Perfectly Correct. Philippa Gregory
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