Perfectly Correct Read online

  Louise turned back to her study and the word processor. Her face looked tired and pale in the grey light. She felt weary of the essay and of the tough unromantic counsel it offered. She sat before the screen again.

  The loud plashing of the overflow abruptly stopped; Louise could hear the water gurgling safely away. She heard Andrew Miles jump down from the ladder and then his knock at the front door. Louise sighed affectedly and went to answer it.

  ‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘There were handfuls of twigs in the gutter. I’m afraid you’ve got a couple of rooks nesting in your chimney. They’re messy builders, they’ve left twigs all over your roof.’

  ‘Rooks?’ Louise asked.

  He nodded. ‘They’ve likely got a nest in one of the chimneys,’ he said. ‘You might have noticed a lot of soot coming down and some sticks?’

  Louise shook her head. ‘Apart from the sitting-room fire they’re all boarded up. But I’ve heard some noise from the fireplace in my bedroom.’

  He nodded. ‘That would be them. You’ll have to clear the nest out and put a cap on the chimney pot.’

  Louise sighed with irritation. ‘Can’t I just leave them?’

  He shrugged. ‘They’re noisy birds and they spread a lot of twigs around. And if a young bird falls down it’ll be trapped in the fireplace and you’ll hear it fluttering until it dies. You wouldn’t want that.’

  Louise found his assumption of her sensibility oddly touching. ‘I suppose I’d better get it done. How do I get the nest cleared? Are there nest-clearing contractors?’

  He gave a little cough to cover his laugh. ‘I can do it,’ he offered. ‘I’ve got a brush I do the farmhouse chimneys with. And I can get you a chimney cap.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Louise said shortly.

  Mutely he held out the ladder to her. Louise took it from him. His cap was dark with rain, his fair hair curling under it at the back was wet. Little rivulets of rain were running down his cheeks and under his collar.

  ‘You’re soaked,’ Louise said. The sudden intimacy of the statement made her flush.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Louise held the door wider. ‘Would you like to come in? You could borrow a towel. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  He stepped out of his Wellington boots and put them carefully side by side in her porch. He took off his wet jacket and cap and hung them on the hooks. He carried the ladder in for her and put it where she indicated, under the stairs. He followed her into the kitchen, stooping a little under the white-painted beams. Louise thought that the cottage suddenly looked like a doll’s house, a Wendy house built for play and filled with pretty insubstantial things. She filled the kettle and switched it on. Andrew Miles sat at the kitchen table and Louise put the biscuit tin before him.

  ‘I was writing an essay,’ Louise said brightly. ‘On D.H. Lawrence, the writer.’

  Mr Miles nodded. ‘Not working today, then.’

  Louise smiled. ‘Not teaching,’ she corrected him. ‘It’s my work to write as well as to teach.’

  She made the coffee and put a cup before him and gestured that he should take a biscuit. Andrew Miles took two digestive biscuits, sandwiched them together and ate them in two big bites.

  ‘Do you have a housekeeper?’ Louise inquired suddenly, thinking of that appetite and the empty farmhouse.

  Andrew smiled. ‘Mrs Shaw comes up every morning. She keeps me neat and makes my dinner. She leaves it in the Aga for me.’

  ‘Your work must be hard,’ Louise said. She was thinking that it was lonely work, and lonelier still to come home in the evening, cold and sometimes wet, to an empty house. Lonelier even than her drive home to her cottage all cool and quiet, with no lights shining and no fires lit.

  ‘It’s what I’m used to,’ Andrew Miles said, draining his cup. ‘I’ve never wanted any other life than farming. But some evenings it would be nice to have some company.’ He drained his mug and put it down. Without looking at her, he said in a little rush: ‘Perhaps you would like to come down to the village one evening with me and have a drink?’

  Louise’s first instinct was to say no at once, but there was something about his diffidence and his reluctance which made her hesitate. He was so very unlike Toby. He had none of Toby’s easy charm, he lacked the confidence, he lacked urbanity. The way he had asked her – as if he had planned the words for some time and then nerved himself to speak out – prompted her to caution. And there was something very solid and honest about him, planted firmly at her table and looking at her with those remarkably dark blue eyes.

  ‘That would be nice,’ Louise said carefully. ‘Perhaps when I’ve got this essay out of the way. I daren’t take any time off before then.’

  He sensed the rejection at once, and got to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said, he sounded almost apologetic. ‘I’ll get that chimney cap and come around and clear the chimney as soon as the weather lifts.’

  He went lightly in his socks to the front door. Louise suddenly wanted to delay him, to recall her rebuff.

  ‘I’ll be finished next week,’ she said. ‘By the weekend.’

  He was stepping into his thick green Wellington boots. Louise owned a similar pair but hers had a neat redundant buckle on the side and cost almost three times as much.

  ‘Well, you’ll come up to the farm for the party, won’t you?’ he asked. ‘They should be here next weekend. And we’ll have a drink and perhaps a dance?’

  ‘Captain Frome says they were turned back,’ Louise said. ‘They won’t be able to get to your farm.’

  He shook his head. ‘They aren’t due till next week. They’re just travelling around. I said they couldn’t come until I had my hay lifted. They knew that.’

  ‘I think you’re making an awful mistake,’ Louise said earnestly. ‘They’re not at all the sort of people you’re thinking about. They’re town people, most of them, and the rave business is big business. They’re professionals. And the people who come to the parties are not all travellers, or gypsies, not people you’re thinking of. They’re ordinary people with jobs and good incomes, they just get out their vans and go to raves at weekends.’

  He smiled at her, and took down his jacket from the hook and put it on, turning up the collar before he pulled on the disreputable cap. ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘I read the newspapers, I listen to the radio. I’m not a complete peasant.’

  Louise flushed redder than ever. ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘They’re straightforward businessmen,’ he continued. ‘They offered me an excellent price to hire two fields. They carry insurance and they’ve paid a deposit against damage. They’re managing their own security. They’re bringing their own catering truck, they bring their own portable toilets. I thought it might be a bit of fun, and it’ll earn me more than the whole hay crop put together. I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘I didn’t realise …’ Louise said feebly.

  Andrew Miles smiled. ‘Most of them round here don’t realise,’ he said. ‘Like your friend Captain Frome. He wants to live in the country, but he doesn’t really want to be in the country as it is now. He has an idea of a place: perhaps he read about it in a book, perhaps it’s where he had his holidays when he was a boy. It’s Pooh Corner or the Wind in the Willows. He thinks of the country like one of those nature films – all animals and no humans at all. Or if there are humans then they’re special people, not like town people. Quiet, and a bit stupid. They pull their forelocks to the local lords and they’re grateful if he remembers their names. That’s why Frome’s always wanting to get us organised, to make the village prettier, to stop farmers hedging and ditching, to cancel the Hallfield market. Real farming is a dirty business, it’s a noisy business, it’s an industry not a postcard. He doesn’t like mud on the road or having to drive slowly behind my tractor. He wants the country to be quiet and pretty. He wants a garden, not a work place.’

  ‘He’s not my friend,’ Louise said uncomfortably.

  ‘Doesn’t matte