What Men Say (15 page)

“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 in 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.”

“In the—?” Bridget sounded blank for a moment. “Oh yes, in the Bodleian . . . Anyway, it's dark, it's raining, they've been reading ghost stories and they're all pissed off. Byron because his wife's left him and he's congenitally gloomy anyway, Polidori because he's jealous of Byron, and Mary—Mary's had all these babies and miscarriages and she's getting fed up with Shelley and his progressive ideas. She was very conservative in her old age, you know. This particular summer, though, she's obsessed with Byron—”

“You've written this for what?”

“Praeternatura.
They're a bunch of Gothic groupies at the University of Western Wisconsin who publish their own quarterly journal—glossy cover, personal ads from English professors who want house swaps with counts in Transylvania. Only kidding,” she added, seeing Loretta's face. “Actually, I've always promised myself
I'll go to their annual convention one summer, they go to wonderful places like Romania. Anyway, as I was saying, there's all this frustrated passion, jealousy, intrigue . . .”

“Sounds more like Mills and Boon.”

“Loretta.
”

“Sorry.”

“. . . with Byron the absolute center, and the result is—Frankenstein's monster.”

“You've lost me.”

Bridget made an impatient sound. “What I'm saying is, Byron
is
Frankenstein's monster. I know the usual theory is that it's Shelley, but you think about it for a minute. They're both physically deformed—just about
the
most famous thing about Byron is his club foot—and they both have this extraordinary charisma. You know the way from here, Loretta?” They were now on the other side of Kidlington, heading north on the road to Banbury.

“Mmm.”

“Slow down then—it's the next right.”

Loretta was already braking and she did a fast right turn, just missing a big red Citroën traveling in the opposite direction. The driver hooted furiously as his car sped past the side road.

“Christ,
Loretta.”

“Sorry. I was thinking about your theory.”

“I'd better shut up if that's the effect it's going to have. I wasn't intending to die for it.”

“No, go on, we're nearly there.”

“OK, if you promise not to fling us in a ditch. Where's Frankenstein the first time he sees the monster?
In bed.
It's practically a seduction scene.” She sounded outraged. “There's this powerful mixture of attraction and repulsion, and you can argue—I do, in
fact—that Mary's unconscious sexual guilt has transformed the person she loves into a monstrous aberration.”

“I'll park round the back, shall I?”

“I should think so. Uh-oh—what are those cars doing here?” Bridget swiveled her head as they passed several empty saloons parked in a line next to the garden wall of Thebes Farm.

“Police?” suggested Loretta, signaling right and driving slowly round into the farmyard on the other side of the house. A little group of people turned to stare incuriously as she parked the car, their blank expressions reminding Loretta of deer at a water hole in a wildlife film; seconds later a ripple of recognition went through them and they surged towards the car, dispelling any doubt as to which was the hunter and which the prey.

“Oh, God,” Bridget gasped, “let's get out of here,” but a middle-aged man was already pulling open the passenger door, his colleagues pressing in on him from behind so he almost fell into her lap. Loretta flung open her own door and discovered her escape route blocked by an excited reporter who thrust a tabloid newspaper in her face and shouted questions which she was quite unable to hear. To her left Bridget burst into tears and Loretta panicked, jamming her finger on the horn and keeping it there as the startled rat pack fell back from the car. Bridget, with greater presence of mind than Loretta had expected, pulled the passenger door shut and locked it, a maneuver Loretta was unable to imitate because she was afraid to take her finger off the horn.

“Can you close mine?” she shouted above the racket, but at that moment help appeared in the shape of a uniformed policeman who hurried round the corner of the house followed by a man in jeans and a bomber jacket.

“Thank God,” cried Loretta, cutting off the noise as
the two men ducked under the blue-and-white tape and shooed the reporters out of the yard.

“Must be the first time in history they're actually here when you want them,” Bridget observed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand as she began to get out of the car. Her breathing slightly labored, she faced the two men and demanded: “Who's in charge here?”

The man in the bomber jacket glanced down at her stomach. “Mrs.—Dr. Bennett? Sorry about that. We weren't expecting you.”

Bridget frowned. “No reason why you should have been. What are they all doing here, anyway? I thought there might be one or two but nothing like this.” She waved towards the journalists who had withdrawn to the road.

“You haven't seen this morning's papers?”

“Only the
Guardian
” Loretta walked round the car to join them. “I'm Loretta Lawson, by the way. Bridget's staying with me.”

“Oh, yes.” He nodded, looking and sounding distinctly jumpy. “Sergeant Crisp. We're just tying up a few loose ends—”

Bridget said abruptly: “Where's my car?”

“Your car?”

“Yes, a maroon Astra. It was parked over there, where that car is.” She indicated an empty police car on the other side of the yard.

“I believe the, er, the forensic team are having a look at it this morning.”

“They've taken my car? Without my permission?”

“Mr. Becker said—”

“What? You mean Sam—” Bridget shot a bewildered look at Loretta, who merely shrugged.

“We did speak to Mr. Becker about both cars,” the detective was saying diplomatically.

“Both
cars? You mean you've got his as well?”

“Mr. Becker's car has been examined, yes.”

“This is—this is outrageous. I'm going to complain to—” She turned and appealed to Loretta. “Who do I complain to?”

“There is a standard procedure involving the Police Complaints Authority. But I think you'll find—”