Pure Juliet (27 page)

Only Miss Lipson, who always attended Juliet's readings of her papers, treated them with respect. Miss Lipson, growing thinner and more caustic in speech as the three years passed, liked Juliet, who frequently consulted her; it was not a human liking, but the kind of attraction Miss Lipson felt for stars, or for certain contemporary music.

‘Matter of fact,' Juliet said to this sole supporter, ‘I'm working on a – a longer paper. I've done three pages.
The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion
, it's called.'

‘Indeed,' was Miss Lipson's comment, from the big armchair where she lay back amid clouds of the tobacco smoke she was forbidden by her doctor to inhale. ‘How long do you think it will take you?'

‘Oh – ten years, fifteen, maybe longer,' withdrawing one hand from behind her back, where she had kept it since entering the don's study. ‘I was out walking, see, and I saw this, and I thought:
That's like someone
. And then I thought:
Miss Lipson
. So it's for you.'

She held out a white flower shaped like a star, small and fragile on a noticeably long and slender stem.

Miss Lipson took the frail thing between fingers equally white and frail, and laid it, meditatively, on her desk.

‘Thank you. Would you say it was a coincidence, our being alike?'

‘Not
pure
,' Juliet pronounced, after thought. ‘I say, don't tell anyone about my thesis, will you?'

‘No.'

‘Cheerio,' and Juliet was gone.

Miss Lipson picked up the flower and studied it.

‘A gift from a genius,' she murmured at last. ‘Oh yes.'

Juliet worked.

Slowly, a quarter of an hour at a time: on summer mornings when she absented herself from a lecture which, she had carefully calculated, she could safely cut; in the small hours when the noise of traffic was almost stilled and the bells of Cambridge made their deep declarations on the dim, chill air. She sat at her table, wrapped in the current hooded cape, hair coiled on top of her head out of the way, and slowly, oh so slowly, wrote word by word the sentences that expressed all she had vaguely felt, and had then begun over the years to prove, since childhood.

She wrote the papers for her Finals if not carelessly, with disrespectful speed; the knowledge implied in the answers demanded was not, to her, a laboriously acquired discipline, but something as familiar as her work-table or that same cape. She usually finished her papers an hour before everyone else – and sat, the recipient of resentful and incredulous glances, gazing out of the window at the waving trees.

And when the results were out, and she was top of her year, all but a few undergraduates thought:
She's welcome
. For who would want to be so brilliant, and also so plain, so thin, so uninteresting and such a weirdo?

*

‘Satisfied, love?' Clemence asked Frank at the breakfast table when the results came. Juliet had returned to her house to tend
to an injured rat which she had found in a ditch and carried home, struggling, wrapped in newspaper.

He shook his head. ‘She's done brilliantly, but that's no more than I expected. No . . . I'm disappointed.'

‘Oh dear,' his wife said, with the merest hint of malice. ‘What did you expect?'

‘I don't know, quite. Something . . . astonishing.'

Clemence was again with child but, for once, not engaged in wiping or comforting the last one. The current nurse, Brigitte or Gretl, was doing that, in the nursery. Breakfast-time was reserved for Frank.

‘She's not yet twenty-one,' she said, regretting the malice, and meaning to comfort.

‘I realize that. But her kind has a habit of dying young. To put it sentimentally, they burn themselves out.'

He came over to kiss her. ‘I'll be back – I don't know – eightish. There's a meeting.'

‘I'll try to get her to choose something else than those dreary colours Grandmamma used to call “Rich Tea biscuit” for the presentation or whatever it is. When she gets her degree.'

He laughed. ‘I miss your grandmother,' he said truthfully, and went out.

Mrs Massey had died precisely as she would have wished: asleep in her chair, dressed with her usual suitability and grace, and with both white hands loosely folded on her creaseless lap. This, after some five years of theatres, drives, society, and choice little dinners. Who could wish for more? Except that she could never get Alice, much less that stubborn little Edith (
Clemence was going to have trouble with that child
) to call her Pretty Granny.

Clemence, left alone at the table, folded the
Daily Telegraph. I really must try
, she thought,
to like her
(as her thoughts ranged over her personal riches and compared them with the dry and dusty store of the sallow virgin a hundred yards away).
I've got so much, and she has so little
.

She sat down abruptly, then got quickly up again.
But she can keep her breakfast down
, she thought, hurrying from the room.

‘Wish you'd change your mind,' Juliet had said to Miss Lipson when she looked in to say goodbye on the last day of term. ‘I got me own house, I told you. You could be quiet, and have breakfast in bed.'

‘I can't, thanks all the same.' Miss Lipson looked down at her copy of Descartes, in whose pages the star flower on the long stem was pressed. ‘I never go away. I dislike it.'

‘ . . . and thanks for all the help,' Juliet had added.

‘No need for thanks, I enjoyed it.' She was referring to one or two elucidations which she had given, bearing on the mathematics, in
The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion
. Miss Lipson added suddenly: ‘Thanks, really, Juliet, for asking me to stay and have breakfast in bed.' A faint smile on the pale lips; three years had increased that suggestion of a skull in the delicate head, so that it had become disturbing. ‘As – as a matter of fact, I may have to go away, quite soon . . . and that's boring enough.'

‘Far?' Juliet asked absently, sliding an ivory bracelet, Frank's present, up and down her arm.

‘I don't know exactly. In fact, I don't know at all.' She began to cough, and slowly lit another cigarette. ‘By the way,
if you'd like to do something to please me, will you include a footnote in your thesis – when it's finally ready? Saying I was responsible for suggesting the line of thought that led to . . .' She added a sentence that perhaps twelve people in the world would have understood.

‘Course I will. I'd meant to anyway.'

Miss Lipson looked down at Descartes. ‘It will be my immortality. Goodbye.' She did not look up.

‘Might send you a card,' Juliet said, lingering she did not know why, at the door.

‘Send it soon, then.'

‘Because you're going away?'

A nod of the down-bent head had been the only answer.

Line by line, word by word, Juliet added to
The Law of Coincidence
.

She walked every day, and sometimes on the long summer nights, noting the slow turning of the year from bud to falling leaf through mist and frost to bud again. It was her only recreation.

Sometimes she came in to meals when the children were present, and looked at them with less interest than if they had been small animals. They called her Juliet, and gradually, as the years mounted, the following ritual conversation developed:

‘Mum, can I go to Juliet's house?' (Never ‘Can I go to see Juliet?')

‘You know you can't.'

‘Ohwhynot?'

‘Because she's busy.'

‘What is she busy
for
?'

‘Writing her book.'

‘I want to see Ratty.'

‘You know poor Ratty's
dead
, Hugh. Do find something to do.'

‘That's what I
meant
.'

‘Oh you want to go to his grave? Take Alice.'

‘Don't want to.'

‘And ask Pilar to go with you. I don't want you falling in that ditch.'

Some years after Juliet's return from Cambridge, Pilar had arrived at the Pennecuicks' – exhausted, travel-worn, almost penniless, and in tears after a fruitless visit to Hightower, ‘full of busy people, who made a rudeness to me'.

Filled up with lunch and sympathy, she had unfolded a story of betrothal, sisterly jealousy, and betrayal worthy of Verdi at his Verdiest. Suddenly she had knelt at Clemence's feet and implored to work for her, ‘to care for these little angels', indicating Alice and Hugh, who were making paper boats and ignoring the drama.

Clemence said that they would decide about that when Mr Frank came home, and distracted Pilar from her misfortunes by taking her on a tour of the House, which caused gasps of ingenuous admiration.

When Frank returned, he surprised Clemence by at once granting Pilar's plea, pointing out that all these Brigittes and Françoises, though nice girls, meant constant change for the children. Frank believed in deep roots, even in minor matters.

So she stayed, grew plump and merry and regained her prettiness; was loved by the children (although Edith sometimes observed ominously: ‘Pilar's silly') and hunted the drama that was necessary to her nature where she could. She believed that
Mees Juliet – such a fright now she wears those glasses
! – had a secret lover. (Well, not exactly secret, for had not Pilar seen them together in the café called the Golden Pig?)

*

Arthur Robinson had left the bookshop years ago and, having been firmly fixed in the clutches of his Brenda, was now, in his early thirties, staggering under the usual male contemporary
load of marriage, mortgage, child's education, car, garden, house decorating and inflation, all mixed with vague guilt and a feeling that he never knew what was going to happen next.

One evening he had recognized Juliet, hastily swallowing a cup of the Golden Pig's awful coffee, and had nervously reintroduced himself.

Juliet so seldom thought about people that the few she did think about, including Sandy and Miss Lipson, etched themselves into her memory.

She welcomed Arthur at once, with mild pleasure, and even repeated the elephant joke as she told him that he was the only boy she had ever been out with.

Arthur, on hearing this titbit, uttered a gallant masculine, ‘Go on!'

‘'S'true. I've always been so busy. That kind of thing doesn't interest me.'

‘Is that so?'

Arthur knew a second's wild wish that it did not interest him, but pulled himself back from the abyss.

‘I'm married,' he said quickly – then went on: ‘Have you been living here these last years? Funny I never ran into you. Remember those coincidences?' (A faint glow came to him, as he remembered being nineteen and free.)

‘I was away three years, at college. And I did look out for you at the bookshop but you'd left, they said. I get all my books there, except some you can only get in London.'

‘Oh . . . About coincidence, are they?' smiling.
Funny little piece. So different from Brenda.

‘I'm writing something,' Juliet said abruptly, feeling an unfamiliar wish to confide.

‘Oh – a novel?' Still smiling. ‘How about another coffee?'

‘Thanks, but I must be getting back.' She stubbed out a cigarette. ‘I still live at Leete, only now I've got my own house. No, it isn't a novel—'

‘I've always felt I could write, if I had the time.' The cliché came mechanically from the sensitive lips.

‘No, 't'isn't a novel,' she repeated as if he had never spoken.

Well, they're all the same
, he thought bitterly,
however different they might seem. Never listened.

‘I never read novels,' Juliet went on. ‘It's a – scientific work.'

‘Oh. Above my head, I expect.'

‘It's above everybody's head,' she said calmly and, having risen to go, sat down again. ‘I
would
like another coffee, please. I did know one woman at the Foundation who began to understand what I'm after, but she never answered the postcard I sent. Years ago, that was – I think.'

Ordinary time, like everyday life, was vague to Juliet.

Arthur felt a curious satisfaction in finding Juliet Slater as odd as ever. She then surprised him, as she had always done, by asking: ‘Do you know a book writer called Edmund Spencer? His poems, I mean. He comes to my guardian's house.'

Arthur's expression changed. ‘Yes, I
do
know Edmund Spencer's work. Now
he's
a true poet.' He hesitated. ‘I say, could we meet sometimes, Juliet? We could talk. About books?'

She shook her head, where the load of glittering hair was pulled up into a knob, becoming only to a face fairer than hers, and drew up the hood of her cape.

‘I simply haven't the time.'

‘I said
sometimes
.'

‘I'll see how my work goes.' She was standing, poised for flight. ‘I would like to, but . . . Tell you what – I'll meet you here on the first of every month, same time. But if I don't come, you must understand its work, and not make a fuss.'

She was gone: flitting out of the door and leaving him to pay both bills, and not seeing Pilar who was crouching, alight with excitement, behind one of the Golden Pig's unnecessary pillars.

Pilar managed to catch the same bus as the detected one.

‘You 'ave been shopping?' she began sunnily, as the bus rushed away into the long June dusk.

‘Course not,' Juliet said. ‘You know I hate shopping. Been to a lecture.'

‘Oh – is interesting, the lecture? What is about?'

‘Lawrence of Arabia.'

‘Oh, but that is an old film.'

‘It wasn't the film. It was about how they made it.'

‘Is not so interesting, that.'

‘I wanted to hear about the desert.' Juliet was looking out of the window at hedges and meadows distinct in the water-clear light.