Pure Juliet

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘But she’s not forty! She’s a genius, and established as one – and she’s at the beginning of her career! What’s the matter with her?’

  Edmund only said: ‘Well, Qu’aid may buck her up – I’ve heard the desert air’s marvellous,’ as a shadow of longing passed over his face, and Frank, cursing all loving, home-making, devoted and possessive women, said no more.

  But early in November the story was on the front pages again: QU’AID ELITE OPPOSES JULIET’S AWARD, bellowed the Daily People, and the women’s page of the Custodian, hardly able to believe its luck, rushed into the new angle with every feminist hackle on end. The free drinks and interviewing started all over again.

  The heavier dailies explained in learned detail that the organizer of the opposition to Juliet was Khalid Lebardi, the powerful ninety-year-old principal of the university, who had been shocked to the recesses of his soul by the prize being bestowed upon a woman, and was even more troubled by the proposed award of the doctorate.

  ‘I cannot die in peace while such an act is proposed,’ he was reported to have said, and Alice Pennecuick said, ‘How sweet,’ and Edith Pennecuick, going scarlet, said, ‘It’s – it’s unbelievable.’

  But the ancient was held in such veneration by the young Emir, whose pupil he had been, and by his fellow members of the council, and indeed by the entire 900,000 who made up the population of the desert city, that for a few days it seemed possible that award and doctorate might be refused to Miss Slater. There was much regret, and feminist outrage, in the West.

  Then the Emir, who fulfilled almost completely Plato’s ideal of the Philosopher King, undertook to talk with his former tutor.

  In the vast, cool room of the palace, where shadows tinted with rose fell from the steep, sun-hardened walls outside, the two – the ancient near his death and the young ruler – sat cross-legged throughout the long, silent day, talking.

  The fading voice and the ringing one, the latter respectfully softened, went to and fro as if in some game of verbal tennis, the brief silences between their words filled by the silvery drippling of a little fountain, falling into a basin made from Qu’aid’s rose-grey stone. The air was cool, and scented by spiced and dried rose leaves.

  The Emir began with a strong advantage over one whom he would not think of as an adversary: a definite idea, to be inserted into the old man’s mind. Khalid Lebardi also had an idea, but one so drenched in tradition and prejudice that it resembed an emotion. The idea upheld by the Emir was pure, uncoloured fact.

  The Emir, who loved and impatiently venerated his former tutor, studied the face opposite him and remembered that, though in the real world of science there were envy and prejudice, the clash of theories, and manoeuvring for fame, in the pure world of ideas where Plato and Moore and Wittgenstein had lived their ideal lives, there was only truth.

  And this was the Emir’s truth: in that ideal world, as in the Christian heaven, was neither male nor female. The person they were discussing was the discoverer of the Law of Coincidence, given into her mind by Allah the All-Great and All-Merciful. She was the bestower, under His power, of a new Law, ‘an outstanding contribution to human knowledge’.

  The day waxed slowly, from the strengthening of the sun in early morning to the terrible fire of noon when all Qu’aid slept.

  Servants came to the two when they awoke, with trays of iced water and peaches freshly peeled, and bathed the firm young hands, and the feeble, knotted old ones, with rosewater.

  Then they resumed their talk, while the three journalists from the West who had been permitted to enter the city to learn the decision, yawned and drank iced tea and played poker in the one hotel, and tried not to notice the pale expanse of endlessness looking in, past them and their concerns, through the windows.

  When the shadows began to stretch, and violet to flow upwards into the vast sky, Khalid Lebardi was very tired. Suddenly, the philosopher and sage deserted his spirit, and, even as the muezzin pealed out from the mosques and master and pupil prepared to kneel on the mats brought by attendants, he said in the peevish voice of a child:

  ‘The words have convinced me, my son. Let the woman have it. Her Law is a Law, and true. Praise be to Allah, who hath in His wisdom bestowed the dim light of an intelligence even upon the worm of the earth, so that it knoweth at which end more easily to grasp the leaf. If worms have intelligence, shall not women? Yes, yes, let her have it – award and money and doctorate, all.’

  ‘Shall I inform the Western journalists, my lord?’ enquired Mark Audley, the Emir’s secretary and aide, who had been hovering in the vicinity throughout the day-long argument, and now approached.

  ‘Let the dogs wait,’ said the Emir.

  28

  Clemence was wondering how to endure the next two days, which would bring them, they trusted but hardly dared to hope, to the city of Qu’aid.

  Even the knowledge that Josh was safe in the care of Nanny and her young man, who, most fortunately, had ten days’ leave at this time and was to stay at the House, could not banish the monotony of the desert stretching away on every side into hazy distance. A likeable young man, Clemence reflected. Soon sat on Nanny’s yearning for the mysterious East by reminding her that he had been stationed out there for three years, and that it was all dust, smells and flies.

  The huge open-top Rolls-Royce limousine which had been awaiting them at the airport must (Hugh and Frank decided) be at least twenty-five years old, and the road was so rutted and stony that it barely qualified as a road.

  At least the cranking wheels and derricks, and the noisy lorries and squalid booths of the oilfield near the airport were left behind; and at the wheel sat a Qu’aidan, silent and mysterious enough, and wrapped from corded brow to sandalled feet in speckless white.

  It was of course Edith who observed that the robes were darned and patched. And the Rolls, though gleaming as to its metal and arrogantly leaping mudguards, was undeniably shaky in its responses. This was disconcerting: discomfort they had anticipated, but not cheese-paring.

  ‘Why doesn’t the Emir buy a new one? He’s got millions.’

  ‘(Piers, will you keep your voice down.) I don’t know. I expect he can’t be bothered, and in this heat I’m not surprised.’

  ‘I approve,’ Frank said. ‘It’s just what I should do if I were an oil millionaire. Everything top quality and old and beautifully kept. Look at that robe,’ in a whisper. ‘It’s the finest long-staple cotton – probably belonged to his grandfather.’

  When they had been gasping and mopping for hours, too uncomfortable to notice the meagre green blurs that were acacias, the only colour in the universal blinding shimmer, the driver stopped in the middle of a landscape defined only by a range of remote, pale mountains.

  ‘I knew it,’ Hugh muttered. ‘Back to town for spares, stored in Michigan.’

  But the driver, with smiling eyes above the snowy material hiding his lips, adjusted some device, and out came an ample canopy, which shaded the limp occupants.

  He resumed his seat, and they bumped on, passing through a minor sandstorm, which thinned away to reveal rolling dunes of a darker hue than the surrounding pallor. The Rolls did its honourable best to glide, but succeeded only in shaking and banging. The road wavered ahead in a blackish line, the acacias and, more surprisingly, the mountains, had vanished.

  Again the car stopped.

  ‘We’ll sleep now,’ the driver announced. ‘Hottest hour of the day approaching. Too much sun to go on. I’ll put up the tents. We eat and drink as well.’ His hidden smile widened.

  With the enthusiastic help of Piers, to whom all this was decidedly preferable to maths under old Scuggers, two large tents of thin black stuff were quickly slung up on poles; cool water and dryish food produced from the Rolls’ boot; and everyone, after eating in almost complete silence, retired to the tents and slept for hours.

  When they awoke, the sun was rushing down towards the line of the horizon, defined and sombre in the dying light, the
air was noticeably cooler, and the sky above them a divine blue-violet.

  ‘We drive until ten o’clock. Nice and cool now,’ the driver said. ‘Then we sleep. And at five o’clock we wake up and eat and drive on.’

  ‘I say, are there any wild animals?’ asked Piers, who had been reflecting that the black stuff of which the tents were made was on the thin side and that many carnivores are nocturnal.

  ‘No. Nothing for them to eat. Rock doves in the mountains, scorpions, spiders in some places. Big ones starve. They wander out here, they starve. Soon learn.’

  ‘You won’t bother to cook, will you? If we’re getting to Qu’aid in the afternoon, one doesn’t want much in this heat,’ Clemence said.

  ‘Oh, I cook. You like to tell your friends you dine in the desert,’ with the usual half-hidden smile, but different in quality. Could it be mocking?

  *

  Juliet was lying full length on the cooling sand, and staring up at the sky. She had been silent since they left Oued, and Frank wondered if the heat was making her feel ill. But her expression was serene and she glanced from side to side as if interested in the pallor and unending monotony. He wondered how she saw it; for so many years he had taught her to see detail, but here there was none.

  He thought with satisfaction of the raven Hrothgar, generally regarded by the Pennecuicks as a menace because it bit. Juliet had announced her wish for a raven on a family visit to the Tower of London, where she had first seen Hrothgar’s peers, and had exerted herself to find one, seeking out a London pet shop (she had ended, on recommendation, by going to Harrods) and insisting upon taking it back to Hertfordshire by hired car.

  It had been the first time, in Frank’s nearly twenty years’ knowledge of her, that she had broken through her pattern of absorption in her work to go out after another living creature – except when she had rescued wounded birds or animals. From these exceptions had grown her interest in the menagerie which lived with her, together with their numerous smells, seeds, scraps and noises.

  The sky quickly darkened. From dim argent points, the stars steadily enlarged until they were rounds of burning silvery gold, hanging in loops and clusters and sprays, or throbbing in solitary splendour: the travellers’ eyes returned again and again to them, and when they spoke, their voices were hushed: and, now that the faint, pathetically hoarse sighing of the Rolls’ engine had ceased, such a silence surrounded them as matched the overwhelming majesty above their heads.

  ‘I feel as if I’d never seen them before,’ Emma said at last, her lifted face illuminated by the mysterious light. ‘If everybody could see them like this, surely they must believe in God.’

  ‘Or not,’ Hugh muttered. Excess in any shape embarrassed him.

  Hugh and Piers helped the driver bring bundles of chopped wood out of the Rolls’ boot. The others lay about or roamed, between the dim, softly coloured endlessness and the throbbing splendour overhead. A fire was started, and soon an iron pot seated skilfully upon it was breathing out the smell of vegetables blended with tarragon, sage and what Alice described as ‘nameless herbs’.

  ‘They’ve got names, ass,’ Edith corrected. ‘“Nameless” is sloppy and romantic. It’s just that we don’t know the names.’

  ‘Oh do shut up. I wish there was someone to dance with,’ and Alice whirled, as gracefully as was possible in khaki shorts. ‘Isn’t it all exciting? Bedouins, perhaps!’

  ‘I do rather wonder he doesn’t have a decent picnic kit; it’s all part of the same stinginess,’ Hugh grumbled as they sat cross-legged round the fire.

  ‘Who? (I say, this is ravvy),’ Emma said through her first mouthful.

  ‘The Emir, of course.’

  ‘Ne parlez pas de lui avant le domestique,’ his mother warned.

  ‘Non, ce n’est pas convenable ni prudent,’ observed a calm, if muffled voice from where the domestic was seated at a respectful distance; the tone was full of laughter.

  ‘I wish Edmund could have come,’ Frank said presently. ‘How he would have revelled in all this.’

  ‘Well, it’s his awful old Maida,’ said Alice.

  ‘I’d have liked Artie, too,’ Juliet murmured, sounding half asleep.

  ‘Well, that was his awful old Brenda. What ghastly females our male friends do take up with,’ said Alice.

  ‘Any man who has the arrogance to assume the responsibility for a woman’s life and self-fulfilment must be prepared to give up his own petty inclinations.’

  ‘Edith, dear,’ Clemence said, ‘I hope this is only a phase. It really does rather dampen ordinary conversation.’

  Frank slowly lifted his head and took a long stare at the heavens. Silence fell.

  Presently Juliet raised herself from the sand and wandered off into the starlit dimness; but she had not gone fifty yards before the driver uncoiled himself.

  ‘I’ll go after her – that’s dangerous,’ he said, and quickly followed the slight, pale figure now hardly distinguishable in the bewildering hollows and shadows.

  The others sat staring.

  ‘Why? There aren’t any animals or terrorists,’ said Piers at last.

  ‘I can see why it might be dangerous. It all looks alike. She could wander on and on—’

  ‘She could always see our fire.’

  ‘Not if she was thinking about something else, as she usually is.’

  Frank was on his feet, and staring anxiously towards a towering dune beyond which the two had disappeared.

  The driver caught up with Juliet. ‘Miss Slater—’ He put out a long slender hand and touched Juliet’s shoulder, and she turned slowly. ‘Come back, please. It’s dangerous to wander off like that; you can become lost easily, so easily.’

  She stood, looking at him absently. ‘Sorry, I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like – what’s in my mind.’

  ‘Yes, but we must not lose our award-winner. Come.’ And keeping a slight touch upon her arm, he led her back to the camp.

  ‘Oh there you are. We were getting worried,’ said Clemence, hearty and relieved.

  ‘Mum.’ A head round the open flaps of the tent, silhouetted against paleness and blazing stars.

  ‘Ssh, you’ll wake Daddy. What is it?’

  ‘Well, I know this seems a mad sort of question, and sorry to wake you up, and I know a lot of brainy chaps have been chewing it over for centuries,’ the breathy whisper went on earnestly, ‘so it’s no use asking really, but . . . You believe in God, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clemence, wondering if she did. But of course she did; hadn’t He given her everything she wanted?

  ‘And does Daddy?’

  ‘Not churchily. You know he calls Him the Star Maker. But he does believe.’

  ‘Oh. Well – thanks. Sorry, again.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be all right in the morning. Go to sleep now – night-night, love.’

  A kiss, accomplished by much cautious crawling, was pressed rather wetly upon her, and with, ‘Thanks, Mum, it was the stars, they’re a bit much, you know,’ Piers was gone.

  The driver suddenly announced: ‘Look – Qu’aid.’

  They had seen it on the horizon for some moments before he spoke, but had supposed it to be an unusually high and dark-coloured dune; it was half veiled in a sandy haze.

  Now, the road having become suddenly smoother and wider, they realized that it was a wall, at least a hundred feet high, and built of some material that was either rose-tinted with grey, or grey-tinted with rose; it was not easy to decide. It was circular; its great bulk curved away on either side into the sand-filled dimness; it looked like one of the Wonders of the World, and Frank muttered as much.

  ‘It is one of the Wonders,’ the driver said warmly. ‘I’ll drive slowly to the gate, so that you can see.’

  29

  The towering height consisted of bricks so small as to suggest that their origin might be Roman; their grey-rose hue suggested coolness, beneath the pale and glaring sky. Very ancient appeared
the great wall of Qu’aid, and very forbidding; its majestic, stupendous curves were unbroken by tower or loophole. Perhaps for the first time, the party from the West realized how great and how strange was the honour that had been bestowed by this astounding place upon the engine-driver’s daughter from North London.

  ‘You’re all frightened,’ the driver suddenly announced, still smiling behind that veil.

  Frank did not quite know how to answer.

  They drove round a mighty curve, and stopped before a wooden gate reaching to the wall’s summit, bleached to silver by the sun, and, even as they gaped again, the driver sent out a long, arrogant note on the Rolls’ horn.

  After a pause, there began a creaking sound which conveyed an impression of extreme age, and the gate split without haste down the middle, the crack widening to reveal a vision of tall, flat-roofed buildings made of that same rose-grey brick lining a narrow street, the windows framed in dazzling white stone, leading the eye away into a vista of booths draped in green and silver, piled with glowing fruits, and covered by canopies of the same dark blue as the sky.

  ‘Those green and silver flags are in honour of you, Miss Slater,’ the driver said, and when Clemence muttered ‘Really?’ because she could think of nothing else to say, he drawled, ‘Yes, “really”,’ adding, ‘Are you pleased, Miss Slater?’

  Juliet only stared. ‘I like the desert best,’ she said at last. ‘But it’s nice of them.’

  ‘Good, good,’ he said oracularly, and turned to watch a tall, slack figure in white European dress who had emerged from a kind of porter’s office attached to the wall like a swallow’s nest, about halfway up the height of the gate. In leisurely fashion, the man descended a ladder.

  ‘Hullo, Audley,’ the driver said, and, turning to the English party, added: ‘May I present Mr Mark Audley, His Highness the Emir’s personal secretary and aide-de-camp,’ and followed this with a run-through of their names. His eyes were mocking.

  Mark Audley said, ‘How do you do – I have the honour, on behalf of His Highness the Emir Abdul Ahmet, to welcome Miss Slater and her friends to the City of Qu’aid,’ and suddenly, from the crowd of people who had been thrusting slowly forward, from booth and dark doorway, something flew across and struck Juliet’s shoulder.