Perfectly Correct
Philippa Gregory

This story is dedicated to those of us who try to be correct and fail to be perfect.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Autumn

About the Author

By The Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Wednesday

LOUISE CASE GLANCED UP from the screen of her word processor to her window, and beyond, to where the cameo-pink blossom of the apple orchard should have been visible, lilting in the wind. It was a familiar sight, which she had enjoyed many times this spring while working at her desk. She blinked. Her view of the apple blossom and the green hills beyond was completely obscured by the roof of a big blue van. A shiny steel chimney poked rakishly from one side, there were three long rusting scratches along the roof. Louise stared at it in incomprehension for long moments. Then, not taking her eyes from it, she reached out her hand to the telephone and dialled a number.

‘Toby Summers please, Sociology department,’ she said.

The big blue roof rocked slightly. For an instant she thought hopefully that the van might be about to move, to disappear as suddenly as it had arrived. But it was someone moving inside that made it rock. It remained, obstinately present, in her orchard, blocking her view of her apple blossom.

Toby’s extension rang. Louise rose to her feet and could see more of the van. There was a small door cut in the side, which stood open. There was a stand of two steps leading up to it, planted firmly in the grass where last autumn Louise had hopefully scattered mixed meadow flower seed. A large mongrel dog was tied on a long piece of string to a bracket beside the door. The inside of the van was in shadow. Louise could see nothing of the owner.

‘Toby Summers.’

‘It’s me.’ Louise had the right of the long-term lover to have her voice recognised at once.

‘Hello,’ Toby said.

‘I’ve got the most extraordinary thing in my orchard. A big blue van. It must have just arrived. I was working in my study and I looked up and there it was.’

Toby chuckled. Since Louise’s impulsive move to the country there had been a number of small crises. Toby preferred to take them as lightly as possible. If Louise was ever in real need both Toby and his wife Miriam would exercise their considerable powers to help her. But they had agreed that the move to the country was so eccentric – so unlike Louise, who had lived in Brighton since her first year at university, through MA and then PhD – that problems were inevitable.

‘Very appropriate,’ he said. ‘Were you working on your Lawrence essay?’

Louise glanced at the screen, blank save for the heading ‘D.H. Lawrence: The Virgin and the Gypsy’. ‘Yes.’

‘And now you have your very own gypsy to research,’ Toby said, smiling. The graduate student in his room rose and moved towards the door. Toby shook his head and waved her back into her seat. His affair with Louise had been conducted so discreetly for so many years that it had attained the status of respectability.

‘What should I do?’ Louise asked. ‘Someone can’t just park in the middle of my orchard. It’s private property. He’s trespassing.’

Toby considered. ‘Why don’t you stroll out and ask him politely what he thinks he’s doing? Maybe he’s just pulled off the road for lunch.’

‘He can’t have lunch in my orchard!’ Louise protested. She realised she sounded peevish and she lightened her tone to match Toby’s detached urbanity. ‘He looks rather settled. There’s a dog tied up by the door, and he’s put some steps out.’

‘Ask him anyway,’ Toby suggested. ‘It’s not as if you’re an enclosing squire of the manor. Maybe he’s looking for somewhere to stay. He could legally camp on the common, couldn’t he? It’s common land, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. But not in my orchard.’

‘Well, have a chat with him first, and then call me back. I’m here till three.’

‘Is someone with you?’

Toby smiled again at the student who had turned in her chair and was ostentatiously examining the books in the bookcase behind her. ‘Yes.’

Louise experienced a swift, illogical pang that someone else should be in Toby’s intimate little office. She knew it was not jealousy. She and Toby had deliberately forged a completely open relationship, too mature to include archaic emotions such as jealousy. Over the nine years of their love affair he had started and ended other affairs, and so had she. They had made an agreement years ago that their relationship should be free from grasping possessiveness. Louise had watched his love for his wife, Miriam, evolve and change. She had seen him intrigued, passionately involved, and then bored by other women. She herself had experimented, rather callously, with other men. But no-one, it seemed, could quite take the place of Toby, and when he said there was a student in his room with him she felt a strange breath pass through her nose to her chest, like a faint whiff of smelling salts, of sulphur.

‘I’ll make a survey from the upstairs window,’ she said, making an amusing expedition of it. ‘And then I’ll just go down the garden and chat over the fence. After all, it is my orchard.’

‘You are an enclosing squire of the manor.’ Toby’s telephone voice was warm and intimate. Louise felt stroked, desirable. The student, who feared Toby’s intellect and disliked the aura of male sexuality which he deliberately radiated, slumped in her chair and pushed her glasses up her short nose. ‘Talk to you later,’ Toby promised and rang off.

Louise put down the phone and glanced again at the blank screen. The essay would not be started until she had resolved the issue of her own gypsy. She went out of her study and through the sitting room, up the little staircase and into her bedroom which looked out over Wistley Common.

The van was even bigger and bluer when viewed from above. It had entered the orchard through a break in the fence which had been made in the winter by Mr Miles skidding in his Land-Rover. He had promised faithfully to mend it and Louise – a newcomer in the village, and dependent on Mr Miles to clear the lane for her should the ice turn to snow – had not reminded him more than twice. His farm was further up the lane, his grazing land nibbled into the edges of the common. This cottage had belonged to his father, and was bought from him by Louise’s aunt who had died and left it to Louise. Mr Miles regarded Louise’s improvements to a cottage ready for demolition with an indulgent eye. He had been sorry to break her pretty new fence, and intended to mend it as soon as he had the time and could buy or borrow some fencing planks. But now, the van had driven through the gap, down the grassy lane between the trees and parked, facing south to Wistley Common, with apple blossom petals showering gently around it and sticking, like damp confetti, to the battered blue roof.

The dog was lying by the steps, ears slack. Someone had placed a bowl of water beside it, and a small dustbin had silently appeared on the other side of the door. Louise watched for some minutes, but no-one came out of the van. If she wanted to see the gypsy she would have to go and tackle him direct.

She was not frightened. Years ago Louise and Miriam had attended women’s defence classes, and assertiveness training. They had temporarily become women secure in their own worth, confident of their ability to deal with men and women. Since those easy undergraduate days Miriam had faced half a dozen violent men demanding to see their wives who were living in the refuge run by Miriam. Experience had taught Miriam that the hip-and-shoulder throw was of little use against a man twice her weight, fuelled with alcohol and anger, and with a knife in his pocket. But Louise’s postgraduate life had been more select. She had never had to try the hip-and-throw technique on anyone more threatening than her instructor, and her confidence remained high. Besides, she would be on one side of her garden gate and the man would be on the other. If he were abusive she had only to walk half a dozen steps to the French windows in her study and pick up a telephone for the police and have him summarily evicted. She felt that it might be better as a police matter anyway. The man was trespassing, and would undoubtedly cause damage – breaking boughs and fouling the area. There would be litter and, if nothing worse, tyre marks in the grass. Louise had not owned a house before. She was rather fiercely proprietary about this one. Also, she believed that the countryside was an empty place, occupied only by small shy animals. That was how she liked it.

Still watching the window, she picked up the telephone by the bed and dialled Miriam’s number at the women’s refuge.

‘Hello?’ Miriam always sounded wary. For the past eight years she had been answering the telephone at the refuge and providing telephone counselling for the Rape Crisis Centre. It was very rare that she picked up the phone to hear pleasant news.

‘It’s me,’ Louise said. ‘I have the most extraordinary thing in my orchard.’

Miriam nodded at the woman sitting opposite her desk. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ she said reassuringly. The woman in her early twenties looked resigned to waiting all day if need be. She did not respond to Miriam’s smile.

‘I have someone with me,’ Miriam said suppressively.

‘There’s a van in my orchard. I think it must be a gypsy or a tinker or someone.’

‘How did he get in?’ Miriam’s interest was sharpened at the first mention of a persecuted minority.

‘Through the gap in my fence. It’s still not mended. What should I do?’

‘Is he doing any damage?’

‘Apart from being parked where I planted my meadow flower mix and spoiling the view, no.’

Miriam held back a sigh. ‘I don’t think the view really matters, does it? Or the meadow flower mix?’

‘Well, it is my orchard.’

‘Then ask him to move on.’

‘He can park anywhere on the common, or Mr Miles might let him rent a field.’

Miriam nodded, saying nothing.

‘I’ll suggest that to him.’

‘Do,’ Miriam agreed. ‘Are you coming to the meeting tonight?’

Miriam and Louise worked on an ambitious adult education project with the aim of recruiting older, preferably abused, women into university degree courses.

‘Yes. Seven o’clock, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Come on to dinner. Toby’s cooking.’

‘Thanks,’ Louise said. ‘I will.’

She put down the phone, and went slowly down the stairs. She opened the French windows of her study and walked slowly down the garden towards the little gate which led into the orchard and from there to the common beyond. The garden was still very wild. It had been derelict when she had inherited the cottage. The little house had stood amid a sea of ferns. Heather and ling grew up to the very door, bracken made a waist-high jungle. The beloved flowers of cottage gardens, forget-me-nots, lupins, tall white iris, and blowsy tea roses sprawling into briars, extended from the cottage out into the common land until no-one could have said for certain where one began and the other ended.

In the long summer, while the builders worked slowly every week, laying a damp course, putting in drains, taking up floorboards and joyfully discovering dry rot, Toby and Louise had driven out at the weekend, with a picnic and a rug, and made love in the little wilderness which was her front garden. On those days Toby had laid his head in her lap and looked up at her face and sighed, ‘This is perfect. I wish I could stay here forever,’ which was a pleasingly ambiguous way of telling his mistress that he preferred her to his wife, and also telling her that he would never act on this preference.

Louise’s whole body, attuned to Toby over years of unequal loving, stirred at the thought of his happiness and, with the selective hearing of the long-term patient mistress, she heard his preference; but was deaf to his choice.

When the builders had finally finished in the autumn, Louise employed Mr Miles to enclose the whole plot, orchard, garden, house, with neat post-and-rail fencing which he put up, efficiently and cheaply, over four weeks, only to break it down one frosty night in the following winter when he drove home from the Holly Bush.

Louise reached her garden gate and paused. For a moment she thought of the Lawrence story which she was about to dissect in the most rigorous of terms.

The Virgin and the Gypsy was a story on the edge of pornography according to Louise’s critical vision. It depicted an adolescent girl fascinated by a gypsy who was passing her home. There was a flood, and he galloped ahead of the rushing water (Louise was prepared to be very scathing about the libidinous image of both horse and flood waters) to save her. His solution was not to build a raft or bring a boat, but instead to mount the stairs to her bedroom and there deflower her until rescue arrived.

This was a deeply flawed story as far as Louise was concerned. It showed Lawrence’s sentimentality for working people. It showed Lawrence’s male fetish of virginity since the girl was young and innocent and the man older and sexually active. There was also the sexual double standard which was only to be expected from a man such as Lawrence. But it went further even than that. It gloried in the gypsy’s mysterious maleness. Louise was prepared to be very sharp with the notion of male mystery. It was generally acknowledged among her circle that it is female sexuality which is the mystery. Male sexuality is all too transparent.

She was particularly tough on this little story, which she intended to compare to the tremulous seducto-rape scenes of so-called women’s fiction because, while she had been re-reading it last night with a pencil in her hand to make sharp little deflating comments in the margin as if D.H. Lawrence were one of her own, not very bright, students, she had been surprised by the sudden rise of sexual desire. Turning out the light, and sliding her hand down inside the pyjamas which she was forced to wear for warmth in the damp cottage, she found herself unexpectedly thinking of Mr Miles crashing his Land-Rover through her fence and how it would have been if he had been drunk with desire and not with Theakston’s Old Peculier. As she wriggled in her bed in the dark room she found her unreliable imagination conjuring an image of herself as the girl, with the gypsy galloping on his horse, with his awesome male potency, to her alone.

That was why she was so particularly angry with D.H. Lawrence in the morning. He had played, she thought, the oldest cheapest trick of all – recycling outworn sexual cliches which long years of consciousness training have not yet wholly eliminated from the female erotic imagination. All very well to say that women are fighting two thousand years of patriarchal pornographic imagery and that they will make their own fantasies anew when their imaginations are freed. All very well to say that in meetings – a different matter altogether at night when the smells of early summer wafted through the bedroom window and the owls called passionately under flaming ochre stars, and Louise’s wilful unreconstructed desires conjured the image of a man who would push her roughly on the bed and take her urgently and breathlessly without a word being exchanged.

Louise hesitated at the garden gate. It was as if her fantasy had been made manifest, summoned by desire out of the dark scented night. What if a dark head brushed the top of the door frame, and warm brown eyes met hers? What if the gypsy himself had come for her; and nothing in her life – not her long sophisticated love-affair with Toby, not her pedantic work, not her affiliation to the Women’s Movement – would ever be the same again?

For a moment she thought she would go back into the house, draw the curtains in all the windows that faced out over the common land tinged with early summer green, and wait for the gypsy to eat his lunch, and reverse – out of her orchard, through the break in the fence, into the lane and away. When she lingered at the gate, it was a succumbing to temptation akin to switching off the light and dropping the pencil on the floor. She was tempted to know who he was, this man who had driven without invitation into her orchard, into her morning, after her night filled with dreams of desire.

The van’s interior was deep in gloomy darkness. ‘Hello?’ she called.

The mongrel dog lifted his pointy head and uttered one sharp bark and then wagged his tail as if to apologise for the noise. He sat up and vigorously shook his floppy ears. Nothing else moved.

‘Hello?’ Louise called again.

The dog and Louise regarded each other, unmoving. Louise was nervous of all animals. At Mr Miles’s farm she shrank from the size and blundering folly of cows. She even feared sheep with their mad yellow eyes. This dog seemed particularly placid, but Louise dared not open the gate and approach him. The string tied to his collar was dangerously thin; it would snap if he lunged for her.

‘Hello?’ she called again.

The van rocked slightly as someone moved inside. Louise found that her breathing was shallow as if she were afraid or excited. ‘Hel-lo-o!’ she called. Whoever he was, he had heard her. Whoever he was, he was coming to the little door.

‘Hello yourself,’ came a sharp voice. ‘Is it me you’re wanting with your hello? hello? hello?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, come in then.’

Louise hesitated. There was the garden gate, and the dog, and the dark mysterious interior of the van. ‘I just wanted to know if you planned to stay here,’ she said feebly, her voice high.

‘I’ve got my steps down, haven’t I?’

‘It’s my orchard,’ Louise pointed out.

The van shook again as if with silent laughter and then rocked more violently. Someone was coming. The dog turned its head and raised its ears in greeting. An old woman stood in the doorway, dressed fantastically in red and orange and green. She wore a wide green skirt in some stiff shiny material, an orange dirty blouse and a red shawl flung round her shoulders. Her feet, gnarled and twisted as the trunks of Louise’s old apple trees, were bare. From underneath a thatch of dirty white hair her dark blue eyes stared at Louise, unsmiling. ‘And who are you?’

‘I’m Louise Case.’

‘Where’s the old one?’

‘The old one? Oh! my aunt. I’m afraid she died.’

The woman nodded at the information. ‘And it was you put up the fence, did you? Who broke it?’

‘Mr Miles skidded on the corner.’

‘Drunk again?’

Louise had to stop herself agreeing.

‘I’ll thank you for some water,’ the old woman said abruptly. She reached behind her and produced an enamelled and brightly painted jug. She held it out to Louise, not moving from her eminence at the top of the steps. Louise hesitated and then opened the gate, and walked towards the big dog. His ears dropped, his grin widened, his feathery tail stirred slightly in the grass. Louise stretched up to receive the jug; the old woman did not trouble herself to descend even one step.

Louise took it and went into the house, through the study into the kitchen. She ran water, and filled the jug. It was a beautiful example of folk art, painted in the bright garish colours beloved of gypsies, bargees, and all travelling people. There was a big surreal bunch of pink cabbage roses on one bright red side, and a sheaf of blue flowers like delphiniums on the other. Louise carried it back out into the sunshine.

The old woman was still at the head of her steps in the darkened doorway. Louise had to go through the gate again and closer still to the dog. As she handed up the jug, his breath stirred against her bare calf and she flinched. The old woman smiled at her discomfort.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and turned and went back inside the van again without another word.

Louise retreated behind the safety of the gate. ‘I wanted to know…’ she called. ‘When you will be moving on?’

There was absolute silence from the inside of the van. It rocked slightly as if the old woman was about her private business with her fresh water and her brightly painted jug. The dog gazed at Louise.

‘When will you be moving on? Actually?’

There was no answer. The dog settled back down and rested his chin on his silky front legs. Only his brown eyes and his mobile eyebrows followed Louise. Defeated, she went slowly back to the house. Out of habit she took her seat again before her word processor and looked at the blank screen. Beyond the screen, where there should have been the bobbing blossom of her apple orchard, the dented blue roof of the van loomed imperturbably solid.

Louise found she could not work at all and closed down the word processor and went to the kitchen which faced coldly north, over the lane, and made herself a cup of coffee. She thought she would go into town early, see Toby, and have a drink with him at the Suffix University post-graduate bar before the meeting with Miriam. There was no point in trying to work any more. Her concentration was gone for the afternoon.

Toby was in the bar, sitting at a table with half a dozen students. Louise felt the familiar tweak of desire when she looked around the crowded bar and was suddenly, once more, struck by the sight of him. She smiled and waved. Toby waved back but did not rise to greet her. Louise bought herself a drink and joined them. She knew all the students; one or two of them were writing MA theses under her supervision. They were laughing with Toby, there was a running joke about what sort of poetry a Conservative government would admire. Kipling was mentioned, and Wordsworth.

‘But only if they didn’t understand what he was saying.’

‘Oh, but if we assume they don’t understand we can give them anything. Shelley! Keats! Plath!’

Toby glanced at Louise and smiled. ‘Did you expel your trespasser?’ he asked.

The students, experts at interpreting when their time was up, moved discreetly to the far end of the table and exchanged gossip about external examiners.

‘No.’ Louise took a sip of wine and set herself to amuse him. ‘I strode down to the end of the garden to assert my rights and found myself delivering fresh water. I shall be taking in her laundry next.’

‘Her?’

‘It’s a woman. Eighty if she’s a day. Dressed for a gypsy ball and with a huge silent dog. I don’t know if she’s travelling alone. I haven’t seen anyone else. I was rather thrown by the whole thing. I came into town early and I’ve been working in the library. I can’t write at home. Every time I glance out of the window all I can see is this most enormous van!’

Toby smiled. ‘How wonderfully surreal! Did she say when she was moving on?’

‘She said absolutely nothing. She asked me where my aunt was and I told her that she’d died. She asked me how the fence got broken and suggested that Mr Miles was drunk. She obviously knows her way around. Perhaps she’s a regular visitor and I’m on her route.’

Toby rested his hand gently on hers as she held her glass. ‘As long as she’s no trouble, I suppose it doesn’t matter?’

Louise let her hand rest passive under his touch even while she protested: ‘Yes; but I don’t want her there! I can’t see out of my study window, I can’t see out of the sitting-room window. When I look out of my bedroom window I look down on this enormous pantechnicon! What are her bathroom facilities? What if she starts burning my trees or my fence posts?’

Toby nodded. ‘We’d better hope she moves on then,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll have to do something about it.’

Louise was mollified at once by his use of the word ‘we’.

‘Are you coming back to dinner after the meeting?’

‘Miriam asked me. She said you were cooking.’

Toby nodded. ‘I thought I’d do lentil soufflé.’

‘Lovely.’

‘You could stay overnight. Perhaps your gypsy will be gone in the morning.’

It was not unusual for Louise to stay in Toby and Miriam’s spare bedroom. Meetings often went on late or, enjoying their company, she drank more wine than was safe if she were to drive home. A new tenant now lived in their studio flat which had been Louise’s home for six years. But she still felt a sense of ownership and comfort in the house. Although Louise and Toby never planned intercourse – they prided themselves on being spontaneous rather than calculating adulterers – Miriam always woke at seven and left the house at eight to be at her desk at eight thirty when the first bruised refugees from the night would start arriving. Toby and Louise never had to be at the university until ten. There was always time to make love, have a shower and eat a leisurely breakfast.

‘I might stay,’ Louise said unhelpfully.

One of the reasons behind her move to the country and a house of her own was a feeling that Toby’s sexual convenience was too well served by an attractive wife in his bed, and an attractive mistress in his upstairs flat. The arrangement had been of Louise’s own making – she had found them the house to buy and then suggested that she rent their studio flat – but after the illicit delight of the early months, she wondered if the chief beneficiary was Toby. His occasional affairs at the university, so prone to heartbreak and disaster, ceased. He no longer had to invent plausible late-night meetings to satisfy Miriam’s polite inquiries. He was no longer exposed to the risk of gossip among the undergraduates.

But his affair with Louise did not cramp his sexual style. If he was attracted to a woman at a conference they would sleep together, and he would tell Louise openly and frankly that he had done so. There was no reason for them to be monogamous lovers. It was only Louise who found that no-one pleased her as Toby did and that other encounters left her weepy and depressed. It was Louise, not Miriam, who dreaded Toby’s weekend conferences on ‘Vandalism and the Inner Cities’ or ‘Dependency Culture’. Miriam had the security of a contractual, property-sharing marriage. Louise sometimes feared that she was peripheral.

Even worse for Louise was that the chief beneficiaries of her arrangement were both Toby and Miriam. Louise did more than her share of housekeeping. She cooked meals for the three of them, she stayed at home to greet plumbers and electricians when Miriam had to be at work. When the married couple took their long summer holiday cycling in France, Louise maintained the house in their absence. Miriam’s outpouring of energy and care to the poor, the dispossessed and the victims of sexual violence left a vacuum in her marriage which would inevitably have been filled by another woman. Any woman other than her best friend would have tried to break up the marriage. But Louise, loving Miriam and desiring Toby, was the only woman in the world who would satisfy Toby’s errant sexuality without threatening Miriam’s position.

And Miriam, sexually satisfied and overworked, trusted her husband and her best friend to be as honourable and as straightforward as herself.

At first Louise had thought herself lucky. Her luxuriously frequent sex with Toby was unshadowed by guilt and did not exclude other possible partners. Her constant and long affection for Miriam deepened and grew as the three settled comfortably into their house together. But slowly Louise began to resent Miriam’s commitment to her causes and her absent-mindedness at home. Louise started to fear that at an unconscious level Miriam was glad to have Toby sexually served without threat to her marriage. This put an entirely different complexion on a love-affair which had been gloriously secret. If it were not clandestine, then it was not a hidden betrayal of Miriam but an open exploitation of Louise – and she hated the thought of that.

Then Louise’s aunt died, she inherited the cottage and chose independence. Toby advised her to stay in town, and even took the trouble to take her to see attractive sea-front flats. Louise suspected him of wanting to set their affair on a permanent and unchanging footing – with a wife at home and a mistress in a pretty little flat. Miriam advised her to stay in town, citing the need of a peer group, of sisterhood, and intellectual neighbours. Louise suspected them both of wanting to keep the comfortable status quo forever. She feared a life of half-marriage, half-spinsterhood, forever waiting on Toby’s free time, forever trying to please him, forever competing not only with Miriam but with younger and younger women. In the back of Louise’s mind was the hardly glimpsed thought, that without her in the house Toby and Miriam’s differences would surface and become insoluble. Their marriage, which from the start had been a three-legged stool, might topple and fall. Toby might leave Miriam for Louise; and the hidden issue of which woman was his favourite would be openly and finally resolved in her favour.

Toby tweaked a sleek lock of Louise’s hair. ‘Don’t tease,’ he said firmly. ‘Say if you’ll stay or not.’

Toby had lived with two feminists for all of his married life. He had never had to tolerate coquetry. He had never had to bear the uncertainty which most men learn to endure. ‘Make your mind up now,’ he insisted. ‘I need to know whether or not to put sheets on the spare bed.’

Louise responded at once to the voice of bracing nononsense comradeship and wilfully cast aside the centuries-old tradition of female manipulative power. ‘I’ll stay.’

Toby finished his drink. ‘I’ll get home to my cooking then. I’ll give you a lift. Are you meeting at the Women’s Centre?’

Louise finished her wine. ‘Thanks.’

They walked to the car park. In the shadowy interior of the car Toby reached for Louise and turned her face towards him. Her skin seemed very pale, almost translucent, her eyes a very dark brown, her hair silky and soft to the touch. Toby felt desire rise in him like a gourmet’s saliva when he anticipates a meal. There was something so exquisitely lavish about having two women under the same roof. Louise, since her move, was more precious to him than she had been before. He had been starting to take her for granted after nine years of domestic adultery. But now, when she came into town there was a scent of strangeness about her; she was a different woman and the philanderer in Toby rose to the challenge of novelty.

Louise rested her head against his palm and let his fingers trace the line of her temple, of her cheekbone. She had slept with half a dozen men during the course of her affair with Toby but not one touched her as Toby could do. When they made love, though they never said, they both listened for Miriam’s key in the lock, and feared her sudden unexpected return. It was a thought which would always bring them both to successful, mutual climax. It was a wholly secret affair: rich, even rancid, with adultery. Nothing else for Louise could equal that sexy frisson of betrayal and guilt.

‘You smell of outdoors,’ Toby said.

Louise smiled.

‘Let’s go up to the Downs,’ Toby suggested, cupping her face in his hand. ‘You can be late, can’t you?’

Miriam would never be late for a meeting. She allotted her time in tidy effective parcels.

Louise remembered this as she turned her lips to Toby’s warm palm and let herself lick and then nip him. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Miriam was chairing the Fresh Start committee meeting. She glanced up with irritation when the door of the committee room opened and Louise came in late and slightly flushed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Car trouble.’

Miriam nodded. ‘We were discussing the number of entrants to the science and industrial courses,’ she said. ‘They’re not very satisfactory.’

Louise took her place between two women. On her left was a postgraduate student specialising in feminist studies, an earnest girl with cropped hair and deliberately plain glasses. On her right was Naomi Petersen, deputy head of the school of Sociology, elegantly dressed in a pale grey suit.

‘Our own background is dominated by the humanities,’ Naomi offered. ‘We’re probably not offering adequate models.’

Miriam nodded. ‘We need more women who work in technology and industry on the committee and especially at the open day.’

‘I suggested some months ago that we approach Sci/Ind direct and tell them the problem,’ Naomi said smoothly.

There was a visible stiffening around the table among the eight members. The engineering students were notorious for their hearty jovial behaviour. None of the women wished to seek help from that department believing that the professor, an industrial chemist of nearly sixty, was as likely to pinch their bottoms as his boyish undergraduates.

‘They’re not savages,’ Naomi snapped irritably. ‘They have a positive discrimination policy. Their problem is recruitment from the schools. Girls are discouraged from industry and engineering long before they consider their A levels.’

‘Perhaps we should work with local schools,’ Wendy Williams said softly from the end of the table. ‘Go to the source of the problem.’

‘But we want women undergraduates next year,’ Naomi replied.

‘And role models for open day,’ Miriam reminded them.

‘I don’t think that Sci/Ind is a very empathetic place,’ Josephine Fields remarked. Her enormous earrings clashed like temple gongs as she turned her head one way and then another. ‘They’re male dominated, their noticeboards are full of sexist jokes, in the workshops they have demeaning posters. I think we should campaign to change them, before we even consider encouraging women to attend. They’ve got to change. I don’t see why we should ask them for help.’

‘What exactly are these jokes and posters?’ Naomi demanded.

‘I’ve looked through the window,’ Josephine insisted. ‘They are offensive.’

Miriam glanced at the clock. ‘We have to take a decision on this and move on. Is there any way we can recruit local trained women for our open day? It’s very soon, remember.’

‘I don’t want this issue swept over,’ Josephine said. She stared at Miriam challengingly. ‘There’s no point in us meeting as women if we’re going to behave like men. I thought we were having a free discussion – not having to rush through a masculine-type agenda, in disciplined male-structured ways.’

‘I suppose we don’t want to be here all night,’ Naomi murmured softly. ‘Whatever gender the meeting is.’

Josephine rounded on her. ‘I suppose we want to be here as long as it takes to reach a consensus,’ she said. ‘Till the problem is solved in a consensual agreeing way. It is men who suppress discussion by imposing unnatural structures and time limits. I thought we were sensitive to natural and organic rhythms, not patriarchal and capitalistic timekeeping.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Miriam said shortly. She did not sound particularly sorry, she sounded exhausted and irritable. ‘I didn’t mean to be heavy-handed. I didn’t understand the complexity of this issue. I thought we were just trying to recruit more women scientists for the open day.’

‘I think there’s a wider issue about whether the Science department is capable of accommodating women students in large numbers,’ Josephine declared, joyfully widening the issue yet further. ‘I’m not happy about trying to recruit mature women students and sending them in there at all.’

‘The alternative is that they don’t go to university,’ Naomi said rather sharply. ‘Are we advising them to stay home and have children instead?’

Josephine flushed. ‘How can we recommend them to attend a course at this university when we know that the course is sexist?’

Naomi smoothed her hair at the back where it was drawn up into an elegant roll. ‘I don’t think we exactly know that, do we? We know that you’ve looked through the window and seen something you didn’t like. But has anyone been round the department? Does anyone know any students or tutors there?’

The women shook their heads in unanimous disapproval.

‘So what did you see that was so dreadful?’ Naomi demanded.

‘It was a very offensive calendar,’ Josephine said. ‘Advertising Unipart.’

Naomi gave an ill-concealed snort of laughter. ‘And what did it show?’

‘It was a picture of a half-naked woman astride a grossly enlarged spark plug,’ Josephine said doggedly. ‘Is anyone going to tell me that this committee believes that that is an acceptable image of women and technology?’

Naomi glanced at Miriam, inviting her to share the joke.

‘Perhaps we could speak to the head of the department,’ Miriam suggested wearily. ‘But I really think that it is important to recruit mature women students into the department.’

‘Into a place like that?’ Josephine demanded.

Wendy nodded in agreement with her. ‘They are openly showing pornography,’ she said quietly. ‘We know this encourages men to see women as sexual objects, and encourages violence against women. The statistics are very clear, Miriam. We can’t send women in there, it’s not safe.’

At the key words ‘sexual objects’ and ‘safe’ three other women nodded solemnly, their gigantic earrings clashing like cymbals. They had invoked a code as powerful as that of a Victorian drawing room where the word ‘improper’ once held the same power. No rational discussion could possibly follow the invoking of the word ‘safe’. If a woman knew she was not safe, thought she was not safe, or even fancied on entirely mistaken evidence that she was not safe, then nothing could be said to dissuade her from her fear. It was a key taboo, and its invocation marked the complete end of all reasonable debate. Miriam threw a despairing look at Louise.

Louise responded. ‘I’d be prepared to take a message to the head of Science/Industry from this committee, drawing the posters and noticeboards to his attention,’ she said. ‘If he’s prepared to take them down then perhaps we could feature his department in our open day. It’d show he was open to education. There must be women working in the department who might be prepared to come and represent the department at the open day.’

‘If there are women working in that environment then I think we should form a subgroup to discuss the issues with them,’ Josephine persevered. ‘They’re being bombarded with male obscenity every day of their working lives. We should be working with them.’

‘That’s two motions,’ Naomi observed, nodding at Miriam prompting her to move on.

Miriam shot her a look which was neither grateful nor sisterly.

‘Can’t we set up a women-only Science and Industry department?’ Wendy asked. ‘Housed in the same buildings but working alternate sessions. So that we train new women scientists and engineers by experienced women scientists and engineers in a safe and segregated environment.’

Naomi Petersen made a muffled exclamation. ‘We haven’t organised an open day yet, and we’ve been discussing it for twenty minutes! How the hell d’you think we’re going to organise an entirely new university department?’

Josephine smiled at her. ‘That’s a very negative attitude to Wendy’s interesting suggestion, Naomi,’ she said with slow triumph. ‘And a very unsupportive tone of voice. A lot of women’s groups have found that separate development solves many problems. I think we should consider Wendy’s very imaginative idea.’

Miriam rubbed her face as if struggling to stay awake. ‘Wendy, would you like to make a report on this, and bring it back to our next meeting, next Tuesday? And Louise, would you approach Sci/Ind and tell them our concern about their noticeboards? And Josephine, would you like to find out how many women are working at Sci/Ind already, staff and students, and we can then consider your idea for a subgroup at the next meeting?’

There was a rather disappointed consensus, but the most disaffected members had been skilfully lumbered with tasks and were reluctant to open their mouths for fear of incurring more chores. Miriam was no slouch in the chair. She glanced around the table. ‘Does anyone want to say anything more about this item?’ she invited. ‘Absolutely sure? OK. Next item is crèche provision at the university. Susan has a comment.’

Louise and Miriam walked home from the meeting. Louise carried some of Miriam’s box files. Both women were inwardly seething at the way the meeting had gone but neither could voice a personal attack against one of the sisterhood. It must be done; but it would have to be done in code.

‘I’m very concerned about Josie,’ Miriam began in a pleasant tone after they had walked for a while.

Louise glanced at her.

‘She seems very stressed,’ Miriam said. ‘Stressed’ was a codeword for behaviour which in conventional society would be regarded as unreason verging on insanity.

‘She is tense,’ Louise agreed. ‘Of course she has personal problems.’ Josephine’s long-term woman lover was a student in Naomi Petersen’s department and had briefly enjoyed a staggeringly glamorous fling with her. The open nature of Josie’s relationship and the general myth of feminist solidarity precluded any complaints when Naomi suddenly favoured the young woman, took her to London to see experimental theatre, kept her overnight at her Brighton flat, lent her books, cooked her meals, and then with equal suddenness sent her, reeling with delight and totally unmanageable, home to Josie.

Neither Louise nor Miriam would discuss other people’s sexual affairs. They adhered to the belief that these matters were private and that any curiosity was vulgar and prurient. Even when they were longing to dissect a piece of rich gossip their conversation had to be conducted in a code as arcane as that of an Edwardian parlour, and always had to indicate first and foremost their concern for the people involved. ‘Josie is bound to find it difficult to work with Naomi for a while,’ Miriam said. ‘Considering her relationship difficulties.’

Louise nodded. ‘I understand that Josie and Viv are talking about a trial separation – ever since Viv spent time with Naomi.’

Miriam widened her eyes but was too restrained to demand details. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘Viv seems to think that she may have a future with Naomi.’

‘Oh,’ Miriam said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Naomi was ready for a commitment.’

‘Viv is very determined. I think she went round to Naomi’s flat and virtually camped on the doorstep.’

‘It’s good that she should ask for what she wants,’ Miriam said doubtfully. ‘But I don’t know if Naomi is right for her?’

‘And Naomi is going through a rather – er – unsettled phase,’ Louise offered. Miriam nodded, understanding that Naomi’s rampant promiscuity meant that no-one stayed more than a couple of nights in her elegant flat, and that Viv might force her way in, but would be swiftly bounced when the novelty wore off.

‘She’s rather brisk,’ Louise said. ‘I thought she wanted to chair the meeting instead of you.’

‘She’s welcome to it,’ Miriam said. ‘I have all the meetings I ever want. And things change so slowly!’

‘You do wonderful work,’ Louise said absent-mindedly. ‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘Your contribution is theory,’ Miriam reassured her. ‘Have you finished that essay on Lawrence yet? Sarah told me she was waiting for it.’

Louise thought of the word processor screen still empty of anything but the little winking cursor, and the van in her orchard. ‘How can I work? Every time I look out of the window I see this huge blue van and this mad woman in it with her horrible dog.’

Miriam glanced at her. The linked topics of madness and women were as taboo as the Unipart calendar. ‘Do you mean she is ill?’ she asked rather stiffly. ‘Has she been released for care in the community? Is she alone and unsupported?’

‘I didn’t mean mad, I meant independent.’ Louise retreated rapidly. ‘She wears something like fancy dress. She seems to be alone. And I can’t help but dislike the fact that she seems to know the neighbourhood and she has parked on my land without permission. There are plenty of other places she could go.’

‘If she’s not doing any damage…’

‘She’s invading my personal space.’

Miriam shot her a quick mocking smile. ‘I didn’t know your personal space went as far as several acres.’

Louise felt herself smiling guiltily in reply. ‘Well, you wouldn’t like it if it was your front garden,’ she said.

Miriam sighed. ‘It virtually is. The phone never stops ringing. I seem to be out every night at one meeting or another. If they all came and lived in a caravan in my garden it would be easier to manage.’

They turned in the gate of the tall terraced house. Miriam glanced up at the illuminated windows of the top flat. ‘Oh, Hugh’s in,’ she said. ‘He might eat with us.’

She opened the front door. A thin watery smell of cooking pulses greeted them. ‘Lentils again,’ Miriam remarked without pleasure. ‘Toby has bought a New Age cookbook. We haven’t had meat for weeks.’

Louise dumped Miriam’s box files on the hall table and went through to the kitchen. Toby was stirring orange porridge in a casserole dish. Louise put her arms around him from behind and hugged him, resting her cheek against the smooth blade of his shoulder.

‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘It smells wonderful.’

Toby did not disengage himself as Miriam came into the kitchen. He smiled at her. ‘Hello, darling, three phone messages for you.’

Miriam nodded and went out to the telephone in the hall. Toby heard her pick up the phone and dial a number. Only then did he turn to Louise and kiss her deeply on the mouth. While his left hand stirred the lentils his right hand smoothed down from her neck across her breast and down to her buttock.

‘Lovely,’ Toby said. With Miriam and Louise under his roof again he felt wealthy as a polygamous sheikh.

Hugh was not invited to join them for dinner. Toby said he had not made enough. Hugh stayed upstairs, eating baked beans with a spoon from the saucepan, tantalised by the smell of hot food and by the sound of popping corks and laughter. Hugh was Miriam’s choice of lodger. She and Louise had together decided that another woman would not be suitable. Toby’s faint, unexpressed hope, that a second woman lodger might invite him into her flat and into her bed in the morning and at weekends when Miriam was working, was disappointed before he had even acknowledged it to himself.

Hugh was researching into marine life and kept strict office hours at his studies. On Friday and Saturday nights he would go out to a modern jazz club with friends from work and get seriously but quietly drunk. Toby in his heart rather envied these bullish excursions. Toby had no friends. Colleagues at the university feared and envied the speedy progress of his career. Women tended to pass through his life, not stay. The Men’s Consciousness group which he led on Thursday nights was an area of conscientious work rather than spontaneous pleasure. Too many of the men had sexual problems, too many of them would weep over their relationship with their father. Toby would facilitate their tears and their worries over the size of their genitals but he could not grieve with them.

He knew that Men’s Consciousness groups were a pale shadow of the real thing. In this area the women had the edge. Female consciousness had the pulse of an authentic revolutionary movement. Women had so much more to say. They were angry with their mothers, with their fathers, with their kids. They had issues to challenge about social treatment. They had two thousand years of repression to cite. Every week, every day, almost every moment they suffered from inequality and had to evolve a revolutionary response. Male consciousness was nothing more than a bandwagon attempt by the left-out kids somehow to join in the game. All the unconvincing inventions of male bonding and tenderness could not conceal the fact that men were solitary, rather stupid individuals while women were spontaneously sensitive and collectively minded. Female sexuality was Toby’s delight. Male sexuality held no interest for him whatsoever. Indeed he had to conceal distaste when his brothers wanted to hug him. Except for Miriam and Louise, Toby was a solitary man.

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.

Today, as other days since Louise’s move to the cottage, their lovemaking was pleasant rather than overwhelming. The night before, in the car, they had been desperate for each other’s touch. The fact that the half-hour was stolen from Miriam’s meeting spiced the taste of each other’s mouths. In the morning, in Toby’s spare bedroom, Toby had chosen a little light sensual teasing, but had refused to make love. He often chose to withhold himself from either his wife or his mistress for Toby was a true gourmet, he liked the taste of desire, he did not have to consume the whole banquet. Also, as his relationship with Louise and Miriam had become part of his domestic routine, he found he enjoyed the knowledge of their desire for him even more than consummation. He liked leaving them aroused, he preferred them dark-eyed and slightly breathless to slack and satisfied. He enjoyed playing with Louise in the morning and then catching sight of her at work, knowing that she was still turned on. Both women serviced his ego as much as his libido.

Toby and Louise on her big bed made love with a sense of familiar enjoyment rather than excitement. Perhaps they were sated, perhaps their minds were distracted by the old lady at the bottom of the garden. But Toby knew that the problem went deeper than that. By some unfortunate trick of fate he now only became deeply excited if there was a possibility of discovery. The car in the lane on the South Downs in the evening light was as dizzy an encounter as any of their earlier moments. Louise in Miriam’s house – when Miriam might return at any moment – was Louise at the very pinnacle of her desirability. Louise in her own house, with the front and the back door safely locked, was too secure to give him that swift, sweet illicit thrill. It was an encounter as safe as those of his marital bed. He went through the erotic motions, and he reached a climax. But it was nothing like the pleasure of having Louise under Miriam’s very nose.

Toby did not know it, and Louise would never have admitted it – not even to herself – but it was exactly the same for her too. They had, both of them, become addicted to guilt and mistaken it for love.

Toby and Louise ate cheese, biscuits and soup sitting either side of the kitchen table. Toby glanced at the clock.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I said I’d be home at ten.’

‘Have you been here?’ Louise asked. She always practised the permanent mistress’s courtesy of priming herself on his deceptions.

‘No. With a graduate student,’ Toby said. ‘James Sutherland, playing pool.’

‘You smell wrong,’ Louise cautioned. ‘Not smoky enough.’

‘He has a pool table at his house.’

Louise raised her eyebrows. ‘Our students are going up in the world,’ she observed. ‘Which one is he?’

‘The one who drives the white Porsche,’ Toby said grimly. ‘God knows where they all get their money. D’you know, I teach a group of undergraduates who are sharing a house – but they’re not squatting, they’re not even renting it, they’re buying.’

Louise nodded. ‘The student bar has started stocking Lanson champagne. God! When we were undergraduates we used to save up for Friday nights and then get drunk on cider and gin.’

Toby chuckled. ‘Did you really?’

‘We called them “Happies”.’

Louise remembered wrongly. She had mostly stayed sober to study. It was Miriam who was the sybarite in those days. ‘Miriam and I used to drink three each and then fall off our bar stools.’

‘I never saw you fall off your bar stools,’ Toby said with regret.

‘You met us in our finals year,’ Louise reminded him. ‘Our salad days were over then. It was all continuous assessment when we were students. We were on the rack from September to June.’

‘But more thoroughly assessed,’ Toby prompted.

He and Louise had fought an easily defeated campaign to preserve the university’s practice of continuous assessment, in which students demonstrate their learning and research skills with work written over weeks of preparation. In practice, the conscientious ones worked themselves into a stupor of fatigue with week after week of late nights and early mornings, while the lazy ones drank to excess and fooled around until two days before the deadline when they went into a frenzy of last-minute labour. The results were broadly comparable.

The university, weary of supervising students rushing to extremes, had instituted the convention of a finals exam fortnight so that all the breakdowns and alcoholism and suicides were concentrated into one short, manageable period.

Louise and Toby had fought this change on the grounds that it was a deviation from the radical nature of the university. Of course, no-one had ever proved that continuous assessment was more or less radical than examinations, and once continuous assessment was adopted as the Conservative government’s policy for GCSEs it had rather gone out of fashion as a Cause. Nonetheless Toby and Louise still loyally paid lip service.

‘I learned more in my final year than I did in the other two put together,’ Louise said.

‘I wish I’d had that opportunity,’ Toby sighed, hypocritically hiding his pride in his own degree. ‘Finals fortnight at Oxford was madness.’

He glanced at the kitchen clock, drained his glass of wine and stood up. ‘See you tomorrow.’

Louise followed him from the kitchen to the sitting room and passed him his jacket. She was attractively dressed in a silky dressing gown. Toby had a moment’s regret that he was leaving her to go into the cool summer night and drive home to Miriam who would be irritable and worried from her meeting at the Alcoholic Women’s Unit.

‘I’m not coming in to university tomorrow,’ Louise reminded him. ‘I shall make sure the old woman moves on and then I’ll work here all day. I’m overdue on that Lawrence essay.’

Toby hesitated. It would be fatal to his plans if the old woman disappeared again into the lanes of Sussex with her precious bundle of primary sources and her irreplaceable oral history. But he could not think of any reason to stop Louise from moving the trespasser on her way. All he could do was delay her. ‘I’m free in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll come out and have breakfast with you. I’ll bring fresh croissants and the newspapers.’

Louise lived far beyond the restricted village paper round which was organised by Mrs Ford from the village shop and delivered only to her particular favourites. Louise adored reading the Guardian over breakfast. Toby had played one of his strongest cards.

‘Oh, how lovely!’ she exclaimed. ‘To what do I owe the honour?’

Toby smiled his engaging smile. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just thought we could spend the morning together. Don’t get up before I arrive and I’ll bring it up to you in bed. I’ll be here by nine.’

Louise wound her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek and his ear. ‘Lovely lovely man,’ she said softly.

‘Promise you won’t get up?’ Toby demanded cunningly. ‘I don’t want you to spoil the mood by worrying about the old lady. You stay in bed until I come.’

‘Promise.’

He released her and she watched him walk from her front door to his car. Then she shut the front door and went to the kitchen to clear the plates from supper. She was thoughtful. This was the first time Toby had offered to bring her breakfast since the move to the cottage. In the old days, in her little studio flat, he had often climbed the stairs with his copy of the Guardian and croissants hot from the bakery in a greasy paper bag, after Miriam had left for work. The transition of this tradition to the cottage could only indicate his increasing commitment.

She wiped down the pine table with a sense of fluttery excitement. Toby had been with her this morning, teasing, withholding, but playing with her and not his wife. He had been with her all evening, and now he was coming to breakfast. His movement towards her was evident. Since the start of their affair Louise had wanted him to choose her. The underground half-conscious competition between close women friends meant that Louise and Miriam were always rivals. The women’s movement’s insistence on loving sisterhood had meant that both women totally ignored this. If challenged they would have denied any feeling of rivalry; but in fact Miriam was always worried that she had made the wrong career choice when she decided to work for the refuge and leave the academic life which had been so good for Louise; while Louise’s sexual confidence would always be undermined by her memory of the three long summers when Miriam attracted scores of young men by doing nothing more seductive than lying on the grass and picking daisies. Only one thing could restore Louise to a proper sense of her own worth – Toby.

Louise went through to her study to collect the vexing copy of The Virgin and the Gypsy to re-read once more in bed. A glimmer of golden light from the bottom of the orchard caught her eye. Now there was a woman who seemed to need no man at all. No friend, no husband, no lover, certainly not the husband of her best friend. Louise stood for a little while in the darkness of her study looking out at the friendly little light, considering the old lady. There was a woman who seemed powerfully self-contained. Not a property-owner like Louise, not a career woman like Louise. Not a sexual object like Louise – left alone again, despite her silky sexy dressing gown. A woman who had avoided all the opportunities and all the traps open to the modern woman. A woman who had been born into a society markedly less free, a woman who enjoyed none of Louise’s opportunities and enhanced consciousness but who was, nonetheless, an independent woman in a way that Louise was not.

Louise speed-read the whole of The Virgin and the Gypsy before she went to sleep. Although she had taken English Literature as her BA and was now a women’s specialist in the Literature department, Louise was quite incapable of understanding either fiction or poetry. All of it was judged purely on its attitude to women. She had learned the jargon and skills of literary criticism. She could point to an adjective and detect imagery. But the heart of her interest in writing was neither the story nor the telling of it, but its attitude to the heroines.

Any work of fiction could thus be simply de-constructed and simply scored on a grade of say one to ten, entirely on the basis of its position on women. The language might be living vibrant poetry, the story might bypass Louise’s critical pencil and plunge straight into her imagination, but still she would work through the pages going tick, tick, tick in the margin for positive references to women, and cross, cross, cross for negative imagery. A piece of blatant sexism would be flagged with a shocked exclamation mark. The Virgin and the Gypsy was spotted with outraged exclamation marks by the time that Louise’s bedside clock showed midnight and she had finished re-reading it.

She closed the book carefully and put it on her bedside table. She set her alarm clock for quarter to eight. She had promised Toby that she would not get up before he arrived with her breakfast but she was not going to be found in bed in her brushed cotton pyjamas, her hair tangled, and her mouth tasting stale. When Toby arrived, thinking he was waking her, she would have already showered with perfumed shower gel, cleaned her teeth, brushed her hair, and changed into silk pyjamas which matched the dressing gown she only wore for Toby’s visits.

She glanced towards the darkened window. There was a pale wide moon riding in the skies over the darkened common. An owl hooted longingly. Up the little lane came the strangled roar of a Land-Rover in the wrong gear: Mr Miles driving home after a late night at the Holly Bush. The sound of the engine faded as he turned the corner towards his solitary darkened farm and then everything was quiet again. Louise turned on her side and gathered her pillow into her arms for the illusion of company, and slept.

She dreamed almost at once. She was in Toby and Miriam’s house but the road before their front gate was a deep brown flood of a river. At the edge of the churning waters, where the waves splashed and broke against the front doorsteps, was a tossing flotsam of paperbacks, their pages soggy and sinking in the dark waters, their covers ripped helplessly from the spines and rolling over and over in the turbulence of the flood.

Louise began to be afraid but then realised, with the easy logic of dreams, that she could go out of the back door, into the little yard and through the backyard gate, where she put out the dustbins on Thursdays. From the backstreet she could go to the university, to her office, where there were plenty of books to replace those that were rushing in the flood past the house, torn and soggy. She went quickly through the kitchen and flung open the back door.

It was the very worst thing she could have done. With an almighty roar, like that of some wild and uncontrollable animal, the flood water rushed towards her, far higher and more violent than it had been at the front. Louise fled before it as it tore the notes from the cork pin-board and clashed saucepans in their cupboards. The larder door burst open and packets of cereals and rice tumbled out into the boiling waters. Toby’s wine rack crashed down and the bottles broke, turning the water as red as blood and terrifyingly sweet. Louise ran for the stairs, the red waves lapping and sucking at her feet as the current eddied and flowed through the ground floor of the house. She screamed as she grabbed the newel post at the bottom of the stairs but there was no answering call from above. She was alone in the whole world with the hungry waters after her.

She staggered up the stairs as a fresh high wave billowed in through the kitchen door. With a crash the front door fell in and the two rivers merged, swirling, in the hall. The scarlet waters’ terrible load of tumbling books chased Louise up the stairs, past Toby and Miriam’s bathroom and bedroom, up the little stairs to her own flat.

There was someone in her bed. A man. For a moment Louise recoiled in fear, and then the crash behind her, as the stairs gave way, made her run into the room and fling herself on him, terrified at last into desire. She was screaming, but not for help. She was screaming: ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

Louise wrenched herself from sleep with a gasp of terror. Her pillow, gripped in her arms, was damp with warm sweat. Her hair was plastered to her neck as if she had indeed been washed by the waters of that strange dream flood. She swallowed painfully, her throat was sore. She unclenched her fists, she released the pillow.

Her bedroom was very quiet. The clock ticked very softly. She looked towards the window. Dawn was coming, the first she had ever seen in the country. In the soft pearly light of the early morning a few solitary birds were starting to sing. Louise raised herself up in her bed and looked down towards the orchard. The blue van was there, with a tiny wisp of smoke coming from the skewed chimney. The van was rocking slightly as the old woman inside moved about, making breakfast for herself and the dog. Louise sniffed. She could smell a safe warm smell of woodsmoke. She felt enormously comforted at the sight of that battered blue roof and the presence of another person nearby. She dropped back to the pillows again and fell asleep like a child that is reassured by the sound of her mother in the next room. There was, after all, nothing to fear.

Friday

TOBY WAS PROMPT, anxious that Louise should not have broken her promise and moved the old woman on. Before he let himself in at the front door he put down the packages on the doorstep and went quietly down to the caravan in the orchard.

The old woman was sitting in her doorway, face turned upwards to the weak morning sunshine. She smiled at him when she saw him but she did not move. The dog raised his head and lifted his ears and gave a soft warning growl.

‘Hush,’ the old woman said gruffly.

At once the dog dropped down to watch Toby in silence.

‘I’ll come and talk to you later,’ Toby said. ‘If I may.’ He smiled his most charming smile. ‘I’m longing to hear about your childhood. Could you spare me some time this morning?’

The old woman looked thoughtful. ‘I promised her I’d leave,’ she said regretfully. ‘She doesn’t want me in her orchard. I should be moving on today. I’m about ready to get packed.’

Toby let himself through the gate, the words spilling out in haste. ‘Oh, don’t go, don’t go. There’s no need for you to go. I’ll talk to Louise. She doesn’t really want you to go. You needn’t leave for a week or so. I promise.’

The old woman smiled at him. ‘As you wish,’ she said gently. ‘I’d rather stay. I’ve some problem with the van that needs sorting. Mr Miles’ll do it for me. I could get it fixed here and then move on later.’

Toby nodded. ‘You do that. I’ll be out later. In about an hour.’

The old woman graciously assented. ‘All right, then. I’ll be here.’

Louise, watching the two of them from her bedroom window, wondered what Toby wanted with the old woman. If it had been Miriam seeking her out then Louise would have known that she had found her a settlement place, a bed in a refuge, a council site. But Toby – Toby never did anything for anyone but himself.

Louise slipped into bed and arranged herself attractively on the pillows as the front door opened and Toby’s footsteps sounded on the stairs.

‘Darling,’ he said as he came into the room and laid the Guardian on her white counterpane. ‘Darling.’

‘The old woman’s van has got some mechanical problem,’ Toby said after he had made efficient but perfunctory love to Louise, unpacked the croissants and drank coffee, all in a rather bohemian mess in Louise’s wide white bed.

Louise watched him, her eyes hazy with post-coital content.

‘She told me Mr Miles would fix it for her if she could stay a few more days. I said I was sure you’d let her.’ Toby put on his little-boy-pleasing face. ‘I was sure you wouldn’t really mind.’

‘I do mind,’ Louise said abruptly. ‘I don’t want her here. I didn’t ask her to come here. And I particularly dislike the way she interferes. She talks to you, she watches my front door and knows when you’re here. God knows what arrangements she has in there for hygiene. Mr Miles has a thousand empty fields. If she’s on such good terms with him, why doesn’t she go up there?’

Toby reconsidered rapidly. As long as he knew where the old woman was, it would actually be more convenient if she were not on Louise’s doorstep. A casual remark from her about Sylvia Pankhurst, and Toby’s research would have to be shared with Louise, and the rewards shared too. But if she were safely housed away from Louise then he could develop the interviews at a leisurely, appropriate pace, and Louise would not find out about it until he had a contract from a publisher and an exclusive agreement with the old lady.

‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you ask Mr Miles? He owes you a favour for breaking the fence.’

‘I’ll phone him,’ Louise decided. ‘I’ll phone him this morning.’

Toby got dressed slowly while Louise showered for the second time that morning and then emerged from the bathroom rubbing her hair dry with a towel. He cleared the breakfast things away while she dressed and when she came downstairs he was washing up.

‘Thank you,’ she said, slightly surprised.

Toby shrugged off her thanks. ‘You’ve got enough to do. I want to see this problem with the old lady solved before I go to work. Call Mr Miles now, I can help him move her.’

Louise gave Toby a long level scrutinising look. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She dialled the number on the kitchen telephone. It rang for a long time and when Andrew Miles picked it up he was breathless from running from the yard.

‘It’s Louise Case. I’m sorry to trouble you but I have a problem here.’

‘Oh aye,’ Mr Miles said cautiously. Louise had telephoned him when her septic tank overflowed, when her rainwater drains had blocked and flooded her study, when her water-pipes froze, and when the coal merchant had failed to deliver her coal. To all these minor crises Mr Miles had responded as a good neighbour, and graciously received Louise’s envelopes containing excessive amounts of cash. But he had learned that Louise’s charm – to which he was deeply susceptible – generally indicated work which needed doing at once, often in the middle of lambing.

‘I have this old woman camping in my orchard,’ Louise said.

‘Well, you would,’ Mr Miles replied. ‘It’s May.’

‘Is that her name?’

‘The month. She always camps in your orchard in May. June she goes on to Cothering Farm. Every year.’

Louise exhaled her rising irritation. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Oh, yes.’

Mr Miles seemed to think the call had ended. He was about to put down the telephone.

‘Wait!’ Louise said urgently. ‘I want her moved.’

There was a shocked silence.

‘She can’t stay here, there are no…facilities. She has a dog, and she needs wood for her stove. She’s right at the bottom of my garden!’

Mr Miles sighed.

‘Surely you have a corner of a field or somewhere she could go?’ Louise asked plaintively. ‘All those fields of yours are empty.’

‘Hay,’ Andrew Miles said succinctly. ‘Those empty fields are hay meadows. They are not empty. They are growing hay. You can’t put a van on a hay crop.’

‘Somewhere there must be a corner for her?’

‘She can come if she likes. But she’s always stayed in your orchard before. She was born there.’

‘Will you come down and tell her?’

‘I’ll come down just before dinner,’ Andrew Miles said grudgingly. ‘But I doubt she’ll listen to me.’

‘Not until tonight?’

‘Dinner midday.’

‘Thank you,’ Louise said. But he had already hung up.

Andrew Miles’s Land-Rover pulled up behind Toby’s clean white Ford Escort and coughed to a standstill. Louise came out of the front door, Toby behind her. Louise introduced the two men. Andrew looked over Toby with one brief, encompassing glance. Toby in his turn saw a man in his middle forties, weathered into a broken-veined tan. A tall man, all bone and muscle with beaky hard features and a pair of hard blue eyes. His thinning fair hair was crushed down by a flat cloth cap with the shine of age on the peak. He was wearing working trousers very unlike Toby’s well-cut chinos, and a brushed cotton coloured shirt with the nap worn away at the collar.

‘Well, then,’ he said.

Louise led the way down the garden to the orchard gate. ‘Hello!’ she called.

The old woman poked her head out of the van door and looked at the three of them. She nodded to Andrew Miles with a small knowing smile, but she said nothing.

‘Mr Miles here has a field where you could park your van,’ Louise began. Unconsciously she had raised her voice to the determinedly bright tone that is appropriate for the disabled and old and those too weak to protest. ‘A lovely big field where you’d be more comfortable.’

The old woman looked at Andrew. ‘The bottom field where your dad kept the pigs?’ she asked. ‘I told your grandad and I told your dad I’d not stop there.’

‘Any field you like. You’re in the way for Miss Case, here,’ he said gruffly.

The old woman looked quickly at Louise. ‘How am I in your way?’

‘You’re not!’ Louise said quickly. ‘But it is my orchard, and you are trespassing, actually.’ She felt her voice weaken. ‘It is my land, you know, and there isn’t really room for you here.’

‘He said I could stay.’ The old woman jerked a dirty thumb at Toby. ‘Your fancy-man. He said I could stay.’

Toby flushed under Andrew Miles’s look of interested inquiry. ‘Well, I was just thinking…’

‘I can’t move anyway,’ the old woman said. ‘The gears are gone. I couldn’t get up that hill. I’ve got no first or second gear. I was going to ask you to fix it for me.’

Andrew nodded. ‘Not today I can’t,’ he cautioned. ‘Later I will.’

The old lady nodded as if the problem were solved. ‘When the engine’s fixed I’ll move on,’ she said. ‘Not to the pig field. I go on to Cothering next. I’ll go when the engine is fixed.’

Louise would have been happier with an undertaking as to when the engine would be fixed but both men had nodded and turned away. The old woman spoke to Louise in a conspiratorial undertone. ‘He’s a handsome man. Any woman would be proud to have him in her bed. I can see why you like him.’

‘Toby?’

‘Andrew Miles,’ the woman said, her voice loving every syllable of his name. ‘And such a pretty farm, and owned freehold, you know. You’ve been wasting your time with that girl’s blouse Toby. If I were your age I’d be tucked up in the big feather bed in the farmhouse b’now and a couple of babies in the cot, too.’

Louise turned away and followed the men back to the house. They were standing in the drive beside Andrew’s Land-Rover. Louise felt extraordinarily uncomfortable.

‘I’ll need to look round,’ Mr Miles said. ‘I’ll have to find a reconditioned gear box. It’s a big job. I can come down and do it later in the week.’

‘That’ll be great,’ Toby agreed eagerly. He was heavier than Andrew Miles, better dressed, rounder-faced, richer all over with the smooth glossiness of a well-serviced urban man. But beside the beaky farmer he looked strangely insubstantial. ‘Louise can’t really work with the van there.’

‘I thought she worked in the dining room?’

‘It overlooks the orchard.’

Andrew Miles looked at Louise as if he would ask her what work took place in the dining room but needed a clear view of the orchard. ‘Landscape painting?’

‘No, I’m trying to write an essay on Lawrence,’ Louise said. ‘But I can’t concentrate on anything when I keep seeing the van.’

‘Oh, writing. I thought you were a teacher.’

‘I teach at the university and I write as well.’

He opened the door of the Land-Rover. It creaked loudly and a few flakes of paint fell like dark green snow. ‘Got to get home,’ he said. ‘Pigs want feeding.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ Louise said. ‘I really do appreciate it. You’re such a good neighbour!’

Andrew Miles nodded without smiling. Louise, feeling that she had been gushing, retreated to the front door. Toby stood by his car, to ensure that Mr Miles crashed his Land-Rover into reverse gear and backed safely away from its shiny whiteness.

They went back into the house. ‘Coffee?’ Louise offered. ‘Or do you have to go?’

‘Actually, I think I’ll pop down and have another word with your old lady. She was talking to me last night about her childhood. I was thinking, I might do a bit of oral history research on her. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. If she’s going to be here for a few days I could take the opportunity.’

‘You hate oral history,’ Louise pointed out. ‘You said it was worse than local history in encouraging people to be egotistical about their boring past, trying to pass tedious personal gossip off as interesting facts.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Toby said with an easy laugh. ‘But if she really was born here and adopted in London then she does have a story. Quite different from all the people who worked in newspapers before computers, or served in shops before supermarkets. She might be really quite interesting.’

Louise shrugged. Her dream of the flood-tide carrying books, the old woman’s admiration of Andrew Miles, and Toby’s sudden attentiveness all conspired to make her feel off-balance. She felt as if the calm certainties of her life as a career academic and adulterous lover were all being questioned at once. ‘Talk to her if you want to,’ she said. ‘But if Miriam rings me, are you supposed to be here?’

‘I’m in the library at university,’ Toby said. He knew that the naming of Miriam was a warning of Louise’s displeasure, but his inner joy that he had successfully laid claim to the old lady’s story without challenge from Louise was too great.

‘You do some work,’ he urged. ‘Don’t worry about the old lady. She’ll be no trouble to you now.’ He smiled at her and went down the garden path to the gate to the orchard. Louise turned and went back into the house.

‘The Virgin and the Gypsy, a patriarchal myth of rape and female growth,’ Louise typed into the keyboard. The words came up on the screen, each letter trotting out behind the cursor like a reliable friend. Louise paused. She had the start of an idea – that Lawrence portrayed the young women as waiting for an event in their lives, that Yvette in particular was shown as a girl awaiting transition into womanhood. There was some concealed pun, Louise thought, in the girls having attended ‘finishing’ school – and the sense that their travels ended at the start of the book. Lawrence affected to know better – that the two women were not finished, they were not even started until they were sexually active.

So far so good (tick tick in the margin) but then Lawrence went further and implied that sexual development was the only future open to them. Their conversation was mainly about adornment and husband-catching. Their social life was all courtship. And their inner life was the progress from unknowing virginity to maturity which could only be achieved through sexual intercourse with a knowing man. All this was very bad indeed (cross cross cross in the margin, and often’!’).

Louise thought she could write a convincing essay dividing Lawrence the rebel – against the bourgeois society, which was good (tick tick) from Lawrence the sexist – against women except as sexual objects, which was bad (cross cross cross). But when she came to write the first paragraph she found that between her and the screen came an entrapping maze of images. The snowdrop-flower of the mother’s face, the gypsy lashing his horse to reach the house before the thundering flood of the river, Andrew Miles’s gentle smile at the old woman, and her own dream of rising water and the man in her bed. A man to whom she had cried ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ A wronged man, the wronged man. The wrong man.

Louise had never screamed at any man, least of all Toby whose control over his own temperament inspired a calm, almost balletic response from her. Toby was so charming, so consciously sexily charming that he inspired Louise to be charming too. She could never have flung herself at him screaming ‘I’m sorry’.

In the end she wrote, ‘It is almost impossible to construct a feminist reading of D.H. Lawrence’s works, immured, as he is, in the sexism of his generation and class’, which felt like the start of an appropriate revenge on a dead author who had filled her night with unacceptable but irresistible images of desire and then given her a dream of a wronged man in her bed and a scarlet flood of spoiled books.

The phone ringing abruptly at her elbow made her jump. She picked it up, half-expecting Andrew Miles with some news of a gear box. But it was Miriam.

‘I can’t talk,’ she said. ‘I’m in a rush. I wondered if I could come and stay with you tonight? I’m up to my ears and I want a break.’

‘Of course,’ Louise said. Miriam often stayed a night in her cottage. Sometimes she came with Toby, sometimes alone. ‘Lovely.’

‘I’ve been doing the finance books of the refuge all morning and the walls are closing in on me. Hell! Louise, d’you remember when we said we’d never get office jobs?’

‘It’s hardly an office.’

‘It’s office work. It just happens that it’s done on an old school desk in a cramped room without any qualified help. This does not make it any better, surprisingly enough. Shall I bring food?’

‘I’ll go into the village and shop,’ Louise said. ‘I might as well. I’m not getting anything done here.’ She paused and then asked with clever deceit, ‘Will Toby come too?’

‘I’ve lost him,’ Miriam replied. ‘He’s not at home and he’s not in his office. Can I be a bore and bring him if he wants to come?’

‘That’s fine,’ Louise said. ‘I’ll make enough for three and we can pig out if he doesn’t come.’

‘Thanks,’ Miriam said. ‘I’ll go to my meeting now. If they ask for a treasurer’s report they can see my notepad. I can’t make head or tail of it myself.’ She giggled, her old feckless undergraduate giggle, and put down the telephone.

Louise pressed the ‘Save’ key on her word processor and shut the machine down, preserving its one solitary sentence, and went out into the garden.

Toby and the old woman were sitting on her steps. She had a large cardboard box on her lap and she was showing Toby one yellowing piece of newspaper after another. Louise waved and was surprised to see Toby stuff a newspaper clipping back into the box and come quickly forward.

‘I’ve just had Miriam on the phone. She’s coming out for dinner and to stay overnight. Will you want to stay too? I have to shop.’

The thought of his wife and mistress under the same roof again was always a temptation for Toby, but then he remembered a meeting on graduate students which he was supposed to chair. ‘Damn, I can’t,’ he said. Besides, it would give him a chance to go to the library and take out everything they had on the suffragette movement. ‘Got to chair the humanities programme meeting.’

‘I’ll shop now then,’ Louise said distantly. ‘Shall I buy something for lunch?’

Toby glanced back at the old woman with her tempting box of cuttings sitting on her steps in the sunshine. ‘No, I’ve delayed you too much today, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ll finish up here and go.’

Louise nodded rather coldly. ‘See you Monday then.’ She waved a casual hand and then went back up the garden to her car. She and Toby were accustomed never to display affection before strangers, but she was irritated by having to be discreet in her own garden.

Wistley village was built along one main street with the village green a bulbous lump on the west side of the road. In older days it had been the village children’s playground when they had tumbled out of the little school beside it. They would buy everlasting gobstoppers or barley-sugar spirals at the village shop and put down their jackets for goalposts in winter, wickets in summer. People who lived adjacent to the green endured the bruising of plants in their front gardens by the flying trespass of a boundary shot or a wildly kicked goal. Often the game was interrupted when an irate gardener burst from a cottage and chased a child across the green and across the road. The children ran like a yelping pack to the common and then dropped into the bracken and lay low.

Since 1972 the village children had been bussed to the big school twelve miles away, and the weekday village was as desolate as Hamelin after the piper. The old school house had been converted into a rather imposing-looking residence, with white gables and mock Georgian bow windows and a double door. The new owner, a retired captain of marines, had put up a name plate which read ‘Wistley Manor’, a rather unfortunate misreading of history in a village which had always escaped a resident squire and which had been, for a brief exciting period in the late eighteenth century, organised as a radical labourers’ co-operative.

No-one objected. The Methodist chapel, which had held services since the great Wesley himself had preached on the green and led a deafening chorus of hymns, was deconsecrated in the early ‘80s and converted into a house which then called itself ‘Wistley House’. This small piece of one-upmanship amused the village and put the Captain’s nose badly out of joint. The two households sent each other Christmas cards of engravings of their houses and signed inside, ‘from all at Wistley Manor’ or ‘from all at Wistley House’, and the question of social predominance was never conclusively settled.

The small Norman parish church survived, though the old vicarage had been sold to a wealthy couple from London who had it done up and maintained, but hardly ever visited. The village children stole daffodils from the immaculate lawns on Mothering Sunday. The vicar, with no home in the village, now commuted from nearby Hallfield, with two other villages in his charge. Wistley had morning communion every third Sunday and some people blamed the poor attendances on the difficulty of predicting whether this particular Sabbath was sacred in Wistley or not.

The majority of people in the village lived in a small council estate on the south side of the green. The houses were pale concrete. They had won an award for imaginative design in the late ‘70s and were notorious for the perennial leaks in the flat roofs. Some of the long narrow gardens were bright with skeletal climbing frames in primary colours. Others were packed with wigwams of peas and beans and obedient rows of potatoes. Many grew nothing but long grass and mysterious bits of engines. One or two had gone very modern indeed and concreted the lot, speckling the concrete with a pattern which was supposed to look like cobblestones or hand-laid bricks. Most of the men worked in Hallfield at the fruit packing and bottling factory. Many women went to Hallfield for part-time work, but some cleaned or nannied in the nearby large renovated cottages and houses.

There was a thriving corner shop run by the widow Mrs Ford which sold newspapers, magazines, sweets, cigarettes, and a small supply of tinned and dry goods. There was a butcher who also stocked teas and groceries. Most of his trade came from the larger cottages and houses. It was cheaper to catch the bus to the supermarket at Hallfield than pay his inflated prices. Only his mince was reasonable and his sausages, though suspected of excess amounts of cereal or worse, were cheap. There was a small greengrocer’s, whose owner was planning to retire shortly. The competition from nearby farm shops and fields of pick-your-own fruit was proving too much. And there was a tiny off-licence which made a living from opening in the evening and selling everything that anyone might want after six. A mobile fish-and-chip van stopped outside the shop on Fridays and Saturdays.

There were two pubs: the Holly Bush, which was used by people from the council houses and boasted a successful darts team, and the Olde House at Home, Wistley, which had been opened in 1973 and boasted many darkened beams – some of them even made from real wood – faded prints, a good menu of bar food, and three different types of beer. Andrew Miles, a connoisseur of public houses, had been thrown out of the Olde House at Home, Wistley, on Christmas Eve, 1989, for caressing the landlord’s wife’s bottom, and remained permanently banned.

Louise, who was planning to make a chicken casserole for herself and Miriam which could go in the Rayburn now and need no attention until they were ready to eat, bought chicken pieces at the butcher’s, and onions, potatoes, red peppers and tomatoes at the greengrocer’s. On her way back to her car she was stopped by Captain Frome of Wistley Manor.

As an unobservant newcomer to the village, Louise had no idea that Wistley Manor was, in reality, a new house, with a snob name. She always felt herself to be in the presence of a genuine squire of the manor when Captain Frome spoke to her. She had attended a sherry party at his house, shortly after moving in to the cottage, and had felt herself simultaneously insulted and flattered by his weighty paternalist flirting. She believed that he was born and bred in Wistley Manor and heir to a long tradition of rural squires. She felt he was the sort of man who would know what gamekeepers did during the day. She had no idea that he knew even less about the countryside than she did.

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