Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Well, what do you want to look up, dear?’

  ‘Some word . . . coincidence.’

  The assistant was tactful as well as kind. She went herself to fetch the Pocket Oxford, and gave it to this dwarfish enquirer with a smile.

  How eagerly Juliet had turned the pages! She did not know what revelation she was expecting – perhaps some other long words which would explain the lure, the fascination that, for her, surrounded this particular word and its associations. She read: ‘Coincide: fill the same portion of space or time; occur simultaneously.’ Her eyes hurried on, that wasn’t exactly what . . . ah . . . ‘Coincidence: notable concurrence of events suggestive of but not having causal connection.’

  She could not quite . . . quite . . . the words were so long, and most of them she had never heard of.

  Then the page before her eyes drifted away, and there came upon her a double inner sensation: as of immense size and microscopic smallness; both together; not feelings; not pictures, though images of stars were in the hugeness; the experience was unlike anything she had ever felt in her life . . . or was it?

  A memory floated up from somewhere within herself. She had had this sensation before. She could feel the damp warmth of her cot blankets enclosing her baby body . . .

  ‘Find what you wanted, dear?’

  She looked up into the young assistant’s smiling face.

  ‘Yes. Wasn’t sure how to spell it.’ And she was off.

  Funny her eyes looked, the girl thought, looking doubtfully after her.

  The experience of double-size – as Juliet came to think of it – haunted her from that day, although she reluctantly came to believe that there would never be any explanation of it in the mathematical terms which she had at first expected. She must just ‘take it for granted’, as she put it.

  But that other sentence – why should there be no ‘causal connection’? (She went to another library to look up those two words, not relishing the elder-sisterly attentions of the young assistant.)

  Why?

  And she began to turn the question over in her mind, to approach it mathematically, because mathematics was the only subject in which any difficulties she encountered were worked through, or leapt over, by her brain – without effort, and with enjoyment.

  Examples is what’s needed, she thought; lots of them, like they give you in the textbooks. And, from the age of fourteen, she had begun to collect coincidences, laboriously writing them down in a notebook in her squared, state-educated hand, numbering each carefully, and adding after each one the comment ‘Pure’ or ‘Only half’ (‘Pure’ in the sense of absolute coincidence: one in which apparently no ‘causal connection’ could be found.)

  And gradually, as the noisy, dull months went by, lit only by this interest within her mind, she came to what she called to herself me ambition – to find some reason that explains why these things happen seemingly without cause.

  To work on this ambition she needed solitude and time: uninterrupted, endless time. That was why she had run away to Hightower. ‘It’s quieter there,’ she would say to herself, in the weeks before she walked out of her home on that last day of the summer term. ‘I’ll get a bit of peace there, p’raps.’

  It was not quite as peaceful and quiet as she had hoped. Auntie was for ever on at you. But Frank, he let you alone. All right, he was. And he had stuck up for her against that Rosario. She might talk to Frank, perhaps; about coincidence. Not about her ambition: that was a secret.

  But she did not get away on her walk at once, because there was that business of having coffee in the drawing-room, as usual.

  ‘How is that poor boy’s head?’ Miss Pennecuick enquired of Maria, whose task it was to bring in the tray.

  ‘He suffers much,’ was the simple and disconcerting reply, as cups and jugs were deftly arranged.

  ‘Oh dear! You don’t think . . . perhaps . . . the doctor?’

  ‘It is in his feelings he suffers.’ On a more sombre note: ‘He is a loving boy, Rosario, our mother say he is.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Maria. Coffee looks good, as usual,’ said Frank, and he sent her away smiling.

  ‘Dear boy! Are you going to join us?’ Miss Pennecuick paused, holding a frail red and gold cup in one shaking hand.

  ‘Good heavens, no, Aunt dear. Absolute poison. Like me to do that?’ And her cup was whisked away and half full of the poison before she could wipe off two tears of gratitude and love.

  ‘Aren’t you having something else, dear?’

  ‘I’ll wait until tea. I’ve got a new herb brew I’d like you to sample,’ smiling.

  ‘No wonder you’re too thin. Clemence may be here by tea-time – I’ll get her to lecture you.’

  ‘Clem knows it wouldn’t have any effect, so she never tries.’

  ‘It would have an effect if you were married.’

  But the mutter was not heard by Frank, who had turned to Juliet.

  ‘Going for a walk? Mind if I come?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘I won’t talk,’ he added, and the unfamiliar feeling of trust came upon her once more.

  ‘All right. I’ll get me things,’ and she rushed out of the room.

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘What, Aunt?’ turning, as Sarah wheeled in the chair.

  ‘You – you aren’t . . . ?’

  Sarah began to bustle with cushions, listening intently.

  Miss Pennecuick indicated her, and made helpless gestures. ‘Getting – fond,’ she mouthed at him.

  ‘Not a bit. I give you my solemn word.’

  He stood straight before her, looking, for once, grave and without the playful expression that usually made his face attractive. And as he said the words, he felt, with a little surprise, how true they were. Not one glimmer of romantic feeling had he for Juliet Slater.

  6

  When Frank went through the hall with Juliet he saw Rosa and Pilar, singing softly as they polished and dusted. Telling himself that he was rejoicing aesthetically in the sight of rounded bosoms and smooth skins, he said, ‘Surely those girls don’t work all day?’

  ‘Fit it in when they like, seems. That old Sarah, she does try to make a kind of timetable, but Auntie don’t mind, so they do as they please.’

  ‘Doesn’t mind, dear.’

  She just glanced at him; no coquettishness, no consciousness. ‘“Doesn’t mind”’, obediently.

  ‘Do you mind my correcting your grammar . . . and . . . calling you “dear”?’

  She looked up at him and smiled, not her usual dutiful grin. Then she shook her head, and he opened the front door and they went out into the quiet golden afternoon.

  ‘That house is too dark and hot,’ he said.

  ‘I know. I’m always gaspin’ for a bit of air.’

  ‘But it isn’t depressing. The girls wouldn’t sing, if it were. That’s Aunt Addie, of course; she’s full of love and kindness, and it gets through the house.’

  ‘Bit too full of it, if you ask me. Gets you down.’

  ‘Aren’t you fond of her, Juliet? She loves you so much and she’s been very kind to you.’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  Withdrawal, and the usual shrug.

  But this afternoon he was not going to be put off by Juliet’s reserve; he meant to find out what she was. When they got back to Hightower, Clem and that old monster, her mother, would be there, and there would be fewer opportunities.

  ‘You don’t like people, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re always on at you,’ sullenly.

  ‘That’s partly because you’re young. They’re always on at me, too, in a different way, because my views on life aren’t like theirs. We’ll turn down here, I want to show you my meadows.’

  ‘Where you’re goin’ to live?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was the usual Hertfordshire lane, a narrow passage, pot-holed with puddles reflecting the fading gold of the sky, hedges of ancient thorn where purple-red berries glowed, with shining ivy;
humble pebbles large and small embedded in the mud, and scattering over all, like another light, the song now near, now far, of a robin. English earth, as it might be remembered in the future by human exiles on another planet, he thought.

  He glanced at her and caught a listening expression on her face.

  ‘That’s a robin,’ he said.

  ‘I know. Used to feed one in that park where I met Auntie. Got quite tame, he did. Never would come onto me hand, though. Hours, I reckon I wasted on him, stoopin’ down holdin’ out bits of bread.’

  ‘They weren’t wasted.’

  ‘What d’you mean? He never came.’

  ‘But you looked at him. You got to know the look of him exactly. That “red” isn’t true red, it’s a kind of orange – you’d realized that, hadn’t you?’

  After a little pause she nodded. The robin, drawn inevitably by the presence of man, was fluttering after them down the lane, and in a moment Frank stooped, picked up a length of stick and began to imitate the action of someone digging. Juliet stood still. The robin hopped nearer, skittered away, came back again, and alighted on a branch within three feet of the moving arm.

  Frank began softly to repeat aloud the legend of the Crucifixion and the gift of the red breast, and Juliet listened, expressionless, her eyes fixed upon the tiny, breathing cluster of bone and feather that seemed, with tilted head and brilliant eye, to be listening too. But before the story was ended, the bird suddenly flung away into the air, dived heedlessly into a bank covered in ivy, and vanished.

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked in a moment, as they walked on, Frank smiling at the dramatic exit.

  ‘Oh Juliet, what a question! How can anyone possibly tell whether something that’s supposed to have happened two thousand years ago is true? Do you mind, if it isn’t?’

  ‘What’s the point, if it isn’t?’

  ‘There isn’t a “point”. It’s just a beautiful and moving legend connected with – another beautiful and moving legend. If it were true—’ He paused, and she glanced at him questioningly.

  Talk with her was so difficult. Every sentence, almost every word, had to be pondered. Dammit, it’s like chatting with a dolphin, he thought.

  ‘If it were true,’ he said slowly at last, ‘I think it would be . . . overwhelming.’

  A long pause. They had reached the end of the lane leading to Leete, and come out upon the wider one that would bring them to Wanby.

  ‘I don’t see that,’ she said at last, dodging a car with a miserable-looking driver.

  ‘Well . . . the contrast between the – the creaturely innocence of the bird, and what was happening on the cross – from a Christian point of view, I’m speaking now – and (our imaginations have to make an almost impossible leap to conceive this) if the feathers of the countless succeeding millions of robins were dyed red by a shock inherited from that one bird – it would . . . would imply more concern on the part of the Star Maker with the smallest of this creation than . . . than most people are able or prepared to accept.’ The sentence faded ineptly.

  ‘You religious then?’

  Her tone was touched with contempt and distaste. He had been expecting such a reaction.

  ‘In a way, I suppose – yes.’

  ‘On about religion at the Comp, they were – that was another thing,’ she muttered. ‘Got me down.’

  And, wondering whether he had said enough for one afternoon, he said no more.

  But now he knew what he felt towards her: a teacher’s impulse. He wanted to fill the vast gaps in her mind with rich facts. Not what he thought of as the colourless facts of mathematics and other branches of science, but the nourishing facts that feed the senses; and, above all, to make her feel the beauty of Nature, which the old world before science came used to spell with the capital letter, bestowing femininity and deity on – on an abstraction? Yes, an abstraction that took a million forms.

  Wanby was a village so pretty, so well kept, that passing motorists were apt to pause, with murmurs of admiration, looking around for somewhere providing luncheons.

  There were none. So far as the grosser appetites were concerned, Wanby was fairy gold, a hollow mockery and a Barmecide feast.

  For that same sour-reputationed nobleman, who owned the land where Hightower stood amidst its four acres, also owned Wanby, and all attempts to obtain licences for cafés or restaurants had been dismissed with urbane indifference. Nor did the occassional cottager display the consoling word Teas in the picturesque window, for in Wanby there were no cottagers. Long ago the last of them had thankfully fled to council houses and flats in Stevenham or St Alberics, for like Edith Cavell in another situation, they had felt, strongly, that views and elm trees were Not Enough.

  Their former homes were grouped about a triangular village green, shaded at its verges by sturdy elms, with a picturesque dry old well in its centre. The houses were not marred by pastel front doors; a chaste scheme of brown, black and white was strictly kept to, under the eye of the Wanby Amenities Committee; and there was not (let the imagination ponder this, and let it sink in full horror into the soul) . . . there was not a garage in the place. When a retired company director or superannuated admiral had trouble with his car, he had to telephone to Stevenham fifteen miles away, or perhaps to St Alberics, which was five. The one Wanby public house, the Two Doves, permitted no coaches and ‘did’ nothing more solid in the way of eatables than the superior kind of biscuit containing no fat and little sugar. There were those, bicycling sullenly through Wanby on their way home from the few working farms left in the district, who bitterly referred to it as a bleeding museum ; but in ten minutes they could dismount outside the Green Man on the road to Stevenham, where the proprietors did ‘do’ lunches; ploughman’s, greasy sausages and limp chips. Coaches were permitted, and one could be companionably sick in the yard. The Green Man’s lights were visible, nay, even bursts of drunken song on Saturday evenings were audible, in autumn and winter, through leafless old thorn hedges surrounding Frank Pennecuick’s two meadows.

  Frank now led Juliet past the immaculate cottages, and down through a thick clump of elder, hazel and thorn, which in a few moments opened out onto meadows: green, empty, still, in the fading light.

  ‘My house is in the other field, through the gate.’

  When they were halfway across the meadow, she stopped, and stood as if listening.

  ‘That isn’t a robin?’ she said questioningly.

  ‘No, that’s a blackbird – better than the nightingale I always think – in spite of—’ He had been about to quote Arnold, but checked himself.

  Only six months ago, ‘Eternal passion! Eternal pain!’ had run intolerably in his heart by night and by day. The line did not do so now. So much for ‘eternal’! Really, he thought, I am nearly thirty-two. Isn’t it time I stopped being adolescent?

  ‘There ’e is!’

  Her exclamation cut across the silence as the blackbird, after the habit of its kind, darted out of its bower, low and away above the grass, and Juliet’s ‘h’ went with it.

  Frank gave her a smile of approval and – yes, he felt that it was – affection as they walked on.

  They went through the gate, which he carefully shut behind them, and then he turned and pointed across the second and larger meadow, with a group of fine oak trees at its far end, their sturdy branches black against the opal sky.

  ‘There – that’s my house,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s cowsheds,’ said Juliet flatly, after a stare.

  ‘I know. But it won’t be for long. See that board? “Abbot Bros – Conversions”. And it’s only one cowshed. There’s a tiny cottage as well, two rooms up and two down, where the herdsman used to live – see,’ pointing across the dim expanse of grass, ‘that white thing. It’s weatherboarded – I’m going to keep that – and in front of it there’s been a vegetable garden. The rest of the meadow I’ll plough up and grow wheat for my own bread.’

  They were slowly approaching the group of low, shab
by buildings. It was almost dark; the first quarter moon was rising through the oak boughs.

  ‘Can we get inside?’ she asked.

  ‘Not tonight – it’s too dark to see anything . . .’

  ‘But there’s electricity, isn’t there?’

  ‘No, I’m having oil lamps.’

  ‘You won’t half be living in a funny sort of way, won’t you?’

  ‘I’m expecting everyone will say so, yes. You see,’ he turned away from his property, after a long, possessive gaze, ‘I’ve got quite a lot of money for one chap, Juliet. My father left it to me and I’ve never known what sort of work I wanted to do until a couple of years ago. I do know now. My life’s work is going to be for the Earth.’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I can’t explain it all now. We must hurry or we’ll be late for dinner, and it’s a very complicated subject.’ He shut the gate behind them. ‘But – very briefly – I want to increase the world’s food supplies. I support a movement called the Association for the Investigation of Edible Grasses; and my ideal vision is of Man returning to a life lovingly linked with Nature.’

  There was no response to this. It was now too dark to see her expression, but his words sounded to him inadequate, even foolish, spoken earnestly in the soft darkness. He also suspected that his companion had gone off into one of those reveries to which she was – a victim? Certainly she never seemed to try to resist them. The phrase maddening brat came, unexpectedly, into his mind.

  ‘Look, we really must hurry,’ he said sharply, as they came out onto Wanby village green.

  She shot away from him, calling: ‘All right – race you?’ and was lost in the dimness.

  But he had seen a car emerging slowly beside one of the pretty cottages, and set off running towards it, shouting, ‘Clem! Hi! Clem!’

  At the same moment Juliet returned out of the dusk. ‘Thought you might get lost,’ she said, grinning her unattractive grin.

  ‘We’re lucky – here’s Miss Massey and her grandmother. They’ll give us a lift.’

  The car stopped, and a young woman’s voice said enquiringly, ‘Frank?’

  ‘None other – and here’s Juliet. You can save us from Sarah’s scowls. In you get,’ to Juliet, as the driver opened the door next to herself. ‘No, on second thoughts, you get in the back. We’ve been looking at my house,’ he added, as he settled himself beside a pleasant-faced girl wearing a raincoat in a murderous shade of blue. ‘Oh, sorry, Dolly – this is Juliet Slater – Juliet, this is Mrs Massey, a very old friend of Aunt Addy’s. And this is Miss Massey.’