Pure Juliet (30 page)

‘No, Josh. Just in that one, in the middle. People don't want to drink flowers.'

‘Bees do. Drink them.'

‘Here, give them to me . . .'

The languid afternoon stole on, as if Time were walking on tiptoe. Juliet had gone into her house and her door was shut. At a quarter to five, when the fire was burning well and the big brass kettle beginning to sing, Frank's bicycle drew up at the outer gate. He paused, to investigate the letterbox, then came on, with one letter and a parcel.

He was greeted with waves and faint cries.

‘Do buck up, Dad, we're gasping.'

‘We're
melting
.'

‘Daddy, Daddy, the mud has all gone away and I put buttercups in the mugs.'

‘Hurry up and wash, darling,' from Clemence, lying in a garden chair wearing the palest of lilac dresses printed with grey flowers, chosen for her by Alice.

‘I'll just give this to Juliet, and be with you,' indicating letter and parcel in the basket.

‘She's in her house.'

‘Seems off-colour, I thought,' Edmund muttered as Frank came up. ‘I'll take that,' putting a hand on the bicycle.

‘She has been for weeks – I was wondering if she oughtn't to see someone.'

‘Wouldn't be any use. The spring's gone and she's running down. You'll have to face it.'

‘What do you mean?' said Frank, turning at Juliet's door with letter and parcel in his hands.

Edmund shrugged. ‘Exactly what I say. Most people have families, or ambitions, or sheer necessity, or a good constitution to keep them alive. She hadn't anything but that extraordinary obsession of hers, and now she's finished it – worked it out of herself – and she's . . . collapsed. As I said. The spring has run down, and she's going with it.'

‘Oh nonsense. It's the heat.'

Frank glanced irritably at the things in his hands. ‘Where's this from – Qu'aid? That's that extraordinary place in the desert. We wrote to them about irrigation and got something back that might have been written in the eleventh century – and the parcel's from there, too.'

‘Perhaps Arthur's on a package trip and sent her a little prezzy,' said Alice, who had come floating up to peep.

Her father absently patted her shoulder, and went up to Juliet's door and rapped on the highly unsuitable pixie knocker given to her by her mother.

‘Juliet! Post for you, and tea's ready.'

There followed that pause, which he associated with summoning Juliet from behind a shut door ever since he had known her.

Afterwards, he knew that those pauses would never seem the same in memory again.

The door slowly opened. She stood there, hair newly dragged into its usual knot, wearing one of what the girls called her ‘sandies', but this one had a wide, delicate lace collar and her arms were bare.

‘Hullo – I'm just ready.' Then she saw the parcel and letter and absolutely snatched them from him, turned and shut the door in his face.

‘Mannerless Maggie,' said Alice.

Juliet stood in the hush and tempered heat and silence of her house, staring at the envelope. She was as solitary as the city of Qu'aid, in the desert where it had stood for a thousand years. She had never felt fear in her life, but she felt it now: she feared the contents of the envelope, with its row of exotic stamps, printed with silver crescents and graceful green Arabic symbols.

She shivered in the heat and said, aloud, in the flat tones that had not altered much over the years:

‘I haven't got it.'

Then, slowly, she turned and took from her table a paper knife, and again slowly, with the deftness that marked all her minor actions, slit the envelope and unfolded the contents.

In her hands were two sheets of thick, creamy paper, so rich in texture as to suggest parchment, one covered in delicate red and green loops, whirls and curves, the other with ordinary typing, and in English. Hardly noting the lovely shield that headed both sheets, she rushed at the typed one:

Juliet did not move. She reread the letter three times. There was no sound but the frenzied beating of a bumble bee against the slats of the venetian blinds.

There then came to her an emotion totally unfamiliar: gratitude. To Frank, and his quarter-century watch over her; to Aunt Addy whose death-bed words she had almost forgotten, whose legacy had bestowed upon her solitude and silence, and freedom to work steadily and in patience; to her mother, who had neither wanted to live with her nor insisted upon her going ‘home'; to all the things which made her home: the birds and the animals, and even her great table and the bamboo and rattan chairs. All these things, living or inanimate, seemed to her in this unfamiliar exultant mood to have helped the seed within her to grow, at last, over long years, into a mighty, solidly rooted tree.

A sound, faint and regular, invaded the confused storm of feeling, and she slowly turned her head to look at the clock. She had been standing, the letter in her hand, for nearly fifteen minutes. At the same moment, there came a roar from outside: ‘Josh wants tea!' followed by a hesitant rapping, and Clemence's voice: ‘Juliet, are you all right?'

Juliet went slowly across the room and as slowly opened the door.

Josh instantly threw a handful of grass at her, again bellowing his desire for tea.

Clemence, after one look, put a hand on her bare arm. ‘Juliet. What is it?' She had never seen Juliet's expression like this – broken up, moved, the eyes behind the enlarging lenses blazing.

Juliet silently handed her the letter, keeping the parcel in one hand, and Clemence's eyes ran down the typed sheet until her lightning perusal ended in a gasp: ‘Juliet! How super! How absolutely marvellous for you – I'm
so glad
– hundreds and hundreds of congratulations . . . Oh, where's Frank. We
must
tell him.'

Then they were rushing towards the group gathered around fire and kettle, all staring in some alarm.

Frank got up and hurried towards Clem.

Josh, still demanding tea, stooped and reinforced himself with more grass. Edmund, Alice, Edith, Emma and Hugh began to raise themselves from the ground. Nanny, hearing the noise, descended from the house upon Josh with a piece of bread and jam.

Through the lengthening sunbeams of earliest evening they came towards Juliet: the young faces alight with curiosity, the older ones anxious.

Clemence thrust the letter into Frank's outstretched hand.

He read it apparently with one glance, then lifted his head and looked at Juliet's transformed face. He was too moved to speak. She had kept her gaze upon his, and now moved forward and clumsily put her arms about him and held him for a moment.

‘Thanks for everything, all you done . . .' Her voice died and her arms dropped at her sides and she stood, staring, eyes bright behind the great lenses of her spectacles.

‘For heaven's
sake
,' screamed Alice. ‘What IS it?' and she darted at the letter, while the rest crowded over her shoulder, reading and muttering.

‘Great God,' Edmund said mildly at last. ‘Well,
what
a birthday present, eh? Hearty congratulations, Juliet.'

‘I can't take it in – it's
too
wonderful – I'm
so glad
, Juliet,' Clemence babbled, and almost added,
So glad for Frank after years of disappointment
.

Juliet turned quickly and, darting at her, bestowed a smacking kiss. Then withdrew rapidly, like a retreating animal. ‘And – and thank you, too, Clemence. Choosing me clothes and all that . . .'

‘I want
more
cake.'

‘Ssh, ssh, Josh – you shall have it. Pipe down,' soothed Nanny. ‘Well, Juliet, ever so many congratulations, I'm sure. Will you be on television, do you think?'

‘Oh God,' muttered Edmund, hastening up with the replenished kettle. ‘Of course there will be interviews and all the other horrors.'

‘Josh light cangles.'

‘No he won't, he isn't old enough.' Nanny sat him down firmly at the edge of the display of pretty foods. ‘But he may blow one out, if he asks Juliet nicely. It's her birthday, you know.'

‘Josh's birthday.'

‘No it isn't, Josh. I've told you, yours is—'

The argument was lost in the clamour of excited voices as they gathered around the cloth. Long greenish shadows from the great oak fell across the party.

Edmund instinctively responded to the idyllic circumstances, but even so he knew that he himself would have welcomed ‘interviews and all the other horrors', while Hugh was thinking
Cripes! A hundred thousand. What I couldn't do with that – though of course, she's got a lot already, and after tax . . . Might marry her
. . .
no.
On second thoughts. No.
And his long, thin, clever face smiled. His strong interest in the making of money, which was not encouraged in the family, sometimes took refuge in fantasy.

And Nanny's thoughts were pitying, rather than admiring.
Who wouldn't rather be twenty-four, and engaged, than win some old prize and be a dried-up old maid?

Everyone was drinking tea and talking at once.

‘Where
is
this place? I've never heard of it.'

‘Oh miles from anywhere. Bang in the middle of the desert. The proper desert, not all touristy,' from Edith, with her mouth full. ‘What's the UAR?'

‘Where did it get a hundred thousand pounds from, if it's in the middle of a desert?' asked Clemence.

‘Oil, of course—' began Hugh.

‘Be quiet, everybody, please.' Frank turned to Juliet, who was sipping tea with eyes fixed on the distance. ‘Juliet . . . won't you please – tell us about it?'

She turned away from the sunlit meadow.

‘Not much to tell, really,' she said, in her usual flat tones. ‘You know I've been working all this time on my thesis. And last year I thought, it's really finished, I can't do anything more to it. But I gave it a year . . . to kind of get . . . ripe . . . if you know what I mean. Errors to come up to the surface . . . like when Clemence makes soup. And meantime, I came across this book.'

She paused to light a cigarette. The eight faces around the picnic cloth were fixed in the same expression of eager attention, with the exception of Josh, who was drawing pictures on his plate in jam.

‘Saw a copy when I was up at that library in London, so I wrote in and ordered it. Last year about this time, it was—'

‘Was that the parcel all over gorgeous green squiggles and stamps? I wondered when it came,' said Alice.

‘That'd be it. Then I got to thinking – it's
proved
. And I got wanting someone to
read
it and
see
it' – her voice rose – ‘so I sent it to this here Arab journal.'

‘What?' Clemence exclaimed before she could check herself.

‘I sent it to this book I got – it's a journal, really, a scientific journal that the Arabs publish. It's printed in that place – Qu'aid.'

‘Ah – I begin to see. You knew about the journal before you decided to send your thesis there.'

‘That's it.' She turned gratefully to Edmund. ‘I kept it by me when I'd read it. Liked the smell of it, as a matter of fact.' A thin small laugh. ‘It goes all over the world, so I thought that it'd be the best place. See, I sent two papers there before, not about coincidence, and they printed them.' A pause. ‘I didn't show you all,' apologetically, ‘because I wanted – when I did show you something – really true and big. And here' – she held up the parcel which she had kept jealously at her side – ‘it is.'

‘You mean your thesis is actually there, printed in . . . Is that a copy of the journal with your thing printed in it?' Frank demanded.

She nodded. ‘Hope so, anyway. They sometimes give a whole number to one paper. That's why I sent it there.'

‘Oh do let's see!' cried everybody, and Juliet slowly unwrapped the thick paper, tied with a heavy silvery-gold string.

A volume bound in heavy green material was revealed, neither hardback nor paper. Printed, in English, in a beautiful silver type was the word
Thought
.

Below the single, impressive word was a note in the same type, but smaller: ‘This number of
Thought
is given entirely to
The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion
, by Juliet Slater of Great Britain.' A silver crescent – slender, graceful, yet conveying a remorseless hardness and strength – finished the square, ornate cover.

‘What oil will do,' muttered Hugh. ‘Shouldn't like to say how much
that
cost to produce.' He took it from his father's hands – almost reverently. It represented such limitless and casual wealth. ‘How often does it come out, Juliet?'

‘Only once a year. S'pose they can't get enough thought to make up any more copies,' and everybody laughed.

‘Arabic – I suppose that's Arabic? – on one page, English on the other,' murmured Emma, as the journal went round the circle. ‘How pretty it is . . .'