What Men Say Read online

  What Men Say

  Joan Smith

  Nunc iam nulla viro iuranti femina credat,

  nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles.

  CATULLUS 64

  That’s it—from now on no woman should listen to a man who

  claims he loves her.

  In fact, if she’s got any sense, she won’t believe a word he says.

  CATULLUS 64

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Postscript

  1

  “They’re All Burnt.” The Boy Pulled A gargoyle face and pushed away the paper plate Loretta was holding out to him.

  “They’re not burnt, it’s just that the grill’s very hot—it makes black lines when you put them on. Look, they’re all like that.” She pointed to the neat row of hamburgers, blotting-paper pink and curling at the edges, cooking on the grill. “Haven’t you been to a barbecue before?”

  The boy, a sandy-haired child of nine or ten in a garish Ninja-turtle T-shirt, ignored the question. “They’re not like that at McDonald’s.”

  “Aren’t they?” Loretta had been to McDonald’s once in her life and felt in no position to argue. Dumping the rejected plate on the table in front of her, she used her forearm to push her hair out of her eyes and wished she had brought something to tie it back from her face. She hadn’t believed the previous evening’s weather forecast, with its confident prediction that heavy overnight showers would give way to bright sunshine, but this was one of those rare occasions when it was spot-on. She had long ago discarded her jacket but there was no escape from the stinging heat of the gas-fired barbecue and she could feel her dress beginning to cling between her shoulder blades. Loretta thought anxiously about how much it would cost to dry-clean, distrusting the “hand wash, cool iron” instruction on the reverse of the size-12 label. She should never have worn a new dress on such a muggy day, especially not this dark-blue silk which she had been able to afford only because it was on sale—and was that a grease stain she could see near the hem? She bunched up the cloth, scratched ineffectually at it and then realized that the surly boy had not moved away.

  “Changed your mind?” she asked hopefully, nudging the plate towards him. On closer inspection she saw that the burgers had acquired a penumbra of animal fat; Loretta was quite hungry herself, but it occurred to her that these shrivelled apologies for meat were enough to make anyone a vegetarian.

  The boy’s attention had wandered to a group of older children arguing over a frisbee further down the lawn. Loretta hoped he would go and join them but after a while he turned back, a wistful expression on his face. “You got anything else?”

  Loretta bit her lip, deducing from his avid glances at the frisbee players that he was clumsy at games, unpopular with other children, or both. “Why don’t you go over there,” she suggested in a friendly voice, “look, where Bridget’s standing, and someone’ll give you a bagel.”

  “What’s a bagel?” His voice was flat, uninterested.

  “It’s a sort of—it’s a kind of bread roll with a hole in the middle. You eat it with cheese and smoked salmon . . .” As she spoke, Loretta realized that this was an even less attractive offer to a ten-year-old than her stripy hamburgers. “Wait a minute. What about these?” She rummaged in a box under the table and came up with a packet of crisps.

  “They chilli?” He twisted his head sideways in an attempt to read.

  “Um—no. Salt and vinegar.” Loretta hadn’t known you could get chilli-flavored crisps.

  The boy twisted his face into another bizarre expression of rejection. “I only like Bovril and chilli.”

  “Bovril and chilli? Oh, I see. Let’s have a look.” Loretta knelt and took packets out of the box one by one. She was supposed to give out a packet of crisps with each plate of hamburgers but she had forgotten their existence until a moment ago. “Sorry, they’re all salt and vinegar. Go on—try them.”

  He shook his head emphatically and Loretta’s patience finally wore out. “Well—that’s it, then. I haven’t got anything else.”

  He thrust his hands in his pockets and slouched off, disappointment radiating from his hunched shoulders. Halfway across the lawn he dropped this act, veered off to chase the frisbee and was shouldered out of the way by a larger boy. Loretta sighed and wondered where his parents were.

  “Trouble?”

  She turned to see Stephen Kaplan, a politics lecturer she knew slightly, watching her with amusement. He was short, dark and intense, and they had become embroiled in a fierce argument over the resignation of Mrs. Thatcher, an event Loretta celebrated with an impromptu party at her house in Oxford, the last time they met. She was surprised to see him at Bridget and Sam’s house-warming party, not on political grounds but because she had the impression Bridget found him less amusing these days.

  “Just a bit of consumer resistance.” She tried to put the dinner-party argument, which had struck her as childish and embarrassing even when it was going on, out of her mind. “I can’t compete with McDonald’s, apparently. Or do I mean Burger King?”

  Stephen smiled and looked superior. “Anyone can see you don’t have kids. Burger King is—” He gestured downwards with his thumb. “McDonald’s, now . . . Rachel had her birthday party there last month. Ten over-excited kids, balloons, sticky drinks . . . prepubescents’ heaven. Can I get you a drink?”

  Loretta nodded gratefully at this unexpected offer and held out her empty plastic beaker. Stephen, she noticed, was drinking from a proper glass. “Something nonalcoholic. I think I’m starting to melt.”

  “Orange juice? Mineral water?”

  “Mineral water. Oh, and do you have any idea of the time? Someone’s supposed to take over from me at two o’clock.”

  He glanced at a watch equipped with sufficient hands and dials to time an Olympic race. “Ten to. I wondered if you were stuck with that thing all afternoon.” He nodded towards the barbecue. “Did you volunteer?”

  “Well, not exactly. Sam had a sort of rota . . .”

  Stephen looked smug. “He tried to sign me up for something but I promised Jane I’d keep an eye on the kids. I’ve been in Warsaw for ten days and she says it’s my turn.”

  Loretta had never met the Kaplan children, a boy and a girl, so she had no idea whether they were among the half-dozen youngsters on the lawn or inside the house. Stephen evidently wore his parental responsibilities lightly, beginning an anecdote about Lech Walesa and someone Loretta had never heard of—Wakowski or Wachowski, some name like that—as though he had the entire afternoon to himself. Loretta listened to him skeptically, recalling a dismissive remark by her most recent lover, a history lecturer, to the effect that Stephen’s Polish contacts were merely a bunch of Poujadists without political access or influence. Of course, Joe was inclined to sneer at anyone who might be construed as a potential rival, which was one of the reasons Loretta had ended their relationship, but his parents were Polish, he spoke the language fluently and his friendships with KOR intellectuals went back a decade.

  Stephen finished his story and waited for Loretta to laugh. She had not really been listening and managed only a thin smile, after which they lapsed into awkward silence.

  “Well—” Stephen looked at his absurd watch again, though it was only five minutes since she had asked the time. “I’d better see about this drink.”

  Loretta watched him set off for the house. Its unu
sual name, Thebes Farm, had prompted a nervous joke from Bridget when she first produced the estate agent’s details, something about the surprisingly short distance between Thebes and Jericho, the latter being the area of Oxford in which Loretta lived. Troy was only four or five miles up the road, Bridget added, referring to an imposing farmhouse of that name in Somerton; this bit of Oxfordshire was a veritable map of the ancient world. The geography lesson was intended, Loretta guessed, to cover up Bridget’s anxiety about her announcement that she was about to move to an isolated farmhouse half an hour’s drive from the city center, thus putting an end to their old habit of walking round to each other’s houses when the mood took them. Although her own first reaction was dismay, Loretta joined in the joke, such as it was, by adding to the list Nineveh Farm on the road from Oxford to Nuneham Courtenay.

  Bridget and Sam were so proud of their singular address that they had commissioned a local artist to provide a sketch of the house for their writing paper. The drawing was only slightly fanciful, showing a solid, double-fronted house with a barn standing at right angles to it; the artist had used her imagination on the barn, which was actually rather dilapidated and boobytrapped, when Loretta last looked inside, with rusting farm machinery of unknown provenance.

  The house itself had flagstone floors in all the downstairs rooms, and Loretta thought wistfully of the cool, shady interior. She was rather sick of hearing about the floors, which had been painstakingly lifted, cleaned and replaced by Bridget and Sam’s builders in an operation which, in terms of expense and effort, seemed to be on only a slightly smaller scale than the renovation of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Loretta had not seen the final result until an hour or so before the party, when Sam showed her into a drawing room straight out of The World of Interiors: smooth, dove-gray flags, brilliantly colored kelims, and two scroll-end sofas newly upholstered in deep-yellow velvet. Even if she had been invited to sit down, Loretta would have been reluctant to disturb their shiny tautness, but the occasion did not arise. Sam had given her a lightning tour of the ground floor before leading her into the kitchen and asking if she’d mind slicing and dressing a gargantuan quantity of boiled potatoes. Loretta wished now that she had given in to the temptation to nibble as she whizzed up mayonnaise in a state-of-the-art food processor, instead of assuming that there’d be plenty left when she escaped from the hamburgers.

  “Hello, how are you?” Loretta greeted Audrey Summers, Bridget’s former next-door neighbor in north Oxford, without enthusiasm. Loretta suspected that Audrey disapproved of her, a suggestion Bridget denied in such a half-hearted way as to convince her of its accuracy. She certainly didn’t want to be trapped into making polite conversation with her across the hamburger stall, and she was relieved when Audrey returned her greeting and kept going, cool and unapproachable in a Liberty-print skirt and jacket.

  “Jack! Jack—why don’t you bring a bottle?” A woman’s voice drifted up from the orchard at the bottom of the garden, vainly trying to attract the attention of a man striding towards the house with a tray of empty glasses. Loretta turned to look at her, watching as she smilingly acknowledged that Jack hadn’t heard and went back to breast-feeding a small baby. She had not seen the dark-haired woman before, nor any of the other adults forming a companionable group about her under the trees.

  The garden was, according to the estate agent, one of the “glories” of Thebes Farm. It was large, south-facing and triangular in shape, at its widest in front of the house where it was laid to lawn. Like the house, it was raised well above the level of the road and was further protected by a high wall. A narrow gate, reached by half a dozen deep stone steps, provided the sole access from the road so that anyone arriving by car had to turn off and drive round the back of the house into the old farmyard. Loretta’s hamburger stall—actually a scarred pine table covered with a thick paper cloth—had been set up parallel to the wall, just in front of a newly planted herbaceous border. Facing her, on the far side of the lawn, was the barn which featured so prettily on Bridget and Sam’s notepaper.

  The dark woman and her friends were at least twenty-five yards away and it was only when one of them turned in her direction that Loretta realized they were not all strangers after all. The woman in the green skirt or shorts was Janet Dunne, an art historian who lived in Park Town; Loretta had been placed next to her at Bridget’s final dinner party in Woodstock Road. A couple of weeks later she had seen Janet on “The Late Show,” taking part in a very solemn discussion on the work of a sculptor whose one-man show, consisting almost exclusively of nude male torsos, had been threatened with prosecution for obscenity. Janet’s attempt to lighten the proceedings with a joke—something about the penis not standing up well to such close scrutiny—had so infuriated another of the guests, a thuggish Glaswegian poet, that he leaped to his feet and hurled abuse at her in an increasingly impenetrable Scots accent. Janet’s spirited attempt to defend herself, on the grounds that the sculptures had more to do with their creator’s personal anxieties than art, had been drowned in the ensuing uproar and the item ended early. Loretta had begun writing a sympathetic note, including a variation on the old joke about the penis being only a phallic symbol, but the phone had rung or someone had come round—whatever the reason for the interruption, she had never sent it.

  She peered up and down the garden, hoping to spot Sam Becker and tell him she’d had enough of his hamburgers and wanted to circulate, but she could not see him. She guessed he was in the house, uncorking more bottles—people seemed to be drinking freely, perhaps because of the heat—or getting the puddings out of the big fridge she had observed in the kitchen. There was no sign of Bridget, either, even though she had been helping to dish out food the last time Loretta looked. She wondered, again, whether Bridget was all right; she had been upstairs when Loretta arrived that morning, taking no part in the party preparations and appearing only as the first guests drove into the yard so there was no chance of speaking to her alone. Loretta had been slightly miffed by this until Bridget stopped to greet her, lifting a pale, tired face which suggested the party was too much for her at this stage in her pregnancy. Either that, Loretta concluded, or she’d had a row with Sam.

  The latter thought came into her head not because of any evidence that Bridget and Sam were on bad terms—on the contrary, he had seemed solicitous and fond as the party began—but because Loretta was feeling uncomfortable about her own relations with Bridget. Their last meeting, over lunch at a wine bar in Little Clarendon Street a couple of weeks before, had been marred by a rare argument; the episode was so unusual, and so unsettling, that she had tried to explain it away as a side effect of Bridget’s condition. Bridget had arrived in an odd mood, joking with the waiter as she ordered mineral water instead of her usual glass of red wine and entertaining Loretta with a satirical account of the antenatal class she and Sam had recently attended, but she looked and sounded preoccupied. Loretta, still unsure of the new boundaries imposed by her friend’s marriage, was trying to think of a tactful way of asking what was wrong when the waiter returned with their main courses, fish cakes for Bridget and kedgeree for Loretta.

  Bridget cheered up at once, asking Loretta’s advice on names for the baby as she finished her first mouthful of food. “I mean, I don’t want to land her—him—with something that’s going to sound dated or embarrassing.” Bridget listed some of her own wilder inspirations, then pulled a face in answer to Loretta’s question about Sam’s preferences. “Howard, can you imagine it? Howard Becker—”

  “Becker? You mean—it’s going to have Sam’s name?” Loretta was too astonished to conceal her reaction.

  “Well, I don’t think those double-barrelled things really work . . .” Bridget hacked at her fish cake, avoiding Loretta’s eye.

  “Neither do I, but what’s wrong with Bennett?”

  “I haven’t been pressured into it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Bridget said crossly, making Loretta think she had. “It’s all very well t
heorizing, but when you’re actually faced with . . . If you must know, it means a lot to Sam.”

  This, from a woman who had been outraged by her younger sister’s decision to change her name when she got married the previous year, was more than Loretta could bear. “I’m sure it does. I’m sure it’s meant a lot to men throughout the ages, which is why—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Loretta, spare me the lecture. Can’t you see it’s personal?”

  “And that isn’t political, all of a sudden?”

  They glared at each other, unused to confrontation and uncertain how to deal with it. When the waiter removed their plates, Bridget refused his offer of pudding and announced she had to dash, thrusting a ten-pound note into Loretta’s hand to cover her share of the bill. They had spoken on the phone since, feeling their way back towards the old, easy companionship, but the sense of constraint had not entirely disappeared. Bridget’s suggestion that Loretta arrive early at the party had raised her hopes of a quiet talk, but in the event she had spent the time in the kitchen, listening to Sam’s enthusiastic description of his plans for the top floor of the house.

  “The best woman.”

  “Sorry?” Loretta looked up in surprise, realizing too late that someone, a man who looked faintly familiar, was talking to her.

  “We met at the wedding—you were the best woman. You made a great speech.”

  “I’m glad you liked it. It didn’t go down too well with Bridget’s parents.”

  “Older people often are traditional. You had a nice touch, livened the party up no end. That place they got married—it was the pits.”

  Loretta smiled. The Oxford register office was a first-floor room in the Westgate Center, a dreary indoor shopping arcade, near a branch of C & A. It had slightly more charm, but not much, than a doctor’s waiting room, and the guests hurried out after the ceremony to find themselves confronted with the frankly inquisitive stares of half a dozen middle-aged shoppers who had stopped to see the bride. Bridget, taking advantage of the unseasonally warm spring weather in a halter-neck dress and Loretta’s gold Italian sandals, was an obvious disappointment and they soon drifted away. Her parents, whose pleas for a church wedding, a Pronuptia dress and bridesmaids in pastel polyester had been swept aside, were left to pose unhappily for photographs with their slightly pregnant daughter, her new American husband and Loretta. They were even denied the consolation of meeting Sam’s mother, who lived in Boston and was unable to come to England at such short notice. Instead, she sent flowers and a conventionally worded telemessage.