Pure Juliet Read Online Free PDF Page A

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