Pure Juliet (28 page)

‘Oh horrible! All sand.'

‘They had some stones there, on show, that really came from the desert. You could touch them.'

‘Interesting, the stones,' Pilar said again, glassy of eye. She was longing to add: And then you meet a friend, I think?
But Mees Juliet, she was strange, you never knew what she might do
. Instead, she asked if there was ‘anything about the stars?' and Juliet thought she meant the stars in the heavens, and Pilar explained that she meant Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole. And
while this was being disentangled, the bus stopped at Wanby, and there were Clemence and Frank, looking out anxiously from Clemence's big new car.

‘Something terrible is happening!' cried Pilar, leaping from the bus and hurrying across the road. ‘Who is at home with the children?'

Juliet followed, almost as swiftly.

‘They're here,' Clemence said, as two faces peered animatedly from a rug on the back seat. ‘Get in. Children, move over.'

‘It's your father, Juliet,' Frank said in a lowered tone, as they drove away. ‘Your mother telephoned.'

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed; not, he thought, from sorrow, memory or grief. It was a sigh of impatience.

She said flatly, ‘I'd better go up tonight, s'pose. She'll be on her own and scared stiff.'

‘You can just catch the ten o'clock, gets in at eleven-forty.'

She was silent, the arrangement having been made, and he was silent from satisfaction. There had been the impatient sigh, but no hesitation. Truly, she had progressed along the road to humanity. If the promise of genius had flickered and died, at least something else had been achieved.

Presently she asked: ‘How did he go?'

‘Very suddenly, your mother said. It was a stroke.'

‘He'd only been retired eighteen months. Think that caused it? He always did like his job, Dad.'

‘Possibly. One can't tell. Retirement comes as a shock to some people.'

She was silent again.

Pilar, huddled up close to the sleeping children, listened intently, but could detect no sobs, stifled or otherwise.
A heart of stone! No doubt she thinks of the secret lover
.

Just as the car drew up at the gate of Frank's meadows, Juliet said: ‘Frank . . .'

‘What, my dear?' turning to her as Clemence got out to open the gate and Pilar began awakening the sleepers.

‘Do you—? She won't want to come and live with me, will she, do you think?'

‘Most unlikely,' Clemence put in loudly over her shoulder as she swung the gate back. ‘Your mother might try it for a week, but she'd never stand it, bless her.' Clemence got back into the car, where Alice and Hugh were demanding ‘grown-up supper'.

‘She's never been here longer than a day and she always said it was “funny”.
He
never would come. I did
ask
him,' Juliet said, resentfully.

The car was bumping through the long second-growth grass and marguerites; the lights of the House shone through the clear dusk. Juliet looked longingly towards her own home.

‘I come with you, Juliet, and help you,' Pilar said importantly. ‘There will be packing.'

‘Packing! I'm taking pyjamas and me toothbrush – and that's all. I'm not going for six months.' It was snapped.

*

During the first shocked hour Mrs Slater thought of something even worse than going to live with the Pennecuicks: Juliet might come to live with
her
.

She was astonished, bewildered, and very afraid of
that
on the bed in the next room. The bird, sleepy and also bewildered at his cage being left uncovered so late, sulked on his highest perch and did not respond to her coaxing.

But Juliet's arrival, just before midnight, comforted her. There were no kisses or cuddling, beyond a peck on one cheek, but Rose was used to going without kisses, and Juliet's matter-of-fact manner, though rather shocking, was soothing,
More like some doctor or nurse
; and Juliet accompanied her into the bedroom, ‘to see your poor old dad', and stood, looking down at the body. The change that comes to some with death had overtaken him, and the leathery, lined face was almost unrecognizable in its calmness.

‘Poor old Dad,' his daughter repeated at last. ‘He didn't have long to enjoy his retirement.'

Rose sighed heavily. ‘He didn't enjoy it all that much, Julie. Retirement. He missed work. Could you fancy a cup of tea?'

‘I don't mind, Mum.'

Juliet slowly replaced the sheet which the ambulance man, distractedly summoned by Rose from Whittington Hospital Casualty, had decently drawn over the still-clothed body, and followed her mother into the kitchen. How small and gaudy it looked. She thought with relief of the notebook in her suitcase filled with a problem she was working on.

Rose sipped scalding tea with a faint sensation of returning comfort. She looked at Julie, sitting upright and silent and heavily spectacled opposite her like some old owl, and suddenly
knew
that whatever else she might want later when she had – had got used to things a bit – it was not to have Julie (
Well,
she is my daughter, but she's always been more like some stranger
) living with her.

‘I been so frightened, Julie,' she began at last, with a heavy sigh, ‘though Nurse was ever so nice, and Dr Baker too, and Mrs Dickson come in, but she's got to be at the factory by half-past eight, and she must get her rest, and the kids to get off to school . . . But I was
afraid
, see, nowhere to sleep but – but in there with – with—'

Juliet leaned across and stroked the plump freckled hand lying on the table.

‘And – can you stay for a bit, Julie? For – for the funeral? – Oh dear, I can't believe it.'

Juliet's face, already pale with exhaustion, grew almost greenish.

Ten years ago she would have refused to make this journey to London. Now she had come with hardly a second's hesitation. But she foresaw a future in which her peaceful life was disturbed again. Frustration, a return to the old and sullen miseries.

The next instant Juliet's cloud of apprehension lifted, sheered off into nowhere.

‘Only for a few days, Julie,' her mother said, with as much tenderness in her voice as husband and daughter had left to her. ‘I know you're happy where you are, workin' on your book and that, I'll be all right.'

A sudden and shocking conviction, instantly dismissed, came to Rose that she
would
be all right; what with her widow's pension, and George's pension from BR, and the money Frank sent regular from Juliet's account.

‘I'll be a bit lonely,' she added, ‘but I expect I'll get used to it.'

The sentence: You'll have to come and live with me, then, Mum, could not be forced through Juliet's lips. It stuck, like some huge and acidulous growth – and then, for the second time, the threat vanished.

‘And I won't be comin' down there to live with you, neither,' her mother said, pouring more tea, ‘so don't you think it, Julie. I know you'd have me, love—'

Juliet looked at her in surprise, and then they exchanged an odd little smile, as if each understood, and forgave.

‘Fact is,' Mrs Slater said confidentially, ‘it's funny down there. Funny way of living. Everyone's very kind and all that but – all that money and no carpet in the lounge, I can't get over it. Don't feel it's
right
somehow. And the food! I wonder those lovely kids look as well as they do, or how you can stand it. Parsley and that yog-stuff for your supper! No wonder you're thin. No, it would never suit me.'

Juliet smoked and sipped tea in silence, her thoughts straying to her notebook.

‘Julie?'

‘What, Mum?' She roused herself.

‘How about – the sleeping?' Rose had paled.

‘Now, Mum. Pity they couldn't take him away.'

‘Oh Julie. Your dad. Doctor said it couldn't be arranged until tomorrow.'

‘Well – let's see.' Juliet got up and went through to the living-room. ‘There's the sofa – you can have that – and plenty of room in that chair for a little one.' (This coaxed the wateriest flicker of a smile.) ‘I'll sleep there.'

‘It'll be ever so uncomfortable.'

‘Shan't notice. I got something I want to work out.'

At this reappearance, in such an hour, of Juliet's ‘work' – that mysterious activity which had made her unlike other women's daughters, and had driven her into running away, and ‘funniness', and boylessness, and, as the years passed, being an old maid – at the intrusion of this familiar devil into what should have been an occasion for intimacy and crying, Rose felt a spasm of irritation. She had to control an impulse to say: Oh,
you
'll be all right, then. Instead she muttered: ‘Julie, could you go in and get my nightie? Under the pillow. Sounds silly, but I'm that afraid—'

‘Course, Mum.'

They had left the light on. There lay the sheeted shape on the bed. Juliet looked down at the uncouth white bulge, then lifted the pink pillow slowly, in order not to disturb the head, and drew out the nightdress case made in the shape of a smirking puppy. She stood, staring, the case dangling from her hand.

This was the second time that she had seen death. Again, that stillness! Over the whole house; not an ordinary quiet.
It's like when there's snow
, she thought. Then she put down the gaudy case and gently lifted the sheet. For a long moment she looked down at her father. Suddenly, she bent and kissed the brow, corrugated by the working of life. As her lips touched it, something rushed up into her throat, her eyes filled, and she uttered a loud sob.

‘Julie!' Her mother, half undressed, blundered into the room. ‘There, there, love, have your cry-out. Do you good. Doctor said so.'

‘I'm all right, Mum. Upset me for a minute, that's all.'

And she cried no more that night. But Frank would have said that she had taken a long step forward.

Two days passed with their usual mingling of incredulous grief and necessary, shocking arrangements.

Mr Slater was buried in the lower part of Highgate Cemetery, not a hundred yards from where his parents and grandparents lay, for he was a Kentish Town man and had lived there all his life. His grandfather used to tell him of the building of the great arch, spanning the country road down which the herds, driven by shouting drovers, descended to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield.

Afterwards, relations, friends and neighbours crowded into the little living-room to drink tea, eat Mr Kipling cakes, and stare at Juliet, who richly rewarded their curiosity by showing no tears and being so plain. (
Educated, was she? Much good might it do her
. ) Any questioning was irritatingly quenched by the curtness, just short of rudeness, of her manner.

She moved about the crammed little room answering enquiries (how was she these days? and not married yet?) and reminders about having known her when she was a tiny girl – with smile fixed and eyes fastened, so steadily as to appear alarming, upon the enquirer's face.

Rose made up for her daughter's tearlessness by weeping throughout the gathering. This was approved as being the done thing. But Mrs Dickson observed to Mrs Barnett that it wasn't as if they had got on all that well; to which Mrs Barnett replied, ‘Well, you know how it is,' and as they both did, Rose' s tears were satisfactorily explained for them both.

*

When Juliet left at the end of three days, which to her had been barely endurable, her mother went with her.

‘There isn't room for you, Mum, not at my house,' Juliet explained. ‘You know that. But Clemence – Mrs Pennecuick – she's got ever such a nice spare room, and there'll be company for you. You'll like Pilar—'

‘Some foreigner, isn't she?' Rose sniffed.

‘She's Spanish, but she talks good English, and you like children, don't you? A change'll do you good,' she ended, so full of dismay that she could not bring herself to add: and of course, stay on if you want to.

‘It's kind of Mrs Pennecuick, but I'll only stay the weekend, Julie. There's all the clearing up to be done at home' (a gulp) ‘and 'sides, I made up me mind.' This was a sentiment which Rose had not had a chance to express for thirty-three years.

Juliet sat up all night, working, smoking, and fruitfully dreaming, and sometimes looking slowly around her silent house where a rescued starling, almost recovered, dozed in his cage, and some rhododendrons which Clemence had left for her, glowed crimson in the shadows. Outside, in the summer stillness, the thorn thickets were motionless in the young moon's light, and Juliet's tortoise's head was tucked into his richly patterned shell, and she was as happy as a creature living without the usual springs of human happiness can be.

Her mother was seen off to London on the Monday morning by Clemence, Juliet and the smallest children, whose half-term at their nursery school it fortunately chanced to be.

The childen showed a flattering liking for Rose, who had novel and, to them, attractive alternative names for dogs and
horses, and they fell as if starved upon the ice creams she insisted upon buying them.

Clemence, led by Frank, discouraged ice cream, unless made at home. But she was so relieved that Rose did not want to live at Wanby that she permitted the ice creams as a kind of thanks-offering, and smiled on the purchase of five of the most expensive to be had. Rose leant out of the carriage window and waved farewell to two small, smiling faces, licking and waving like automata.

Little dears
, she thought, settling back into her corner seat.
There, I never waved to Julie
. And her thoughts ran guiltily on.
Poor old George
. . .
It don't half seem funny to be
– the word came shockingly into her mind –
free
.