What Men Say Page 11

  “Glad you liked it. Is it OK with you—I wanted to ask if she could stay on here a while? Just till the cops finish up at the house.”

  She looked at him in surprise, having assumed that Bridget would be going home today. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Thanks, Loretta.” He looked at his watch again, sounding relieved. “Will you excuse me? I’m going to give her another call, I have to leave in five minutes.”

  He went to the door and Loretta cleared her throat: “Sam?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Did Bridget . . . Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Hey, what is it?” He came back into the room.

  “Nothing. This solicitor you mentioned. There’s no chance of seeing him today?”

  “He’s in court. I checked.” He reached out and moved the freesias a fraction to one side, standing back to study the effect. “Is that all?”

  “Mmm. I’m just . . . you know.”

  He shook his head. “Tell me.”

  “Anxious. All these visits from the police. I’m probably worrying too much.”

  To her surprise, he studied her face for a moment, then sat down. “Loretta, I’m sorry—this is really getting to you, isn’t it? I’ve been so concerned about Bridget I didn’t think . . . Listen, hon, everything’s going to be all right I promise.”

  She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy, and said quickly: “Then why did they come round twice yesterday? I don’t like their attitude.”

  He laughed. “You should meet some of the cops we have back home. You ever hear of a guy called Darryl Gates? They’re just pissed because they didn’t get to her for so long, that’s what the lawyer told me on the phone. They reckon to collect most of their evidence in the first forty-eight hours, after that it starts getting”—he narrowed his eyes and moved his hand gently from side to side—“you know, dicey.” He leaned across and patted her arm. “Don’t worry. Listen, I really have to find out what’s happened to Bridget—I have a meeting at nine.”

  “Life goes on?”

  “Sure it does.” He stood up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry for the woman, but it’s not like she’s a relative or anything. Hey, you didn’t have your croissant.” He picked up the Blanc bag and held it out to her. “Go on, eat. You need your strength.”

  She reached inside, fingers closing on a croissant, and had lifted it to her lips before she smelled the almond paste. She was about to get up and exchange it for a plain one when it occurred to her that her blood sugar was probably low, and she bit into it anyway. The sweet, sticky pastry dissolved on her tongue, her teeth crunched on slivers of almonds, and she began to eat greedily, devouring the whole thing in half a dozen large bites and licking her fingers enthusiastically afterwards. She heard voices on the floor above and got up to make a pot of Earl Grey tea, expecting Bridget and Sam to appear in the kitchen at any moment, but they remained upstairs, conducting an animated discussion in the hall. Loretta warmed the pot, poured boiling water onto the loose tea and carried it to the table, glancing at the home-news pages of the paper while she allowed it to brew for a couple of minutes. She was just pouring an experimental inch into her cup, gazing in approval at the transparent golden liquid, when the cat flap clattered and Bertie trotted into the kitchen. He dropped a small, mangled corpse at her feet and sat down, stretching his front legs and jerking his head round in obedience to a sudden urge to wash his left flank. Then, satisfied that his toilet arrangements were complete, he gazed up at her adoringly and let out a soft yowl.

  Loretta screwed up her nose, pushed back her chair and reached for the roll of kitchen paper. She advanced on the cat stealthily, her hands protected by makeshift paper bandages, and was about to snatch his prey from under his nose when Bridget sauntered into the kitchen.

  “Morning, Loretta.”

  The cat seized the corpse in his mouth and bolted. Loretta groaned, knowing he would probably sneak back later and hide it under a sofa or in a dusty corner of her study. “Honestly, Bridget,” she complained, “I’d nearly got it.”

  “Never mind, he’s taken it into the garden. Best place for it.”

  “He’ll bring it back. Half the time I don’t know where he’s put them till they start to smell.”

  “Oh, well.” Bridget shrugged. With a sudden access of delicacy, she lifted her nightclothes and skirted the minute bloodstains on the floor, dropped into a chair and poured herself a glass of orange juice.

  “Mmm, this is what I call breakfast,” she said, peering into the Blanc bag and taking out a croissant. Loretta raised her eyebrows, crumpled the unused kitchen paper from her hands into a thick wad and knelt to wipe the floor.

  “What, will these tiny hands ne’er be clean?” Bridget intoned for no obvious reason, observing her with interest. “You look like Lady Macbeth in one of those minimalist modern productions. You know, Katherine Hamnett T-shirts and the witches with mobile phones.”

  “No,” said Loretta, thinking she would have read about such a production if it really existed, “I don’t.” She got up and stuffed the soiled paper into the bin. “You’re very cheerful this morning.”

  “Mmm,” Bridget said again, glancing down at her croissant with a secretive smile on her lips. She offered no explanation for her late appearance, but finished her croissant with an abstracted air and lifted a freesia stem to her nose. “Sam doesn’t do things by half, does he? Is there any coffee?”

  Loretta, who had just filled her cup with tea and discovered it was stewed, reached for the cafetiere and dumped it next to Bridget’s plate. “Has Sam gone?”

  Bridget didn’t answer at once, staring instead at the photograph of her husband on page two of the Guardian. “God, what a terrible picture of Sam.” She groped for the coffee with her free hand, pouring it carelessly into her cup and allowing it to drip onto the tablecloth. “Yes, he had a meeting. Oh, they’ve released her name at last.” She shook her head, confirming it meant nothing to her, and continued reading. When she had finished she tasted her coffee and immediately pulled a face. “Ugh, it’s lukewarm. Is that tea you’re making?”

  Loretta nodded and Bridget got up, rinsed her cup out and returned to the table. She took up the paper again and flicked through it, folding it open at the letters page. “Oh, good, someone’s written in about that piece last week. Did you see it, Loretta? Arguing against tax relief for childcare? Funny piece for the Guardian to have.”

  “No,” said Loretta as the kettle boiled and she filled the teapot for a second time. She reached across and switched on the radio, thinking she might catch the nine-o’clock news on Radio Four, but the bulletin had just finished and the announcer was introducing the next program. She turned the dial irritably, searching for Radio Three but unable to remember its frequency. Her ghetto blaster was in a repair shop in Walton Street and the old wireless she had brought down from the attic was a monument to the early days of radio, marking obsolete stations like Hilversum and Daventry.

  “Hang on,” Bridget protested as a robotic bass line blasted the kitchen and was quickly displaced by someone speaking French. “That was Madonna.”

  “Was it?” Loretta continued her search, pausing over a few bars of country music.

  “God, Loretta, don’t be so stuffy. Madonna’s great, she’s so upfront about her sexuality—”

  “She’s an exhibitionist, and she can’t sing.”

  “What’s wrong with being an exhibitionist? At least she’s in control, she knows exactly what she’s doing.”

  “In control?” Loretta turned to stare at her. “Only of turning herself into a commodity, which is what women have had to do for centuries. It’s true she’s doing a better job of it than Marilyn Monroe, but do you really think that’s progress?”

  Bridget dropped her gaze and turned a page of the paper. “If someone chooses to make herself an object—”

  “What?” Loretta demanded, turning the radio down. “I can’t hear you.”

  �
��All I was saying,” Bridget said, still in a low voice, “is that power relations aren’t that simple. I mean, what you’re overlooking is that a woman who chooses to put herself in a—in a certain type of role is actually making a powerful choice—”

  “Blimey,” said Loretta, “what have you been reading? The Marquis de Sade?”

  “No.” Bridget noisily folded the paper. “Forget it.”

  “All right.” Wondering if she had missed something, Loretta turned the dial back until she heard the familiar breathy voice. “There you are,” she said, “you can listen to Madonna and I’ll have my tea in the bath. I was going to have one anyway.”

  Bridget put down the paper and said rather aggressively: “What is wrong with you this morning? You’re not still cross about . . . you know. Yesterday?”

  “No,” said Loretta, not wanting to continue the argument. She poured tea into her cup and held her hand out for Bridget’s. “There’s milk in the fridge if you want it.”

  “Loretta—”

  “I’m tired, that’s all, and I don’t want to listen to Madonna. Is that strong enough for you?”

  “Mmm, fine.” Bridget watched her, visibly weighing up the pros and cons of saying more. She got up and went to the fridge, taking a bottle of milk from the door and adding a fraction to her tea. “Actually, Loretta,” she began in a different tone, pressing the foil top back in place, “there’s something I wanted to ask you. Could you do me a favor and run me over to the house later this morning? I really need my car—I had to wait twenty-five minutes for a taxi back from the John Radcliffe yesterday. It won’t take long, promise.”

  “This morning?”

  “Well, this afternoon if you’re busy.”

  “No, let’s get it over.” It sounded much more ungracious than she intended and Loretta added: “Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . Is there any washing you’d like me to do? I’m going to put one on this morning.”

  “Yes, please,” Bridget said hurriedly. “I haven’t got much, but it’ll save me going home with a bag of dirty washing.”

  “OK, put it in the machine—you know where it is.” She picked up her cup. “Shall we say—what? About half ten?”

  “Perfect. Thanks, Loretta.”

  “Hello, Bertie. Back again?” The cat had reappeared, minus dead rodent, and was rubbing himself against her legs. He followed her out of the room, overtaking her on the stairs and lying in wait to ambush her feet as she turned the corner.

  “Careful,” she said, trying not to spill her tea, and he bounded away into her study. She saw that the post was lying in an untidy heap by the front door and went to pick it up, her spirits sinking as she recognized two bills: her Visa statement and a renewal notice for her car insurance. She glanced briefly at a postcard from her sister Jenny, on holiday in Normandy with her family, and a couple of letters readdressed to her by the English-department secretary in London. Neither of them looked interesting and she put them on the hall table with the bills, turning over the blue air-mail envelope which had been at the bottom of the pile and raising her eyebrows when she recognized John Tracey’s small, obsessively neat handwriting. She slid her finger under the flap and started to ease it open, then changed her mind and carried the letter and her un-drunk tea upstairs to the bathroom. Sam’s toilet bag, she noticed as she closed the door, was lined up neatly on the floor next to Bridget’s, his damp shaving brush sticking out at one end. It seemed that he, too, proposed to stay at least one more night; Loretta sighed as she turned on the taps and wondered when she would have the house to herself again. She poured a generous quantity of oil into the bath, inhaling the steamy jasmine scent which immediately rose from the water, and reached behind her for the loo seat, lowering herself onto it as she tore open the blue envelope and began to read.

  “You’ll never guess who I heard from this morning,” Loretta remarked an hour later as she waited to turn left into Woodstock Road. “John Tracey—I got a letter.” The traffic was light and she pulled out, stopping rather abruptly for a couple of teenagers and a dog at a pelican crossing.

  “What’s he want?”

  Loretta glanced at Bridget and laughed. “God, you’re suspicious. Actually, to judge by the way his writing gets bigger towards the end, he may have been pissed when he wrote it. It’s awfully rambling—there’s a long bit about whether the car’s all right and whether I’m having it serviced regularly. I mean, you’d think he’d just take the money and forget it.” Tracey had persuaded Loretta to buy his three-year-old Golf, which he had owned from new, when her old Panda finally became too expensive to repair. “Then he goes on about the hotel he’s staying in, something about the maid not changing his towels often enough and room service refusing to bring him a sandwich after ten o’clock.”

  “Typical. And you’re supposed to be interested in his servant problems?”

  “I said it was rambling. Anyway, the point seems to be—it’s more of a hint than so many words, but I think he’d like us to get back together.”

  “He’s not pissed, he’s bonkers. What about that Greek girl he was going to marry? Is he into polygamy now, or what?”

  “I gather that never came to anything. He came back to England on his own and—well, I didn’t like to ask. With us being divorced, I mean.”

  “It’s the male menopause, that’s what it is. Why’d he write to you, anyway? Couldn’t he ring you up?”

  “The letter’s postmarked Bucharest. He’s been traveling all over Eastern Europe—didn’t I tell you he’s won a prize? He sounded, um, lonely.”

  Bridget squirmed in the passenger seat. “Christ, whoever designed this seat belt wasn’t pregnant. Either you have it down here”—she patted her lap—“and it keeps riding up, or it’s round your neck strangling you. Listen, I’ve got a proposal for you as well—much more interesting than going back to that boring old hack.”

  “Bridget.” Loretta slowed the car and joined the queue for the roundabout at the top of Woodstock Road, wishing she hadn’t mentioned the letter. “Anyway,” she said lightly, “you’re already married.”

  “That’s better. You know I’m going on maternity leave at the end of September? I thought you might like to stand in for me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, why not? Wouldn’t the money come in handy? This business of having lodgers, you wouldn’t be doing it unless you needed the cash.”

  “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it. Anyway, I can’t possibly take on another job—I’m in London two days a week for a start. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  “I’ve never . . . I’m not an Oxbridge sort of person.”

  “Loretta!”

  “Well, it’s true. I did my first degree at Sussex, if you remember, and then my doctorate at Royal Holloway.”

  “I know—Egham. Very suburban.”

  “There you are, that’s just what I mean. I absolutely wouldn’t fit in.”

  “You might at least listen to what it involves.”

  Loretta swerved as the driver of a car on her left cut in front of her in his haste to get off the roundabout. “God, how much road do you want?” she called after his retreating back, then said without enthusiasm: “All right, what does it involve?”

  “Two sets of lectures, basically. I know how you feel about Clarissa, so you can forget that, I’m sure I can talk Andrew Michell into taking it on. And I’ve switched Emily Dickinson to the spring term, which leaves the Brontës and Gothic.”

  “The Brontës and . . . the Gothic influence on Wuthering Heights is obvious, Tales of Hoffman and so on, but I don’t see—”

  “Oh, Loretta, don’t be so literal. The Brontës, full stop. Gothic, full stop. Two different courses. You could teach the Brontës standing on your head. I read a bit of your chapter on Shirley when you left your laptop switched on the other day. It’s terribly good.”

  “Thanks, but I really don’t think—”

  “We want the Kidlington road here.” She sat back i
n her seat, still trying to find a comfortable position, as Loretta negotiated another roundabout. “OK, let’s start again. There is something wrong with you this morning.”

  “With me?”

  Bridget turned and made an exaggerated survey of the back seat. “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the car. You are upset about yesterday, aren’t you?”

  “No . . .”

  “If you must know, I rang that inspector woman this morning, while you were having a bath, and told her I’d lost the bloody thing—the diary. So you’re off the hook.”

  “What did she say?”

  “What could she say? She was a bit sniffy about it but it’s not a criminal offense, losing your diary. Don’t start worrying about that. Now—tell me again why you can’t teach Gothic?”

  Loretta drove along the main road into Kidlington, glancing to her left in search of one of the few landmarks she knew, a vet’s surgery where she occasionally took Bertie. “I don’t know much about it, that’s all. I’ve read Frankenstein, of course, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, but not for a long time . . . I’d have to do a huge amount of reading.”

  Bridget grinned. “I could let you see my paper for Praeternatura” she offered. “My ground-breaking exegesis of the role of sexual anxiety in the development of English Gothic.”

  “Your what?”

  “Sounds good, doesn’t it? They made me put that because they said the original title was too jokey.”

  “What was it?”

  “Some Enchanted Evening. It’s all about that night at the Villa Diodati when Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein. Remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Course you do, it’s all in the Preface. So there they all are: Byron, Shelley, Claire Clairmont—who, incidentally, is the real heroine of that bunch—Mary Shelley, Polidori.”

  “So that’s why you were looking him up in the Bodleian.”