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
r,’ Andrew said gently. ‘I don’t like people telling me who I can have on my land, or what I can do. I don’t tell him who he can have to dinner.’
Louise suddenly had a vision of the country which was her home as a working community, not an attractive arrangement of scenery with an inconvenient absence of services. ‘Have your family always lived here?’
‘We’ve got headstones in the churchyard going back to 1425,’ Andrew said. ‘A long time.’
‘You’d know what a gamekeeper does,’ Louise remarked irrelevantly, thinking of her unfinished essay.
Andrew Miles chuckled. ‘You’re reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ he guessed. ‘I thought it was good. He’s right about the gamekeeper. It’s very realistic – not the …’ he hesitated, a little embarrassed ‘… not the sex – that was all made up of course – but he was right about the pheasants. He knew about pheasants. I thought it was good.’
Louise had to adjust her picture of Andrew Miles yet again. She had never thought of him reading at all, she had almost assumed that he was half-illiterate, perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper, perhaps arduously scanning a farming magazine.
‘You read novels?’ she asked rudely.
‘Sometimes. Mostly I listen to them,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve got a Walkman and I like to listen to novels when I’m in the tractor cab. I like Jane Austen best I think, but I like them all.’
He did up the buttons on his jacket. ‘George Eliot is good for a long field,’ he said. ‘And Henry James is the best for harrowing. But that post-modernist fiction I just can’t get on with. It’s no good for ploughing at all.’ He shot a mischievous grin at her astounded face. ‘Thank you for the coffee, Miss Case. I have to go now, the pigs want feeding. I’ll stop in to see that Rose is all right, on my way out.’
Louise opened her mouth to speak and found herself wordless. She let him go.
Andrew Miles pulled an armful of wood from the back of the Land-Rover and walked down the garden to Rose’s van. Louise, from her seat before the word processor, watched him. He shouted from the steps and Rose opened the van door. Today she was huddled in a deep green velvet evening cape with the glamorous hood pulled up over her grey head for warmth. Andrew piled most of the wood into the van and dropped the rest by the steps. He went back to his Land-Rover for more, then he fetched a red petrol can, and went into the van. In a few moments Louise saw a thin plume of smoke coming from the chimney. He had got Rose’s stove burning. Louise, abandoning all thought of the essay until he had gone, wondered uncomfortably if he thought badly of her, sitting warm in a centrally heated house while Rose huddled against the damp and the cold in a van at the bottom of the garden.
After a few minutes he emerged from the door. He was laughing at something Rose had said. Rose patted him on the cheek with an easy, affectionate gesture and then waved farewell.
Andrew strode back to his Land-Rover, started the engine with the familiar badly tuned roar, and drove back up the hill to his farm.
Louise looked blankly at the screen. Then she remembered the meeting at the university on women in Science and Industry and telephoned the head of the department.
‘I’m a member of the Fresh Start committee,’ Louise said, wincing at the name. It always sounded to her like some kind of new soap powder. ‘We’re planning to target science and technology courses for our next open day. I wonder if I could meet with you and have a talk.’
‘What about?’ he said unhelpfully.
‘About what we can do to make your department and other science and industry departments more attractive to mature women students,’ Louise said pleasantly.
‘In what way?’
Louise particularly did not want to complain about pin-up pictures which she had never seen. She had only Josephine Fields’s assurance that the department was festooned with naked women astride burgeoning spark plugs.
‘Any ways you think would be appropriate.’ She paused. ‘I think we all feel that there should be more mature women students in science and technology departments. The committee were wondering how best to encourage mature women entrants. Could I come and see you and we could have a talk about it?’
‘Are you anything to do with that nutcase woman who has been stealing notices from the noticeboards?’ the head of department demanded.
Louise thought. In theory, she was nothing to do with any nutcase woman who was a stereotype of the sexist male imagination and had never existed in reality. On the other hand, she recognised without difficulty a description of Josephine Fields joyously engaged in direct action.
‘No,’ she lied firmly. ‘I don’t know what woman you mean.’
‘An ugly batty woman who has been going around my department, upsetting my lab technicians, and taking down posters,’ he said bluntly.
‘No,’ Louise said again. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Two o’clock today,’ he said gruffly. ‘Or next week sometime.’
‘Today will be fine.’ Louise knew that her voice was smooth and soothing. She couldn’t help it. Any time she wanted a man to do something for her, she instinctively cooed. Twenty-nine years of training could not be overcome by sheer will. And anyway, it always worked.
‘See you then,’ he said. But he was already less gruff.
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Louise said sweetly. ‘Pompous old fart,’ she said to restore her sense of independence as she put down the telephone.
The paragraphs on the screen stared back at her looking more uncertain than ever before.
As women and feminists we have to challenge this myth. We have to surrender romance, love, glamour, and belief in all-conquering desire in favour of reality. We can still enjoy friendship with men. We can still enjoy sexual intercourse with men. But we can no longer allow ourselves to be conned into the nonsensical belief that their attentions make us ‘whole’, or that sexual intercourse or making love is in any way some sort of spiritual activity. We understand the physiology of orgasm now, we have reclaimed our bodies. Now we need to reclaim our hearts.
Louise sighed deeply. She was not at all sure that she had reclaimed her body. She thought the sentence ‘reclaim our hearts’ was a bit purple and, in any case, she was not sure that it could be done. She had been in love with another woman’s husband for nine years – not a very impressive record for a professional feminist. She pressed ‘Save’ again and shut the screen down. Her thoughts on Lawrence would have to wait.
She took a pile of students’ essays with her into the sitting room and sat on the sofa, red pen in hand. She had set them the title, ‘Clarissa: Willing Victim or Martyr?’ Half of them were completely floored by the very question because they had neglected the preliminary precaution of reading the book. The other half had, quite intelligently, paid a substantial sum to the only student on the course whose mum had videoed the BBC film of the novel. Louise had heard that there had been ‘Clarissa parties’ where, by payment of small amounts of mood-inducing drugs to the host, you could go and watch the video. What Clarissa was like viewed through the bias of Ecstasy Louise could only imagine.
The essays were staggeringly lacklustre. The effect of Ecstasy while watching the video seemed to have negated any educational impact a grasp of the story might have caused. Those students who had flicked through the library copy of the novel and decided that it was something about people who wrote and wrote and wrote to each other, were as well informed as those who had blearily followed the story on screen through a drug-induced illusion of knowing everything.
The only students who had actually read the book – all 1499 pages – were the mature students, mainly women of thirty-five years and more who, plagued by their customary insecurity, had cooked supper for four, put the children to bed, loaded the washing machine, and then worked till three in the morning for a fortnight in an effort to get the work done. Louise tried to be fair, but she could not respect a woman whose academic work took place on a corner of the kitchen table, after everyone else had gone to be
d. Despite her long membership of a committee to encourage mature women students to return to education Louise had a strongly held and strongly hidden belief that childbirth damaged a woman’s brain. Unfortunately for them all, the overanxious overworked students on her course could do nothing to disprove this.
Louise turned the pages idly, rewarding a good point with a red tick and a bad one with a cross. An occasional ‘!’ marked her indignant disapproval. It was just like her reading of Lawrence. By lunchtime she had marked half of them, and after a miserable spinster lunch of a can of soup and a plate of crispbread and cheese she returned to the study and had another short go at the Lawrence essay. In the cool empty house, with the rain pattering on her window and a grey mist sliding up over the common, immersed in pointless unsatisfactory work, Louise kept herself busy: successfully distracting herself from the knowledge she was lonely and unloved; hungry and cold.
The meeting with Professor Edgeley of Science and Industry did not promise well. Louise made her way to his little room on the second floor of the Sci/Ind block, past posters which promised: GIANT PISS UP TONITE (NURSES FROM GENERAL HOSPITAL INVITED!!!) CHEAP BEER. PARTY GAMES. STRIPPER. One chemistry lab was empty; Louise put her head around the door. It had the strange potent sharp smell of chemistry labs at her school and the same wooden benches with the little taps for bunsen burners at intervals along the stained brown benches and the swannecked taps gazing down into grimy sinks at the end of each bench. The walls had posters pinned to them showing linkages of molecules and a pretty necklace diagram which Louise vaguely assumed was the plan of DNA. On one noticeboard at the back marked ‘social’ was an offensive poster. Louise tightened her lips. It was a picture of a half-naked woman in a hammock under a brilliantly blue sky. In the sky were printed the words ‘AFL scrubbers – for cleaner skies’. Louise thought ‘scrubbers’ was deeply offensive to women, as was the woman’s pose.
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