Perfectly Correct (11 page)

He was surprised to find the van door closed. He called ‘Hello’ from the gate but did not like to come closer because the dog, which was sulking under the van with its back turned to the increasingly cool breezes which were blowing up the hill, raised its lip and growled softly at him. The second time he called the door creaked open.

‘Yes?’ Rose asked. ‘It’s a good deal too busy here, shouting and people visiting all day. It was better when the old lady was alive.’

‘I
am
sorry,’ Toby said charmingly. ‘It’s just that I’m so keen to talk to you. I am fascinated by your story. May I come in?’

She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t settle to it today, I’m that worried.’

Toby was alert. ‘Surely you could settle to it,’ he said. ‘Those interesting newspaper clippings?’

‘I’m not well,’ Rose said. ‘You’ll have heard that.’

Toby composed his face into an expression of sincere concern. ‘I
did
hear,’ he said. ‘I was so sorry. It made me think how lovely it would be if we could preserve your memories in a beautiful book so that you will have left your mark on the world.’

‘I need my burying clothes,’ Rose said thoughtfully. ‘Something special.’

Toby gritted his teeth on his impatience. ‘I could give you some money,’ he offered. ‘For the time and trouble you will be spending on our project. Not very much of course,’
he added hastily. ‘But enough for some clothes. Perhaps fifty pounds?’ He saw her face and said quickly, ‘A hundred?’

‘Let’s go and buy them,’ Rose said. ‘Let’s pop down to the village and buy them now.’

‘And then come back and do some work?’ Toby confirmed.

Rose was thrusting her feet into a pair of grimy sandals. ‘When my mind’s at rest,’ she said. ‘I have to see my burial clothes in my drawer before I can think about anything else.’

Toby drove tight-lipped down to the village. He felt conspicuous with Rose sitting beside him swathed in purple silk with her shock of white hair and her alert bright face. He noticed vaguely that there were posters on the village lampposts and a big poster nailed to the tree on the village green in dayglo orange which said: KEEP MOVING ON, HIPPIES! YOU’RE NOT WANTED HERE.

‘No clothes shops,’ Toby said after a swift survey.

‘Not here,’ Rose said. ‘I meant to go to Hallfield. Drive on.’

Toby developed a white line around his mouth and drove on. He had to slow down and stop three miles outside the village where two police cars were blocking the road and exiting traffic had to trail around them.

‘What’s all that about?’ he asked.

Rose shrugged.

In the closeness of the car Toby became aware of a stuffy grassy smell about her. He opened the window. Altogether it was turning into a most disagreeable afternoon. They drove into Hallfield and Toby followed the signs to the car park but Rose stopped him. ‘Drop me in front of the shop,’
she commanded. ‘And wait. We’ll be quicker that way.’

Toby went down the broad street and, sighting a rare parking space at the side, pulled into the gap. Rose put out her age-spotted hand, palm up. ‘A hundred pounds I think you said?’

For a moment Toby thought of reneging, but the box of clippings and the unseen diary of Sylvia Pankhurst were like jam in the larder to him. ‘I’ll have to get the cash,’ he said unwillingly.

There was a branch of his bank with a cash dispenser on the other side of the road. Toby went over to it, uncomfortably aware of the stares at Rose, dogging his steps in her violently purple kimono tied with the pink shot silk scarves. Rose crowded close and watched him tap in his number and the card and then the money come out. ‘That’s a useful thing,’ she remarked. ‘Where d’you get the cards from?’

‘You have to have a bank account first,’ Toby said crossly. He thrust the smooth, warm notes at her with regret. Rose licked a forefinger and flicked through them. ‘They get smaller and smaller,’ she said.

‘What do?’

‘The notes. I remember when a five-pound note was as big as your hand. You knew you were spending money then.’

Toby strode back to the car. Rose’s general recollections were of no value at all. Any old woman would say the same. He did not want to indulge her nostalgia. He had no interest in her except as source material. ‘I’ll wait here,’ he said.

Rose smiled, ‘Shan’t be long,’ and disappeared into the shop.

Toby leaned against his car and waited. It was an unusual experience for him. Since the advent of feminism none of the women he knew expected him to join them on shopping expeditions. Since women did not dress to please men, then men’s opinions were clearly superfluous. Indeed, once this theory had been elevated into doctrine, any comment on a woman’s appearance was an insult to both the man and the woman, and under some circumstances could constitute sexual harassment. How such a state could evolve in a mere ten years had never bothered Toby. He merely reaped the benefits of being able to neglect the little politenesses which had been compulsory for men a generation ago. He had never been required to compliment a woman on a new outfit, or notice and praise a new hairstyle. No woman had ever sulked because he had failed to notice a new dress. Of course he had never bought an item of clothing as a present for any woman and this had saved him a good deal of boredom and enormous amounts of money. Both Miriam and Louise were far more careful with their own hard-earned salaries than they would have been if they had been brought up as spendthrift conventional women with free access to his. When they shopped for clothes they bought swiftly and efficiently without troubling him for his time or opinions.

Toby waited for what seemed like hours. Occasionally he sighted Rose, who waved to him as she crossed the road to try yet another shop, but when she came back to the car she was empty-handed.

‘No good,’ she said shortly.

Toby opened the car door and Rose dropped into the seat with a little sigh of exhaustion.

‘Why not?’ Toby asked as patiently as he could.

Rose shook her head. ‘So dreary,’ she said. ‘All greys and navy and cream. I like a bit of colour.’

‘Surely, to be buried in …’ Toby suggested.

‘A nice bright red,’ Rose decreed. ‘Go out with a bang. Sylvia always wore colours. She loved her clothes.’

‘Did she?’ Toby asked, ambition suddenly revitalising him. ‘Sylvia Pankhurst? Was she vain about clothes?’

‘Oooh!’ Rose exclaimed. ‘A peacock! But then she was the feminine one, of the two of them.’

‘The feminine one?’ Toby backed the car into the main road and headed back for the village. ‘Of the two Pankhurst sisters?’

‘There were three sisters,’ Rose volunteered. Toby longed for his blank index cards, his little dictaphone and his coloured pens.

‘And Sylvia was the feminine one,’ he prompted.

‘Not among the Pankhurst sisters,’ Rose said. ‘They were all keen on their clothes. I meant with her girl friend. The American. The one that dressed like a man.’

Toby let out a small yelp and veered sharply into the middle of the road. ‘Sylvia Pankhurst was gay?’ he asked breathlessly. The implication of this was greater than his ferreting brain could take into account. It could provide a new heroine for the gay women’s movement. He could write a book which would become a classic text for gay women, linking forever women’s rights with lesbianism. On the other hand, and perhaps more commercially viable, would be a scandalous deconstruction of the Pankhursts and the suffragette movement (and by implication,
all
feminists) by showing that the first great feminist heroine (or at any rate, the only one he knew of) was in fact a raving dyke.

Of course Toby did not say ‘raving dyke’, even to himself. He had been too well-trained. But there was a gap in his mental sentence, like a crossword puzzle clue: ‘A politically incorrect and abusive term for lesbians, two words, (6,4)’.

‘Gay? She was happy enough,’ Rose said equably.

They turned the corner and there was the police roadblock marked by yellow signs saying: WISTLEY VILLAGE, ACCESS TO RESIDENTS ONLY. On either side of the road the trees were unwillingly sprouting the orange dayglo posters which read NO HIPPIES IN WISTLEY and DRIVE ON, HIPPIES.

‘Where are you going, sir?’ The policeman bent down to Toby’s window and took a good look at Rose, who bared her teeth at him in a grin more threatening than pleasing.

‘Wistley village,’ Toby said deferentially. Policemen always made him feel guilty. Despite compulsory attendance with Miriam at a number of political demonstrations where police had often outnumbered marchers and were sometimes prevailed upon to help roll up banners and offer lifts home, Toby always felt nervous around policemen. ‘Wistley village, officer.’

‘Are you a resident, sir?’

‘No, just visiting.’

‘And is this lady a resident?’

Rose beamed horridly at him. ‘Squatting,’ she said helpfully. Toby closed his eyes briefly and then laughed a light inconsequential laugh. ‘Please pay no attention,’ he said. ‘We are both guests of Dr Case. I am Dr Summers and this is Miss Pankhurst.’

‘Dr Case’s address?’ the policeman asked, impressed as the police always are by professional status, and with no ability to differentiate between GP and PhD.

‘Wistley Common Cottage.’

‘Just a moment, sir.’ The policeman went back to his car and spoke to someone on his radio. Toby assumed he was checking the address. He came back, putting on his hat again. ‘That’s fine, sir. Sorry to inconvenience you.’

Toby smiled weakly. Rose beamed. They drove on into the village, past a group of watching children who had appeared from nowhere and gathered to laugh at the policemen, and up the deserted main street, empty of passing traffic. The Olde House at Home was shuttered and closed. The Holly Bush’s door was shut and the curtains were drawn. Every gate was padlocked. Every garden shed was bolted and double-locked. Houses which had little ornamental shutters had fastened them tight. Curtains were drawn. It was a village which had frightened itself into siege.

‘Stop!’ Rose suddenly shouted.

Instinctively Toby jammed on the brakes but not a curtain twitched at the squeal of the tyres. ‘What is it?’

‘There it is!’ Rose cried longingly. ‘My burial gown.’

Toby looked along the line of her pointing finger. Rose had seen through the high bolted wrought-iron garden gate of Wistley Manor to where clothes swung and blew on a rotary line. There was Mrs Frome’s scarlet chiffon dressing gown, a gorgeous affair of layers of floaty chiffon trimmed with thick silky red ribbons and inches of ruching at the hem. ‘That’s it,’ Rose said again. ‘That’s what I want.’

Toby experimented with his light inconsequential laugh. ‘It
is
nice,’ he said, as one might speak to a child. ‘Now let me think! I wonder where we could find something like it!’

‘Why?’

‘So that we could get it for you …’

‘I don’t want something like it,’ Rose said reasonably. ‘I want that one.’

Toby laughed again and looked at her for confirmation that she was joking. Her face was completely serious. Toby looked back at the chiffon gown. ‘You can’t have that one,’ he said patiently. ‘That one belongs to someone else. I don’t
know who. We’ll see if we can find you something
like
that one. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’

Rose gave a brief sardonic laugh, and got out of the car.

‘Now hang on a minute …’ Toby began hastily.

Someone had been putting up posters all over the village. The telegraph pole adjacent to Wistley Manor’s garden wall had two dayglo orange posters, one on top of another. The lower one said: NO HIPPIES, NO GYPSIES. The upper one said: NO BLACKS, NO YIDS. Someone had clearly had second thoughts about this, and there was a ladder beside the telegraph pole, which someone had left standing while he went in search of pliers to cut down the second poster. In the morality of the middle-class England of the early ’90s it was acceptable to abuse hippies and gypsies but not yet permissible to abuse blacks and Jews. Or at any rate – not publicly in posters. After all, the former threaten rural property values while the latter do not. This is what is known as successful assimilation and multi-cultural society.

In one brief horrifying moment Rose had hitched up her purple kimono, tucked it into the pink belt, scurried up the ladder, swung her leg over the rounded top of the wall and dropped out of sight.

Toby moaned softly and went to the garden gate and peered through the wrought-iron lilies. Rose had the chiffon negligee over her arm but she was also helping herself to some large beige silk French knickers and a couple of capacious bras. ‘God, no,’ Toby said quietly. ‘Miss Pankhurst!’ he called softly. ‘Miss Pankhurst! I think you should come away now.’

Rose, her arms full of someone else’s laundry, started towards the wall, and then stopped.

‘I can’t get out,’ she hissed. ‘There’s no ladder this side.’

Toby moaned a little louder. ‘Oh God!’ He tugged at the
gate. Captain Frome had locked it, and there was a new and shiny chain and padlock around the latch and also, for safekeeping, around the hinge. It rattled loudly but it did not yield.

‘Hush!’ Rose snapped irritably. ‘Idiot. Someone’ll hear.’

Toby cast a swift look up and down the deserted village street. The children were all gathered at the roadblock, half a mile down the road. The village green was empty, the owners of substantial properties were all bolting up their garden sheds for fear of gypsies maddened by the sight of the elegantly stripy lawns raiding their Black and Decker mowers. Toby swarmed up the ladder and sat astride on the top of the wall. He stretched down as far as he could reach. ‘I’ll pull you up,’ he said.

Rose came to the foot of the wall, trampling zinnias, begonias and bright expensive bedding plants and held up her right arm, her left still clutching her swag. Their fingers barely brushed.

‘You’ll have to come down,’ she said.

With a cry like a wounded rabbit, Toby leaned down to the street side of the wall and hauled up the ladder, straining under the weight of it. Then he dropped it down into the garden side of the wall, breaking the buds of prize-winning roses. Rose raced up the ladder, handed Toby the trailing wispy booty and then helped Toby see-saw the ladder back to the street side of the wall. She set off down with an agility surprising in a woman of eighty afflicted with a terminal illness. At that precise moment Captain Frome came out of his French windows into his garden and saw Toby sitting astride his handsome polished flint garden wall, with his arms full of stolen washing.