Perfectly Correct Read online

  There had been something about Rose Pankhurst’s bright button eyes that had put him off, put him off very deeply. Louise had been in his arms, he had felt her easy sudden response. Miriam had been packing upstairs, it was a stolen embrace, like any one that they had snatched over the years of deception. Sweetest of all because of the quick clandestine desire of it. He had pushed Louise’s questing hand from the flies of his trousers because he wanted to enjoy desire, not to be racked by it. But he continued to caress her, enjoying the speeding of her breath and the flush in her face. The picture of Louise aching with unassuagable desire was one of the most attractive sights of their love affair. He adored teasing her into arousal and then watching her struggling to hide it. So with one hand firmly restraining her from touching him, he had allowed his other hand to wander down her cheek, over her breast and down to the soft warmth of her crutch. And then he had seen Rose’s bright critical beam and he had felt his erection vanish and his desire wilt.

  She had looked at him as if he were some kind of ordinary cheating husband. She had looked at him with disdain as if he were some horrid travelling salesman who had enticed his secretary into the back seat of his company car. She had looked at him as if he were not a caring, sensual free-thinking new man. She had looked straight through him, as if he were one of an old tedious type and not worthy of her attention, not a new man at all.

  Rage would have been better, Toby thought sulkily. Outrage, shock, even exposure would have left him with the moral high ground of being able to expose Rose as a prying old fool who had seen a fraternal hug and leaped to smutty and incorrect conclusions. Miriam would have believed him, Louise would have backed him up. Rose would have looked foolish and he would have been generous, forgiving, and kind.

  Instead Rose’s sharp black eyes had scanned him, had seen his hand straying to the welcoming heat of Louise’s crutch while his other hand restrained her from touching the swelling in his trousers. Sitting in his study, before the box of cuttings, Toby felt himself grow warm and knew he was actually blushing at the memory. It was the pushing of Louise’s hand away which had unmanned him before Rose. It was such a shy rejection, like an old-fashioned girl in the darkness of a cinema. It was the gesture of a tease. Rose had caught Toby out – not in adultery, which he could have brazened through – but in coyness. Rose had seen Toby protect his own feelings and risk Louise’s discomfort. Rose had seen Toby behave selfishly, egoistically, nastily. Toby could not rid himself of that picture. Rose’s view of Toby had entered into his image of himself like a rush of cold water. It turned him off like a tap.

  He pulled the box towards him. He had employed a second-year undergraduate to sort the pieces of newsprint into distinct piles. She had bound them with elastic bands and labelled them in her careful schoolgirl script. Toby read the labels. ‘Recipes – puddings. Recipes – savouries. Cartoons and sketches. Book reviews. Suffragette attacks. Housekeeping hints. Court cases. Countryside news. Public meetings. Travel notes.’

  He had not told Alison the student of his particular interest. His innate discretion warned him to tell her nothing. He said merely that the papers had come into his possession and he wanted them collated as research material. He had hinted that this tedious exercise of reading and sorting was the very bones and basis of research which would undoubtedly help her in her degree, and would prepare her for postgraduate work. Alison, who would willingly have sorted a dozen boxes just for the privilege of sitting on the floor of his room, even when he was not there, had knelt before Toby’s cardboard box and respectfully sorted his clippings into these asinine categories.

  Toby flipped through the recipes at random. They were, had he but known it, Sylvia Pankhurst’s own recipes from her Price Cost Restaurant which operated in the Old Ford Road, Bow, during the First World War, serving food at cost price to working people. Louise, or even Miriam, could have told him of some of Sylvia Pankhurst’s social concerns. But Toby wanted to share this project with no-one. Accordingly he dropped into the wastepaper basket at the side of his desk all of the Price Cost Restaurant’s published menus.

  The housekeeping hints so categorised by Alison were in fact advice for working women trying to survive on soldiers’ pay, written by Sylvia as part of her general attack on the poor conditions facing women during the war years. The travel notes were Sylvia’s diary of her travels in America, and in revolutionary Russia (including her meeting with Lenin). Toby glanced at the first couple of pages and tossed them into the bin without troubling himself to read further. The illustrations so carefully smoothed out and collected by Alison were from the Dreadnought newspaper which Sylvia published herself in an attempt to give working people the true news of the war.

  The cartoons and sketches were Sylvia’s own attempts at William Morris-style drawings, invaluable to historians of the pre-Raphaelite movement – and of course to modern wallpaper companies. Toby merely glanced at them and tossed them in the bin. He had no interest in art, and he did not look carefully enough to see the little SP initials in the corner of each precious fragment. The section of countryside notes – which included some rare original poetry by Sylvia Pankhurst, and her book reviews of revolutionary and Marxist books from 1917–21 – went the same way. Toby was not generally interested in any book reviews except those which he wrote himself, or those which condemned the work of his colleagues and competitors.

  When the wastepaper basket was filled with irreplaceable invaluable material, Toby felt that he had gone a long way to clearing aside the dross. Before him he had only the public meetings’ cuttings, accounts of court cases and those clearly labelled suffragette cuttings. He started to read.

  Toby had two principal disadvantages working against him as he embarked on this course of study. Firstly he knew nothing about the suffragette movement other than the most commonplace facts. He vaguely remembered the Cat and Mouse Act, and the force-feeding of suffragettes in prison from his A level history. He remembered the Pankhursts, mainly Emily, the mother, and two daughters, Sylvia and Christabel: Sylvia who worked in the East End of London and became radical (he did not know about her putting Lenin straight on how to run a revolution in the heady days of Moscow in 1920) and Christabel who ran the campaign from exile in Paris. He had never even heard of Adela Pankhurst, the third sister, who emigrated to Australia.

  His other disadvantage was no less grave. He was trained as a sociologist, not an historian, and artefacts from the past held no interest for him. Toby’s usual research took place on clean bright computer screens with pretty coloured graphs, or with newly published papers in freshly printed journals. He resented having to read from yellowing newsprint, and he disliked the dusty feeling of the clippings. They smelled rather strongly of dog’s wee and they strained his eyes. However, he staunchly read every word and made careful notes of all the rhetorical uninteresting speeches and the hints of organisational in-fighting. When he had read every one, noted it, and its date and publication where available, he left a note for Miriam telling her he would be home later, and drove out to Louise’s cottage to see Rose.

  It was strange driving up to the door of the little house knowing it would be empty since Louise would still be at the Tuesday Fresh Start meeting. Toby had his own key and could have let himself in, but Rose’s guilt-inducing glare still made him uncomfortable. Besides, he was working, not visiting. He left the box of diminished clippings in the back of the car and strolled down the garden path to the blue van.

  The dog was not at his post at the doorstep. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Rose was not at home. Toby was so surprised that he did not know what to do. He waited for a little while by the gate, he walked down to the bottom of the orchard and looked out, in case she was walking on the common and he could stroll down the path to meet her. He considered driving back down to the village in case she was walking home along the lane. But she was nowhere to be seen. He decided to overcome his sense of diffidence about entering Louise’s house and wrote on one of his