Pure Juliet (15 page)

‘But sweet, Grandmamma. And kind. And – and good, too.'

Mrs Massey made the sound written as h'mph. The qualities her granddaughter had named did not attract her in the male.

‘Of course, if that's what you
like
, dear.'

‘It's the best basis for . . . the kind of marriage I want.'

Clemence was leaning forward, holding her large capable hands out to the fire, and looking into its flames, and she now repeated the conversation at lunch.

‘Do you – er – think any progress has been made?' Mrs Massey ventured to ask at last.

‘Absolutely none, I should think,' was the quiet answer, and then she burst out: ‘It's absolutely the
end
having some dotty
idea
for a rival!'

‘Really the best advice I can give you, dear – and I've seen a good deal of the world, you know – is to find someone else, and quickly. I've always said, and I say it now: the best cure for A is B.'

‘But I want Frank,' Clemence said.

‘I've found another coincidence for you, a really good one,' Frank said to Juliet, on a walk they were taking some days later. It was suddenly high spring; emerald leaves and pink and white blossom tossing in a tearing, cool wind, and the sun silver-white in the changing sky.

Round came her head, with the eyes full of light. She said nothing.

‘Yes, in some book of memoirs – can't remember whose. A man had bought his wife a superb painting of a grasshopper by some very famous painter, Picasso, I think; and that night when she went to bed she found a grasshopper struggling and buzzing under the bedclothes. I thought it very odd indeed, and just up your street.'

‘Pure.'

‘What?' He was not quite sure that he had heard the muttered word correctly; it was so unexpected.

‘Nothing. That's interestin'. I – I liked what you told me about the robin, too. Superstitious, course – Christ, and all that – but I liked it. Dunno why.'

No
, thought her would-be mentor,
you don't know why, and for a very long time you won't
.

Juliet's road was going to be immensely stony and immensely long, and perhaps at the end of it all his cautious feeding into her of the nourishment he believed a human creature must ingest in order to be human (if these treasures were not in the spirit from birth) might have been wasted.

‘There's
two
robins!' exclaimed a voice at his side almost unrecognizable from excitement. ‘And we was just talking . . .'

‘Yes. It is the mating season, dear,' he said gently. It then occurred to him, with one of those flights of fancy more usual in women than in men, that perhaps for Juliet there never would be a mating season. It was the kind of thought for which, among other qualities, Clemence wanted him for her husband; such perceptions complemented her own sober and unimaginative temperament.

‘You goin' off to the Cowshed now?' Juliet asked, as he paused at the crossroads, one road leading to St Alberics, and the other back to Leete.

‘Yes. As usual, I've got to see a man . . . I only came up to drag you out for a walk. You'd sit stewing over those books all day if someone didn't, and there's no one else to.'

‘It's better stewin' than what it is sittin' with poor old Auntie. That does get me down, if you like.'

Miss Pennecuick had taken to her bed, and did not seem likely to rise from it again.

He looked at her curiously. Did she have no feeling of affection towards the woman who had rescued her, and given her solitude and silence so that her strange powers could develop?

‘Yes. It must be very tedious,' he said drily, moving in the direction of the small shop selling ice cream and cigarettes that adorned the otherwise charming break in the lonely little roads. ‘I left my bicycle here. See you later this week.'

‘All right' – and she turned back slowly down the Leete road.

‘Juliet?' he called, as he rode past her a moment later. ‘Don't be too long, will you? You know how it upsets Great-Aunt if you aren't there when she wants you, especially lately.'

‘Oh all right. But it's a dead bore.'

The thin voice floated after him, its discontented note contrasting with the bloom over tree and hedge.

When he was out of sight, she dawdled. The wind lifted her hair and sent it flying out behind her, and the chill air had brought colour into her face.

The white grasses of winter had mysteriously vanished, the last bronze and copper leaves had blown away, and emerald, emerald had everywhere replaced the dun and pallor. The air bit, but it smelled sweeter than any scent that man could concoct; the wild rosebuds, long and pointed with deep pink, were lifting themselves in the hedges.

Juliet wandered on, slowly on. For once her brain was quiescent, and that mathematician's inner picture of the world which is ‘presented in the form of inter-related quantities', was replaced by one presented by her senses. Not fully, not with the mysterious splendour that brings tears (as Frank's friend the poet would have seen it with his inward eye) – only faintly and, compared with his vision, a ghost-like entity. But she felt the difference: it came upon her like a revelation; she experienced an emotion almost completely unfamiliar, and only
dimly present in the past while she was talking to the pet bird in her former home, or watching wild creatures at play. The world of Nature, Mother of all the Goddesses and of Man, broke through the framework imposed by science, and with it there came a new happiness.

She wandered slowly homewards, seeing everything, breathing each waft of cold sweet air, treading with pausing feet the dry road already lightly filmed with summer's dust.

So when Sarah, shaking with indignation and almost purple with rage, saw from her place by the gate in Hightower's wall her mistress's detested protegée ‘dawdling along as if tomorrow would do', she broke into a shrill tirade:

‘Where you been, you wicked little beast, you? Bone-selfish, that's what you are, crawling home like some snail, and that poor dear nearly out of her mind wondering where you was. You know's well as I do the doctor says she got to avoid all excitement. All excitement, he said.' Sarah was now tottering beside Juliet, as the latter began to hurry along the path leading to the house. ‘
That's
what he said, and Mr Frank ought to know better, taking you out when she's about as bad as she can be—'

Juliet broke into a run, flinging an expletive over her shoulder, and Sarah uttered a gasp of outrage, while beginning a shaky attempt to run herself.

The front door was open. Juliet rushed through, across the hall where Pilar, polishing, gaped at her, and up the stairs, two at a time. The unfamiliar happiness she had just experienced was fading; in seconds, it would be forgotten. All she wanted was to get the interview with Auntie over, and get back to her table and books.

She rapped loudly on the door, hearing as she did so a peculiar sound, a kind of loud gasping. She opened the door violently, her anger rising, and darted across the room to the bed and stood there, silent and sullen and trembling with rage.

‘Wh – wa – wh – late – wh—' choked a voice out of the face almost unrecognizable from age and agitation. ‘I – wh—' The eyes behind the spectacles were fixed in a piteous glare upon her face. ‘Oh have you – I – got so—'

‘So what? I'm late!' she burst out. ‘I only been for a
walk
, haven't I? Anybody'd think I been taking drugs or something – off with some boy – only for a bloody
walk
, and you knew it, and it was your Frank called for me. There's never a minute's peace in this place, it's worse than what it was at home—'

‘Juliet' – in a cracked, sobbing voice – ‘baby—'

‘Yes, that's about it – “Juliet baby” – and treated like one, too. Makes me sick – I'm going on seventeen, not a kid of nine. I can't get a minute to meself, not to
think
, that's what I want to do,
think
. How can I think, with you after me all the time, worrying and moaning?'

Miss Pennecuick uttered a loud cry, and lifted a violently shaking hand as if in fear of a blow, while tears rolled down her face; her heartbeats were shaking her nightdress.

‘That's right – now blub. Oh, I'm off, I can't stand no more of this—' and Juliet turned and ran out of the room, swerving to avoid Sarah who, breathless, had just reached the door.

‘You wicked girl!' as Juliet swept past. ‘After all she's done for you!' Her voice was lost in the slam of the door.

Juliet tossed back her hair angrily when she stood in the welcome silence of her room, and muttered an ugly word;
but the sight of her work table, with books and instruments arranged upon it in the order that was never changed, immediately soothed her.

With strong satisfaction, she saw the figures, spread on a sheet of paper, on which she had been working when Frank's knock interrupted her; and, pulling the chair towards her with one foot, she sat down before them. The May airs floated, sweet with the scent of blossom, through the window: she did not notice them, nor lift her head to listen to a distant cuckoo's cry.

With both hands held against her skull, so large beneath the masses of hair, she sat, staring unseeingly at the paper, motionless as stone.

‘What is it?' she called faintly, in answer to a dramatically loud knock on her door. She did not start nor look up.

The door was flung open. Sarah stood there with, behind her, the flushed faces of Rosa and Maria.

‘She's been taken very bad indeed,' Sarah shouted. ‘Very bad, she is. I phoned for Dr Masters and told him to stop on the way at that place' – Sarah meant the Cowshed – ‘and pick up Mr Frank. And
you
come along, too, and stay with her, seeing it's all your fault, God forgive you.'

Juliet got up and came over to her, meeting the shocked gaze of the two girls with a defiant stare.

Along the passage the four went; she could smell lunch cooking and, suddenly, felt hungry.

At Miss Pennecuick's door, Sarah turned on the two maids.

‘You be off downstairs and don't you leave that hall for
one second
. I want the doctor in the house the very instant he comes. And none of your chattering and giggling, neither.'

‘Oh no, Senora Sarah!' Two shocked voices, and tears welling into four dark eyes. ‘Of course we don't make laughing. She been so kind like a mother—'

‘Yes, all right, never mind all that . . . You just be off and mind what I say.
You
,' to Juliet, ‘I hope God'll punish you, that's all,' and she noiselessly opened the door.

The scene was quiet enough. Antonio and Rosario were at either side of the bed, the younger man clasping Miss Pennecuick's hand as he knelt beside her, and Antonio reading slowly aloud, his deep voice reverently softened to the occasion: ‘“He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”' – the voice sank, became full of awe – ‘“I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”'

His eyes were fixed upon Miss Pennecuick's worn prayer book, the gift to her, when she was twelve, of her mother; his expression, with lowered lids, was all solemnity and sorrow.

Miss Pennecuick's eyes were shut, but as the quiet sounds of entry came, she stirred. ‘Jul . . .' she mumbled, and a speck of saliva came from the corner of her twisted mouth. ‘Where's my baby?'

‘Go on – speak to her,' hissed Sarah, giving Juliet a savage push towards the bed.

Juliet stumbled, turned, and pierced Sarah with a look that made her draw back, then went slowly forward.

Antonio let his voice fade off: ‘“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,”' and stood in silence, his eyes fixed upon the book, which he gently shut.

Rosario, with a delicacy and tenderness unexpected in so carnal a creature, was gently stroking the hand he held, his eyes fixed mournfully upon the unrecognizable face.

Juliet stood, staring.
Christ, she looks ugly
, she thought.
Like some old guy what's going to be burnt.
She forced herself to speak softly:

‘Auntie? It's me – Juliet.'

‘Jul . . .' The mauve lips tried to form words but failed; the head moved from side to side.

‘Take her hand – go on – take it,' Sarah whispered fiercely.

Juliet reluctantly put her fingers about the skeletal wrist; then, in imitation of Rosario, began to stroke it. She had to bend over the bed; the position irked her, so she knelt – and that was more uncomfortable still, from its unfamiliarity. She half turned: ‘Get me a stool.'

Antonio noiselessly carried up one of the tuffets kept in every room where Juliet would expect to sit down.

Juliet settled herself, and the familiar position was welcome. Miss Pennecuick's eyelids came down, shutting her faded eyes into their dark little caverns, and she seemed asleep.

‘How long'll the doctor be?' Juliet did not bother to lower her voice, and Rosario's eyes fixed her in a shocked stare.

‘Never mind. You stay where you are,' Sarah whispered.

‘I'm hungry.'

‘Yes, and she's dying. Now you shut up. Your place is there.'

Sarah sat down in the chair which was her own, and there was silence but for the tick of the clock. Some twenty minutes passed, during which Sarah once made an imperious gesture, and the young men tiptoed out, with last, awed looks at the still figure in the bed.

As Catholics, living a full family life, they were used to such scenes at the bedsides of elderly aunts, grandfathers, cousins and in-laws, and, while perhaps there was some acting of a part, there was also true grief, true religious awe, and none of the fear mingled with embarrassment which might have been felt by English servants.