Perfectly Correct Read online

  His sunny smile was as untroubled as a little cherub. ‘Fine. You pack a box. I’ll just pop down and see Rose is OK.’

  Louise watched him walk down through the orchard and went inside to her study. The red light on her ansaphone winked urgently. She played the message. It was Toby, his voice urgent and whiney.

  ‘Louise, I need to talk to you urgently. Please return this call without fail. I also need to talk to Miriam who has done a dreadful thing. Please make sure she calls me. This is really urgent. I am at the university all evening since I cannot go home until this is resolved. I am depending on you. You must telephone me at once.’

  Louise glanced towards the orchard. Andrew’s big boots stood neatly beside the step of the caravan. Rose’s dog dozed beside them. Louise dialled Toby’s departmental office. He picked up the phone on the second ring.

  ‘Toby Summers.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Louise, thank God! I’ve been waiting for hours for you to call.’

  ‘I only just got in.’

  ‘Is Miriam with you?’

  ‘She’s coming out now. She’s on her way.’

  ‘I think she’s gone absolutely crazy,’ Toby said. ‘You must talk to her, Louise, and then I’ll come out and see her.’

  ‘She sounded very upset,’ Louise said cautiously.

  ‘She’s gone mad,’ Toby cried, forgetting the cardinal rule that madness and women can never be anything more than tangentially connected. ‘She’s barking. She’s stolen my cash card and she’s robbed me of an entire month’s salary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Since last Tuesday and on every single subsequent day, she has taken the maximum of two hundred pounds out of my account,’ said Toby, spite making his enunciation dauntingly precise. ‘She’s emptied my account. I had seven hundred and fifty pounds in there and it’s all gone.’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Louise said certainly. Toby’s and Miriam’s sexual standards might be flexible but they had always shown rigorous rectitude over their independent bank accounts.

  ‘I tell you it’s gone!’ Toby wailed. ‘What did she say to you?’

  ‘That the refuge was bankrupt, and that she was unhappy with you.’

  Toby moaned. ‘The refuge! Oh God, that bloody refuge! She’s spent all my money on those hopeless women!’

  ‘Toby!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Louise. I’m sorry! I don’t know what I’m saying! I’m dreadfully upset. Also, we had a quarrel. Did she tell you?’

  ‘She said something.’

  ‘I thought you might tell her about the negligee,’ Toby said. ‘I wanted to clarify things for her.’

  ‘So you told her you’d had an affair for the past nine years.’

  ‘I didn’t say who with.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ Louise said with weighty irony.

  ‘Look,’ Toby said. ‘We’re in crisis. There’s no getting away from it, Louise, and you and I have to stand together. We’ll tell Miriam we’re lovers. She’ll agree to let me go, I know she will. You needn’t tell her about the gown, it wouldn’t make any sense to her. And she can give me my money back. She can have the house if she wants, she can buy me out of my share. I shan’t need a place of my own, once I’m living with you. I should have done it years ago. I’ll come out now. We’ll start our life together now.’

  ‘No,’ Louise said quickly. ‘That’s not possible. I’m not even in my cottage. I’m staying up at the farm.’

  ‘My mind’s made up,’ Toby announced with awful decisiveness. ‘I’m coming out at once, Louise. I’ll come up to the farm to meet you there.’

  ‘I can’t …’ Louise started.

  ‘You and I are going to be together and we’ll get my money back from Miriam. We’ll counsel her. We’ll help her with this. She’s obviously suffering some kind of crisis kleptomania. We owe it to her to help her. I’m on my way. We’ll be together now, my darling …’

  ‘No!’ Louise shrieked, but the telephone clicked and Toby was already gone.

  Louise walked slowly to the Land-Rover as Andrew stepped into his boots at Rose’s door. Rose came out on the step and waved to Louise. Louise waved back. Even at that distance she could see Rose’s triumphant beam. ‘Everything all right then, dear?’ Rose yelled.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Louise called back repressively.

  ‘Farmhouse to your liking? Bed comfortable, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Louise said shortly and got into the Land-Rover and slammed the door. She could still hear Rose’s rich wicked chuckle. Then Andrew stepped into the cab and started the engine. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got everything?’

  ‘Everything,’ Louise said. ‘But there’s a bit of a problem with Toby and Miriam.’

  ‘I should think there was,’ Andrew said in a tone of reproof. ‘Carrying on as you’ve all been doing.’

  Louise looked him straight in his dark blue eyes. ‘That’s quite enough of that,’ she said firmly.

  Andrew pulled his forelock and drove out into the lane. ‘Yes’m,’ he said subserviently. ‘Beg pardon’m.’

  ‘Miriam says she wants to leave him, she’s coming out to the farm tonight. I said that would be all right.’ Louise shot a quick look at him. ‘You said it would be all right?’

  He nodded. ‘It is.’

  ‘But now Toby says that she’s been stealing money out of his bank account, and he’s coming out to sort things out.’

  ‘Coming out to the farm?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Louise said awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. I told him I was there and he just said he’d come out. He didn’t give me a chance to say no.’

  ‘We’d better go down to the Bush then,’ Andrew suggested helpfully. ‘And stay there till they’ve sorted themselves out. We could stay at the Bush all night. Give them the place to themselves. Keep out of trouble generally.’

  ‘Oh, no! They’re my friends. I have to be there.’

  ‘Seems to me like you’ve been there a bit too much already.’

  Louise laid one finger on his hand as it rested on the gear lever. ‘I warned you,’ she said. ‘That’s enough.’

  He shot her one of his wicked grins. ‘All right, I’m done. But shouldn’t they just get on with it on their own? There’s an awful lot of talking and talking and talking in your world. Maybe they’ll just go to bed and make up.’

  Louise shook her head. ‘I don’t think they’ll do that,’ she said. ‘There’s the missing money, and Toby told Miriam he had an affair.’

  Andrew pulled up outside the Holly Bush and switched off the engine. Louise tried to open her door but the handle came off in her hand. ‘He lives dangerously, that Toby,’ Andrew said with respect. He walked around the Land-Rover and opened the door for Louise. ‘Rose told me that he’s been stealing women’s underwear and dressing up in it.’

  Louise closed her eyes briefly. ‘Please, Andrew, don’t ever ever mention that again. I can’t bear to even think about it. Rose should not have said anything, least of all to you. It was a distressing and very private thing. She should have treated it in the strictest of confidence.’

  ‘Put you off him, did it?’ Andrew noted perceptively. ‘Well, I can imagine it would.’

  Louise slipped down from the cab seat, her face closed and her lips tight.

  ‘Very disturbing,’ Andrew sympathised. ‘I can see it would be very disturbing – seeing your lover, all dressed up in flowery knickers!’

  Louise walked past him saying nothing, pushed open the door of the pub and went in.

  ‘Worse if it was one of them basque things. Stands to reason. It would put anyone off,’ Andrew said irrepressibly as he followed her in. ‘Or stockings and suspenders,’ he speculated.

  There was something like a muted roar of approval as he came in. ‘Is it on then?’ someone shouted from the end of the bar. ‘The party? When are they all coming?’

  ‘You’ll never get them in on the roads,’ someone else warned. ‘There’s