Perfectly Correct (12 page)

‘You!’ he yelled in the stentorian shout that had pacified
a whole sub-continent. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’

Only Rose knew what she was doing. Without wasting a moment she dropped from the ladder into the street and flung herself into Toby’s car. Toby clung to the top of the wall, frozen in horror as Captain Frome, his eyes bulging and his face flushing, galloped down the garden.

‘Name?’ he demanded. ‘And get down from there.’

Toby gave a short despairing wail and dropped from the wall to the street. He picked himself up and hobbled to his car as Captain Frome tore down the garden path and flung himself at the gate. Alas for precautions! He could not open his own gate without three separate keys. Plunging his hands in his pockets and bellowing in impatience, Captain Frome found one key, unlocked the gate, and then another for the first padlock. But by the time he had fitted the third key in the lock Toby’s car had roared, the tyres had squealed and Toby and Rose and the Fromes’ washing had disappeared up Wistley High Street.

‘I saw you!’ Captain Frome bellowed. ‘And I’ll know you again!’

In his rage he had not thought of the registration number, nor had he spotted Rose. He turned from his gate and ran back into the house to telephone the convoy hotline number and to alert the neighbourhood watch that not even roadblocks and offensive and illegal posters were enough to deter the scourge which had descended on the hapless village and was even now wreaking havoc on unprotected lingerie.

The frosty atmosphere at the cottage had melted under the two women’s mutual disapproval of Toby’s attitude to Rose. They dissected his ambition and his exploitation of the old
woman very thoroughly and found themselves in complete accord.

‘I think I’m really growing away from him,’ Miriam said. ‘We married much too young of course … and somehow everything was different then. Toby, me, you.’

Louise nodded. Toby was a shared problem, like the disappointing child of intellectual parents. They liked it when he was difficult almost more than when he published an essay, gave a public lecture, or gained promotion. There was more to talk about then. ‘He’s certainly got more ambitious recently,’ Louise said. ‘More individualistic.’

Individualism was a very serious character flaw. Louise’s ambition and her lucky rise through the university hierarchy was unobjectionable because her promotion increased the numbers of women in the university and offered a good role model to other aspiring women. Toby’s more effortful ascent brought no benefits at all for women and thus could only be a source of pleasure in the most individualist and private sense. It was nice for his wife that he was earning more money, and nice for his lover, but for them as women it was actually to be decried.

‘Of course he’s brilliant,’ Miriam said loyally.

Louise nodded. ‘And right-thinking.’

In the current climate a man working in the humanities had to be both brilliant and right-thinking or give up his post and carve out a career for himself in the bolder frontiers of right-wing journalism. Toby would have loved to have been irritating in print once a fortnight, but he had neither the originality nor the courage to take on the women’s movement as a whole and certainly would not dare to challenge such opponents as his wife and his lover.

‘But he can’t just
use
Miss Miles.’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ Louise said. ‘She
is
my guest.’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ Miriam agreed. ‘He can’t sacrifice his sense of respect for other people for egotistical ambition.’

The two women nodded at their accord and Miriam went back to her newspaper while Louise read her book in an agreeable silence. After a little while Louise looked up. ‘Lawrence is really quite disgusting,’ she commented. ‘All of this stuff about Mellors’ phallus, it really is quite fetishistic.’

Miriam nodded. She had not read Lawrence for years. She hardly ever read novels now, and poetry – which she had loved – she could no longer understand. Unless it was cathartic poetry written by women exploring scarifying experiences, she could not see the point of it. Rhyming poetry actually offended her as a waste of time and energy which could have been better spent on pamphlets.

‘And the sex is absurd,’ Louise went on. ‘In this part here they’ve just made love, but Lady Chatterley didn’t want to. Then she does want to and they make love again, and then they make love again. That’s three erections between teatime and dinner. It’s physiologically impossible. It’s ridiculous.’

Miriam smiled faintly, as if she were remembering something equally physiologically impossible. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘He’s a thirty-nine-year-old man with a weak chest and heart,’ Louise said firmly. ‘He simply couldn’t do it, and Lawrence knows it. It’s just male exaggeration, just as Lawrence goes on about how big Mellors’ penis is. Just male vanity.’

The smile died from Miriam’s face. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘But isn’t the point of the story the magic of love? Not really realism? About the lady and the gamekeeper in a sort of triumph through sex against an unfeeling class-bound society?’

Louise snorted and put three crosses in the margin.
‘Exactly so,’ she said. ‘It’s a Mills and Boon novel written by a man. The magic of love. What’s that supposed to be? Have
you
ever experienced it? It’s a myth.’

Miriam looked down at the
Guardian
again. ‘I suppose it is.’ She spoke almost with regret. ‘But I do think that there are times when something – chemistry perhaps, or hormones, or sexual desire – can give you a feeling that is really quite magical. When you’re just mad for someone and nothing else in the world matters.’

Louise smiled with affectionate contempt. ‘You’re a romantic,’ she said. ‘Would you melt and flame and flutter?’

‘Given half a chance,’ Miriam said. ‘But the women’s refuge doesn’t give you quite the scope of a gamekeeper’s hut in the woods. Anyway, I think my melting and fluttering days are over.’

‘Melting and fluttering are illusions,’ Louise said firmly. ‘They’re designed to keep women subservient through their emotions. I don’t think any woman of sense would melt and flame and flutter. Lady Chatterley is a real subservient character – firstly to her family, then to her husband, and then to her lover.’

‘Have you got a man at the moment?’ Miriam asked with sudden apparent irrelevance. ‘Are you still seeing what’s-his-name, Michael?’

Louise nodded. A few years ago, unable to keep a full secret from Miriam, she had invented an imaginary married lover, with the proviso that she did not want to talk about him.

Miriam, a true friend, prompted confidences but did not demand them and kindly hoped that Louise was sexually satisfied and privately worried that she was lonely.

‘Still him?’ Miriam said. ‘D’you think he’ll ever leave his wife?’

Louise had the grace to blush slightly. ‘I think he will,’ she said. ‘Their marriage was always a bit, I don’t know, empty. I think he will leave her soon.’

‘Would you have him here?’ Miriam asked, looking around at Louise’s orderly sitting room. ‘Would you live with him?’

‘I’d love it,’ Louise said. ‘It’s lonely here, sometimes. Especially in the winter, when it gets dark so early and it’s so quiet. It would be good to have company. Some nights I put on the radio just to hear another voice, and I actually wait to hear Mr Miles drive past at closing time. It’s ridiculous. I wait to hear the noise of his Land-Rover and then I know it’s bedtime. It would be bliss to have him here. I’ve waited so long for him, it’s the only plan in my life I haven’t completed. My work is right, I have a place of my own, I’m earning better than I ever have before. It’s just him – the one thing I’ve not got.’

Miriam looked uncomprehending. ‘I’d love to have time to be lonely,’ she said. ‘The phone’s always ringing and I live in a house with two men. The place is never empty, it’s never quiet, and it’s never how I like it.’ There was a short silence. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit … a bit obsessive?’ Miriam asked cautiously. ‘How you are about him? You don’t think you’re a kind of typical mistress, waiting and waiting while he fobs you off with excuses?’

Louise closed her mouth on an angry retort. ‘We’re going at my speed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want more commitment at the early stages. I wasn’t ready for it. It’s only just now that I feel ready to move on. He’ll come to me when he and I agree the time is right.’

Miriam nodded but she did not seem convinced. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just that you hear of an awful lot of women who think that the man is coming to them, and then they’re
forty or fifty and he’s still not arrived, and they never meet anyone else.’

Louise shook her head emphatically, pushing away the dreary vision. ‘Not me,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve not got problems with dependency. I’m a liberated woman. I love this man and we have a relationship but it’s an open relationship. But I have other men. I have a mature and independent life.’

‘But you don’t really get involved with other men,’ Miriam pointed out. ‘That guy from Leicester who I thought was so nice. You hardly spent any time with him at all. He was really interested in you and you only saw him at the conference and didn’t get in touch later. You’re not truly free if you’re not free to fall in love.’

‘Fall in love!’ Louise mocked. ‘Melt and flame and flutter?’

‘Not melting or flaming then – but you know what I mean. Intimacy, openness.’

Louise shook her sleek head. ‘I don’t believe in it,’ she said. ‘I believe in comradeship and sexual compatibility. All the rest is just a patriarchal myth to keep women in their place, waiting for men, putting up with their neglect or abuse.
You
of all people should know! You see that stuff over and over again! “He only hits me because he loves me so much.”’

Miriam nodded. ‘I suppose so. But
you’re
waiting. You’re not really free if you’re waiting. You’re putting up with neglect while he stays with his wife. You said yourself you were lonely.’

‘We’re not a conventional couple, you can’t make those sort of definitions,’ Louise said confidently. ‘I’m working towards the relationship I want with him. I accept the limitations on the relationship for now because they give me freedom and space. When I am ready and he is ready he’ll
come to me.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Toby’s a long time.’

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ Miriam said. ‘When did he go?’

‘More than an hour and a half ago.’ Louise stood up and stretched. ‘Damn. I’d better take the money for the gate up to the farm.’

‘I’ll take it for you,’ Miriam offered. ‘I’d like a walk.’

In her first months at the cottage Louise had bought a pair of expensive walking boots and marched along all the local footpaths and bridleways. But after her first enthusiasm she found that she preferred to observe the countryside, and the small seasonal changes, from her windows. The landscape – so important to town dwellers – rapidly became nothing more than an obstacle between where she was and where she wanted to be. The four miles down the road to the Wistley shops might be a flower-fringed lane, no wider than a car, where cow-parsley and meadow vetch wiped their pollen on her car doors in midsummer. But it was a nuisance to have to drive every time you wanted a newspaper or a pint of milk. The twenty-mile drive to the university through the high clear hills of the Sussex downs was completed by Louise in an efficient trance. She listened to the radio, she thought about her work, she daydreamed of Toby. She hardly saw the pale earth turning green or the wheeling gulls.

‘Are you sure? I can just as easily drive up there.’

Miriam nodded. ‘I’d like to see the farm,’ she said. ‘Is it OK to just go round? Should I ring up or anything?’

‘He’s always there. I knock on the back door, and if there’s no reply I go round to the yard,’ Louise said. ‘He’s often in the barn doing things to animals. Sometimes he’s out on the tractor, but generally he’s in the yard or the barn.’

Miriam pulled on a light jacket. ‘Does he live there on his own?’

‘Yes. His father died about five years ago, I think.’

‘I’m surprised he’s not married.’

‘I don’t think he’s the marrying type. He’s got a bit of a reputation in the village, they talk about him in the shop sometimes. And he drinks of course.’

‘Gorgeous eyes,’ Miriam said.

Louise suddenly felt a stir of interest. She looked at Miriam more closely. ‘Gorgeous eyes?’

Miriam smiled. ‘A girl can look,’ she said. ‘And he does have the most deep blue eyes, that wonderful navy blue. Like Robert Redford.’

‘Wistley Common’s Robert Redford!’ Louise put her hand in her pocket for the envelope. ‘Here you are. Try and control your restless desires. I think you’d frighten him to death!’

Miriam smiled. ‘I’ll come back over the common,’ she said. ‘I’ll be a while.’

Louise nodded and turned back to
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. It was one of the long descriptive passages about scenery, page after page containing nothing to which she could possibly object.

She had never thought of Andrew Miles as a desirable man before Rose had spoken of his bed and Miriam mentioned his eyes. She had thought of him as useful – a competent neighbour who would put up gutters and deliver her sacks of coal when the coal lorry could not manage the snowy lane. She sometimes bought eggs from him, and he knew the name of the septic tank contractors. He put up the fence for her, and mended a window hinge. It was comforting to know that a man as large and competent as Andrew Miles was up the road. His routine was known to her, the strangled roar at night of his Land-Rover taking the hill was as regular as a clock bell chiming for half past eleven, except at weekends when he was later.

She could not have survived in the cottage, especially the winter, if he had not stopped once or twice a week at her door to ask her if all was well. When her power had cut off suddenly in the night, it had been Andrew Miles at half past seven the next morning who had told her about the trip switch on the fuse box which would put the power back on. When there was a brief flurry of snow in February he drove down the lane in his tractor beating a clear path so that she could get to work. He told her she might telephone him from the university before she drove home and he would meet her in the Land-Rover in the village and ferry her to and from her cottage until the thaw. She always paid him excessive amounts of cash in unmarked envelopes; but she had never thought before that he was a man who might be seen as desirable rather than useful.