What Men Say

by Joan Smith

  Loretta said nothing and Janet mistook her silence for curiosity. “One of the dons was found murdered in Paris—Hugh Puddephat, does the name mean anything to you? Possibly not, he was a structuralist and that’s all a bit passé now, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s the kind of thing Donald’s determined to avoid, especially as one of the other fellows was nearly charged with the murder. He only got off when the master’s wife went to the police and admitted they were having an affair . . . Loretta, are you all right?”

  “Mmm,” she said, getting up and kneeling on the sofa next to Janet. “It gets a bit stuffy in here in the mornings”—she fiddled with the window lock—“especially now that the rain’s stopped.” The window catch was stiff, needing several attempts before she was able to swivel it round with her thumb, and the window moved only nine inches before jamming in the frame, but Loretta was grateful for the diversion. “That’s better,” she said, feeling able to face Janet again, and returned to her seat.

  Janet looked at her oddly, but said nothing. Instead she uncurled her long legs from the sofa, slipped on her sandals and got up to look at Loretta’s bookshelves. “You don’t mind?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder. “I’m always interested in other people’s books.”

  “Go ahead,” said Loretta and watched as Janet took down a book, read the synopsis on the inside cover and put it back.

  “Have you read this?” She turned and held out another, this time a Virago paperback.

  “What is it?” Loretta leaned forward to get a better look and recognized a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim. “Mmm, no, I don’t think so. In fact, I’m not even sure it’s mine. Let’s have a look.” She held out her hand and took the book from Janet. “I thought so—it’s Bridget’s.” She turned it over and read the blurb aloud in a rapid monotone: “‘First published da-de-da . . . forceful study of the power of men . . . weakness of women when they love . . .’ I read another one, Enchanted April, and she said this was better. I think it’s the one about her marriage to—I’ve forgotten his name.”

  She placed the book on the low table in front of her, thinking she should at least offer to return it to Bridget. They had fallen into the habit of lending each other things, clothes as well as books, soon after Loretta moved to Oxford; she had gone to her first formal dinner, in the cavernous dining hall of one of the grandest colleges, where the only illumination came from candles flickering above tarnished silver, wearing a black lace cocktail dress which had originally belonged to Bridget’s aunt. She had been quite unprepared for the random, possibly mischievous placement, which had abandoned her to the mercies of a mechanical engineer, a former employee of British Rail who had talked about faults in railway engines throughout the first two courses. The dress had at least given her the confidence to regard her plight with detached amusement.

  “Sorry,” she said, realizing Janet had spoken. She put up a hand and pushed a few stray hairs back from her forehead, twisting them under the elastic band and wishing she had brushed it out before Janet arrived. “I haven’t been sleeping very well . . . What did you say?”

  Janet shook her head. “Nothing.” She draped herself gracefully on the sofa, glancing at her watch in a slightly surreptitious way which suggested she had had enough of their conversation and was impatient for Bridget to arrive. “Do you think Sam has a record? I suppose he’s too young to have been a draft dodger?”

  “I should have thought so. I don’t know his exact age.” Loretta tried to remember when the last American troops left Vietnam—1971?

  “Me neither. I don’t know much about him at all, do you?”

  Loretta said noncommittally: “Well, he hasn’t been here long. I know he’s got a mother in Boston, though she didn’t come to the wedding . . . He seems a perfectly ordinary—”

  “A perfectly ordinary what?” Janet prompted when Loretta failed to finish the sentence.

  “Oh, I’m not the person to talk to about Sam,” Loretta said with feigned lightness, looking down and scratching at a minute paint stain on her jeans. She was unprepared for the rush of emotion unleashed by this trivial conversation, and her ears strained for the sound of Bridget’s key in the front door to end it.

  “I didn’t realize you disliked him so much.”

  “I don’t, I—it’s just sour grapes on my part.” Loretta dragged at the elastic band, tears springing to her eyes as it brought a knot of torn hair with it. “Bridget’s my closest friend, I’ve known her for, oh, ten years”—she picked savagely at the band, trying to unwind strands of hair from it—“and of course there’ve been times when we saw less of each other, but it’s been such a shock, the way she’s retreated into this . . . this parody of the nuclear family. She didn’t even—it was Sam who told me about her blood pressure being too high.” She looked up, stung by the recollection of this recent injury which she’d hardly had time to think about, and tossed the elastic band onto the table. “It’s as if, all these years, it was all second-best and she really wanted a husband—just like my sister. I thought we were different, I thought our generation—” She stopped, horrified by the way in which her feelings had betrayed her into these rash, painful confidences.

  “I’m sorry,” Janet said after a moment’s silence. She shifted on the sofa, sitting up straight and crossing one leg over the other. “Have you—you haven’t talked to her about it?”

  “Talked to her?” Loretta exclaimed. She felt like two people, one of them struggling unsuccessfully to get the other under control. “That’s the problem,” she said more quietly. “We don’t have conversations like that anymore.”

  “You don’t think—” Janet began cautiously. “Her loyalties must be divided. Perhaps she’s afraid to raise it?”

  Loretta made an impatient gesture. “I’m sorry, Janet, I’m making a complete fool of myself. Can I get you another drink?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Janet gestured to the half-full glass of kir on the table. “Aren’t you being a little harsh? She’s been trying so hard to toe the line this last couple of years, going to Donald’s little dinners for industrialists and his mates from right-wing think tanks.” Janet made a face to show where her sympathy lay. “Then there was that silly row and Donald, without even asking for her side of the story, accused her of bringing the college into disrepute. She’s thirty-six, thirty-seven, and what’s she got to look forward to as far as Oxford’s concerned? All right, I know she isn’t unemployed and sleeping in a cardboard box—I think you have to be an Oxford person yourself to know what it means. Why, anywhere else would be”—she sat back, distancing herself from Loretta’s unvoiced disapproval—“second-best. I can’t really see her upping sticks and going to work in Reading. That’s if there are any jobs in Reading.”

  Loretta shook her head. “Even if it’s true, I thought she’d got over it long ago. She said herself it was political—”

  “Of course it was, but that doesn’t help. Well, I could be wrong, you’ve known her a lot longer than I have. On the other hand, maybe she put a brave face on for you—”

  “For me? Why would she do that?”

  “Well, your book for a start.”

  “My—that was two years ago, and I haven’t even got a full-time job.” Loretta sometimes joked that she personally was an education cut—forced to go part-time when her college embarked on a money-saving exercise and pruned a quarter of its teaching staff. She had pointed out at the time that the axe was falling disproportionately on female lecturers in all departments, and had even persuaded her union to take up the issue, but the principal replied that it just happened, regrettably, to be the women who did not have tenure. They were, in other words, easier to sack.

  “And you review all over the place.”

  “I need the money.” This was partly true, although it hardly made up for the loss of a third of her salary; Loretta had had a succession of lodgers in the past year, the latest departing the previous week, and she would soon have to advertise for another.

  Janet le
aned forward, picked up her glass and sipped from it. “That’s not what people think when they see your byline. To get back to Bridget, I think she was vulnerable and Sam happened to come along at the right time—”

  Loretta said: “Some day my prince will come.”

  “If you want to put it like that. Or you could say he’s intelligent, good-looking—”

  “Not to mention rich.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  Stung by this justified rebuke, Loretta cried: “It’s all so bloody perfect.”

  “Of course it is. They’ve known each other—what? Nine months? You know what it’s like, the first few months of an affair. Freud compared it to a temporary psychosis—”

  “Oh, Freudr.”

  “You’re not listening. The operative word is temporary. Give her time and she’ll get over it.”

  “What—living in that color-supplement house and with a baby?”

  “She’s not going to give up work, is she? She says she’s going back at Christmas and I don’t see any reason—”

  The phone rang and Loretta let out an audible gasp of relief. “Excuse me,” she said, hurrying to the other end of the room.

  “Sam,” she said a moment later, turning her back on Janet to hide her embarrassment. “Bridget’s not back yet, I’m expecting her any minute.”

  “You saw her this morning? How did she look?”

  “All right. Better than yesterday.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Loretta sighed. “She looked fine. Really.”

  “O-kay.” He did not sound entirely convinced. “Listen, Loretta, they think they know who she is.”

  “Who? Oh, the, um . . .”

  “Yeah, and the point is she’s American”

  “American?”

  “So now we know why the heat’s on us—Bridget and me. These guys”—he sighed—“these guys go for the obvious, they put two and two together and come up with four hundred. She’s American, I’m American, there has to be a connection.”

  “But Oxford’s full of Americans.”

  “Turns out they already suspected—the pathologist spotted some fancy orthodontic work. Now this guy’s called in, says he sat next to her on a plane and sure, she did have an American accent.”

  “This is from the photofit—drawing?”

  “Yeah. Why I’m calling, Loretta, is they’re setting up a press conference this afternoon and they want me and Bridget at it. I said no way, I want her kept out of this—if I have to get some kind of a medical certificate, OK, I’ll do it. Can you ask her to call me as soon as she gets in? I’m staying at my desk, Elaine’s going out to get me a sandwich.”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Loretta, I have to go. There’s a call coming through on the other line. Talk to you later.”

  He hung up and Loretta walked the length of the room to where Janet was waiting expectantly for her.

  “Apparently they’ve identified—” Loretta turned her head, at last hearing the sound she’d been waiting for. “Bridget?” She went to the door and saw her friend standing just inside. “God,” she said, her tone changing, “you look terrible. Come in and sit down.” She took Bridget’s arm and guided her into the drawing room, pushing her gently onto the sofa she’d recently vacated. “What is it?” she asked, kneeling beside her and taking her hand, which neither returned Loretta’s grip nor attempted to withdraw from it. “What happened?”

  Bridget leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Janet said: “Shall I get her some water?”

  Bridget opened her eyes briefly. “Janet,” she said, acknowledging her presence, and closed them again. “No, really. I’ve had a bad morning, that’s all.”

  “Is it your blood pressure? Has it got worse?”

  “Mmm. They wanted me to go in for a few days.”

  “Into hospital? That’s a bit drastic, surely?”

  Bridget took a deep breath and heaved herself into a sitting position. “That’s what I said,” she admitted with the ghost of a smile.

  “And did they—what did they say?”

  “They said I’m at risk of pre-eclampsia.”

  Loretta glanced at Janet. “I don’t know what that means.”

  Bridget groped on the floor for her bag, felt inside with her free hand and then gave up. “It used to be called toxemia. I could lose the baby and—apparently it’s still the main cause of maternal death.”

  5

  “You Mean They Offered Her A Bed And she turned it down?” Audrey’s voice, at the other end of the telephone line, was incredulous.

  “So it seems. Look, I don’t know the first thing about—about pre-eclampsia. Is it really as dangerous as she thinks?”

  “If it isn’t stopped,” Audrey said crisply. “If it becomes full eclampsia. Is she there?”

  “She’s upstairs, talking to Janet—Janet Dunne. Shall I get her?”

  “No, let me think. I’ve got two more home visits which’ll take me the best part of an hour, then I’ve got to try and get a psychiatric bed for a patient . . .” The weariness audible in her voice, Audrey calculated how long these tasks would take and finished: “I could get to you around four. If you have any trouble with the police before then, refer them to me—press conference, indeed!”

  “Thanks, Audrey. See you at four.”

  “What does—Loretta?—what does Sam say about all this?”

  Loretta sighed. “He doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to worry him, she says he’s got enough on his plate with the police—”

  “That’s the end of my money.” Audrey’s change ran out and the line went dead.

  Loretta moved back to the chopping board, picked up a knife smeared with avocado flesh and used it to ease out the stone. She sliced the avocado halves as thinly as the slippery, aging flesh would permit and arranged them in the center of a large oval plate which she had already decorated with alternate slices of mozzarella and plum tomatoes. There was a full bottle of extra-virgin olive oil in the food cupboard and she twisted off the metal cap, lowering her head for a moment to inhale the tangy scent. She had made an unproductive attempt to question Bridget before coming downstairs, quickly discovering that the consultant’s shock tactics—if that was what they were—had backfired. Bridget was in a state of trembling ignorance about the causes of preeclampsia, the symptoms to expect if her condition got worse, and the possible existence of alternative forms of treatment to the hospital admission she had already refused.

  “Can’t we look it up?” she pleaded when Loretta first suggested contacting Audrey. “There’s no need to bother her—there’s bound to be something about it in Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

  Loretta had acquired her edition at least a decade ago and thought it was almost certainly out of date but she went obediently to the high shelf in her study where she kept the classic feminist texts she had devoured in her early twenties. Our Bodies, Ourselves was usually in the middle, somewhere near The Dialectic of Sex and Sexual Politics, but on this occasion there was no sign of it. Loretta checked the index of a couple of other health handbooks but found nothing under P or E.

  “Oh, all right,” Bridget conceded when Loretta returned empty-handed, “I suppose she’ll have to know sometime, seeing she’s my GP. As long as”—she lifted a hand to her face and pressed her cheek into the palm—“as long as I don’t have to go into hospital. Not yet, anyway.” Her eyes were large and frightened, and Loretta suddenly realized what was behind this almost phobic response. Two years ago, when an old friend discovered he was dying of AIDS, Bridget had made regular trips to see him in hospital and returned from each hundred-mile round-trip in a state of quivering indignation about the way in which staff shortages and a lack of basic resources were denying him small comforts in his final days. Loretta did not know whether the situation was as bad in Oxford but she exchanged a look with Janet, shaking her head slightly to convey that this was not the moment to press her. Inst
ead, she diverted the conversation by passing on Sam’s message.

  “What’s the point of that?” Bridget asked when she heard about the press conference. “I mean, what do they expect me to say? I don’t know anything, nothing that would interest the scandal rags.” She seemed more puzzled than anxious, furrowing her brow as though she’d received a dinner invitation from people she barely knew.

  Janet crossed one leg over the other. “I expect they want to ask how it feels, finding a body in your garden.”

  Loretta frowned and said more confidently than she felt: “It’s out of the question, anyway.” She thought it unlikely that the police had the power to compel someone to attend a press conference, it wasn’t like appearing in court, but it would certainly make things simpler if Bridget was actually in hospital. Feeling out of her depth, slightly panicky even, Loretta had to exert rigid control to prevent herself from blurting out this opinion.

  “Sounds like she might have been on holiday,” Bridget said suddenly, kicking off her shoes and curling her legs under her on the sofa. It took Loretta a moment to realize that she was talking about the dead woman. “I mean, as she’s American. I thought they were supposed to be staying away because of the Gulf War and the recession, but Oxford seems to be full of them.”

  Janet looked surprised. “Is it? Those open-topped buses don’t have many people on them, I wonder sometimes how they stay in business.”

  “Oh, I’m an expert on those,” said Bridget, sounding animated for the first time since her return from the hospital. “One of them stops right under my window at St. Frideswide’s, it’s the same spiel every time—college founded in 1431, great hall burned down by deranged ex-student in 1582, look over the wall and you can just see the famous clock supported by marble figures of Dante and Virgil . . . Actually it isn’t Virgil, it’s Petrarch, I keep meaning to ring up and mention it to whoever writes the script.”