Perfectly Correct (15 page)

Toby and Louise cleared the breakfast plates away and washed up in quiet harmony while Miriam went upstairs to pack her weekend bag.

‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ Toby apologised, finally referring to Saturday afternoon when he had limped home after his shopping trip with Rose and locked himself in the bathroom for two hours. ‘Sometimes I really need space. Thank you for having the consideration to give me that space. You’re so aware, Louise, so sensitive.’

In fact Louise had sulked downstairs while Toby had bathed and sulked upstairs, but this small rewriting of recent history made their mutual irritability appear in a more becoming light.

‘What was the matter?’ Louise asked, still being sensitive and aware.

Toby shrugged. ‘Oh! I don’t know! Having to shop with Rose. She borrowed a hundred pounds off me, you know, and I don’t expect to see it again. I suppose I’m just not used
to being around demanding women.’ He gave Louise a sexy small smile. ‘You’ve spoiled me,’ he said.

Louise flapped at him lightly with the tea towel. ‘I know it. But you are getting on well with her, are you? You will get some material out of her?’

Toby caught her hand, took the towel from her, and turned her palm upwards and kissed it very gently. Louise felt her whole body warm to his touch. They could hear Miriam moving around upstairs. Louise felt her nine-year habit of clandestine desire rising like a Pavlovian dog’s saliva at the dinner bell. Sexual pleasure for Louise and Toby always meant the fear of being caught.

Toby bit the fleshy part of her palm. Louise leaned against the sink and dropped her head back, baring the smooth column of her throat. Toby moved closer and kissed down her neck, from her jawline to her collar bone; and where the crew neck of her jumper would hide any mark, he bit her soft warm skin and felt her responsive quiver.

His hands clasped her breasts and then stroked firmly down her body, but when Louise reached for his groin he stepped back. Toby had enjoyed years of this sort of encounter with Louise and he had trained himself to keep within the comfortable side of arousal. He was not going to drive home with Miriam suffering from cramps of lust. There was no possibility of making love to Louise, the most they could do now was a little adolescent dangerous snogging, and that was all Toby was prepared to do. He would touch Louise as intimately as he wished, but she might not caress him.

He captured her hands and came closer again. Louise’s eyes were shut; unlike him, she had no cautious self-preserving boundaries. Toby enjoyed the sight of her absorbed sensuality. He felt powerful, masterful. He loved
arousing her in these stolen moments. And he loved to watch her struggling to hide her desire when Miriam reappeared. He felt like some cruel pagan god dispensing desire and withholding satisfaction. He kissed her soft inviting lips, he stroked his hand around her buttock and slid round to caress her thigh. A movement outside the kitchen window caught his eye. He lifted his face from Louise, and took his mouth from stirring hers.

Rose was there. She was watching him, staring without any embarrassment, as if he were some curious and not particularly attractive animal playing with itself in a glass case. Toby felt his erection collapse in a rush, and desire abruptly vanish. He stepped back from Louise and she slowly opened her eyes. Louise had her back to the window, she did not know they were being observed.

‘You’re too sexy,’ Toby said feebly. His heart was not in it.

‘Kiss me again,’ Louise breathed. ‘Oh God, I want you.’

Toby shot a quick glance at the window behind her head. Rose’s staring critical face had gone. But he had no guarantee that she would not reappear like Jiminy Crickett the moment he laid his hands on his mistress.

He shook his head. ‘I won’t be able to stop,’ he lied, playing the trump card of uncontrollable male desire, unreconstructed despite years of feminism. ‘And Miriam’ll be down in a moment.’

Louise drooped. ‘I wish you could stay,’ she said plaintively. For a moment, for half a moment, she felt a pang of resentment. Toby and Miriam were leaving together, going home to an empty house. If they so wished they could close their front door behind them and retreat to their battered double bed for the whole of the afternoon. Louise carefully turned her mind away from the possibility that Toby’s
desire, aroused with her, might be satisfied with Miriam. She had learned early in this relationship never to speculate. Her own satisfaction would have to wait until Tuesday night in the back of the car if Toby was then willing, or else it would be her own insubstantial fingers in her cold big bed.

‘Oh God, I wish I could,’ Toby breathed, coming a little closer but keeping a wary eye on the window. ‘I can think of nothing in the world better. I am crazy for you, Louise, I want you so much. I can’t go on without you.’

He had said exactly the right thing. Louise’s face took on that desirous tranced expression again. ‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured.

Miriam clattered down the uncarpeted stairs. ‘Sorry I was so long,’ she said brightly. ‘I lost a sock. Why is it one always loses one? Why never the pair?’

‘Isn’t it Douglas Adams who proposes a corner of the universe filled with odd socks and biro pen tops?’ Toby asked. He had stepped back half a pace from Louise at the first sound of his wife’s footsteps on the stairs. He knew better than to jump guiltily away.

Louise looked from one smiling face to another.

‘All packed?’ Toby asked pleasantly.

They went to the front door, Miriam lagging a little to whisper to Louise, ‘I’m sorry I was grouchy about neighbourhood watch. I hate that kind of thing. But I do really think that your Andrew Miles is a sweetie.’

‘That’s OK,’ Louise said shortly.

‘See you at the meeting, Tuesday?’

‘Yes.’

Miriam and Louise hugged and then Toby came back from loading Miriam’s bag in the back seat beside the precious box of cuttings. Miriam got in the passenger seat.
Toby kissed Louise goodbye, a careful unmeaning brush of the lips on her cheek.

‘Thanks for a great weekend,’ he said lightly. ‘Call me, Monday.’

Louise stood on the doorstep of her pretty cottage and waved goodbye as they turned out of her drive into the lane. She felt unaccountably depressed but could not think why. She went back inside the house. The Sunday papers, heavy with words and bursting with opinions, were spread all around her tidy sitting room. Toby and she had forgotten the washing up and the greasy plates were drowned in cooling dishwater. The kitchen smelled of old cooking, and Louise felt tired all over. The long deception of Miriam, the long clandestine affair with Toby seemed suddenly pointless and unworthy. And if Miriam were genuinely tired of Toby, if Miriam who had lived with him and been showered with his love was sick of feminist men, was finding Toby himself wanting – Louise tossed pages of the newspapers from the sofa to the floor and put her feet up – if Miriam’s final judgement that Toby was
not
, after all, the ideal man; then Louise could not think what she had been doing waiting for him for the past nine years.

M
ONDAY MORNING IT RAINED
in steady grey sheets against Louise’s study windows. The van in the orchard looked drenched and miserable. All the firewood for the stove had gone from beside the steps. Louise thought guiltily about Rose in her van with a damp dog listening to the rain on the roof while the last of the wood smoked on the little stove.

She switched on the word processor and read the uninspired title and one sentence: ‘
The Virgin and the Gypsy
: A Patriarchal Myth of Rape and Female Growth’. She pressed the ‘Delete’ button with a sense of relief and watched the words wiped from the screen. Louise typed urgently and the words flickered into life:

However attractive the notion of a relationship based on irresistible desire and spiritual compatibility, we know that this is a romantic dream. The union of the virgin and the gypsy of the title is as unlikely in real life as the union of Mellors the gamekeeper and Constance Chatterley, the lady of the manor. In real life we know that relationships are only meaningful if based on thorough equality – and such equality can
only exist if there is equality of education and aspirations.

The dream of ‘falling in love’ and this love being all-powerful and transcending every objection of class, suitability and compatibility, is central to the romantic myth which has kept women in a state of slavish subservience for centuries.

Louise nodded at the screen and smiled slightly. Her fingers tapped rapidly. Last night, after reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, she had dreamed that a steeplechase race had been organised from Wistley village. A runaway horse had crashed through her fence, and then through her front door. In her dream Louise had run downstairs and somehow leaped into the saddle and the horse had turned and thundered from the cold and empty house outside into the rain, jumping hedges and even trees, up to Mr Miles’s farmhouse. Louise had clung to the horse as it galloped along the narrow paths of the commons and then, as it had leaped higher and higher over more and more obstacles, she had opened her mouth and heard a great wild song spilling out from her lips. She had woken abruptly, to the sound of rain pouring from an overflowing gutter, in a state of elated sexual arousal mixed with intense irritation with D.H. Lawrence, and, less explicably, with Andrew Miles.

As women and feminists we have to challenge this myth [she wrote sharply]. We have to surrender romance, love, glamour, and belief in all-conquering desire in favour of reality. We can still enjoy friendship with men. We can still enjoy sexual intercourse with men. But we can no longer allow ourselves to be conned into the nonsensical belief that their attentions
make us ‘whole’, or that sexual intercourse or making love is in any way some sort of spiritual activity. We understand the physiology of orgasm now, we have reclaimed our bodies. Now we need to reclaim our hearts.

There was a loud knock at the door. Louise pressed the ‘Save’ button on the word processor with a small triumphant flourish; and went to the front door.

Andrew Miles was standing in the pouring rain, the collar of his jacket upturned, his cap pulled down low over his blue eyes. When Louise opened the door he smiled at her, a new smile, an intimate smile.

‘Hello, Louise,’ he said.

Louise felt suddenly absolutely certain that he knew all about her dream. That he had come for her in this daytime rain, as the runaway horse had come for her in the storm of her dream. That at any moment he would swing her up into his arms and take her outside into the rain and that they would leap and fly and she would sing as she had done in her dream. ‘What d’you want?’

He flinched a little from her abruptness. ‘Nothing!’ he said defensively. ‘Nothing! But when I put that guttering up I promised to come and check it at the next big storm. I wondered if it was holding up under this rain.’

‘It’s overflowing,’ Louise replied mechanically, still pushing her dream away from her. ‘It woke me in the night.’

At the mention of the night Mr Miles flushed at once. He was thinking of Rose’s tantalisingly vivid description of Louise’s silk pyjamas and big empty bed. Louise, watching his colour rise, felt her own cheeks grow hot.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said brusquely. ‘You’re getting soaked.’

He did not move forward at the invitation but actually took a step backwards from the sharpness of her tone. ‘Perhaps I’d better take a look at that gutter,’ he offered. ‘It may just be blocked with leaves.’

‘I’ll get the ladder,’ Louise said.

She turned and went inside the house. The light aluminium ladder was stored in the cupboard beneath the stairs. She lifted it easily and brought it out to him. He was still standing in the rain, patiently waiting for her. He took the ladder with a word of thanks and then put it up at the south-east corner of the house where the rainwater was pouring from the gutter in a rich splashing stream. He put his hand up into the cold water and felt around in the downpipe. The diverted water overflowed in a curtain down his sleeve and splashed on to Louise’s newly laid flagstones.

Louise watched him for a little while from the shelter of the sitting-room French windows. Silhouetted against the grey sky, balancing on the top of the light ladder she could see the strength and bulk of his body. He looked curiously comfortable out in the rain with the water pouring around him. His cap was firmly jammed on his fair head, his collar was upturned. His legs, encased in rubberised trousers and thick Wellington boots, stood firmly on the ladder so that he towered over the sitting-room window. He looked like a giant, like some old Sussex chalk giant conjured from the rain, the storm, and Louise’s unsatisfied desires.

Louise turned back to her study and the word processor. Her face looked tired and pale in the grey light. She felt weary of the essay and of the tough unromantic counsel it offered. She sat before the screen again.

The loud plashing of the overflow abruptly stopped; Louise could hear the water gurgling safely away. She heard Andrew Miles jump down from the ladder and then his
knock at the front door. Louise sighed affectedly and went to answer it.

‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘There were handfuls of twigs in the gutter. I’m afraid you’ve got a couple of rooks nesting in your chimney. They’re messy builders, they’ve left twigs all over your roof.’

‘Rooks?’ Louise asked.

He nodded. ‘They’ve likely got a nest in one of the chimneys,’ he said. ‘You might have noticed a lot of soot coming down and some sticks?’

Louise shook her head. ‘Apart from the sitting-room fire they’re all boarded up. But I’ve heard some noise from the fireplace in my bedroom.’

He nodded. ‘That would be them. You’ll have to clear the nest out and put a cap on the chimney pot.’

Louise sighed with irritation. ‘Can’t I just leave them?’

He shrugged. ‘They’re noisy birds and they spread a lot of twigs around. And if a young bird falls down it’ll be trapped in the fireplace and you’ll hear it fluttering until it dies. You wouldn’t want that.’

Louise found his assumption of her sensibility oddly touching. ‘I suppose I’d better get it done. How do I get the nest cleared? Are there nest-clearing contractors?’

He gave a little cough to cover his laugh. ‘I can do it,’ he offered. ‘I’ve got a brush I do the farmhouse chimneys with. And I can get you a chimney cap.’

‘Thank you,’ Louise said shortly.

Mutely he held out the ladder to her. Louise took it from him. His cap was dark with rain, his fair hair curling under it at the back was wet. Little rivulets of rain were running down his cheeks and under his collar.

‘You’re soaked,’ Louise said. The sudden intimacy of the statement made her flush.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

Louise held the door wider. ‘Would you like to come in? You could borrow a towel. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

He stepped out of his Wellington boots and put them carefully side by side in her porch. He took off his wet jacket and cap and hung them on the hooks. He carried the ladder in for her and put it where she indicated, under the stairs. He followed her into the kitchen, stooping a little under the white-painted beams. Louise thought that the cottage suddenly looked like a doll’s house, a Wendy house built for play and filled with pretty insubstantial things. She filled the kettle and switched it on. Andrew Miles sat at the kitchen table and Louise put the biscuit tin before him.

‘I was writing an essay,’ Louise said brightly. ‘On D.H. Lawrence, the writer.’

Mr Miles nodded. ‘Not working today, then.’

Louise smiled. ‘Not teaching,’ she corrected him. ‘It’s my work to write as well as to teach.’

She made the coffee and put a cup before him and gestured that he should take a biscuit. Andrew Miles took two digestive biscuits, sandwiched them together and ate them in two big bites.

‘Do you have a housekeeper?’ Louise inquired suddenly, thinking of that appetite and the empty farmhouse.

Andrew smiled. ‘Mrs Shaw comes up every morning. She keeps me neat and makes my dinner. She leaves it in the Aga for me.’

‘Your work must be hard,’ Louise said. She was thinking that it was lonely work, and lonelier still to come home in the evening, cold and sometimes wet, to an empty house. Lonelier even than her drive home to her cottage all cool and quiet, with no lights shining and no fires lit.

‘It’s what I’m used to,’ Andrew Miles said, draining his
cup. ‘I’ve never wanted any other life than farming. But some evenings it would be nice to have some company.’ He drained his mug and put it down. Without looking at her, he said in a little rush: ‘Perhaps you would like to come down to the village one evening with me and have a drink?’

Louise’s first instinct was to say no at once, but there was something about his diffidence and his reluctance which made her hesitate. He was so very unlike Toby. He had none of Toby’s easy charm, he lacked the confidence, he lacked urbanity. The way he had asked her – as if he had planned the words for some time and then nerved himself to speak out – prompted her to caution. And there was something very solid and honest about him, planted firmly at her table and looking at her with those remarkably dark blue eyes.

‘That would be nice,’ Louise said carefully. ‘Perhaps when I’ve got this essay out of the way. I daren’t take any time off before then.’

He sensed the rejection at once, and got to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said, he sounded almost apologetic. ‘I’ll get that chimney cap and come around and clear the chimney as soon as the weather lifts.’

He went lightly in his socks to the front door. Louise suddenly wanted to delay him, to recall her rebuff.

‘I’ll be finished next week,’ she said. ‘By the weekend.’

He was stepping into his thick green Wellington boots. Louise owned a similar pair but hers had a neat redundant buckle on the side and cost almost three times as much.

‘Well, you’ll come up to the farm for the party, won’t you?’ he asked. ‘They should be here next weekend. And we’ll have a drink and perhaps a dance?’

‘Captain Frome says they were turned back,’ Louise said. ‘They won’t be able to get to your farm.’

He shook his head. ‘They aren’t due till next week. They’re just travelling around. I said they couldn’t come until I had my hay lifted. They knew that.’

‘I think you’re making an awful mistake,’ Louise said earnestly. ‘They’re not at all the sort of people you’re thinking about. They’re town people, most of them, and the rave business is big business. They’re professionals. And the people who come to the parties are not all travellers, or gypsies, not people you’re thinking of. They’re ordinary people with jobs and good incomes, they just get out their vans and go to raves at weekends.’

He smiled at her, and took down his jacket from the hook and put it on, turning up the collar before he pulled on the disreputable cap. ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘I read the newspapers, I listen to the radio. I’m not a complete peasant.’

Louise flushed redder than ever. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘They’re straightforward businessmen,’ he continued. ‘They offered me an excellent price to hire two fields. They carry insurance and they’ve paid a deposit against damage. They’re managing their own security. They’re bringing their own catering truck, they bring their own portable toilets. I thought it might be a bit of fun, and it’ll earn me more than the whole hay crop put together. I don’t see the problem.’

‘I didn’t realise …’ Louise said feebly.

Andrew Miles smiled. ‘Most of them round here don’t realise,’ he said. ‘Like your friend Captain Frome. He wants to live in the country, but he doesn’t really want to be in the country as it is now. He has an idea of a place: perhaps he read about it in a book, perhaps it’s where he had his holidays when he was a boy. It’s Pooh Corner or the Wind in the Willows. He thinks of the country like one of those nature films – all animals and no humans at all. Or if there
are humans then they’re special people, not like town people. Quiet, and a bit stupid. They pull their forelocks to the local lords and they’re grateful if he remembers their names. That’s why Frome’s always wanting to get us organised, to make the village prettier, to stop farmers hedging and ditching, to cancel the Hallfield market. Real farming is a dirty business, it’s a noisy business, it’s an industry not a postcard. He doesn’t like mud on the road or having to drive slowly behind my tractor. He wants the country to be quiet and pretty. He wants a garden, not a work place.’

‘He’s not my friend,’ Louise said uncomfortably.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Andrew said gently. ‘I don’t like people telling me who I can have on my land, or what I can do. I don’t tell him who he can have to dinner.’

Louise suddenly had a vision of the country which was her home as a working community, not an attractive arrangement of scenery with an inconvenient absence of services. ‘Have your family always lived here?’

‘We’ve got headstones in the churchyard going back to 1425,’ Andrew said. ‘A long time.’

‘You’d know what a gamekeeper does,’ Louise remarked irrelevantly, thinking of her unfinished essay.

Andrew Miles chuckled. ‘You’re reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,’ he guessed. ‘I thought it was good. He’s right about the gamekeeper. It’s very realistic – not the …’ he hesitated, a little embarrassed ‘… not the sex – that was all made up of course – but he was right about the pheasants. He knew about pheasants. I thought it was good.’