Pure Juliet (14 page)

He waited at the open front door, studying the neatness and brightness of the tiny hall. The stuffy air was pierced by the song of a bird, accompanying a cacophony on the radio. The chill spring wind blew against his shoulders. Listening intently now, he caught the sustained mutter of a conversation behind a shut door: a kind of whining rush broken by occasional monosyllables, like rocks impeding the flow of a stream.

After a pause of quite eight minutes, the door opened, and Mrs Slater came out. She had been crying.

‘Come in, will you, please,' keeping her head turned away. ‘In 'ere,' she added almost inaudibly, standing aside.

When he was in the room, he heard the door shut softly behind him, and was so full of indignation over that
tear-marked face that for a moment he could not get a word out; he stood staring at the big man sitting up in the big double bed. And when he did speak, he said, not ‘Good morning', but: ‘I should prefer Mrs Slater to be here, please; I want to talk to you both.'

‘Morning.' Mr Slater never took his stare from Frank's face. ‘Oh – all right.' He opened his mouth wider, and sent out a mighty shout: ‘Rose! Chap wants a word.'

Frank received an impression that ‘chap' had been substituted for ‘gentleman' out of principle, rather than from insolence. The room was tidy, except for Mr Slater's large underclothing flung on the floor. It was furnished in bright colours, and was very clean, and stiff.

‘May I sit down?' he asked, as Mrs Slater, with hastily repaired face, hurried into the room and she muttered, ‘Course', and pushed a pink mini-armchair at him. He waited, standing, until she had rolled herself into its twin, muttering, ‘May as well be comf'able.'

Mr Slater folded the
Daily Mirror
and said: ‘Only to be expected, is what I say.'

‘Oh – er . . .' Frank sought for a suitable reply. Could this apply to Juliet?

‘This Beezeley girl. Ask for it, girls do. Out all hours, dressed any'ow, talk to anyone what chats 'em up instead of acting quiet and walking off 'ome, and then don't like it when they get murdered . . . you read about it?'

‘Er – no. Murder doesn't interest me, as a matter of fact.'

Frank perceived that the subject had been introduced as a kind of social ice-breaker, the Slater equivalent of ‘Do-you-know-the-Rowden-Smiths?'

‘Ah. I like a good murder. Interestin'. The police work and that. But this one isn't much good. Straightforward. Soon's they find the body they'll be home and dry.' A slight movement, altering the shape of Mr Slater's mouth, appeared at its corners. ‘Though dry isn't the word, reely. Drowned, they think she was. The frogmen are out.'

The frogmen are out
. The sentence might have come from some thriller. Frank roused himself from an instant's fantasy.

‘Mr Slater, I want to talk to you both about Juliet,' he began, ‘and I'm going to be frank with you. I don't want you to – er – misunderstand my interest in her—'

‘That's all right,' Mr Slater interrupted. ‘She isn't that sort. Clever, but never looks at boys nor had boys look at her, so far as me and her mother knows.'

Here Mrs Slater gave a watery smile and said: ‘Julie and me says she's no more interested in boys than if they was elephants – not so much, tell you the truth, she always says, it's a kind of—'

‘Belt up, Rose,' Mr Slater commanded. ‘Besides,' to Frank, ‘you're old enough to be her father.'

This was not heard by Frank with pleasure. ‘Well. Perhaps more like an uncle. That's the way I've come to feel towards her. Not as – er – close – as a father. Now this is the point' – he leant forwards – ‘and we must be realistic about it. The old lady, Miss Pennecuick, my great-aunt, is failing; her doctor told me only a few days ago that the end may come at any moment. And she may have left Juliet money in her will.'

He paused, studying the faces turned towards him, and expecting exclamations of excited greed. What he had not
expected was a manifestation of that now almost extinct and forgotten quality: pride.

Mr Slater's expression changed not at all, but he said in his hardest tone: ‘Oh she may, may she? Well, for all me and Rose cares, she can keep it, we can do without it, thank you all the same. Rose! Hot us up another, will you?' and he thrust the teacup at her. ‘I can keep me family all right, and Julie can go out to work, like any other bit of a girl.'

Mrs Slater rolled hastily out of the room with the teacup.

‘Any money will be left to Juliet,' Frank said, gently emphasizing the name. ‘Of course, if she wanted to share—'

‘We don't want nothing!' Mr Slater dashed his hand down on the
Daily Mirror
. He had become plum-coloured in face and neck. ‘Let her take the old girl's money and do what she likes with it. She won't go to the bad, that's certain sure, not with her looks.'

‘No . . . but she might go to university, Mr Slater.'

‘She could o' gone to one of them places without any old lady's money. She got five of them A levels, most unusual they said, up at her school. Wanted her to go on there, on some grant, but I wasn't 'aving it, wasting her time when she could o' been earnin' good money. Why, I seen adverts for bits o' sekerteries for three thousand a year and more. And
more
. I ask yer.'

He almost snatched the refilled cup from his wife, sipped, then set it down on the bedside table, growling: ‘Burn yer blasted mouth, now.'

‘Oh George, you've spilt it! I just polished that.'

‘Then you can polish it again. Give yer summink ter do.'

‘I
got
things to do.'

‘Go and do 'em, then,' Mr Slater instructed without a trace of ill-temper, but Rose was leaning back in the pink mini-armchair.

Frank persevered. ‘Yes, she's an unusually clever girl – outstandingly so. But about this money. What I want to make certain of is – if she does inherit something handsome, and if Miss Pennecuick's relations contest the will – er – make a fuss . . .'

‘Oo'll make a fuss? What right 'ave they got? Old girl leaves it to Julie, it's hers by right. That's the law, isn't it? I'd like to see anyone sticking their pissing nose into her affairs!'

‘Now, George. That's ugly,' Mrs Slater said placidly. ‘Language . . .' And to Frank's surprise Mr Slater muttered, ‘Oh all right . . . sorry. But just let anyone try doing my girl out of her rights, that's all. Not that we
need
it, mind—'

‘Well then, if we're doing all that well, p'raps you'll see your way to me havin' that cork lino for the kitchen,' his wife said, with an effect of tartness.

He waved a hand impatiently: ‘
I
don't want nothing to do with any money, mind yer. But if you come 'ere to find out if we'll stand by our own, course we will. Stands to reason. I don't like 'er much—'

‘George! What a thing to say!'

‘—but she's me own flesh and blood, and 'sides' – here was thrust out, gaunt, and harder than tempered steel, the expression of one of those bedrocks of the British character that has
not
been destroyed – ‘it wouldn't be fair.'

He brought his fist down slowly, with impressive effect, upon the already crumpled
Daily Mirror
. Rose twitched the paper off the bed, murmuring, ‘I want a read of that, looks like it's been in the dustbin already,' while Frank stood up,
divided between a desire to laugh, and incredulity at such a pair having produced Juliet.

‘Are you in touch with Juliet?' to Rose.

‘Phones regular once a week.'

Then she hesitated and Frank wondered if she was about to refer to Juliet's lies. But, after a stealthy glance at her husband, who was glaring at the
Daily Mirror
as though compelling it back onto the bed, she only ended in a murmur: ‘Keeps in touch, I will say that.'

Frank made a little bow to Rose and turned to leave.

She accompanied him.

‘You mustn't take too much notice of him,' she said, as they stood by the front door. ‘His bark's worse than what his bite is . . . I wish Julie'd get married or even engaged, that's what I'd really like . . . All the other girls . . . She's a funny one, and no mistake. I don't s'pose she's got anyone down there?'

‘Not so far as I know, Mrs Slater,' gently.

‘No . . . I didn't s'pose so. Oh well, all come out in the wash. Good morning. Thanks for coming . . . I s'pose you couldn't fancy a cup of tea?'

He shook his head smilingly, thanked her with more words than he would have used to most people, and, catching sight by good luck of a cruising taxi, hailed it, and directed the driver to King's Cross.

His mind was full of the awfulness of marriage. These thoughts were more insistent than the reflection that his interview with Juliet's parents had gone better than he had anticipated. But he suddenly felt a wish to talk it over with someone. He decided to take Clemence out to lunch: she was such a good listener.

St Alberics, like every other place in England large enough to call itself a town, had recently opened a restaurant for ‘natural' foods, and this, of course, was the one to which he took her.

She, soberly pleased at being pounced upon as she was leaving Dr Masters's surgery at ten minutes to one, did not like the Cool Cucumber, but did not, of course, say so.

She surveyed the trays of glowing grated carrot and pearly rings of raw onion, and the bowls of chopped cheese set beside cartons of natural yoghurt, without any vulgar rising of the salival juices. There were also those little wooden barrels full of nettle wine and dandelion wine. She would have relished a glass of rosé.

But he was handing her a wooden spoon and fork and a beech-wood bowl, which she had to fill with a meal; cold, moist, and good for you.

In comic despair, she studied the back of her host's head, shapely below its curtain of thick, curling, shoulder-length hair. What would happen, she wondered, if she slammed bowl, spoon and fork back in their racks, and demanded to be taken somewhere where one could eat the kind of food
she
liked?

But of course she would do nothing of the kind.

‘I saw Juliet's parents this morning,' he announced when they were seated and he had poured out two generous glasses of dandelion wine. ‘The most extraordinary pair – I don't mean eccentric, I mean extraordinary in having produced Juliet.'

He attacked a mound of shredded vegetables, while giving her an account of his visit and of Juliet's lies. (She suppressed an impulse to burst out:
How do you really feel about her, Frank?
)

Instead, ‘What was the point of going to see them?' Dutifully chewing raw carrot. ‘I mean, how does that help her?'

‘I want them on my side –
her
side, that is.'

There was a trace of defiance in his voice. He was now more anxious than ever that his interest in Juliet should not be misinterpreted.

Clemence's clear blue eyes met his own with their usual calm, and the defiance subsided. Good friend that she was, she always understood: she was ‘the thousandth man that sticketh closer than a brother' – but never so close as to be a nuisance, he thought.

She, meanwhile, wanted to exclaim:
But she told Aunt Addy!
and
She must be thoroughly untrustworthy
, and, fatally,
Frank, how can you care about what happens to such a little liar?
And of course she exclaimed not at all, but assumed a gentle, questioning expression which encouraged him to continue.

Which he did.

‘You see' – he spoke slowly and with concentration – ‘there's this something, some problem she has; I gather from hints she's dropped that it's something to do with coincidence – scientific. Anyway one or two books have been written in the last few years about coincidence but she's only lately got hold of those, she told me. She's been thinking about it, this question, ever since she could think at all, in a vague kind of way, not really knowing what she was puzzled about—'

Yes, I must face it. He's Off Again
, the Thousandth Man was thinking dismally.
But it's in a different way, this time
.

‘—and now the question, whatever it is, absorbs her to the exclusion of all other interests.' He drew a carton of yoghurt energetically towards him and reached for some very brown sugar.

‘But what
is
it, Frank?'

‘She doesn't
know.
Haven't you been listening?'

‘Of course I have.'

‘Have some more—' He pushed the carafe at her.

‘No thank you. I – I haven't quite—' She held up her glass. ‘But if she doesn't know, and can't tell you because she doesn't, how can you help her by seeing her parents?' She glanced at her watch.

‘I can get their support if the Barrows make a plea of undue influence over Great-Aunt's will and—'

‘And what? (Frank, I'm sorry but I must go. We've got someone really ill, one of what Edward calls his “heavies”, coming at two-fifteen sharp . . .')

‘And I can guarantee quiet and solitude for her to work at her problem.'

‘But that means – adopting her. Or . . . something.'

Clemence, standing up to slip unaided into her coat, turned to stare at him.
Or something
? Not . . . her stomach seemed to turn over.

‘Exactly,' he said, in the tone she had heard from him only two or three times in the twenty years of their friendship. ‘I believe she's a genius, and I'm going to see that she gets her chance.'

‘Well, dear. What kind of a day?' her grandmother asked, when she got home that evening.

‘Oh, so-so. Frank took me out to lunch.'

‘Raw salad and that unnatural cutlery?' Mrs Massey said tartly. ‘Why couldn't he have taken you to the Santo Alberic and given you something eatable? He can afford it. He really is
one of the most trying . . . no,
the
most trying man I've ever known. And so
silly
.'