Full Stop Read online

  ‘She’s fine.’ Loretta glanced at the dog, puzzling over why Toni was using a payphone.

  ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Of course. Actually, I’ve just left a message for you with Jay’s parents. On their answering-machine. What’s all this stuff about requests for prayers?’

  Toni said impatiently: ‘He freelances.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He freelances,’ Toni yelled, as though Loretta hadn’t heard her the first time. ‘People call him from all over the States. Loretta, I need most of these quarters to call my gyno — I left my address book behind and I need you to look up her number for me.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My gynaecologist. It should be in my desk drawer, the second one down. A little red book. Don’t be too long or my money’11 run out.’

  ‘Give me the number you’re on and I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Excuse me? Sorry, Loretta, I don’t think this phone takes incoming calls. Can you go get it?’

  She found the book easily and returned to the phone.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Rosenstein. Dr Hester Rosenstein.’

  Loretta read out the number. ‘Toni, before you go.’ She hesitated, not sure what to say, and in the end asked baldly: ‘Do you know anyone called Michael?’

  ‘Michael? Sure. Why? Did someone leave a message?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘Didn’t he give his last name? It’s most likely Michael Koganovich, we’ve been developing a new course together, he said he’d call before he went off to Rome for the summer. Have you read his work on Derrida? He has a very interesting perspective on — shit, I don’t have many of these things left and I have to call Dr Rosenstein.’

  Loretta realised this was not the time to discuss obscene phone calls. ‘Ring me later,’ she said, ‘I’m going to be out all day but you can get me between five and seven. Toni? Toni?

  The line went dead, presumably because Toni had cut the connection in her eagerness to ring Dr Rosenstein. Loretta wondered idly what it was all about, having got used to the way Americans routinely hooked up with an array of specialists, approaching them direct instead of waiting months for referrals as happened under the NHS. The system was faster than the British one, much more expensive, and Loretta had a suspicion that it resulted in unnecessary medical treatment, particularly operations. The bath was almost full and she turned off the taps, removed Toni’s robe and stepped into the water. Perhaps she was having tests, Loretta speculated as she added more cold, trying to recall exactly what Toni had said the previous afternoon — something about how difficult it was to conceive at her age. It would explain why she had sounded so distracted a few moments ago.

  The bathroom door, which Loretta hadn’t fully closed, swung eerily open as if propelled by an invisible hand. Getting more used to the set-up in the flat, Loretta postponed her panic about intruders and waited for Honey to appear. Sure enough, she was rewarded by a series of peremptory barks; the dog, it seemed, was reluctant to cross the threshold into the bathroom, perhaps because she associated it with doggy shampoo and other unwelcome grooming procedures.

  ‘Five minutes, dog,’ Loretta sang out, and slid deeper into the perfumed water.

  Central Park was hillier than Loretta remembered, and teeming with people. Half of New York seemed to have been lured out by the prospect of brilliant sunshine when the mist cleared, and she was continually overtaken by joggers, roller skaters and even the occasional pony and trap. Loretta turned to watch one of them clip-clop smartly into the distance, surprised by the realisation that at the turn of the century this would have been an everyday form of transport even in New York. Her impression of the city as a twentieth-century creation, with entrepreneurs competing with each other to build higher and better, was so vivid that she hardly connected it with the city she knew from the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Smiling to herself, and wondering if she’d have time over the weekend to visit Washington Square, Loretta resumed her walk across the park. There was a relaxed, almost carnival atmosphere in spite of the heat, and the fact that virtually everyone except Loretta was wearing some variation on sports gear — tubular cycling shorts, track suit bottoms, vests in acid purples and greens — fostered the illusion that she was on the periphery of some major sporting event. It was certainly more pleasant than the narrow, scrubby strip of land sandwiched between Riverside Drive and the fast-moving traffic on Henry Hudson Parkway where she had walked Honey earlier that morning.

  The dog had dragged her on a zigzag course, sniffing the ground and setting off on trails which petered out in dusty earth until Loretta decided she had had enough and turned for home. Honey promptly initiated a noisy quarrel with an oversized poodle which Loretta recognised as a bichon frise even as the lead slipped through her fingers and she realised she was contravening at least one and probably several of the city’s by-laws. ‘Don’t let her off the lead’ Toni had warned, relating an incident in which a friend had been fined by the parks police. She hadn’t mentioned Honey’s hysterical dislike of dogs larger than herself and Loretta lunged forward, panting as she seized Honey’s collar and extricated her from the snarling mass of fur.

  ‘Is he always so aggressive?’ the poodle’s owner inquired in a tone of detached interest when the dogs were eyeing each other from a safe distance. ‘You thought of taking him to a shrink?’

  Loretta didn’t waste time explaining Honey was a girl. She apologised curtly, hurried back to the flat and discovered that the dog had spent part of the hot, suffocating night chewing the handles of her weekend case. Thoroughly disgruntled and muttering under her breath, she scooped up all her belongings and put them out of Honey’s reach — shoes perched incongruously on bookshelves, her passport and spare cash on top of the fridge. So far the the dog had shown an interest only in leather but Loretta did not want to risk coming home and finding her air ticket punctured with teethmarks and sodden with canine saliva. Honey reacted as though it was a game, rearing up on her hind legs and barking noisily every time Loretta thought of a new hiding place. Either Toni’s neighbours were a tolerant lot or the walls of the flat were thicker than she imagined, for no one banged on the front door to complain about the racket. She eventually escaped from the apartment block a few minutes before eleven, quite a lot later than she intended.

  Nodding to the lift attendant, who recognised her from her earlier outing with Honey, she waited for the lift to descend and compared Toni’s cramped flat, with its fearsome list of rules and regulations about everything from having visitors to stay to separating different types of rubbish for recycling, with her own house in Oxford. Loretta’s study, and her bedroom, were at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the canal; on sunny mornings she had breakfast outside on a small terrace, watching boats go by and smiling as her grey cat stalked bees and butterflies. He was a companionable animal and his vocal range was in an altogether more subtle register than the fusillade of growls and barks which Honey seemed to let loose on the slightest pretext. Loretta got out of the lift, reminding herself that the dog was only a puppy, and probably bewildered by the unexpected absence of her owner.

  Before setting off for the Metropolitan Museum Loretta had left a message for her American agent, Kelly Sibon. She also recorded a new outgoing message on Toni’s answering-machine, punctuated by strange chomping sounds as Honey worried a rubber bone, in case Kelly or John Tracey tried to contact her before she returned. Loretta frowned as she thought of Tracey, and as she emerged from the park on to Museum Mile she worried about what he would do if he had to leave the Sunday Herald. He freely admitted he had neither the desire nor the confidence to go freelance; when Loretta was offered a part-time lectureship at Oxford, enabling her to give up a job she hated in London, he had been both admiring and envious. Their situations were not dissimilar in that Loretta’s unhappiness had been brought about by what her former boss, the Professor of English at Fitzroy College, insisted on refe
rring to as ‘new working practices’. He enthusiastically welcomed the idea of working more closely with industry, so much so that Loretta once lost her temper at a staff meeting and snapped that she didn’t want to spend her working life turning out literate food department managers for Marks & Spencer.

  Unlike Loretta, John Tracey usually described himself as apolitical but from the little he’d said in phone calls to San Francisco he seemed to be finding the brash new regime at the Sunday Herald hard to take. He was pessimistic about his chances of finding a staff job on another newspaper, even though he had recently won two awards for his reporting of events in Eastern Europe. Just before she left England Loretta had rather diffidently suggested that he should write a book about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, whereupon he rolled his eyes upwards and said: ‘You write the books, Loretta. I’m a fifteen-hundred-words man.’

  The fountains outside the Met were turned off, apparently for maintenance work. Loretta climbed the graceful stone steps, putting Tracey’s problems out of her mind as she reached the top and went inside. In the lofty atrium she heard an eager buzz of conversation in several languages — tour guides briefing their charges, sleek women in gold jewellery discussing where to have lunch, tired children complaining and plucking at their mothers’ sleeves. She was surprised by how familiar it all seemed, from the graceful pillars fronting the wide staircase to the great urns of fresh flowers whose sweet perfume floated on the artificially cool air. It was a relief just to escape the clammy late-morning heat, which had drawn out a film of sweat on her bare arms, and Loretta stood for a moment, enjoying the change. She put her hands in the pockets of her trousers and lifted her head, expecting to find Rosa Bonheur’s flamboyant canvas of a horse fair, but saw in its place a florid picture which looked like a Tiepolo. A glance round the atrium revealed three others in the same style, a special display Loretta assumed, and she wasted no more time on them. She handed over the $7 entrance fee, clipped a metal badge on the collar of her shirt to show she’d paid, and went upstairs.

  She had allowed herself an hour or so before lunch, knowing from past experience that her senses gradually became exhausted before the visual richness of Ghirlandaio, Bronzino, Giovanni di Paolo. Looking at pictures was like gorging on chocolate, she thought, strolling from room to room, the appetite feeding on itself until quite suddenly it was sated, and nausea threatened. She hadn’t quite reached that point when she stopped in front of a Filippo Lippi she hadn’t seen before, an unconventional portrait of a couple in profile. The woman’s elaborate dress and graceful figure filled most of the frame, literally relegating her husband to the margins, and Loretta wondered whether the unusual composition reflected the woman’s superior wealth or rank. There was an unspoken intimacy between the sitters, a hint of a smile on the woman’s face which suggested smothered amusement, and Loretta suddenly felt like an intruder on some intensely private moment. She stepped back, uncertain whether the sexual history she had conjectured was really present or had been prompted by her knowledge of the artist’s own prodigious carnal appetites. The effect faded with distance, almost as if it cut the painting down to size, and Loretta noticed for the first time that the woman’s hands were quite awkwardly depicted. She looked down at her watch, realised she was hungry and decided it was time for lunch.

  To get to the ground floor restaurant she had to retrace her steps, a route which took her past a very small Sassetta, the Journey of the Magi, which had been almost completely obscured by a party of Japanese tourists when she passed it earlier. This time the room was almost empty and Loretta paused for a moment, entranced by the tiny figures and characteristic Sienese colours — limpid pinks, purplish blues and drab greens. One of the tiny horses carried a brown monkey, so brilliantly rendered that Loretta thought Sassetta must have painted it from life rather than copying it from a bestiary. Absorbed in the painting, she hardly registered soft footfalls until they stopped behind her, so close she could hear — she could feel- someone’s breath over her right shoulder. She edged to the left, aware that she had been blocking the approach to the painting and expecting whoever it was to respect the space she had put between them. Instead he moved with her, trapping her between his body and a glass case housing a processional crucifix. She could see his outline reflected in the glass, easily overlapping her own, and for an instant she was paralysed by a claustrophobic sensation of déja vu — the memory of a frotteur who had pushed up against her on the London Underground. She had been so shocked by the touch of his body on hers, the pressure of his penis pushing into her back on a crowded train, that she failed to react quickly enough and was left shaking and furious when he got off at the next station.

  ‘Leave me alone?,’ she gasped, elbowing the stranger out of her way and hurrying into the next room. Once there she stopped short, flooded by a feeling of inadequacy because she hadn’t actually confronted him. Wouldn’t he just find another victim, some other woman to menace? She hesitated, gripped by indecision, and an attendant approached.

  ‘Something wrong, miss?’

  ‘Yes, there was a man –’ She glanced back the way she had come, putting her hand up to her mouth. ‘He — I was looking at a picture when he –’

  ‘He touch you, miss? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘He didn’t — I don’t think he touched me. But he was so close.’

  ‘Would you recognise him?’

  ‘I — yes, no. I didn’t really see ... Maybe he’s still there.’ She plucked at the sleeve of the attendant’s uniform, pulling her back the way she had come.

  ‘There he is,’ she said in an agitated whisper, and they both stopped just inside the room.

  ‘The same guy?’

  Loretta peered through the glass case, not entirely sure. The man was leaning forward, bending towards the painting as though he was short-sighted. His height was about right, she thought, or would be when he straightened, but what about the rest: age, clothes, hair colour? She could summon only the vaguest outline, an impression of someone taller and certainly heavier than herself. There was one way to find out and, pushing aside her doubts, she approached him.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He turned to look at her, his eyes screwed up as though he had trouble focusing. Loretta stepped back, registering with shock the disfiguring blotches on his face, Kaposi’s Sarcoma, the way he leaned heavily on a stick.

  ‘This the guy?’ The attendant was beside her.

  ‘No. I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake.’ She gestured helplessly towards him, not knowing how to make amends.

  In a cultured, slightly foreign accent he asked: ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Did you see –’ Loretta stopped, appalled by her tactlessness, certain there was something wrong with his eyes. She knew the disease could do that, in its later stages.

  The attendant said: ‘You wanna make an official complaint?’

  ‘God, no,’ Loretta said quickly, feeling her cheeks grow red. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again and turned towards the doorway, aware that the museum attendant and the man with the stick were joined together in a tableau of bewilderment. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, backing towards the exit.

  When she got to the stairs she hurried down them, wanting to put as much space as possible between herself and the scene of her embarrassment. She could not imagine how she had come to make such a terrible mistake. It was obvious now that the man’s sight was affected and he had only been trying to get a better view of the painting ... She crossed the lobby and entered the Roman section of the museum, hardly noticing wall paintings in eidetic colours over which, in normal circumstances, she would have lingered and exclaimed. In the restaurant she joined a short queue, was shown downstairs to a table and ordered the lightest dish on the menu, pasta with a simple sauce, her appetite deserting her even though she’d only had a cup of tea for breakfast. She couldn’t stop thinking about her narrow escape, what would have happened if she’d actually accused him — always assum
ing, of course, that the thickset figure whose reflection she had seen looming behind her in the glass and the sick man were one and the same. Doubts set in: wouldn’t she have noticed the marks on his face, even subliminally? The fact that he needed a stick? Loretta leaned back in her chair, wondering if she’d somehow been fooled ...

  After a moment she leaned down and reached inside her bag, pulling out a paperback, the American edition of her biography of Edith Wharton. She had brought it with her because she was due to meet a journalist from New York magazine that afternoon. The woman had been vague on the phone but she seemed to be writing an article on Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese, The Age of Innocence, literary adaptations in general ... It seemed a bit late in the day to tackle the subject, the film had been out for months, but Loretta opened the book at the introduction and read the first few lines, taking comfort in their familiarity.

  Her food arrived and she ate it mechanically, refusing pudding and asking for a cup of hot tea. She rarely ordered it in American restaurants, they were brilliant at coffee but had a tendency to produce a tea bag dunked in a cup of stale hot water from an espresso machine instead of a properly warmed pot of Earl Grey or Darjeeling. Today was no exception and she stirred the teabag violently, still preoccupied by what had happened upstairs. Someone, she was sure, had done research into minor sexual offences like flashing and dirty phone calls; the consensus was that they didn’t move on to other, more threatening activities like — well, like following their victims or harassing them in public places. Loretta moved uneasily in her chair, thinking there was always an exception to every rule and if Michael actually knew Toni, rather than dialling her number at random, he would also know her address and where Loretta was staying. She wished she’d brought Donelly’s number with her, she had passed a couple of payphones on her way in to the museum, but she had left her notebook at the flat, not thinking for a moment that she might need it.