Perfectly Correct (19 page)

‘Were they lovers?’

Rose looked thoughtfully at Toby. He could actually feel his heart racing. If this greedy and disgusting old woman gave him the right answer he was on his way to the University of California, international renown, tenure and as many conferences in exotic locations as he could be troubled to attend.

‘Something’s been worrying me,’ Rose said.

‘What?’

‘That dressing gown you stole. My burial gown.’

Toby could have screamed with frustration. ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I don’t want you to worry about anything. Please don’t worry. That’s fine. I’ve forgotten all about it. Don’t apologise now, especially when we’re getting on so well here. And you’re telling me about Nora and Sylvia. I just asked you if you thought they were lovers?’ Toby nodded sympathetically. ‘It would have been perfectly understandable if they had been. There’s no slur attached to a love-affair like that at all. Nobody worries about something like that these days.’ (Except the
Spectator
, he thought
delightedly to himself, the
Telegraph, The Times
and every journal and university that is gleefully joining the backlash against the feminist movement.) ‘D’you think they were? Lovers? Sylvia and Nora? D’you think so?’

‘I think it’s too long,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve tried it on and I want to hem it up a bit, but I can’t get it level on myself. Would you help me with it?’

‘Sure,’ Toby agreed happily. ‘Love to. Can we do it when we’re finished here? After you’ve told me about Sylvia and Nora? Where did they meet, for instance?’

Rose pushed the empty tin of biscuits away and shook her head. ‘I can’t settle without knowing that my gown will be right,’ she said. ‘I could go any day now. I don’t want to be lying in my coffin with half a yard to spare at the bottom. It won’t look right.’

‘All
right
,’ Toby said through smiling teeth. ‘Let’s do it at once, shall we? Let’s do it now! We’ll go to your van and fetch it, shall we? And get it over with?’ Despite himself, the suppressed anger seeped through his voice.

Rose shook her head. ‘You don’t really want to be bothered with it,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s just an old woman fussing about nothing to you. All these memories of the past, and me getting ready to die. A lot of fuss about nothing to a handsome young man like you.’

‘No, no,’ Toby assured her hastily. ‘You know I’m fascinated by your story, Miss Pankhurst. You know how much this means to me. And I
do
want you to be comfortable. You must forgive my – er – scholarly impatience. But I want to be your friend. I will help you with anything you like. After all, I got the gown for you, didn’t I? Let’s make sure it’s right.’

‘I brought it with me,’ Rose said with sudden alacrity. She threw open the gas-mask case and inside was the red
chiffon gown packed tight. She shook it out in a flurry of crimson and then threw it around her shoulders. ‘See, it’s too long,’ she said.

She looked like a wizened little child in an adult’s dress. The hem touched the floor and spread out all around her.

‘I can pin it up,’ Toby said cheerfully. He dropped down to his hands and knees before Rose’s extremely dirty feet and folded up a wedge of the fabric. ‘How short? This short?’

Rose shook her head unhappily. ‘I want it pinned and cut and then tacked and then hemmed,’ she said. ‘I want to do it myself.’

Toby sat back on his heels like a patient dressmaker with a difficult client. ‘Shall I pin it for you?’

Rose was struck with a sudden brainwave. ‘
You
put it on,’ she said. ‘And I’ll cut it and tack it while you’ve got it on.’

‘But I’m much taller than you,’ Toby objected.

‘I’ll allow for that,’ Rose said. ‘As long as the hem is shorter and straight. I can allow for it.’

Toby hesitated. He had an odd reluctance to put on Captain Frome’s wife’s negligee. He glanced at the kitchen windows. The evening outside was cool apricot and gold. Anyone could walk by and glance in. ‘I’ll cut it for you,’ he offered again. ‘I’m very good at that sort of thing.’

Rose shrugged her way out of the gown. ‘You wear it, I’ll hem it,’ she said firmly.

Toby passively received the armful of chiffon. ‘But we’ll talk about the Pankhursts when it’s done?’ he stipulated.

Rose nodded. ‘We can talk all night. Pop it on,’ she instructed.

Toby tried to pull the flimsy gown on over his shirt. The armholes were too small. ‘I can’t get it on,’ he complained. ‘We can’t do it.’

‘You’ll have to take your shirt off,’ Rose said.

Toby hesitated for a moment, he looked towards the windows again.

‘I’ll draw the curtains,’ Rose said helpfully. ‘And slip your trousers off at the same time. I can’t see where your ankles are with them on.’

She bustled around the kitchen, drawing the curtains. A sudden intimate twilight fell on the room. Rose switched on the lights and nodded approvingly at him. In the yellow electric light she looked younger, she looked elated. ‘Come on,’ she said encouragingly.

Toby laid his trousers carefully on a chair and put his silk shirt around a chair-back. He slipped into the chiffon gown with his teeth gritted; the fabric was silky and sensuous against his bare skin, he folded his arms across his bare chest and tried to ignore the seductive tickle of chiffon on his thighs.

Rose stood back, not a glimmer of a smile on her face, all professional intensity. ‘I can’t kneel down,’ she protested. ‘Not at my age. You’ll have to hop up on the table.’

Toby, wearing only dark blue socks, blue Y-fronts and a scarlet chiffon negligee, felt his manhood draining from him. ‘All right,’ he said weakly. Lifting the ruffled skirts he climbed meekly on to the kitchen table.

‘Do it up,’ Rose commanded. ‘I can’t see the fall of the skirt if it’s undone.’

Toby fastened the provocative ribbon bows up the front and then tied the red silk ribbon at the waist. Rose stood at the edge of the table and contentedly folded and pinned. ‘D’you think it would look better with an extra ruffle?’ she
asked. ‘Instead of cutting the hem off, perhaps I should fold it up to make an extra ruffle of fabric?’

Toby did not hear the car stop in the drive and Louise’s key in the lock. Rose did.

‘I don’t see that it matters,’ he said sulkily.

‘An extra ruffle would be nice,’ Rose pointed out. ‘Fancy. Now turn around.’

Toby turned a little way.

‘Turn a bit more,’ Rose directed, alert for the sound of Louise coming in. Toby turned again so that his back was towards the kitchen door.

‘It suits you actually,’ Rose said loudly over the noise of the front door opening. ‘Red’s your colour.’

Louise, seeing Toby’s car in the drive, and Rose’s clogs in the porch and hearing voices from the kitchen, walked briskly towards the kitchen door and irritably threw it open. There was Toby, standing on the kitchen table with his back to her. He was whitely naked except for a pair of blue briefs, his socks, and a grotesque ruched and trimmed red chiffon negligee.

‘I
do
like red actually,’ he said. ‘But men are always trapped in such sombre colours. I wish we could wear whatever we wanted without people being so conventional …’

Louise let out a clear and piercing scream of horror and dropped her files and papers on the floor with a resounding crash.

Rose whipped the red negligee off Toby’s bare goosefleshy shoulders and was gone in an instant, leaving the couple alone. She only paused on the front doorstep to whisper to Louise, who was pushing her out: ‘It’s Mrs Frome’s gown,
you know. He stole it from the washing line the day we went shopping. I didn’t know how to tell you.’

‘Just go,’ Louise said tightly. She was creamy white with shock. She thrust Rose from the front door and then collapsed into a chair in the sitting room. Toby came from the kitchen, buttoning his trousers. Louise, who had once adored watching him dress, turned her head away.

Toby forced himself to laugh, a thin echo of his confident assured chuckle. ‘God! That must have looked funny!’

There was no answering gleam from Louise. The face she turned towards him was mutely accusing.

‘It’s Rose’s gown,’ he said. ‘She set her heart on it. She says she wants to be buried in it! Absurd, isn’t she? She was so determined to have it that she went over the wall into Captain Frome’s garden to steal it! Outrageous! And now it’s the wrong length and she wouldn’t do any work until we pinned it up. She made me put it on so that she could hem it. She really is a character!’

‘Captain Frome says a man stole it,’ Louise said dully. ‘His description would match you. And your car.’

Toby flushed a little. ‘Well, that was the awful part,’ he said too quickly. He checked himself, he knew he was sounding glib. ‘I didn’t tell you. She got stuck in the garden so
I
had to get up on the wall to help her out. When the Captain came out, she was already down on the road, out of sight. She committed the actual crime, of course, but he only saw me.’ Toby laughed with affected easiness. ‘Ha! I admit to being an accomplice; but I’m not the prime suspect!’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Louise demanded, her voice tragic. ‘Does Miriam know?’

‘Tell you what? Miriam know what? About Rose’s little pilfering?’

Louise shook her head. ‘No!’ she cried in a sudden burst
of emotion. ‘Of course not! About
you
, Toby. How long have you been dressing in women’s clothes? Is it to do with Miriam and you? Or is it my fault?’

Toby tried to laugh again but his heart was not in it. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said.

Louise threw a pained look at him and went through to the kitchen. The biscuit tin was empty, the table scattered with crumbs and Toby’s notes. Louise took it all in with one sweeping, condemning glance, like a vice squad inspector at an orgy. She put the kettle on. Her hands were shaking as she took down a mug.

She made herself a cup of instant coffee in silence, and then she went to the larder and poured herself a large measure of brandy. She did not offer Toby a drink though he eyed the bottle and thought he could have done with one, a large one.

‘Are you a cross dresser or a full transvestite?’ she asked, speaking in a slow deliberate monotone. She was completely, unnaturally, controlled. Her face was still waxy with shock.

‘I’m neither,’ Toby said gently. ‘Of course I am neither. Come on, Louise, you know me!’

‘I
thought
I knew you,’ she flashed out. ‘It turns out I didn’t know you at all. Does Miriam know? Is this some long-hidden secret?’

‘Of course not!’ Toby snapped. ‘There’s nothing for her to know. What you saw was an accident. It looked ridiculous but there’s nothing to it. I was just wearing the gown for Rose. I was modelling it for her.’

Louise put her head in her hands. ‘Stop it,’ she said suddenly. ‘I can stand anything but not you continuing to lie to me. Please, Toby, trust me with the truth. You’re out of the closet now. I can take it, I think. But you
have
to be honest with me.’

‘I am not out of the closet!’ Toby raised his voice. ‘I was never in the closet!’

When Louise looked up at him her dark eyes were filled with tears. ‘I will try to understand,’ she whispered. ‘I really will try to understand, Toby. But you have to tell me the truth. You have to share this with me. Perhaps I can help you. Perhaps we can get through this together.’

Toby, maddened beyond the restraints of good manners, strode to the glass cupboard and marched back with a tumbler. He poured himself a slug of brandy without Louise’s invitation and took a deep swig. ‘Will you listen to me?’ he demanded. ‘What you saw this evening was an accident. I have never in my life worn women’s clothing. I have never in my life
wanted
to wear women’s clothing. I put on that damned gown to oblige Rose because I wanted her to tell me about Sylvia Pankhurst. If you had come in ten minutes earlier you would have heard me interviewing her. If you had come in ten minutes later you would have seen us back at work. What happened was a break in our work. Rose was anxious about the gown. I was prepared to help her.’

Louise fixed him with her wounded disbelieving stare.

‘Listen!’ Toby exclaimed, his voice rising with frustration. He pulled the cassette towards him and wound the tape back at random. He pressed the ‘Play’ button. They could hear a strange pattering sound – the crumbs of the Hobnob on the microphone – and then Toby’s voice saying clearly, excitedly: ‘Tell me about them. Which one was the cross dresser?’

‘Oh God, no!’ Louise exclaimed. She pushed her chair from the table and stood up. ‘I think you’d better go, Toby,’ she said quickly. ‘I need to be on my own.’

‘No, wait,’ Toby said. ‘I’ll play you some more. That was out of context! It makes no sense out of context!’

‘
Please
go!’ Louise shrieked. She seized him by the arm and pushed him towards the front door, gathering his index cards and his pens and his cassette player. ‘Take all this with you! I don’t want any of it in my house! Just go, Toby! Go!’

‘But I can explain if you would only listen!’ he cried as she thrust him over the threshold into the cooling summer dusk.

‘Can’t you see?’ Louise demanded in a throbbing voice. ‘Are you so perverse that you cannot even
see
a woman? Can you not understand what you have done to me? This is the worst insult to my womanhood that I can imagine! That my lover should want to wear women’s clothes! That you should dress up and preen – and before Rose of all people! That you should refuse to be honest with me! You fool! Can’t you see that my heart is breaking?’

She slammed the front door in his face. Toby staggered to his car. He flung his research notes into the box on the back seat and leaned his head on his hands on the steering wheel.

He waited for long moments. When it became apparent that Louise would not see reason and come out of the house, apologise to him and let him in again; and when no kindly angels rewound time a convenient half hour, to let him live his life more successfully, he started the car quietly and drove home to his wife.

Rose Miles stepped out of the shadows of the oak tree by the front door and went quietly down the path to her caravan with the satisfied air of a woman who has seen a difficult job well done.