Pure Juliet (31 page)

‘Juliet!' burst out Alice, sitting back on her heels, head held high up on her swan's neck, eyes dancing. ‘You're
going
, aren't you? Oh,
say
you are, sweet Juliet, dear Juliet! And can I come too, as your lady-in-waiting? Ma, you'll come, won't you?' to Clemence.

‘If I'm asked, Alice. It's Juliet's party, you know,' Clemence said gently.

‘Oh – the candles!' Emma exclaimed, and everyone turned to stare at the cake, except Frank, who was looking alternately at the journal he held open in his hands, and at Juliet.

Josh began to move towards the candles until Nanny, with firm clasp of one naked leg, brought him to a halt.

‘No, Josh. Juliet must blow. It's her birthday. Quick, Juliet – that one's nearly out!' cried Edith.

Juliet leant across the cloth, pursed the lips from which youthful fullness had gone for ever, drew a breath into her thin chest, and blew.

It was not successful; five candles remained burning.

With the aid of Juliet's encouraging hand, Josh launched a breathy gasp. Nothing would have happened had not a skilfully directed gust from behind extinguished the remaining candles.

‘Bravo!' ‘Clever Josh!' everyone dutifully cried, and Emma murmured, ‘Clever Nanny.'

‘Practise, dear, just practise.' But Nanny looked gratified.

‘Well, what will you do with your cool hundred thou?' Hugh asked, when everyone was lying back, replete with tea and excitement.

Juliet shrugged. The familiar, indifferent shrug. ‘Don't know. S'pose they'll tell me all that when I get there.'

‘You're going, then?' said Frank.

‘Oh yes,' decidedly. ‘Always did want to see the desert.' And she smiled at him, even with mischief.

‘And I can come too?' from Alice once more, ignoring Hugh's sharp nudge.

‘I want you all to come,' said Juliet, looking round the circle of sun-warmed, familiar faces. ‘Frank and Clem and the girls and – oh – Piers'll be at school.'

‘It'll be his half-term,' his mother said calmly. ‘I just worked it out.'

‘That's good, Piers then, and Nanny, you'll come? To look after old Josh?'

‘Well, thank you, Juliet, I've always had a longing to see the mysterious East.'

‘And Qu'aid is about the last chance you will have to see it,' Edmund put in, speaking with an anger and jealousy firmly controlled, because he knew that Maida was never going to allow him to go to Qu'aid with the Pennecuicks. That was why, with unusual tact, Juliet had not mentioned him. ‘They're not technologized at all, took a referendum under the new young Emir five years ago, and came out ninety-three per cent for staying as they were.'

‘I bet the other seven per cent were women,' Edith cried.

‘I hope not,' Edmund answered amiably. ‘He had them hanged.'

‘It sounds the most charming place,' Hugh said, with something of Alice's drawl.

‘And I'd like old Artie to come,' Juliet went on, ‘but we'll have to see about that.'

‘That' was generally known to be Mrs Arthur, who shared Maida's implacable jealousy and suspicion of their men's friendships with ‘those people'.

‘It'll be an
entourage
,' exulted Alice, doing a half roll sideways in her flowing skirts: her affectation of general ignorance did not include French, which she considered elegant.

Juliet sank the knife into the rich round cake, and for a moment, while it was tasted and criticized, the Avicenna Award was forgotten. Then Frank said suddenly: ‘You do all know what the award's given for, don't you?'

Murmurs of ignorance, from mouths full of cake.

‘“For an outstanding contribution to the sum of human knowledge” –
that's
what it's given for. My God – Juliet – I'm – I'm so proud of you I could burst.' He leant over and gently pressed her hand. ‘And something else –
Thought
, it says here, is dedicated “To the glory of Allah the All-Powerful, the All-Wise, the All-Merciful”. So you see, your coincidences arrived at an
unpredictable destination. Tell me – when you first began to see – what you were after – did you ever think of that?'

‘Never had the faintest,' was the answer.

This was in early September. There was much to be done before the fifteenth of November.

First, there were the reporters. It was a story that could be described as ‘a lulu': hundred thousand pound prize as prestigious as the Nobel, remote desert city, mysterious young Emir, unintelligible new Law, a female discoverer of working-class origin. The press hardly knew where to start.

Frank, always aware of the value of publicity to the AIEG, kept an open drinks table and a loquacious welcome for the hordes, while seeing to it that Juliet gave a fifteen-minute press conference and thus did not become exhausted, during the exact seven days that the story lasted.

In a week it was off the front pages and onto the back; Juliet's abrupt manner and plainness had undoubtedly a damping effect, and her one appearance on television successfully revived the general public opinion that all scientists were dotty.

There was some patting on the back from some quarters for Qu'aid, because it had spent part of its oil revenues on the encouragement of science (‘as if it needed encouraging,' groaned Edmund) instead of megalomanic building and Rolls-Royces; and then the family at the House was left more or less in peace to prepare for its journey; though almost every day someone tapped at Juliet's door flourishing a superior magazine and announcing, ‘Juliet, here's a bit about you – want to see it?'

She would rouse herself slowly from the long chair where she had been lying, and come to the door. But her answer was always the same: ‘No thanks. What's all the fuss about?'

But on one of these occasions, Emma replied, ‘They rang up; they want to interview you. What shall I tell them?'

Juliet glanced at the article – on the women's page of the
Custodian
– which took umbrage at someone saying that her thesis ‘was of interest, unlike most scientific theories, to the woman in the street'.

‘Oh hell – I don't know – yes, I s'pose so, Emma.'

The dedicated youthful feminist who arrived the next day (Edith having been sent in ignorance, by her mother, on an errand to St Alberics) was answered by Juliet mostly in monosyllables, and when, almost in despair, the reporter demanded: ‘Miss Slater, I want your honest opinion of the Women's Movement, as it stands today,' and received the reply, ‘I never thought about it. What is it?' she left in cold annoyance, believing that she was being mocked. The interview never appeared.

Juliet continued to decline: in energy, in speech, in her interests.

‘I told you, Frank. It's what the Victorians called “a general break-up of the constitution”,' Edmund said.

‘But she's not forty! She's a genius, and established as one – and she's at the beginning of her career! What's the
matter
with her?'

Edmund only said: ‘Well, Qu'aid may buck her up – I've heard the desert air's marvellous,' as a shadow of longing passed over his face, and Frank, cursing all loving, home-making, devoted and possessive women, said no more.

But early in November the story was on the front pages again: Q
U'AID
E
LITE
O
PPOSES
J
ULIET'S
A
WARD
, bellowed the
Daily People
, and the women's page of the
Custodian
, hardly able to believe its luck, rushed into the new angle with every feminist hackle on end. The free drinks and interviewing started all over again.

The heavier dailies explained in learned detail that the organizer of the opposition to Juliet was Khalid Lebardi, the powerful ninety-year-old principal of the university, who had been shocked to the recesses of his soul by the prize being bestowed upon a woman, and was even more troubled by the proposed award of the doctorate.

‘I cannot die in peace while such an act is proposed,' he was reported to have said, and Alice Pennecuick said, ‘How sweet,' and Edith Pennecuick, going scarlet, said, ‘It's – it's unbelievable.'

But the ancient was held in such veneration by the young Emir, whose pupil he had been, and by his fellow members of the council, and indeed by the entire 900,000 who made up the population of the desert city, that for a few days it seemed possible that award and doctorate might be refused to Miss Slater. There was much regret, and feminist outrage, in the West.

Then the Emir, who fulfilled almost completely Plato's ideal of the Philosopher King, undertook to talk with his former tutor.

In the vast, cool room of the palace, where shadows tinted with rose fell from the steep, sun-hardened walls outside, the two – the ancient near his death and the young ruler – sat cross-legged throughout the long, silent day, talking.

The fading voice and the ringing one, the latter respectfully softened, went to and fro as if in some game of verbal tennis, the brief silences between their words filled by the silvery drippling of a little fountain, falling into a basin made from Qu'aid's rose-grey stone. The air was cool, and scented by spiced and dried rose leaves.

The Emir began with a strong advantage over one whom he would not think of as an adversary: a definite idea, to be inserted into the old man's mind. Khalid Lebardi also had an idea, but one so drenched in tradition and prejudice that it resembed an emotion. The idea upheld by the Emir was pure, uncoloured fact.

The Emir, who loved and impatiently venerated his former tutor, studied the face opposite him and remembered that, though in the real world of science there were envy and prejudice, the clash of theories, and manoeuvring for fame, in the pure world of ideas where Plato and Moore and Wittgenstein had lived their ideal lives, there was only truth.

And this was the Emir's truth: in that ideal world, as in the Christian heaven, was neither male nor female. The person they were discussing was the discoverer of the Law of Coincidence, given into her mind by Allah the All-Great and All-Merciful. She was the bestower, under His power, of a new Law, ‘an outstanding contribution to human knowledge'.

The day waxed slowly, from the strengthening of the sun in early morning to the terrible fire of noon when all Qu'aid slept.

Servants came to the two when they awoke, with trays of iced water and peaches freshly peeled, and bathed the firm young hands, and the feeble, knotted old ones, with rosewater.

Then they resumed their talk, while the three journalists from the West who had been permitted to enter the city to learn the decision, yawned and drank iced tea and played poker in the one hotel, and tried not to notice the pale expanse of endlessness looking in, past them and their concerns, through the windows.

When the shadows began to stretch, and violet to flow upwards into the vast sky, Khalid Lebardi was very tired. Suddenly, the philosopher and sage deserted his spirit, and, even as the muezzin pealed out from the mosques and master and pupil prepared to kneel on the mats brought by attendants, he said in the peevish voice of a child:

‘The words have convinced me, my son. Let the woman have it. Her Law is a Law, and true. Praise be to Allah, who hath in His wisdom bestowed the dim light of an intelligence even upon the worm of the earth, so that it knoweth at which end more easily to grasp the leaf. If worms have intelligence, shall not women? Yes, yes, let her have it – award and money and doctorate, all.'

‘Shall I inform the Western journalists, my lord?' enquired Mark Audley, the Emir's secretary and aide, who had been hovering in the vicinity throughout the day-long argument, and now approached.

‘Let the dogs wait,' said the Emir.

Clemence was wondering how to endure the next two days, which would bring them, they trusted but hardly dared to hope, to the city of Qu'aid.

Even the knowledge that Josh was safe in the care of Nanny and her young man, who, most fortunately, had ten days' leave at this time and was to stay at the House, could not banish the monotony of the desert stretching away on every side into hazy distance.
A likeable young man
, Clemence reflected.
Soon sat on Nanny's yearning for the mysterious East by reminding her that he had been stationed out there for three years, and that it was all dust, smells and flies
.

The huge open-top Rolls-Royce limousine which had been awaiting them at the airport must (Hugh and Frank decided) be at least twenty-five years old, and the road was so rutted and stony that it barely qualified as a road.

At least the cranking wheels and derricks, and the noisy lorries and squalid booths of the oilfield near the airport were left behind; and at the wheel sat a Qu'aidan, silent and mysterious enough, and wrapped from corded brow to sandalled feet in speckless white.

It was of course Edith who observed that the robes were darned and patched. And the Rolls, though gleaming as to its metal and arrogantly leaping mudguards, was undeniably shaky in its responses. This was disconcerting: discomfort they had anticipated, but not cheese-paring.

‘Why doesn't the Emir buy a new one? He's got millions.'

‘(Piers,
will
you keep your voice down.) I don't know. I expect he can't be bothered, and in this heat I'm not surprised.'

‘I approve,' Frank said. ‘It's just what I should do if I were an oil millionaire. Everything top quality and old and beautifully kept. Look at that robe,' in a whisper. ‘It's the finest long-staple cotton – probably belonged to his grandfather.'

When they had been gasping and mopping for hours, too uncomfortable to notice the meagre green blurs that were acacias, the only colour in the universal blinding shimmer, the driver stopped in the middle of a landscape defined only by a range of remote, pale mountains.