‘We’ll show ’em,’ Mrs Ford said militantly, earning herself a swift approving smile from the Captain.
‘They may try and regroup, of course,’ Captain Frome warned. ‘But I think we’ve got them on the run.’
One of the women in the shop said, ‘Seems a shame,’ under her breath but Captain Frome was too grand to acknowledge such suppressed heckling.
‘Neighbourhood watch meeting, Tuesday night, six thirty sharp,’ he said, handing a poster to Mrs Ford with a commanding nod. ‘Hope you’ll be there, Miss Case?’
Louise glanced uncomfortably at Miriam. ‘Unfortunately I have a meeting at the university on Tuesday,’ she said.
‘Cut it! Send your apologies!’
‘You’re reporting on the Science and Industry Sub-dean’s attitude,’ Miriam reminded her sharply.
‘I really have to be there,’ Louise said weakly. ‘But I’ll telephone you the next day if I may and see what was decided.’
Captain Frome nodded but he was dissatisfied. ‘Do you wish to register a proxy vote, or nominate someone to vote for you?’
‘What would we be voting on?’ Louise asked.
‘Further actions, of course.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Louise said vaguely. ‘Well … would you like to be my proxy, Captain Frome?’
He nodded. ‘Very well. We do need to stick together, I think.’
‘Hounding innocent people from pillar to post,’ a woman murmured quietly behind the rack of groceries. ‘Moved on all the time. Doesn’t seem right. Half of them with kiddies. Where are they supposed to go?’
Captain Frome raised his voice slightly. ‘I think I speak for the whole village when I say that we’re not some kind of Butlins holiday camp for every ne’er do well who can get his hands on a caravan.’
‘Do you know,’ Miriam suddenly interrupted, her voice loud and icy, ‘I’ve never heard anyone say “ne’er do well” before? I thought it was something people only said in books.’
There was a snort of laughter from behind the groceries. Miriam took the newspapers from Louise and walked past Captain Frome and out of the shop.
‘Oh,’ Louise said feebly. ‘Good day, Captain Frome.’
Miriam was waiting beside Louise’s car in a state of barely repressed rage. ‘What a pompous oaf!’ she spluttered.
‘He represents the village’s feelings,’ Louise said, hastily unlocking the car so that Miriam’s noisy disdain could be shut inside and muffled.
‘No he doesn’t,’ Miriam said abruptly. ‘He represents the propertied classes. All the working people and the farming people are perfectly happy for the travellers to come. Mr Miles is looking forward to the party.’
‘That is absolutely absurd,’ Louise said, starting the car. ‘Mr Miles knows nothing about raves. He’s been conned into providing his land by some sharp operator. He knows nothing about raves or what is going to happen. Everyone in the village is behind Captain Frome, he has organised an enormous protest meeting. I live here, Miriam. I know what’s going on.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Miriam argued, as if she had totally forgotten about female consensus and about women’s natural ability to listen and share information. ‘All you know about is what that pompous old windbag says. You should listen to Andrew. He says everyone at the pub is quite happy about it.’
Louise drove too fast up the lane towards her house. ‘I’m not that intimate with him actually. We’ve only ever talked about odd jobs.’
‘Well, he’s a damn sight more interesting than Colonel Blimp,’ Miriam said. ‘He’s a sensible generous warm-hearted man. Not a stuffed shirt trying to find something to do to fill in his retirement.’
‘Oh, really!’ Louise cried in irritation. ‘You hardly know either of them.’
‘I know a nice man when I see him,’ Miriam said. ‘And I’d put my faith in Andrew Miles any day.’
Louise felt herself gripped with a quite unreasonable fury. If she had believed in the existence of jealousy between feminists she would have recognised this savage rage at Miriam’s sudden intimacy with Andrew Miles. Louise’s whole world was abruptly turned upside down if Miriam should find a man such as Andrew Miles attractive. Miriam who had Toby, who had been the pinnacle of Louise’s desires for nine years. It made no sense at all that Miriam, with Toby as her husband, her intellectual companion and her lover, should find Andrew Miles, an uneducated uncouth farm labourer, so extremely attractive.
Louise drew up in front of her cottage and jerked on the handbrake. ‘I think you go out of your way to be different,’ she said. ‘Andrew Miles has probably never even heard of feminism or activism or the Second Wave. He probably doesn’t have an idea in his head beyond the weather and the price of corn.’
Miriam laughed. ‘All the better for that,’ she said perversely. ‘I’m sick of feminist men.’
Miriam and Toby left at midday after a leisurely breakfast reading the newspapers. Miriam, who knew she had been unreasonable with Louise, cooked eggs and bacon for the three of them and made coffee and toast. Toby, who was anxious to avoid question or challenge about his relationship with Rose or the contents of Rose’s big box, laid himself out to be entertaining, reading out snippets from the Sunday newspapers and commenting with insight and sarcasm. He could be very amusing when he wished and Miriam and Louise laughed and prompted him to further irony at the expense of the government. Much of what he mocked was funny, but the decline of the pound against other currencies and the steady downward spiral of the recession could only ever be amusing to people, like Louise and Toby, with small mortgages, guaranteed wages, and a contract of employment. Their amusement was founded on the smugness of being politically correct and financially secure. Miriam laughed with them but knew that her work and her salary was more uncertain, and the projects which she espoused – the safety of women – were not dear to this government’s heart.
Toby and Louise cleared the breakfast plates away and washed up in quiet harmony while Miriam went upstairs to pack her weekend bag.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ Toby apologised, finally referring to Saturday afternoon when he had limped home after his shopping trip with Rose and locked himself in the bathroom for two hours. ‘Sometimes I really need space. Thank you for having the consideration to give me that space. You’re so aware, Louise, so sensitive.’
In fact Louise had sulked downstairs while Toby had bathed and sulked upstairs, but this small rewriting of recent history made their mutual irritability appear in a more becoming light.
‘What was the matter?’ Louise asked, still being sensitive and aware.
Toby shrugged. ‘Oh! I don’t know! Having to shop with Rose. She borrowed a hundred pounds off me, you know, and I don’t expect to see it again. I suppose I’m just not used to being around demanding women.’ He gave Louise a sexy small smile. ‘You’ve spoiled me,’ he said.
Louise flapped at him lightly with the tea towel. ‘I know it. But you are getting on well with her, are you? You will get some material out of her?’
Toby caught her hand, took the towel from her, and turned her palm upwards and kissed it very gently. Louise felt her whole body warm to his touch. They could hear Miriam moving around upstairs. Louise felt her nine-year habit of clandestine desire rising like a Pavlovian dog’s saliva at the dinner bell. Sexual pleasure for Louise and Toby always meant the fear of being caught.
Toby bit the fleshy part of her palm. Louise leaned against the sink and dropped her head back, baring the smooth column of her throat. Toby moved closer and kissed down her neck, from her jawline to her collar bone; and where the crew neck of her jumper would hide any mark, he bit her soft warm skin and felt her responsive quiver.
His hands clasped her breasts and then stroked firmly down her body, but when Louise reached for his groin he stepped back. Toby had enjoyed years of this sort of encounter with Louise and he had trained himself to keep within the comfortable side of arousal. He was not going to drive home with Miriam suffering fr
om cramps of lust. There was no possibility of making love to Louise, the most they could do now was a little adolescent dangerous snogging, and that was all Toby was prepared to do. He would touch Louise as intimately as he wished, but she might not caress him.
He captured her hands and came closer again. Louise’s eyes were shut; unlike him, she had no cautious self-preserving boundaries. Toby enjoyed the sight of her absorbed sensuality. He felt powerful, masterful. He loved arousing her in these stolen moments. And he loved to watch her struggling to hide her desire when Miriam reappeared. He felt like some cruel pagan god dispensing desire and withholding satisfaction. He kissed her soft inviting lips, he stroked his hand around her buttock and slid round to caress her thigh. A movement outside the kitchen window caught his eye. He lifted his face from Louise, and took his mouth from stirring hers.
Rose was there. She was watching him, staring without any embarrassment, as if he were some curious and not particularly attractive animal playing with itself in a glass case. Toby felt his erection collapse in a rush, and desire abruptly vanish. He stepped back from Louise and she slowly opened her eyes. Louise had her back to the window, she did not know they were being observed.
‘You’re too sexy,’ Toby said feebly. His heart was not in it.
‘Kiss me again,’ Louise breathed. ‘Oh God, I want you.’
Toby shot a quick glance at the window behind her head. Rose’s staring critical face had gone. But he had no guarantee that she would not reappear like Jiminy Crickett the moment he laid his hands on his mistress.
He shook his head. ‘I won’t be able to stop,’ he lied, playing the trump card of uncontrollable male desire, unreconstructed despite years of feminism. ‘And Miriam’ll be down in a moment.’
Louise drooped. ‘I wish you could stay,’ she said plaintively. For a moment, for half a moment, she felt a pang of resentment. Toby and Miriam were leaving together, going home to an empty house. If they so wished they could close their front door behind them and retreat to their battered double bed for the whole of the afternoon. Louise carefully turned her mind away from the possibility that Toby’s desire, aroused with her, might be satisfied with Miriam. She had learned early in this relationship never to speculate. Her own satisfaction would have to wait until Tuesday night in the back of the car if Toby was then willing, or else it would be her own insubstantial fingers in her cold big bed.
‘Oh God, I wish I could,’ Toby breathed, coming a little closer but keeping a wary eye on the window. ‘I can think of nothing in the world better. I am crazy for you, Louise, I want you so much. I can’t go on without you.’
He had said exactly the right thing. Louise’s face took on that desirous tranced expression again. ‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured.
Miriam clattered down the uncarpeted stairs. ‘Sorry I was so long,’ she said brightly. ‘I lost a sock. Why is it one always loses one? Why never the pair?’
‘Isn’t it Douglas Adams who proposes a corner of the universe filled with odd socks and biro pen tops?’ Toby asked. He had stepped back half a pace from Louise at the first sound of his wife’s footsteps on the stairs. He knew better than to jump guiltily away.
Louise looked from one smiling face to another.
‘All packed?’ Toby asked pleasantly.
They went to the front door, Miriam lagging a little to whisper to Louise, ‘I’m sorry I was grouchy about neighbourhood watch. I hate that kind of thing. But I do really think that your Andrew Miles is a sweetie.’
‘That’s OK,’ Louise said shortly.
‘See you at the meeting, Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’
Miriam and Louise hugged and then Toby came back from loading Miriam’s bag in the back seat beside the precious box of cuttings. Miriam got in the passenger seat. Toby kissed Louise goodbye, a careful unmeaning brush of the lips on her cheek.
‘Thanks for a great weekend,’ he said lightly. ‘Call me, Monday.’
Louise stood on the doorstep of her pretty cottage and waved goodbye as they turned out of her drive into the lane. She felt unaccountably depressed but could not think why. She went back inside the house. The Sunday papers, heavy with words and bursting with opinions, were spread all around her tidy sitting room. Toby and she had forgotten the washing up and the greasy plates were drowned in cooling dishwater. The kitchen smelled of old cooking, and Louise felt tired all over. The long deception of Miriam, the long clandestine affair with Toby seemed suddenly pointless and unworthy. And if Miriam were genuinely tired of Toby, if Miriam who had lived with him and been showered with his love was sick of feminist men, was finding Toby himself wanting – Louise tossed pages of the newspapers from the sofa to the floor and put her feet up – if Miriam’s final judgement that Toby was not, after all, the ideal man; then Louise could not think what she had been doing waiting for him for the past nine years.
Monday
MONDAY MORNING IT RAINED in steady grey sheets against Louise’s study windows. The van in the orchard looked drenched and miserable. All the firewood for the stove had gone from beside the steps. Louise thought guiltily about Rose in her van with a damp dog listening to the rain on the roof while the last of the wood smoked on the little stove.
She switched on the word processor and read the uninspired title and one sentence: ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy: A Patriarchal Myth of Rape and Female Growth’. She pressed the ‘Delete’ button with a sense of relief and watched the words wiped from the screen. Louise typed urgently and the words flickered into life:
However attractive the notion of a relationship based on irresistible desire and spiritual compatibility, we know that this is a romantic dream. The union of the virgin and the gypsy of the title is as unlikely in real life as the union of Mellors the gamekeeper and Constance Chatterley, the lady of the manor. In real life we know that relationships are only meaningful if based on thorough equality – and such equality can only exist if there is equality of education and aspirations.
The dream of ‘falling in love’ and this love being all-powerful and transcending every objection of class, suitability and compatibility, is central to the romantic myth which has kept women in a state of slavish subservience for centuries.
Louise nodded at the screen and smiled slightly. Her fingers tapped rapidly. Last night, after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she had dreamed that a steeplechase race had been organised from Wistley village. A runaway horse had crashed through her fence, and then through her front door. In her dream Louise had run downstairs and somehow leaped into the saddle and the horse had turned and thundered from the cold and empty house outside into the rain, jumping hedges and even trees, up to Mr Miles’s farmhouse. Louise had clung to the horse as it galloped along the narrow paths of the commons and then, as it had leaped higher and higher over more and more obstacles, she had opened her mouth and heard a great wild song spilling out from her lips. She had woken abruptly, to the sound of rain pouring from an overflowing gutter, in a state of elated sexual arousal mixed with intense irritation with D.H. Lawrence, and, less explicably, with Andrew Miles.
As women and feminists we have to challenge this myth [she wrote sharply]. We have to surrender romance, love, glamour, and belief in all-conquering desire in favour of reality. We can still enjoy friendship with men. We can still enjoy sexual intercourse with men. But we can no longer allow ourselves to be conned into the nonsensical belief that their attentions make us ‘whole’, or that sexual intercourse or making love is in any way some sort of spiritual activity. We understand the physiology of orgasm now, we have reclaimed our bodies. Now we need to reclaim our hearts.
There was a loud knock at the door. Louise pressed the ‘Save’ button on the word processor with a small triumphant flourish; and went to the front door.
Andrew Miles was standing in the pouring rain, the collar of his jacket upturned, his cap pulled down low over his blue eyes. When Louise opened the door he smiled at her, a new smile, an intimate smile.
‘Hello
, Louise,’ he said.
Louise felt suddenly absolutely certain that he knew all about her dream. That he had come for her in this daytime rain, as the runaway horse had come for her in the storm of her dream. That at any moment he would swing her up into his arms and take her outside into the rain and that they would leap and fly and she would sing as she had done in her dream. ‘What d’you want?’
He flinched a little from her abruptness. ‘Nothing!’ he said defensively. ‘Nothing! But when I put that guttering up I promised to come and check it at the next big storm. I wondered if it was holding up under this rain.’
‘It’s overflowing,’ Louise replied mechanically, still pushing her dream away from her. ‘It woke me in the night.’
At the mention of the night Mr Miles flushed at once. He was thinking of Rose’s tantalisingly vivid description of Louise’s silk pyjamas and big empty bed. Louise, watching his colour rise, felt her own cheeks grow hot.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said brusquely. ‘You’re getting soaked.’
He did not move forward at the invitation but actually took a step backwards from the sharpness of her tone. ‘Perhaps I’d better take a look at that gutter,’ he offered. ‘It may just be blocked with leaves.’
‘I’ll get the ladder,’ Louise said.
She turned and went inside the house. The light aluminium ladder was stored in the cupboard beneath the stairs. She lifted it easily and brought it out to him. He was still standing in the rain, patiently waiting for her. He took the ladder with a word of thanks and then put it up at the south-east corner of the house where the rainwater was pouring from the gutter in a rich splashing stream. He put his hand up into the cold water and felt around in the downpipe. The diverted water overflowed in a curtain down his sleeve and splashed on to Louise’s newly laid flagstones.
Louise watched him for a little while from the shelter of the sitting-room French windows. Silhouetted against the grey sky, balancing on the top of the light ladder she could see the strength and bulk of his body. He looked curiously comfortable out in the rain with the water pouring around him. His cap was firmly jammed on his fair head, his collar was upturned. His legs, encased in rubberised trousers and thick Wellington boots, stood firmly on the ladder so that he towered over the sitting-room window. He looked like a giant, like some old Sussex chalk giant conjured from the rain, the storm, and Louise’s unsatisfied desires.
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