Perfectly Correct (4 page)

Louise dumped Miriam’s box files on the hall table and went through to the kitchen. Toby was stirring orange porridge in a casserole dish. Louise put her arms around him from behind and hugged him, resting her cheek against the smooth blade of his shoulder.

‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘It smells wonderful.’

Toby did not disengage himself as Miriam came into the kitchen. He smiled at her. ‘Hello, darling, three phone messages for you.’

Miriam nodded and went out to the telephone in the hall. Toby heard her pick up the phone and dial a number. Only then did he turn to Louise and kiss her deeply on the mouth. While his left hand stirred the lentils his right hand smoothed down from her neck across her breast and down to her buttock.

‘Lovely,’ Toby said. With Miriam and Louise under his roof again he felt wealthy as a polygamous sheikh.

Hugh was not invited to join them for dinner. Toby said he had not made enough. Hugh stayed upstairs, eating baked beans with a spoon from the saucepan, tantalised by the smell of hot food and by the sound of popping corks and laughter. Hugh was Miriam’s choice of lodger. She and Louise had together decided that another woman would not be suitable. Toby’s faint, unexpressed hope, that a second woman lodger might invite him into her flat and into her bed in the morning and at weekends when Miriam was working, was disappointed before he had even acknowledged it to himself.

Hugh was researching into marine life and kept strict office hours at his studies. On Friday and Saturday nights he would go out to a modern jazz club with friends from work and get seriously but quietly drunk. Toby in his heart rather envied these bullish excursions. Toby had no friends. Colleagues at the university feared and envied the speedy progress of his career. Women tended to pass through his life, not stay. The Men’s Consciousness group which he led on Thursday nights was an area of conscientious work rather than spontaneous pleasure. Too many of the men had sexual problems, too many of them would weep over their relationship with their father. Toby would facilitate their tears and their worries over the size of their genitals but he could not grieve with them.

He knew that Men’s Consciousness groups were a pale shadow of the real thing. In this area the women had the edge. Female consciousness had the pulse of an authentic revolutionary movement. Women had so much more to
say. They were angry with their mothers, with their fathers, with their kids. They had issues to challenge about social treatment. They had two thousand years of repression to cite. Every week, every day, almost every moment they suffered from inequality and had to evolve a revolutionary response. Male consciousness was nothing more than a bandwagon attempt by the left-out kids somehow to join in the game. All the unconvincing inventions of male bonding and tenderness could not conceal the fact that men were solitary, rather stupid individuals while women were spontaneously sensitive and collectively minded. Female sexuality was Toby’s delight. Male sexuality held no interest for him whatsoever. Indeed he had to conceal distaste when his brothers wanted to hug him. Except for Miriam and Louise, Toby was a solitary man.

Miriam concluded the last of her telephone calls and came into the kitchen. The table was laid, Toby and Louise were drinking wine. A glass was standing ready for her at her place.

‘Thanks,’ she said, dropping into her chair. ‘That was about the council again.’

The lease on the women’s refuge was due to expire within six months and the council were reluctant to renew. Miriam had launched a lobby campaign on councillors but battered wives were not a priority in a tourist town where income depended largely on an atmosphere of carefree perfection.

‘They’re such bastards,’ Miriam declared.

Toby and Louise nodded, looking suitably grave.

‘Help me serve,’ Toby said to Louise.

Together they arranged the soufflé on the plates and took them to the table. There was a green salad with Toby’s special salad dressing and his home-made brown bread. They opened another bottle of wine.

‘How was the meeting?’ Toby inquired.

‘Bloody awful,’ Miriam replied.

Toby smiled and helped himself to more bread. Miriam might be irritable now but after more wine and some fruit she would become sleepy and pliable. He would not make love with her, he was tired after groping with Louise in the car, but he enjoyed the reassurance of knowing that his wife and his mistress were sexually available to him. Tomorrow morning, after Miriam had brought him a cup of coffee in bed and gone to work, he would make love with Louise if he felt like it. He was a fortunate man and he knew it.

L
OUISE
, driving back to her cottage after teaching a morning tutorial, had every hope of seeing an empty orchard. Instead, as she rounded the bend that Mr Miles had found so treacherous, she was greeted by the irritating sight of the big blue van and a washing line strung between two of her apple trees. Brightly coloured blouses and shapeless grey underwear were bobbing among the blossom. Louise swore, turned her car down the drive, jerked on the handbrake and marched purposefully towards the orchard.

‘Anyone home?’ she demanded truculently.

The van rocked. First the dog put his head around the door, and when he saw Louise wagged a welcoming tail. Then the old lady herself emerged. She was wearing a man’s smoking jacket in deep plum patterned silk and midnight-blue silk pyjama trousers. ‘You again,’ she said.

‘I think you should move on today,’ Louise said clearly. ‘This is my orchard and you have been here now for more than twenty-four hours. I think it’s time you went. If you want a nearby site I can telephone Mr Miles at Wistley Common Farm for you. He sometimes has a vacant field.’

The woman observed her from under the mop of hair. ‘Out all night,’ she said. ‘Did you go to a party?’

Louise found herself blushing. ‘Of course not. I was at a meeting and then I went on to dinner with friends.’

‘I’ll trouble you for some fresh water,’ the woman said. She reached inside the van and brought out the empty jug again. She jumped lightly down from the steps and strolled towards the gate, the dog at her bare heels. Louise took the jug and marched into the house. A couple of letters were pushed to one side as she opened the door into the porch. She filled the jug and stalked back down the garden path. The old woman was leaning on the gate.

‘Beautiful day,’ she commented. ‘You must enjoy the birds at dawn.’

Louise, who never woke until long after dawn, said nothing.

‘I was born here, you know,’ the old woman said conversationally. ‘In this very cottage.’

Louise could not help but be interested but she remained sulkily silent.

‘The trees were younger then,’ the old woman sighed. ‘The trees were so much younger then.’

She put out an old mottled hand and rested it against a tree trunk as an owner might stroke a favourite dog. There was a strange familiarity between her and the tree, as if the tree were responding to her touch. Louise found herself trying to picture her orchard as a field of saplings, like girls ready to dance. ‘I think you should go today,’ she said, but her voice was no longer angry.

The old woman nodded. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘Whatever you wish.’

Louise felt suddenly deflated, as if she had triumphed in some small act of malice.

‘What was your meeting?’ the old woman asked.

Louise shrugged. ‘It’s a committee I belong to. We’re
trying to encourage older women to go on university degree courses. Every year we organise an open day and then for those that are interested we run introductory courses. This year we’re focusing on women in science and industry.’ Louise heard her voice sounding flat and indifferent. ‘It’s a
very
important issue,’ she said.

‘And where did you go for dinner?’

‘To my friends’ house – Toby and Miriam. I used to rent their flat before I came to live here. Miriam and I were at university together. Toby and I …’ Louise abruptly broke off. ‘Toby is her husband,’ she said.

‘Drives a white Ford Escort car, does he?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been past a few times. Quite often there was the white Ford Escort parked outside.’

‘Yes,’ Louise said shortly.

The old woman smiled at her benevolently. ‘Quite a friend you are!’ she observed.

Louise could think of no response to make at all.

‘And what d’you teach, at the university?’ the woman inquired pleasantly.

‘I have an experimental post. I’m a specialist in women’s studies seconded to the Literature department on a year’s trial.’

The old woman nodded. ‘Well, I must get on,’ she said as if Louise were delaying her with gossip. She started towards the van.

‘But you
are
leaving today?’ Louise confirmed.

The old woman turned and waved the gaudy jug. ‘Just as soon as I get packed,’ she said. ‘As you wish.’

Louise nodded and turned and went into the house. She picked up the letters and went to read them in her study. The van, solid and blue, obscured the view of the common
which she usually found so soothing. She opened the letters without needing to tear the flaps, glanced at them and put them under a paperweight. She switched on the word processor and picked up the phone to speak to Toby.

‘She says she’s leaving.’

Toby, collecting books for a seminar for which he had failed to prepare, was rather brisk. ‘Good. End of problem.’

‘I feel like a bully.’

‘Napoleon!’

‘Napoleon?’

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said bracingly. ‘Napoleon said it.’

‘She’s so very old. And she was born here. She says she was born here.’

‘She probably says that everywhere she goes. Look, I have to go. I’m supposed to be taking a seminar on industrialisation and I’ve put
Das Kapital
down somewhere and I can’t find it.’

‘Call me later,’ Louise urged. ‘I feel a bit desolate.’

‘Do some work!’ Toby recommended. ‘Sarah’s waiting for your Lawrence article, she told me this morning. I’ll call you later. I might be able to get out to see you this evening – Men’s Consciousness group is finishing early.’

‘Oh!’ The half-promise was an immediate restorative. Louise often dreaded being alone in the cottage. On cool summer evenings when the swallows swooped and chased against an apricot horizon the cottage seemed too full of ghosts, other people whose lives had been lived more vividly and more passionately than Louise’s. They had left a trace of their desires and needs in every sun-warmed stone, while Louise flitted like a cold shadow leaving no record. Louise felt half-invisible, looking out of the window across the common. She would pour herself a glass of wine and go out
into the garden, sit in a deck chair on the front lawn and read a book, consciously trying to enjoy her solitude. Then she would turn around and look at the little cottage which seemed more lively and vital than herself.

It had been built as a gamekeeper’s cottage, part of a grand estate of which Mr Miles’s great-grandfather had bought a small slice. Louise thought of a man like Lawrence’s gamekeeper, Mellors, letting himself quietly out of the gate that led to the common and walking softly on dew-soaked grass to check his rabbit snares. Impossible for Louise to speculate what a man like that would think as he walked down the sandy paths between the ferns, a dark shadow of a dog at his heels. Impossible even to imagine him without the gloss of literature on him. Louise was not even sure what a gamekeeper did for his day-to-day work, she was far better informed about his sexually gymnastic nights. But that was fiction. Everything she knew best was fiction.

The gamekeeper had left when the big estate was sold up. Mr Miles had told her that the cottage was used by his own family and then housed farm labourers. He knew one of his father’s workers who had lived there with his wife and their seven children. Louise had protested that they could not possibly have all fitted into the two little bedrooms.

‘No bathroom,’ Mr Miles had reminded her. ‘So three bedrooms. Girls in one room, boys in another and parents in the third. I used to come down for my tea with them sometimes. It was grand.’ He smiled at Louise, trying to find the words. ‘A lot of play,’ he said. ‘Like foxcubs.’

Louise sometimes thought of that family as she went to sleep alone in her wide white bed. A family where the children played like foxcubs, with four boys in one room and
three girls whispering in another and a great marital bed which saw birth and death and lovemaking year after year.

She pulled up her chair and sat down before the word processor.

Nothing came.

Outside in the orchard, the blossom bobbed. The blue van was as still as a rock, planted like a rock, embedded in the earth. The old woman was clearly not packing, she was not moving around at all. She was doing nothing and Louise feared very much that when Toby visited in the evening the van would be there still, and the old woman, who guessed so quickly and knew so much, would see Toby’s white Ford Escort car pull up the drive and watch him get out and let himself in the front door with his own key. Louise thought that with the old woman’s bright eyes scanning the front of the cottage she would not feel at all in the right mood to go upstairs with Toby if he wanted to make love.

She was quite right. The van was still there as the sunset dimmed slowly into a soft lavender twilight. Toby’s tyres sprayed gravel as he pulled up outside the cottage. Louise opened the door at once to draw him in, hoping that the old woman would not see them.

‘Evening!’ the old voice called penetratingly from the bottom of the darkening garden.

Toby turned at once, ignoring Louise’s hand on his sleeve. ‘Good evening,’ he replied.

‘Oh, come in,’ Louise urged. ‘She said she was going, but she’s still here. I’ll talk to her tomorrow and get her moved on. Come inside now, Toby.’

‘I’ll just say hello,’ Toby said. ‘I’m curious.’ He handed Louise the bottle of wine he was carrying and strolled down
towards the orchard. The old woman was leaning against the garden gate, her dog sprawled over her bare feet, keeping them warm.

‘Hello.’ Toby smiled his charming smile at her.

The old woman nodded, taking in every inch of him: his silk shirt, sleek trousers, casual shoes, and his jacket slung over his shoulder.

‘And are you at the university too?’ she asked, as if continuing a long conversation.

‘Yes,’ Toby said engagingly. ‘I’m in the Sociology department. Louise teaches feminist studies in the Literature department so we’re colleagues. But tell me, what are you doing here?’

The old woman looked around her as if the briar roses were leaning their pale faces forward to eavesdrop. ‘I’ve come here to write,’ she confided softly. ‘To write my memoirs. I wanted somewhere quiet where I could work.’

‘Really? How very interesting.’ Toby was not interested at all.

She nodded. ‘I was born in 1908. My mother died when I was four. Her health had been broken, you see, by the force-feeding.’

Toby, whose attention had been wandering, suddenly clicked on, like a searchlight. ‘Force-feeding?’

The old woman shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t know. It’s all over and forgotten now. But they were terrible days for the women suffragettes.’

‘I do know,’ Toby said hurriedly and untruthfully. ‘I’ve studied that period. Was your mother a militant suffragette?’

The old woman suddenly gleamed at him. ‘She was! She was! And after her death, they took me in. They called me the youngest recruit of them all! They used to pop me
through the scullery windows to check the houses were empty. We cared about pets, you know. If there was a budgie or a canary I’d open the front door and we’d get them out before we fired the building.’

Toby could feel his heart rate speeding. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You were working for the WSPU – the women’s suffrage movement. And they used you, as a little girl, to help them in their attacks on property?’

The old woman nodded. ‘It was like the greatest adventure in the world for me. I used to love going out at night with them, on the raids.’

‘And you can remember it all?’

‘Remember it?’ the old woman laughed. ‘I’ve got a trunk full of photographs and newspaper clippings. I’ve got my diary and my letters. And
her
diary and her letters too.’

‘Whose diary?’ Toby asked. He had a feeling very like drunkenness. He could feel his head swimming and his breath coming too fast. ‘Whose diary have you got?’

‘Why, the diary of the woman who adopted me,’ the old woman said nonchalantly. ‘Sylvia, Sylvia Pankhurst.’

Toby waded back to the house like a drowning man gasping for the shore. In his fevered imagination he saw the book he would write, the definitive book on the women’s suffrage movement and the inside story of the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. It would be illustrated lavishly with previously unseen photographs. He would quote extensively from her private papers – letters, diaries. He would collate and index them all into chronological order and then deposit them, perhaps at Suffix, perhaps in London. They would be called the Summers collection and he would publish a guide to them. The book would go into many editions. There was a
huge and growing interest in anything about the women’s movement, not just in England but worldwide. He would get a teaching post far better paid, far more prestigious than Suffix could ever offer. He could go to Cambridge, or Oxford. He leaned against the front door for a moment, hyperventilating with fantasy.

Oxford, hell! He could go to America! What would the University of California not give for him, and for the Summers collection? He would be able to name his price. The increasingly complex, increasingly competitive world of sociology would be left behind him. He would be into gender studies, he would be an expert on the women’s movement. He was a new man, every inch of him was a new man. He could enter this deliciously easy growth area and leave sociology with its growing emphasis on computers and complicated statistics behind him.

The door opened behind him. ‘Are you ready to come in now?’ Louise asked sulkily. ‘I’ve opened the wine.’

He turned to her, elated, full of his plans. Then some cautious instinct made him hesitate. ‘She’s quite a character,’ he said casually. ‘D’you know why she’s here?’

Louise passed him a glass of red wine. ‘It’s her route, isn’t it? She knew my aunt. She probably comes here every year.’

‘Oh.’ Toby forced the excitement to drain from his face, he controlled his voice so that he sounded nonchalant. ‘Like a gypsy. They always travel the same route, don’t they?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Louise said. ‘Ask Miriam, it’s more her area than mine.’

As usual, a reference to Miriam signalled Louise’s greatest displeasure. Toby leaned back on the sofa and invitingly patted the cushion beside him. ‘Come and sit here,’ he said.
‘I’ve been thinking about you all day. I couldn’t get you out of my mind.’