Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘I don’t.’ And Arthur grinned.

  The brown browser smiled too. ‘Yes, I know. But I think it possible that some day you’ll be proud of having helped her.’

  Arthur looked steadily at him through spectacles which performed, for him, one of those warning or menacing effects produced by the markings on certain butterflies.

  ‘You her boyfriend?’ he demanded sternly, feeling protective towards Juliet Slater, and was reassured by a wholesome laugh.

  ‘Good God, no, I’m just a kind of elder brother or something. That respectable enough for you? Come to that – are you her boyfriend?’ on an unmistakable note of hope.

  Arthur shook his head. ‘No fear.’

  Frank smiled and turned away.

  Juliet’s parents had no religious or, for that matter, tender notions about Christmas.

  ‘We-always-go-to-my-sister’s, see? A-bit-of-company,’ Mrs Slater had been saying, ever since Juliet could recall. Mr Slater refrained from complaint as long as he was allowed, for once, to drink too much, in the company of a brother-in-law as large, morose and habit-clenched as himself.

  ‘Don’t s’pose you’ll be comin’ home for it, then,’ stated, rather than questioned, Mrs Slater a week or so before the festival. It had been arranged between them that Juliet’s telephone call to the neighbour’s house should be made on the same day and at the same time every week, as this avoided Mrs B having to go next door to summon Mrs Slater.

  ‘No, Mum.’

  ‘People’ll think it’s a bit funny.’

  ‘Will they?’ Indifferently.

  ‘You’re welcome, Julie, ’spite of running off like that, you know that.’

  ‘Aunt Addy’d have a fit. She’s got this here nephew. And some other people coming to stay.’

  ‘Don’t she think it a bit funny, you not wanting to be with us Christmas-time and you our only one?’

  ‘She don’t think I’m your only one.’ Juliet was suddenly irritated by her mother’s soft whine.

  ‘Wot? Wot you say?’

  ‘I said she don’t think I am your only one.’ There was a grin in Juliet’s tone.

  ‘Oh Julie! You been telling her lies?’

  ‘Had to. Now don’t go on about it, Mum, it’s done now.’

  ‘Oh Julie! Wot you been and told her?’

  ‘Nothing you need worry about. You have a nice Christmas with your other four kids.’

  ‘Julie! You never!’

  ‘Yes I did – and so’d you if you was half off your trolley wanting a bit of peace and couldn’t never get it . . . Now don’t cry, Mum. I’ll ring you Christmas Eve. And there’ll be something nice for you and Dad in the post. Cheerio.’

  ‘Julie—’

  But Juliet had replaced the receiver.

  Miss Pennecuick had invited the Masseys, Frank, and a married pair, old friends of hers, to stay until New Year’s Day. The Harding-Grays were amiable and pleasant enough, but hardly ‘added to the gaiety of nations’, though nations were their chief topic of conversation. Priding themselves upon keeping their minds alert, they remorselessly read their newspaper from front to back every morning over their breakfast trays (omitting only the sports pages), and arrived at luncheon primed with the difficult names, correctly pronounced, of the Arabs or Vietnamese present at the latest hopeless conference table.

  From the ‘newest industrial deadlock’ to black holes and the bouncing universe was, for the Harding-Grays, only a step, and they did not seem to realize that other people might have weaker nerves and digestions than themselves.

  ‘Well, at least they didn’t grumble about permissiveness,’ said Clemence. She and Frank were indulging in a little good-natured mockery of the departed guests on New Year’s morning.

  ‘Yes, we were spared that. They rather approved, trendy old donkeys.’

  ‘I thought “Three cheers for Aunt Addy” when she came out with: “Well, my dears, I can’t do anything about all these things so I shall just ignore them.”’

  Frank was staring out at the silvery trees. Hoar frost, one of the rarest and most beautiful of natural spectacles, had descended, as silently as a New Year angel, in the night. A sudden sense of enjoyment in Clem’s company came to him, and with it the realization that his own mood was usually so lofty as to lower the spirits of others.

  Man’s Fate . . . The Origin of the Universe . . . I almost never feel actively cheerful, he admitted to himself, and laughed aloud suddenly, and got up from the window seat.

  ‘What is it?’ Smiling, as she looked up from her knitting.

  ‘I was just thinking I’m a bit of a Harding-Gray myself.’

  ‘Oh you aren’t . . . but you do hardly ever laugh out loud.’

  ‘I’m going to take young Juliet out for a walk. She looks liverish to me. Coming?’

  ‘No thanks. I must write some letters.’

  Not though the hoar frost was so pretty, not though an hour of his company was precious. Not with Juliet Slater.

  ‘We’ll be back for lunch.’

  He smiled at her as he went out, leaving her glad to have heard the unromantic word. One did not fall in love with a liverish teenager.

  Frank ran upstairs and tapped on Juliet’s door.

  ‘Juliet? Coming for a walk?’

  ‘All right,’ after a pause. She opened the door. She was putting on her cape. Her books were open on the table, and Frank felt such a strong curiosity about what she might be reading that in two strides he was across the room and bending over them.

  Juliet said impatiently: ‘Get your skates on.’

  ‘Sorry. What’s this? The Challenge of Chance – any good?’

  She shook her head.

  Frank forgot to watch his speech, and said, like anyone else, ‘What an odd book for a girl to be reading.’

  ‘He – that boy – you know, Arthur in the shop – told me about it, so I tried in the library. But they hadn’t got it, so I bought it.’

  ‘Bit of a waste of money, was it?’

  They were hurrying down the stairs.

  ‘S’pose so.’ Clang! went the armour, the grin vanished. They were crossing the hall in the sunny winter silence of the house.

  ‘Have a good promenade!’ cried Antonio, as two faces peered round the green baize door.

  ‘Thank you,’ Frank called, turning to smile at this unbutler-like valediction, and shut the front door on himself and Juliet.

  ‘Surely,’ said Rosario to his brother, ‘he will not sleep with her in the icy fields?’ (He did not say ‘sleep’.)

  ‘No, they will go to his hovel. He is crazy. Though, should they sleep in a hedge, it would be suitable. Icy fields, icy girl.’

  Guffawing, they returned to their region.

  Here were trees masked in stiff silver up to their highest twig, a lane gleaming with ice splinters, and an air so cold that it bit. Cold gaiety danced over field and sky from a white-yellow sun. There were the usual distant cries of distress and protest from cars skidding, cars stuck, cars run out of petrol, cars. Otherwise Juliet and Frank had the world to themselves.

  Here, he thought, is the morning to start nourishing those starved buds of feeling.

  Yet he did not know how to begin, and actually felt a little nervous. Would this inarticulate adolescent find him ‘soppy’, or the contemporary equivalent, if he pointed out the beauties surrounding them? Best begin on something solid . . .

  ‘Juliet, have you thought any more about going to university?’

  Their footsteps were making a light crunching noise in the frost as they marched along.

  She glanced up at him.

  ‘They said I ought, at the comp. I told you. But Dad . . .’

  ‘Hey – I thought you said you didn’t have a dad.’

  This, the second slip, was not going to be ignored.

  ‘Oh,’ and she grinned, ‘don’t you go grassing on me, will you?’

  ‘I won’t. As long as you tell me all about it.’

  ‘You blab to
her, and I won’t never tell you another word about anything ever again.’ She had stood still suddenly, and her eyes flashed with anger.

  ‘I won’t, Juliet, I promise. It would only hurt her and . . . upset everything for your future, perhaps. But won’t you tell me? As your friend?’

  She considered him steadily, and then began to march on in silence.

  ‘See, I had to get away,’ she began suddenly. ‘Get a lot o’ time to meself. Think things out. About what interests me. Dad’ve pushed me into a factory. Not for the money, he’s an engine driver, we got enough. No. He just thinks I ought to be workin’ and everythink else is a waste o’ time, university included.’

  ‘I see,’ Frank said, really moved. The passion of the artist or scientist for solitude! The young Mozart, the young Poe, every gifted creature who had ever been frustrated, Frank knew how they felt; and throughout time, and all over the world in which they were strangers, he sorrowed for them.

  ‘Stoppin’ me tryin’ to work something out,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘About coincidence?’ he dared, following an intuition.

  But all he got in reply was: ‘Not sure . . . s’pose so,’ and a long pause.

  He almost held his breath. All suspicion that his imagination was at work, magnifying a small situation into something important, had gone. He saw an ignorant child, burdened with a gift that was too great for her. And what was the gift?

  A richer light poured suddenly over them, making the fields sparkle as if scattered with powdered diamonds.

  ‘There’s the sun!’ he exclaimed, and Juliet said crossly, ‘Go on!’ and then laughed; they both laughed.

  ‘Well, he hardly looked like himself before, did he?’ said Frank, yielding to that streak of whimsy in which he usually indulged only with Clemence. Juliet was staring straight into the white radiance, Like an eaglet, he thought, like an eaglet. Leave things, now. Don’t push too hard.

  ‘At a university, you know,’ he began ‘(we’d better turn back or we’ll be late for lunch), there would be people who could help you to – think out whatever it is you want to. People trained to do it. Would you like me to suggest to Aunt Addy that she send you to one?’

  She turned on him; a small hooded figure suggesting some dwarfish norn, and snapped: ‘I don’t know what it is I want to work out – so how could they help me? Not if I don’t know? ’Sides, I sooner work it out for meself.’

  ‘But they could help you to think, Juliet. That’s their job.’

  ‘I can think, all right.’ She was climbing swiftly over a stile, declining his offered help. ‘Trouble is—’ She landed carelessly on the ice below and slipped, and he caught her before she fell. Frail as the robin’s bones, he thought, nothing of her.

  ‘There.’ He set her on her feet as if she were a child.

  ‘Wasn’t lookin’.’

  ‘Go on with what were you saying—’

  ‘Trouble is,’ and she turned and looked up at him, ‘I got to find out what I’m thinkin’ about.’

  ‘They could help you to find out.’

  But she seemed to have lost interest. ‘Oh, it’d be all yaketty-yak – it always is,’ she said roughly. ‘I can’t spare the time.’

  ‘No . . . Well, I’m – I’m your friend, anyway. You do believe that?’ He knew what he would hear.

  ‘S’pose so.’

  But with it went a smile, the one differing from the defensive grin, and they finished the homeward walk in amiable silence, broken only by one or two cautious remarks in which he pointed out the beauties of Nature.

  Clemence spent most of that afternoon writing to the only man who had ever proposed to her.

  The house was silent.

  A freshly arisen east wind whipped the frost about; and the sun had gone in. It needed a strong effort of Clemence’s will to sit down at the handsome, elderly desk (born 1903) in the library, and start ‘Toddy dear ’.

  ‘Toddy’ was Edward Rossiter, his baby attempt at Teddy. He was thoroughly likeable, solid and desirable in every way except one: she did not want to marry him.

  He was in South America, managing a branch of one of the great English banks. She wrote to him every month. She suspected, from casual observations in his recent letters, that he was becoming interested in another young woman, a member of the English colony in Lima, and she was jealous: she had been keeping Toddy in cold storage in case Frank suddenly married one of the Fionas.

  10

  ‘A thoroughly dull visit,’ pronounced Mrs Massey as the car sped away from Hightower. ‘But the food was good . . .’

  ‘Yes, Maria can cook.’

  ‘ . . . and that’s another thing, they’re colourful, a picturesque family, I should have enjoyed seeing more of them. If only Addy weren’t so conventional! Anyone else would have had them in for drinks one evening, and heard something amusing, for a change. But not Addy. I can just hear her “Being familiar with the servants” – oh no.’

  ‘Grandmamma, what do you think of Juliet?’

  Clemence did not try to hide her strong wish to hear the verdict.

  Mrs Massey’s private opinion, Clemence knew, was that Frank was a cranky fool and that her grandchild was ‘going the wrong way to work’. But she never let slip a word of unkindness about Frank, or gave Clemence advice that went against the grain of the latter’s nature. In this case, and in this alone, she let the wisdom of love prevail.

  ‘A most peculiar little creature,’ she now snapped. ‘That appalling accent and no looks . . . And yet there’s something striking about her, something really unusual.’

  ‘Do you . . . think Frank is . . . off again?’

  ‘I think not. She’s too odd and bony and mysterious – like Ottolie – only she wasn’t bony. (Such a name, too. So irritating.)’

  ‘You don’t think he’s likely to marry her?’

  ‘Most unlikely,’ was the decisive answer.

  Mrs Massey thought that Frank would not endanger the inheritance of his great-aunt’s fortune by such a piece of rashness, but she said instead: ‘She’s very young, and extremely dependent on Addy’s kindness, and that would appeal to his chivalry.’

  Clemence did not answer, but a long sigh seemed to breathe out into the dimness.

  ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully at last, ‘entirely dependent. Do you think she’s on the make?’

  ‘Impossible to say; she’s “cagey” as the young say nowadays, never gives anything away. She’s certainly got herself comfortably placed. I should think Addy will leave her a great deal, if not everything.’

  ‘And cut out Frank? Oh no! She couldn’t be so – so unjust.’

  ‘She’s besotted. I’m sure I can’t think why. The chit gives me the creeps – she has such peculiar eyes. I never saw any like them. It isn’t only that very pale greenish-blue, though that’s unusual enough, I don’t know what it is . . . when she looks at one . . .’

  ‘But she hardly ever does – not really look.’

  ‘I know. It’s when she does look, it’s as if she were directing rays onto you or something, that go right through you, not inquisitively, nothing so ordinary as inquisitiveness. I felt on one occasion as if I were being taken to pieces.’ (This remark was accompanied by swelling bosom and deepened voice.)

  ‘There is something very – cold – about her. Perhaps it’s just being very clever,’ Clemence said.

  ‘Oh nonsense. When she does condescend to utter, she sounds mentally defective to me.’

  Clemence gave her an affectionate glance. ‘Are you warm enough, dear?’

  ‘Of course I’m warm enough,’ defiantly wagging the stableboy cap, which was allowing her ears to feel frozen. ‘Oh dear – another week to get through,’ as the car drew up in front of their cottage. ‘If only someone amusing would drop in. Not that there is anyone amusing in Wanby.’

  Clemence competently housed the car for the night and joined her grandmother, who was sitting close to a pleasantly glowing fire, in the small, white-walled li
ving-room with its dark beams and chintzes and ancient Chinese and Japanese wall plates.

  ‘At least this place isn’t damp,’ Mrs Massey observed. ‘But the quiet! Really – so depressing.’

  ‘I’m going to have some orange juice. Do you want anything?’

  ‘A small whisky, please. Thank you, darling. Aren’t you having a biscuit?’ she added, as Clemence came back in carrying a tray.

  ‘Not me – I’ve got my figure to think about.’ Clemence set down the tray.

  ‘Oh, there’s more to it than figures,’ darkly.

  Clemence mentally responded: Yes, Grandmamma, I’m quite aware of that. And I haven’t got it.

  Mrs Massey was thinking: And what a pity you haven’t, my poor pet! It, as that woman Elinor Glyn used to call it. She thought it wiser to change the subject.

  ‘If I were younger and had the energy, it would amuse me to investigate that girl’s background. It sounds fishy, to me.’

  ‘Juliet? Oh Grandmamma. Why?’

  Clemence was anxious to be fair to Juliet; she held the code of ‘fair play’, instilled, if only by fading tradition, by the excellent girls’ private school at which she had been educated.

  ‘I’m sure she’s lying,’ Mrs Massey went on.

  ‘I don’t see how you can possibly tell.’

  ‘I feel it.’ Mrs Massey gestured dramatically. ‘Addy ought to be protected. Goodness knows, she isn’t capable of protecting herself.’

  ‘I think she’s very well protected – first-class accountant and so on.’

  ‘Oh that sort of thing – of course. It’s her poor silly old feelings I’m worried about.’

  Clemence let these observations drift into silence. If Juliet were a liar, and out for herself, and the facts were discovered, what difference would that make to Frank’s obsession? Judging by Clemence’s experience of his previous infatuations – none. He had never loved his nymphs for their moral qualities.

  In spite of her anxiousness to be fair to Frank’s collection of dryads and moon-spirits, Clemence referred to them, in her own mind, as ‘those useless wets’.