of these lunches, while Jay was in the Gents. ‘But it's sweet to see someone with such an adoring husband. I should be so lucky!'

  Loyalty forbade the honest reply, but after that Juliette noticed that gradually the lunch invitations stopped.

  After six months, she suggested she should look for an office job. Jay went dangerously quiet; reading familiar storm signs, she felt herself tensing up.

  `Are you saying you don't love me any more?' he asked softly. 'Tired of me already?' He was staring at her, forcing her somehow to look into those mesmeric eyes.

  `Oh Jay, of course not, don't be silly!' She tried to laugh it off, but she was aware of sounding nervous not amused. `It's just that we do absolutely everything together, and—'

  `And isn't that just how it should be?' he cut in before she could finish. 'Modern marriages come apart because other things and other people get in the way, and I'm not taking any risks with you, my life, my only love.'

  She sensed mockery in what he said, but what answer could she make? 'Fine,' she said feebly. 'It was only an idea.'

  And the thing was, he was still, as ever, the greatest fun to be with. Even as a child, she had been flattered to be his chosen friend. The summer of the Egyptian Game, everyone had wanted to be in his gang because his ideas – bad, dangerous, cruel ideas sometimes – were the sort that no one else would think of. His fantasies became a sort of secret life for them all, deliciously scary at the time, even if they regretted it later.

  That was all behind them, of course, forgotten as far as possible, but he'd never lost his talent for originality, and now he had money as well. For the first Valentine's Day of their marriage he gave her a fur hat, then took her to Krakow where it was thirty below so she could wear it. They rode the rollercoasters at adventure parks and watched avant-garde plays where they formed a third of the audience. They went clubbing in Amsterdam. He got tickets for a Tom Jones concert and for Glyndebourne and for an amateur pantomime in a village one Christmas which was funnier than anything the West End could offer. He'd found out where there was badger-baiting in darkest Somerset, but Juliette, with horror, refused to see it as a joke.

  They even went to Egypt to see the pyramids at the height, of the Foreign Office warnings about tourist terrorism. Well, of course, since Burlow Primary Jay had always had a sort of obsession with Egypt. They all had, then, but after the horrible business with Bonnie Bryant she had been plagued with recurring nightmares about the animal-headed gods, and even no
w had problems with Jay's elegant collection of Egyptian antiquities. She was glad to get home after that trip, and only partly because of the danger of bombs.

  They had been married for two years before she noticed uneasily that, somehow, they had no friends. Her flatmates had married or moved away. Her neighbours might nod, but she didn't know them. Her father took them out to dinner occasionally when he came down to London, but apart from business contacts they entertained together, there was no one else they socialised with. They only had each other.

  She began to dread their evenings in, when over the coffee cups after supper he would demand, 'Amuse me!' And since it was he who usually came up with the fun ideas, it seemed only fair that she should try, though it made her feel like a caged canary, kept for its entertainment value and obliged to sing.

  For what was there to talk about? She had to cudgel her brain to think of something fresh; what could she tell him about the events of her day that he didn't know already? What opinions did she ever hear, but his own?

  It got harder and harder. At last the night came — would she ever forget it? — when she wasn't prepared to try any longer.

  `Sorry, Jay, I'm all talked out,' she said lightly, getting up to clear the table.

  `Oh, I'm sure you can do better than that,' he drawled. `I like to hear you try.' He glanced up at her, and that was when she saw cold malice in his eyes, and felt as if it had turned her blood to ice.

  Oh, he covered up at once. He veiled his gaze, and then he was smiling, saying, 'But never mind! It doesn't matter. I'll put on a CD, shall I, while we clear up?'

  It was The Magic Flute, of course, as she had known it would be. But as Juliette went mechanically about the domestic tasks, she knew what she had seen, and with Mozart's sublime Isis and Osiris aria filling the room just a little too loudly, everything fell relentlessly, horribly into place. She had been feeling like a helpless bird in a cage, because that was exactly what she was. She was friendless, because he had made her so. And knowing him as she did, how could she have been stupid enough not to realise before?