Full Stop (14 page)

Three or four minutes later dark clouds rolled over and translucent pearls of rain dropped out of the sky, dissolving in warm pools as they made contact with her skin. Loretta had
never experienced hot rain before, the sensation was disconcerting but not unpleasant until the drops began to multiply. Within minutes the wide skirt of her cotton dress clung damply to her legs, her toes were gritty in her open-toed sandals and her hair hung about her face in damp tendrils. A bus swept past and Loretta broke into a trot, catching up with it at a bus stop a few yards down the road. She waited as the woman ahead of her in the queue methodically shook and furled a large umbrella, ascending the steps with maddening slowness while Loretta fretted behind her. She took the last window seat, sliding gratefully across and running her hands through her wet hair. According to her map, which she unfolded as soon as she'd finished trying to repair her appearance, they would soon be in the Theater District, passing right through the middle of Times Square.

By now the rain was hurling itself against the glass, obscuring her view of shopfronts and people sheltering from the rain. Loretta studied the map, turning it sideways to read the names of the few churches it marked. Plenty of other landmarks were shown, places she'd heard about in films or books without knowing their location: Radio City on Sixth Avenue, the United Nations HQ on First, Bellevue Hospital a few blocks down from the UN, but the map was clearly not intended for the more devout tourist. Loretta assumed that one of Donelly's subordinates was even now working his or her way down a list of ecclesiastical telephone numbers, questioning puzzled clerics as to whether they were in the habit of holding services on Friday nights. Evensong? Loretta was so ignorant about the liturgy that she had no idea whether bells were rung before an evening service and it occurred to her that the faint sound on the tape might just as easily be bell practice. The exercise seemed a waste of time and resources, such a long shot as hardly to justify the cost of making the calls, but she supposed Donelly's unit had to do something to justify its existence. She tugged at her skirt, which was bunched uncomfortably under her, and went back to the map, this time trying to remember the name of John Tracey's
hotel. He'd said it was at the far end of Lexington and she traced the avenue with her finger until she came to what she was looking for: it ended at East 21st Street, at a small green blob marked on the map as Gramercy Park, which she recognised as the name of his hotel. He should have finished his story by now and faxed it over although he might still be dealing with subs and lawyers in London. Loretta thought she'd give him a bit more time before calling to ask if he had time to meet her for a drink before she left New York the following evening.

She yawned, thinking how fond she was of Tracey. They had been getting on very well in the last few months, better than at any time since their divorce, and he was her closest male friend in spite of their surface incompatibilities. Knowing him as well as she did, she could not imagine him settling down in some backwater in Hampshire; his natural habitat, if not actually a war zone, was somewhere with a population of several million and plenty of late-opening bars. He had an exhaustive knowledge of London by night, once taking her to an all-night café in Brick Lane where a burly man with a glass eye acknowledged him with the slightest of nods. Tracey refused to reveal the man's identity, even to Loretta, but said they had ‘helped each other out' on numerous occasions. Loretta suspected he was a retired mercenary, if such a species existed.

Tracey occasionally sent her maudlin letters from warravaged East European cities, talking longingly of having someone to come home to, but they were usually written late at night and, Loretta guessed, under the influence of several whiskies. In a recent telephone call to San Francisco he had even spoken regretfully of the fact that they hadn't had children, prompting an acerbic reply from Loretta; she was fairly sure that Tracey liked to indulge in wistful regret about not being a father while having someone else to blame for a situation that suited him very well. She had noticed that he soon tired of his boisterous twin nephews on the rare occasions he paid a visit to his brother and sister-in-law's house in Ealing.

The bus stopped and an overweight woman in tight red
trousers lumbered down the aisle and fell into the seat next to Loretta. She exuded an odour Loretta couldn't quite identify, stale food and old perfume, and she turned her head to the window, wrinkling her nose to shut it out. She yawned again and did not at first notice that the rain had very nearly stopped, skimming down in diagonal lines so fine as to be almost invisible. A weak sun was struggling to come out, as yet only a luminous disc in an opaque white sky, but Loretta guessed that the weather was about to make another of its abrupt changes. The fat woman reached into her bag and drew out a Hershey bar, peeled off the wrapper and broke it in halves; the smell of the chocolate reminded Loretta she was hungry, she had skipped breakfast for the second day running and her last uninterrupted meal, in the restaurant at the Met, was almost 24 hours ago. Shaking off the trance-like mood of passivity which had settled on her since she got on the bus, she stood up and asked her neighbour rather brusquely to allow her to pass.

‘You getting off, honey?' The fat woman turned on her a smile of such transparent benevolence that Loretta felt ashamed of herself. She nodded, retrieved the remains of the Hershey bar as it slipped to the floor and received another radiant smile when she returned it. Standing passengers blocked her way to the doors and she eased herself through, reaching the exit just as the bus stopped. On the pavement she blinked in the bright sunshine and felt in her bag for her sunglasses, discovering when she put them on that she was much further down Broadway than she thought. She had somehow managed to miss the Flatiron building, one of her favourite New York landmarks, and a glance at the map told her she was almost at Union Square. She walked a couple of blocks, hot and damp but confident that the heat would soon dry her clothes, and spotted an
espresso
bar on the other side of the road. She crossed, dodging through stationary traffic, and studied an inviting window display of
patisserie:
Danish pastries,
pains au chocolat
and
croissants
studded with apricots as round and glutinously yellow as egg yolks. Her mouth began to water and she went inside, took a
table near the window and ordered a double
espresso,
an apricot
croissant
and, feeling only slightly greedy, a warmed-up
pain au chocolat.

Loretta was examining a secondhand copy of her most recent book, looking inside the cover to see if the person who had sold it to the huge bookshop on Broadway had left any trace. There was nothing, no name or dedication, only the price in pencil, and she was miffed to find it disposed of so quickly. The American edition had not been out long, no more than six months, and she was mildly affronted by the speed with which it had found its way on to a table displaying unsorted volumes which fell vaguely under the heading of language and literary criticism: dusty hardbacks which had long ago lost their jackets, scruffy paperbacks, books by and about Barthes and Foucault back to back with F R Leavis. Loretta's book stood out in its shiny jacket, the bright red lettering of the title,
Milton's Cook: Fiction's Invisible Woman
, superimposed on a reproduction of Eve being expelled from Paradise from the Brancacci chapel in Florence. On the back cover was the quotation from
Shirley
which had suggested the title, the heroine's complaint that Milton was unable to visualise Eve when he was writing
Paradise Lost
and had mixed her up with his cook.

Loretta held the book so it fell open, turning her head sideways to examine the picture of herself on the back flap. It had been taken in London by a friend of John Tracey, an occasional contributor to the
Sunday Herald
magazine who patiently experimented with studio lamps until the light was just right-highlighting her cheekbones and creating a soft glow around her hair. Staring at the black-and-white image now, aware of the ratty curls on her forehead and her dress sticking to her body after another torrential rainstorm, Loretta couldn't quite connect it with herself. Nor, it seemed, could John Tracey; when she
showed him the contact prints, he had paid her the dubious compliment of exclaiming ‘God, Loretta, you look quite sexy!', a remark she had brooded over all the way back to Oxford.

Someone came and stood beside her, picking up books and discarding them with startling rapidity. She moved sideways, furtively sliding her own volume back on to the table, and the young man, who looked like a student, pounced on it and began to read the blurb. Loretta inched round the table until they were on opposite sides, her eyes flicking up every few seconds to gauge his reaction. He had a narrow, pale face under thick dark hair and although she could not see his eyes, she was not at all surprised when he flipped the book shut and slid it back on the table. She sighed, the air rushing out of her lungs like a deflating balloon even though she hadn't known she was holding her breath.

Struggling not to take the rejection personally, Loretta lowered her head and immediately a name leapt up at her from a book jacket. Her hand shot out, colliding with the bony fingers of the pale young man who had also spotted it. ‘Sorry,' she said, gripping the book firmly as he said, ‘Excuse me,' and tried to take it from her. They glared at each other and Loretta said, without much justification: ‘I think I got there first.'

The student shrugged and let go with a bad grace. Loretta put down her purse, which she had taken the precaution of removing from her bag before handing it in at the front desk, and examined the plain blue volume. It was not a proof, as she first thought, but a finished copy in the style of some austere French publishing house, Gallimard say, rather than the small university press whose imprint it bore.
Form, Fiction, Phallacy: Re-Reading the Victorians
by Hugh Puddephat, she read in small black type, trying to ignore the scowling presence of the student on the far side of the table.

‘The late Hugh Puddephat,' the biographical details began, and Loretta's eyes widened in surprise. She hadn't known of a posthumous edition of Puddephat's work, she couldn't recall seeing a review in the
TLS
but it was an American edition and
expensive — almost an exercise in vanity publishing, she thought, given the quality of Puddephat's earlier books. An explanatory note revealed that he had all but completed a collection of essays at the time of his death, and that they had been brought together in this volume by his ‘friend, colleague and admirer', an obscure American academic called Irving Ashby. Loretta read:

The late Hugh Puddephat was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He was known to colleagues in France and the United States as an incisive interpreter of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida — those iconoclasts grouped loosely round the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Dr Puddephat's project was to import their methods into the profoundly insular climate of English academe, of which his own college, St Mark's, Oxford, was unfortunately representative.

Undeterred by the intemperate and frequently personal attacks of his critics, he was unflinching in his determination to apply structuralist theory to the icons of the English literary canon.

Loretta let out a ‘hmmph', indicating her sceptical attitude to this hagiography of the dead don. She had never actually spoken to him, their connection had come too late for that, but as far as she knew he had got into Althusser and Paul de Mann just as everyone else was getting out. A joke in thoroughly bad taste came into her head, something about the death of the author, and she was shocked by her own callousness: after all, the man had been killed when he was in his early 40s. Apparently the habit was catching, for a moment later she came to a bit about Puddephat having been ‘cut down in his prime' — a singularly unfortunate phrase to apply to someone who had fallen victim to a savage and still unsolved knife attack in a dingy flat in Paris. There was no mention of it in the biographical notes, just Puddephat's dates and the information that he had died suddenly in France. Loretta chewed her bottom lip as she glanced through essays on Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës,
and George Eliot, uncomfortable with the memories the book had stirred up. It was all a long time ago, she told herself, and found a welcome distraction in being able to identify the exact point in the essays at which Puddephat had discovered Jacques Lacan and Hélène Cixous.

‘Who can be said to “possess the phallus” in
Wuthering Heights}'
Puddephat asked pompously. ‘The most obvious candidate, Heathcliff, runs away precisely at that moment when he is forced, by overhearing Cathy's denunciation of him to Nelly Dean, into an admission of its ontological lack: his failure, in Lacanian terms, to act as the whip/phallus for which Cathy, in furious recognition of her own castration, begs her father at the book's outset.'

A rumour had reached Oxford, via the French police, that Puddephat was an early victim of a serial killer who had never been caught – the Gay Ripper, as the British tabloids inevitably called him when the story got into the press. A senior detective in Paris had been quoted in the
Guardian
to the effect that the same man was believed to be responsible for the deaths of five gay men and a female transvestite in and around the Rue Monge, the area Puddephat had been staying in when he died. The bizarre detail about the transvestite caused a flurry of excitement at North Oxford dinner parties where former colleagues of the dead don affected always to have known he was gay, in spite of his very public marriage to a peer's daughter. On one occasion Loretta had even heard it whispered, as the port was being passed, that Hugh Puddephat was wearing a blonde wig, low-cut red dress and stiletto heels when he was attacked. Not only did this make no sense — the murdered transvestite was a woman dressed as a man, not the other way round — but Loretta found herself sitting miserably between her host and a Classics don from St Mark's, Puddephat's college, as they vied with each other to produce yet more scurrilous details. As soon as she could do it without drawing attention to herself, she made an excuse about an early lecture the following morning and left.