Perfectly Correct (22 page)

Louise sighed, staring at the screen, willing the essay to write itself. Summer was coming on. Where only days ago she had looked for apple blossom and seen instead the ominous sight of Rose’s van, the trees were now a riot of green. The leaves were iridescent and emerald, the little buds of the apples were already showing a promising rosy flush. The rust on the top of Rose’s van was darker and deeper. The steps were bedded down in the grass and small meadow flowers, from Louise’s Meadow Mix, had surprisingly germinated and were sprouting around the wheels. Rose’s dog sat alert at the steps watching her as she went back and forth with her arms full of gloriously coloured clothes and boxes filled with yellowing pages.

She was having some kind of clean-out, Louise thought idly. She left her desk and went to the French window to see Rose more clearly. For some reason, Rose was stacking boxes all around the wheels and the axles of the van. Perhaps she was making ready to move on at last, Louise thought. And she found herself suddenly filled with regret and a sense of loss. She had become used to the eyesore of Rose’s van. She had become used to Rose’s irritating intrusive presence. She was used to the little light in the orchard and
the friendly face of the big dog. She was used to having Rose as her neighbour.

She opened the French windows and went down the path to where Rose was working, stacking one box on another.

‘What are you doing?’ Louise asked.

Rose stretched up, a hand on her back where she privately felt a new little pebbly lump, on the right of her spine. ‘Getting ready,’ she said.

‘To move on?’

Rose grinned. ‘In a way,’ she said.

‘Are you sorting out your things?’

‘Aye.’

Louise paused. ‘Will you be giving Toby your papers before you go?’ she asked.

‘He can have them if he wants them,’ Rose said. ‘D’you think he’s got the balls to come and fetch them?’

Louise hesitated. Part of her was deeply offended at Rose’s language and her casual dismissal of Toby. Part of her rejoiced at it.
Did
Toby have the balls to confront the mistress he had lied to and betrayed for nine years? Did he have the balls to come back to Rose who had witnessed his humiliation ? Louise knew he did not. ‘He’ll send Miriam,’ Louise said after a moment’s thought. ‘She’s coming tomorrow.’

Rose nodded and lowered herself to the step. ‘Can’t think why you bothered with him in the first place,’ she said pleasantly.

Louise sat in the grass. The dog lolled down, stretched his paws, and settled himself for a chat. ‘He was terribly attractive,’ Louise explained. ‘Miriam was mad over him. He’d come from Oxford, and he was the only unmarried lecturer in the whole department. He was very – you know – glamorous.’

Rose nodded. ‘I was at Oxford,’ she volunteered.

‘Were you? What, camping there?’

‘No, at the university. I did my MA and then I wrote a thesis on the WSPU.’

‘The suffragettes?’

Rose nodded again, turning her face to the sun. ‘Good times,’ she said gently.

Louise leaned forward. ‘Why did you choose to do the WSPU?’

‘My parents were involved in the movement, and we
did
know Sylvia,’ Rose said. She grinned her conspiratorial grin. ‘
That
much was true, anyway. It was a movement I was interested in. I collected and kept a lot of cuttings, a lot of letters. A lot of photographs.’

‘The research material Toby wanted?’

Rose nodded. ‘
Didn’t
he want it?’ she demanded with wicked satisfaction. ‘He’d have done anything for me. Made me feel young again.’

‘He didn’t know you’d already used it?’ Louise asked. Talking to Rose gave her the strangest feeling of vertigo, as if the ground were crumbling away beneath her and dropping her lightly and sweetly into a void of unknown but infinite promise.

Rose chuckled richly. ‘I published,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought a clever lad like him would have looked me up. I’m in all the bibliographies. I published a history of the WSPU and a biography of Sylvia, and a couple of histories of the Pankhurst sisters.’

‘Under your name?’

‘Rose Miles.’

‘But Toby thinks your name is Rose Pankhurst?’

Rose smiled gently. ‘Can I help that?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘He’s a bit of a one for getting the wrong end of the stick.’

‘So his plans for research won’t come to anything,’ Louise said slowly.

Rose shook her head. ‘No,’ she said lazily. ‘How could they? He never cared for anything I said. He never really wanted to know. All he wanted was a step up for his career. Not to know anything. And all he wanted was gossip and dirt. Nothing about ideas, nothing about ideals. It’s a funny thing, that – there he is, a man who has given his life to books and reading and ideas, but all he really cares about is his own career, and smutty gossip.’

They were quiet for a moment. Louise could not defend Toby. She did not want to defend Toby ever again. ‘It’s absolute chaos at university at the moment,’ she remarked idly. It did not seem to matter here, sitting in the warm sunshine with a dog at her feet and Rose, friendly and amused, at her side. ‘Everything I’ve tried to do to make changes has gone wrong.’

‘You’re too old,’ Rose said simply.

‘What! I’m twenty-nine!’

‘You’re too old to be a revolutionary unless you were on the barricades at twenty. It takes training. You’ve been a good girl all your life, a hard worker, conscientious. The baddest thing you ever did was sleep with your friend’s husband and
that
was convenient for everyone. You need to make some changes in yourself first.’

‘Working women have rights that I can fight for,’ Louise protested.

‘They should be fighting for themselves,’ Rose said sourly. ‘These little groups, this do-gooding. It’s just patronage from women rather than from men. Girls need to find out for themselves what they want and then go and get it.’

Louise thought of Mo the punk secretary and her purple
hair entwined with weed as a burly student fished her out of the water like an exotic mermaid. ‘Girls are full of false consciousness,’ she protested. ‘They don’t know what they want.’

Rose shook her head. ‘Who are you to say? You can call it false consciousness or you can call it not knowing your place. I’ve heard both in my lifetime. But deep down every woman knows what she wants. It’s the bosses and teachers, and leaders like you, who try and tell people what they should want and don’t understand. Maybe they want to be silly little tarts; maybe they want to be rocket scientists. If they want it badly enough they’ll find a way.’

‘Are you saying that women should not be helped to gain positions of power?’ Louise demanded. She would have been indignant but for the sun on her eyelids.

‘Of course not,’ Rose said. ‘No-one ever thanks you for what they get on a plate. And what’s it worth as a gift? Little favours!’

‘But society is set up to work against women,’ Louise said. ‘Girls don’t get the chances that boys get. Women don’t get promoted. Women still don’t get paid the same for the same jobs.’

Rose nodded. ‘It’s a bitch, isn’t it?’ she asked comfortably. ‘But you won’t change anything by setting up committees and telling women what they should want. They’ve got to want it themselves. And half of them want to be parasites and sex bombs, remember.’

‘Are you saying that women ought to be happy to stay at home and support men and be second-class citizens?’ Louise demanded.

‘You’ve got to build the doorways for women,’ Rose said seriously. ‘That’s easy to do. You can see where there is injustice. We knew that when we were fighting for the vote.
You make the doorways and the women will go through them when they are ready.

‘There are seasons,’ Rose said simply. ‘Sometimes the time is right for a girl to have fun, sometimes for her to work and struggle. Sometimes to stay home and love a man, sometimes to run away from him. A clever woman follows her own path. And no one path is the same as another.’

Louise was silent for a moment. ‘I wonder what my path is now,’ she mused.

Rose gave her a look which was brimful of mischief. ‘If you don’t know by now you’re a bigger fool than I thought,’ she said. ‘I want some tea. Could I have some water?’

Louise got slowly to her feet. ‘I’ll make the tea. But you’ve eaten all the biscuits already.’

Louise worked on her essay all Wednesday evening. By the simple precaution of disconnecting her telephone and not checking the ansaphone she managed to avoid two languidly insulting calls from Maurice Sinclair and two short appeals, made potent by the brief anguish in their tone, from Toby. By midnight she had a screen full of text. She printed it out and then faxed it to Sarah’s office so that it would be on her desk by Thursday morning. The first paragraphs read:

D.H. Lawrence the sexist: a reconsideration of
The Virgin and the Gypsy
.

There is much the modern feminist can dislike about Lawrence: his obsession with male power, his insistence on male sexuality and his view of women as the recipients rather than the givers of sensuality
and mystery. But it is wrong for us to deny the liberating power of his view of sexual relations.

Old-fashioned feminists may concentrate on Lawrence’s phallocracy, but we of the Second Wave can overlook this prejudice of his – as much a part of his time as his snobbery and his concern with the condition of England and the Empire.

What he has to teach us, as modern feminists, is both more potent and more liberating than his flaws. Lawrence teaches us about sensuality, about the freedom a woman can feel with a man who adores her, about finding oneself through sexuality with a male partner. Lawrence indicates that all conventions – those of feminist puritanism, as well as those of the patriarchy – are equally wrong. Lawrence shows us that a sensual woman can be free whatever her environment. Her task is to find a man with whom she can express this.

And Lawrence’s sexuality is fundamentally heterosexual. It is the difference between men and women – which has for so long puzzled and distressed us as feminists – that is the source of Lawrence’s deepest delight. As lovers, as enemies, it is the opposing nature of men and women which makes Lawrence’s view of the world come alive. And he shows us, as perhaps we need to be shown, that the difference is nothing to fear but is in fact the source of our energy as women – that we are
not
men, but something wonderfully different.

‘I
DON’T THINK WE CAN USE THIS
.’ Sarah’s voice on the telephone on Thursday morning sounded as shocked as if Louise had sent her a picture of herself astride a grossly enlarged spark plug. ‘I don’t follow the argument at all, Louise.’

Louise, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, felt instantly uneasy. Feminist criticism is a new science, as prickly and as difficult as any Comintern meeting as it moves invisibly and without warning from one phase to another. ‘What’s the matter?’ Louise asked weakly. ‘I know it’s late, Sarah, I’m very sorry.’

‘It’s not that it’s late,’ Sarah said, aggrieved. ‘It’s that it is so … so …’ She paused. Clearly there was no epithet bad enough for whatever Louise had done. ‘It’s so sexy,’ she said with disdain.

‘Sexy?’

‘Yes! As far as I can tell, what you’re saying is that Lawrence should be read as a man who understands women’s sexuality. And that what women want, if they’re free to choose, is a man who will arouse them and love them and sometimes dominate them and sometimes be dominated! And that as feminists we should be developing our sensuality with free men.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I can’t use this, Louise, it’s not the line we take at all.’

Louise said nothing for a moment. ‘I think I may have been a little confused when I wrote it,’ she apologised.

‘I should think so,’ Sarah said sternly. ‘Louise, this doesn’t read like you at all! It’s one thing to redefine dress codes and insist on a woman’s right to wear what she wishes, including erotic underwear. But you seem to be going a stage further and suggesting that women will only be free when they acknowledge their desire for men.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s quite slavish!’

‘Yes, but the way Lawrence puts it is that if you acknowledge that you really desire a man, and he acknowledges that he really desires you, then you are free and equal in your sensuality. And your practical day-to-day life is free and equal too. For instance, we don’t see Constance Chatterley and Mellors together very much, but I think Lawrence suggests that they have an ideally equal and liberating life together because of their shared sexuality. And the ending of the novel indicates that they will go to a new world together – because they are equal pioneers.’

‘So if a man is a wonderful lover, the best lover you’ve ever had, you should go and live with him, and nothing else matters?’

‘Should I?’ Louise asked unguardedly.

There was a short silence.

‘Do you want to reconsider this essay for the next edition?’ Sarah asked patiently.

‘Yes … I think … actually … No.’

There was another silence.

‘I don’t think I really want to work on Lawrence for a
while,’ Louise said feebly. ‘He puts ideas in my head.’

‘Ideas?’

‘Yes. I think I’d rather stay on feminist theory or maybe review something for you, Sarah, if I may. I’d rather not read Lawrence right now. I’d rather stick to something which we know is right. Something we’ve thought through and got straight.’

‘I need a couple of reviews doing.’ There was a brief space as Sarah hunted on her crowded desk for the books. ‘Here’s one that might suit you:
Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990
.’

‘That sounds ideal,’ Louise agreed. ‘I’ll pick it up later today if you leave it in my pigeonhole. Thank you, Sarah.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said pleasantly. ‘By Wednesday week, please.’

Louise put the telephone down with a sigh of relief.

There was a knock on the door. Captain Frome was on the doorstep.

‘Neighbourhood watch,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘I’m afraid we’re on amber again.’

‘Amber?’ Louise asked. For a moment she thought it might be some new hallucinogenic drug.

‘Amber alert,’ he explained.

‘Oh, you’d better come in.’

He had a large manila folder under one arm and a collection of pamphlets in his other hand. He put them all down on the coffee table and sat on the sofa. ‘First things first. Here’s the new
Convoy Alert!
! pamphlet. They’ve regrouped and they’re headed back in this direction. The police will cordon off the village here, and here.’ He pointed to the little lanes marked on the map. ‘There is a party planned
somewhere in the neighbourhood. Our job is to make sure that none of the blighters get within ten miles of Wistley. Any news, any gossip and suspicions, and you telephone this number.’ Captain Frome’s finger pointed to the telephone number printed in large figures at the bottom of the pamphlet. ‘Inside here are a few details about making your home secure and how to recognise a hippy. You should have no trouble with that!’

‘I?’

‘The university is full of them, isn’t it? Keep your ear to the ground. Some of your students may be in touch. This is a subversive movement we are dealing with here. We don’t know how far the tentacles of it may stretch. Satanism, drugs, communism. We’re going to Keep Wistley Free of the Hippy Menace.’

Louise nodded wearily.

‘Now. Something even more serious.’ Captain Frome’s large grey-moustached face took on an expression more suitable for a funeral mute than for a morning caller. ‘I took the liberty of looking into your squatter.’

‘Rose?’

‘Rose Miles. Rose de Vere, Rambling Rose, she’s had a number of names.’

Louise said nothing but she felt wary.

‘I have some bad news for you,’ he said. ‘Tell me first, which lawyer did you use when you bought the cottage? Local man?’

‘I inherited it,’ Louise said. ‘From my aunt. She bought it from Mr Miles’s father.’

‘We have to hope it was a straightforward mistake then, and not a put-up job.’

‘What was?’

‘The conveyancing. According to the deeds held at the
county archive office, this was once two cottages with two cottage gardens.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your aunt only bought the one. They had been converted into one property by 1950, but originally there were two owners of two separate houses: Mr Miles senior – Andrew Miles’s grandfather – and Mr Stephen Miles, his younger brother. Your aunt occupied the whole property but she bought only from Mr Miles senior. The property was never declared as one house, the garden was never declared as one garden. In theory, Mr Stephen Miles the younger brother, or his heirs, still own half of this house and half of the garden.’

Louise stared blankly at Captain Frome. He opened the manila envelope and spread photocopies of ageing documents on her coffee table. ‘Then the trail goes cold,’ he went on. ‘But local belief is that Mr Stephen Miles had a number of children, all now deceased except for one daughter – Rose. Mr Miles senior had a son who inherited the farm, and
his
son is Andrew Miles, our Mr Miles. This cottage was used as a gamekeeper’s cottage and then a farm labourer’s cottage and then finally sold as one unit to your aunt, and subsequently inherited by you.’

‘I only own half ?’ Louise asked.

‘And the other half is owned by Rose Miles,’ Captain Frome concluded grimly. ‘
This
accounts for why she makes so free with her accusations of trespass. She probably knows perfectly well that she is the owner of your orchard, and indeed, half your house. She’s probably just biding her time before she strikes.’

‘Strikes?’

‘Blackmail, Miss Case. Presumably she came to discover the lie of the land and shortly she will be threatening you
with a claim against your property. I should imagine that she will settle for a cash payment to go away – her sort usually do. But until you settle this matter, she probably has a full legal right to your orchard and to half your house and, what is worse, she is the Achilles’ heel of the Wistley Keep the Convoy Out!! campaign.’

Louise was stunned into complete silence for long minutes. ‘This is a nightmare,’ she eventually said.

‘It is!’ the Captain confirmed. ‘We shall be made a laughing stock. Here we are campaigning for total control of all travellers and their forced moving on, and here we have, in the heart of the village, half a property and a site owned and legally registered to a vagrant. We can’t even have her moved on. We can’t prosecute her for trespass. She
owns
her site. She has a legal right to
rent
her site out to others if she wishes. She could have a dozen vans on that orchard tomorrow and we could do nothing to stop her.’

Louise closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. ‘Nothing?’ she asked faintly.

Captain Frome leaned a little closer and his voice dropped low. ‘If I were you, I would go down to her van with a legally prepared document, quite watertight, and I would offer her a couple of thousand pounds to disappear and never come back.’

‘She’s very stubborn,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t imagine her disappearing. And I haven’t got a thousand pounds.’

‘Then you may have to be a little stubborn yourself,’ Captain Frome suggested. ‘No access to her property through your gate, for instance. No visitors allowed. No deliveries. No services. Don’t supply her with any water. Report her to the relevant Health authorities. Report her to Social Services. You have a friend who is a social worker, don’t you? Ask her to register the woman under the Mental
Health Act as someone who should be restrained for her own safety. I think we can find ways of making her life here too uncomfortable to tolerate. We can probably get her locked up. There’s a section of the Mental Health Act we can call in. Sectioned,’ he said with relish. ‘We’ll get her sectioned.’

It sounded as if he was preparing to slice her into sample fillets. Louise said nothing. She was thinking about invoking the full force of the property-owning patriarchal law against one mischievous old lady.

‘I don’t ask for thanks,’ Captain Frome said.

‘Thank you very much,’ Louise said. ‘You have been incredible officious.’

‘Just doing my duty as a neighbour.’ He beamed at her. ‘I
am
after all the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee. Sir Henry Wilcox of Wistley House was the original chairman but there was a vote of no confidence in him at the last meeting and I took the chair.’

‘Did you?’

‘He had shown himself very casual in his response to the emergency. Very casual indeed. But it was a close-fought thing. The whole issue swung on one vote.’ He leaned forward and tapped his finger against his rosy nose. ‘Your vote, actually.’

‘Mine?’

‘You gave me your proxy vote, if you remember. It was your one vote which swung the decision in my favour. So I’m the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee, and chairman of the Keep the Convoy Out!! sub-committee.’ Captain Frome glanced at his watch. ‘Heigh ho! I had better go,’ he said. ‘Though it
is
rather that time of day.’

Louise said nothing. She had no idea that ‘that time of
day’ indicated that it was noon and an appropriate time for her to offer Captain Frome a glass of dry sherry or, better still, a whisky and water. She merely rose to her feet and Captain Frome, an English gentleman, had no choice but to rise too.

‘I’ll leave these documents with you, shall I?’ he asked. ‘You’ll want to take them in to your lawyer. I suppose you could consider suing your aunt’s lawyer for incompetence. That could be a useful and fruitful avenue.’

Louise looked with distaste at the documents spread on the coffee table. It seemed to her that in two brief days she had lost her lover, her academic credibility, her job, and had now discovered that she did not own half of her home.

‘Don’t thank me,’ Captain Frome said again, raising his hat to her and striding energetically to his Rover. ‘The new neighbourhood watch committee does not seek thanks. Just support. Just support.’

Louise nodded dully. ‘Thank you,’ she said like an obedient child and stood respectfully in the doorway until he had gone.

Rose appeared from behind the oak tree that grew before the front door.

‘What are you doing?’ Louise asked abruptly.

‘Listening at the door,’ Rose said helpfully. ‘So the party’s still on, is it?’

‘What did you hear?’

‘All of it,’ Rose said reasonably. She felt rather affronted at the implication that she might have been listening but failed to do a thorough job. ‘All of it, of course.’

‘About the cottage?’

‘Well, I knew that already.’

‘You knew that you own the orchard?’

‘I told him so when he came and tried to turn me off. I
accused him of trespass on my land. It shut him up good and proper. That’s the trouble with these little tinpot colonels. They hate to see a woman win.’

‘You knew that the conveyancing was never done on the second cottage?’

‘And that I own half the house? Yes, I knew that. I’ve always known that.’

Louise sagged against the doorpost. ‘I think we had better go to a lawyer and get this straightened out,’ she said wearily.

‘No real need,’ Rose replied. ‘I only ever stay here in May. I never wanted the house. And anyway, I’ll be dead soon.’

‘Oh yes,’ Louise said bitterly. ‘So you keep saying whenever it’s convenient. But I suppose you think you can come here every May, forever. And even if you
do
die, then who is going to inherit and come rolling up the drive next May? Who are you going to leave it to that I have to put up with for the rest of my life?’

Rose looked at Louise with a patient smile. ‘Think. You have a little think. You should have worked it out by now, clever girl like you. Who d’you think will inherit the west half of your house? The sitting room, the stairs,’ she paused for greater emphasis, ‘the bedroom?’

‘No,’ Louise said weakly. ‘I can’t believe that you mean …’

‘Bonny Andrew,’ Rose said lovingly. ‘Andrew Miles. You and he will own this house together. It’s as if it was meant to be.’

That afternoon Louise drove into university at speed, parked a long way from her usual place and scuttled into the department
with her head down in the hopes of being unseen. Cravenly, she waited outside the department office until she heard the telephone ring and the secretary become involved in a personal and unauthorised gossip. Only then did she open the door a crack and slide into the room. Susan, the secretary, signalled wildly at Louise with her plucked eyebrows. She put a well-manicured hand over the telephone. ‘Professor Sinclair wants to see you,’ she hissed in a stage whisper. ‘Urgently and at once!’