Pure Juliet by Stella Gibbons Read Free Book Online Page A

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 toherself 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