Louise said nothing but she felt wary.
‘I have some bad news for you,’ he said. ‘Tell me first, which lawyer did you use when you bought the cottage? Local man?’
‘I inherited it,’ Louise said. ‘From my aunt. She bought it from Mr Miles’s father.’
‘We have to hope it was a straightforward mistake then, and not a put-up job.’
‘What was?’
‘The conveyancing. According to the deeds held at the county archive office, this was once two cottages with two cottage gardens.’
‘Yes?’
‘Your aunt only bought the one. They had been converted into one property by 1950, but originally there were two owners of two separate houses: Mr Miles senior – Andrew Miles’s grandfather – and Mr Stephen Miles, his younger brother. Your aunt occupied the whole property but she bought only from Mr Miles senior. The property was never declared as one house, the garden was never declared as one garden. In theory, Mr Stephen Miles the younger brother, or his heirs, still own half of this house and half of the garden.’
Louise stared blankly at Captain Frome. He opened the manila envelope and spread photocopies of ageing documents on her coffee table. ‘Then the trail goes cold,’ he went on. ‘But local belief is that Mr Stephen Miles had a number of children, all now deceased except for one daughter – Rose. Mr Miles senior had a son who inherited the farm, and his son is Andrew Miles, our Mr Miles. This cottage was used as a gamekeeper’s cottage and then a farm labourer’s cottage and then finally sold as one unit to your aunt, and subsequently inherited by you.’
‘I only own half ?’ Louise asked.
‘And the other half is owned by Rose Miles,’ Captain Frome concluded grimly. ‘This accounts for why she makes so free with her accusations of trespass. She probably knows perfectly well that she is the owner of your orchard, and indeed, half your house. She’s probably just biding her time before she strikes.’
‘Strikes?’
‘Blackmail, Miss Case. Presumably she came to discover the lie of the land and shortly she will be threatening you with a claim against your property. I should imagine that she will settle for a cash payment to go away – her sort usually do. But until you settle this matter, she probably has a full legal right to your orchard and to half your house and, what is worse, she is the Achilles’ heel of the Wistley Keep the Convoy Out!! campaign.’
Louise was stunned into complete silence for long minutes. ‘This is a nightmare,’ she eventually said.
‘It is!’ the Captain confirmed. ‘We shall be made a laughing stock. Here we are campaigning for total control of all travellers and their forced moving on, and here we have, in the heart of the village, half a property and a site owned and legally registered to a vagrant. We can’t even have her moved on. We can’t prosecute her for trespass. She owns her site. She has a legal right to rent her site out to others if she wishes. She could have a dozen vans on that orchard tomorrow and we could do nothing to stop her.’
Louise closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. ‘Nothing?’ she asked faintly.
Captain Frome leaned a little closer and his voice dropped low. ‘If I were you, I would go down to her van with a legally prepared document, quite watertight, and I would offer her a couple of thousand pounds to disappear and never come back.’
‘She’s very stubborn,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t imagine her disappearing. And I haven’t got a thousand pounds.’
‘Then you may have to be a little stubborn yourself,’ Captain Frome suggested. ‘No access to her property through your gate, for instance. No visitors allowed. No deliveries. No services. Don’t supply her with any water. Report her to the relevant Health authorities. Report her to Social Services. You have a friend who is a social worker, don’t you? Ask her to register the woman under the Mental Health Act as someone who should be restrained for her own safety. I think we can find ways of making her life here too uncomfortable to tolerate. We can probably get her locked up. There’s a section of the Mental Health Act we can call in. Sectioned,’ he said with relish. ‘We’ll get her sectioned.’
It sounded as if he was preparing to slice her into sample fillets. Louise said nothing. She was thinking about invoking the full force of the property-owning patriarchal law against one mischievous old lady.
‘I don’t ask for thanks,’ Captain Frome said.
‘Thank you very much,’ Louise said. ‘You have been incredible officious.’
‘Just doing my duty as a neighbour.’ He beamed at her. ‘I am after all the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee. Sir Henry Wilcox of Wistley House was the original chairman but there was a vote of no confidence in him at the last meeting and I took the chair.’
‘Did you?’
‘He had shown himself very casual in his response to the emergency. Very casual indeed. But it was a close-fought thing. The whole issue swung on one vote.’ He leaned forward and tapped his finger against his rosy nose. ‘Your vote, actually.’
‘Mine?’
‘You gave me your proxy vote, if you remember. It was your one vote which swung the decision in my favour. So I’m the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee, and chairman of the Keep the Convoy Out!! sub-committee.’ Captain Frome glanced at his watch. ‘Heigh ho! I had better go,’ he said. ‘Though it is rather that time of day.’
Louise said nothing. She had no idea that ‘that time of day’ indicated that it was noon and an appropriate time for her to offer Captain Frome a glass of dry sherry or, better still, a whisky and water. She merely rose to her feet and Captain Frome, an English gentleman, had no choice but to rise too.
‘I’ll leave these documents with you, shall I?’ he asked. ‘You’ll want to take them in to your lawyer. I suppose you could consider suing your aunt’s lawyer for incompetence. That could be a useful and fruitful avenue.’
Louise looked with distaste at the documents spread on the coffee table. It seemed to her that in two brief days she had lost her lover, her academic credibility, her job, and had now discovered that she did not own half of her home.
‘Don’t thank me,’ Captain Frome said again, raising his hat to her and striding energetically to his Rover. ‘The new neighbourhood watch committee does not seek thanks. Just support. Just support.’
Louise nodded dully. ‘Thank you,’ she said like an obedient child and stood respectfully in the doorway until he had gone.
Rose appeared from behind the oak tree that grew before the front door.
‘What are you doing?’ Louise asked abruptly.
‘Listening at the door,’ Rose said helpfully. ‘So the party’s still on, is it?’
‘What did you hear?’
‘All of it,’ Rose said reasonably. She felt rather affronted at the implication that she might have been listening but failed to do a thorough job. ‘All of it, of course.’
‘About the cottage?’
‘Well, I knew that already.’
‘You knew that you own the orchard?’
‘I told him so when he came and tried to turn me off. I accused him of trespass on my land. It shut him up good and proper. That’s the trouble with these little tinpot colonels. They hate to see a woman win.’
‘You knew that the conveyancing was never done on the second cottage?’
‘And that I own half the house? Yes, I knew that. I’ve always known that.’
Louise sagged against the doorpost. ‘I think we had better go to a lawyer and get this straightened out,’ she said wearily.
‘No real need,’ Rose replied. ‘I only ever stay here in May. I never wanted the house. And anyway, I’ll be dead soon.’
‘Oh yes,’ Louise said bitterly. ‘So you keep saying whenever it’s convenient. But I suppose you think you can come here every May, forever. And even if you do die, then who is going to inherit and come rolling up the drive next May? Who are you going to leave it to that I have to put up with for the rest of my life?’
Rose lo
oked at Louise with a patient smile. ‘Think. You have a little think. You should have worked it out by now, clever girl like you. Who d’you think will inherit the west half of your house? The sitting room, the stairs,’ she paused for greater emphasis, ‘the bedroom?’
‘No,’ Louise said weakly. ‘I can’t believe that you mean …’
‘Bonny Andrew,’ Rose said lovingly. ‘Andrew Miles. You and he will own this house together. It’s as if it was meant to be.’
That afternoon Louise drove into university at speed, parked a long way from her usual place and scuttled into the department with her head down in the hopes of being unseen. Cravenly, she waited outside the department office until she heard the telephone ring and the secretary become involved in a personal and unauthorised gossip. Only then did she open the door a crack and slide into the room. Susan, the secretary, signalled wildly at Louise with her plucked eyebrows. She put a well-manicured hand over the telephone. ‘Professor Sinclair wants to see you,’ she hissed in a stage whisper. ‘Urgently and at once!’
Louise nodded, snatched up her post and got herself out of the room before Susan could free herself from the conversation. In the corridor she found she was trembling with a heady mixture of nerves, and elation at having escaped Professor Sinclair, and with a fighting chance of evading Toby.
She had a jiffy bag containing, no doubt, Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990, and an envelope from Sarah containing her rejected Lawrence essay. She had a folder enclosing a dozen student essays, and half a dozen unconvincing excuses. There was also an official-looking envelope marked with the university’s crest, and two plain envelopes with Toby’s handwriting on them.
Louise pinned a notice on the department noticeboard. It read: ‘Dr Louise Case has to cancel all meetings for the next two days. Normal classes will resume on Monday. Students working on the Feminist in Literature option are to read and compare Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, and Money, by Martin Amis, by Thursday of next week.’
‘That should keep them quiet,’ she thought vindictively and pushed in the drawing pin with force.
Like a ghost she melted from the corridor and slipped down the stairs. Turning her head away from Toby’s office window she scuttled back to her car, flung her booty into the back seat and started the engine. Feeling secure at last she reached behind and pulled out Toby’s two envelopes. The first she opened contained a short note dated Wednesday morning:
This is ridiculous. The explanation of my appearance is perfectly simple. I was modelling the gown for Rose to take up the hem. She will confirm this. If you cling to any other belief you are being paranoid and I suggest you examine your own subconscious motivation. I demand that you behave like a rational woman. Toby.
The second envelope had a longer letter.
You came into university today (Wednesday) and did not see me, nor have you replied to my note of this morning, nor have you returned my telephone calls. I left two messages on your ansaphone. Are you ill?
If you are still upset because of that ridiculous scene at your cottage on Tuesday night I can only repeat my assurance that you have misunderstood what was taking place. Really, Louise, we have been intimate for years. Don’t you think that if any of your suspicions were well-founded that you – with your sensitivity and perception – would have noticed something before? Or that Miriam would have complained?
I will not address this matter again. It is too ridiculous. Please telephone me at once and we can meet and get back to normal. I want you to know that this brief interruption to our relationship has made things much clearer for me. Miriam and I are slowly growing apart. I think you know what this means to you and me. I know what you have always planned and wanted – I think the time is now coming for us to be together. Toby.
Louise scrunched both letters into a ball and tossed it on the floor. She let in the clutch and drove carefully away. She felt as if she had come to an important turning point in her life. On the one hand was Toby, hers for the claiming at last. But on the other hand there was the dreadful inexpungible memory of him, half-naked in red chiffon with his white ankles peeping out below chiffon ruffles, and his bony knee sticking through a provocative beribboned front opening.
‘Oh God, no,’ Louise said in unassumed disgust. ‘No. It’s not possible.’
She drove without seeing the road, without seeing the hedges starry with speedwell, illuminated by shining clumps of ox-eye daisies. Under the hedges were buttery yellow clusters of late primroses, in the woods on either side of the road were deep lush pools of rotting bluebells. As Louise drove slowly up the lane to her cottage ecstatic birdsong ringed the little car as thrush, blackbird, robin and coaltit swore their desire in rippling oaths into the warm blue air. When Louise parked the car and went wearily to the front door, clutching her letters, she could smell pollen and nectar and the perfume of flowers laying themselves out to please passing bees. Everything on the common was green and fertile and ready for summer. Bracken and fern were unfolding their tiny tentacles, reaching for the sunshine. The trees were as wetly green as lettuce. The cottage was besieged by rhododendron, their dark shiny leaves a nearblack foil to the prodigal trumpets of purple and white flowers. The wild golden azalea extending tongues of saffron perfumed the air with a heady intoxicating scent.
Louise, blinded with more than her usual myopia, saw nothing and heard nothing, smelled nothing and felt nothing. She fitted her key in the lock and walked into her cold tidy house. She dropped the letters on the kitchen table and opened the one marked with the university crest. It was from Maurice Sinclair expressing his sorrow that the department would be unable to renew her post after the end of the summer term.
She nodded without surprise and opened the jiffy bag. The book Separatism – the way forward. How a community of twenty women lived without men, 1988–1990 no longer struck her as a bold and adventurous experiment in social engineering, but as a curious waste of the time and energy of good women who could have been doing something more interesting. She looked closely at the photograph on the cover. Twenty blank faces under short unflattering haircuts looked back at her. They did indeed look determined, right-thinking, and forceful. They did not look as if they were having a whole lot of fun. Louise sank into the kitchen chair. She was afraid she had lost her lover, her job, and her Cause.
Realising she had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch, Louise went wearily to the little freezer, depressed by lack of food but not hungry. It was packed with small square boxes of frozen meals which rejoiced in the fact that the portions inside were so small and so inadequate in calories that Louise could have eaten the entire contents of the freezer and gained no more than a quarter of a pound in weight. Each meal, priced ounce per ounce far beyond the finest fillet steak, came in a small frozen bag fitted neatly inside its box, which sported a picture of lush and exotic sauce and tasty meat on the front. Louise was not fooled. She had lived off these miserable simulacra before. She knew there was nothing more to them than a little knitted soya thread and an equal amount of chemical additives. She selected one at random, freed it from its box, stabbed it with efficient malice, microwaved it and then decanted it on to a cold plate. She opened a bottle of wine without relish and placed it, and a glass, on her tray. She went to the larder and took out a giant emergency-size block of fruit and nut chocolate. Thus armoured against desolation, she carried the whole tray up the stairs to her lonely bedroom and put herself to bed with a Virginia Woolf novel similarly brilliant on technique but short on calories.
Drunk with wine and gorged with chocolate by half past nine, Louise lay back against her pillows and fell into a sottish slumber. She was still drunk at eleven when she was awakened by the roar of Andrew Miles’s unsuppressed Land-Rover charging the hill. Once again Andrew, fuelled by Theakston’s Old Peculier and now also by passion, misjudged the corner, pulled the wheel around too late, and slid helplessly and happily on his bald tyres towards the hurdle which
blocked the gap in the broken fence around the orchard. Once again, through shards of breaking wood his Land-Rover came to rest amid the trees which grew before his darling’s cottage.
Louise leaped from her bed in her frumpish cotton pyjamas, smeared with chocolate and groggy with alcohol, and looked out from her bedroom window. Andrew Miles was slumped in the attitude of a man knocked unconscious by his windscreen, and impaled on his steering wheel thrust like a spear between his ribs.
Louise took it all in, in a single heart-stopping moment, and screamed his name. She fled downstairs, tore open the front door, crying ‘Andrew! Oh! Andrew!’ She ran on her bare feet, regardless of the sharp gravel, to the Land-Rover just as Andrew, miraculously recovering from his injuries, opened the driver’s door with the familiar resounding creak and received her into his open arms.
Louise had not had a man who stayed the whole night in her bed ever before. In her undergraduate days she and her partners had separated, driven apart by the discomfort of the study bedrooms at the university. Toby always went home to the marital bed even if Miriam was away for the night. He said he could not sleep elsewhere, and that in any case in this way they preserved a mystery and an erotic strangeness to each other. Her occasional other lovers she always dismissed. She might have sex with other men but there was only ever one man she wanted to wake beside. She had thus never slept with a man who, after a prolonged session of lovemaking which was both tender, experimental and, in the end, ravenously animal, curled himself around her like a fat dormouse on an ear of corn and fell deeply asleep, breathing beer fumes warmly into her ear.
Any attempt to disengage herself did nothing but make him tighten his grip. When Louise put a hand gently on his chest and whispered, ‘Andrew, could you move over a bit?’ he at once obligingly wriggled closer and held her tighter still. At one in the morning, suffering from both insomnia and claustrophobia, Louise shook him gently and said, ‘Andrew, I can’t sleep.’
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