Perfectly Correct Read Free Page B

Perhaps your gypsy will be gone in the morning.’
    It was not unusual for Louise to stay in Toby and Miriam’s spare bedroom. Meetings often went on late or, enjoying their company, she drank more wine than was safe if she were to drive home. A new tenant now lived in their studio flat which had been Louise’s home for six years. But she still felt a sense of ownership and comfort in the house. Although Louise and Toby never planned intercourse – they prided themselves on being spontaneous rather than calculating adulterers – Miriam always woke at seven and left the house at eight to be at her desk at eight thirty when the first bruised refugees from the night would start arriving. Toby and Louise never had to be at the university until ten. There was always time to make love, have a shower and eat a leisurely breakfast.
    ‘I might stay,’ Louise said unhelpfully.
    One of the reasons behind her move to the country and a house of her own was a feeling that Toby’s sexual convenience was too well served by an attractive wife in his bed, and an attractive mistress in his upstairs flat. The arrangement had been of Louise’s own making – she had found them the house to buy and then suggested that she rent their studio flat – but after the illicit delight of the early months, she wondered if the chief beneficiary was Toby. His occasional affairs at the university, so prone to heartbreak and disaster, ceased. He no longer had to invent plausible late-night meetings to satisfy Miriam’s polite inquiries.He was no longer exposed to the risk of gossip among the undergraduates.
    But his affair with Louise did not cramp his sexual style. If he was attracted to a woman at a conference they would sleep together, and he would tell Louise openly and frankly that he had done so. There was no reason for them to be monogamous lovers. It was only Louise who found that no-one pleased her as Toby did and that other encounters left her weepy and depressed. It was Louise, not Miriam, who dreaded Toby’s weekend conferences on ‘Vandalism and the Inner Cities’ or ‘Dependency Culture’. Miriam had the security of a contractual, property-sharing marriage. Louise sometimes feared that she was peripheral.
    Even worse for Louise was that the chief beneficiaries of her arrangement were both Toby and Miriam. Louise did more than her share of housekeeping. She cooked meals for the three of them, she stayed at home to greet plumbers and electricians when Miriam had to be at work. When the married couple took their long summer holiday cycling in France, Louise maintained the house in their absence. Miriam’s outpouring of energy and care to the poor, the dispossessed and the victims of sexual violence left a vacuum in her marriage which would inevitably have been filled by another woman. Any woman other than her best friend would have tried to break up the marriage. But Louise, loving Miriam and desiring Toby, was the only woman in the world who would satisfy Toby’s errant sexuality without threatening Miriam’s position.
    And Miriam, sexually satisfied and overworked, trusted her husband and her best friend to be as honourable and as straightforward as herself.
    At first Louise had thought herself lucky. Her luxuriously frequent sex with Toby was unshadowed by guilt and didnot exclude other possible partners. Her constant and long affection for Miriam deepened and grew as the three settled comfortably into their house together. But slowly Louise began to resent Miriam’s commitment to her causes and her absent-mindedness at home. Louise started to fear that at an unconscious level Miriam was glad to have Toby sexually served without threat to her marriage. This put an entirely different complexion on a love-affair which had been gloriously secret. If it were not clandestine, then it was not a hidden betrayal of Miriam but an open exploitation of Louise – and she hated the thought of that.
    Then Louise’s aunt died, she inherited