Perfectly Correct

L
OUISE CASE GLANCED UP
from the screen of her word processor to her window, and beyond, to where the cameo-pink blossom of the apple orchard should have been visible, lilting in the wind. It was a familiar sight, which she had enjoyed many times this spring while working at her desk. She blinked. Her view of the apple blossom and the green hills beyond was completely obscured by the roof of a big blue van. A shiny steel chimney poked rakishly from one side, there were three long rusting scratches along the roof. Louise stared at it in incomprehension for long moments. Then, not taking her eyes from it, she reached out her hand to the telephone and dialled a number.

‘Toby Summers please, Sociology department,’ she said.

The big blue roof rocked slightly. For an instant she thought hopefully that the van might be about to move, to disappear as suddenly as it had arrived. But it was someone moving inside that made it rock. It remained, obstinately present, in her orchard, blocking her view of her apple blossom.

Toby’s extension rang. Louise rose to her feet and could see more of the van. There was a small door cut in the side, which stood open. There was a stand of two steps leading up to it, planted firmly in the grass where last autumn
Louise had hopefully scattered mixed meadow flower seed. A large mongrel dog was tied on a long piece of string to a bracket beside the door. The inside of the van was in shadow. Louise could see nothing of the owner.

‘Toby Summers.’

‘It’s me.’ Louise had the right of the long-term lover to have her voice recognised at once.

‘Hello,’ Toby said.

‘I’ve got the most extraordinary thing in my orchard. A big blue van. It must have just arrived. I was working in my study and I looked up and there it was.’

Toby chuckled. Since Louise’s impulsive move to the country there had been a number of small crises. Toby preferred to take them as lightly as possible. If Louise was ever in real need both Toby and his wife Miriam would exercise their considerable powers to help her. But they had agreed that the move to the country was so eccentric – so unlike Louise, who had lived in Brighton since her first year at university, through MA and then PhD – that problems were inevitable.

‘Very appropriate,’ he said. ‘Were you working on your Lawrence essay?’

Louise glanced at the screen, blank save for the heading ‘D.H. Lawrence:
The Virgin and the Gypsy
’. ‘Yes.’

‘And now you have your very own gypsy to research,’ Toby said, smiling. The graduate student in his room rose and moved towards the door. Toby shook his head and waved her back into her seat. His affair with Louise had been conducted so discreetly for so many years that it had attained the status of respectability.

‘What should I do?’ Louise asked. ‘Someone can’t just park in the middle of my orchard. It’s private property. He’s trespassing.’

Toby considered. ‘Why don’t you stroll out and ask him politely what he thinks he’s doing? Maybe he’s just pulled off the road for lunch.’

‘He can’t have lunch in my orchard!’ Louise protested. She realised she sounded peevish and she lightened her tone to match Toby’s detached urbanity. ‘He
looks
rather settled. There’s a dog tied up by the door, and he’s put some steps out.’

‘Ask him anyway,’ Toby suggested. ‘It’s not as if you’re an enclosing squire of the manor. Maybe he’s looking for somewhere to stay. He could legally camp on the common, couldn’t he? It’s common land, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. But not in my orchard.’

‘Well, have a chat with him first, and then call me back. I’m here till three.’

‘Is someone with you?’

Toby smiled again at the student who had turned in her chair and was ostentatiously examining the books in the bookcase behind her. ‘Yes.’

Louise experienced a swift, illogical pang that someone else should be in Toby’s intimate little office. She knew it was not jealousy. She and Toby had deliberately forged a completely open relationship, too mature to include archaic emotions such as jealousy. Over the nine years of their love affair he had started and ended other affairs, and so had she. They had made an agreement years ago that their relationship should be free from grasping possessiveness. Louise had watched his love for his wife, Miriam, evolve and change. She had seen him intrigued, passionately involved, and then bored by other women. She herself had experimented, rather callously, with other men. But no-one, it seemed, could quite take the place of Toby, and when he said there was a student in his room with him she felt a
strange breath pass through her nose to her chest, like a faint whiff of smelling salts, of sulphur.

‘I’ll make a survey from the upstairs window,’ she said, making an amusing expedition of it. ‘And then I’ll just go down the garden and chat over the fence. After all, it
is
my orchard.’

‘You
are
an enclosing squire of the manor.’ Toby’s telephone voice was warm and intimate. Louise felt stroked, desirable. The student, who feared Toby’s intellect and disliked the aura of male sexuality which he deliberately radiated, slumped in her chair and pushed her glasses up her short nose. ‘Talk to you later,’ Toby promised and rang off.

Louise put down the phone and glanced again at the blank screen. The essay would not be started until she had resolved the issue of her own gypsy. She went out of her study and through the sitting room, up the little staircase and into her bedroom which looked out over Wistley Common.

The van was even bigger and bluer when viewed from above. It had entered the orchard through a break in the fence which had been made in the winter by Mr Miles skidding in his Land-Rover. He had promised faithfully to mend it and Louise – a newcomer in the village, and dependent on Mr Miles to clear the lane for her should the ice turn to snow – had not reminded him more than twice. His farm was further up the lane, his grazing land nibbled into the edges of the common. This cottage had belonged to his father, and was bought from him by Louise’s aunt who had died and left it to Louise. Mr Miles regarded Louise’s improvements to a cottage ready for demolition with an indulgent eye. He had been sorry to break her pretty new fence, and intended to mend it as soon as he had the time and could buy or borrow some fencing planks. But now,
the van had driven through the gap, down the grassy lane between the trees and parked, facing south to Wistley Common, with apple blossom petals showering gently around it and sticking, like damp confetti, to the battered blue roof.

The dog was lying by the steps, ears slack. Someone had placed a bowl of water beside it, and a small dustbin had silently appeared on the other side of the door. Louise watched for some minutes, but no-one came out of the van. If she wanted to see the gypsy she would have to go and tackle him direct.

She was not frightened. Years ago Louise and Miriam had attended women’s defence classes, and assertiveness training. They had temporarily become women secure in their own worth, confident of their ability to deal with men and women. Since those easy undergraduate days Miriam had faced half a dozen violent men demanding to see their wives who were living in the refuge run by Miriam. Experience had taught Miriam that the hip-and-shoulder throw was of little use against a man twice her weight, fuelled with alcohol and anger, and with a knife in his pocket. But Louise’s postgraduate life had been more select. She had never had to try the hip-and-throw technique on anyone more threatening than her instructor, and her confidence remained high. Besides, she would be on one side of her garden gate and the man would be on the other. If he were abusive she had only to walk half a dozen steps to the French windows in her study and pick up a telephone for the police and have him summarily evicted. She felt that it might be better as a police matter anyway. The man was trespassing, and would undoubtedly cause damage – breaking boughs and fouling the area. There would be litter and, if nothing worse, tyre marks in the grass. Louise had not owned a
house before. She was rather fiercely proprietary about this one. Also, she believed that the countryside was an empty place, occupied only by small shy animals. That was how she liked it.

Still watching the window, she picked up the telephone by the bed and dialled Miriam’s number at the women’s refuge.

‘Hello?’ Miriam always sounded wary. For the past eight years she had been answering the telephone at the refuge and providing telephone counselling for the Rape Crisis Centre. It was very rare that she picked up the phone to hear pleasant news.

‘It’s me,’ Louise said. ‘I have the most extraordinary thing in my orchard.’

Miriam nodded at the woman sitting opposite her desk. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ she said reassuringly. The woman in her early twenties looked resigned to waiting all day if need be. She did not respond to Miriam’s smile.

‘I have someone with me,’ Miriam said suppressively.

‘There’s a van in my orchard. I think it must be a gypsy or a tinker or someone.’

‘How did he get in?’ Miriam’s interest was sharpened at the first mention of a persecuted minority.

‘Through the gap in my fence. It’s still not mended. What should I do?’

‘Is he doing any damage?’

‘Apart from being parked where I planted my meadow flower mix and spoiling the view, no.’

Miriam held back a sigh. ‘I don’t think the view really matters, does it? Or the meadow flower mix?’

‘Well, it is my orchard.’

‘Then ask him to move on.’

‘He can park anywhere on the common, or Mr Miles might let him rent a field.’

Miriam nodded, saying nothing.

‘I’ll suggest that to him.’

‘Do,’ Miriam agreed. ‘Are you coming to the meeting tonight?’

Miriam and Louise worked on an ambitious adult education project with the aim of recruiting older, preferably abused, women into university degree courses.

‘Yes. Seven o’clock, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Come on to dinner. Toby’s cooking.’

‘Thanks,’ Louise said. ‘I will.’

She put down the phone, and went slowly down the stairs. She opened the French windows of her study and walked slowly down the garden towards the little gate which led into the orchard and from there to the common beyond. The garden was still very wild. It had been derelict when she had inherited the cottage. The little house had stood amid a sea of ferns. Heather and ling grew up to the very door, bracken made a waist-high jungle. The beloved flowers of cottage gardens, forget-me-nots, lupins, tall white iris, and blowsy tea roses sprawling into briars, extended from the cottage out into the common land until no-one could have said for certain where one began and the other ended.

In the long summer, while the builders worked slowly every week, laying a damp course, putting in drains, taking up floorboards and joyfully discovering dry rot, Toby and Louise had driven out at the weekend, with a picnic and a rug, and made love in the little wilderness which was her front garden. On those days Toby had laid his head in her lap and looked up at her face and sighed, ‘This is perfect. I wish I could stay here forever,’ which was a pleasingly
ambiguous way of telling his mistress that he preferred her to his wife, and also telling her that he would never act on this preference.

Louise’s whole body, attuned to Toby over years of unequal loving, stirred at the thought of his happiness and, with the selective hearing of the long-term patient mistress, she heard his preference; but was deaf to his choice.

When the builders had finally finished in the autumn, Louise employed Mr Miles to enclose the whole plot, orchard, garden, house, with neat post-and-rail fencing which he put up, efficiently and cheaply, over four weeks, only to break it down one frosty night in the following winter when he drove home from the Holly Bush.

Louise reached her garden gate and paused. For a moment she thought of the Lawrence story which she was about to dissect in the most rigorous of terms.

The Virgin and the Gypsy
was a story on the edge of pornography according to Louise’s critical vision. It depicted an adolescent girl fascinated by a gypsy who was passing her home. There was a flood, and he galloped ahead of the rushing water (Louise was prepared to be very scathing about the libidinous image of both horse and flood waters) to save her. His solution was not to build a raft or bring a boat, but instead to mount the stairs to her bedroom and there deflower her until rescue arrived.

This was a deeply flawed story as far as Louise was concerned. It showed Lawrence’s sentimentality for working people. It showed Lawrence’s male fetish of virginity since the girl was young and innocent and the man older and sexually active. There was also the sexual double standard which was only to be expected from a man such as Lawrence. But it went further even than that. It gloried in the gypsy’s mysterious maleness. Louise was prepared to be very sharp
with the notion of male mystery. It was generally acknowledged among her circle that it is female sexuality which is the mystery. Male sexuality is all too transparent.

She was particularly tough on this little story, which she intended to compare to the tremulous seducto-rape scenes of so-called women’s fiction because, while she had been re-reading it last night with a pencil in her hand to make sharp little deflating comments in the margin as if D.H. Lawrence were one of her own, not very bright, students, she had been surprised by the sudden rise of sexual desire. Turning out the light, and sliding her hand down inside the pyjamas which she was forced to wear for warmth in the damp cottage, she found herself unexpectedly thinking of Mr Miles crashing his Land-Rover through her fence and how it would have been if he had been drunk with desire and not with Theakston’s Old Peculier. As she wriggled in her bed in the dark room she found her unreliable imagination conjuring an image of herself as the girl, with the gypsy galloping on his horse, with his awesome male potency, to her alone.

That
was why she was so particularly angry with D.H. Lawrence in the morning. He had played, she thought, the oldest cheapest trick of all – recycling outworn sexual cliches which long years of consciousness training have not yet wholly eliminated from the female erotic imagination. All very well to say that women are fighting two thousand years of patriarchal pornographic imagery and that they will make their own fantasies anew when their imaginations are freed. All very well to
say
that in meetings – a different matter altogether at night when the smells of early summer wafted through the bedroom window and the owls called passionately under flaming ochre stars, and Louise’s wilful unreconstructed desires conjured the image of a man who would
push her roughly on the bed and take her urgently and breathlessly without a word being exchanged.