Perfectly Correct Read Online Free PDF

dog.’
    Miriam glanced at her. The linked topics of madness and women were as taboo as the Unipart calendar. ‘Do you mean she is ill?’ she asked rather stiffly. ‘Has she been released for care in the community? Is she alone and unsupported?’
    ‘I didn’t mean mad, I meant independent.’ Louise retreated rapidly. ‘She wears something like fancy dress. She seems to be alone. And I can’t help but dislike the fact that she seems to know the neighbourhood and she has parked on my land without permission. There are plenty of other places she could go.’
    ‘If she’s not doing any damage …’
    ‘She’s invading my personal space.’
    Miriam shot her a quick mocking smile. ‘I didn’t know your personal space went as far as several acres.’
    Louise felt herself smiling guiltily in reply. ‘Well, you wouldn’t like it if it was your front garden,’ she said.
    Miriam sighed. ‘It virtually is. The phone never stops ringing. I seem to be out every night at one meeting or another. If they all came and lived in a caravan in my garden it would be easier to manage.’
    They turned in the gate of the tall terraced house. Miriam glanced up at the illuminated windows of the top flat. ‘Oh, Hugh’s in,’ she said. ‘He might eat with us.’
    She opened the front door. A thin watery smell of cooking pulses greeted them. ‘Lentils again,’ Miriam remarked without pleasure. ‘Toby has bought a New Age cookbook. We haven’t had meat for weeks.’
    Louise dumped Miriam’s box files on the hall table and went through to the kitchen. Toby was stirring orange porridge in a casserole dish. Louise put her arms around him from behind and hugged him, resting her cheek against the smooth blade of his shoulder.
    ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘It smells wonderful.’
    Toby did not disengage himself as Miriam came into the kitchen. He smiled at her. ‘Hello, darling, three phone messages for you.’
    Miriam nodded and went out to the telephone in the hall. Toby heard her pick up the phone and dial a number. Only then did he turn to Louise and kiss her deeply on the mouth. While his left hand stirred the lentils his right hand smoothed down from her neck across her breast and down to her buttock.
    ‘Lovely,’ Toby said. With Miriam and Louise under his roof again he felt wealthy as a polygamous sheikh.
    Hugh was not invited to join them for dinner. Toby said he had not made enough. Hugh stayed upstairs, eating baked beans with a spoon from the saucepan, tantalised by the smell of hot food and by the sound of popping corks and laughter. Hugh was Miriam’s choice of lodger. She and Louise had together decided that another woman would not be suitable. Toby’s faint, unexpressed hope, that a second woman lodger might invite him into her flat and into her bed in the morning and at weekends when Miriam was working, was disappointed before he had even acknowledged it to himself.
    Hugh was researching into marine life and kept strict office hours at his studies. On Friday and Saturday nights he would go out to a modern jazz club with friends from work and get seriously but quietly drunk. Toby in his heart rather envied these bullish excursions. Toby had no friends. Colleagues at the university feared and envied the speedy progress of his career. Women tended to pass through his life, not stay. The Men’s Consciousness group which he led on Thursday nights was an area of conscientious work rather than spontaneous pleasure. Too many of the men had sexual problems, too many of them would weep over their relationship with their father. Toby would facilitate their tears and their worries over the size of their genitals but he could not grieve with them.
    He knew that Men’s Consciousness groups were a pale shadow of the real thing. In this area the women had the edge. Female consciousness had the pulse of an authentic revolutionary movement. Women had so much more tosay. They were angry with their mothers, with their