Perfectly Correct Read online

  ‘Napoleon?’

  ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said bracingly. ‘Napoleon said it.’

  ‘She’s so very old. And she was born here. She says she was born here.’

  ‘She probably says that everywhere she goes. Look, I have to go. I’m supposed to be taking a seminar on industrialisation and I’ve put Das Kapital down somewhere and I can’t find it.’

  ‘Call me later,’ Louise urged. ‘I feel a bit desolate.’

  ‘Do some work!’ Toby recommended. ‘Sarah’s waiting for your Lawrence article, she told me this morning. I’ll call you later. I might be able to get out to see you this evening – Men’s Consciousness group is finishing early.’

  ‘Oh!’ The half-promise was an immediate restorative. Louise often dreaded being alone in the cottage. On cool summer evenings when the swallows swooped and chased against an apricot horizon the cottage seemed too full of ghosts, other people whose lives had been lived more vividly and more passionately than Louise’s. They had left a trace of their desires and needs in every sun-warmed stone, while Louise flitted like a cold shadow leaving no record. Louise felt half-invisible, looking out of the window across the common. She would pour herself a glass of wine and go out into the garden, sit in a deck chair on the front lawn and read a book, consciously trying to enjoy her solitude. Then she would turn around and look at the little cottage which seemed more lively and vital than herself.

  It had been built as a gamekeeper’s cottage, part of a grand estate of which Mr Miles’s great-grandfather had bought a small slice. Louise thought of a man like Lawrence’s gamekeeper, Mellors, letting himself quietly out of the gate that led to the common and walking softly on dew-soaked grass to check his rabbit snares. Impossible for Louise to speculate what a man like that would think as he walked down the sandy paths between the ferns, a dark shadow of a dog at his heels. Impossible even to imagine him without the gloss of literature on him. Louise was not even sure what a gamekeeper did for his day-to-day work, she was far better informed about his sexually gymnastic nights. But that was fiction. Everything she knew best was fiction.

  The gamekeeper had left when the big estate was sold up. Mr Miles had told her that the cottage was used by his own family and then housed farm labourers. He knew one of his father’s workers who had lived there with his wife and their seven children. Louise had protested that they could not possibly have all fitted into the two little bedrooms.

  ‘No bathroom,’ Mr Miles had reminded her. ‘So three bedrooms. Girls in one room, boys in another and parents in the third. I used to come down for my tea with them sometimes. It was grand.’ He smiled at Louise, trying to find the words. ‘A lot of play,’ he said. ‘Like foxcubs.’

  Louise sometimes thought of that family as she went to sleep alone in her wide white bed. A family where the children played like foxcubs, with four boys in one room and three girls whispering in another and a great marital bed which saw birth and death and lovemaking year after year.

  She pulled up her chair and sat down before the word processor.

  Nothing came.

  Outside in the orchard, the blossom bobbed. The blue van was as still as a rock, planted like a rock, embedded in the earth. The old woman was clearly not packing, she was not moving around at all. She was doing nothing and Louise feared very much that when Toby visited in the evening the van would be there still, and the old woman, who guessed so quickly and knew so much, would see Toby’s white Ford Escort car pull up the drive and watch him get out and let himself in the front door with his own key. Louise thought that with the old woman’s bright eyes scanning the front of the cottage she would not feel at all in the right mood to go upstairs with Toby if he wanted to make love.

  She was quite right. The van was still there as the sunset dimmed slowly into a soft lavender twilight. Toby’s tyres sprayed gravel as he pulled up outside the cottage. Louise opened the door at once to draw him in, hoping that the old woman would not see them.

  ‘Evening!’ the old voice called penetratingly from the bottom of the darkening garden.

  Toby turned at once, ignoring Louise’s hand on his sleeve. ‘Good evening,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh, come in,’ Louise urged. ‘She said she was going, but she’s still here. I’ll talk to her tomorrow and get her moved on. Come inside now, Toby.’

  ‘I’ll just say hello,’ Toby said. ‘I’m curious.’ He handed Louise the bottle of wine he was carrying and strolled down towards the orchard. The old woman was leaning against the garden gate, her dog sprawled over her bare feet, keeping them warm.

  ‘Hello.’ Toby smiled his charming smile at her.

  The old woman nodded, taking in every inch of him: his silk shirt, sleek trousers, casual shoes, and his jacket slung over his shoulder.

  ‘And are you at the university too?’ she asked, as if continuing a long conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said engagingly. ‘I’m in the Sociology department. Louise teaches feminist studies in the Literature department so we’re colleagues. But tell me, what are you doing here?’

  The old woman looked around her as if the briar roses were leaning their pale faces forward to eavesdrop. ‘I’ve come here to write,’ she confided softly. ‘To write my memoirs. I wanted somewhere quiet where I could work.’

  ‘Really? How very interesting.’ Toby was not interested at all.

  She nodded. ‘I was born in 1908. My mother died when I was four. Her health had been broken, you see, by the force-feeding.’

  Toby, whose attention had been wandering, suddenly clicked on, like a searchlight. ‘Force-feeding?’

  The old woman shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t know. It’s all over and forgotten now. But they were terrible days for the women suffragettes.’

  ‘I do know,’ Toby said hurriedly and untruthfully. ‘I’ve studied that period. Was your mother a militant suffragette?’

  The old woman suddenly gleamed at him. ‘She was! She was! And after her death, they took me in. They called me the youngest recruit of them all! They used to pop me through the scullery windows to check the houses were empty. We cared about pets, you know. If there was a budgie or a canary I’d open the front door and we’d get them out before we fired the building.’

  Toby could feel his heart rate speeding. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You were working for the WSPU – the women’s suffrage movement. And they used you, as a little girl, to help them in their attacks on property?’

  The old woman nodded. ‘It was like the greatest adventure in the world for me. I used to love going out at night with them, on the raids.’

  ‘And you can remember it all?’

  ‘Remember it?’ the old woman laughed. ‘I’ve got a trunk full of photographs and newspaper clippings. I’ve got my diary and my letters. And her diary and her letters too.’

  ‘Whose diary?’ Toby asked. He had a feeling very like drunkenness. He could feel his head swimming and his breath coming too fast. ‘Whose diary have you got?’

  ‘Why, the diary of the woman who adopted me,’ the old woman said nonchalantly. ‘Sylvia, Sylvia Pankhurst.’

  Toby waded back to the house like a drowning man gasping for the shore. In his fevered imagination he saw the book he would write, the definitive book on the women’s suffrage movement and the inside story of the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. It would be illustrated lavishly with previously unseen photographs. He would quote extensively from her private papers – letters, diaries. He would collate and index them all into chronological order and then deposit them, perhaps at Suffix, perhaps in London. They would be called the Summers collection and he would publish a guide to them. The book would go into many editions. There was a huge and growing interest in anything about the women’s movement, not just in England but worldwide. He would get a teaching post far better paid, far more prestigious than Suffix could ever offer. He could go to Cambridge, or Oxford. He leaned against the front door for a moment, hyperventilatin