Free Perfectly Correct by Philippa Gregory

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 claimto 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 – againstwomen 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