‘You know you can’t.’
‘Ohwhynot?’
‘Because she’s busy.’
‘What is she busy for?’
‘Writing her book.’
‘I want to see Ratty.’
‘You know poor Ratty’s dead, Hugh. Do find something to do.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Oh you want to go to his grave? Take Alice.’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘And ask Pilar to go with you. I don’t want you falling in that ditch.’
Some years after Juliet’s return from Cambridge, Pilar had arrived at the Pennecuicks’ – exhausted, travel-worn, almost penniless, and in tears after a fruitless visit to Hightower, ‘full of busy people, who made a rudeness to me’.
Filled up with lunch and sympathy, she had unfolded a story of betrothal, sisterly jealousy, and betrayal worthy of Verdi at his Verdiest. Suddenly she had knelt at Clemence’s feet and implored to work for her, ‘to care for these little angels’, indicating Alice and Hugh, who were making paper boats and ignoring the drama.
Clemence said that they would decide about that when Mr Frank came home, and distracted Pilar from her misfortunes by taking her on a tour of the House, which caused gasps of ingenuous admiration.
When Frank returned, he surprised Clemence by at once granting Pilar’s plea, pointing out that all these Brigittes and Françoises, though nice girls, meant constant change for the children. Frank believed in deep roots, even in minor matters.
So she stayed, grew plump and merry and regained her prettiness; was loved by the children (although Edith sometimes observed ominously: ‘Pilar’s silly’) and hunted the drama that was necessary to her nature where she could. She believed that Mees Juliet – such a fright now she wears those glasses! – had a secret lover. (Well, not exactly secret, for had not Pilar seen them together in the café called the Golden Pig?)
*
Arthur Robinson had left the bookshop years ago and, having been firmly fixed in the clutches of his Brenda, was now, in his early thirties, staggering under the usual male contemporary load of marriage, mortgage, child’s education, car, garden, house decorating and inflation, all mixed with vague guilt and a feeling that he never knew what was going to happen next.
One evening he had recognized Juliet, hastily swallowing a cup of the Golden Pig’s awful coffee, and had nervously reintroduced himself.
Juliet so seldom thought about people that the few she did think about, including Sandy and Miss Lipson, etched themselves into her memory.
She welcomed Arthur at once, with mild pleasure, and even repeated the elephant joke as she told him that he was the only boy she had ever been out with.
Arthur, on hearing this titbit, uttered a gallant masculine, ‘Go on!’
‘’S’true. I’ve always been so busy. That kind of thing doesn’t interest me.’
‘Is that so?’
Arthur knew a second’s wild wish that it did not interest him, but pulled himself back from the abyss.
‘I’m married,’ he said quickly – then went on: ‘Have you been living here these last years? Funny I never ran into you. Remember those coincidences?’ (A faint glow came to him, as he remembered being nineteen and free.)
‘I was away three years, at college. And I did look out for you at the bookshop but you’d left, they said. I get all my books there, except some you can only get in London.’
‘Oh . . . About coincidence, are they?’ smiling. Funny little piece. So different from Brenda.
‘I’m writing something,’ Juliet said abruptly, feeling an unfamiliar wish to confide.
‘Oh – a novel?’ Still smiling. ‘How about another coffee?’
‘Thanks, but I must be getting back.’ She stubbed out a cigarette. ‘I still live at Leete, only now I’ve got my own house. No, it isn’t a novel—’
‘I’ve always felt I could write, if I had the time.’ The cliché came mechanically from the sensitive lips.
‘No, ’t’isn’t a novel,’ she repeated as if he had never spoken.
Well, they’re all the same, he thought bitterly, however different they might seem. Never listened.
‘I never read novels,’ Juliet went on. ‘It’s a – scientific work.’
‘Oh. Above my head, I expect.’
‘It’s above everybody’s head,’ she said calmly and, having risen to go, sat down again. ‘I would like another coffee, please. I did know one woman at the Foundation who began to understand what I’m after, but she never answered the postcard I sent. Years ago, that was – I think.’
Ordinary time, like everyday life, was vague to Juliet.
Arthur felt a curious satisfaction in finding Juliet Slater as odd as ever. She then surprised him, as she had always done, by asking: ‘Do you know a book writer called Edmund Spencer? His poems, I mean. He comes to my guardian’s house.’
Arthur’s expression changed. ‘Yes, I do know Edmund Spencer’s work. Now he’s a true poet.’ He hesitated. ‘I say, could we meet sometimes, Juliet? We could talk. About books?’
She shook her head, where the load of glittering hair was pulled up into a knob, becoming only to a face fairer than hers, and drew up the hood of her cape.
‘I simply haven’t the time.’
‘I said sometimes.’
‘I’ll see how my work goes.’ She was standing, poised for flight. ‘I would like to, but . . . Tell you what – I’ll meet you here on the first of every month, same time. But if I don’t come, you must understand its work, and not make a fuss.’
She was gone: flitting out of the door and leaving him to pay both bills, and not seeing Pilar who was crouching, alight with excitement, behind one of the Golden Pig’s unnecessary pillars.
Pilar managed to catch the same bus as the detected one.
‘You ’ave been shopping?’ she began sunnily, as the bus rushed away into the long June dusk.
‘Course not,’ Juliet said. ‘You know I hate shopping. Been to a lecture.’
‘Oh – is interesting, the lecture? What is about?’
‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Oh, but that is an old film.’
‘It wasn’t the film. It was about how they made it.’
‘Is not so interesting, that.’
‘I wanted to hear about the desert.’ Juliet was looking out of the window at hedges and meadows distinct in the water-clear light.
‘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.