Pure Juliet (5 page)

But he knew.

‘People,' was the muttered answer.

‘People! What's the matter with people?'

‘Always on at you.'

‘Not always. I—' He turned to her, swept by one of the impulses he usually came to regret. ‘I – I won't be, Juliet, I promise you.'

‘You won't get the chance,' she grinned, and set one foot firmly down in a puddle. ‘Damn, now that's gone up me tights.'

This silenced Frank. The immodesty of his past loves had been sensuous, and carefully calculated to stimulate, in a satisfying way. But this – this suggested a fifteen-year-old boy on his way back from the rugger field. And the legs covered by the torn tights were thin and shapeless. Frank, to his surprise, found himself thinking:
Poor little beast.
The very way she splashed through the puddles was like a heedless boy.

Why? She had youth, lovely hair, apparently unshakeable self-confidence and a rich patroness. Why should he think of her as a poor little beast?

He decided to persevere.

‘How did you meet Great-Aunt Addy? Something about squirrels, wasn't it?'

She gave him a cautious sideways look, and now he felt suspicion. Why should she look cautious? But, if she lied to him, he could always check with Great-Aunt. Unless she was lying to Aunt Addy as well. His suspicion increased. He was fond of his aunt, and would see to it that she was neither deceived nor hurt; the latter was the more important.

‘Oh – four years ago, it was,' Juliet now said. ‘She came up to this hospital near where I live, see, 'cos they got some machine there what's good for her illness, o'ny one in England, it is, and one of them at the hospital had her out for a breath of air in one of them wheelchairs – when she was a bit better, that was – and I was comin' home from school through the park. She was feeding the squirrels and I'd got a few nuts, so I stopped too. And we got natterin'. 'Bout the squirrels. That's how it was.'

It was the longest speech she had made for days.

He had no conception how long, nor what an effort it had been for Juliet, who had, very early in life, discovered that talking used up energy that could be more usefully employed; also, that silence was a weapon.

He said: ‘What a coincidence.'

She whirled round on him, stopping full in her swift walk, fixed him with eyes that, for one startling second, seemed to be darting flashes, and snapped loudly: ‘What?'

‘What?' He stared, but before he could speak she said again, louder:

‘What j'oo say? About coincidence?'

Frank was irritated; he was used to softness, teasing, mystery, and remote sweetness in the female friend.

‘I meant that it was an extraordinary coincidence that there should be that
one
hospital in England with that machine, and she should go
there
, and that
you
should be coming home through just
that
park and you should meet . . . And here you are. The whole thing due to a series of coincidences. That's all I meant.'

Juliet's nose was raspberry pink, and what he could see of her legs were spattered with mud, and the sun had gone in, so that her hair looked dull. She stood, staring at him.

‘Don't be cross, Juliet,' he said gently. ‘I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘Who's upset?' She began to walk on. ‘Yes, it is a – coincidence. Funny. I . . . I been thinking how funny it is, these four years.' Her voice died away, and there was a long pause.

‘And then – who wrote first?' he pursued at last.

‘Auntie. She took a fancy to me, like, and asked for me address and we used to meet every day, after that, and she asked me would I send her a line how I was getting on. Goin' in for me O levels, I was.'

‘And you'll be here for a year? Whose idea was that?'

‘You naturally nosy or just nosy with me?'

It was the first hint of girlish sauciness that he had had from her, and he was oddly relieved. He laughed.

‘Both, I think. Go on, tell me.'

‘
She
wanted to adop' me. Course, Mum wants me to get a job and help the others get on, so she wasn't having that. A year, Mum says, I could come for.'

‘And then?'

She shrugged. They had paused at the door in the wall surrounding Hightower.

‘There's the others to think about.'

‘Are they bright, too? How old are they?'

‘Fifteen, John is – Sandra's twelve – I dunno, can't remember exactly, seems like there's ten of 'em sometimes, the row they make. I don't think about them, most of the time. They'll get on.' She pressed the bell savagely.

The door opened after the usual delay, and there, all apron and eyelashes, was Rosario.

‘Good morning,' smiled Frank. ‘Are you Antonio?'

‘No, sir. Rosario. Madame tells us you are coming. Welcome, Mister Frank. Hullo, Juliet.'

‘
She
says you're to say “Miss”. She hears you, you'll get a strip torn off of you,' Juliet said over her shoulder.

‘Why should I say “Mees” to you? Antonio say you come from the oppressed masses.'

It occurred to Juliet, as she sat, weeks later at the large table she had persuaded Miss Pennecuick to instal in her room, that Dad drove what she thought of as ‘his train' every other day through St Alberics station.

But he doesn't know I'm only a couple of miles away, she thought with satisfaction, and drifted off into the meditation from which the far-off sound of a passing diesel had aroused her.

She had not feared that her father would inform the police about his missing daughter. How could you call anyone missing when they phoned their mum once a week? Also, such an action would have meant the interruption of his habits – those habits which he preferred over wife, daughter and home.

These habits consisted of his work: the alternation of days spent driving the train between St Pancras and Standish far up in the Midlands, with stops at every commuter station on the way; his silent fellowship with mates known for twenty years; the homeward journey, after his arrival at the London terminus, by the 214 bus to his own neighbourhood; a pause to pick up the late-night
Evening News
at Mawser's on the corner; the
hour spent in the Duke of Gloucester over a couple of pints; then the short trudge through the dimly lit streets; his key in the door – boots off – the greasy, ample tea, and the paper and television until bedtime.

When he was on the night shift the routine was even more compelling, because there was in it an element with which years of experience had not made quite familiar: darkness; faces less known than those seen by day; fewer people about; long periods, in fact, of complete solitude, especially on the walk back to his home. Pallid light flowed along the damp pavements. There lay the humped shape of his wife in the double bed; he growled a greeting as he got in beside her, and then there were hours of heavy sleep, through daylight and noises in the street outside.

Very strong in George Slater were self-will, grudgingness and obstinacy; but stronger than anything else was his feeling for this pattern that he relished with a hardly conscious enjoyment. He would put up with anything rather than ‘put himself out'. His daughter knew this.

As for Mum, if she had a cup of tea and Mrs Next Door to yak-yak with, she was not going to create, neither.
The telephone calls had already settled into routine questions about Julie's health, and warning repetitions about Dad not wanting to see her unless she got a job like everyone else.

For a year, she was safe.

She stared across into the yellowing elms at the end of the lawn, and the faintest glint of pleasure came into her eyes. Then her gaze passed over the solid oak surface of the table; there was more than enough room for books and yet more books, geometric instruments, pencils, everything. She liked this table better than any object in Hightower; its squareness and
firmness and proportion satisfied some quality in her nature. Every morning after breakfast, she ran up to her room and seated herself at it.

Miss Pennecuick was always at her most frail in the mornings, and ate her slight repast in bed, while Frank had usually been out on his own affairs for an hour when Juliet came into the dining-room. Sarah was usually hovering about; if Juliet had listened, she would have heard mutterings about Mr Frank killing himself eating that rubbishy hay stuff, enough to murder anyone. But she did not listen. She was not interested.

Once seated at her table, she forgot everything but the shapes and theories haunting her brain.

She leant back easily in a comfortable chair, sometimes with a book in her lap, sometimes with one open on the table. But always she remained motionless, her narrow breast hardly seeming to lift and fall, and her eyes fixed upon the pages she was studying.

The hours between breakfast and twelve passed like a quarter. They would have been tantalisingly short had she not already been at her table since five each morning, her face splashed with cold water to awaken her thoroughly from light sleep, her hair drawn up into a knot to keep it out of her eyes.

Those were mornings of a hazy light, silence and mist that, to another kind of imagination, would have seemed sad or lonely. Juliet did not notice the stillness until the first birds broke it with their thin greeting. Then she would lift her head, and listen, and a faint look of pleasure would come into eyes reddened by lack of sleep.

Frank was not often in to lunch, but when he was, he observed Juliet closely.

She gobbled. But he did not put this down to what he thought of as working-class habits, nor yet to appreciation of better food than she was accustomed to, nor to simple greed.

Juliet gobbled partly because she was not interested in eating, and partly because, like himself, she was eager to get out of the dark overheated house into the leafy way that led to Leete, and thence to even narrower footpaths and silent meadows.

He had spent his morning inspecting, measuring, talking, calculating, bargaining. How had she spent hers, in her room looking out over the great elms?

And what did she think about, while she ‘fleeted' (
like swift Camilla
) over frosty ruts, her hair bundled under a badly knitted woollen cap (Frank was a severe critic of handicrafts; all his own skills of that kind were admirable) and her hands in the pockets of a tough, elegant cape chosen and bought for her by Great-Aunt Addy? Its sandy hue, Juliet's own choice, was unfortunate with her colouring (
Ah, the misty aquamarine and lilac tints favoured by Ottolie – and, for that matter, by Deirdre and Fiona
. . .)

What did she think about? Nothing, he was dismally certain, that a mermaid or a fairy might.

No: of Juliet the song for the Edwardian musical comedy
Our Miss Gibbs
was true – ‘
Mary is a girl and not a fairy
' – and he was beginning to feel that she was not even a girl.

He could not cease, in spite of the many activities crowding his days, from studying her.

‘Dearie, must you eat so fast? Auntie doesn't like to see her girlie gobbling away like a little piggy-wiggy. It isn't pretty.'

*

Rosario threatened to become a nuisance.

Juliet had known Antonio, eldest of the five servants, since her first visit there some four years ago, and had seen the gradual infiltration into the household of his younger siblings: Maria, Pilar, Rosa and, finally, Rosario.

Quick-witted, content under the benevolent rule of their mistress, tactful with the privileged Sarah, and fully appreciating the shops, excursions, cinemas, discos and pick-ups to be had in nearby St Alberics, none of the family wanted to leave their English place. Antonio's diplomatic skills were much admired, and they took his advice – as the eldest, the knowing one, who had whisked them out of a poor, dirty, hungry life in a small Spanish town, into all this.

All five had a childlike enjoyment in mere living: they groaned, they wept. An hour of sunlight produced a mental state of playing the guitar with a rose over one ear.

Their English equivalents would have been bored by the isolation, and contemptuous of St Alberics imitation of London pleasures, envious of Sarah, and spitefully inquisitive about Juliet. The Spaniards laughed over every small frustration, and Antonio added to the gaiety by encouraging the bringing into the house of bottles of wine by sheepish admirers of either sex, occasionally administering a rebuke should spirits be introduced.

Their widowed mother cheerfully and boastfully wasted the generous share of their wages sent to her every week back in Spain.

But Rosario . . .
He is not quite broken in, that one
, thought his elder brother, having seen him give a light pull, in passing, at Juliet's hair.
That is a very peculiar girl. Her voice is of the backstreets, it isn't like the Senora's. Her clothes are torn. She cares nothing for boys, only for books. It is not natural. Rosario must leave her alone, because the Senora dotes upon her. We do not want troubles
.

He administered a short lecture to his brother. ‘We are very well placed here. Good money, no hard work, plenty of free time, a little town near with girls and wine shops. Why, we live like Onassis—'

‘I like to pull her hair. She hates me – me! You know how all the girls were crazy for me at home.'

‘So you say, and I know you've been very successful, little one. But this is different. She is not pretty—'

‘Holy Maria, no! No bosom at all. I have more, myself.'

‘Then leave her alone. The next time I catch you pulling her hair, I hit you really hard.'

Rosario looked sulky and said nothing.

But it was not Antonio who hit him really hard.

Juliet was sitting on her tuffet one day, just before the lunch hour, and Rosario, gliding around the table adding finishing touches, squatted down when he came up to her, stooped his dark curls so that they almost brushed her cheek, and whispered, ‘Silver hair. I pull it really hard –
feel
, Juliet!'