Pure Juliet (19 page)

In the drawing-room, the party was drinking tea and dissecting the afternoon's announcements, after a polite interval, of course, during which the weather was introduced.

Everyone studied Juliet, stealthily, but avidly; everyone essayed little remarks, intended to convey kindly interest in her future and a complete lack of envy. At last, when the ladies (with the exception of Clemence) had ceased lying, old Mr Barrow said: ‘And what are you going to do with your money, young lady?'

He had been eating his way, with gusto, through a plateful of hot tea cakes.
Tea cakes! It must be forty years since anyone had bothered to send up the little hot buttery things for his delectation.

Juliet looked up absently and muttered, ‘Oh – I can't say yet.'

But Frank said with decision: ‘University is the place for her. Isn't it, Juliet?'

‘S'pose so.'

‘Very wise,' said Mr Barrow, whose income, provided by a small fortune he had made at forty, had been devoted to padding him round with every comfort purchasable on this planet. ‘Where do you think of going?'

Silence. The May wind sailed past the windows.

‘Cambridge, I s'pose,' she said at last. ‘They're best for maths.'

‘Whew! Flyin' high, aren't you? You'll have to work damned hard if you want to get in there.'

‘Juliet will get her place all right,' said Frank. ‘The problem is what's to be done with her until she goes up in probably a year's time.'

Clemence looked at him steadily. Yes, his chief interest (next to Edible Grasses) was now Juliet Slater.
I'm sick and tired of waiting
.

‘Can't I stay on here?' Juliet asked. Her quiet room and her table were calling, and the theory that had danced in her mind before she came downstairs was beginning to throb again, with an almost painful force.

‘Hardly, dear.' Frank brought out the last word clearly, and stealthy glances were exchanged. ‘The servants will be going back to Spain, and I shall probably sell the house to some institution. Or I might just pull it down and put the land under cultivation.'

‘Or turn it into a country club,' Clemence said rather shrilly. And as he glanced at her in surprise, her grandmother exclaimed:

‘
What
a good idea! Bring some life into this very dreary part of the world.'

Mr Barrow, having eaten most of the tea cakes and a thick slice of sponge cake, glanced at the clock and said that they must be going. (It was
Kojak
this evening.)

There was a general setting aside of cups, and everybody rose.

The warm wind pressed against the windows, and the haunting theory danced its stately pavane in Juliet's head as she almost ran out of the room.

‘Grandmamma,' in a half whisper, ‘ask Edward to drive. Please.'

‘Oh dear – must I? You know he hates driving and that makes him nervous, and if there's anything that does frighten me—'

‘
Please
. I – want a word with Frank. He and I will walk.'

Mrs Massey, glancing down to ascertain that her ample grey folds were in order, noticed that Clemence's hands were clenched at her sides. Most unusual. Poor child.

‘Very well, dear,' she said and advanced upon Dr Masters. ‘Clem doesn't feel quite up to the mark. So will you be a dear, Edward . . . ?'

Dr Masters, no better pleased than she, made himself be a dear, and off the pair went.

‘Frank, walk me home, will you? I feel a bit – I don't know – queasy, and I need exercise.'

‘Of course. I thought you sounded on edge. Need an arm or anything?'

She shook her head, not looking at him.

‘Right. I won't be a minute. Must just speak to the servants.'

She stood, waiting: as she had waited since she was fourteen. Addy's death, unloved, unmated, childless, had been the last
straw. Must she, Clemence Massey, that nice woman who's been with Dr Masters for years, die some fifty years on, perhaps, in the same way? And the long rays of evening sunlight, and all the brilliant, throbbing spring life around her, even the scent of hawthorn, increased her pain. She had no idea what she was going to do or say. But say or do something she must.

In ten minutes they were walking down the drive.

‘Don't let's hurry, shall we?' she said, as Frank shut the little door after them, having smilingly waved back Antonio, who had accompanied them, beaming. ‘It's such a – lovely evening.' She gulped.

‘Clem, dear, what is the matter? Has the funeral upset you?' Frank looked concernedly into her face, unbecomingly flushed.

‘Of course it has,' she almost burst out. ‘Someone dying like that – poor Addy – with no one to love her – or – anything.'

He was silent for a moment, surprised and a little embarrassed. Then he said: ‘Does that matter so much? I don't think – that side of life – troubled her much. She had all the money and comfort she wanted – friends, travel (when she was younger). I shouldn't have said she was that kind of woman.'

‘What kind of woman?' It was a snap, and an angry one, and she turned to glare – yes, it was a glare – at him.

‘Well, the kind to whom love and marriage mean a great deal.'

‘Oh Frank! They meant
everything
, poor, poor Addy. And
all
women are that kind of woman. If they aren't, they aren't women,' she ended rather wildly.

‘There are so many different kinds of love, Clem.'

‘Addy didn't have
any
kind of love. She made me think of a – a flowering branch that's never lost its petals or formed any fruit. Wasted.'

‘Well, that's enlarging the question considerably, to say her life was wasted. I like your comparison with the branch. I didn't know you were a poet, Clem,' teasingly, and with the object of lightening the atmosphere a little.

‘Oh why must men always
generalize
?' was the angry and surprising answer, almost a cry. ‘And I'm
not
a poet, I'm—' She choked the words back. ‘Oh, never mind
what
I am – let's walk a bit faster, shall we?' and for the remaining twenty minutes or so, going at a pace almost as swift as Juliet's, they were silent.

Clemence felt no better; rather worse. It was as if she had within her a miniature volcano of some indefinable kind, which had yet to erupt.

‘Come in for a drink?' he suggested, when, hardly realizing where she was going, she had accompanied him across the meadow to the doorstep of the almost completed Cowshed.

‘Oh – all right. Thanks. I will.

He opened the door into the long, low, austere living-room, and she sank uninvited into a comfortable old chair and sat staring at nothing. The place smelled slightly of raw putty, which made her feel sick.

‘Frank,' she said in a loud, harsh tone, as he was crossing the room to the cupboard where he kept his homebrews, ‘can I have an ordinary drink, please? Not that . . . You do keep some, I know.'

‘Of course. For the unregenerate, I do – yes,' he grinned.

He brought up one of the low tables which he had made himself during his scanty moments of leisure, and arranged glasses on it and drew up a chair opposite her, a glass of dandelion wine in his hand. Staring somewhere over her shoulder,
he had plainly gone off into thoughts of something deeply interesting to himself.

Clemence angrily took a large gulp of whisky.

She usually drank little, and had today eaten sparsely because she had been so upset. The whisky rushed joyously straight up into her head, and she was instantaneously, blissfully drunk.

He did not notice the changed expression in her eyes; nor did he lift his glass in the usual salute to the years of their shared childhood. She began to feel a strong wish to talk, to bubble out her longings and her pain, and her lips parted slowly, of their own volition, in a long sigh that was poised, like a breaking wave, over a rush of words that were yet to come.

He looked across at her. ‘I'm wondering,' he began, ‘about Juliet— What?'

‘Nothing.' (In fact, it had been a furious murmur – ‘Blast Juliet.')

‘You see,' he leant forward, his thin face and large eyes alight with eagerness, ‘I feel she's my treasure, my trust. I'm pretty certain she's a mathematical genius in the range of Keppler or Einstein, quite incapable of making a living by teaching or anything of that sort. She needs unlimited solitude and privacy to let her powers develop. She can't stay at Hightower. She can't – and wouldn't anyway – go back to her parents. What I'd like to do is to have her here with me, and give her complete freedom for the next year and a half – but I suppose there'd be gossip.'

‘Yesh.' Clemence held her glass, admiringly, up to the light, fuzzily smiling, ‘There would. Be gossip.'

‘And when she does make a name for herself – and I believe it'll be a very big one – it would be tiresome for her to have
had . . . well . . . a shady-sounding adolescence. Added to her being a woman. What?'

Clemence had muttered something else and now was nodding; she had meant to shake her head with decision, but somehow the gesture reversed itself.

‘Any hint of sex interest . . . I simply cannot face inviting some unknown female, however suitable, to come here as companion for the months before Juliet goes up. I can't face it, I'd murder the unfortunate creature. So what's to be done?' He paused. ‘I simply do not know.'

‘You could marry me,' Clemence said.

His glass fell to the floor.

She nodded – sagely. ‘Marry me. Alwaysh wanted to marry you, since I was seventeen. I could see to Juliet and I want shome children. Lotsh of children. We get on so well, you see. Alwaysh have.'

There he sat, gaping, a pool of dandelion wine at his feet, and the smashed glass glittering. The silence lasted just long enough for reality to make its way up to the edge of the alcoholic liberty in which Clemence was floating.

She was on the brink of realizing what she had done, and if she had continued to sit, leaning back comfortably and gazing at him with that glazed, silly smile, and gently waving her glass at him, perhaps convention and common sense and bachelor habits might have asserted themselves.

But suddenly she gulped, and set her glass down with care on the table and covered her contorted face with both hands, and burst into tears, crying loudly like a child.

‘Clem! Love!' Frank scrambled across the six feet separating them and took her awkwardly into his arms (with none of
the sensuous reverence with which he used to take Deirdre or Ottolie). ‘Don't – don't cry – it's marvellous – a marvellous idea – of course, that's the solution. Only a fool like me wouldn't have thought of it before. Of course we'll get married. Brilliant girl – there, there,' and he attempted a soothing rocking, which failed because she was lying back in the chair. ‘Don't cry—' A series of kisses were deposited all over her wet face as he pulled down her hands. ‘Here, have some more whisky—' He looked distractedly over his shoulder for the bottle.

Clemence
! He felt as if the roof had fallen in.

Then he was visited by one of those angels who bestow strokes of genius upon ordinary people; who inspire the sentences that heal wounds, and modestly, with simple means, shape lives. He drew back a little, still clasping her loosely, and said, the angel prompting him to a doubtful tone: ‘You did mean it, didn't you, my love?'

‘Of course I meant it, you idiot,' she said, between sobs. ‘Been meaning it for agesh, only you kept falling in love with all thoshe—'

‘No more,' he assured her earnestly. ‘That really is over. My poor Clem,' kissing her tenderly, ‘you must have been so miserable. My jewel of a best friend.'

She looked up at him, her face lacking even its usual ordinary pleasant attractions because it was so ravaged and tear-stained.

‘But you don't love me, do you?'

Don't hesitate
, commanded the angel, in as near a hiss as an angel can get.

‘Of course I love you. In the best, most lasting way of all. As one loves a wife. I'll love you more, too, when we're married. You wait.'

He ventured a smile, and Clemence sat up and produced a handkerchief. Reality returned.

Suddenly, she felt more than usually sober. And all those slightly dreary but necessary spirits which had guided her since she had decided she wanted to marry Frank, stood before her, and ‘The Smile of Reason' was gone from the faces of Control, Common Sense, Prudence, and Planning. Those faces were all a yard long; and their owners were enquiring in one dismal chorus, ‘Clemence Massey,
what
have you
done
?'

‘I think it might work,' she said shakily, after some nose-blowing which did not add Romance to the occasion.

He stood up, towering over her, looking down at her with gentle eyes. ‘I get my best friend for life. You get what – you seem to want. And Juliet gets protection for her genius. Perfect.'

Juliet.

Clemence was now well afloat on the tide of reaction that had replaced the blissful alcoholic one, and she heard the dismal chorus of her inward mentors change to a warning note.

Oh yes
, they were saying,
it will work if you don't drop Us, and don't protest about herb wines or no carpets, or, most of all, that ghastly little Juliet
.
It'll work all right. And work is the word
, they added coldly.
You drop Us, my girl, and see what happens
.

Clemence lay back in her chair, feeling dazed, and there was silence in the room. She was very aware of that smell of putty. Perhaps that was why she felt sick?

Frank had gone off into a stare, his eyes fixed on a wooden spoon which came from Indonesia and was hanging on the wall, for he had already begun to install his possessions. A soft sound broke into his reverie.