Perfectly Correct (23 page)

Louise nodded, snatched up her post and got herself out of the room before Susan could free herself from the conversation. In the corridor she found she was trembling with a heady mixture of nerves, and elation at having escaped Professor Sinclair, and with a fighting chance of evading Toby.

She had a jiffy bag containing, no doubt,
Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990
, and an envelope from Sarah containing her rejected Lawrence essay. She had a folder enclosing a dozen student essays, and half a dozen unconvincing excuses. There was also an official-looking envelope marked with the university’s crest, and two plain envelopes with Toby’s handwriting on them.

Louise pinned a notice on the department noticeboard. It read: ‘Dr Louise Case has to cancel all meetings for the next two days. Normal classes will resume on Monday. Students working on the Feminist in Literature option are to read and compare
Tom Jones
, by Henry Fielding, and
Money
, by Martin Amis, by Thursday of next week.’

‘That should keep them quiet,’ she thought vindictively and pushed in the drawing pin with force.

Like a ghost she melted from the corridor and slipped down the stairs. Turning her head away from Toby’s office
window she scuttled back to her car, flung her booty into the back seat and started the engine. Feeling secure at last she reached behind and pulled out Toby’s two envelopes. The first she opened contained a short note dated Wednesday morning:

This is ridiculous. The explanation of my appearance is perfectly simple. I was modelling the gown for Rose to take up the hem. She will confirm this. If you cling to any other belief you are being paranoid and I suggest you examine your own subconscious motivation. I demand that you behave like a rational woman. Toby.

The second envelope had a longer letter.

You came into university today (Wednesday) and did not see me, nor have you replied to my note of this morning, nor have you returned my telephone calls. I left two messages on your ansaphone. Are you ill?

If you are still upset because of that ridiculous scene at your cottage on Tuesday night I can only repeat my assurance that you have misunderstood what was taking place. Really, Louise, we have been intimate for years. Don’t you think that if any of your suspicions were well-founded that you – with your sensitivity and perception – would have noticed something before? Or that Miriam would have complained?

I will not address this matter again. It is too ridiculous. Please telephone me at once and we can meet and get back to normal. I want you to know that this brief interruption to our relationship has
made things much clearer for me. Miriam and I are slowly growing apart. I think you know what this means to you and me. I know what you have always planned and wanted – I think the time is now coming for us to be together. Toby.

Louise scrunched both letters into a ball and tossed it on the floor. She let in the clutch and drove carefully away. She felt as if she had come to an important turning point in her life. On the one hand was Toby, hers for the claiming at last. But on the other hand there was the dreadful inexpungible memory of him, half-naked in red chiffon with his white ankles peeping out below chiffon ruffles, and his bony knee sticking through a provocative beribboned front opening.

‘Oh God, no,’ Louise said in unassumed disgust. ‘No. It’s not possible.’

She drove without seeing the road, without seeing the hedges starry with speedwell, illuminated by shining clumps of ox-eye daisies. Under the hedges were buttery yellow clusters of late primroses, in the woods on either side of the road were deep lush pools of rotting bluebells. As Louise drove slowly up the lane to her cottage ecstatic birdsong ringed the little car as thrush, blackbird, robin and coaltit swore their desire in rippling oaths into the warm blue air. When Louise parked the car and went wearily to the front door, clutching her letters, she could smell pollen and nectar and the perfume of flowers laying themselves out to please passing bees. Everything on the common was green and fertile and ready for summer. Bracken and fern were unfolding their tiny tentacles, reaching for the sunshine. The trees were as wetly green as lettuce. The cottage was besieged by rhododendron, their dark shiny leaves a nearblack foil to the prodigal trumpets of purple and white
flowers. The wild golden azalea extending tongues of saffron perfumed the air with a heady intoxicating scent.

Louise, blinded with more than her usual myopia, saw nothing and heard nothing, smelled nothing and felt nothing. She fitted her key in the lock and walked into her cold tidy house. She dropped the letters on the kitchen table and opened the one marked with the university crest. It was from Maurice Sinclair expressing his sorrow that the department would be unable to renew her post after the end of the summer term.

She nodded without surprise and opened the jiffy bag. The book
Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990
no longer struck her as a bold and adventurous experiment in social engineering, but as a curious waste of the time and energy of good women who could have been doing something more interesting. She looked closely at the photograph on the cover. Twenty blank faces under short unflattering haircuts looked back at her. They did indeed look determined, right-thinking, and forceful. They did not look as if they were having a whole lot of fun. Louise sank into the kitchen chair. She was afraid she had lost her lover, her job, and her Cause.

Realising she had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch, Louise went wearily to the little freezer, depressed by lack of food but not hungry. It was packed with small square boxes of frozen meals which rejoiced in the fact that the portions inside were so small and so inadequate in calories that Louise could have eaten the entire contents of the freezer and gained no more than a quarter of a pound in weight. Each meal, priced ounce per ounce far beyond the finest fillet steak, came in a small frozen bag fitted neatly inside its box, which sported a picture of lush and exotic
sauce and tasty meat on the front. Louise was not fooled. She had lived off these miserable simulacra before. She knew there was nothing more to them than a little knitted soya thread and an equal amount of chemical additives. She selected one at random, freed it from its box, stabbed it with efficient malice, microwaved it and then decanted it on to a cold plate. She opened a bottle of wine without relish and placed it, and a glass, on her tray. She went to the larder and took out a giant emergency-size block of fruit and nut chocolate. Thus armoured against desolation, she carried the whole tray up the stairs to her lonely bedroom and put herself to bed with a Virginia Woolf novel similarly brilliant on technique but short on calories.

Drunk with wine and gorged with chocolate by half past nine, Louise lay back against her pillows and fell into a sottish slumber. She was still drunk at eleven when she was awakened by the roar of Andrew Miles’s unsuppressed Land-Rover charging the hill. Once again Andrew, fuelled by Theakston’s Old Peculier and now also by passion, misjudged the corner, pulled the wheel around too late, and slid helplessly and happily on his bald tyres towards the hurdle which blocked the gap in the broken fence around the orchard. Once again, through shards of breaking wood his Land-Rover came to rest amid the trees which grew before his darling’s cottage.

Louise leaped from her bed in her frumpish cotton pyjamas, smeared with chocolate and groggy with alcohol, and looked out from her bedroom window. Andrew Miles was slumped in the attitude of a man knocked unconscious by his windscreen, and impaled on his steering wheel thrust like a spear between his ribs.

Louise took it all in, in a single heart-stopping moment, and screamed his name. She fled downstairs, tore open the
front door, crying ‘Andrew! Oh! Andrew!’ She ran on her bare feet, regardless of the sharp gravel, to the Land-Rover just as Andrew, miraculously recovering from his injuries, opened the driver’s door with the familiar resounding creak and received her into his open arms.

Louise had not had a man who stayed the whole night in her bed ever before. In her undergraduate days she and her partners had separated, driven apart by the discomfort of the study bedrooms at the university. Toby always went home to the marital bed even if Miriam was away for the night. He said he could not sleep elsewhere, and that in any case in this way they preserved a mystery and an erotic strangeness to each other. Her occasional other lovers she always dismissed. She might have sex with other men but there was only ever one man she wanted to wake beside. She had thus never slept with a man who, after a prolonged session of lovemaking which was both tender, experimental and, in the end, ravenously animal, curled himself around her like a fat dormouse on an ear of corn and fell deeply asleep, breathing beer fumes warmly into her ear.

Any attempt to disengage herself did nothing but make him tighten his grip. When Louise put a hand gently on his chest and whispered, ‘Andrew, could you move over a bit?’ he at once obligingly wriggled closer and held her tighter still. At one in the morning, suffering from both insomnia and claustrophobia, Louise shook him gently and said, ‘Andrew, I can’t sleep.’

He woke at once and moved on top of her in the darkness, kissing her face and neck and breasts with gentle sleepy tenderness. ‘OK,’ he said agreeably.

‘I didn’t mean …’ Louise started.

‘I love you,’ he said, and slid inside her. ‘You are absolutely the most perfect woman in the world and I love you.’

L
OUISE WOKE AT DAWN
to kisses and more loving. Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered telling Miriam that lovemaking four times in twenty-four hours was a ridiculous Lawrentian fiction. She giggled at the thought and Andrew Miles, always responsive to her desires, obligingly tickled her. The subsequent play – as wanton as kittens and as hysterical as schoolchildren – left them amorously entwined on the floor amid Andrew’s clothes and Louise’s supper tray.

Finally they separated. ‘I have to go to the farm,’ Andrew said. ‘Pigs want feeding. Shall I bring back anything for breakfast?’

Louise blinked at his assumption that he would be returning for breakfast. ‘I was going to work this morning,’ she said firmly.

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘But I suppose we’ll have breakfast.’

Louise opened her mouth to argue and then checked herself. He wanted to come back for breakfast, and she wanted him in her house. For the first time in nine years she glimpsed the possibility of a life with a man who spent his time with her, who was not always obliged to be elsewhere, whose primary loyalty was not always to another woman.

‘What do you eat for breakfast?’ she asked cautiously. It
was like a whole new world slowly extending before her. She had a feeling that croissants and coffee were not enough for a man who made love all night and then got up at six to feed pigs.

‘Bacon,’ he said. ‘Eggs, toast, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread. Cereal to start and toast and marmalade to finish. Lots and lots of tea. Nothing special.’

‘I haven’t got anything like that,’ Louise confessed, rather dashed. ‘I have a baguette in my freezer.’

Andrew, pulling on baggy corduroy trousers, chuckled. ‘It sounds positively obscene. Come up to the farm with me, and let’s
eat
.’

Louise suddenly found that she was hugely hungry. ‘I’ll have a shower and come up,’ she said. ‘Don’t wait for me. I’ll be up in half an hour.’

Andrew, shrugging himself into a tartan shirt which woefully clashed with the trousers, shook his head. ‘No. I want you with me. I’m sick of you being here and me being up the hill. I want you with me all day and I want you in my bed tonight.’

Louise held the bedcovers up to her naked shoulders. ‘I have things to do,’ she said. ‘I have a book to review and essays to mark. Just because we … just because you … just because … doesn’t mean that we have to make any big commitment to each other. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘God in heaven!’ Andrew swore, abruptly sitting down on the corner of the bed. ‘What do I have to do to stop you tarting around? I love you, I want to make love with you, probably as soon as I have had some breakfast. Moreover I want
you
to cook my breakfast while I feed the pigs. And then I want us to have
dinner
together. I want us to have
tea
together. I want to go down to the Holly Bush and get
drunk
together. And then tonight,’ he raised his voice and
brought his fist down on to the bed with each word as a hammering emphasis, ‘tonight I
want you in my bed
!’

Louise paused for no more than a moment. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said with what she feared was a simper. ‘All right by me.’

A broad grin spread across Andrew’s face and he gathered her naked warmth into his arms and dragged her out of bed and on to his lap.

‘What about the pigs?’ Louise asked as they rolled lazily back into the shambles of the duvet and the pillows.

‘They’ll understand,’ Andrew said.

Louise sat in the warmth of the Land-Rover while Andrew picked up pieces of broken hurdle and fence post and stacked them tidily against the orchard fence. The grass in the orchard was starry with dew, each blade of grass drenched in a string of droplets. Andrew lifted a pile of small pieces of wood and trudged with them down through the orchard to Rose’s van and threw them down at her doorstep. His big boots left bold dark tracks through the luminous grass. Louise found herself watching him in a way she had never watched any other man, appraising the broadness of his back and the strength of his shoulders; looking at him not only as a lover, but also as a potential husband who would care for her, a man who would father her children.

He was generous, she thought. He was thoughtful. He did not have to carry the kindling to Rose’s door, he could have left it stacked in the orchard and Rose would have helped herself. Louise put her head on one side and watched Andrew make a second trip with another armful of wood. He was a good man, kindly. He would make a good husband, she thought. If he was so considerate of the comfort of an
old lady he would be a pleasant man to live with. He would be patient with small children, he would make a good father.

Louise checked her own thoughts with a guilty start. Liberated feminist women do not assess men as husbands, they do not plan marriage the moment they climb out of bed. But then she shrugged. She had never felt like this about any man before. She had seen Toby through a haze of envy when she wished he had chosen her instead of Miriam. She had never analysed his behaviour and wondered if he were indeed the most desirable man she knew. She had accepted her old judgement, the judgement of a girl of twenty, that he was the man she wanted. She knew now, at twenty-nine, that he was not.

She looked at Andrew Miles with a clearer vision, thinking of her needs, of her future, and whether they could indeed make a relationship which would last for them both. She thought of the little Elizabethan manor farm and the fields around it, and the common stretching away from it and thought she would like to live there, as Rose had suggested, in the big farm bed with a baby on the way.

He came to the Land-Rover and opened the door. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked as he started the engine and backed the vehicle carefully into the lane away from the wreckage of Louise’s fence.

‘I was thinking that you would make a nice husband,’ Louise said with rare honesty, breaking every rule of appropriate social behaviour between new lovers, and every rule of politically correct behaviour for liberated women.

He turned his head and gave her a swift happy grin. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would. I will. I will make a wonderful husband to you. Let’s get married at once.’

‘I didn’t mean that!’ Louise protested immediately. ‘I was thinking theoretically.’

‘Oh, bollocks,’ he said. ‘Of course we should get married.’

Louise said nothing for a moment as he drove carefully up the lane and then turned in the gateway to his farm. He stopped the Land-Rover, switched off the engine and turned to look at her, resting his hand gently on her shoulder and then turning her face towards him. ‘I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘And I’m not theorising. I want to marry you and bring you here as my wife. I want children in the farmhouse again and a girl or a boy to have the farm when I’m dead. You’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted and I want you very much. Will you marry me, Louise?’

‘It’s so quick …’

‘I’ve known you and I’ve been caring for you for nearly a year,’ he said. ‘Anything that’s ever been a problem for you and I’ve been there. Septic tank, snow, gutters, chimneys. I’ve never stopped thinking about you and doing things for you. For nearly a year, Louise. That’s long enough.’

‘But I always paid you!’ Louise exclaimed.

‘Well, go on paying me!’ he said irritably. ‘But for God’s sake let’s get married and live in my house. You can pay me all you like.’

Louise giggled irresistibly and Andrew pulled her gently into his arms. ‘Say yes,’ he whispered into her hair.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Louise had thought that Andrew had been joking about spending the entire day with her but she found that he meant precisely and simply what he said. She therefore spent the morning with him beating the bounds of his fields, checking sheep, moving his small herd of cream-coloured Charolais cows from one field to another, fixing the stop
cock in a water trough, and starting to clear out a barn for the next instalment of the hay crop.

At noon they went into the house for dinner. Mrs Shaw had left a huge pan of home-made tomato soup, and there was home-baked bread in the bin and a substantial cheese board. They ate with fervent hunger in companionable silence, listening to the detailed weather forecast and the ‘World at One’ and then ‘The Archers’, from which Andrew extracted a high degree of scandalised enjoyment.

‘What do we do now?’ Louise asked as he switched off the radio. She felt wonderfully tired after a night of constant lovemaking and the long morning in the open air.

Andrew smiled. ‘I think we should have a little lie down.’

He led the way up the winding wooden stairs to the bedroom. It faced south over the Wistley common. Diamonds of golden sunshine filtered through the leaded windows and spread like an aureate counterpane on the big brass bed. Andrew shucked off his breeches, socks, and pants, and hopped between the sheets, patting the pillows welcomingly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I won’t bite.’

‘You might,’ Louise said, stripping off her own clothes with equal shamelessness.

‘Not very hard,’ he said.

Louise slid into bed beside him and felt at once a rush of what must be joy, absolute joy, at the firm smooth warmth of him, at the confident touch of his hands on her body as he drew her to him, at the clear windblown sunned smell of him, and at the easy unbidden rising of her desire.

‘What about the pigs?’ she asked as Andrew turned her firmly on her side and caressed her long slim back, and her shoulders, and traced her vertebrae with his tongue.

‘Pigs?’

‘You’re always saying, “pigs want feeding”. But I’ve not
seen your pigs. I’ve seen everything but pigs; and we’ve not fed them this morning.’

He gave a guilty little chuckle and buried his head against the smooth skin of her back, and nibbled at her neck. ‘I’ve not got any pigs,’ he confessed. ‘But it’s the sort of thing that you can say when you want to get out of something or leave somewhere. I didn’t realise I said it so often as to be noticeable. I don’t have pigs – or only as a manner of speech. I have metaphorical pigs. I have theoretical pigs.’

Louise giggled and turned around in his arms and pulled his smiling face down to her own. ‘You absurd man!’ she said lovingly. ‘Metaphors are my department. Theoretical pigs are certainly my department.’

They slept until half past two and then Andrew crept downstairs and made a pot of strong lapsang souchong tea with slabs of rich fruit cake. ‘Wakey wakey,’ he called to Louise, putting the tray on the bed. ‘I want to turn some hay. You can come and learn how to drive a tractor.’

‘I’ve got to go home sometime,’ Louise said. ‘I need my night things and I should check my ansaphone. I’ve got to shop for tomorrow. Miriam’s coming to stay with me tomorrow night.’

‘She can stay here,’ Andrew said. ‘We’ll go and fetch your things on the way to the Bush if you like this evening. Phone her and tell her to come here.’

‘She might not want to stay with you,’ Louise pointed out, assuming a voice of chilly reproof. ‘She was looking forward to staying with me in a caring and secure women-only environment.’

He looked thoughtful for a moment; but then – ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Better food here. Better company, nicer house,
cosier rooms, an all-night rave and theoretical pigs! What more could a woman ask?’

‘I’ll phone her,’ Louise said.

He passed her the telephone from the bedside table, and went across the landing to the bathroom. Louise could hear him singing as he splashed the water into the basin and she realised that she had made him happy, and that this was connubial happiness, as she, full of sceptical disbelief, had read of only in novels. She was making him happy, and his happiness made her happy, which in turn … she shook her head in a state of mild wonderment. All these years of waiting and longing for Toby and she had never had any idea that loving a man could be so easy.

She dialled the number of the women’s refuge but the line bleeped and did not ring. So she telephoned Miriam at home, ready to put down the receiver if Toby answered.

‘Hello?’ Miriam said in her most pessimistic voice.

‘It’s Louise,’ Louise said.

‘Oh, hi.’

‘Are you still coming over tomorrow?’

‘Could I come tonight?’ Miriam asked. ‘The shit has really hit the fan here. I’m leaving Toby. The refuge has been bankrupted and closed. I’m out of a job, I’m out of my marriage. I’ve finished here.’

‘Oh God,’ Louise said. ‘What’s happened between you and Toby?’

‘He’s been seeing another woman,’ Miriam said bitterly. ‘For nine years. Nearly all of our married life. He’s never been completely committed to me.’

‘How d’you know?’ Louise whispered. Guilt invaded her and drowned her new joy.

‘He told me,’ Miriam said blankly. ‘The silly bastard told me this morning. I’d always known he had the occasional
fling. And I did too. It was something which we knew about, but something we never discussed. We’re adults, Louise, I don’t need to know every damn thing he does. But suddenly he spills the whole can of worms at my feet.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he took it into his stupid head that you were going to tell me that he is a transvestite. He wanted me to know that he’s
not
a transvestite – which he’d be really ashamed of. So he tells me he
is
a liar and a committed adulterer. He seemed to think that being a cheat for all of his married life was better than wanting to dress up in frocks.’

‘I wouldn’t have said anything,’ Louise protested weakly.

‘I wouldn’t have cared if you had!’ Miriam exclaimed. ‘Bloody hell, Louise, I see worse than that daily. We could have coped with that. He could have borrowed my Laura Ashleys – why should I worry? But what I can’t stand is the thought of him lying and lying for all those years, and then telling me, with that soppy little-boy-naughty face of his as if he was proud of himself.’

‘Come out now,’ Louise said, summoning a desperate courage. ‘I have to talk to you.’

‘I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ve been packing all morning. I’ve got another hour’s work and then I’ll come. I’ll be out with you at about nine.’

‘I’m not at my cottage,’ Louise said cautiously. ‘I’m up at the farm.’