Perfectly Correct Read online

  ‘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. M
iriam’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 no-nonsense 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?’