‘We got talkin’. She goes horse-ridin’, hunting after foxes. Cruel, I call it.’
‘Balls,’ said Sandy cheerfully. ‘Here’s my train. Goodbye, Edmund,’ nodding. ‘Au ’voir, Juliet. See you in September.’
‘If I get me place,’ Juliet called, skimming along beside the moving train. ‘Thanks for the help.’
‘Of course you will, you dolt.’ The beautiful head, which irresistibly suggested to Edmund that of some high-bred racer looking out of a horsebox, was withdrawing, when he was astounded to hear Juliet scream, as the train snatched Sandy away: ‘Wish you wasn’t goin’, Sandy.’
‘Simply got to go to lousy London. Bye-bye,’ and she was a quarter of a mile away.
‘Diana of the Uplands,’ Edmund muttered.
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing. It’s an Edwardian picture. There’s a refreshment bar on our train,’ as they boarded the Norwich express which followed quickly on Sandy’s train. ‘We’d better make for it. I suppose you had some lunch?’
‘Fergot. Want to know how I got on?’ looking back at him over her shoulder as they pushed their way down the crowded corridor. ‘I got me paper somewhere here,’ patting herself. ‘Course you won’t understand the science questions.’
‘Nor want to, thank you – I say, when you said thanks for the help . . . ?’ They were now seated at a plastic table.
‘She just told me about Paradise Lost. Good thing she did.’ Juliet brought out a crumpled paper from somewhere, and pointed with a finger protruding from a hand wrapped about a cheese roll. ‘We got a Milton question. See? A fucker, isn’t it?’
‘I see that you have quickly picked up your girlfriend’s vocabulary,’ was the dry answer. (Beautiful upper-class girls! How he hated them.)
‘I don’t get you. She was all right. I think I done all right in the English, me and her compared notes.’ The phrase came out a little self-consciously and Edmund suspected that it, also, had been picked up from Sandy.
‘How about another roll?’ he asked, and went in search of that and another beer.
Faces like Sandy’s haunted him. His life was scattered with such forever elusive images.
What I need, he thought, blundering laden back to their table, is some cosy puss to pick me up in her jaws and carry me off for life.
About three weeks later, on a morning so beautiful that every remark made against the English climate was forgotten, a letter was handed in at the open door where the three – for once, Juliet had joined them – were seated at breakfast.
Frank, after an inspection of the envelope, handed it to her. She tore it open and scanned the typed page. Then she looked up, and announced in a tone of mild satisfaction:
‘I got me place.’
‘And I’ – Clemence announced, looking up from an untapped egg – ‘I am going to have a baby.’
BOOK THREE
23
Clemence obtained her way in many things, and Frank his, in approximately an equal number. This helped towards making an unusually happy marriage.
Frank, the more imaginative of the pair, sometimes thought that the two large meadows, shut away from the outside world by their ancient thorn hedges, made, literally, a world of their own, in which he, at least, lived an ideal life.
Supported by his own fortune and that left him by his great-aunt, he could avoid most of the pressures of contemporary Western life; and his own temperament, and Clemence’s absorption in their children, kept his few worries confined to their family circle and, as far as the larger scale was concerned, to the AIEG, which continued to steadily increase.
His family continued to increase, too; Clemence planned like a general before a battle and Providence apparently planned with her. Fifteen years after their wedding day, Frank sometimes felt himself surrounded by a crowd of shrill-voiced, astoundingly energetic, clear-skinned, silky haired, diminutive strangers: Hugh aged fourteen, Alice aged twelve, Edith aged ten, and Emma and Piers aged respectively eight and six. He had more than once gently hinted that five was enough, and Clemence, grown becomingly stout, had smiled dreamily.
She had had her way about children. And she had her way about the House, which she had demanded (undoubtedly it had been a demand) should be built to replace the Cowshed after the birth of Edith.
The House had ten rooms, and was built on two storeys to save everyone’s legs; and it took up most of First Meadow, Second Meadow being given over to wheat, vegetables, and accommodation for a cow, a pig and chickens. Juliet’s house, once a comfortable two hundred yards distant, was now at the end of Clemence’s flower garden. Two of its three sheltering oaks had had to be felled, because of disease, but the largest and most impressive remained, and under it was the family’s place for meals out of doors.
Each house also had its own telephone, Clemence having insisted that to share one between two houses – one where there were three small children and another where there was an absent-minded genius – would be unheard-of and dangerous.
Hertfordshire elm, Cornish slate, the best natural products from almost every county in England had been used to build the House; and its low, comfortable lines and solid beauty had so grown upon snobby Wanby that it was boasted of. Local newspapers, when occasionally referring sneeringly to the AIEG, described Frank as ‘the eccentric near-millionaire’. Occasional motoring tourists, slowing down to gape at the House, were disappointed to get a glimpse of nothing more startling than, occasionally, a happy face.
There was only one shadow upon this genial glow.
Juliet.
Fifteen years had sped for her as fast as she herself had skimmed the surrounding lanes while home on vacation from the Margaret Fuller Foundation. Thick spectacles with horn rims now added to the natural disadvantages of her face; but her strange eyes, thus magnified, showed to advantage.
While on one of his frequent missions around the world attempting to persuade governments into buying into Edible Grass Ltd, Frank would reflect upon his patriarchal life. It was solid, contented and, in spite of the bitter opposition to the AIEG from the meat cartels, increasingly useful. Clem was happy, the children beautiful and promising, and his fortune, in the hands of competent advisers, had, in spite of large expenditure upon promoting Edible Grass, Ltd, increased.
But Juliet had not fulfilled her promise.
While at the Foundation, she had shown signs of doing so, passing top of her year in the Finals and, in addition, being the first graduate to win, with distinction, the prestigious new prize which Mrs Saltounstall had persuaded the governing body into instituting.
Juliet declined the offer of a research fellowship in mathematics at the Foundation with such an absent ungraciousness that it was not repeated; and indeed, her three years there had showed an application to the curriculum so intent as to seem obsessive, and some of her tutors suspected her of being unbalanced: as a member of a board of eminent academics, she might one day collapse or explode.
She had made no friends.
The beautiful and foul-mouthed Sandy had made a bet with several of her set that she would take the Weirdo out to lunch three times a term, and won it. But no embarrassed liking lay hidden behind the bet; Sandy was embarrassed only when trying to express her feeling for horses. She made the bet because the Weirdo would so obviously rather work than have lunch, and Sandy liked to torment her.
At the end of her lazy, promiscuous, laughing first year, Sandy was sent down rejoicing, and Juliet never saw her again. Her departure left a tiny fracture in Juliet’s carapace. She even thought quite often of Sandy, the Honorable Elvira Roxeth.
Juliet’s other fellow undergraduates meanwhile ignored her, except for the exchanges of every day. A reputation for extreme cleverness had somehow escaped and had at first surrounded her; but soon they became accustomed to it. It only expressed itself in examination results; and she herself was so odd as soon to earn her nickname.
She led what seemed to her the ideal life she had longed for since her arriv
al at Hightower.
She had her own little cell, as sparsely furnished as a room could be: the narrow bed, shelves round three walls overflowing with books, the Möbius ring from Hightower and a key to her door.
There was also the informed company of her tutor when she needed to discuss a difficulty, and, when she must walk, flat country lying under a vast sky. There she could glide along until dusk slowly descended, going ever further into that dreaming mood which, she now knew, was more fruitful than study.
There were also the birds.
To them she gave the scanty stream of love which Frank had coaxed from her.
These visitors to her windowsill were not encouraged at the Foundation. Had they been sparrows, blue tits, wrens, and others of the small kind, sweetly feathered in tan or russet with an occasional gleam of orange or blue, and endowed with piping voices, they might have been tolerated and their tiny droppings ignored. But the severe angles and cliff-like heights of the great building attracted stout waddling pigeons and voracious gulls with greedy yellow eyes. The Foundation was more than liberal with rules; solemnly did it recognize the myriad idiosyncracies in human nature; faithfully it went forward under the banners of Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan. But seagulls on the windowsills it was not having.
Juliet felt a vague identification with the birds and their need for a refuge far above the dwellings of human beings. She openly saved scraps from her own meals at the college table, scooping them into a paper handkerchief. Emboldened by ‘encouragement’, the birds would bang their beaks on Juliet’s windowpanes, eyes bolting with greed and incredulous indignation, while she was vaguely aware of their summons but could not bring herself to break her train of thought or, more valuable still, the dreaming.
Afterwards, the dream retreating and the thought concluded, she would open the window, light a cigarette, and scatter their food. I used to feel like that, as if I’d go mad if I didn’t get a bit of peace. Only with them, course, it’s food.
The papers she submitted to the Science Group, the only Foundation society which she joined, were seven in the course of three years; and dealt always with one subject: coincidence.
They were written in a plain style which should have made their subject intelligible, had it not been fatally associated, in the minds of the scanty audience, with mystery and marvelling, so that, even if any conclusion had been reached at the end of each short paper, it would have received no credence.
Quite soon, the Weirdo gained a reputation for being obsessional about coincidence. She was pigeon-holed, and mildly pitied, and her papers forgotten as soon as heard.
Only Miss Lipson, who always attended Juliet’s readings of her papers, treated them with respect. Miss Lipson, growing thinner and more caustic in speech as the three years passed, liked Juliet, who frequently consulted her; it was not a human liking, but the kind of attraction Miss Lipson felt for stars, or for certain contemporary music.
‘Matter of fact,’ Juliet said to this sole supporter, ‘I’m working on a – a longer paper. I’ve done three pages. The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion, it’s called.’
‘Indeed,’ was Miss Lipson’s comment, from the big armchair where she lay back amid clouds of the tobacco smoke she was forbidden by her doctor to inhale. ‘How long do you think it will take you?’
‘Oh – ten years, fifteen, maybe longer,’ withdrawing one hand from behind her back, where she had kept it since entering the don’s study. ‘I was out walking, see, and I saw this, and I thought: That’s like someone. And then I thought: Miss Lipson. So it’s for you.’
She held out a white flower shaped like a star, small and fragile on a noticeably long and slender stem.
Miss Lipson took the frail thing between fingers equally white and frail, and laid it, meditatively, on her desk.
‘Thank you. Would you say it was a coincidence, our being alike?’
‘Not pure,’ Juliet pronounced, after thought. ‘I say, don’t tell anyone about my thesis, will you?’
‘No.’
‘Cheerio,’ and Juliet was gone.
Miss Lipson picked up the flower and studied it.
‘A gift from a genius,’ she murmured at last. ‘Oh yes.’
Juliet worked.
Slowly, a quarter of an hour at a time: on summer mornings when she absented herself from a lecture which, she had carefully calculated, she could safely cut; in the small hours when the noise of traffic was almost stilled and the bells of Cambridge made their deep declarations on the dim, chill air. She sat at her table, wrapped in the current hooded cape, hair coiled on top of her head out of the way, and slowly, oh so slowly, wrote word by word the sentences that expressed all she had vaguely felt, and had then begun over the years to prove, since childhood.
She wrote the papers for her Finals if not carelessly, with disrespectful speed; the knowledge implied in the answers demanded was not, to her, a laboriously acquired discipline, but something as familiar as her work-table or that same cape. She usually finished her papers an hour before everyone else – and sat, the recipient of resentful and incredulous glances, gazing out of the window at the waving trees.
And when the results were out, and she was top of her year, all but a few undergraduates thought: She’s welcome. For who would want to be so brilliant, and also so plain, so thin, so uninteresting and such a weirdo?
*
‘Satisfied, love?’ Clemence asked Frank at the breakfast table when the results came. Juliet had returned to her house to tend to an injured rat which she had found in a ditch and carried home, struggling, wrapped in newspaper.
He shook his head. ‘She’s done brilliantly, but that’s no more than I expected. No . . . I’m disappointed.’
‘Oh dear,’ his wife said, with the merest hint of malice. ‘What did you expect?’
‘I don’t know, quite. Something . . . astonishing.’
Clemence was again with child but, for once, not engaged in wiping or comforting the last one. The current nurse, Brigitte or Gretl, was doing that, in the nursery. Breakfast-time was reserved for Frank.
‘She’s not yet twenty-one,’ she said, regretting the malice, and meaning to comfort.
‘I realize that. But her kind has a habit of dying young. To put it sentimentally, they burn themselves out.’
He came over to kiss her. ‘I’ll be back – I don’t know – eightish. There’s a meeting.’
‘I’ll try to get her to choose something else than those dreary colours Grandmamma used to call “Rich Tea biscuit” for the presentation or whatever it is. When she gets her degree.’
He laughed. ‘I miss your grandmother,’ he said truthfully, and went out.
Mrs Massey had died precisely as she would have wished: asleep in her chair, dressed with her usual suitability and grace, and with both white hands loosely folded on her creaseless lap. This, after some five years of theatres, drives, society, and choice little dinners. Who could wish for more? Except that she could never get Alice, much less that stubborn little Edith (Clemence was going to have trouble with that child ) to call her Pretty Granny.
Clemence, left alone at the table, folded the Daily Telegraph. I really must try, she thought, to like her (as her thoughts ranged over her personal riches and compared them with the dry and dusty store of the sallow virgin a hundred yards away). I’ve got so much, and she has so little.
She sat down abruptly, then got quickly up again. But she can keep her breakfast down, she thought, hurrying from the room.
‘Wish you’d change your mind,’ Juliet had said to Miss Lipson when she looked in to say goodbye on the last day of term. ‘I got me own house, I told you. You could be quiet, and have breakfast in bed.’
‘I can’t, thanks all the same.’ Miss Lipson looked down at her copy of Descartes, in whose pages the star flower on the long stem was pressed. ‘I never go away. I dislike it.’
‘ . . . and thanks for all the help,’ Juliet had added.
‘No
need for thanks, I enjoyed it.’ She was referring to one or two elucidations which she had given, bearing on the mathematics, in The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion. Miss Lipson added suddenly: ‘Thanks, really, Juliet, for asking me to stay and have breakfast in bed.’ A faint smile on the pale lips; three years had increased that suggestion of a skull in the delicate head, so that it had become disturbing. ‘As – as a matter of fact, I may have to go away, quite soon . . . and that’s boring enough.’
‘Far?’ Juliet asked absently, sliding an ivory bracelet, Frank’s present, up and down her arm.
‘I don’t know exactly. In fact, I don’t know at all.’ She began to cough, and slowly lit another cigarette. ‘By the way, if you’d like to do something to please me, will you include a footnote in your thesis – when it’s finally ready? Saying I was responsible for suggesting the line of thought that led to . . .’ She added a sentence that perhaps twelve people in the world would have understood.
‘Course I will. I’d meant to anyway.’
Miss Lipson looked down at Descartes. ‘It will be my immortality. Goodbye.’ She did not look up.
‘Might send you a card,’ Juliet said, lingering she did not know why, at the door.
‘Send it soon, then.’
‘Because you’re going away?’
A nod of the down-bent head had been the only answer.
24
Line by line, word by word, Juliet added to The Law of Coincidence.
She walked every day, and sometimes on the long summer nights, noting the slow turning of the year from bud to falling leaf through mist and frost to bud again. It was her only recreation.
Sometimes she came in to meals when the children were present, and looked at them with less interest than if they had been small animals. They called her Juliet, and gradually, as the years mounted, the following ritual conversation developed:
‘Mum, can I go to Juliet’s house?’ (Never ‘Can I go to see Juliet?’)
Pure Juliet Page 20