Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  His expression, which had been indulgent and amused, hardened.

  ‘I’ve given that life a fair trial – some twelve years of it. It didn’t work. Now I’m going to try living as I want to.’

  ‘You’ll be so uncomfortable. ’

  ‘Not half as uncomfortable as I would be living surrounded by hundreds of unnecessary objects, as most people do.’ (He suppressed as you do ; he was fond of his great-aunt.) ‘In a hundred years most people will either want, or have, to live as I’m going to. Have to is more likely, at the rate things are going.’

  Juliet was staring into space.

  He can’t surely fall for such a mannerless, ungrateful brat, Clemence thought; and then, Oh yes he can – what about Fiona, and Deirdre, and Melisande and that awful Ottolie?

  Clemence was a gifted pianist, but with her duties as Dr Masters’s receptionist, the supervision of housekeeping, and the demands of her grandmother, she got little enough time for the practise necessary to keep her technique at its best.

  She loved her music, which seemed in some way to soothe those feelings which she was too sensible and sober to indulge freely, and when on the next evening Miss Pennecuick said, turning to her, ‘Clemmie, give us some music, won’t you, dear,’ she went to the handsome old rosewood piano with a sensation of relief.

  A long walk in the afternoon had brought colour to Juliet’s cheeks, and made her a little less plain than usual. Frank had commented casually but favourably on the flush, and now Clemence felt inclined to dash into her stormiest Beethoven.

  ‘Don’t give us any of that dreadful modern stuff,’ warned her grandmother, elegant in soft shades of brown, from the long sofa.

  ‘Yes, something tuneful and pretty, dear,’ from Miss Pennecuick, haggard in rose silk in the wheeled chair.

  Clemence mentally dismissed Beethoven. But I’m damned if I’m giving them the Spring Song, she thought, as she gently lifted the piano’s shining lid, inlaid with sprays of pale yellow and cedar-coloured flowers.

  She settled herself on the stool, paused for a moment looking down at her large hands – so useful for a stretch – then struck out the first chill, simple notes of an air by Bach.

  It wound and rippled on: to each listener suggesting vague pictures, or merely an agreeable sound. But Frank was looking at Juliet.

  Her head, as he watched, had turned slowly towards the piano, and as the themes proceeded, growing ever more complex and interwoven, and giving an ever-increasing beauty to the simple opening theme, her gaze did not move from the player’s hands. She was listening – listening as she had listened to the song of the robin.

  It was the first time, except when she had looked at the robin, that she had shown attention to anything but her own unguessable thoughts.

  The beautiful sounds ceased. Clemence allowed her hands to rest on the keys for a moment. Then she turned to her audience:

  ‘That’s only the first movement. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Rather heavy, isn’t it?’ from Dolly.

  ‘Very pretty, and thank you, dear, but what I’d really like is some Mendelssohn. I’m so fond of him,’ said Miss Pennecuick.

  Clemence found some Mendelssohn in the rosewood chest, and played on for another half hour. Juliet was again staring into the ferns: not listening, now, he thought. But she had been listening: listening more intently than most people do in a lifetime.

  At ten, Sarah arrived to help her mistress to bed, and greeted Mrs Massey with a respectful near-sparkle.

  Mrs Massey was her ideal of what a lady who was ‘getting on’ ought to be. Nicely dressed and fond of a laugh, and no ailments. Quite cheered you up, to have her in the house. Not but what Miss Addie didn’t dress nice, Sarah mused.

  Those remaining by the fire tactfully refrained from watching the piteous exit and, as the two disappeared, Mrs Massey turned determinedly on Juliet. (Contributing nothing, but nothing, to the evening’s entertainment, which, heaven knew, had been dull enough!)

  ‘Now,’ she began, ‘you can tell us your plans. What are you – Seventeen? At seventeen’ – two stout arms spread wide – ‘I felt the world was at my feet!’

  Juliet looked away from the self-important old face. Her own expression made Frank think of an animal being poked out of its hole by a stick.

  As no one said anything, Mrs Massey retreated in excellent order by snapping, ‘It wasn’t, of course. But I felt that it was, and that’s the important thing. What do you want to do – to become – to be?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Juliet looked at the floor.

  ‘Don’t know! But you must have some idea. What are your hobbies, interests, tastes? Do you like this “punk” music?’

  ‘Nope,’ decidedly.

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose . . . but how do you intend to earn a living? I had played in a Number One tour of Our Miss Gibbs when I was your age.’

  ‘Had j’oo?’ It might have been the original production of Phèdre for all the interest Juliet expressed.

  ‘Plenty of time, Juliet,’ Clemence put in. (Frank must be irritated to see the girl baited.) ‘The important thing is to know what you want.’

  ‘Maths and physics are all right,’ Juliet said after a pause. ‘I got A levels in all them subjects.’

  ‘“Those subjects” dear,’ from Frank.

  ‘Those subjects.’

  ‘Then why,’ demanded Mrs Massey, ‘didn’t you go to a university? All those As and Os – so confusing – oh for the good old days when young people went to a university when their parents could afford it, and didn’t when they couldn’t.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Didn’t when they couldn’t. Afford it,’ snapped Mrs Massey. She disliked having to repeat her pronouncements.

  ‘My dad wouldn’t have it. Set on me getting a job he is . . .’

  Juliet’s voice, already faint, died off into a mumble. But this time, one hand went slowly up to her mouth and two fingers stroked her lips, As though Frank thought, to hush them into silence. So she’s a liar, is she? I’d thought as much. We’ll certainly have another walk.

  But no one else seemed to have noticed the slip.

  ‘Don’t see meself stuck in some factory all day,’ Juliet went on smoothly, lighting a cigarette and shaking out the match with force.

  Mrs Massey saw no reason why someone with that accent should not be stuck in a factory. But she never let herself appear disagreeable when she could avoid it; an amusing elderly tartness is one thing, an old woman’s spite another. She said indulgently:

  ‘But with all those levels or whatever they’re called, surely you could get something better than a factory?’

  Juliet shrugged.

  ‘As a secretary?’ Mrs Massey turned to Frank. ‘Two thousand a year girls are getting now; I saw an advertisement the other day. Two thousand pounds – why, my father brought us up, three of us, on five hundred – and very well he did it, too.’

  ‘Wouldn’t keep me in fags, that wouldn’t.’

  What strange eyes Juliet has, Clemence thought. But all his girls are weirdies, in some way. Then, suddenly, there came into her head the lines written of Newton – ‘A mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.’

  ‘If everybody won’t think me rude,’ she said, ‘I’m off to bed; we’ve got to be up early tomorrow, you know, if I’m going to drop you at home, Grandmother.’

  ‘Of course, dear,’ said Mrs Massey briskly. ‘I’ll come up too. I make it a rule,’ addressing the room, ‘to be in bed by half-past ten . . . unless, of course, I’m at a party.’

  Neither Frank nor Juliet registering surprise or admiration at this statement.

  Clemence held out her hands to help her grandmother rise.

  As she did so, she thought with gratitude of her grandmother’s part in her own life: never allowing a situation to become embarrassing if she could steer it round the social rocks; so amusing; so comfortingly devoted to Clemence herself, and, yes, so silently understanding of
the ‘situation’. How infinitely worse my life might be, Clemence thought.

  When Frank and Juliet were alone, and the voices of the others had died away, he felt stealing upon him a familiar, dreamy pleasure. It stole up, to a point: then, so to speak, it shook itself and was replaced by other feelings.

  Outside, the great stars of late summer blazed in the clear darkness; the house in its wide garden was surrounded by fields dimly seen under the albescent moon.

  The two were alone, and he knew that the romantic aspects of the situation were felt solely within his own imaginaton.

  Juliet was smoking and staring at the floor. This evening’s exchange of ordinary remarks with four other people was the closest she had ever come in her life to conversation.

  At school, words had not got beyond snaps at her fellow scholars, answers in class and, on the occasion when her possible application for a university place had been discussed, a ten-minute shooting out of monosyllabic answers to the dutiful, mechanical probings of a headmaster too drained by exhaustion to feel more than a faint interest in the brilliance of her A level results.

  She had made no friends.

  In her home no one but a guest at their table (but there so seldom were any) could have known how few and how uncommunicative were the sentences exchanged between herself and her parents.

  Demands for food or drink to be passed; comments grudgingly commendatory or sulkily complaining, about the cooking; an occasional announcement from Dad that he was ‘off now’ or from Mum that she was ‘just going to pop out’. A ‘Shocking, that’s what I say it is,’ about some scandal illuminated by the Daily Mirror. These had been the Slater versions of conversation, every day, every week, since Juliet had been a silent, swift-moving child old enough to understand words.

  The mere unusualness, the mere gentleness, of the exchange between the guests at Hightower had compelled her attention. She was so accustomed after nearly seventeen years, to grunts and mispronounced sounds passing for communication that it was only when the rise and fall of agreeable voices – and Frank’s was beautiful – had continued for some time that she had begun to notice it. She had liked it; smashing, she had thought.

  ‘Smashing’, and ‘all right’ were the only words of commendation she knew; and she had picked them up at the comprehensive as she might have done a germ.

  ‘Oh!’ She uttered a little scream and shook her fingers. ‘Burnt meself – wasn’t thinkin’.’ She ground out the stub in the ashtray.

  ‘But that’s just what you were doing, Juliet. Thinking.’ Frank leant forward. ‘What about?’

  The usual shrug. ‘Oh – nothin’ much.’

  He studied her coolly. He felt, strongly, that there, sitting across the hearth from him – thin and angular, with glittering hair spread above the girlish, unbecoming dress chosen by Miss Pennecuick – was someone very strange. Not quite human, he thought suddenly, with satisfaction at having solved what had been puzzling him, not quite human. Something vital to human beings is lacking.

  ‘That piano music she was playing,’ Juliet said suddenly. ‘Did she make it up, then?’

  ‘Of course not, Juliet.’

  He had to talk to her as if she were a child. But how else could he talk? He was generally sensitive to the vibrations given out by human beings, but never had he encountered any like those of Juliet. Immense force and – immense negativeness. Extraordinary.

  ‘It was written by—’

  ‘Do people write music, then? Like books?’

  ‘Of course – do you really mean that you didn’t know that?’

  ‘The groups make it up,’ on a note of defiance.

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. Didn’t you notice that she, Miss Massey, had some sheet music on the piano while she was playing the other thing – the Mendelssohn?’

  ‘Wasn’t listenin’ to that. That other what she was playing—’

  ‘Which or that, she was playing.’ He began to laugh, looking at her affectionately: ‘Oh Juliet! You really are . . . did you like it?’

  Silence for a moment. Then, in an expressionless voice, with a nod: ‘Yes . . . It was like maths.’

  ‘Some people see a connection between the two,’ he said casually. ‘People who are good at one are often good at the other.’

  ‘I couldn’t never play on the piano.’ She shook her head. ‘Maths – I’m all right with them.’

  ‘What did the Mendelssohn make you think of?’

  ‘Nothing – I told you, I wasn’t listenin’.’ She stood up quickly, and stretched. ‘I’m off upstairs. Got some work to do .’Night.’

  She was half across the room.

  ‘At this time of night? For heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Oh – just somethin’ I’m tryin’ to work out.’

  She flashed a real smile at him, and was gone.

  8

  The presence in St Alberics of an ancient grammar school, which had so far successfully resisted attempts to turn it into a comprehensive, had encouraged the proprietors of the Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley to establish their bookshop in the town. They had hoped for a regular flow of customers, drawn from a predominently middle-class background: schoolchildren in search of books to help with their homework and the two levels; old people who had retired to St Alberics to die. The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley sold books. No book tokens; no cards of any kind – birthday, wedding or Christmas; no pencils, no pens, no rubbers, no pocket devices for adding up sums. Just books.

  One morning late in November, Juliet darted in with a book in her hand and thrust it at Arthur Robinson, aged nineteen, in charge of the shop while the manageress went out for a coffee.

  ‘Got anything about this?’ she demanded.

  If Juliet was a most unusual girl, Arthur Robinson was a not quite ordinary boy. He looked at The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler, which came from St Alberics public library.

  ‘About coincidence, do you mean?’

  A nod.

  Arthur’s spirits had lifted on seeing that hair come through the door. There was hardly any light in the low sky, and her head caught what there was, and glittered. But her face caused his heart to sink again – even puppy fat and trousers thrust into cowboy boots were better than a face like that. Reg Porter, who boasted that he could make the toughest chick, would have said: Why the hell does a pretty girl like you want to read about coincidence? It’s a coincidence you and me’s here together, that’s all that matters.

  Oh, Arthur could invent the dialogue all right (he was, like most young men in the British Isles, writing a novel). But he could not speak it. Besides, she might know she was not pretty and one couldn’t (at least if one was A. Robinson) go around hurting girls’ feelings.

  ‘There’s one by Sir Alister Hardy,’ he said. ‘That’s about decoincidence, written together with that chap,’ nodding towards the book she held.

  She hesitated. ‘All right if I look round?’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Arthur, pleased with his reply.

  He returned to his duties. One or two customers came in and were served. An unexpected-looking person went off, obviously gratified, with The Lesbian Murders, and someone else parted (gloomily, and with the air of one doing their duty) with £9.99p for Anxiety and Lust, by J. Benelheim in paperback.

  Half an hour passed.

  ‘Found anything?’ he enquired, appearing round one of the tall, double-sided bookcases that were arranged about the shop. Unerringly, he had approached the one carrying titles on New Mathematics, Geometry, the New Physics, and similar works dealing with the sciences.

  Her months at Hightower, eating nutritious food and enjoying plenty of solitude, had put flesh on Juliet’s frame and removed the slight frown, caused by the perpetual straining after that solitude.

  She would never, now, have the usual bloom of the late teens, but the aura of some kind of starvation that had hung about her had gone. And, although Miss Pennecuick worried about her darling’s small appetite, every
day thousands of cubic feet of pure air poured into her narrow lungs, thickening and reddening her seventeen-year-old blood.

  ‘Come to the movies with me tonight?’ blurted Arthur Robinson, affronted at being looked through, and wishing to emulate Reg Porter.

  She laughed.

  What he afterwards described in his novel as a ‘bloody awful sensation’ came down upon Arthur: a mixture of pain somewhere within himself (It’s because I wear glasses ) and an impulse to hit something.

  But almost before the pain had time to grow, she said: ‘Can’t help laughing. Reminds me of elephants.’

  ‘Elephants?’

  The pain subsided. Was she a mental case?

  ‘Yes . . . My mum, see, she says I’m more interested in elephants than what I am in boys, that was why I laughed. Kind of a joke, really.’

  He smiled rather constrainedly.

  ‘Well, how about it? It’s Star Wars at the Odeon.’

  ‘Don’t know – I’m stayin’ with my auntie, and she likes me in evenin’s.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to take too much notice of her!’ cried Arthur, with that confidence in giving advice bestowed by an, on the whole, contented temperament and an easy home life. ‘Can’t you get away without her knowing?’

  Juliet considered. ‘S’pose so . . . I know, I’ll say I’m going over to Frank’s.’

  ‘Who’s Frank?’ Was this girl, interesting now to the novelist Arthur rather than to the Arthur who wanted to get level with Reg Porter, already booked?

  ‘A friend. All right, what time?’

  ‘Seven, it starts. Meet you outside, twenty-to? We’ll have to queue.’

  ‘All right . . . I must be off.’ And she was round the shelf and at the door almost before he could cry:

  ‘Here – what’s your name?’

  ‘Juliet Slater.’ She did not turn round or ask what was his name, and now she had gone.