Full Stop (15 page)

She closed Hugh Puddephat's book with a snap. The pale
young man had moved away and she put it on the table as far from
Milton's Cook
as was physically possible. It was stiflingly hot, a foetid combination of airlessness and perspiration which seemed to be untouched by the plug-in electric fans whirring at intervals throughout the shop, and Loretta would have left at once if she hadn't promised to look for an out-of-print book on Samuel Richardson for her friend Bridget Bennett. She picked up the cookery book she had found earlier and turned her head towards the tall bookcases at the rear, dismayed by the sheer number of books crammed into them. Doubting whether she would even be able to find the right section, she walked reluctantly towards the back of the shop, thinking that with every breath she took she was inhaling the effluvium of dead knowledge. This morbid mood was doubtless something to do with encountering Hugh Puddephat's book and Loretta tried to shake it off, holding herself very straight and approaching the shelves in a deliberately businesslike fashion. She was standing on tiptoe, reaching upwards in the dark, narrow space between two high bookcases when a quiet voice inquired: ‘Excuse me?'

She turned. ‘Sorry, am I in your way?'

The woman who had spoken shook her head. She was shorter than Loretta, dark and fine-featured, probably in her late 40s though her immaculate make-up made it hard to tell, wearing a short black skirt, uncreased white blouse and half-a-dozen gold chains. In one hand she held a recent novel, most likely an unwanted review copy, and in the other Loretta's purse.

‘You left this. Back there.' She indicated with her head.

‘Did I?' Loretta felt a belated spurt of alarm. ‘God, how stupid of me. It's got everything in it, all my credit cards and ... well, everything.'

‘You're English, right?' She peered up at Loretta, holding her head at an angle that was almost birdlike. ‘Is this your first time in New York? You should take more care, it's lucky I got there first.'

‘First?'

‘There was a guy.' She half-turned, surveying the shop, still
talking in a low, curiously unemphatic voice. ‘I don't see him now but I thought he knew you.'

‘Oh,' said Loretta, much relieved. ‘Young, with short dark hair? We were both after the same book, that's all.'

The woman shook her head. ‘Guy I'm talking about was older, thirty-five, forty? It's hard to tell with these guys who lose their hair. It happened with my first husband, he was twenty-eight when I divorced him and people regularly took him for forty.' She patted her matt black bob, which looked dyed to Loretta. ‘I used to say, he got the knives and forks, I got the hair.'

‘What?'

‘Joke,' she explained laconically. ‘Guy I'm talking about, he's five nine, five ten, kind of flushed because he's carrying too much weight — a hundred eighty, maybe a hundred ninety pounds?' She added in explanation: ‘I'm a nutritionist, I see guys off and on the scales all the time. You're how much, one twenty?'

Loretta said distractedly: ‘I don't know, not in pounds. You say he ... you think he was after my purse?'

‘That's how it looked. I see him watching from across the way' -again she gestured towards the front of the shop –' and at first he has a look on his face, kind of puzzled, like he's trying to work out where he saw you before. So I'm saying to myself OK, most likely the guy knows her, no call to get spooked. But all the time I'm thinking about my friend Miriam, she's in a store on 34th Street three, maybe four weeks ago. Guy pushes up against her, she says what-the-hell and he's full of apologies, I'm so sorry, my wife's sick, on his way to the hospital and so on. And you know what?'

Loretta shook her head.

‘She gets home and takes off her jacket and there's' — she lowered her voice —
‘stuff
on it.'

‘Stuff?'

‘You know. He jerked off on her.'

Loretta stared.

‘So when I see this guy watching you, I'm thinking — uh-oh. And it's as well I did, because soon's you walk away I see he's got his eye on your wallet.'

‘Five feet ten? And bald?' There was a hollow feeling in Loretta's throat.

‘Bald, no. He had some hair left here,' she patted her own head, more or less on the crown. ‘I guess it was kind of brown. Mean anything to you?'

‘I'm not sure.' She tried to think, disturbed by something the woman had said without being able to pin down what it was. ‘You're absolutely certain it was me he was looking at?'

‘Sure I'm sure.' She turned her wrist and read the time on a gold watch, small and elegant like herself. ‘I have to pay for my book. You want this or not?'

Loretta took her purse. ‘Sorry, I was just ... I mean, it's not a nice thought, someone watching me.'

The woman touched her lightly on the arm. ‘This is New York, hon. You take care now.'

‘Yes,' said Loretta, watching her walk away. ‘Yes, I will. And thank you.'

‘You're welcome. Have a nice day.'

Loretta remained where she was, the book she was supposed to be looking for quite forgotten. The woman's watch had said twenty past two, there was no point in going straight back to Toni's flat because the bad-tempered porter wouldn't be back on duty until four o'clock that afternoon. She had discovered this from his replacement when she went downstairs at five o'clock in the morning; they worked eight-hour shifts and the black porter had ended his stint the previous night at ten, while she was still worrying about whether to call a doctor for Tracey. Although he had volunteered almost nothing about the man who tried to sneak upstairs to Toni's flat, Loretta thought the result might be different if she asked specific questions: if she were to put to him, that is, the description she had just been given by the nutritionist. She leaned back against the dusty shelves, tiredness and anxiety catching up with her again. After her stupid mistake over the wasp sting she had been willing to concede John Tracey might be right, that her imagination had been working overtime since she stepped off the plane at LaGuardia, especially when she also had
Donelly's scepticism to contend with. But this was different, this time she had corroboration from someone else that she was being watched, a description even, and the woman hadn't seemed like a crank. She had made a rather cruel joke about her ex-husband but that hardly made her a nutter —

Loretta hugged the cookery book to her chest. She had intended to get a taxi from the bookshop to the Frick on East 70th and Fifth but now she wavered, tempted to go back to Toni's flat and wait for the porter to come on duty so she could interrogate him at once. Then she asked herself what she would do in the meantime, other than sit miserably in Toni's flat with only the bulldog for company. If someone
was
following her, she was probably safer in a public place, with other people around, than alone in a fifteenth floor flat where the neighbours might not even hear, or do anything, if she called for help. She levered herself forward from the bookshelves, ran a hand through her damp hair and moved back into the main section of the shop, glancing right and left as she headed for the tills. There was no queue and she handed the cookery book to an assistant, a puzzled look passing across her face as she watched it being wrapped and tried to remember why it had seemed so important half an hour ago to buy a collection of authentic Cajun recipes. She handed over twenty dollars, put away her change and collected her shoulder bag from the counter next to the door. Outside the pavement glistened with moisture under a bright blue sky but Loretta was too preoccupied to notice, struggling to fit the book into her bag while the vague outline of the man the nutritionist had described continued to trouble her. Something in the woman's description had started a train of thought, some detail Loretta couldn't quite pin down, and she hardly registered a distant, retreating rumble of thunder, the tail end of a storm she hadn't even noticed in the gloomy recesses of the bookshop. Glancing up and down the street in a nervous, disjointed way, she finally recalled what she was supposed to be doing and stepped off the kerb with her hand upraised.

‘Taxi,' she called, uncertain whether the scruffy yellow vehicle
with the buckled fender was about to stop, and jumped back as it squealed to a halt and threw up a plume of dirty water which only just missed her ankles.

The eyes were heavy-lidded, languorous, as though their owner was on the verge of sleep; the nose flared gently, in perfect harmony with the smooth contours of the cheeks. Loretta stepped back, as though the slightest noise from her might break into the unknown woman's reverie, and then laughed at herself. The marble woman had been in the same position for around five hundred years, she was not even particularly lifelike when Loretta came to study her properly, mainly because the sculptor had left the eyes blank. Loretta took out her floor plan and studied it, discovering she was not yet half way round the collection, and wished she had brought someone with her, even John Tracey; Bridget Bennett had once unfairly accused him of not knowing the difference between Canaletto and cannelloni but he did at least have a sense of humour. Loretta was surprised by the reverential posture of the other people going round the gallery, their awkward, mincing gait as they walked across priceless carpets, their acquiescent admiration of works of art which did not move her at all.

She was increasingly out of sympathy with the late Mr Frick, who appeared to have written out cheques indiscriminately, his taste not so much eclectic as random. To be fair, she was hardly in the mood to appreciate dozens of old masters, most of them unfamiliar to her or in styles she disliked; each time she moved from picture to picture, or stopped to look at a piece of furniture, she could not examine it properly until she had first thrown a nervous glance over her shoulder to see if anyone was showing undue interest in her. It was actually a rather pointless exercise as she had only someone else's vague description to go on; she spotted several balding, overweight men but none of them was alone, as far as she could tell, or absorbed in anything other than the Goyas and Gainsboroughs. She was left with a restless sensation of anxiety and an unusually clear idea of the kind of
people, their ages and class and nationalities, who visited the Frick. She had arrived at the East 70th Street entrance at the same time as a small group of Swedes, mother, father and two teenage children, who were progressing through the gallery at roughly the same pace, their four blonde heads always immediately behind or just ahead. She had passed two American women so often that they had begun to nod like distant friends although their taste was radically different from hers. They were slender, wearing almost identical sleeveless dresses, one with a pastel cashmere cardigan draped over her shoulders — it was at least cool in the Frick, presumably more out of consideration for the pictures than the visitors — and while their ages were hard to judge, their restrained gestures spoke eloquently of inherited wealth.

They were talking in hushed tones when she arrived in the Boucher room, murmuring their admiration in voices so low that Loretta could catch only an occasional word: peerless, ravishing, incomparable. Loretta had turned from the brunette's upturned face — which bore, she realised, a slight resemblance to Jackie Kennedy -to the first of the four canvases, a dainty female with a rosebud mouth representing Spring. Boucher had painted her on a mossy river bank, her youthful swain plaiting flowers in her hair, and she appeared to be quite unconcerned by the damp rising up through her gold satin frock and knickers — if she was wearing any, which the three fleshy nymphs in the next canvas, Summer, conspicuously were not. Loretta moved towards it and found herself performing an awkward little dance with the New Yorkers as they tried to share out the confined space. Two of the Summer nymphs were naked, sprawling on their discarded petticoats in a way which drew attention to the middle female's generously proportioned and flamboyantly unclothed posterior; the third was
en déshabillé
in yards of white gauze whose lack of resemblance to any standard item of female dress made Loretta raise her eyebrows, like Flora Poste quizzically observing some benign but inexplicable bucolic rite in
Cold Comfort Farm
.

Next door, in the Fragonard room, Loretta had been
confronted by an even less restrained exhibition of posturing youths, simpering girls and snogging
putti.
The Jackie Kennedy lookalike and her friend caught up, immediately exclaiming over the delicacy of flesh tones, the
exquisite
rendering of the foliage. Loretta idly looked up the history of the paintings in her guide book, learning that they had been commissioned by Mme Du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, for her house near Versailles. Three years later — inexplicably, according to the guide, although Loretta thought the charitable explanation was a belated attack of good taste — Mme Du Barry had sent them back; speculating that they had perhaps distracted Madame from her functions as a royal mistress, minimal as Loretta conjectured those to be, she decided she would rather live with anything, including late 1980s Laura Ashley, than all these garlands, ribbons, parasols, doves, urns and waterfalls. There was even something that looked like — Loretta stood on tiptoe, trying and failing to make out what it really was — a discarded thermos flask, abandoned by one of the frisky
putti
.

She had left the New Yorkers in silent rapture in the Fragonard room but now they had caught up, stationing themselves in front of the Italian marble bust which had attracted Loretta's attention. It took her a moment to realise, from their rapid hand movements and facial expressions, that they were disagreeing —
sotto voce
of course, but she only had to move a couple of steps closer to hear what they were saying. The dispute seemed to be about style, whether the bust was ‘classical' or ‘archaic', but it was sufficiently heated to have brought two bright spots of colour to the blonde's powdery cheeks. Loretta wondered what they were really arguing about, what deep and unacknowledged rift in their friendship had been displaced on to this trivial subject, and was fascinated by the speed with which the dispute died down. It was the brunette who gave way, lifting her hand and flaring the fingers as if by doing so she was literally dropping the subject, and a moment later they walked away. Loretta followed at a safe distance, overtaking the Swedes again and noting that they seemed to have fallen into conversation
with a French couple. In the west gallery, which turned out to be by far the largest room in the house, Loretta paused just inside the door, overwhelmed by its size and the sheer number of paintings. It reminded her of the National Gallery in London and she puzzled over Mr and Mrs Frick's decision to build and live in a house which so closely resembled a public institution. She drifted towards the small enamel room at the far end, unable to imagine anyone holding a normal domestic conversation about holidays or what to have for dinner in the presence of all these Constables and Turners.