Perfectly Correct

by Philippa Gregory

  There had never, in the whole history of the university, been a more successful demonstration. Most of the women demonstrators, hauled out of the ponds by men more decisive and assertive than any they had known before, melted into their arms. And the men, finding themselves with hot wet half-naked women in their arms, responded with a directness and an honesty which is rare at any time, and almost unheard of in these carefully enlightened days. The more chivalrous of them took off their own shirts, like members of a nicely mannered rugby team, and draped them round the women. The more direct simply swept their trophies away, back to their rooms and set about drying them in the swiftest and most enjoyable way possible: by energetic friction.

  Louise, watching her career as a feminist activist disappear into the lily ponds, smiled vaguely at the television journalist and slid quietly away.

  She did not go back to her office. She knew the place would be hideous with the ringing telephone and the imminent arrival of one of Maurice Sinclair’s most glutinous memoranda which would say, in short, that she was fired. She would not go to the library, even the soothing volumes of unread political scientists could not help. She went back to her car and drove off the campus and headed instinctively for home.

  It was lunchtime but Louise ate nothing. She sat in her study before her word processor with her face as blank as the screen. All that was showing was the title ‘D.H. Lawrence: The Virgin and the Gypsy’ and Louise’s new introductory sentence:

  ‘What can the woman of today learn from this story?’

  After that there was simple silence. Louise could learn nothing from the story. She could learn nothing from Rose Miles. She could learn nothing from the fleeing half-naked demonstration of the Creative Anarchy Group for Equality. She could learn nothing from the memorable image of Toby on the kitchen table draped in crimson chiffon. She could learn nothing, most of all, from her encounter only that morning with Andrew Miles. Her conscious mind refused to accept that she had lain beneath him and known nothing but a wildly physical joy and a sense of release and wholeness that nine years with Toby had never provided.

  Louise sighed, staring at the screen, willing the essay to write itself. Summer was coming on. Where only days ago she had looked for apple blossom and seen instead the ominous sight of Rose’s van, the trees were now a riot of green. The leaves were iridescent and emerald, the little buds of the apples were already showing a promising rosy flush. The rust on the top of Rose’s van was darker and deeper. The steps were bedded down in the grass and small meadow flowers, from Louise’s Meadow Mix, had surprisingly germinated and were sprouting around the wheels. Rose’s dog sat alert at the steps watching her as she went back and forth with her arms full of gloriously coloured clothes and boxes filled with yellowing pages.

  She was having some kind of clean-out, Louise thought idly. She left her desk and went to the French window to see Rose more clearly. For some reason, Rose was stacking boxes all around the wheels and the axles of the van. Perhaps she was making ready to move on at last, Louise thought. And she found herself suddenly filled with regret and a sense of loss. She had become used to the eyesore of Rose’s van. She had become used to Rose’s irritating intrusive presence. She was used to the little light in the orchard and the friendly face of the big dog. She was used to having Rose as her neighbour.

  She opened the French windows and went down the path to where Rose was working, stacking one box on another.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Louise asked.

  Rose stretched up, a hand on her back where she privately felt a new little pebbly lump, on the right of her spine. ‘Getting ready,’ she said.

  ‘To move on?’

  Rose grinned. ‘In a way,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sorting out your things?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Louise paused. ‘Will you be giving Toby your papers before you go?’ she asked.

  ‘He can have them if he wants them,’ Rose said. ‘D’you think he’s got the balls to come and fetch them?’

  Louise hesitated. Part of her was deeply offended at Rose’s language and her casual dismissal of Toby. Part of her rejoiced at it. Did Toby have the balls to confront the mistress he had lied to and betrayed for nine years? Did he have the balls to come back to Rose who had witnessed his humiliation ? Louise knew he did not. ‘He’ll send Miriam,’ Louise said after a moment’s thought. ‘She’s coming tomorrow.’

  Rose nodded and lowered herself to the step. ‘Can’t think why you bothered with him in the first place,’ she said pleasantly.

  Louise sat in the grass. The dog lolled down, stretched his paws, and settled himself for a chat. ‘He was terribly attractive,’ Louise explained. ‘Miriam was mad over him. He’d come from Oxford, and he was the only unmarried lecturer in the whole department. He was very – you know – glamorous.’

  Rose nodded. ‘I was at Oxford,’ she volunteered.

  ‘Were you? What, camping there?’

  ‘No, at the university. I did my MA and then I wrote a thesis on the WSPU.’

  ‘The suffragettes?’

  Rose nodded again, turning her face to the sun. ‘Good times,’ she said gently.

  Louise leaned forward. ‘Why did you choose to do the WSPU?’

  ‘My parents were involved in the movement, and we did know Sylvia,’ Rose said. She grinned her conspiratorial grin. ‘That much was true, anyway. It was a movement I was interested in. I collected and kept a lot of cuttings, a lot of letters. A lot of photographs.’

  ‘The research material Toby wanted?’

  Rose nodded. ‘Didn’t he want it?’ she demanded with wicked satisfaction. ‘He’d have done anything for me. Made me feel young again.’

  ‘He didn’t know you’d already used it?’ Louise asked. Talking to Rose gave her the strangest feeling of vertigo, as if the ground were crumbling away beneath her and dropping her lightly and sweetly into a void of unknown but infinite promise.

  Rose chuckled richly. ‘I published,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought a clever lad like him would have looked me up. I’m in all the bibliographies. I published a history of the WSPU and a biography of Sylvia, and a couple of histories of the Pankhurst sisters.’

  ‘Under your name?’

  ‘Rose Miles.’

  ‘But Toby thinks your name is Rose Pankhurst?’

  Rose smiled gently. ‘Can I help that?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘He’s a bit of a one for getting the wrong end of the stick.’

  ‘So his plans for research won’t come to anything,’ Louise said slowly.

  Rose shook her head. ‘No,’ she said lazily. ‘How could they? He never cared for anything I said. He never really wanted to know. All he wanted was a step up for his career. Not to know anything. And all he wanted was gossip and dirt. Nothing about ideas, nothing about ideals. It’s a funny thing, that – there he is, a man who has given his life to books and reading and ideas, but all he really cares about is his own career, and smutty gossip.’

  They were quiet for a moment. Louise could not defend Toby. She did not want to defend Toby ever again. ‘It’s absolute chaos at university at the moment,’ she remarked idly. It did not seem to matter here, sitting in the warm sunshine with a dog at her feet and Rose, friendly and amused, at her side. ‘Everything I’ve tried to do to make changes has gone wrong.’

  ‘You’re too old,’ Rose said simply.

  ‘What! I’m twenty-nine!’

  ‘You’re too old to be a revolutionary unless you were on the barricades at twenty. It takes training. You’ve been a good girl all your life, a hard worker, conscientious. The baddest thing you ever did was sleep with your friend’s husband and that was convenient for everyone. You need to make some changes in yourself first.’

  ‘Working women have rights that I can fight for,’ Louise protested.

  ‘They should be fighting for themselves,’ Rose said sourly. ‘These little groups, this do-gooding. It’s just patronage from women rather than from men. Girls need to find
out for themselves what they want and then go and get it.’

  Louise thought of Mo the punk secretary and her purple hair entwined with weed as a burly student fished her out of the water like an exotic mermaid. ‘Girls are full of false consciousness,’ she protested. ‘They don’t know what they want.’

  Rose shook her head. ‘Who are you to say? You can call it false consciousness or you can call it not knowing your place. I’ve heard both in my lifetime. But deep down every woman knows what she wants. It’s the bosses and teachers, and leaders like you, who try and tell people what they should want and don’t understand. Maybe they want to be silly little tarts; maybe they want to be rocket scientists. If they want it badly enough they’ll find a way.’

  ‘Are you saying that women should not be helped to gain positions of power?’ Louise demanded. She would have been indignant but for the sun on her eyelids.

  ‘Of course not,’ Rose said. ‘No-one ever thanks you for what they get on a plate. And what’s it worth as a gift? Little favours!’

  ‘But society is set up to work against women,’ Louise said. ‘Girls don’t get the chances that boys get. Women don’t get promoted. Women still don’t get paid the same for the same jobs.’

  Rose nodded. ‘It’s a bitch, isn’t it?’ she asked comfortably. ‘But you won’t change anything by setting up committees and telling women what they should want. They’ve got to want it themselves. And half of them want to be parasites and sex bombs, remember.’

  ‘Are you saying that women ought to be happy to stay at home and support men and be second-class citizens?’ Louise demanded.

  ‘You’ve got to build the doorways for women,’ Rose said seriously. ‘That’s easy to do. You can see where there is injustice. We knew that when we were fighting for the vote. You make the doorways and the women will go through them when they are ready.

  ‘There are seasons,’ Rose said simply. ‘Sometimes the time is right for a girl to have fun, sometimes for her to work and struggle. Sometimes to stay home and love a man, sometimes to run away from him. A clever woman follows her own path. And no one path is the same as another.’

  Louise was silent for a moment. ‘I wonder what my path is now,’ she mused.

  Rose gave her a look which was brimful of mischief. ‘If you don’t know by now you’re a bigger fool than I thought,’ she said. ‘I want some tea. Could I have some water?’

  Louise got slowly to her feet. ‘I’ll make the tea. But you’ve eaten all the biscuits already.’

  Louise worked on her essay all Wednesday evening. By the simple precaution of disconnecting her telephone and not checking the ansaphone she managed to avoid two languidly insulting calls from Maurice Sinclair and two short appeals, made potent by the brief anguish in their tone, from Toby. By midnight she had a screen full of text. She printed it out and then faxed it to Sarah’s office so that it would be on her desk by Thursday morning. The first paragraphs read:

  D.H. Lawrence the sexist: a reconsideration of The Virgin and the Gypsy.

  There is much the modern feminist can dislike about Lawrence: his obsession with male power, his insistence on male sexuality and his view of women as the recipients rather than the givers of sensuality and mystery. But it is wrong for us to deny the liberating power of his view of sexual relations.

  Old-fashioned feminists may concentrate on Lawrence’s phallocracy, but we of the Second Wave can overlook this prejudice of his – as much a part of his time as his snobbery and his concern with the condition of England and the Empire.

  What he has to teach us, as modern feminists, is both more potent and more liberating than his flaws. Lawrence teaches us about sensuality, about the freedom a woman can feel with a man who adores her, about finding oneself through sexuality with a male partner. Lawrence indicates that all conventions – those of feminist puritanism, as well as those of the patriarchy – are equally wrong. Lawrence shows us that a sensual woman can be free whatever her environment. Her task is to find a man with whom she can express this.

  And Lawrence’s sexuality is fundamentally heterosexual. It is the difference between men and women – which has for so long puzzled and distressed us as feminists – that is the source of Lawrence’s deepest delight. As lovers, as enemies, it is the opposing nature of men and women which makes Lawrence’s view of the world come alive. And he shows us, as perhaps we need to be shown, that the difference is nothing to fear but is in fact the source of our energy as women – that we are not men, but something wonderfully different.

  Thursday

  ‘I DON’T THINK WE CAN USE THIS.’ Sarah’s voice on the telephone on Thursday morning sounded as shocked as if Louise had sent her a picture of herself astride a grossly enlarged spark plug. ‘I don’t follow the argument at all, Louise.’

  Louise, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, felt instantly uneasy. Feminist criticism is a new science, as prickly and as difficult as any Comintern meeting as it moves invisibly and without warning from one phase to another. ‘What’s the matter?’ Louise asked weakly. ‘I know it’s late, Sarah, I’m very sorry.’

  ‘It’s not that it’s late,’ Sarah said, aggrieved. ‘It’s that it is so … so …’ She paused. Clearly there was no epithet bad enough for whatever Louise had done. ‘It’s so sexy,’ she said with disdain.

  ‘Sexy?’

  ‘Yes! As far as I can tell, what you’re saying is that Lawrence should be read as a man who understands women’s sexuality. And that what women want, if they’re free to choose, is a man who will arouse them and love them and sometimes dominate them and sometimes be dominated! And that as feminists we should be developing our sensuality with free men.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I can’t use this, Louise, it’s not the line we take at all.’

  Louise said nothing for a moment. ‘I think I may have been a little confused when I wrote it,’ she apologised.

  ‘I should think so,’ Sarah said sternly. ‘Louise, this doesn’t read like you at all! It’s one thing to redefine dress codes and insist on a woman’s right to wear what she wishes, including erotic underwear. But you seem to be going a stage further and suggesting that women will only be free when they acknowledge their desire for men.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite slavish!’

  ‘Yes, but the way Lawrence puts it is that if you acknowledge that you really desire a man, and he acknowledges that he really desires you, then you are free and equal in your sensuality. And your practical day-to-day life is free and equal too. For instance, we don’t see Constance Chatterley and Mellors together very much, but I think Lawrence suggests that they have an ideally equal and liberating life together because of their shared sexuality. And the ending of the novel indicates that they will go to a new world together – because they are equal pioneers.’

  ‘So if a man is a wonderful lover, the best lover you’ve ever had, you should go and live with him, and nothing else matters?’

  ‘Should I?’ Louise asked unguardedly.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Do you want to reconsider this essay for the next edition?’ Sarah asked patiently.

  ‘Yes … I think … actually … No.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘I don’t think I really want to work on Lawrence for a while,’ Louise said feebly. ‘He puts ideas in my head.’

  ‘Ideas?’

  ‘Yes. I think I’d rather stay on feminist theory or maybe review something for you, Sarah, if I may. I’d rather not read Lawrence right now. I’d rather stick to something which we know is right. Something we’ve thought through and got straight.’

  ‘I need a couple of reviews doing.’ There was a brief space as Sarah hunted on her crowded desk for the books. ‘Here’s one that might suit you: Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990.’

  ‘That sounds ideal,’ Louise agreed. ‘I’ll pick it up later today if you leave i
t in my pigeonhole. Thank you, Sarah.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said pleasantly. ‘By Wednesday week, please.’

  Louise put the telephone down with a sigh of relief.

  There was a knock on the door. Captain Frome was on the doorstep.

  ‘Neighbourhood watch,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘I’m afraid we’re on amber again.’

  ‘Amber?’ Louise asked. For a moment she thought it might be some new hallucinogenic drug.

  ‘Amber alert,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, you’d better come in.’

  He had a large manila folder under one arm and a collection of pamphlets in his other hand. He put them all down on the coffee table and sat on the sofa. ‘First things first. Here’s the new Convoy Alert!! pamphlet. They’ve regrouped and they’re headed back in this direction. The police will cordon off the village here, and here.’ He pointed to the little lanes marked on the map. ‘There is a party planned somewhere in the neighbourhood. Our job is to make sure that none of the blighters get within ten miles of Wistley. Any news, any gossip and suspicions, and you telephone this number.’ Captain Frome’s finger pointed to the telephone number printed in large figures at the bottom of the pamphlet. ‘Inside here are a few details about making your home secure and how to recognise a hippy. You should have no trouble with that!’

  ‘I?’

  ‘The university is full of them, isn’t it? Keep your ear to the ground. Some of your students may be in touch. This is a subversive movement we are dealing with here. We don’t know how far the tentacles of it may stretch. Satanism, drugs, communism. We’re going to Keep Wistley Free of the Hippy Menace.’

  Louise nodded wearily.

  ‘Now. Something even more serious.’ Captain Frome’s large grey-moustached face took on an expression more suitable for a funeral mute than for a morning caller. ‘I took the liberty of looking into your squatter.’

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘Rose Miles. Rose de Vere, Rambling Rose, she’s had a number of names.’