Читать книгу Perfectly Correct - Philippa Gregory - Страница 5

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.