What Men Say (11 page)

“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.”

“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. Instead, 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.”

Loretta took this opportunity to slip downstairs, out of earshot, and leave a message for Audrey at the surgery in Woodstock Road. Five minutes later, Loretta heard the single chirrup which indicated someone had picked up the phone, presumably Bridget trying to reach Sam before the press conference. She had finished her call just in time for Audrey to get through from the call box in Wolvercote.

A timer sounded as Loretta shook olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a jar and dribbled the mixture onto the salad, reminding her to remove a Marks and Spencer loaf from the oven. She put the various bits and pieces on the table, wishing she had been able to come up with
something a bit more adventurous than an
insalata tricolore
and a bowl of olives, and called up from the bottom of the stairs: “It's ready.” She listened for a moment until she heard signs of movement on the floor above, footsteps and Janet's voice getting louder as she and Bridget came into the hall, then returned to the kitchen.

“What did she say?” Bridget appeared first, pale but composed.

“Who?” Loretta was flustered and it took her a moment to remember. “Audrey? She's coming round at four.”

“Hmm.” Bridget unscrewed the top of the pill bottle she was carrying and shook a capsule onto her palm. “I suppose I'd better take one of these.”

“What is it?” Loretta knew Bridget's fondness for quack remedies, ginseng and curious herbal concoctions, and was relieved when she moved closer to see that the typed label on the bottle appeared official.

“Dunno. Something they gave me at the hospital.” Bridget put the capsule in her mouth, swallowed and looked down at the three places set at table. “Is there some mineral water?”

Loretta fetched a bottle from the fridge and they sat down to eat. Almost immediately, and to Loretta's relief, Janet began to talk about the book she was writing, a study of Artemisia Gentileschi commissioned by an American publisher who believed there was a market for lavishly illustrated feminist reinterpretations of art history. Janet had just spent a week in Florence, where an exhibition of Gentileschi's paintings, the first major retrospective of her work, was being held at Michelangelo's house, the Casa Buonarroti.

“
Judith Decapitating Holofernes,
” Loretta said instantly, recalling an illustration in a magazine. She was
about to describe the picture, a gory biblical scene of blood-soaked sheets and a severed jugular vein, but stopped abruptly when she realized it would lead them straight back to the subject of murder.

“Yes, she really got her own back on men, didn't she?” Bridget remarked unexpectedly, showing no such qualms. “For being raped, I mean—all those Judiths and Salomes.”

Janet sighed and speared a smidgeon of avocado with her fork. “So my editor would like to think.”

Bridget refilled her glass with water. “Well, there are rather a lot of them. You look at a picture and it seems familiar, then you realize it's yet another woman with some bloke's head in a basket.”

“Don't forget Jael and Sisara. And the flaying of Marsyas, although the attribution isn't absolutely certain. I should say about a third of her subjects involve violent death, certainly as far as this exhibition goes.”

Loretta prompted: “But?”

Janet put down her fork and propped her elbows on the table in front of her, resting her chin lightly on her clasped hands. “The problem is that we don't look at male painters in that way—autobiographically. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, produced at least two versions of the Judith story but we don't assume a personal motive. You have to remember that they were professional painters, they worked to commission, and it wasn't unusual for them to be asked to repeat a successful subject. Heroic women, Judith and Jael and Cleopatra, they were hugely popular throughout the seventeenth century. Baglione painted Judith and so did Caravaggio.”

“Who committed a murder himself,” Loretta pointed out.

“Yes, but . . .” Janet hesitated, frowning as she thought about how best to express herself. “What I'm
suggesting is that it's
how
she painted, not
what
she painted, that matters. The history of art is littered with women artists whose work has traditionally been ignored or dismissed because they
only
painted still life, or in Artemisia's case because of this facile equation between an event we don't fully understand—we don't even know the outcome of Tassi's trial for rape—and the subject of her most famous paintings.” Janet paused again, narrowing her eyes and flexing her fingers. She had not seen Bridget's signal to Loretta that the conversation was getting too serious, and before either of them could speak she continued: “The exceptional thing about Artemisia in my view, and I must say it was borne out by seeing the pictures together at the Casa Buonarroti, is her ability to paint women—real women, whether we're talking about the Judiths or an allegorical figure such as the nude in
L'inclinazione,
In the Caravaggio decapitation, for instance, the one in Palazzo Barberini in Rome, Holofernes is in agony but there's something curiously detached about Judith—you wouldn't guess from her face or from the way she's holding her arms that she's in the middle of murdering someone. Caravaggio simply hasn't given her much thought, her reaction to what she's doing or her motivation. Whereas in Artemisia's version, both the Uffizi canvas and the copy in Naples, Judith has a most determined expression and she's bracing her left arm against his cheek—she's definitely
sawing”