Free Perfectly Correct by Philippa Gregory Page A

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 man in her bed and a scarlet flood of spoiled books.
    The phone ringing abruptly at her elbow made her jump. She picked it up, half-expecting Andrew Miles with some news of a gear box. But it was Miriam.
    ‘I can’t talk,’ she said. ‘I’m in a rush. I wondered if I could come and stay with you tonight? I’m up to my ears and I want a break.’
    ‘Of course,’ Louise said. Miriam often stayed a night in her cottage. Sometimes she came with Toby, sometimes alone. ‘Lovely.’
    ‘I’ve been doing the finance books of the refuge all morning and the walls are closing in on me. Hell! Louise, d’you remember when we said we’d never get office jobs?’
    ‘It’s hardly an office.’
    ‘It’s office work. It just happens that it’s done on an old school desk in a cramped room without any qualified help. This does not make it any better, surprisingly enough. Shall I bring food?’
    ‘I’ll go into the village and shop,’ Louise said. ‘I might as well. I’m not getting anything done here.’ She paused and then asked with clever deceit, ‘Will Toby come too?’
    ‘I’ve lost him,’ Miriam replied. ‘He’s not at home and he’s not in his office. Can I be a bore and bring him if he wants to come?’
    ‘That’s fine,’ Louise said. ‘I’ll make enough for three and we can pig out if he doesn’t come.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Miriam said. ‘I’ll go to my meeting now. If they ask for a treasurer’s report they can see my notepad. I can’t make head or tail of it myself.’ She giggled, her old feckless undergraduate giggle, and put down the telephone.
    Louise pressed the ‘Save’ key on her word processor and shut the machine down, preserving its one solitary sentence, and went out into the garden.
    Toby and the old woman were sitting on her steps. She had a large cardboard box on her lap and she was showing Toby one yellowing piece of newspaper after another. Louise waved and was surprised to see Toby stuff a newspaper clipping back into the box and come quickly forward.
    ‘I’ve just had Miriam on the phone. She’s coming out for dinner and to stay overnight. Will you want to stay too? I have to shop.’
    The thought of his wife and mistress under the same roof again was always a temptation for Toby, but then heremembered a meeting on graduate students which he was supposed to chair. ‘Damn, I can’t,’ he said. Besides, it would give him a chance to go to the library and take out everything they had on the suffragette movement. ‘Got to chair the humanities programme meeting.’
    ‘I’ll shop now then,’ Louise said distantly. ‘Shall I buy something for lunch?’
    Toby glanced back at the old woman with her tempting box of cuttings sitting on her steps in the sunshine. ‘No, I’ve delayed you too much today, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ll finish up here and go.’
    Louise nodded rather coldly. ‘See you Monday then.’ She waved a casual hand and then went back up the garden to her car.