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  Miriam looked down at the Guardian again. ‘I suppose it is.’ She spoke almost with regret. ‘But I do think that there are times when something – chemistry perhaps, or hormones, or sexual desire – can give you a feeling that is really quite magical. When you’re just mad for someone and nothing else in the world matters.’

  Louise smiled with affectionate contempt. ‘You’re a romantic,’ she said. ‘Would you melt and flame and flutter?’

  ‘Given half a chance,’ Miriam said. ‘But the women’s refuge doesn’t give you quite the scope of a gamekeeper’s hut in the woods. Anyway, I think my melting and fluttering days are over.’

  ‘Melting and fluttering are illusions,’ Louise said firmly. ‘They’re designed to keep women subservient through their emotions. I don’t think any woman of sense would melt and flame and flutter. Lady Chatterley is a real subservient character – firstly to her family, then to her husband, and then to her lover.’

  ‘Have you got a man at the moment?’ Miriam asked with sudden apparent irrelevance. ‘Are you still seeing what’s-his-name, Michael?’

  Louise nodded. A few years ago, unable to keep a full secret from Miriam, she had invented an imaginary married lover, with the proviso that she did not want to talk about him.

  Miriam, a true friend, prompted confidences but did not demand them and kindly hoped that Louise was sexually satisfied and privately worried that she was lonely.

  ‘Still him?’ Miriam said. ‘D’you think he’ll ever leave his wife?’

  Louise had the grace to blush slightly. ‘I think he will,’ she said. ‘Their marriage was always a bit, I don’t know, empty. I think he will leave her soon.’

  ‘Would you have him here?’ Miriam asked, looking around at Louise’s orderly sitting room. ‘Would you live with him?’

  ‘I’d love it,’ Louise said. ‘It’s lonely here, sometimes. Especially in the winter, when it gets dark so early and it’s so quiet. It would be good to have company. Some nights I put on the radio just to hear another voice, and I actually wait to hear Mr Miles drive past at closing time. It’s ridiculous. I wait to hear the noise of his Land-Rover and then I know it’s bedtime. It would be bliss to have him here. I’ve waited so long for him, it’s the only plan in my life I haven’t completed. My work is right, I have a place of my own, I’m earning better than I ever have before. It’s just him – the one thing I’ve not got.’

  Miriam looked uncomprehending. ‘I’d love to have time to be lonely,’ she said. ‘The phone’s always ringing and I live in a house with two men. The place is never empty, it’s never quiet, and it’s never how I like it.’ There was a short silence. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit … a bit obsessive?’ Miriam asked cautiously. ‘How you are about him? You don’t think you’re a kind of typical mistress, waiting and waiting while he fobs you off with excuses?’

  Louise closed her mouth on an angry retort. ‘We’re going at my speed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want more commitment at the early stages. I wasn’t ready for it. It’s only just now that I feel ready to move on. He’ll come to me when he and I agree the time is right.’

  Miriam nodded but she did not seem convinced. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just that you hear of an awful lot of women who think that the man is coming to them, and then they’re forty or fifty and he’s still not arrived, and they never meet anyone else.’

  Louise shook her head emphatically, pushing away the dreary vision. ‘Not me,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve not got problems with dependency. I’m a liberated woman. I love this man and we have a relationship but it’s an open relationship. But I have other men. I have a mature and independent life.’

  ‘But you don’t really get involved with other men,’ Miriam pointed out. ‘That guy from Leicester who I thought was so nice. You hardly spent any time with him at all. He was really interested in you and you only saw him at the conference and didn’t get in touch later. You’re not truly free if you’re not free to fall in love.’

  ‘Fall in love!’ Louise mocked. ‘Melt and flame and flutter?’

  ‘Not melting or flaming then – but you know what I mean. Intimacy, openness.’

  Louise shook her sleek head. ‘I don’t believe in it,’ she said. ‘I believe in comradeship and sexual compatibility. All the rest is just a patriarchal myth to keep women in their place, waiting for men, putting up with their neglect or abuse. You of all people should know! You see that stuff over and over again! “He only hits me because he loves me so much.”’

  Miriam nodded. ‘I suppose so. But you’re waiting. You’re not really free if you’re waiting. You’re putting up with neglect while he stays with his wife. You said yourself you were lonely.’

  ‘We’re not a conventional couple, you can’t make those sort of definitions,’ Louise said confidently. ‘I’m working towards the relationship I want with him. I accept the limitations on the relationship for now because they give me freedom and space. When I am ready and he is ready he’ll come to me.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Toby’s a long time.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ Miriam said. ‘When did he go?’

  ‘More than an hour and a half ago.’ Louise stood up and stretched. ‘Damn. I’d better take the money for the gate up to the farm.’

  ‘I’ll take it for you,’ Miriam offered. ‘I’d like a walk.’

  In her first months at the cottage Louise had bought a pair of expensive walking boots and marched along all the local footpaths and bridleways. But after her first enthusiasm she found that she preferred to observe the countryside, and the small seasonal changes, from her windows. The landscape – so important to town dwellers – rapidly became nothing more than an obstacle between where she was and where she wanted to be. The four miles down the road to the Wistley shops might be a flower-fringed lane, no wider than a car, where cow-parsley and meadow vetch wiped their pollen on her car doors in midsummer. But it was a nuisance to have to drive every time you wanted a newspaper or a pint of milk. The twenty-mile drive to the university through the high clear hills of the Sussex downs was completed by Louise in an efficient trance. She listened to the radio, she thought about her work, she daydreamed of Toby. She hardly saw the pale earth turning green or the wheeling gulls.

  ‘Are you sure? I can just as easily drive up there.’

  Miriam nodded. ‘I’d like to see the farm,’ she said. ‘Is it OK to just go round? Should I ring up or anything?’

  ‘He’s always there. I knock on the back door, and if there’s no reply I go round to the yard,’ Louise said. ‘He’s often in the barn doing things to animals. Sometimes he’s out on the tractor, but generally he’s in the yard or the barn.’

  Miriam pulled on a light jacket. ‘Does he live there on his own?’

  ‘Yes. His father died about five years ago, I think.’

  ‘I’m surprised he’s not married.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s the marrying type. He’s got a bit of a reputation in the village, they talk about him in the shop sometimes. And he drinks of course.’

  ‘Gorgeous eyes,’ Miriam said.

  Louise suddenly felt a stir of interest. She looked at Miriam more closely. ‘Gorgeous eyes?’

  Miriam smiled. ‘A girl can look,’ she said. ‘And he does have the most deep blue eyes, that wonderful navy blue. Like Robert Redford.’

  ‘Wistley Common’s Robert Redford!’ Louise put her hand in her pocket for the envelope. ‘Here you are. Try and control your restless desires. I think you’d frighten him to death!’

  Miriam smiled. ‘I’ll come back over the common,’ she said. ‘I’ll be a while.’

  Louise nodded and turned back to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was one of the long descriptive passages about scenery, page after page containing nothing to which she could possibly object.

  She had never thought of Andrew Miles as a desirable man before Rose had spoken of his bed and Miriam mentioned his eyes. She had thought of him as useful – a competent neighbour who would put up gut