Pure Juliet Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Book Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Book Three

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Creepy. Peculiar. Fairy. Goblin. Liar. Weirdo. Crank. Genius.

  No one knows what to make of Juliet Slater, not even her mother. And clothes, boys, school, friends, the changing seasons and what other people think – none of these things seem to matter to Juliet. She spends hours in her room with incomprehensible mathematical text books, her mind voyaging in strange seas of thought, alone. Is she a genius? It might take the rest of her life to find out.

  While Stella Gibbons was celebrated for her beloved bestseller Cold Comfort Farm, the manuscript for Pure Juliet lay unseen and forgotten until it was brought to light by her family in 2014, and is published here for the first time in Vintage Classics. A tale that travels from an eco-millionaire’s British country idyll to an Arabian Nights-style fantasy of the Middle East, this is a treat for fans of this witty, curious and always surprising author.

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-seven novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Among her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  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

  For Rosemary Steiner

  STELLA GIBBONS

  Pure Juliet

  ‘Yet once in a while the miracle seems to occur; an effect of great splendour is produced without visible cause. There will be a sort of immaculate conception, and a mind of great power and originality will develop, where heredity and environment would lead one least to expect it, engendering in itself, apparently without any fertilizing contact, a violent impulse towards some science, some art, which it pursues with unaccountable love.’

  Margaret Lane, in an essay on

  ‘The Boyhood of Fabre’

  ‘La demarche scientifique . . . est une patiente

  recherche, une minutieuse comparaison d’un petit

  nombre de facteurs, dont le savant essaie les rapports

  profonds, cachés sons des apparences superficielles.’

  Pierre Gaxotte, de l’Académie française

  ‘Theory is grey, but green-gold is the tree of life.’

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  BOOK ONE

  1

  ‘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 w
as 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 . . .’

  2

  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.