Pure Juliet (36 page)

‘When do we camp? I'm starving,' said Piers.

‘In an hour – we'll go to bed early, then we can start at dawn.'

It seemed a long time before the black tents were up, the fire lit, and the servant, a smiling person, was boiling water, opening tins, and stealing glances at the girls – which Alice with flirtatiousness, Edith with indifference, and Emma with childish friendliness, returned.

Next day, when they had been driving along that familiar road for some hours, and were entering a region of low rock-strewn hills, Juliet suddenly exclaimed, ‘Oh please slow down,' and pointed.

On a rocky ridge high above the nearest dune, the last outcrop of the vanishing heights, an ibex was standing, looking down at them. Its great curved horns glowed amber-white against the blue of the sky. Its large proud innocent eyes surveyed, without fear, the intruders below. For perhaps a moment it stood, then turned and sprang lightly over the rise of the rock, away into the desert.

Frank motioned the driver on.

‘That was Qu'aid saying goodbye,' said Emma at last.

‘And good riddance, judging by his expression,' said Hugh.

‘Kind of scornful, like the camels,' Piers added.

‘Oh no, Piers, not scornful,' said Emma. ‘I don't know what he was saying, but I felt it was something.'

‘“Instead”, perhaps,' her father said.

‘“Instead”?'

‘It's from a poem by Auden. “Clear, unscalable, ahead/Rise the Mountains of Instead.”'

‘That's the way you've brought us up, isn't it, Daddy?' Emma said, in a moment.

‘Tried to, darling.'

If he had a favourite among his horde of children, it was she.

‘Oh,' Alice sighed suddenly. ‘Won't it be lovely to be home.'

‘You ought to apologize to Mark for that,' said Clemence. ‘It's his country.'

‘But I share your feelings, Miss Alice,' Mark said, fervently.

Him and his Miss Alice
! thought Clemence. She turned to Juliet.

‘Decided what you're going to do with your millions yet?'

‘I hadn't thought – I was thinking about Hrothgar, wondering if he's been all right.'

‘So long as no one teases him,' said Edith, who had, from her chosen study of Anglo-Saxon literature, named the interesting bird.

In another hour they were sitting in the shadow of the car and drinking scalding tea. The hills were low blue shades on the horizon; the black, ill-made road ran ahead through featureless flatness. Juliet said suddenly, staring out across its monotony:

‘I'll be glad to be home.'

‘Will you? Will you really, in spite of it all being so beautiful and strange here?' Frank asked, turning to her.

‘Yes.' She nodded. ‘That's why I said “no” when he asked me.'

‘
Asked
you? Who did? What?' exclaimed Edith.

‘The old doctor. Not the one who got uptight about me getting the award. The one what – who – showed me into the chair.'

‘Well I never,' cooed Alice. ‘I saw him rabbiting on, and I hoped he wasn't cursing you.'

‘And he was asking you to stay on at Qu'aid?' Clemence marvelled.

‘Oh yes, Mrs Pennecuick,' Mark Audley put in. ‘I translated for him. “We, the doctors of the University of Qu'aid, invite
you to remain here, within the university, as a doctor, to add to its honour and the richness of the learning—'

‘I bet
that
nearly choked him,' from Edith.

‘It's the formula they use when they invite anyone to join the faculty. About every fifty years or so,' Mark said.

‘Wow!' exclaimed Emma. ‘That's better.'

Juliet had taken out a crumpled piece of paper from an old notecase in her jacket pocket, and was inspecting it in a detached manner.

‘Is that the cheque?' Hugh asked respectfully, and she nodded.

‘I'll buy you all super presents, anyway,' she said at last, and put the cheque away.

But Frank was not satisfied.

‘But why didn't you accept?' He leant forward, looking earnestly into the tired, sallow face from which all trace of youth had faded. ‘I should have thought—'

‘Oh, I couldn't. You're my family, like.'

She looked round on the listening circle of faces and slowly smiled. ‘I couldn't leave you all now – you, and my animals. Oh no. I couldn't stay there. I told him so. Straight.'

And now time began to rush by like a rising wind; with Alice married to a rich, silly, likeable man thrice divorced; with Edith practising feminism and journalism, living with her small daughter in a cottage in Watford; with Emma a nurse; with Hugh finding a spiritual home in the City; with Piers working steadily through Hayleybury and Cambridge towards Medicine; and with Josh, unexpectedly, showing a talent for the piano that blossomed into modest but gratifying success. And Clemence and Frank were so occupied, with pain and joy in their children, with the ever-increasing growth, all over the world, of the AIEG, that their hair whitened and their bodies grew feebler without their taking much notice.

Juliet had settled into an early middle age, going about her daily routine of tending and observing the animals, that were replaced, as the years took them away, by others equally well cared for.

She smoked. She read: unusual books about mysteries at sea, and travel in the few remaining lonely places of the Earth. The oak tree beside her door, the ‘green castle' beneath which old Hrothgar lay buried, was her reception salon, and there, in the months of summer, came grey-haired Edmund to sit opposite her (the little woman in the big cane chair who looked seventy but was in fact not yet fifty) and grumble to her about contemporary poetry; and here a bent, tired Arthur Robinson timidly brought his pert grandchildren. Her books of reference and her table were dusted meticulously, but never used; she worked no more.

Arthur once remarked to Edmund, after one of these visits, that whenever they saw Juliet nowadays she was lying back in that chair. And she had taken to employing a daily help.

‘Burnt out at last,' was the glum answer, and Arthur, being on the whole a cheerful and contented man, changed the subject.

One summer morning of celestial beauty, her dog Young Robert, second successor to the first Robert, was heard barking urgently outside the door of her house. It was nearly breakfast-time; Clemence put aside the newspaper which she was reading in bed while awaiting her tray, got up with some difficulty, and went slowly to the open window.

‘Robert – what is it, boy?'

More anxious barking and whining.

Clemence and Frank got there just as her eyes slowly opened. The yellowish face looked up at them from her narrow bed, and then the familiar ugly little hand crept out from beneath the coverlet towards them, and Frank clasped it, and held it fast in his own. The dog whined.

‘Sorry – so tired. I can't get up,' she whispered. ‘You can't imagine how tired I am . . .'

The whisper died away, and her eyes closed again. But her lips moved, and bending down to the worn, withered face, Frank thought that the words he just caught, as her breathing stopped, were: ‘Love to all.'

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Copyright © The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Stella Gibbons 2016

Lines from ‘Autumn Song' by W.H. Auden,
here
, copyright © 1936 W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd

Stella Gibbons has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Vintage Classics in 2016

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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