Perfectly Correct. Philippa Gregory
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