Pure Juliet (11 page)

The light in her eyes seemed to dim. Here was the usual ignorance that had driven her to run away to Hightower.

Arthur observed the dimming.

‘Here, if we want that bus we must run for it,' and in a few seconds they were racing down the high street. As Juliet jumped onto the bus, amidst a small crowd of Leete-bound night-owls, Arthur called, ‘Tell you what – I'll collect coincidences for you and write them down. You come into the shop every week and pick them up – right?'

She turned – the bus was already moving away – and waved.

‘What's yer name?'

‘Arthur Robinson.' (A shout.)

‘See yer.' (A thin scream.)

What a girl! Not a word about three-fifty on seats and coffees!

His thoughts went with relief to Brenda, who was at this moment probably trying a new hair-do in front of the glass or painting her nails – or even (thought Arthur tolerantly) out with someone else. He was not jealous.

The workmen at the Cowshed having driven off to their lunch in a large car belonging to one of them, Frank was taking the opportunity to sweep the floor of his living-room, on which they had allowed much litter to accumulate. He was also quoting aloud poetry appropriate to autumn: ‘“A spirit haunts the year's last hours / Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers: / To himself he talks . . .”'
As I'm doing
, he thought, vigorously driving before him empty cigarette cartons, fragments of plaster, whitish dust and greasy paper. He was content, though somewhere at the back of his mind lurked faint uneasiness at the fact that no other man within many miles was at that moment quoting Tennyson while sweeping with a twig broom the floor of a disused cowshed in which he proposed to live.

To banish this slight sensation, he began to think of Juliet.
I wish I could do something about that child: she bothers me. The best thing would be to get old Addy to put up the money to keep her at a university. (We won't bother with grants.) I could do it, I suppose, but then there would probably be gossip, certainly in
Wanby. Everybody's so used to my being in love with the wrong person
.

Whistling, he put the broom away, and set about brewing some herb tea. As he did so, a thought hit him, solid as a brick and with much the same effect:
I lead an unnatural life and I'm getting old maid-ish
.

Instantly, other thoughts leapt to his defence:
Hell, why shouldn't I? I'm comfortable. I'm not utterly useless – there's the Society to prove that – and the belief that bachelors are ‘selfish' is old-fashioned. I do no harm (that's a feeble one, if you like) . . . perhaps I'm getting a bit bored with my own comfort. Perhaps I'll meet a new mermaid
. . .

He was astonished at the force with which he thought:
God forbid
.

His thoughts, as he sipped the dark-green liquid and stared out over his meadows, returned to Juliet.

She's virgin soil. I've never heard her utter a word showing she has been influenced by anyone or anything, except this mysterious something that demands so much solitude. And mathematics. Oh, and that Bach the other night.

But the lack! There's such a lack there: lack of ordinary human responses, human tastes, human desires . . . That would be something to occupy me, teaching Juliet to be human. I'll teach her to look, and to hear, and to feel, until she's a human creature.

He was smiling as he went through to the little kitchen that had been added to the long, low shed. He felt full of energy and interest. It would be a Good Work.

Perhaps there is something about an unusual female which arouses in males the desire to instruct and to change. It was
well for Frank Pennecuick and Arthur Robinson that neither of them knew what they had taken on.

Arthur was finding that his search for coincidences was quite as embarrassing and tiresome as he had expected.

At the end of the first week, however, he had perfected a system; had bought a notebook; and was growing accustomed to sitting down at café tables or leaning on bars, and saying to strangers: ‘I say, excuse me, but I'm writing a thriller and the plot turns on a coincidence. I wonder if you can help me?'

He did not want trouble. He chose the more unalarming-looking of the young, and the more soppy-looking of the elderly, avoiding members of HM Forces, and gangs of either sex. An hour a week was quite enough to give to his odd search. In a fortnight, his job in the bookshop would be up, and he would go into Uncle Bill's office. Free time would be scarcer after that.

Then, gradually, he learnt that no one is ‘ordinary'.

Every individual he spoke to showed some narrow, delicate, almost colourless streak, personal as a fingerprint, that set them imperceptibly apart from everyone else. Even within the most apparently moulded type there appeared these variations, infant shoots of oddness and individuality. There had been the elderly man who accused him of nosy-parkerism, muttered about a free country, and threatened him with the police. This was the evening on which Arthur nearly abandoned the project. But the embryo novelist heard the shy notes and saw the faint gleams behind the halting sentences and the clichés.

As for stupidity . . . perhaps he did not make enough allowance for the slightly alarming effect of clear dark eyes (not
exactly glaring, but magnified by thick spectacles) fixed with severe attention upon the victim. Usually his spiel about the thriller and the coincidence was greeted with an open mouth and ‘Pardon?'

‘Eh? Say it again slower, son.'

‘I dunno what you're on about.'

‘How very interesting! My nephew writes. He hasn't had any luck so far with
publishing
, poor boy, but he isn't discouraged. So
you
want to be a writer too, how
thrilling
! I wonder if you'd like to meet Andrew?'

‘Coincidences? Funny you should ask me that. Only this morning I was saying to Mrs Bender who lives next door to us no it wasn't this morning it must have been Monday because I'd just come from the launderette well I was on my way back as a matter of fact and I ran into her just as I was going along Bowie Road . . .'

From the mass of examples collected during one week, there shone out, large and lucent, one jewel.

It came from a tramp, an old man with a flowing beard who was covered, or rather packed into, layers of rags, glimpsed by Arthur on his way home one cold evening as he hurried past a coffee stall.

The handsome, ravaged profile outlined against the lights in the little place caught Arthur's attention, and he paused; approached; ordered coffee; and addressed the towering ancient with his tale.

There was a pause. Arthur noticed that the old man's nose was purple and threaded with crimson veins. He was prepared for retreat. Anything: a blow, a roar of rage, a shout of laughter.

‘I know of one,' said a hoarse voice at last, while bloodshot eyes were fixed dreamingly upon Arthur's own. ‘It happened in Bulgaria to a man I knew. He murdered his cousin. Wrapped his body in a rug and threw it into the river. But the crime haunted him; yes, it haunted him, and he couldn't sleep. He used to walk along the seashore at night, up and down, up and down,' went on the broken, educated voice somnolently, ‘and presently he noticed something dark lying at his feet and rolling to and fro in the waves.' Pause. ‘I suppose you haven't such a thing as a cigarette about you?'

Arthur, mesmerized, handed him a nearly-full packet.

‘Ah thank you – very kind – and it was the rug. The body had gone; the fishes had got that; but it was the rug.'

He lit a cigarette shakily, and stowed the packet into his rags.

‘Thanks for telling me,' Arthur said at last, and the old man gave a mocking wave of a long-fingered hand and turned his back.

Arthur hurried away. It was not until he was nearly home that it struck him that the story might be made up.

He shut the gate of his home with a sensation of safety and relief. The rags, the great beard, the voice: all had seemed to open before him a chasm in which wandered souls once sure of themselves and safe but now preferring this twilight to the light of day.

Juliet came into the shop on a busy morning with such an air of meaning to be attended to at once that Arthur's sole customer, a sturdy lady choosing
a nice book about dogs
gave her a haughty glance.

‘Oh hullo. Be with you in a minute,' Arthur muttered. When the lady had gone (having deliberately prolonged her choosing,
to teach that girl a lesson
), he turned round to find Juliet at the other end of the shop.

He hurried down to her, and held out his notebook.

‘Here – they aren't much good, I'm afraid, except one I got from an old tramp. That's a beauty. Hurry up – there's another person waiting.'

She had snatched the book from him and was already reading the carefully written pages, with an effect of
eating
them, so intense was her concentration.

‘Pure,' he thought he heard her mutter, and saw her give a little nod, as he rushed off, thinking,
Well, I'll never know what that meant, so shan't waste time wondering
.

As the second customer left, there wandered in a tall man, shabbily dressed in brown. Arthur did not approach with helpful enquiries; he had been told to encourage browsing, and this one looked like a browser.

Instead, the brown man went straight to Juliet.

‘There you are,' he said, and she said, ‘Oh – hullo,' impatiently.

‘Are those the notes your friend was collecting for you?' the brown man asked, while glancing pleasantly towards Arthur.

‘Yes. Not much use except for one,' raising her voice and nodding at ‘your friend'. And she was at the door.

‘I suppose you can't join us for coffee and tell us how you got this material, which I'm sure will be useful to Juliet,' the browser said warmly, turning to Arthur.

‘Oh – thanks. But that's impossible. I'm in charge, see, until the other assistant comes on at one. But thanks all the same.'

‘Some other time, then.' He hesitated. ‘Juliet doesn't mean . . . It's just that she's – well, a very unusual child, and one mustn't expect ordinary behaviour from her.'

‘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.