Pure Juliet (26 page)

(Here it was; the first argument over Juliet. Mild, indeed, but an argument.)

‘I know, but she might want to blow off steam to someone.'

‘
Juliet
? Blow off
steam
?' Clemence tried to maintain the calm expression.

‘Clem' – he hesitated – ‘I hoped you were getting used to her.'

‘I am used to her. I just don't feel up to going to Cambridge and back. It's very hot. And – I – I don't feel like it.'

‘All right then, dear. I'll see Edmund.'

Victory
, thought his wife, as he swung off.
Hardly any trouble at all – though he did forget to kiss me . . . Perhaps he didn't forget
.

She went slowly through her morning's tasks: the telephoning and the supervising. But by lunchtime this solemn creeping about and pondering every action was swept away by a sudden feeling of hunger. She began to laugh, and finished off the afternoon at her usual pace.

Frank was met that evening by a hug and a savoury smell of cooking, but Clemence did not leave with Juliet on the following morning for Cambridge.

Edmund escorted Juliet as far as the doors of the Foundation.

Surrounded by hastening crowds of what he sourly thought of as young females who would have been better employed at the summer sales, he paused at the soaring edifice of glass and marble.

She was darting up to the entrance as he said: ‘What about lunch?'

‘I'll find somewhere – you enjoy yourself. See you,' and with the nearest she could come to a teasing smile she disappeared through the doors with a crowd of other would-be students. The American ‘r' was loud on the dry, sunny Cambridge air.

‘Good luck,' he called. She did not hear.

He sauntered down the long tree-shaded road.
And now I will enjoy myself. Beer first
.

He had the beer; and spent the rest of the day sitting on a bench in a shabby little public park opening off a backstreet of ancient houses, next to an old man feeding sparrows.

Mercifully, the old man was silent, except for a ‘Good day to you,' when he shuffled away; and Edmund, having lunched off a lump of cheese and two cold sausages, found, as a bonus, that his neighbour had left behind a sizeable piece of cake which, on being tasted, was found to be excellent and served him for dessert.

He became absorbed by this small, untidy world of birds, squirrels, litter and silence; and fell into a half doze, half dream from which he was aroused by the bells of Cambridge chiming four. Hurrying through the streets still crowded with loitering tourists, he wondered, for the first time since that morning, how Juliet had ‘got on'.

He was waiting by the station bookstall and beginning to feel apprehensive about her non-arrival, when she came in sight. With her was a tall girl with red hair.

‘This here's Sandy,' she announced, jerking her head at her companion. ‘Sandy, this is Edmund.'

Sandy said ‘Hi, Edmund' with a glorious smile, and looked away towards an approaching train.

‘She's been helping me,' Juliet said. ‘I was walkin' along, see, saying to meself out loud, “Who the hell wrote
Paradise Lost
?” and she came up behind me.'

‘And I said “Milton, you clot,”' gurgled Sandy.

‘We got talkin'. She goes horse-ridin', hunting after foxes. Cruel, I call it.'

‘Balls,' said Sandy cheerfully. ‘Here's my train. Goodbye, Edmund,' nodding. ‘Au 'voir, Juliet. See you in September.'

‘If I get me place,' Juliet called, skimming along beside the moving train. ‘Thanks for the help.'

‘Of course you will, you dolt.' The beautiful head, which irresistibly suggested to Edmund that of some high-bred racer looking out of a horsebox, was withdrawing, when he was astounded to hear Juliet scream, as the train snatched Sandy away: ‘Wish you wasn't goin', Sandy.'

‘Simply
got
to go to lousy London. Bye-bye,' and she was a quarter of a mile away.

‘Diana of the Uplands,' Edmund muttered.

‘Pardon?'

‘Nothing. It's an Edwardian picture. There's a refreshment bar on our train,' as they boarded the Norwich express which followed quickly on Sandy's train. ‘We'd better make for it. I suppose you had some lunch?'

‘Fergot. Want to know how I got on?' looking back at him over her shoulder as they pushed their way down the crowded corridor. ‘I got me paper somewhere here,' patting herself. ‘Course you won't understand the science questions.'

‘Nor want to, thank you – I say, when you said thanks for the help . . . ?' They were now seated at a plastic table.

‘She just told me about
Paradise Lost
. Good thing she did.' Juliet brought out a crumpled paper from somewhere, and pointed with a finger protruding from a hand wrapped about a cheese roll. ‘We got a Milton question. See? A fucker, isn't it?'

‘I see that you have quickly picked up your girlfriend's vocabulary,' was the dry answer. (Beautiful upper-class girls! How he hated them.)

‘I don't get you. She was all right. I think I done all right in the English, me and her
compared notes
.' The phrase came out a little self-consciously and Edmund suspected that it, also, had been picked up from Sandy.

‘How about another roll?' he asked, and went in search of that and another beer.

Faces like Sandy's haunted him. His life was scattered with such forever elusive images.

What I need
, he thought, blundering laden back to their table,
is some cosy puss to pick me up in her jaws and carry me off for life
.

About three weeks later, on a morning so beautiful that every remark made against the English climate was forgotten, a letter was handed in at the open door where the three – for once, Juliet had joined them – were seated at breakfast.

Frank, after an inspection of the envelope, handed it to her. She tore it open and scanned the typed page. Then she looked up, and announced in a tone of mild satisfaction:

‘I got me place.'

‘And I' – Clemence announced, looking up from an untapped egg – ‘I am going to have a baby.'

Clemence obtained her way in many things, and Frank his, in approximately an equal number. This helped towards making an unusually happy marriage.

Frank, the more imaginative of the pair, sometimes thought that the two large meadows, shut away from the outside world by their ancient thorn hedges, made, literally, a world of their own, in which he, at least, lived an ideal life.

Supported by his own fortune and that left him by his great-aunt, he could avoid most of the pressures of contemporary Western life; and his own temperament, and Clemence's absorption in their children, kept his few worries confined to their family circle and, as far as the larger scale was concerned, to the AIEG, which continued to steadily increase.

His family continued to increase, too; Clemence planned like a general before a battle and Providence apparently planned with her. Fifteen years after their wedding day, Frank sometimes felt himself surrounded by a crowd of shrill-voiced, astoundingly energetic, clear-skinned, silky haired, diminutive strangers: Hugh aged fourteen, Alice aged twelve, Edith aged ten, and Emma and Piers aged respectively eight
and six. He had more than once gently hinted that five was enough, and Clemence, grown becomingly stout, had smiled dreamily.

She had had her way about children. And she had her way about the House, which she had demanded (undoubtedly it had
been a demand) should be built to replace the Cowshed after the birth of Edith.

The House had ten rooms, and was built on two storeys to save everyone's legs; and it took up most of First Meadow, Second Meadow being given over to wheat, vegetables, and accommodation for a cow, a pig and chickens. Juliet's house, once a comfortable two hundred yards distant, was now at the end of Clemence's flower garden. Two of its three sheltering oaks had had to be felled, because of disease, but the largest and most impressive remained, and under it was the family's place for meals out of doors.

Each house also had its own telephone, Clemence having insisted that to share one between two houses – one where there were three small children and another where there was an absent-minded genius – would be unheard-of and dangerous.

Hertfordshire elm, Cornish slate, the best natural products from almost every county in England had been used to build the House; and its low, comfortable lines and solid beauty had so grown upon snobby Wanby that it was boasted of. Local newspapers, when occasionally referring sneeringly to the AIEG, described Frank as ‘the eccentric near-millionaire'. Occasional motoring tourists, slowing down to gape at the House, were disappointed to get a glimpse of nothing more startling than, occasionally, a happy face.

There was only one shadow upon this genial glow.

Juliet.

Fifteen years had sped for her as fast as she herself had skimmed the surrounding lanes while home on vacation from the Margaret Fuller Foundation. Thick spectacles with horn
rims now added to the natural disadvantages of her face; but her strange eyes, thus magnified, showed to advantage.

While on one of his frequent missions around the world attempting to persuade governments into buying into Edible Grass Ltd, Frank would reflect upon his patriarchal life. It was solid, contented and, in spite of the bitter opposition to the AIEG from the meat cartels, increasingly useful. Clem was happy, the children beautiful and promising, and his fortune, in the hands of competent advisers, had, in spite of large expenditure upon promoting Edible Grass, Ltd, increased.

But Juliet had not fulfilled her promise.

While at the Foundation, she had shown signs of doing so, passing top of her year in the Finals and, in addition, being the first graduate to win, with distinction, the prestigious new prize which Mrs Saltounstall had persuaded the governing body into instituting.

Juliet declined the offer of a research fellowship in mathematics at the Foundation with such an absent ungraciousness that it was not repeated; and indeed, her three years there had showed an application to the curriculum so intent as to seem obsessive, and some of her tutors suspected her of being unbalanced: as a member of a board of eminent academics, she might one day collapse or explode.

She had made no friends.

The beautiful and foul-mouthed Sandy had made a bet with several of her set that she would take the Weirdo out to lunch three times a term, and won it. But no embarrassed liking lay hidden behind the bet; Sandy was embarrassed only when trying to express her feeling for horses. She made the bet because the
Weirdo would so obviously rather work than have lunch, and Sandy liked to torment her.

At the end of her lazy, promiscuous, laughing first year, Sandy was sent down rejoicing, and Juliet never saw her again. Her departure left a tiny fracture in Juliet's carapace. She even thought quite often of Sandy, the Honorable Elvira Roxeth.

Juliet's other fellow undergraduates meanwhile ignored her, except for the exchanges of every day. A reputation for extreme cleverness had somehow escaped and had at first surrounded her; but soon they became accustomed to it. It only expressed itself in examination results; and she herself was so odd as soon to earn her nickname.

She led what seemed to her the ideal life she had longed for since her arrival at Hightower.

She had her own little cell, as sparsely furnished as a room could be: the narrow bed, shelves round three walls overflowing with books, the Möbius ring from
Hightower and a key to her door.

There was also the informed company of her tutor when she needed to discuss a difficulty, and, when she must walk, flat country lying under a vast sky. There she could glide along until dusk slowly descended, going ever further into that dreaming mood which, she now knew, was more fruitful than study.

There were also the birds.

To them she gave the scanty stream of love which Frank had coaxed from her.

These visitors to her windowsill were not encouraged at the Foundation. Had they been sparrows, blue tits, wrens, and others of the small kind, sweetly feathered in tan or russet
with an occasional gleam of orange or blue, and endowed with piping voices, they might have been tolerated and their tiny droppings ignored. But the severe angles and cliff-like heights of the great building attracted stout waddling pigeons and voracious gulls with greedy yellow eyes. The Foundation was more than liberal with rules; solemnly did it recognize the myriad idiosyncracies in human nature; faithfully it went forward under the banners of Susan Sontag and Betty Friedan. But seagulls on the windowsills it was not having.

Juliet felt a vague identification with the birds and their need for a refuge far above the dwellings of human beings. She openly saved scraps from her own meals at the college table, scooping them into a paper handkerchief. Emboldened by ‘encouragement', the birds would bang their beaks on Juliet's windowpanes, eyes bolting with greed and incredulous indignation, while she was vaguely aware of their summons but could not bring herself to break her train of thought or, more valuable still, the dreaming.

Afterwards, the dream retreating and the thought concluded, she would open the window, light a cigarette, and scatter their food.
I used to feel like that, as if I'd go mad if I didn't get a bit of peace. Only with them, course, it's food.

The papers she submitted to the Science Group, the only Foundation society which she joined, were seven in the course of three years; and dealt always with one subject: coincidence.

They were written in a plain style which should have made their subject intelligible, had it not been fatally associated, in the minds of the scanty audience, with mystery and marvelling, so that, even if any conclusion had been reached at the end of each short paper, it would have received no credence.

Quite soon, the Weirdo gained a reputation for being obsessional about coincidence. She was pigeon-holed, and mildly pitied, and her papers forgotten as soon as heard.