Perfectly Correct (16 page)

Louise had to adjust her picture of Andrew Miles yet again. She had never thought of him reading at all, she had almost assumed that he was half-illiterate, perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper, perhaps arduously scanning a farming magazine.

‘You read novels?’ she asked rudely.

‘Sometimes. Mostly I listen to them,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve got a Walkman and I like to listen to novels when I’m in the tractor cab. I like Jane Austen best I think, but I like them all.’

He did up the buttons on his jacket. ‘George Eliot is good for a long field,’ he said. ‘And Henry James is the best for harrowing. But that post-modernist fiction I just can’t get on with. It’s no good for ploughing at all.’ He shot a mischievous grin at her astounded face. ‘Thank you for the coffee, Miss Case. I have to go now, the pigs want feeding. I’ll stop in to see that Rose is all right, on my way out.’

Louise opened her mouth to speak and found herself wordless. She let him go.

Andrew Miles pulled an armful of wood from the back of the Land-Rover and walked down the garden to Rose’s van. Louise, from her seat before the word processor, watched him. He shouted from the steps and Rose opened the van door. Today she was huddled in a deep green velvet evening cape with the glamorous hood pulled up over her grey head for warmth. Andrew piled most of the wood into the van and dropped the rest by the steps. He went back to his Land-Rover for more, then he fetched a red petrol can, and went into the van. In a few moments Louise saw a thin plume of smoke coming from the chimney. He had got Rose’s stove burning. Louise, abandoning all thought of the essay until he had gone, wondered uncomfortably if he thought badly of her, sitting warm in a centrally heated house while Rose huddled against the damp and the cold in a van at the bottom of the garden.

After a few minutes he emerged from the door. He was
laughing at something Rose had said. Rose patted him on the cheek with an easy, affectionate gesture and then waved farewell.

Andrew strode back to his Land-Rover, started the engine with the familiar badly tuned roar, and drove back up the hill to his farm.

Louise looked blankly at the screen. Then she remembered the meeting at the university on women in Science and Industry and telephoned the head of the department.

‘I’m a member of the Fresh Start committee,’ Louise said, wincing at the name. It always sounded to her like some kind of new soap powder. ‘We’re planning to target science and technology courses for our next open day. I wonder if I could meet with you and have a talk.’

‘What about?’ he said unhelpfully.

‘About what we can do to make your department and other science and industry departments more attractive to mature women students,’ Louise said pleasantly.

‘In what way?’

Louise particularly did not want to complain about pin-up pictures which she had never seen. She had only Josephine Fields’s assurance that the department was festooned with naked women astride burgeoning spark plugs.

‘Any ways you think would be appropriate.’ She paused. ‘I think we all feel that there should be more mature women students in science and technology departments. The committee were wondering how best to encourage mature women entrants. Could I come and see you and we could have a talk about it?’

‘Are you anything to do with that nutcase woman who has been stealing notices from the noticeboards?’ the head of department demanded.

Louise thought. In theory, she was nothing to do with any nutcase woman who was a stereotype of the sexist male imagination and had never existed in reality. On the other hand, she recognised without difficulty a description of Josephine Fields joyously engaged in direct action.

‘No,’ she lied firmly. ‘I don’t know what woman you mean.’

‘An ugly batty woman who has been going around my department, upsetting my lab technicians, and taking down posters,’ he said bluntly.

‘No,’ Louise said again. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Two o’clock today,’ he said gruffly. ‘Or next week sometime.’

‘Today will be fine.’ Louise knew that her voice was smooth and soothing. She couldn’t help it. Any time she wanted a man to do something for her, she instinctively cooed. Twenty-nine years of training could not be overcome by sheer will. And anyway, it always worked.

‘See you then,’ he said. But he was already less gruff.

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Louise said sweetly. ‘Pompous old fart,’ she said to restore her sense of independence as she put down the telephone.

The paragraphs on the screen stared back at her looking more uncertain than ever before.

As women and feminists we have to challenge this myth. 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.

Louise sighed deeply. She was not at all sure that she had reclaimed her body. She thought the sentence ‘reclaim our hearts’ was a bit purple and, in any case, she was not sure that it could be done. She had been in love with another woman’s husband for nine years – not a very impressive record for a professional feminist. She pressed ‘Save’ again and shut the screen down. Her thoughts on Lawrence would have to wait.

She took a pile of students’ essays with her into the sitting room and sat on the sofa, red pen in hand. She had set them the title, ‘Clarissa: Willing Victim or Martyr?’ Half of them were completely floored by the very question because they had neglected the preliminary precaution of reading the book. The other half had, quite intelligently, paid a substantial sum to the only student on the course whose mum had videoed the BBC film of the novel. Louise had heard that there had been ‘Clarissa parties’ where, by payment of small amounts of mood-inducing drugs to the host, you could go and watch the video. What
Clarissa
was like viewed through the bias of Ecstasy Louise could only imagine.

The essays were staggeringly lacklustre. The effect of Ecstasy while watching the video seemed to have negated any educational impact a grasp of the story might have caused. Those students who had flicked through the library copy of the novel and decided that it was something about people who wrote and wrote and wrote to each other, were as well informed as those who had blearily followed the story on screen through a drug-induced illusion of knowing everything.

The only students who had actually read the book – all 1499 pages – were the mature students, mainly women of thirty-five years and more who, plagued by their customary insecurity, had cooked supper for four, put the children to bed, loaded the washing machine, and then worked till three in the morning for a fortnight in an effort to get the work done. Louise tried to be fair, but she could not respect a woman whose academic work took place on a corner of the kitchen table, after everyone else had gone to bed. Despite her long membership of a committee to encourage mature women students to return to education Louise had a strongly held and strongly hidden belief that childbirth damaged a woman’s brain. Unfortunately for them all, the overanxious overworked students on her course could do nothing to disprove this.

Louise turned the pages idly, rewarding a good point with a red tick and a bad one with a cross. An occasional ‘!’ marked her indignant disapproval. It was just like her reading of Lawrence. By lunchtime she had marked half of them, and after a miserable spinster lunch of a can of soup and a plate of crispbread and cheese she returned to the study and had another short go at the Lawrence essay. In the cool empty house, with the rain pattering on her window and a grey mist sliding up over the common, immersed in pointless unsatisfactory work, Louise kept herself busy: successfully distracting herself from the knowledge she was lonely and unloved; hungry and cold.

The meeting with Professor Edgeley of Science and Industry did not promise well. Louise made her way to his little room on the second floor of the Sci/Ind block, past posters which promised: GIANT PISS UP TONITE (NURSES FROM
GENERAL HOSPITAL INVITED!!!) CHEAP BEER. PARTY GAMES. STRIPPER. One chemistry lab was empty; Louise put her head around the door. It had the strange potent sharp smell of chemistry labs at her school and the same wooden benches with the little taps for bunsen burners at intervals along the stained brown benches and the swannecked taps gazing down into grimy sinks at the end of each bench. The walls had posters pinned to them showing linkages of molecules and a pretty necklace diagram which Louise vaguely assumed was the plan of DNA. On one noticeboard at the back marked ‘social’ was an offensive poster. Louise tightened her lips. It was a picture of a half-naked woman in a hammock under a brilliantly blue sky. In the sky were printed the words ‘AFL scrubbers – for cleaner skies’. Louise thought ‘scrubbers’ was deeply offensive to women, as was the woman’s pose.

She went back into the corridor and walked briskly to the professor’s room. She knocked on the door and went in.

He was sitting at his desk with a Tupperware container open before him, eating sandwiches, engrossed in a newspaper. When Louise entered he shot a guilty look at the little clock on his desk and rose to his feet.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to teach an extra class and missed my lunch. Please sit down.’

Louise looked pointedly at the chair covered with library books and essay papers and made no move at all. He scampered round from behind his desk and thrust the papers and books to the floor. Louise smoothed her skirt down over her knees and sat down and crossed her legs. She thought she had him thoroughly rattled.

He bundled his lunch away into a desk drawer and smiled nervously at her. He was a large-built man with thin flyaway grey hair. He had small reading spectacles which he
put on the desk before him and touched from time to time with his long fingers.

Louise smiled her confident smile. ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of the Fresh Start committee?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I never, I haven’t, that is to say … No.’

Louise nodded. ‘We were founded about four years ago with the aim of attracting mature women students into higher education,’ she said. ‘The committee is chaired by a graduate of this university who now works with abused women in the refuge in the town, Miriam Carpenter. I am vice-chair. The deputy head of Sociology, Naomi Petersen, is a member, as are other women students, undergraduates, postgraduates, and a couple of women who work locally.’

Professor Edgeley looked overwhelmed rather than gratified by this flood of information.

‘After being very successful in encouraging women to join degree courses in the humanities, we thought this year we would target science and engineering.’

‘Why pick on us?’ the professor demanded. ‘I mean, why concentrate on us?’

Louise smiled calmly. ‘What are your proportions of women students?’

He hunted under his newspapers for a memo pad. ‘I looked it up. At the moment we’ve got in the third year, twenty-eight per cent; in the second year, oh, we did rather well, thirty-seven per cent; and in the first year, thirty-two per cent.’

Louise nodded. ‘Rather a long way from the ideal of fifty per cent,’ she observed calmly.

‘I don’t think fifty per cent would be ideal at all,’ Professor Edgeley said with sudden spirit. ‘The country doesn’t need that many women scientists and engineers. There aren’t
that many openings in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry! And we don’t have the applicants.’

‘I think women scientists could do something other than work with make-up and medicine,’ Louise countered with acidic sweetness. ‘But I am interested that you don’t have the applicants. I think we could help you with that.’

‘No need! No need at all!’ the professor said hastily. ‘We find that the numbers rise and fall depending on the A-level syllabi in the schools, what’s on telly, whether the girls get the encouragement early on. We just take the best students available to us – like anyone else. We’re happy with the mix we have here. It’s a natural mix you know, a result of the environment.’ He looked at Louise’s unrelenting face. ‘Darwinian,’ he said feebly.

‘My committee would like to encourage more mature women students to join your courses,’ Louise stated firmly. ‘That is our function. We are proposing to feature you at our open day next week.’

The professor looked increasingly uncomfortable. His hair was becoming more and more independent in his distress, it stood up around his head and waved rather like the tentacles of a sea anemone seeking nutrients. ‘Very kind,’ he said. ‘Very kind indeed. But we’re fine as we are. Fine. Thank you. But I hear that Technology have tremendous difficulties in recruiting girls,’ he added cunningly. ‘Perhaps you should talk with them.’

Louise nodded. ‘We will talk with them. But let’s stay with you for a moment. Do you have any publicity material, any campaign boards, any displays you would like us to use?’

The professor tried to smile. ‘Certainly, certainly. We have a travelling display we take out to schools, we could set that up at your open day. And we could man it too.’

Louise recoiled, quivering with dismay. He coughed, looked down, looked up to check her face again.

‘Do you mean “staff” it?’ Louise asked icily.

The poor fool still did not know what he had done to cause such offence. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll send along a couple of our graduate students, good chaps, they’ll put it up and be on hand to talk to anyone.’ He paused. ‘Is it
all
women?’

Louise nodded. ‘We prefer it to be women only,’ she said. ‘I assume you have female graduate students or members of staff?’

‘Well, of course we have one or two,’ he said weakly. ‘And most of our lab technicians are women, and
all
our secretaries and admin assistants are women.’ He beamed at Louise encouragingly as if she would be thrilled to learn that every menial job in the department was done by a low-paid woman. ‘All of our cleaners are women,’ he went on, warming to the theme. ‘We’re not prejudiced against women, you see. Now I come to think of it, across the whole department we actually employ more women than men! I could ask one or two of them if they would attend.’