Perfectly Correct (6 page)

Louise lived far beyond the restricted village paper round which was organised by Mrs Ford from the village shop and delivered only to her particular favourites. Louise adored reading the
Guardian
over breakfast. Toby had played one of his strongest cards.

‘Oh, how lovely!’ she exclaimed. ‘To what do I owe the honour?’

Toby smiled his engaging smile. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just thought we could spend the morning together. Don’t get up before I arrive and I’ll bring it up to you in bed. I’ll be here by nine.’

Louise wound her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek and his ear. ‘Lovely lovely man,’ she said softly.

‘Promise you won’t get up?’ Toby demanded cunningly. ‘I don’t want you to spoil the mood by worrying about the old lady. You stay in bed until I come.’

‘Promise.’

He released her and she watched him walk from her front
door to his car. Then she shut the front door and went to the kitchen to clear the plates from supper. She was thoughtful. This was the first time Toby had offered to bring her breakfast since the move to the cottage. In the old days, in her little studio flat, he had often climbed the stairs with his copy of the
Guardian
and croissants hot from the bakery in a greasy paper bag, after Miriam had left for work. The transition of this tradition to the cottage could only indicate his increasing commitment.

She wiped down the pine table with a sense of fluttery excitement. Toby had been with her this morning, teasing, withholding, but playing with her and not his wife. He had been with her all evening, and now he was coming to breakfast. His movement towards her was evident. Since the start of their affair Louise had wanted him to choose her. The underground half-conscious competition between close women friends meant that Louise and Miriam were always rivals. The women’s movement’s insistence on loving sisterhood had meant that both women totally ignored this. If challenged they would have denied any feeling of rivalry; but in fact Miriam was always worried that she had made the wrong career choice when she decided to work for the refuge and leave the academic life which had been so good for Louise; while Louise’s sexual confidence would always be undermined by her memory of the three long summers when Miriam attracted scores of young men by doing nothing more seductive than lying on the grass and picking daisies. Only one thing could restore Louise to a proper sense of her own worth – Toby.

Louise went through to her study to collect the vexing copy of
The Virgin and the Gypsy
to re-read once more in bed. A glimmer of golden light from the bottom of the orchard caught her eye. Now there was a woman who
seemed to need no man at all. No friend, no husband, no lover, certainly not the husband of her best friend. Louise stood for a little while in the darkness of her study looking out at the friendly little light, considering the old lady. There was a woman who seemed powerfully self-contained. Not a property-owner like Louise, not a career woman like Louise. Not a sexual object like Louise – left alone again, despite her silky sexy dressing gown. A woman who had avoided all the opportunities and all the traps open to the modern woman. A woman who had been born into a society markedly less free, a woman who enjoyed none of Louise’s opportunities and enhanced consciousness but who was, nonetheless, an independent woman in a way that Louise was not.

Louise speed-read the whole of
The Virgin and the Gypsy
before she went to sleep. Although she had taken English Literature as her BA and was now a women’s specialist in the Literature department, Louise was quite incapable of understanding either fiction or poetry. All of it was judged purely on its attitude to women. She had learned the jargon and skills of literary criticism. She could point to an adjective and detect imagery. But the heart of her interest in writing was neither the story nor the telling of it, but its attitude to the heroines.

Any work of fiction could thus be simply de-constructed and simply scored on a grade of say one to ten, entirely on the basis of its position on women. The language might be living vibrant poetry, the story might bypass Louise’s critical pencil and plunge straight into her imagination, but still she would work through the pages going tick, tick, tick in the margin for positive references to women, and cross, cross, cross for negative imagery. A piece of blatant sexism would be flagged with a shocked exclamation mark.
The
Virgin and the Gypsy
was spotted with outraged exclamation marks by the time that Louise’s bedside clock showed midnight and she had finished re-reading it.

She closed the book carefully and put it on her bedside table. She set her alarm clock for quarter to eight. She had promised Toby that she would not get up before he arrived with her breakfast but she was not going to be found in bed in her brushed cotton pyjamas, her hair tangled, and her mouth tasting stale. When Toby arrived, thinking he was waking her, she would have already showered with perfumed shower gel, cleaned her teeth, brushed her hair, and changed into silk pyjamas which matched the dressing gown she only wore for Toby’s visits.

She glanced towards the darkened window. There was a pale wide moon riding in the skies over the darkened common. An owl hooted longingly. Up the little lane came the strangled roar of a Land-Rover in the wrong gear: Mr Miles driving home after a late night at the Holly Bush. The sound of the engine faded as he turned the corner towards his solitary darkened farm and then everything was quiet again. Louise turned on her side and gathered her pillow into her arms for the illusion of company, and slept.

She dreamed almost at once. She was in Toby and Miriam’s house but the road before their front gate was a deep brown flood of a river. At the edge of the churning waters, where the waves splashed and broke against the front doorsteps, was a tossing flotsam of paperbacks, their pages soggy and sinking in the dark waters, their covers ripped helplessly from the spines and rolling over and over in the turbulence of the flood.

Louise began to be afraid but then realised, with the easy logic of dreams, that she could go out of the back door, into the little yard and through the backyard gate, where she
put out the dustbins on Thursdays. From the backstreet she could go to the university, to her office, where there were plenty of books to replace those that were rushing in the flood past the house, torn and soggy. She went quickly through the kitchen and flung open the back door.

It was the very worst thing she could have done. With an almighty roar, like that of some wild and uncontrollable animal, the flood water rushed towards her, far higher and more violent than it had been at the front. Louise fled before it as it tore the notes from the cork pin-board and clashed saucepans in their cupboards. The larder door burst open and packets of cereals and rice tumbled out into the boiling waters. Toby’s wine rack crashed down and the bottles broke, turning the water as red as blood and terrifyingly sweet. Louise ran for the stairs, the red waves lapping and sucking at her feet as the current eddied and flowed through the ground floor of the house. She screamed as she grabbed the newel post at the bottom of the stairs but there was no answering call from above. She was alone in the whole world with the hungry waters after her.

She staggered up the stairs as a fresh high wave billowed in through the kitchen door. With a crash the front door fell in and the two rivers merged, swirling, in the hall. The scarlet waters’ terrible load of tumbling books chased Louise up the stairs, past Toby and Miriam’s bathroom and bedroom, up the little stairs to her own flat.

There was someone in her bed. A man. For a moment Louise recoiled in fear, and then the crash behind her, as the stairs gave way, made her run into the room and fling herself on him, terrified at last into desire. She was screaming, but not for help. She was screaming: ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

Louise wrenched herself from sleep with a gasp of terror.
Her pillow, gripped in her arms, was damp with warm sweat. Her hair was plastered to her neck as if she had indeed been washed by the waters of that strange dream flood. She swallowed painfully, her throat was sore. She unclenched her fists, she released the pillow.

Her bedroom was very quiet. The clock ticked very softly. She looked towards the window. Dawn was coming, the first she had ever seen in the country. In the soft pearly light of the early morning a few solitary birds were starting to sing. Louise raised herself up in her bed and looked down towards the orchard. The blue van was there, with a tiny wisp of smoke coming from the skewed chimney. The van was rocking slightly as the old woman inside moved about, making breakfast for herself and the dog. Louise sniffed. She could smell a safe warm smell of woodsmoke. She felt enormously comforted at the sight of that battered blue roof and the presence of another person nearby. She dropped back to the pillows again and fell asleep like a child that is reassured by the sound of her mother in the next room. There was, after all, nothing to fear.

T
OBY WAS PROMPT
, anxious that Louise should not have broken her promise and moved the old woman on. Before he let himself in at the front door he put down the packages on the doorstep and went quietly down to the caravan in the orchard.

The old woman was sitting in her doorway, face turned upwards to the weak morning sunshine. She smiled at him when she saw him but she did not move. The dog raised his head and lifted his ears and gave a soft warning growl.

‘Hush,’ the old woman said gruffly.

At once the dog dropped down to watch Toby in silence.

‘I’ll come and talk to you later,’ Toby said. ‘If I may.’ He smiled his most charming smile. ‘I’m longing to hear about your childhood. Could you spare me some time this morning?’

The old woman looked thoughtful. ‘I promised her I’d leave,’ she said regretfully. ‘She doesn’t want me in her orchard. I should be moving on today. I’m about ready to get packed.’

Toby let himself through the gate, the words spilling out in haste. ‘Oh, don’t go, don’t go. There’s no need for you to go. I’ll talk to Louise. She doesn’t really want you to go. You needn’t leave for a week or so. I promise.’

The old woman smiled at him. ‘As you wish,’ she said gently. ‘I’d rather stay. I’ve some problem with the van that needs sorting. Mr Miles’ll do it for me. I could get it fixed here and then move on later.’

Toby nodded. ‘You do that. I’ll be out later. In about an hour.’

The old woman graciously assented. ‘All right, then. I’ll be here.’

Louise, watching the two of them from her bedroom window, wondered what Toby wanted with the old woman. If it had been Miriam seeking her out then Louise would have known that she had found her a settlement place, a bed in a refuge, a council site. But Toby – Toby never did anything for anyone but himself.

Louise slipped into bed and arranged herself attractively on the pillows as the front door opened and Toby’s footsteps sounded on the stairs.

‘Darling,’ he said as he came into the room and laid the
Guardian
on her white counterpane. ‘Darling.’

‘The old woman’s van has got some mechanical problem,’ Toby said after he had made efficient but perfunctory love to Louise, unpacked the croissants and drank coffee, all in a rather bohemian mess in Louise’s wide white bed.

Louise watched him, her eyes hazy with post-coital content.

‘She told me Mr Miles would fix it for her if she could stay a few more days. I said I was sure you’d let her.’ Toby put on his little-boy-pleasing face. ‘I was sure you wouldn’t really mind.’

‘I do mind,’ Louise said abruptly. ‘I don’t want her here. I didn’t ask her to come here. And I particularly dislike the
way she interferes. She talks to you, she watches my front door and knows when you’re here. God knows what arrangements she has in there for hygiene. Mr Miles has a thousand empty fields. If she’s on such good terms with him, why doesn’t she go up there?’

Toby reconsidered rapidly. As long as he knew where the old woman was, it would actually be more convenient if she were not on Louise’s doorstep. A casual remark from her about Sylvia Pankhurst, and Toby’s research would have to be shared with Louise, and the rewards shared too. But if she were safely housed away from Louise then he could develop the interviews at a leisurely, appropriate pace, and Louise would not find out about it until he had a contract from a publisher and an exclusive agreement with the old lady.

‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you ask Mr Miles? He owes you a favour for breaking the fence.’

‘I’ll phone him,’ Louise decided. ‘I’ll phone him this morning.’

Toby got dressed slowly while Louise showered for the second time that morning and then emerged from the bathroom rubbing her hair dry with a towel. He cleared the breakfast things away while she dressed and when she came downstairs he was washing up.

‘Thank you,’ she said, slightly surprised.

Toby shrugged off her thanks. ‘You’ve got enough to do. I want to see this problem with the old lady solved before I go to work. Call Mr Miles now, I can help him move her.’

Louise gave Toby a long level scrutinising look. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She dialled the number on the kitchen telephone. It rang for a long time and when Andrew Miles picked it up he was breathless from running from the yard.

‘It’s Louise Case. I’m sorry to trouble you but I have a problem here.’

‘Oh aye,’ Mr Miles said cautiously. Louise had telephoned him when her septic tank overflowed, when her rainwater drains had blocked and flooded her study, when her water-pipes froze, and when the coal merchant had failed to deliver her coal. To all these minor crises Mr Miles had responded as a good neighbour, and graciously received Louise’s envelopes containing excessive amounts of cash. But he had learned that Louise’s charm – to which he was deeply susceptible – generally indicated work which needed doing at once, often in the middle of lambing.

‘I have this old woman camping in my orchard,’ Louise said.

‘Well, you would,’ Mr Miles replied. ‘It’s May.’

‘Is that her name?’

‘The month. She always camps in your orchard in May. June she goes on to Cothering Farm. Every year.’

Louise exhaled her rising irritation. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Oh, yes.’

Mr Miles seemed to think the call had ended. He was about to put down the telephone.

‘Wait!’ Louise said urgently. ‘I want her moved.’

There was a shocked silence.

‘She can’t stay here, there are no … facilities. She has a dog, and she needs wood for her stove. She’s right at the bottom of my garden!’

Mr Miles sighed.

‘Surely you have a corner of a field or somewhere she could go?’ Louise asked plaintively. ‘All those fields of yours are empty.’

‘Hay,’ Andrew Miles said succinctly. ‘Those empty fields
are hay meadows. They are not empty. They are growing hay. You can’t put a van on a hay crop.’

‘Somewhere there must be a corner for her?’

‘She can come if she likes. But she’s always stayed in your orchard before. She was born there.’

‘Will you come down and tell her?’

‘I’ll come down just before dinner,’ Andrew Miles said grudgingly. ‘But I doubt she’ll listen to me.’

‘Not until tonight?’

‘Dinner midday.’

‘Thank you,’ Louise said. But he had already hung up.

Andrew Miles’s Land-Rover pulled up behind Toby’s clean white Ford Escort and coughed to a standstill. Louise came out of the front door, Toby behind her. Louise introduced the two men. Andrew looked over Toby with one brief, encompassing glance. Toby in his turn saw a man in his middle forties, weathered into a broken-veined tan. A tall man, all bone and muscle with beaky hard features and a pair of hard blue eyes. His thinning fair hair was crushed down by a flat cloth cap with the shine of age on the peak. He was wearing working trousers very unlike Toby’s well-cut chinos, and a brushed cotton coloured shirt with the nap worn away at the collar.

‘Well, then,’ he said.

Louise led the way down the garden to the orchard gate. ‘Hello!’ she called.

The old woman poked her head out of the van door and looked at the three of them. She nodded to Andrew Miles with a small knowing smile, but she said nothing.

‘Mr Miles here has a field where you could park your van,’ Louise began. Unconsciously she had raised her voice
to the determinedly bright tone that is appropriate for the disabled and old and those too weak to protest. ‘A lovely big field where you’d be more comfortable.’

The old woman looked at Andrew. ‘The bottom field where your dad kept the pigs?’ she asked. ‘I told your grandad and I told your dad I’d not stop there.’

‘Any field you like. You’re in the way for Miss Case, here,’ he said gruffly.

The old woman looked quickly at Louise. ‘How am I in your way?’

‘You’re not!’ Louise said quickly. ‘But it is my orchard, and you are trespassing, actually.’ She felt her voice weaken. ‘It is my land, you know, and there isn’t really room for you here.’

‘He said I could stay.’ The old woman jerked a dirty thumb at Toby. ‘Your fancy-man. He said I could stay.’

Toby flushed under Andrew Miles’s look of interested inquiry. ‘Well, I was just thinking …’

‘I can’t move anyway,’ the old woman said. ‘The gears are gone. I couldn’t get up that hill. I’ve got no first or second gear. I was going to ask you to fix it for me.’

Andrew nodded. ‘Not today I can’t,’ he cautioned. ‘Later I will.’

The old lady nodded as if the problem were solved. ‘When the engine’s fixed I’ll move on,’ she said. ‘Not to the pig field. I go on to Cothering next. I’ll go when the engine is fixed.’

Louise would have been happier with an undertaking as to when the engine would be fixed but both men had nodded and turned away. The old woman spoke to Louise in a conspiratorial undertone. ‘He’s a handsome man. Any woman would be proud to have him in her bed. I can see why you like him.’

‘Toby?’

‘Andrew Miles,’ the woman said, her voice loving every syllable of his name. ‘And such a pretty farm, and owned freehold, you know. You’ve been wasting your time with that girl’s blouse Toby. If I were your age I’d be tucked up in the big feather bed in the farmhouse b’now and a couple of babies in the cot, too.’

Louise turned away and followed the men back to the house. They were standing in the drive beside Andrew’s Land-Rover. Louise felt extraordinarily uncomfortable.

‘I’ll need to look round,’ Mr Miles said. ‘I’ll have to find a reconditioned gear box. It’s a big job. I can come down and do it later in the week.’

‘That’ll be great,’ Toby agreed eagerly. He was heavier than Andrew Miles, better dressed, rounder-faced, richer all over with the smooth glossiness of a well-serviced urban man. But beside the beaky farmer he looked strangely insubstantial. ‘Louise can’t really work with the van there.’

‘I thought she worked in the dining room?’

‘It overlooks the orchard.’

Andrew Miles looked at Louise as if he would ask her what work took place in the dining room but needed a clear view of the orchard. ‘Landscape painting?’

‘No, I’m trying to write an essay on Lawrence,’ Louise said. ‘But I can’t concentrate on anything when I keep seeing the van.’

‘Oh, writing. I thought you were a teacher.’

‘I teach at the university and I write as well.’

He opened the door of the Land-Rover. It creaked loudly and a few flakes of paint fell like dark green snow. ‘Got to get home,’ he said. ‘Pigs want feeding.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ Louise said. ‘I really do appreciate it. You’re such a good neighbour!’

Andrew Miles nodded without smiling. Louise, feeling that she had been gushing, retreated to the front door. Toby stood by his car, to ensure that Mr Miles crashed his Land-Rover into reverse gear and backed safely away from its shiny whiteness.

They went back into the house. ‘Coffee?’ Louise offered. ‘Or do you have to go?’

‘Actually, I think I’ll pop down and have another word with your old lady. She was talking to me last night about her childhood. I was thinking, I might do a bit of oral history research on her. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. If she’s going to be here for a few days I could take the opportunity.’

‘You hate oral history,’ Louise pointed out. ‘You said it was worse than local history in encouraging people to be egotistical about their boring past, trying to pass tedious personal gossip off as interesting facts.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Toby said with an easy laugh. ‘But if she really was born here and adopted in London then she does have a story. Quite different from all the people who worked in newspapers before computers, or served in shops before supermarkets. She might be really quite interesting.’

Louise shrugged. Her dream of the flood-tide carrying books, the old woman’s admiration of Andrew Miles, and Toby’s sudden attentiveness all conspired to make her feel off-balance. She felt as if the calm certainties of her life as a career academic and adulterous lover were all being questioned at once. ‘Talk to her if you want to,’ she said. ‘But if Miriam rings me, are you supposed to be here?’

‘I’m in the library at university,’ Toby said. He knew that the naming of Miriam was a warning of Louise’s displeasure, but his inner joy that he had successfully laid claim
to the old lady’s story without challenge from Louise was too great.

‘You do some work,’ he urged. ‘Don’t worry about the old lady. She’ll be no trouble to you now.’ He smiled at her and went down the garden path to the gate to the orchard. Louise turned and went back into the house.

‘
The Virgin and the Gypsy
, a patriarchal myth of rape and female growth,’ Louise typed into the keyboard. The words came up on the screen, each letter trotting out behind the cursor like a reliable friend. Louise paused. She had the start of an idea – that Lawrence portrayed the young women as waiting for an event in their lives, that Yvette in particular was shown as a girl awaiting transition into womanhood. There was some concealed pun, Louise thought, in the girls having attended ‘finishing’ school – and the sense that their travels ended at the start of the book. Lawrence affected to know better – that the two women were not finished, they were not even started until they were sexually active.

So far so good (tick tick in the margin) but then Lawrence went further and implied that sexual development was the only future open to them. Their conversation was mainly about adornment and husband-catching. Their social life was all courtship. And their inner life was the progress from unknowing virginity to maturity which could only be achieved through sexual intercourse with a knowing man. All this was very bad indeed (cross cross cross in the margin, and often‘!’).

Louise thought she could write a convincing essay dividing Lawrence the rebel – against the bourgeois society, which was good (tick tick) from Lawrence the sexist – against
women except as sexual objects, which was bad (cross cross cross). But when she came to write the first paragraph she found that between her and the screen came an entrapping maze of images. The snowdrop-flower of the mother’s face, the gypsy lashing his horse to reach the house before the thundering flood of the river, Andrew Miles’s gentle smile at the old woman, and her own dream of rising water and the man in her bed. A man to whom she had cried ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ A wronged man, the wronged man. The wrong man.