Perfectly Correct

Miriam concluded the last of her telephone calls and came into the kitchen. The table was laid, Toby and Louise were drinking wine. A glass was standing ready for her at her place.

‘Thanks,’ she said, dropping into her chair. ‘That was about the council again.’

The lease on the women’s refuge was due to expire within six months and the council were reluctant to renew. Miriam had launched a lobby campaign on councillors but battered wives were not a priority in a tourist town where income depended largely on an atmosphere of carefree perfection.

‘They’re such bastards,’ Miriam declared.

Toby and Louise nodded, looking suitably grave.

‘Help me serve,’ Toby said to Louise.

Together they arranged the soufflé on the plates and took them to the table. There was a green salad with Toby’s special salad dressing and his home-made brown bread. They opened another bottle of wine.

‘How was the meeting?’ Toby inquired.

‘Bloody awful,’ Miriam replied.

Toby smiled and helped himself to more bread. Miriam might be irritable now but after more wine and some fruit she would become sleepy and pliable. He would not make love with her, he was tired after groping with Louise in the car, but he enjoyed the reassurance of knowing that his wife and his mistress were sexually available to him. Tomorrow morning, after Miriam had brought him a cup of coffee in bed and gone to work, he would make love with Louise if he felt like it. He was a fortunate man and he knew it.

Thursday

LOUISE, driving back to her cottage after teaching a morning tutorial, had every hope of seeing an empty orchard. Instead, as she rounded the bend that Mr Miles had found so treacherous, she was greeted by the irritating sight of the big blue van and a washing line strung between two of her apple trees. Brightly coloured blouses and shapeless grey underwear were bobbing among the blossom. Louise swore, turned her car down the drive, jerked on the handbrake and marched purposefully towards the orchard.

‘Anyone home?’ she demanded truculently.

The van rocked. First the dog put his head around the door, and when he saw Louise wagged a welcoming tail. Then the old lady herself emerged. She was wearing a man’s smoking jacket in deep plum patterned silk and midnight-blue silk pyjama trousers. ‘You again,’ she said.

‘I think you should move on today,’ Louise said clearly. ‘This is my orchard and you have been here now for more than twenty-four hours. I think it’s time you went. If you want a nearby site I can telephone Mr Miles at Wistley Common Farm for you. He sometimes has a vacant field.’

The woman observed her from under the mop of hair. ‘Out all night,’ she said. ‘Did you go to a party?’

Louise found herself blushing. ‘Of course not. I was at a meeting and then I went on to dinner with friends.’

‘I’ll trouble you for some fresh water,’ the woman said. She reached inside the van and brought out the empty jug again. She jumped lightly down from the steps and strolled towards the gate, the dog at her bare heels. Louise took the jug and marched into the house. A couple of letters were pushed to one side as she opened the door into the porch. She filled the jug and stalked back down the garden path. The old woman was leaning on the gate.

‘Beautiful day,’ she commented. ‘You must enjoy the birds at dawn.’

Louise, who never woke until long after dawn, said nothing.

‘I was born here, you know,’ the old woman said conversationally. ‘In this very cottage.’

Louise could not help but be interested but she remained sulkily silent.

‘The trees were younger then,’ the old woman sighed. ‘The trees were so much younger then.’

She put out an old mottled hand and rested it against a tree trunk as an owner might stroke a favourite dog. There was a strange familiarity between her and the tree, as if the tree were responding to her touch. Louise found herself trying to picture her orchard as a field of saplings, like girls ready to dance. ‘I think you should go today,’ she said, but her voice was no longer angry.

The old woman nodded. ‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘Whatever you wish.’

Louise felt suddenly deflated, as if she had triumphed in some small act of malice.

‘What was your meeting?’ the old woman asked.

Louise shrugged. ‘It’s a committee I belong to. We’re trying to encourage older women to go on university degree courses. Every year we organise an open day and then for those that are interested we run introductory courses. This year we’re focusing on women in science and industry.’ Louise heard her voice sounding flat and indifferent. ‘It’s a very important issue,’ she said.

‘And where did you go for dinner?’

‘To my friends’ house – Toby and Miriam. I used to rent their flat before I came to live here. Miriam and I were at university together. Toby and I…’ Louise abruptly broke off. ‘Toby is her husband,’ she said.

‘Drives a white Ford Escort car, does he?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been past a few times. Quite often there was the white Ford Escort parked outside.’

‘Yes,’ Louise said shortly.

The old woman smiled at her benevolently. ‘Quite a friend you are!’ she observed.

Louise could think of no response to make at all.

‘And what d’you teach, at the university?’ the woman inquired pleasantly.

‘I have an experimental post. I’m a specialist in women’s studies seconded to the Literature department on a year’s trial.’

The old woman nodded. ‘Well, I must get on,’ she said as if Louise were delaying her with gossip. She started towards the van.

‘But you are leaving today?’ Louise confirmed.

The old woman turned and waved the gaudy jug. ‘Just as soon as I get packed,’ she said. ‘As you wish.’

Louise nodded and turned and went into the house. She picked up the letters and went to read them in her study. The van, solid and blue, obscured the view of the common which she usually found so soothing. She opened the letters without needing to tear the flaps, glanced at them and put them under a paperweight. She switched on the word processor and picked up the phone to speak to Toby.

‘She says she’s leaving.’

Toby, collecting books for a seminar for which he had failed to prepare, was rather brisk. ‘Good. End of problem.’

‘I feel like a bully.’

‘Napoleon!’

‘Napoleon?’

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said bracingly. ‘Napoleon said it.’

‘She’s so very old. And she was born here. She says she was born here.’

‘She probably says that everywhere she goes. Look, I have to go. I’m supposed to be taking a seminar on industrialisation and I’ve put Das Kapital down somewhere and I can’t find it.’

‘Call me later,’ Louise urged. ‘I feel a bit desolate.’

‘Do some work!’ Toby recommended. ‘Sarah’s waiting for your Lawrence article, she told me this morning. I’ll call you later. I might be able to get out to see you this evening – Men’s Consciousness group is finishing early.’

‘Oh!’ The half-promise was an immediate restorative. Louise often dreaded being alone in the cottage. On cool summer evenings when the swallows swooped and chased against an apricot horizon the cottage seemed too full of ghosts, other people whose lives had been lived more vividly and more passionately than Louise’s. They had left a trace of their desires and needs in every sun-warmed stone, while Louise flitted like a cold shadow leaving no record. Louise felt half-invisible, looking out of the window across the common. She would pour herself a glass of wine and go out into the garden, sit in a deck chair on the front lawn and read a book, consciously trying to enjoy her solitude. Then she would turn around and look at the little cottage which seemed more lively and vital than herself.

It had been built as a gamekeeper’s cottage, part of a grand estate of which Mr Miles’s great-grandfather had bought a small slice. Louise thought of a man like Lawrence’s gamekeeper, Mellors, letting himself quietly out of the gate that led to the common and walking softly on dew-soaked grass to check his rabbit snares. Impossible for Louise to speculate what a man like that would think as he walked down the sandy paths between the ferns, a dark shadow of a dog at his heels. Impossible even to imagine him without the gloss of literature on him. Louise was not even sure what a gamekeeper did for his day-to-day work, she was far better informed about his sexually gymnastic nights. But that was fiction. Everything she knew best was fiction.

The gamekeeper had left when the big estate was sold up. Mr Miles had told her that the cottage was used by his own family and then housed farm labourers. He knew one of his father’s workers who had lived there with his wife and their seven children. Louise had protested that they could not possibly have all fitted into the two little bedrooms.

‘No bathroom,’ Mr Miles had reminded her. ‘So three bedrooms. Girls in one room, boys in another and parents in the third. I used to come down for my tea with them sometimes. It was grand.’ He smiled at Louise, trying to find the words. ‘A lot of play,’ he said. ‘Like foxcubs.’

Louise sometimes thought of that family as she went to sleep alone in her wide white bed. A family where the children played like foxcubs, with four boys in one room and three girls whispering in another and a great marital bed which saw birth and death and lovemaking year after year.

She pulled up her chair and sat down before the word processor.

Nothing came.

Outside in the orchard, the blossom bobbed. The blue van was as still as a rock, planted like a rock, embedded in the earth. The old woman was clearly not packing, she was not moving around at all. She was doing nothing and Louise feared very much that when Toby visited in the evening the van would be there still, and the old woman, who guessed so quickly and knew so much, would see Toby’s white Ford Escort car pull up the drive and watch him get out and let himself in the front door with his own key. Louise thought that with the old woman’s bright eyes scanning the front of the cottage she would not feel at all in the right mood to go upstairs with Toby if he wanted to make love.

She was quite right. The van was still there as the sunset dimmed slowly into a soft lavender twilight. Toby’s tyres sprayed gravel as he pulled up outside the cottage. Louise opened the door at once to draw him in, hoping that the old woman would not see them.

‘Evening!’ the old voice called penetratingly from the bottom of the darkening garden.

Toby turned at once, ignoring Louise’s hand on his sleeve. ‘Good evening,’ he replied.

‘Oh, come in,’ Louise urged. ‘She said she was going, but she’s still here. I’ll talk to her tomorrow and get her moved on. Come inside now, Toby.’

‘I’ll just say hello,’ Toby said. ‘I’m curious.’ He handed Louise the bottle of wine he was carrying and strolled down towards the orchard. The old woman was leaning against the garden gate, her dog sprawled over her bare feet, keeping them warm.

‘Hello.’ Toby smiled his charming smile at her.

The old woman nodded, taking in every inch of him: his silk shirt, sleek trousers, casual shoes, and his jacket slung over his shoulder.

‘And are you at the university too?’ she asked, as if continuing a long conversation.

‘Yes,’ Toby said engagingly. ‘I’m in the Sociology department. Louise teaches feminist studies in the Literature department so we’re colleagues. But tell me, what are you doing here?’

The old woman looked around her as if the briar roses were leaning their pale faces forward to eavesdrop. ‘I’ve come here to write,’ she confided softly. ‘To write my memoirs. I wanted somewhere quiet where I could work.’

‘Really? How very interesting.’ Toby was not interested at all.

She nodded. ‘I was born in 1908. My mother died when I was four. Her health had been broken, you see, by the force-feeding.’

Toby, whose attention had been wandering, suddenly clicked on, like a searchlight. ‘Force-feeding?’

The old woman shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t know. It’s all over and forgotten now. But they were terrible days for the women suffragettes.’

‘I do know,’ Toby said hurriedly and untruthfully. ‘I’ve studied that period. Was your mother a militant suffragette?’

The old woman suddenly gleamed at him. ‘She was! She was! And after her death, they took me in. They called me the youngest recruit of them all! They used to pop me through the scullery windows to check the houses were empty. We cared about pets, you know. If there was a budgie or a canary I’d open the front door and we’d get them out before we fired the building.’

Toby could feel his heart rate speeding. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You were working for the WSPU – the women’s suffrage movement. And they used you, as a little girl, to help them in their attacks on property?’

The old woman nodded. ‘It was like the greatest adventure in the world for me. I used to love going out at night with them, on the raids.’

‘And you can remember it all?’

‘Remember it?’ the old woman laughed. ‘I’ve got a trunk full of photographs and newspaper clippings. I’ve got my diary and my letters. And her diary and her letters too.’

‘Whose diary?’ Toby asked. He had a feeling very like drunkenness. He could feel his head swimming and his breath coming too fast. ‘Whose diary have you got?’

‘Why, the diary of the woman who adopted me,’ the old woman said nonchalantly. ‘Sylvia, Sylvia Pankhurst.’

Toby waded back to the house like a drowning man gasping for the shore. In his fevered imagination he saw the book he would write, the definitive book on the women’s suffrage movement and the inside story of the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. It would be illustrated lavishly with previously unseen photographs. He would quote extensively from her private papers – letters, diaries. He would collate and index them all into chronological order and then deposit them, perhaps at Suffix, perhaps in London. They would be called the Summers collection and he would publish a guide to them. The book would go into many editions. There was a huge and growing interest in anything about the women’s movement, not just in England but worldwide. He would get a teaching post far better paid, far more prestigious than Suffix could ever offer. He could go to Cambridge, or Oxford. He leaned against the front door for a moment, hyperventilating with fantasy.

Oxford, hell! He could go to America! What would the University of California not give for him, and for the Summers collection? He would be able to name his price. The increasingly complex, increasingly competitive world of sociology would be left behind him. He would be into gender studies, he would be an expert on the women’s movement. He was a new man, every inch of him was a new man. He could enter this deliciously easy growth area and leave sociology with its growing emphasis on computers and complicated statistics behind him.

The door opened behind him. ‘Are you ready to come in now?’ Louise asked sulkily. ‘I’ve opened the wine.’

He turned to her, elated, full of his plans. Then some cautious instinct made him hesitate. ‘She’s quite a character,’ he said casually. ‘D’you know why she’s here?’

Louise passed him a glass of red wine. ‘It’s her route, isn’t it? She knew my aunt. She probably comes here every year.’

‘Oh.’ Toby forced the excitement to drain from his face, he controlled his voice so that he sounded nonchalant. ‘Like a gypsy. They always travel the same route, don’t they?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Louise said. ‘Ask Miriam, it’s more her area than mine.’

As usual, a reference to Miriam signalled Louise’s greatest displeasure. Toby leaned back on the sofa and invitingly patted the cushion beside him. ‘Come and sit here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day. I couldn’t get you out of my mind.’

Louise could never resist that tone of voice from him. She crossed the room and sat close. Toby slid his arm around her shoulders. His mind was working frantically. He would borrow or buy a tape recorder and persuade the old woman to talk before a microphone. He would make her go through every photograph and every newspaper clipping and identify each one, and all the people in the pictures. He would give each photograph a reference number and cross-refer each one to the tape recording. Then he would lead her through her childhood, from her earliest memories of her mother, through her contact with the Pankhursts and her relationship with them all.

He had lied when he said he had studied the period. He had a nodding acquaintance with the history of the struggle for women’s votes, but no more than any man who has read a couple of history books and lived with a feminist. Both Louise and Miriam would have been better prepared and better suited to interview the old woman. Miriam had taught a women’s history course at evening class, and Louise specialised in women’s studies. Toby did not care. The world was full of better-qualified, better-read, more learned academics and he could not give way to all of them.

There is a point in every academic’s life when he or she realises that a career in a university is as unjust as the upward struggle in any large corporation. Those that survive are those that learn to exploit career opportunities. Those that do well are as unscrupulous and ambitious as any City executive. Toby was not going to hand over the research opportunity of a lifetime simply because he was the wrong gender and had no interest in the topic.

‘So she’s told you nothing of her plans?’ he asked softly. Louise kicked off her shoes and rested her bare feet on the end of the sofa. Toby observed that she had painted her toe-nails a deep sexy red.

‘She’s supposed to be leaving,’ Louise said. ‘She said she’d go today. I’ll make sure she goes tomorrow. I’m at home all day. I’ll pack her up and drive the van myself, if need be.’

Toby smoothed his lips along Louise’s sleek head. When he had first met her and Miriam, Louise had worn her straight hair very short in an unbecoming crop. It had made her face look pointy and sharp. Of the two women, Miriam with her great mop of a shaggy perm and her wide easy smile was undeniably the more attractive. But over the years Louise had grown her hair into a pageboy bob which went well with the increasingly smart clothes she wore. Miriam, who had no time for regular visits to the hairdresser, let the curl drop out of her hair till it was flat and straight . Now she tied it back at the nape of her neck with a leather barrette when she remembered, or an inelegant elastic band; and cut it with the kitchen scissors every month or so.

The faces of the women had changed too. Miriam’s sexy wide-mouthed grin had faded over eight years of arduous and depressing work. When Toby came home late at night and found her dozing in an armchair, a Home Office report open in her lap, he often thought she looked older than her thirty years. Older, and tired and sad. He would wake her and send her up to bed then, full of nostalgic regret for the girl she had been, who used to get drunk on a pint of weak lager and lime at lunchtime, and lie in the sun and refuse to go to her seminars.

Louise’s pointy face had grown rounder and more relaxed. The successful reception of her PhD thesis, the publication of her book, and her particularly lucky slide into her lectureship had put the gloss of a successful woman on her. Her move to the country had given her more time to herself, and Toby was agreeably surprised to find that she seemed to be spending this time on personal grooming, of which the claret toes were the latest example. Louise contributed to a quarterly paper of feminist theory. Toby had just read her essay which explained that feminists now could legitimately wear any kind of garment, adopt any sort of adornment. The old dreary dress codes of puritan drabness could be rejected. Apparently feminists could now enjoy their femininity. Indeed, any kind of aping of male dress style – whether boiler suit or power dressing in a tailored jacket – was a betrayal of their true sexuality. Lace underwear, even stockings and suspenders, was part of a woman’s personal choice and a legitimate statement of her individual power.

Toby found this development of feminism intensely enjoyable. No enthusiast had greeted the Second Wave more ardently. He slid an exploratory hand under the collar of Louise’s shirt and felt the thin strap of something which might be a bra, or might be some kind of teddy or body stocking. He knew himself to be a remarkably lucky man. His youth had coincided with the period of time where women demonstrated their emancipation by leaving off their underwear, refusing to shave their body hair, and participating in promiscuous sex. A state as near to Paradise as the mid-twenty-year-old Toby could imagine. Now he was older and his tastes were more refined he had the remarkable good fortune to discover that feminism had taken a developmental turn. Body hair was now removed, personal adornment was a sign of confidence and pride, and although promiscuity was out of fashion, celibacy – that spectre of the late ‘80s – had never caught on. Provided a man was prepared to wear a condom (and Toby was always thoroughly prepared), he could expect to find most serious intelligent women dressed in underwear appropriate to a fin-de-siècle Parisian brothel, and open to invitations of the most imaginative nature. Toby let his hand stray downwards to Louise’s right breast. She seemed to be encased in a kind of silky lace. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’ he asked politely.

Louise smiled in assent and led the way. She glanced over her shoulder to the blue van in the orchard. It was still and quiet. No lights were showing. Perhaps the old woman was having an early night prior to a long journey at dawn tomorrow. Louise resolutely put her from her mind and opened the bedroom door.

Miriam and Toby’s bedroom at home was functional – part library, part sleeping area. Toby often worked in bed and the floor and table on his side were often littered with papers and books. The telephone was Miriam’s side with a notepad and pencil for late-night emergency calls. Toby loved the contrast of Louise’s orderly female room. There were no frills or lace, nothing fussy, but the room had a groomed elegance – like Louise herself. There was a pure white quilt on the modern brass bed. There were complicated and faintly erotic prints on the freshly painted walls. On Louise’s uncluttered dressing-table were a few small bottles of perfume. On her bedside table was a promising bottle of aromatherapy massage oil. The electric blanket had been switched on since the late afternoon; Louise disliked cold sheets. Toby undressed without haste and laid his clothes carefully on a chair. Louise stripped down to her lacy teddy, threw back the covers of the bed and spread herself out for his view.

‘Gorgeous,’ Toby said appreciatively, and slid on top of her.

He did not stay there for more than a moment. Toby’s lovemaking followed a certain pattern which both Miriam and Louise had learned. He moved easily from one position to another with the woman on top, or at his side, but rarely beneath him, a position which had been unpopular with feminists in the old days, when Toby learned his erotic skills. He varied the rhythm of his movements from very fast to languidly slow. He neglected no erogenous zone with his fingers or his tongue with the meticulous thoroughness of a man checking off a mental list. He talked to Louise (or Miriam) not only about his feelings and desires, but he also inquired courteously as to their progress. ‘Is this good? And this? Do you like it when I do this? And this?’ Whether he was trying to please or inviting congratulations, it was impossible to say.

When he was ready to come to orgasm which, with Louise (and Miriam), was these days rather soon, he would smile a peculiarly attractive smile and take Louise’s (or Miriam’s) hand, lick the middle finger and place it lovingly but firmly on her clitoris. Thus prompted, Louise (or Miriam) would caress herself to a climax while Toby gave himself up to the bliss of his ejaculation with a clear conscience.