Perfectly Correct (27 page)

From the lane came the whine of sirens. Andrew sighed at the prospect of imminent trouble. ‘She wrote a note to me,’ he said. ‘She wanted you to have Lloyd George.’

‘Lloyd George?’

‘The dog.’

‘Oh. Did she burn all her papers?’

Andrew nodded. ‘That was her right,’ he said gently.

‘I suppose so,’ Louise said regretfully.

‘It was her that stole Toby’s money, you know.’

‘What?’

‘She pickpocketed his cash card and memorised the
number. She watched him tap it in when they were shopping. She
said
she didn’t understand how it worked, that she was just taking it from the bank. But she took out all the money until it was empty.’

Louise could feel her laughter rising. ‘Oh, she was dreadful! She was a wonderfully dreadful woman!’

‘She had three hundred pounds of it left. She’s sent it to Miriam.’

‘To Miriam?’

‘In her letter she says for Miriam to buy a mountain bike and go.’

A police car turned in to Louise’s gate, followed by another.

‘And she left her share of the cottage to the two of us on conditions,’ Andrew said.

‘I thought you were her heir?’

‘She’s very determined we should marry. I’ll show you the letter tonight. The cottage is left to the two of us on condition we marry.’

Louise nodded. ‘She was an awfully bossy old lady.’

Andrew smiled reflectively. ‘She was,’ he agreed. ‘I’m glad to have known her.’ He turned towards the police cars. ‘This may take me some time. You sort your things out here and go back to the farm. You can make sure that the ravers get off all right. If there’s no damage to the fences or gates or anything you can give them their deposit cheque back, it’s in the right-hand drawer of the desk in the farm office. If anyone wants to stay on it’s eight pounds a night and they can stay till next weekend, but that’s all. If I’m in real trouble with the police, I’ll phone you. My solicitor’s telephone number is in the back of the diary on my desk. You’d better give him a ring anyway, and tell him what has happened.’

Louise clutched hold of Andrew’s sleeve. ‘Will they charge you with something?’

Andrew grinned and shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not their favourite responsible citizen at the moment. But it’s not a hanging offence.’

He gave Louise a quick kiss and a hug and then turned and walked up towards the police cars, pulling on his cap as he went. Behind him the fire burned dully as the last remnants of Rose’s treasures went up in a defiant plume of grey smoke with her.

At the farm Miriam was eating lunch in the kitchen when Louise returned with a despondent dog on the end of a piece of string. ‘Mrs Shaw left the most wonderful salad,’ she said, then she stopped as she saw Louise’s face. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Rose is dead,’ Louise replied. She sat down at the table. Lloyd George immediately sat under the table and rested his warm chin on her feet. ‘She died overnight. She had asked Andrew to go down there at midday today. She knew she would be dead. She left him a letter telling him to burn her body and her van. She left me her dog. She left you three hundred pounds to buy a mountain bike.’

A slow smile spread across Miriam’s astounded face. ‘She was a wonderful woman,’ she said. ‘And I’ll damn well do it too. It was her who put the idea of running away in my mind in the first place. She told me to change myself before I tried to change other people. I wonder where she got three hundred pounds from?’

‘I don’t know,’ Louise said, suddenly cowardly. ‘But it’s yours now.’

‘Where’s Andrew?’

‘The police took him off. I think it’s all probably dreadfully illegal. He told me to phone his solicitor and tell him what’s happening.’

‘But the rave organisers are leaving, they need their cheque back and they wanted to see him.’

‘I’ll deal with them,’ Louise said, unconscious of her quiet confidence. ‘I’ll just go and phone Andrew’s lawyer. I don’t want him clapped up in irons all day.’

Miriam blinked in surprise as this new, assertive Louise went through to the farm office, made herself comfortable at the desk, and telephoned Andrew’s lawyer with a succinct account of Rose’s death and funeral pyre. Then she went out into the field with Steve and checked the fences and the gates and the absence of any litter and damage, and returned him his cheque. ‘I wanted to see the boss, to make a booking for next year, if he’s agreeable,’ Steve said.

Louise nodded. ‘You can deal with me. We’d be happy to see you back here again. About the same time of year, when we’ve cut the hay crop. We’ll call it a provisional booking, I’ll confirm with you in writing later.’

‘OK. Same money?’

Louise shook her head. ‘There’ll be a fifteen per cent surcharge next year,’ she said firmly. ‘If we’re going to make it an annual event then it has to go up in price annually. The pigs need feeding, you know.’

Steve put out his hand. ‘Done.’

‘Twenty per cent deposit to pay when you confirm the booking,’ Louise said.

Steve grinned at her. ‘So you’re the new business manager.’

Louise smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

Steve waved the big stage truck out of the farm gate and
into the lane, and then got behind the wheel of his BMW. ‘See you next year,’ he said. ‘It was a great party.’

‘We enjoyed it too!’ Louise called. ‘Next year.’

The little convoy turned out of the field into the lane followed by a couple of the ramshackle vans. No-one had stayed behind and only the stamped-down grass of the dancing area showed that they had been there at all. Louise looked across the hayfield to the field near the common where the Charolais cows were grazing, and to the fields next door where the sheep were safe. Andrew’s tractor was where he had left it in the hayfield. Louise strolled down the meadow towards it. She felt like trying a spot of haymaking.

The police held Andrew long enough to irritate him but then released him without bringing any charges. Rose had explained her illness and her desire for a traditional Romany funeral in her letter. She had consulted the GP at Wistley’s weekly clinic and when the police inspector telephoned, he confirmed that she had cancer. She had refused all treatment but had accepted a large prescription for painkillers. In her letter to Andrew she said that she had been saving all her painkillers in recent months and had washed them down with a truly excellent bottle of port late on Saturday night. The police objected very strongly to Andrew running his own private crematorium, but the inspector decided that the charge of setting fire to a van and to the body of an old lady was too bizarre for the magistrates’ court to sort out. He warned Andrew that he must never never do it again and Andrew pointed out, rather ungraciously, that he was hardly likely to feel the need.

They released him at six o’clock that evening after taking two full statements in triplicate. Andrew telephoned Louise
from the public call box outside the police station at Chichester.

‘I was starting to wonder if you were OK.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Can you come down and pick me up?’

‘I’ll take you out to dinner,’ Louise offered.

‘Done,’ he said. ‘Bring a clean shirt for me if you want to go anywhere in the least respectable. I smell like a cowpunching arsonist.’

‘Sexy beast,’ Louise said and rang off.

She went upstairs to their bedroom and took a clean blue cotton shirt from the wardrobe and held it for a moment against her cheek, looking down the valley of Wistley common. The sun was setting and the common was golden in the muted light. On her left a little rind of moon was rising, a pale gold. The fields were quiet, the cows on the distant field gathered in the far corner. The hay had been turned, the last three windrows hopelessly zig-zag from Louise’s unpractised steering. The sheep were lying down like little puffs of cotton wool in the twilight. The pigs were hypothetical as ever.

Louise looked at the landscape which over the next years would become as familiar and as dear as Andrew’s face, and knew herself to be deeply happy.

Then she ran down the stairs and out to the yard to fetch Andrew home.

D.H. LAWRENCE
,
THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY
,
A RECONSIDERATION
.

For too many years feminist criticism has focused on Lawrence’s obsession with male sexuality and his neglect of heroines who too often are mere mirrors for the dominant male ego. These represent genuine difficulties, especially for the feminist reader, but if we allow Lawrence this bias, we see that he has much to teach us about male-female relationships, especially at this stage of our development.

The demand by feminists for the so-called ‘New Man’ who should equal the woman in his caring and emotional nature has produced serious consequences. One of these is the backlash from men who cannot or will not conform to this new stereotype of behaviour, men who are inadequate or psychologically unfit. But there are also men, of a different sort, who cannot conform to the weakness and femininity of the ‘New Man’. These are men who prize their assertiveness, their right to protect and defend their family, who insist on their difference from women – not their sameness.

As feminists we should understand this. We have been insisting for years on the right to explore our femininity despite the stereotypical images of women in our patriarchal culture. Now men too are saying that the patriarchal culture imposes stereotypes on them and they have to explore their gender’s history and their personal psychology to find their true nature. What this true nature is likely to be it is still too early to say. But it will be neither the macho image of maleness that twentieth-century western culture promotes, nor the weak effeminacy of the worst of the ‘New Man’.

Men’s view of themselves is in a powerful and exciting period of change and, just as we have demanded their support in our experiments with taking our power, we owe them a reciprocal support as they explore their own genuine power, which is quite different from the exploitive and abusive power offered them by patriarchy. There are a very few men [Louise wrote smugly] who by virtue of circumstance and personal psychology have managed to be relatively untouched by the cruelty of unequal relationships between the sexes and can thus give themselves in a relationship with passion and with honesty, with sensitivity and with pride. When a woman is lucky enough to be loved by a man such as this – as the Virgin of the story is loved by the Gypsy, as Constance Chatterley is by Mellors – she knows that she has the foundation of a relationship which is not only deeply exciting, but which shows her the way forward and away from the battle between the sexes. The battle was always sited on false positions, posturing about stereotypes of behaviour. The reality is the wonderful erotic and romantic differences between genuinely enlightened men and women.

Louise stopped typing and gazed out of the window. Her new study in the farmhouse spare bedroom looked south over her fields and towards the common. It was early autumn. Andrew was ploughing a field for winter wheat and seagulls flew up like a plume of silver white smoke from behind the plough. The common beyond the little red tractor was in shades of ochre, bronze, russet and sepia. The dryer higher patches of grass were a pale bleached yellow and where the autumn bracken lay thick, a foxy auburn colour predominated.

Louise sat back, resting her feet on Rose’s mongrel dog Lloyd George, at his customary place under her desk. She re-read what she had written, unaware as usual that she had completely failed to comment on Lawrence but had successfully described her own emotional state.

She rested a hand on the swell of her belly and felt for the first time the extraordinary sensation of the baby moving inside her. At once the little shape she had seen on the hospital scanner, the little patter of heartbeats, meant something more: the start of a new life, an individual taking shape, an heir for the farm, a child for Andrew and Louise.

Lawrence, the patriarchy, the evolution of new sexual relationships all receded into the background. Louise sat very still, her eyes on the sweet slopes of the Sussex hills, a little smile on her face, waiting for their baby to move again.

THE END