Pure Juliet (2 page)

‘Mum?' she called.

A pause, then the heavy footsteps. ‘Oh Julie – you're locked in. You are a funny girl, I wanted a bit of a chat – alone all day – what is it?'

‘I need more fags.'

‘Can't I come in?'

‘I'm changin' me clothes.'

Their voices sounded flat in the bright, comfortable little place, Mrs Slater's soft and slurred, Juliet's thin and high.

‘Shan't be a tick. You have the tea ready.'

She had pulled a suitcase from under the bed, and was rapidly putting into it the clothes she took from the chest of drawers; when the case was full and shut, she noiselessly unlocked the door. She could hear the sounds made by her mother moving
about the kitchen, and water running, and plates being clashed, and a humming of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night'.

Rapidly, she opened the case of books and took out some volumes dealing with physics, mathematics and other scientific disciplines, and all bearing the label of Hawley Road Comprehensive School. She crammed them into a plastic carrier.

She set suitcase and bag down beside the door.

‘Ready, Julie.'

‘Righto.'

Her mother, coming slowly into the living-room some moments later carrying the teapot, found her standing by the cage stroking the bird's blue and yellow back with a touch as light as one of the glowing feathers, while it perched on her finger.

‘Bertie,' she was saying, in a lowered tone, ‘Bertie-boy.'

‘Get him his drink, will you, Julie? And you might fill up his seed bin, too; my feet are awful today, it's this heat.' She sank into one of the armchairs, and began opening a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don't want to go round to Mawser's just as your tea's ready, you have one of these.' She held out the packet.

‘You know I like my own . . . I'll get his drink . . . and then I won't be five minutes.'

She went out with the two little containers and came back with both freshly filled, and arranged them carefully in the cage to which the bird had retreated.

‘Bye-bye, Julie, bye-bye,' came a tiny elf's voice from the cage.

‘Oh . . .' Juliet paused at the door. ‘Bye-bye, Bertie-boy. Now you be good.'

‘Bye-bye, Julie. Bertie love Julie. Bye-bye.'

Mrs Slater's lids were drooping.

Juliet almost ran down the passage, snatched up case and bag, and a second later her mother saw her pass the living-room; saw, too, with humble pleasure, that she wore a cap Mrs Slater had knitted for her. In the dusk of the little narrow passage, the suitcase and bag, which Juliet carried on her far side, were not visible.

The front door shut sharply. Mrs Slater sighed, inhaled smoke, and settled herself more comfortably. Perhaps Julie would tell her something about the school party over tea. Not that she ever talked much, Julie. Mrs Slater's thoughts began to play discontentedly about her daughter, named after Julie Andrews in
My Fair Lady
, in memory of that one, never-forgotten evening out with Dad a few days before their wedding. She had so hoped that their daughter would grow up to look like the star.

Clever she
was
, an unusually clever child, them at all her schools had said – and what use was that, her and her cleverness? Didn't care how she looked, except for brushing her hair, nice hair, Julie had, though not much of a looker, as George said right out. And them at the school wanting her to put up for the university! Did they think George was a millionaire? There he
had
put his foot down: she'd leave at seventeen and find a job like everybody else, bright or not. As for boys, they might be elephants, thought Mrs Slater resentfully, for all the notice Julie took of them or they of her.

Come to that, if they
had
been elephants, Julie might have noticed them; Julie liked animals, as much as she liked anything, and this
boys and elephants
was an old joke between herself and her mother, and the only one.

Oh, she was a funny girl. Sometimes she made you feel she wasn't all there – nor you there with her neither, come to that.

Mrs Slater lit another cigarette.

‘Bertie,' she said softly, looking towards the bird where he sat preening himself and chirruping in the fading light, ‘who's Mum's boy, then? Bertie-bird . . .'

Juliet walked the length of Ava Street, then turned onto a highway crammed with traffic. From here, the road went steadily upwards.

Having paused to buy two packets of cigarettes at a small stationer's, she scrambled on to a bus, and alighted at a crossroads just beyond the summit of the great hill, where most of the traffic passed on its way under a notice saying
TO THE NORTH
, and another road, less wide and busy, led away under its own legend:
TO ST ALBERICS, HERTFORD, STAVENHAM
.

Here, on a corner where the cars set out on their longer journey, she took her stand. The last of the light caught her hair; she was, for once, conspicuous, and it was an advantage.

It was not yet dark. The sun's falling rays were hidden behind little, old low houses, but every hint of grey, of dun, of brown was brushed with their softness; the massive trees along the verges drooped in dusty near-blackness above the moving ruby lights of the cars.

Juliet studied her prey carefully. Not a lorry: that meant dangers about which she knew, but never thought. Not elderly men driving alone, who looked too angry, exhausted and
intent to bother with her. Here came something that would do – a middle-aged couple looking mildly worried and driving carefully.

Out went Juliet's arm, as the woman's eye strayed to her glittering hair. There was the briefest of consultations between the pair, and the car slowed down.

‘Goin' anywhere near St Alberics?' she called shrilly, putting out the third cigarette since her vigil began.

‘Passing through it,' the man called back, with an unexpectedly kind smile. ‘Only hurry up – this is a bad place to stop.'

Juliet darted across the few feet of road and settled herself and her case and bag along the back seat. She slammed the door.

‘Here, young lady, steady on.'

‘Sorry – I'm not used to cars.'

The woman turned, and smiled. So young! And that lovely hair. Had she a family? Was she running away? Oh, the perils of this world for the young, the beloved, the rebellious young.

‘And what's your name and where are you off to?' the driver asked in a tone more of the politeness of the road than of curiosity.

‘Sandra Smith, and I'm goin' to stay with my auntie. Lives just outside St Alberics.'

‘Well, I hope you have this lovely weather for your holiday. Break up today, did you? I noticed the children coming out as we passed through London,' the woman said. When did she not notice children? Everywhere, and always.

‘Left,' said Juliet; almost snapped the word.

‘Oh – I expect you're sorry to leave school and all your friends. I know I was.'

Juliet nearly answered: Haven't got any friends, but her instinct for secrecy intervened, and she satisfied her questioner with a ‘Yes', as regretful-sounding as she could make it. And the second expected, and undesired, question,
And what are you going to do now?
did not follow.

The woman smiled again, and turned to watch the rapidly darkening landscape going by.

There was no more conversation. They had entered a motorway; their pace had increased, and there began to be a dream-like quality about their flight beside other dark shapes, following scores of ruby will-o'-the-wisps. In the orange glare of the lamps the general ugliness was not veiled, but emphasized.

Juliet noticed nothing; she was thinking.

They turned aside at length, down a narrowing road where a softer light shone on a sign and its arrow: S
T
A
LBERICS
. S
TAVENHAM
.

Another half hour, and the car stopped in the brightly lit high street of a country town whose shops were small imitations of those in Oxford Street. Here and there, the three-hundred-year-old face of a cottage showed its forlorn and gentle beauty to the chemical glow of the lamps.

The driver turned, smiling, and said, ‘All right for you? Where does your aunt live?'

‘Oh, not far, 'bout five minutes' walk.' Juliet was gathering up case and carrier.

‘Because, if it's not far, we could—'

‘Yes, do be careful, my dear,' from the woman.

‘I'll be all right; there's plenty of people about.' Juliet was out and on the pavement. Indeed at that moment, a bus-load,
scattering in different directions, alighted at a coach station where other passengers were waiting. The scene was neither lonely nor desolate.

‘Cheerio.'

The pair smiled and waved; the car moved off, grew smaller, turned a corner, and was gone.

Juliet had already left behind the shop windows, where fashion models postured, and was walking quickly onwards.

She turned aside at the far end of the high street, down a narrow road without shops and with only occasional dim lamps on old-fashioned iron standards. It was lined on either side by ancient cottages. One had a turquoise-blue door; some others had additions to make them acceptably contemporary, but Ragnall Street was unmistakably in a small country town: narrow, ill-lit, silent, and filled with air scented by leaves and grass in hidden fields.

Juliet's pace quickened. A man on a bicycle passed, calling ‘Goodnight!' A woman hurried by with a heavy shopping bag and entered a cottage that had a light glowing behind its flowery curtains; children's voices greeted her as she opened the front door. The sky, lucid blue and as yet starless, was gradually becoming the most noticeable part of the scene. The sky, and the silence.

The last cottage was left behind, its garden glimmering with white dahlias. Fields stretched away, behind low hedges of thorn, into the twilight; the great elms typical of Hertfordshire were just distinguishable as darker masses against the darkening blue.

Juliet was crossing a stone bridge, humped and ancient, with hidden water running quietly beneath, when a car came past,
too quickly, headlights glaring; she pressed herself against the stone parapet just in time. Then the sky and the silence, as the brutal noise died away, resumed their power, and she turned down a lane, with a signpost that said, she knew,
TO LEETE
. And suddenly a high brick wall was beside her, some fifteen feet tall, ending in iron gates intricately wrought in a design of grapes and vine leaves and, in the centre, a group of initials.

She stopped and pressed a bell set at the side door inserted in the brickwork.

Then she put down her luggage, seated herself on the grass verge, and prepared to wait.

It was dark, but a grain moon was rising, huge and warm-tinted above the elms. Through a thin place in the thorn hedge she could see swathes of mist covering the meadows. There were far-off sounds, and the sudden sweeps of distant headlights in the darkness, but all around her was stillness and silence. She glanced impatiently at the door.

Now there were voices, approaching and raised in argument, though she could not make out what they were saying.

The door jerked open suddenly, and she stood up. A light came on above the gates, revealing a figure known to her, in the familiar black dress which was too short and showed stout legs in pale stockings. A cross old face, a pompadour of white curls.

Behind this person hovered the brown, smiling face of a man above a white jacket.

‘So it's you, is it. Trust you to get here when dinner's over—'

‘Hullo, Sarah.' Juliet began to pick up her baggage. But the man darted forward.

‘I take for you.' And she let him have them, even giving him a brief smile.

‘Mrs Bason, to you,' said Sarah, in a voice meant to be dignified but betrayed by age at the conclusion of her sentence into a squeak.

‘Mrs Bason – sorry.'

‘How do you look when you're glad? Come on, hurry up, she's been all on edge ever since your letter come.'

The old woman turned, grumbling under her breath, the man shut the door behind them, and they went along a wide, curving path leading up to a large house with lit windows.

‘When did it come?' Juliet asked, knowing that Sarah was less irritable if a flow of unnecessary detailed talk was kept going.

‘This morning. Posted day before yesterday, wasn't it? These posts, they get worse and worse. If I'd thought when I was your age I'd live to see the day when it took forty-eight hours for a letter to get from London to Leete, and seven pence to pay at that, and herrings at ten shillings the pound—'

‘Yes, awful,' Juliet muttered.

As they approached the house, whose door stood open revealing a dimly lit hall, a group of faces could be seen peering out into the dusk, and gabbling in Spanish became audible. There was waving of hands, to which Juliet responded slackly, and the group, consisting of a young man and three girls, moved forward to meet her.

But Sarah, assuming an authoritative manner, said sharply, ‘That'll do now, off you go,' and they disappeared, without haste and smiling over their shoulders, in the direction of a door covered in green baize at the end of the hall.

The older man shut the front door.

Sarah turned to Juliet.

‘She's in the drawing-room. Best go in. She's bound to ask if you want something – I'll see about it. Always on the go, I am. On a blessed tray, I s'pose.'

‘That'll do nicely,' Juliet quoted, showing teeth white and small between her pallid lips: it was not a smile of sweetness.

Juliet crossed towards a door on the left. It was of dark wood, like the panelled walls. The hall had a pseudo-antique appearance; its many old portraits lacked distinction, and the long oriental carpets had the hard colours of modern work rather than the silky dimness of the real thing.