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!’
And he pulled.
She did not look up, but struck out so violently, with a shoving movement, that he lost his balance on the highly polished floor, and fell flat on his back, uttering a roar of rage.
At this moment the door was slowly opened by Sarah, and Miss Pennecuick crept in. Both paused, exclaiming and aghast.
‘Rosario! What’s the matter? Are you hurt, my poor boy?’ Much rubbing of the curls was going on. ‘Juliet, what happened?’
Juliet smiled, and said, ‘Morning, Auntie.’
‘Come on, now, get up, you aren’t dead,’ Sarah said roughly, as he continued to lie there and shout in Spanish.
‘Did he slip on the floor?’
‘What on earth’s going on?’ demanded Frank, coming in at that minute.
‘Rosario fell down—’
‘There’s nothing the matter with him—’
‘Here, let’s see if any bones are broken—’
But even as Frank advanced upon him, Rosario scrambled up, bowed fiercely to the elder ladies, and marched out, shutting the door with a slam that shook the room.
Frank raised his eyebrows.
Juliet got up to kiss Miss Pennecuick’s cheek; then sat down again.
‘Now you come out of that book, Miss, show a bit of sympathy for once – poor young fellow, that floor’s hard, as my knees know to their cost. You be in to lunch, Mr Frank?’
‘Yes please, Sarah.’
‘It’s a nice bit of roast lamb – but I expect you’ve brought your own grass and stuff?’
‘No, I could manage a nice bit of roast lamb, for once’ – cheerfully.
He sat in an armchair opposite to Juliet, noticing that red burned in her cheeks, though she was apparently interested only in her book.
‘Well, Aunt Addy, I’ve got some good news—’
‘Oh have you, dear boy? Well done – let’s hear it. Juliet,’ gently, ‘it isn’t nice to read when other people are talking – put your book away, dear.’
‘Sorry, Auntie.’ The book obediently dropped at the side of the tuffet; the red deepened, as Juliet fixed her gaze on Miss Pennecuick’s face.
‘Yes, I really think everything’s arranged at last. I’m going to get the necessary papers signed next Monday.’
‘Then you’ll be in by Christmas. How delightful. We must have a party – and talking of parties, Clemence and Dolly are coming for the weekend.’
At this point the luncheon gong sounded, and they went in.
‘I already see lots of Clem in Wanby,’ Frank said, as he drew his great-aunt’s chair for her, and she laughed and pinched his cheek.
Here Sarah, who was sourly handing vegetables, said loudly, ‘Dr Masters ought to see that boy, Miss Addy. He’s got a bump on the back of his head the size of an egg. Some people ought to be ashamed of themselves,’ fixing Juliet with a glare.
Juliet, gobbling, did not look up.
‘Well, Sarah, I did ask you to tell Pilar not to polish the floors so highly.’
‘You like the floors well polished, Miss Addy, and besides it wasn’t the floor. She pushed him.’
‘Pilar? His own sister?’
‘No, Miss Addy. Her,’ indicating Juliet with a jerk of the head.
‘Did you, Juliet dear? Surely not – what happened? Tell old Auntie – she promises not to be cross with her girlie.’
‘I expect he pulled her hair,’ Frank said. ‘I’ve seen him at it more than once.’
‘Did he, Juliet?’
A nod.
‘And did you push him?’
‘Yes. As hard as I could.’ She gulped some water.
‘Well . . .’ Miss Pennecuick said helplessly, while Sarah’s voice cut in: ‘Comes of wearing it all over the place, instead of done up decent. What does she expect?’
‘It served him damn well right,’ Frank said calmly, ‘and if he does it again, you do it again, Juliet. That will do, Sarah, thank you,’ with a smile.
Sarah crept out of the room.
‘I – I really don’t know what to say . . .’ Miss Pennecuick leant back feebly, pushing away her plate. ‘Sarah can be so tiresome – she’s faithfulness itself, of course, and she’s been with me so long, nearly fifty years, but it makes it so difficult sometimes, she gets jealous, I don’t know how it is, you can always manage things—’
‘I’m a man,’ and he laughed.
Juliet continued to eat.
‘I’m so pleased and relieved, dear boy, that you’re coming to live at Wanby. Now if only you would settle down with that sweet girl—’
‘What sweet girl, Aunt?’
‘Now you know perfectly well who I mean—’
‘I assure you I haven’t the faintest idea . . . are you ready for pud?’ and he rang the bell.
It was true; he had not the faintest idea. For he did not think of his great friend, Clemence Massey, as a sweet girl.
Once or twice during the consumption of the pud, Juliet looked at Frank with a long stare. He had stood up for her. Not as that old fool of an auntie would have, but sensibly. If someone at the Comp hit you or pulled your hair, you hit or pulled back. Only common sense, that was, only natural.
For the first time since their meeting in St Alberics high street, she thought about Frank Pennecuick. Bolting pudding, because she had forgotten Auntie’s gentle reproof, she let him invade her mind.
An unfamiliar feeling came upon her when she looked at his long brown face. She wondered if she could talk to him about that part of her mind which was suffering confusion. For what she was beginning to feel towards him, without knowing its nature, was trust.
At the Comp, the mathematics master had been permanently irritable and exhausted, and the one thing that he had always made starkly plain was the fact that no individual could have more than three minutes, preferably two, of his time.
Juliet wanted an hour, perhaps half a day; she did not know how long because she did not know exactly what she wanted to talk about. It was something to do with maths . . . and why certain things happened . . . and if there was an answer . . .
She had a vague, yet strong, idea that ‘coincidence’ was the word that expressed her fascination, interest, whatever it was.
But what, exactly, was coincidence?
She knew about reference books; she had been, one Saturday afternoon, to the public library and, having asked the girl assistant for a ‘dictionary’, and being asked what kind, had answered that she did not know.
‘Well, what do you want to look up, dear?’
‘Some word . . . coincidence.’
The assistant was tactful as well as kind. She went herself to fetch the Pocket Oxford, and gave it to this dwarfish enquirer with a smile.
How eagerly Juliet had turned the pages! She did not know what revelation she was expecting – perhaps some other long words which would explain the lure, the fascination that, for her, surrounded this particular word and its associations. She read: ‘Coincide: fill the same portion of space or time; occur simultaneously.’ Her eyes hurried on, that wasn’t exactly what . . . ah . . . ‘Coincidence: notable concurrence of events suggestive of but not having causal connection.’
She could not quite . . . quite . . . the words were so long, and most of them she had never heard of.
Then the page before her eyes drifted away, and there came upon her a double inner sensation: as of immense size and microscopic smallness; both together; not feelings; not pictures, though images of stars were in the hugeness; the experience was unlike anything she had ever felt in her life . . . or was it?
A memory floated up from somewhere within herself. She had had this sensation before. She could feel the damp warmth of her cot blankets enclosing her baby body . . .
‘Find what you wanted, dear?’
She looked up into the young assistant’s smiling face.
‘Yes. Wasn’t sure how to spell it.’ And she was off.
Funny her eyes looked, the girl thought, looking doubtfully after her.
The experience of double-size – as Juliet came to think of it – haunted her from that day, although she reluctantly came to believe that there would never be any explanation of it in the mathematical terms which she had at first expected. She must just ‘take it for granted’, as she put it.
But that other sentence – why should there be no ‘causal connection’? (She went to another library to look up those two words, not relishing the elder-sisterly attentions of the young assistant.)
Why?
And she began to turn the question over in her mind, to approach it mathematically, because mathematics was the only subject in which any difficulties she encountered were worked through, or leapt over, by her brain – without effort, and with enjoyment.
Examples is what’s needed, she thought; lots of them, like they give you in the textbooks. And, from the age of fourteen, she had begun to collect coincidences, laboriously writing them down in a notebook in her squared, state-educated hand, numbering each carefully, and adding after each one the comment ‘Pure’ or ‘Only half’ (‘Pure’ in the sense of absolute coincidence: one in which apparently no ‘causal connection’ could be found.)
And gradually, as the noisy, dull months went by, lit only by this interest within her mind, she came to what she called to herself me ambition – to find some reason that explains why these things happen seemingly without cause.
To work on this ambition she needed solitude and time: uninterrupted, endless time. That was why she had run away to Hightower. ‘It’s quieter there,’ she would say to herself, in the weeks before she walked out of her home on that last day of the summer term. ‘I’ll get a bit of peace there, p’raps.’
It was not quite as peaceful and quiet as she had hoped. Auntie was for ever on at you. But Frank, he let you alone. All right, he was. And he had stuck up for her against that Rosario. She might talk to Frank, perhaps; about coincidence. Not about her ambition: that was a secret.
But she did not get away on her walk at once, because there was that business of having coffee in the drawing-room, as usual.
‘How is that poor boy’s head?’ Miss Pennecuick enquired of Maria, whose task it was to bring in the tray.
‘He suffers much,’ was the simple and disconcerting reply, as cups and jugs were deftly arranged.
‘Oh dear! You don’t think . . . perhaps . . . the doctor?’
‘It is in his feelings he suffers.’ On a more sombre note: ‘He is a loving boy, Rosario, our mother say he is.’
‘Yes, thank you, Maria. Coffee looks good, as usual,’ said Frank, and he sent her away smiling.
‘Dear boy! Are you going to join us?’ Miss Pennecuick paused, holding a frail red and gold cup in one shaking hand.
‘Good heavens, no, Aunt dear. Absolute poison. Like me to do that?’ And her cup was whisked away and half full of the poison before she could wipe off two tears of gratitude and love.
‘Aren’t you having something else, dear?’
‘I’ll wait until tea. I’ve got a new herb brew I’d like you to sample,’ smiling.
‘No wonder you’re too thin. Clemence may be here by tea-time – I’ll get her to lecture you.’
‘Clem knows it wouldn’t have any effect, so she never tries.’
‘It would have an effect if you were married.’
But the mutter was not heard by Frank, who had turned to Juliet.
‘Going for a walk? Mind if I come?’
She hesitated.
‘I won’t talk,’ he added, and the unfamiliar feeling of trust came upon her once more.
‘All right. I’ll get me things,’ and she rushed out of the room.
‘Frank?’
‘What, Aunt?’ turning, as Sarah wheeled in the chair.
‘You – you aren’t . . . ?’
Sarah began to bustle with cushions, listening intently.
Miss Pennecuick indicated her, and made helpless gestures. ‘Getting – fond,’ she mouthed at him.
‘Not a bit. I give you my solemn word.’
He stood straight before her, looking, for once, grave and without the playful expression that usually made his face attractive. And as he said the words, he felt, with a little surprise, how true they were. Not one glimmer of romantic feeling had he for Juliet Slater.