Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
The Charmers
Starlight
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN: 9781473521445
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
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
For Rosemary Steiner
‘I’ll be more than glad to see the back of that one.’
Miss Roberts jerked her head towards a solitary figure moving swiftly across the otherwise deserted playground of Hawley Road Comprehensive School.
‘Why ’specially her? She’s extra bright, and doesn’t muck about in class. I hardly notice her.’
‘She gives me the creeps.’
‘God knows there are enough things here to give anyone the creeps. Thank Him we shan’t be seeing any of them for six weeks. Come on.’
Mrs Arrowby flung a bright scarf about her neck, shook back a shock of ragged hair, snatched up a case heavy with books, and stood impatiently while Miss Roberts hauled up her jeans and adjusted her linen jacket. The women teachers’ cloakroom was empty now but for these two.
‘Get your skates on, Mary. I can’t wait to get out of this place,’ Mrs Arrowby said.
It was the end of July, but not the end of summer. Roofs and houses baked in the late, blazing light that filled the horizon and, beyond the silent expanse of playground, home-going traffic was beginning to roar.
‘She gone?’
Miss Roberts opened the cloakroom door a little wider and took a longish look. ‘Of course she’s gone. You are jittery, aren’t you? Halfway home by now . . . Where does she live, by the way?’
‘Oh somewhere on one of those new estates between here and the Archway – I don’t remember . . . We’re off, Peters, bye-bye until September,’ she called to the school caretaker, who was approaching with keys swinging from a finger.
‘Bye-bye. Enjoy your hols. And if you can’t be good, be careful.’
‘Saucy old . . .’ The sentence was lost in a wave to the man as the two young women left the building and began to cross the playground.
They spoke no more. The exhaustion of the school year fell upon them, together with the unnatural silence that had invaded the shabby building with the departure of the twelve hundred adolescents who, every day, had tramped through its corridors, sending their ugly fresh voices ringing about its great rooms. The shadows of one or two plane trees, their trunks deeply scarred with initials in spite of the wire fences surrounding them, drifted over the two women as they passed beneath.
‘Well, you won’t have to get the creeps over Slater next term,’ said Mrs Arrowby, as they reached the gates.
‘She hasn’t left!’
‘She has, though,’ Mrs Arrowby nodded. ‘No university entrance exams for her.’
‘What – after all those bloody A levels?’ Miss Roberts marched on. ‘I thought she’d be a cert.’
‘No. We did write to the father, of course, pointing out how bright she is and so on – blah blah blah. And the Head got a letter back, quite well written and spelled, I heard, just saying Julie was going out to work like any other girl and no thank you.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I never asked her. Come on, we’ll miss our train.’
They began to walk fast, and their footsteps died away under larger trees, covered in the swart green of late summer, until they were lost in the crowds of the high street.
The person described as giving Miss Roberts the creeps proceeded at a swift pace ahead of the two teachers. She was noticeable for this unusual quickness of movement; for her hair, which was so fair as to look silver in certain lights; and for the expression in her eyes, small and so full of light that their colour was hard to name. These eyes remained fixed steadily ahead of her, looking unseeingly down the long, ugly, crammed street, with an inward gaze. Her sallow face was expressionless. She was thinking. A forehead too high and her lack of colour, added to a breast almost as flat as a boy’s, made her unattractive. But it was another quality, difficult to define, that had given Miss Roberts the creeps.
She was carelessly dressed in that global uniform of the young, a shabby T-shirt and denim jeans; and she carried a case full of books. A cigarette stuck out between her thin lips, and as she smoked one down, she paused to light another.
Presently she turned aside, and left the crowded high street, following quieter and ever more ruinous roads in process of demolition, until she reached a block of new council flats. The lowest storey was sunk below pavement level behind a tiny garden and a wall some six feet high – a sign of the times (vandals might hesitate to jump down into a place whence a sudden leap back was not possible).
Juliet Slater glanced down at the garden as she passed: grass was clipped and smooth; beds were weeded and bearing the dahlias, Japanese chrysanthemums and late geraniums as if autumn had come early. Ivy and passionflower twined up a plastic trellis beside shut French windows curtained in snowy nylon.
A look of interest came into her eyes as she glanced down into the little wells of greenery. She turned, and went up a railed ramp leading to the front doors at the back of the row, secured at night by massive locked gates.
She rang the bell of the fifth door, and soft chimes sounded inside.
In a moment, slow footsteps were audible.
‘Hullo, Julie,’ said the woman who stood there, drowsily. ‘Didn’t expect you yet. I was having a kip. I knew there’d be a bit of a party, seeing it’s the last day . . .’
‘There was. I came away, couldn’t stick it.’
She pushed past her mother. Mrs Slater put out a hand uncertainly, then withdrew it as Juliet went down the narrow passage, glancing as she went into a brightly coloured living-room, where a budgerigar perched on top of an armchair screamed and fluttered.
‘He wants his drink, bless him.’ Mrs Slater was slowly following. ‘I’ll just get it . . . D’you want your tea, love? I’ve got some pork luncheon – too hot for cooking.’
‘I don’t mind, Mum. If it’s ready.’
Juliet’s voice came from her own room, a slip of a place furnished with a narrow, gaily covered bed, a wardrobe and chest of drawers painted pale blue and, in front of the window, a bare, square table that looked too large for the room. Juliet set down her case of books, called an impatient answer to a distant question from her mother, then glanced at the alarm clock ticking on the chest of drawers. It was just five o’clock.
She drew in a breath, not deep, not agitated, yet as if some inner pressure had forced it to come, then stealthily moved across the room and noiselessly locked the door.
‘Mum?’ she called.
A pause, then the heavy footsteps. ‘Oh Julie – you’re locked in. You are a funny girl, I wanted a bit of a chat – alone all day – what is it?’
‘I need more fags.’
‘Can’t I come in?’
‘I’m changin’ me clothes.’
Their voices sounded flat in the bright, comfortable little place, Mrs Slater’s soft and slurred, Juliet’s thin and high.
‘Shan’t be a tick. You have the tea ready.’
She had pulled a suitcase from under the bed, and was rapidly putting into it the clothes she took from the chest of drawers; when the case was full and shut, she noiselessly unlocked the door. She could hear the sounds made by her mother moving about the kitchen, and water running, and plates being clashed, and a humming of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’.
Rapidly, she opened the case of books and took out some volumes dealing with physics, mathematics and other scientific disciplines, and all bearing the label of Hawley Road Comprehensive School. She crammed them into a plastic carrier.
She set suitcase and bag down beside the door.
‘Ready, Julie.’
‘Righto.’
Her mother, coming slowly into the living-room some moments later carrying the teapot, found her standing by the cage stroking the bird’s blue and yellow back with a touch as light as one of the glowing feathers, while it perched on her finger.
‘Bertie,’ she was saying, in a lowered tone, ‘Bertie-boy.’
‘Get him his drink, will you, Julie? And you might fill up his seed bin, too; my feet are awful today, it’s this heat.’ She sank into one of the armchairs, and began opening a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don’t want to go round to Mawser’s just as your tea’s ready, you have one of these.’ She held out the packet.
‘You know I like my own . . . I’ll get his drink . . . and then I won’t be five minutes.’
She went out with the two little containers and came back with both freshly filled, and arranged them carefully in the cage to which the bird had retreated.
‘Bye-bye, Julie, bye-bye,’ came a tiny elf’s voice from the cage.
‘Oh . . .’ Juliet paused at the door. ‘Bye-bye, Bertie-boy. Now you be good.’
‘Bye-bye, Julie. Bertie love Julie. Bye-bye.’
Mrs Slater’s lids were drooping.
Juliet almost ran down the passage, snatched up case and bag, and a second later her mother saw her pass the living-room; saw, too, with humble pleasure, that she wore a cap Mrs Slater had knitted for her. In the dusk of the little narrow passage, the suitcase and bag, which Juliet carried on her far side, were not visible.
The front door shut sharply. Mrs Slater sighed, inhaled smoke, and settled herself more comfortably. Perhaps Julie would tell her something about the school party over tea. Not that she ever talked much, Julie. Mrs Slater’s thoughts began to play discontentedly about her daughter, named after Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, in memory of that one, never-forgotten evening out with Dad a few days before their wedding. She had so hoped that their daughter would grow up to look like the star.
Clever she was, an unusually clever child, them at all her schools had said – and what use was that, her and her cleverness? Didn’t care how she looked, except for brushing her hair, nice hair, Julie had, though not much of a looker, as George said right out. And them at the school wanting her to put up for the university! Did they think George was a millionaire? There he had put his foot down: she’d leave at seventeen and find a job like everybody else, bright or not. As for boys, they might be elephants, thought Mrs Slater resentfully, for all the notice Julie took of them or they of her.
Come to that, if they had been elephants, Julie might have noticed them; Julie liked animals, as much as she liked anything, and this boys and elephants was an old joke between herself and her mother, and the only one.
Oh, she was a funny girl. Sometimes she made you feel she wasn’t all there – nor you there with her neither, come to that.
Mrs Slater lit another cigarette.
‘Bertie,’ she said softly, looking towards the bird where he sat preening himself and chirruping in the fading light, ‘who’s Mum’s boy, then? Bertie-bird . . .’
Juliet walked the length of Ava Street, then turned onto a highway crammed with traffic. From here, the road went steadily upwards.
Having paused to buy two packets of cigarettes at a small stationer’s, she scrambled on to a bus, and alighted at a crossroads just beyond the summit of the great hill, where most of the traffic passed on its way under a notice saying TO THE NORTH, and another road, less wide and busy, led away under its own legend: TO ST ALBERICS, HERTFORD, STAVENHAM.
Here, on a corner where the cars set out on their longer journey, she took her stand. The last of the light caught her hair; she was, for once, conspicuous, and it was an advantage.
It was not yet dark. The sun’s falling rays were hidden behind little, old low houses, but every hint of grey, of dun, of brown was brushed with their softness; the massive trees along the verges drooped in dusty near-blackness above the moving ruby lights of the cars.
Juliet studied her prey carefully. Not a lorry: that meant dangers about which she knew, but never thought. Not elderly men driving alone, who looked too angry, exhausted and intent to bother with her. Here came something that would do – a middle-aged couple looking mildly worried and driving carefully.
Out went Juliet’s arm, as the woman’s eye strayed to her glittering hair. There was the briefest of consultations between the pair, and the car slowed down.
‘Goin’ anywhere near St Alberics?’ she called shrilly, putting out the third cigarette since her vigil began.
‘Passing through it,’ the man called back, with an unexpectedly kind smile. ‘Only hurry up – this is a bad place to stop.’
Juliet darted across the few feet of road and settled herself and her case and bag along the back seat. She slammed the door.
‘Here, young lady, steady on.’
‘Sorry – I’m not used to cars.’
The woman turned, and smiled. So young! And that lovely hair. Had she a family? Was she running away? Oh, the perils of this world for the young, the beloved, the rebellious young.
‘And what’s your name and where are you off to?’ the driver asked in a tone more of the politeness of the road than of curiosity.
‘Sandra Smith, and I’m goin’ to stay with my auntie. Lives just outside St Alberics.’
‘Well, I hope you have this lovely weather for your holiday. Break up today, did you? I noticed the children coming out as we passed through London,’ the woman said. When did she not notice children? Everywhere, and always.
‘Left,’ said Juliet; almost snapped the word.
‘Oh – I expect you’re sorry to leave school and all your friends. I know I was.’
Juliet nearly answered: Haven’t got any friends, but her instinct for secrecy intervened, and she satisfied her questioner with a ‘Yes’, as regretful-sounding as she could make it. And the second expected, and undesired, question, And what are you going to do now? did not follow.
The woman smiled again, and turned to watch the rapidly darkening landscape going by.
There was no more conversation. They had entered a motorway; their pace had increased, and there began to be a dream-like quality about their flight beside other dark shapes, following scores of ruby will-o’-the-wisps. In the orange glare of the lamps the general ugliness was not veiled, but emphasized.
Juliet noticed nothing; she was thinking.
They turned aside at length, down a narrowing road where a softer light shone on a sign and its arrow: ST ALBERICS. STAVENHAM.
Another half hour, and the car stopped in the brightly lit high street of a country town whose shops were small imitations of those in Oxford Street. Here and there, the three-hundred-year-old face of a cottage showed its forlorn and gentle beauty to the chemical glow of the lamps.
The driver turned, smiling, and said, ‘All right for you? Where does your aunt live?’
‘Oh, not far, ’bout five minutes’ walk.’ Juliet was gathering up case and carrier.
‘Because, if it’s not far, we could—’
‘Yes, do be careful, my dear,’ from the woman.
‘I’ll be all right; there’s plenty of people about.’ Juliet was out and on the pavement. Indeed at that moment, a bus-load, scattering in different directions, alighted at a coach station where other passengers were waiting. The scene was neither lonely nor desolate.
‘Cheerio.’
The pair smiled and waved; the car moved off, grew smaller, turned a corner, and was gone.
Juliet had already left behind the shop windows, where fashion models postured, and was walking quickly onwards.
She turned aside at the far end of the high street, down a narrow road without shops and with only occasional dim lamps on old-fashioned iron standards. It was lined on either side by ancient cottages. One had a turquoise-blue door; some others had additions to make them acceptably contemporary, but Ragnall Street was unmistakably in a small country town: narrow, ill-lit, silent, and filled with air scented by leaves and grass in hidden fields.
Juliet’s pace quickened. A man on a bicycle passed, calling ‘Goodnight!’ A woman hurried by with a heavy shopping bag and entered a cottage that had a light glowing behind its flowery curtains; children’s voices greeted her as she opened the front door. The sky, lucid blue and as yet starless, was gradually becoming the most noticeable part of the scene. The sky, and the silence.
The last cottage was left behind, its garden glimmering with white dahlias. Fields stretched away, behind low hedges of thorn, into the twilight; the great elms typical of Hertfordshire were just distinguishable as darker masses against the darkening blue.
Juliet was crossing a stone bridge, humped and ancient, with hidden water running quietly beneath, when a car came past, too quickly, headlights glaring; she pressed herself against the stone parapet just in time. Then the sky and the silence, as the brutal noise died away, resumed their power, and she turned down a lane, with a signpost that said, she knew, TO LEETE. And suddenly a high brick wall was beside her, some fifteen feet tall, ending in iron gates intricately wrought in a design of grapes and vine leaves and, in the centre, a group of initials.
She stopped and pressed a bell set at the side door inserted in the brickwork.
Then she put down her luggage, seated herself on the grass verge, and prepared to wait.
It was dark, but a grain moon was rising, huge and warm-tinted above the elms. Through a thin place in the thorn hedge she could see swathes of mist covering the meadows. There were far-off sounds, and the sudden sweeps of distant headlights in the darkness, but all around her was stillness and silence. She glanced impatiently at the door.
Now there were voices, approaching and raised in argument, though she could not make out what they were saying.
The door jerked open suddenly, and she stood up. A light came on above the gates, revealing a figure known to her, in the familiar black dress which was too short and showed stout legs in pale stockings. A cross old face, a pompadour of white curls.
Behind this person hovered the brown, smiling face of a man above a white jacket.
‘So it’s you, is it. Trust you to get here when dinner’s over—’
‘Hullo, Sarah.’ Juliet began to pick up her baggage. But the man darted forward.
‘I take for you.’ And she let him have them, even giving him a brief smile.
‘Mrs Bason, to you,’ said Sarah, in a voice meant to be dignified but betrayed by age at the conclusion of her sentence into a squeak.
‘Mrs Bason – sorry.’
‘How do you look when you’re glad? Come on, hurry up, she’s been all on edge ever since your letter come.’
The old woman turned, grumbling under her breath, the man shut the door behind them, and they went along a wide, curving path leading up to a large house with lit windows.
‘When did it come?’ Juliet asked, knowing that Sarah was less irritable if a flow of unnecessary detailed talk was kept going.
‘This morning. Posted day before yesterday, wasn’t it? These posts, they get worse and worse. If I’d thought when I was your age I’d live to see the day when it took forty-eight hours for a letter to get from London to Leete, and seven pence to pay at that, and herrings at ten shillings the pound—’
‘Yes, awful,’ Juliet muttered.
As they approached the house, whose door stood open revealing a dimly lit hall, a group of faces could be seen peering out into the dusk, and gabbling in Spanish became audible. There was waving of hands, to which Juliet responded slackly, and the group, consisting of a young man and three girls, moved forward to meet her.
But Sarah, assuming an authoritative manner, said sharply, ‘That’ll do now, off you go,’ and they disappeared, without haste and smiling over their shoulders, in the direction of a door covered in green baize at the end of the hall.
The older man shut the front door.
Sarah turned to Juliet.
‘She’s in the drawing-room. Best go in. She’s bound to ask if you want something – I’ll see about it. Always on the go, I am. On a blessed tray, I s’pose.’
‘That’ll do nicely,’ Juliet quoted, showing teeth white and small between her pallid lips: it was not a smile of sweetness.
Juliet crossed towards a door on the left. It was of dark wood, like the panelled walls. The hall had a pseudo-antique appearance; its many old portraits lacked distinction, and the long oriental carpets had the hard colours of modern work rather than the silky dimness of the real thing.
Sarah had disappeared.
Juliet gently opened the door, there was a pause, then a soft old voice exclaimed: ‘Why, it’s my girl! Darling! I was getting so worried!’ and Juliet went forward into the room.
A long face, irresistibly suggesting that of a sheep, below silver hair, smiled at her from a wheelchair drawn up to an electric fire. The room was stiflingly hot, in spite of the summer heat outside; the occupant of the chair’s skeletal arms were bared to the elbow by a long dress of blue silk.
Juliet went up to her, sank to her knees beside the chair and, putting her arms round the thin old body, lifted her face passively to receive kiss after lingering kiss, while she shut her senses against the odour of verbena toilet water and eighty-year-old flesh.
‘You’re really here! I can’t believe it, let me look at you – that lovely, lovely hair – how long is it since you were here, my darling?’
‘Easter, Auntie.’
‘I couldn’t believe it when I got your letter – how can your mother bear to part with you?’
Juliet sat back on her heels.
‘Five of us, Auntie, and no dad. ’T’isn’t easy for her.’
‘Yes. Yes. Oh that was a day blessed by God, when I saw the sun shining on your hair . . .’ She leant forward, with difficulty, to lift a tress in her knotted fingers. ‘My girl! Here at last. My lovely, lovely . . . daughter.’
The last word came out reverently, as if she spoke of something sacred.
‘What have I done,’ she went on, quaveringly, ‘that God should be so good to me?’
She paused to wipe her eyes, while Juliet, moving no closer, made vague sounds that might have been intended for comfort.
‘Ah, here’s Sarah – and Rosa with your supper, dear – we can’t call it dinner, it’s only something light, but you must be hungry. I told Sarah to save some chicken, the nicest part. Now you eat it up, my darling, while I watch you.’
Sarah, looking more than sour, prowled in silence finding small unnecessary things to do while the plump, pretty Rosa set down a tray on a low table, smiling shyly at Juliet. With the air of one being at home, Juliet got up and fetched a tuffet covered in rose-red brocade, and arranged it beside the wheelchair.
Chicken and salad, with fruit and a glass of orange juice, were set out appetizingly, and, settling herself on the tuffet, Juliet began to eat, while the sheep-face watched with an expression of the purest, foolish delight.
‘Time for your bed, Miss Addy,’ Sarah said. ‘Close on nine.’
‘I know that, Sarah, thank you,’ the old lady said sharply. ‘I’m staying up.’
‘Upset yourself – you know what Dr Masters said.’
‘It won’t hurt for once. I’m so happy, and this is a special occasion.’
‘Please yourself.’
Sarah was going out of the room when her employer said, in a different voice: ‘Sarah!’
‘Yes, Miss Addy?’ turning sulkily.
‘Ask Antonio to bring up a magnum of champagne – and eight glasses. We’re going to celebrate.’
‘Champagne! There’s none chilled, and it’ll kill you, this time of night.’
‘In half an hour, Sarah, please. And tell the other servants they are to be my guests.’
Sarah stalked out. Her hands were at her sides, but her expression raised them in the position of those of the old steward in Hogarth’s painting.
Juliet had not watched any of this tiny drama, nor noticed the deliberate use of the expression ‘other servants’; she was eating.
In a moment the old lady said: ‘And so you passed all your examinations, darling?’
Juliet, with her mouth full, nodded.
‘A levels, they call them now, don’t they? I’m sure my clever girl did well, didn’t she? And was she nervous?’
‘Course not.’ Juliet gulped orange juice.
‘Were you – top, would it be – in any of the subjects? What were they?’
The faded eyes, behind the spectacles of the strongest power available, fixed themselves greedily on the young face, as if passionate to draw from it information about a world, ideas, habits, of which their owner was ignorant. Behind the glare of curiosity there was a hint, too, of piteousness: I am so old, said the look. And helpless. And helpless, for all my five servants and my faithful Sarah. Helpless.
‘Oh’ – Juliet used her tongue to dislodge a fragment of lettuce – ‘mathematics, physics, chemistry – that kind of subject. I got five As.’
‘And did you expect to – is that exceptional, dear? Five As? You must forgive your old auntie, she isn’t “brainy”, like you. You know, at my school, the North London Collegiate, only the cleverest girls studied science. That was more than sixty years ago . . .’
Juliet pushed the tray aside and drew her knees up to her chin and circled them with her arms, in her first gesture that evening suggesting youthfulness. She wanted a cigarette, but decided against asking; there would be a fuss, probably a lecture.
‘Five As is good,’ she said. ‘Very good, they said at the school.’
‘But didn’t you find those scientific subjects very dry, dear? And such hard work, all those figures . . . I never was any good at arithmetic. I used to cry over my sums. Wasn’t I a silly-billy?’
‘Course they aren’t dry – they’re ever so interesting. Easy, too. Only . . .’
Juliet paused, and her gaze moved away from the eager old face into some other world. Her own face became expressionless.
‘Are you thinking about – him, darling?’ the old lady said softly, in a moment.
‘Who?’ The thoughts, whatever they had been, vanished beneath Juliet’s eyes, like some unknown species of fish darting down into fathoms of icy water. ‘Who do you mean – him?’
‘Silly Auntie thought perhaps there might be some young man – some boy, don’t they say nowadays? – that her girlie was . . . very fond of.’
‘Chr—! Course not, Auntie. I don’t like boys, they’re always making a row. Me and Mum, we have a joke about that, see, ’cos she says I take as much notice of boys as if they was elephants, and I say, if they was elephants, I’d take a bit more notice.’
She smiled. Her little teeth flashed: the too-white teeth of the child fed on the wrong food.
The old lady was looking bewildered. ‘Do you like elephants so much, then, dear?’
‘Not all that. But better than what I do boys.’
‘“Better than I do boys,” Juliet. Not “what I do”.’ Her voice was gentle as ever, but authoritative.
‘Better than I do boys.’
‘You see, my darling’ – lifting a tress of silver-gold hair – ‘you’re such a lovely girl . . . and I want my girlie to talk as prettily as she looks. You don’t mind my telling you about these little faults?’
‘Course not, Auntie.’ Juliet was staring down at her shabby jogging shoes. They were dirty, and the side of one of them was split.
A procession entered, with Sarah, looking disapproving, at its head. She was followed by the white-coated servant, carrying a silver bucket from which peered the head of the magnum. A young man was negligently flourishing a grubby white cloth to wipe up spilt drops; he had found a red plastic carnation somewhere and stuck it in his buttonhole. Three pretty young women were carrying glasses.
Their employer clapped her hands feebly. Her face had suddenly gone pale from exhaustion, but seemed to be shining from inward joy.
The white-coated servant set down the bucket on the table, copying the demeanour of an English butler seen on television, and, beckoning imperiously to the girls, took two glasses (which needed polishing) and handed them ceremoniously, one to the old lady and one to Juliet. He gestured that a glass should be given to Sarah, who grimly waved it away.
The champagne was opened with a satisfactorily loud pop, and the cork flew off somewhere into one of the dim corners of the hall amid much ducking and many screeches. The wine, never lacking glamour for some ingenuous hearts, slid hissing into the shallow glasses. The servants, in response to beckoning from the old lady, drew near to her wheelchair and stood in a circle about it. She reached out and took Juliet’s hand in her own.
‘Goodness, childie!’ she exclaimed in a startled tone. ‘How cold you are! Do you feel quite well?’
‘Course, Auntie.’
‘Well – so long as you feel all right.’
She looked straight at Sarah, who was standing with folded arms outside the circle.
‘To Miss Juliet,’ she said, raising her glass together with her weak, ancient voice, ‘who’s going to be my dear adopted daughter for a – a – whole . . . wonderful . . . year . . . to Miss Juliet.’
‘To Miss Juliet!’ came the cheerful echo in five young voices, sending for a moment a ripple of human gaiety through the large old house standing in its great gardens under the wide country sky.
Their glasses glowed like topaz in the lamplight. The eyes of the young man, dark under the perfect bow of his brows and shaded by heavy lashes, wandered speculatively, as he sipped, over Juliet’s meagre body. She was nearly seventeen, wasn’t she? Well then, let her get what girls of seventeen must get. It would be difficult, of course. The more fun for that.
‘I’m so tired.’ The old lady suddenly set down her glass. ‘Sarah, take me up. Goodnight Antonio, Maria, Rosa, Pilar, Rosario. Goodnight, my girlie,’ patting Juliet’s arm. ‘You’ll come up and say nighty-night to old Auntie when she’s in beddy-byes, won’t you? Goodnight, then. Goodnight to you all.’
‘There’s a good half of that magnum left,’ Sarah observed. ‘More’n half, I’d say.’
‘Oh never mind, Sarah – let them have it. I said it was a celebration.’
The senior servant – Antonio – who had been unobtrusively hastening the departure of his retinue in case this fact should be noted, turned at the door with a flashing smile as he heard the permission, then disappeared.
Only young Rosario had lingered, on pretext of looking for the champagne cork.
Juliet had seated herself on the tuffet which had been established as her own place since her first visit four years ago, and was lifting her almost untouched glass to her lips.
He circled about until he stood above her, looking down with his bold, usually successful, smile. ‘You come and sit with us in our room, Juliet?’ he said softly in the broken English that, in a man’s voice, is irresistible to some women. ‘When she in bed? We laugh and perhaps sing – you come?’
She did not look up at him, but uttered in a quiet but clear voice a phrase of the harshest vulgarity which told him to go away.
He stared down at the fair, lowered head with the eyes of a hurt dog. It was less the insult than the shock of hearing those words, which he had heard in the backstreets of Stevenham, from the lips of a creature who seemed to him, though not beautiful, of a stubborn virginity, and therefore the better worth conquering.
He turned away and followed his family out of the room.
Juliet, slowly sipping champagne, did not look towards the staircase, visible through the door which Rosario, in his wounded pride, had deliberately left open.
The wheelchair stood at the foot of the stairs, and a figure was crawling upwards, with one swollen hand grasping at the banister; the elegant, floating blue dress gave the final grotesqueness to the hardly human, bent shape. Sarah hovered above it; the sound of her grumbling, affectionate voice came to Juliet through the silence. She leant forward and turned out the fire.
She drank off the champagne and glanced at the ornate French clock, set with gilt symbolical figures of Peace and Plenty. Ten. She could count on four hours of reading before she felt the need for sleep.
The air had been overheated for too long for any cooling to be noticeable, but the heat was no longer coming at her in waves. There was not a sound in the long, coldly lit room, nor from the blue night outside where hung the great stars and planets of late summer, low, and stilly burning.
Gradually Juliet’s face became as calm, as still, as those circlers in the depths, with the same look of remoteness. She sat as if charmed.
‘Here, Miss Pennecuick wants you to go up.’
It was Sarah, standing over her, morose and pale.
Juliet did not move for some seconds. Slowly her eyelids lifted and she looked at the old retainer in silence, and smiled. It was well that Sarah thought a smile from Juliet, any smile, suitable in any circumstance, and did not observe its quality.
Juliet’s mother knew the smile well; she had seen it when Julie came out of her bedroom at the request of well-meaning visitors. Mrs Slater had never allowed herself to think consciously about it, because it frightened her.
Sarah, mollified by a gossip and an affectionate goodnight from her mistress, was feeling penitent. She stooped with difficulty and switched the logs on again.
‘Freezing in here . . . have a bit o’ warmth. Up you go.’
Miss Pennecuick, piteous in nylon and lace, was sitting up in another stifling room.
‘Ah, there you are, my pet. Come and sit by old Auntie.’ She patted the coverlet of fine embroidered lawn, and Juliet obeyed.
There followed twenty minutes of explanation as to why Miss Pennecuick preferred to climb the stairs unseen by anyone but Sarah. ‘When I was young like you, darling, Auntie was pretty. And then this old arthritis came along and took all my prettiness away . . . It hurts me, dear. Perhaps you’ll understand, one day . . . that’s why I don’t want you to see me unless I’m nicely dressed, or all covered up as I am now. Wipe my eyes, love – as if you were my own dear daughter . . . hanky under the pillow, dear.’
Juliet, with a delicacy of touch learnt from using geometrical instruments, mopped Miss Pennecuick’s tears as carefully as if her heart were full of love.
‘Hadn’t you better settle down, Auntie?’
‘Yes, darling. I am rather tired, it’s the excitement. Dr Masters said . . . Give me that little book, yes, the one with the red cover.’ Daily Light, inset with a gilt cross, and worn with many years of use.
Juliet put it into the knotted, slow-moving hands.
‘Find the date for me, dear. You see, it has texts from the Bible, all on the same theme, for every day in the year . . . so comforting. Juliet, do you ever think about God?’ Again, that change to a quality like authority in the old voice. Then her head sank back. ‘No . . . I’m too tired tonight,’ feebly. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow. And another thing . . . make sure the servants say Miss Juliet. Goodnight, my lovely girl, my baby.’
The lightest pressure of her lips on the hot, old-smelling skin, a darting smile, and Juliet was away.
The bed in Juliet’s room was spread with a white honeycomb quilt, the carpet and walls were respectively tan and beige; the chest of drawers matched the light oak frame of the bed, and was decorated by small carvings that served as handles.
Juliet switched on the bedside lamp under its shade of cream silk. At the window, she drew aside the heavy curtains drawn an hour ago by Pilar, then opened the casement and leant out.
Darkness made visible by the great moon, elms seeming to float as a deeper blackness against the colourless sky, sweet exhausted scents of dying flowers and leaves.
Damn, no table, she thought.
She drew in her head, shut the window, drew the curtains again, and began to unpack; the putting away of her few, Marks & Spencer clothes was soon finished. Then she sat down on the bed and looked about her.
There had not been an artist or a rebel in the Pennecuick family for a hundred and forty years, but that is a long time to be middle class and very rich, and their investments, derived from coal and later from the rents of valuable land, had inevitably, on one or two occasions, been spent on the products of fashion.
Here was one of them, hanging on the wall: at once mysterious and decorative, the shape of the Möbius ring had caught, first the eye of some artist, and then the eye of a Pennecuick with money to burn.
Juliet was familiar with the print; it was the first detail in the room that she had noticed on her original visit to Hightower some four years ago; and suddenly, as she studied the arcane shape, she experienced a sense of safety.
She was here: she had done it; she had escaped from noise and continual interruptions and her parents and the dirty fools at the comprehensive; she had left them all behind for a whole year.
The thought of dirt sent her springing up. She snatched thick towels from a heated rail, and almost ran along to a bathroom at the end of the passage. And soon she was lying relaxed under the water; her body congruous in its chaste modelling with the old-fashioned furnishings of the room, and her hair floating about her like the myriad lines of some geometric problem – not to be solved by an earthly brain, and belonging to a sphere other than this.
‘Mum?’
‘So it’s you, is it? Where you been all night? Anyone else, I’d say you was off with some boy.’
‘Well I wasn’t – and if you was all that worried you could have phoned the Elephant House at the zoo.’
But the feeble old joke brought no response except: ‘Where are you, Julie?’
‘With the old lady – you know – Miss Pennecuick. I am staying off – for a year, anyway.’
‘A year! I thought you was telling me you was getting a job?’
‘I’m not getting a job. I’m staying here. She wants me – kind of an adopted daughter, like.’
‘Well I’m sure I hope she’ll find you a better daughter than what I’ve done . . . what you goin’ to do with yourself all day? She got a car?’
‘Read. Work things out, go on a bit further than me A levels. I don’t know. S’pose so. She’s rich.’
‘You are a funny girl. You beat me, honestly you do . . . As for a job, me and your dad can manage without anythink from you, thank you. I can always go out and do a bit, if we run short, though he won’t like it. Rich, is she? Nice for you. What’ll she buy you? Books, I s’pose – clothes’d be wasted on you.’
‘I dunno – bye, Mum. I’ll phone you again next week, same time. Mrs B’s number.’
‘Julie – here, don’t cut off—’
But the line had gone dead. In the little living-room of her neighbour, Mrs Barnett, where the telephone was, Mrs Slater slowly put back the receiver. Her slack, rosy face became doleful. Now there would be lies to think up to tell Mrs Barnett about the phone calls, and George creating when he woke up . . . there was always something. And no Julie coming in round four o’clock . . . better than nothing, when you hadn’t spoken to a soul all day but the milkman or them in the shops. There was always something.
Juliet came out of the telephone box on Church Corner, Leete, which hardly deserved the name of village: a shop, a group of sturdy flint cottages, and an exquisite fourteenth-century church locked and falling into ruin. The telephone booth had been given a recent going-over by delinquents from St Alberics, and was hardly usable, and she hoped that it would soon be repaired; she did not want to use the telephone at Hightower. The servants might know more English than they admitted to, and she did not want them speculating about those four siblings and dead father.
She set off at her swift pace between hedges of thorn dense with green leaves, along the few miles to St Alberics. It was about three in the afternoon, and the lanes and surrounding meadows were silent in the summer hush. The road to tiny Leete ended in its miniature green and a maze of pot-holed lanes leading to grazing land; few cars went exploring there. The occasional enthusiast who had heard of St Helena’s drove down into the secret little place, only to be disappointed by the church’s shut, ancient door, and shocked by black gaps in the windows once filled by dim blue and violet glass.
Juliet had had from Miss Pennecuick that morning, during two hours of fondling and chatter, an inspection of her split shoe; and the suggestion that she should go that afternoon into St Alberics (fumbling extraction of a five-pound note from a handsome leather handbag) and buy another pair: ‘a prettier one, this time love, to please old Auntie’.
Juliet had not yet faced the question of how five pounds was to buy ‘a prettier one’, which would cost at least fifteen pounds; now she was looking, without interest, at the shops in St Alberics high street. She was walking with her usual fleet step, thinking about a problem which she had been studying at three o’clock that morning, when a man’s voice, deep and musical, said somewhere above her head:
‘Good afternoon, Juliet.’
She stopped, startled and angry. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you—’
‘Who’s frightened? How j’oo know my name?’
‘I’ve heard my great-aunt speak of you lots of times, and only one girl she knows could have that hair.’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘I’m on my way to see her now: shall we walk up together?’
‘Who are you, anyway?’ She did not move, but stood staring up at him.
Oh God, he thought, eyes like a mermaid’s or a fay’s. Oh God.
‘Frank Pennecuick. Hasn’t she ever spoken of me?’
‘Yes – come to think of it,’ Juliet admitted grudgingly. ‘You been abroad.’
‘Yes, all over South America, looking for grasses to eat’ – expecting a laugh and some comment.
She uttered neither.
They had paused in the middle of the high street, which, although it was late afternoon, was crowded with inhabitants who appeared never to stop shopping. Frank and Juliet, motionless and apparently gossiping, were attracting irritated glances as people walked round them.
‘Let’s get on – we’re holding up the consumers,’ he said, and they fell into step. Juliet did not, after her first angry stare, glance at him again.
She had seen a face she thought of as ‘kind of wet’; brown, above old brownish clothes, with a shabby rucksack on narrow shoulders. Brown, too, were the large eyes that had smiled down into her own. He was about thirty, and too thin for his height.
In a moment, she stopped. ‘I got to get some shoes. She— Auntie give me a fiver.’
‘Can’t I come in and assist?’
‘S’pose so – I can’t get the sort she wants me to get for a fiver, anyway.’
She turned towards a shop where racks stood outside, laden with single shoes priced at between two and three pounds and made of canvas and plastic. She unhesitatingly picked one out, marched up to an assistant who was loudly laughing with a young man who was attempting to label boxes, and said: ‘I’ll have these. Three quid, aren’t they?’ She handed over the notes. ‘Don’t wrap ’em up, I’ll wear ’em.’
She sat down and slipped off her own broken-soled pair, her head bent so that her hair showered down.
Regarding the hair as a personal affront, the girl assistant undulated to the till. ‘Two-fifty,’ without turning her head.
‘These’ll do – no, better have a smaller size. These slip about.’
The assistant, whose feet were large, banged about among the boxes until she knocked down a pile of them.
Frank Pennecuick, too, studied that hair. He had last week got back from a three-year stay abroad, trying to forget the pain of an excruciating love affair with just such another dryad (these were his type) with the same abundance of hair. But Ottolie’s hair had been red. Also like silk, as thick, but pale red as the hair of some dragon’s daughter. What had he done, that his aunt’s protegée should turn out to be his type again? His fatal and fascinating, irresistible type?
And once more, he groaned in his heart, Oh, God. All that to go through again?
But he had observed the everyday miniature drama going on in the shop, and, desiring to get Juliet to himself as soon as possible, strode inside and said to the girl scrabbling irritably among the scattered boxes: ‘I say – that’s a bit of a disaster. Can I give you a hand?’ in his most flirtatious tone, which gained much from the beauty of his voice.
‘I’m looking for a Size 4,’ said the assistant, instantly all sweetness.
‘Here you are – no sooner sought than found.’ Frank whisked up a box from the pile and held it out, smiling.
‘Thanks ever so.’ And she writhed away to Juliet, who was gazing, shoeless, out of the door.
In two minutes the smaller size was on (Runs in her tights, he noted. That wasn’t like any of the others ) and they were walking together down the high street.
‘Is that the lot?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Any more shopping to do?’
‘No, thank God.’
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’ (Oh, those ‘walks’ with Ottolie or Fiona or Deirdre, walks which had always ended, somehow, in the smartest shop in whatever town they were staying . . .)
‘Hate it.’ Juliet was walking so fast that she was almost running.
‘Good – so do I.’