The air had been overheated for too long for any cooling to be noticeable, but the heat was no longer coming at her in waves. There was not a sound in the long, coldly lit room, nor from the blue night outside where hung the great stars and planets of late summer, low, and stilly burning.
Gradually Juliet’s face became as calm, as still, as those circlers in the depths, with the same look of remoteness. She sat as if charmed.
‘Here, Miss Pennecuick wants you to go up.’
It was Sarah, standing over her, morose and pale.
Juliet did not move for some seconds. Slowly her eyelids lifted and she looked at the old retainer in silence, and smiled. It was well that Sarah thought a smile from Juliet, any smile, suitable in any circumstance, and did not observe its quality.
Juliet’s mother knew the smile well; she had seen it when Julie came out of her bedroom at the request of well-meaning visitors. Mrs Slater had never allowed herself to think consciously about it, because it frightened her.
Sarah, mollified by a gossip and an affectionate goodnight from her mistress, was feeling penitent. She stooped with difficulty and switched the logs on again.
‘Freezing in here . . . have a bit o’ warmth. Up you go.’
Miss Pennecuick, piteous in nylon and lace, was sitting up in another stifling room.
‘Ah, there you are, my pet. Come and sit by old Auntie.’ She patted the coverlet of fine embroidered lawn, and Juliet obeyed.
There followed twenty minutes of explanation as to why Miss Pennecuick preferred to climb the stairs unseen by anyone but Sarah. ‘When I was young like you, darling, Auntie was pretty. And then this old arthritis came along and took all my prettiness away . . . It hurts me, dear. Perhaps you’ll understand, one day . . . that’s why I don’t want you to see me unless I’m nicely dressed, or all covered up as I am now. Wipe my eyes, love – as if you were my own dear daughter . . . hanky under the pillow, dear.’
Juliet, with a delicacy of touch learnt from using geometrical instruments, mopped Miss Pennecuick’s tears as carefully as if her heart were full of love.
‘Hadn’t you better settle down, Auntie?’
‘Yes, darling. I am rather tired, it’s the excitement. Dr Masters said . . . Give me that little book, yes, the one with the red cover.’ Daily Light, inset with a gilt cross, and worn with many years of use.
Juliet put it into the knotted, slow-moving hands.
‘Find the date for me, dear. You see, it has texts from the Bible, all on the same theme, for every day in the year . . . so comforting. Juliet, do you ever think about God?’ Again, that change to a quality like authority in the old voice. Then her head sank back. ‘No . . . I’m too tired tonight,’ feebly. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow. And another thing . . . make sure the servants say Miss Juliet. Goodnight, my lovely girl, my baby.’
The lightest pressure of her lips on the hot, old-smelling skin, a darting smile, and Juliet was away.
The bed in Juliet’s room was spread with a white honeycomb quilt, the carpet and walls were respectively tan and beige; the chest of drawers matched the light oak frame of the bed, and was decorated by small carvings that served as handles.
Juliet switched on the bedside lamp under its shade of cream silk. At the window, she drew aside the heavy curtains drawn an hour ago by Pilar, then opened the casement and leant out.
Darkness made visible by the great moon, elms seeming to float as a deeper blackness against the colourless sky, sweet exhausted scents of dying flowers and leaves.
Damn, no table, she thought.
She drew in her head, shut the window, drew the curtains again, and began to unpack; the putting away of her few, Marks & Spencer clothes was soon finished. Then she sat down on the bed and looked about her.
There had not been an artist or a rebel in the Pennecuick family for a hundred and forty years, but that is a long time to be middle class and very rich, and their investments, derived from coal and later from the rents of valuable land, had inevitably, on one or two occasions, been spent on the products of fashion.
Here was one of them, hanging on the wall: at once mysterious and decorative, the shape of the Möbius ring had caught, first the eye of some artist, and then the eye of a Pennecuick with money to burn.
Juliet was familiar with the print; it was the first detail in the room that she had noticed on her original visit to Hightower some four years ago; and suddenly, as she studied the arcane shape, she experienced a sense of safety.
She was here: she had done it; she had escaped from noise and continual interruptions and her parents and the dirty fools at the comprehensive; she had left them all behind for a whole year.
The thought of dirt sent her springing up. She snatched thick towels from a heated rail, and almost ran along to a bathroom at the end of the passage. And soon she was lying relaxed under the water; her body congruous in its chaste modelling with the old-fashioned furnishings of the room, and her hair floating about her like the myriad lines of some geometric problem – not to be solved by an earthly brain, and belonging to a sphere other than this.
4
‘Mum?’
‘So it’s you, is it? Where you been all night? Anyone else, I’d say you was off with some boy.’
‘Well I wasn’t – and if you was all that worried you could have phoned the Elephant House at the zoo.’
But the feeble old joke brought no response except: ‘Where are you, Julie?’
‘With the old lady – you know – Miss Pennecuick. I am staying off – for a year, anyway.’
‘A year! I thought you was telling me you was getting a job?’
‘I’m not getting a job. I’m staying here. She wants me – kind of an adopted daughter, like.’
‘Well I’m sure I hope she’ll find you a better daughter than what I’ve done . . . what you goin’ to do with yourself all day? She got a car?’
‘Read. Work things out, go on a bit further than me A levels. I don’t know. S’pose so. She’s rich.’
‘You are a funny girl. You beat me, honestly you do . . . As for a job, me and your dad can manage without anythink from you, thank you. I can always go out and do a bit, if we run short, though he won’t like it. Rich, is she? Nice for you. What’ll she buy you? Books, I s’pose – clothes’d be wasted on you.’
‘I dunno – bye, Mum. I’ll phone you again next week, same time. Mrs B’s number.’
‘Julie – here, don’t cut off—’
But the line had gone dead. In the little living-room of her neighbour, Mrs Barnett, where the telephone was, Mrs Slater slowly put back the receiver. Her slack, rosy face became doleful. Now there would be lies to think up to tell Mrs Barnett about the phone calls, and George creating when he woke up . . . there was always something. And no Julie coming in round four o’clock . . . better than nothing, when you hadn’t spoken to a soul all day but the milkman or them in the shops. There was always something.
Juliet came out of the telephone box on Church Corner, Leete, which hardly deserved the name of village: a shop, a group of sturdy flint cottages, and an exquisite fourteenth-century church locked and falling into ruin. The telephone booth had been given a recent going-over by delinquents from St Alberics, and was hardly usable, and she hoped that it would soon be repaired; she did not want to use the telephone at Hightower. The servants might know more English than they admitted to, and she did not want them speculating about those four siblings and dead father.
She set off at her swift pace between hedges of thorn dense with green leaves, along the few miles to St Alberics. It was about three in the afternoon, and the lanes and surrounding meadows were silent in the summer hush. The road to tiny Leete ended in its miniature green and a maze of pot-holed lanes leading to grazing land; few cars went exploring there. The occasional enthusiast who had heard of St Helena’s drove down into the secret little place, only to be disappointed by the church’s shut, ancient door, and shocked by black gaps in the windows once filled by
dim blue and violet glass.
Juliet had had from Miss Pennecuick that morning, during two hours of fondling and chatter, an inspection of her split shoe; and the suggestion that she should go that afternoon into St Alberics (fumbling extraction of a five-pound note from a handsome leather handbag) and buy another pair: ‘a prettier one, this time love, to please old Auntie’.
Juliet had not yet faced the question of how five pounds was to buy ‘a prettier one’, which would cost at least fifteen pounds; now she was looking, without interest, at the shops in St Alberics high street. She was walking with her usual fleet step, thinking about a problem which she had been studying at three o’clock that morning, when a man’s voice, deep and musical, said somewhere above her head:
‘Good afternoon, Juliet.’
She stopped, startled and angry. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you—’
‘Who’s frightened? How j’oo know my name?’
‘I’ve heard my great-aunt speak of you lots of times, and only one girl she knows could have that hair.’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘I’m on my way to see her now: shall we walk up together?’
‘Who are you, anyway?’ She did not move, but stood staring up at him.
Oh God, he thought, eyes like a mermaid’s or a fay’s. Oh God.
‘Frank Pennecuick. Hasn’t she ever spoken of me?’
‘Yes – come to think of it,’ Juliet admitted grudgingly. ‘You been abroad.’
‘Yes, all over South America, looking for grasses to eat’ – expecting a laugh and some comment.
She uttered neither.
They had paused in the middle of the high street, which, although it was late afternoon, was crowded with inhabitants who appeared never to stop shopping. Frank and Juliet, motionless and apparently gossiping, were attracting irritated glances as people walked round them.
‘Let’s get on – we’re holding up the consumers,’ he said, and they fell into step. Juliet did not, after her first angry stare, glance at him again.
She had seen a face she thought of as ‘kind of wet’; brown, above old brownish clothes, with a shabby rucksack on narrow shoulders. Brown, too, were the large eyes that had smiled down into her own. He was about thirty, and too thin for his height.
In a moment, she stopped. ‘I got to get some shoes. She— Auntie give me a fiver.’
‘Can’t I come in and assist?’
‘S’pose so – I can’t get the sort she wants me to get for a fiver, anyway.’
She turned towards a shop where racks stood outside, laden with single shoes priced at between two and three pounds and made of canvas and plastic. She unhesitatingly picked one out, marched up to an assistant who was loudly laughing with a young man who was attempting to label boxes, and said: ‘I’ll have these. Three quid, aren’t they?’ She handed over the notes. ‘Don’t wrap ’em up, I’ll wear ’em.’
She sat down and slipped off her own broken-soled pair, her head bent so that her hair showered down.
Regarding the hair as a personal affront, the girl assistant undulated to the till. ‘Two-fifty,’ without turning her head.
‘These’ll do – no, better have a smaller size. These slip about.’
The assistant, whose feet were large, banged about among the boxes until she knocked down a pile of them.
Frank Pennecuick, too, studied that hair. He had last week got back from a three-year stay abroad, trying to forget the pain of an excruciating love affair with just such another dryad (these were his type) with the same abundance of hair. But Ottolie’s hair had been red. Also like silk, as thick, but pale red as the hair of some dragon’s daughter. What had he done, that his aunt’s protegée should turn out to be his type again? His fatal and fascinating, irresistible type?
And once more, he groaned in his heart, Oh, God. All that to go through again?
But he had observed the everyday miniature drama going on in the shop, and, desiring to get Juliet to himself as soon as possible, strode inside and said to the girl scrabbling irritably among the scattered boxes: ‘I say – that’s a bit of a disaster. Can I give you a hand?’ in his most flirtatious tone, which gained much from the beauty of his voice.
‘I’m looking for a Size 4,’ said the assistant, instantly all sweetness.
‘Here you are – no sooner sought than found.’ Frank whisked up a box from the pile and held it out, smiling.
‘Thanks ever so.’ And she writhed away to Juliet, who was gazing, shoeless, out of the door.
In two minutes the smaller size was on (Runs in her tights, he noted. That wasn’t like any of the others ) and they were walking together down the high street.
‘Is that the lot?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Any more shopping to do?’
‘No, thank God.’
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’ (Oh, those ‘walks’ with Ottolie or Fiona or Deirdre, walks which had always ended, somehow, in the smartest shop in whatever town they were staying . . .)
‘Hate it.’ Juliet was walking so fast that she was almost running.
‘Good – so do I.’
They turned out of the high street into the quieter road leading to Leete.
He hesitated, then went on: ‘I may be coming to live near here. At Wanby. It’s about four miles from St Alberics. Do you know it?’
A shake of her head. She was walking through the pools of last night’s rain, heedless of the new shoes. Her manner was not encouraging.
‘I’m hoping Great-Aunt’s doctor, Dr Masters, will sell me two meadows he owns there, with a couple of old sheds. It’s as much “miles from anywhere” as a place can be in this terrible modern England’ – a glance at her; no reaction – ‘and if I get permission, I can make the kind of home there that I want.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘Why? Haven’t you got the kind of home you want – with Great-Aunt?’
‘Sooner be by myself,’ she said.
With Frank’s obsession with fays and water-sprites, went a passion for what was delicate and beautiful; in fact, obsession and passion fed upon one another, and it was not possible, it really was not possible, for him to experience the dawn of a satisfyingly painful love for a girl who showed no sign of interest in anything he said, splashed in new shoes through puddles, and looked – let him confront the fact – but for her hair, unhealthy and plain.
‘You lived in London before you came to my great-aunt, didn’t you?’
A nod.
‘And there are five of you . . . you, and two sisters and two brothers?’
‘Yes . . . s’pose Auntie told you. And me dad’s dead.’ Her eyes (Bright with anger, surely?) were turned full on him.
‘In her letters, yes. She’s very fond of you, Juliet, you’re the daughter she’s always wanted. And when I telephoned her this morning to say I was back in England and coming to stay with her—’
‘You comin’ to stay?’ Unflattering dismay in the thin voice. (Ah, the languorous note in the voice of Ottolie . . .)
He laughed. ‘Don’t sound so horrified. I shan’t be in much, I’ll spend half my time over at Wanby, arranging things with Dr Masters and seeing the council . . . damn, I meant to buy a bicycle . . . Never mind, tomorrow will have to do. When I telephoned this morning, Great-Aunt told me that you had come to stay for a year. What—’
‘Won’t you get a car?’ she interrupted.
Ha, a crack in the armour! Disappointing.
‘No, I hate the filthy things, for what they’re making of England. I wish every car in the world were at the bottom of the Pacific.’
‘You can get away in them,’ she said.
They had turned down the narrow, winding lane leading direct to Leete, where fields, of so dark a brown as to look purple, stretched away on either side behind hedges of withering thorn.
‘Away from what?’
But he knew.
‘People,’ was the muttered answer.
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br /> ‘People! What’s the matter with people?’
‘Always on at you.’
‘Not always. I—’ He turned to her, swept by one of the impulses he usually came to regret. ‘I – I won’t be, Juliet, I promise you.’
‘You won’t get the chance,’ she grinned, and set one foot firmly down in a puddle. ‘Damn, now that’s gone up me tights.’
This silenced Frank. The immodesty of his past loves had been sensuous, and carefully calculated to stimulate, in a satisfying way. But this – this suggested a fifteen-year-old boy on his way back from the rugger field. And the legs covered by the torn tights were thin and shapeless. Frank, to his surprise, found himself thinking: Poor little beast. The very way she splashed through the puddles was like a heedless boy.
Why? She had youth, lovely hair, apparently unshakeable self-confidence and a rich patroness. Why should he think of her as a poor little beast?
He decided to persevere.
‘How did you meet Great-Aunt Addy? Something about squirrels, wasn’t it?’
She gave him a cautious sideways look, and now he felt suspicion. Why should she look cautious? But, if she lied to him, he could always check with Great-Aunt. Unless she was lying to Aunt Addy as well. His suspicion increased. He was fond of his aunt, and would see to it that she was neither deceived nor hurt; the latter was the more important.
‘Oh – four years ago, it was,’ Juliet now said. ‘She came up to this hospital near where I live, see, ’cos they got some machine there what’s good for her illness, o’ny one in England, it is, and one of them at the hospital had her out for a breath of air in one of them wheelchairs – when she was a bit better, that was – and I was comin’ home from school through the park. She was feeding the squirrels and I’d got a few nuts, so I stopped too. And we got natterin’. ’Bout the squirrels. That’s how it was.’
It was the longest speech she had made for days.
He had no conception how long, nor what an effort it had been for Juliet, who had, very early in life, discovered that talking used up energy that could be more usefully employed; also, that silence was a weapon.
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