Loretta Lawson 01 - A Masculine Ending

by Joan Smith

  The lavatory she had already been warned about - indeed, she had not been able to avoid noticing its odour on the way up. Andrew had described it colourfully enough to give her a vivid impression of what she would find inside, but he had not warned her about the smell. It stood on the landing, consisted of a hole in the floor, and was shared with the occupants of the other flats. There was a bucket under the sink, Andrew had promised, but it was for use in emergencies only. Loretta concluded that her present circum-stances fitted the bill, and rummaged accordingly. The bucket proved clean, and would get her through until morning.

  The flat had two bedrooms, she had been told, on either side of a small corridor which ran from one of the long sides of the living-room. She entered the corridor, and was just able to discern the door at the end - she had been warned that, confusingly, this door concealed not a bedroom but a cupboard. She opened the door to her right, and found herself in a small, square room with very little furniture, lit by light from an uncurtained window. The bare mattress of the single bed looked lumpy; Andrew and his friends had spared every possible expense in maintaining the flat, it seemed. She wondered if the other room might prove more inviting, and stepped quietly back into the dark corridor to open the door of the second bedroom. This room was darker, the window covered by a tacked-up piece of light-coloured cloth, but there was just enough light to distinguish its contents. Loretta’s gaze took in a double bed, and on it something that rooted her to the spot with shock.

  A man was lying on the bed, his back turned to her, apparently fast asleep. For a moment, Loretta’s brain seemed to stop working and she felt nothing but fear. She had no idea who the stranger was, how he came to be there, nor what she should do.

  Her faculties returning, Loretta realized that the man, most of whose body was covered by bedding, was sleeping so deeply that her quiet entry into the room had not awakened him. She had time to think. She withdrew into the corridor, closing the door gently behind her.

  She collected her bags from the living-room and went again into the first bedroom. An old kitchen chair stood next to the narrow bed. It looked about the same height as the door handle, and she jammed it in position so that she would at least have warning if her unexpected fellow guest chose, for any reason, to take a look into the room. Unlacing her black canvas boots, Loretta sat down on the bed fully clothed and began to think. She was already feeling calmer. There was no evidence at all that the unknown man had a sinister motive for being at the flat. She had seen no sign of a forced entry, which suggested he had keys. He might even be Gardner, paying a visit to the flat unexpectedly, and without bothering to warn Andrew. Although the co-tenants were supposed to confer on the dates that each of them intended to use the flat to avoid just this situation, it was possible that there had not been time to stick to the system, or that dates had got mixed up. There was every reason to think the present situation an innocent accident, rather than anything alarming. At any other time, it probably would not have occurred to her to find the situation frightening. She was simply overwrought. Nevertheless, it would be as well to wait until morning to announce her presence, she decided. The stranger might not be too pleased to be woken unexpectedly at such an hour. Loretta stretched out on the bed and waited for sleep. It was unexpectedly quick in coming.

  In the morning, Loretta woke from a troubled dream in which she had started to give her paper on authorship only to find she had brought with her the menu from the brasserie at the Gare du Nord. Instead of opening her contribution with a refutation of Flaubert’s view on the relationship between art and experience, she had offered her audience a choice between soupe à l’oignon and pâté de campagne. She woke with a start, hungry and confused. Her watch, which was still on her wrist, showed her that it was twenty-five minutes to nine - no time for the wash she badly needed, or the breakfast of tea and fresh croissants in a café that she had promised herself the night before. It was just as well she had slept in her clothes and need not waste time dressing. Gathering her belongings together, she slipped out into the corridor.

  There was no sign of life from the other bedroom. The stranger was clearly enjoying a more leisurely visit to Paris than her own. She opened the front door and, bucket in hand, braved the primitive toilet facilities on the landing. Returning to the kitchen-cum-living-room, she cleaned and put away the bucket, washed her face, and prepared to leave the flat. Since she had no idea who the man was, it seemed prudent to take her bags with her. Hesitating on the landing, she decided to leave the top lock undone. There was no need to puzzle the stranger by leaving the flat in any way different from how she had found it.

  In daylight, she noticed, the apartment building looked much more attractive than it had the night before. The wooden staircase was quaintly charming, and the peeling paint gave the block the aspect of an old and trusted friend. Loretta wished she had time to explore, but she was already in danger of arriving late for the conference. As she closed the heavy front door behind her, she noticed that a faded piece of paper next to the doorbell bore the word ‘concierge’, with a line scored through it; it was a pity that there was no present incumbent to find a taxi for her. She decided to make her way down to rue Monge, which was clearly an important route through the city, and look for a cab.

  As she walked along rue Roland, she felt slightly ashamed of the nervousness she had felt in the street the night before. By the light of day, rue Roland was entirely unremarkable. Running lightly down the steps, overnight bag swinging from her shoulder, she peered northwards along rue Monge in the direction of the river. Her luck appeared to have changed: a noisy American couple were removing an impressive collection of luggage from a taxi parked outside a hotel fifty yards way. The proceedings took so long that Loretta had plenty of time to get to the spot and commandeer the cab. She arrived at the conference centre, sighing with relief, on the dot of nine.

  Her paper, a discussion of the sources from which writers draw their material, was well received. Loretta was gratified; the practice of feminist literary criticism tended to be a tightrope walk among opposing factions who might separately detect either excessive conservatism or extreme radicalism in one and the same piece of work. Today’s talk, a scholarly rebuttal of the masculine notion of ‘pure intellect,’ seemed to please almost everyone.

  It was just as well that the morning provided an easy ride, for the evening meeting of the Fem Sap collective proved even more exhausting and dispiriting than she had anticipated. The Franco-American alliance, which wanted to abolish masculine nouns and verb endings, had carried out some effective lobbying within the collective, and support for their proposal was stronger than expected. But since opposition to it was equally vocal, a stalemate was soon reached from which the meeting degenerated into little more than an exchange of insults; anyone who opposed the proposal was accused of not being a ‘real’ feminist. No vote could be taken, since it turned out that the radicals had not followed the proper procedure for giving notice of their motion, and the wrangle looked set to go on all night.

  Just after nine o’clock, Loretta decided there was little point in staying. She made her apologies and left the conference building. Her plans had been frustrated for the second night running: she had hoped to get away from the meeting in time for dinner with an American lecturer with whom she had struck up a friendship a couple of years before while on an exchange visit to the US. But the woman, who was not a member of the editorial collective, had promised to wait at her hotel for Loretta only until eight, and would be long gone. Climbing into a taxi, Loretta asked the driver to take her back to rue Roland. She had spent most of her lunch break stocking up with bread, cheese, and wine, just in case the evening’s meeting dragged on. As well as ensuring that she would have some supper, it would serve as a peace-offering if the stranger turned out to be hostile to their enforced flat-sharing arrangement.

  At this time of night, rue Roland still showed signs of life. Although the street itself was deserted, there were lights in
windows, and Loretta could hear a radio or television as she walked along the street. It was all comfortingly familiar. As she entered the apartment block, she could hear music and voices which she identified as the ‘Un di felice’ duet from La Traviata. Someone on the ground floor evidently shared her taste for Italian opera. On her way up the stairs, she wondered if her unknown fellow guest would still be at the flat. She rather hoped not, since it would be pleasant to recover from the tiresome events at the Fern Sap meeting with a quiet supper and a good book.

  Her spirits lifted when she discovered the door was double-locked, unlike the previous evening, suggesting that the stranger might have moved on. Stepping inside, Loretta called out ‘Hello’ several times and received no response. The room looked much as she had left it, with no sign of recent habitation. She put down her bags, and crossed into the corridor. The bedroom she had used the night before was empty. She turned to the door of the second bedroom. Just in case the stranger was inside, she rapped on the door sharply with her knuckles. No response. She knocked again. There was still silence. She turned the handle quietly, and peered in. The first thing she noticed in the gloom was that there was no one there. The second thing was a jumble of sheets lying on the bed, their whiteness marred by large, dark stains which looked like nothing so much as blood.

  Loretta moved slowly and silently towards the bed. She bent forward and gingerly touched one of the stains. It was dry, but only recently so. She lifted the sheet from the tangle on the bed, and held it up. It was still damp in one or two places. She wiped her finger across one of the damp patches, and it came away smeared. Even before she held her finger to her nose and recognized the sour aroma, she knew she was right. The stains were of blood, and they had been made very recently indeed. Loretta felt her stomach heave and rushed into the living-room to lean over the kitchen sink.

  When she found that she was not actually going to be sick, she turned on the tap and splashed her face with cold water. Her heart was pounding and she was shaking with a mixture of fear and shock. She had no doubt that a murder had taken place at the flat, and realized that she had been moving as silently as possible in case the murderer was still on the premises. The foolishness of it suddenly assailed her - five minutes ago she had been noisily announcing her presence, and the murderer, if he or she was still in the flat, could not help but be aware of her. The thought calmed her slightly. There were few places to hide, and the door had been double-locked. All the evidence suggested she had arrived after the killer’s getaway. Before giving herself time to think, she rapidly checked the only possible places of concealment: the cupboard at the end of the corridor, and under both beds. She found no one.

  The fact that she was not immediately going to be attacked calmed her. Her first impulse had been to run away from the flat and call the police, but now, deciding that she could afford a few moments to think Loretta sat down in a rather battered armchair standing near the window in the living-room. What, she asked herself, were the facts of the case? Presumably whatever had taken place at the flat involved the man she had seen there last night. She began to tremble again as she contemplated the possibility that she had shared the flat not with a stranger but with a corpse. She tried to visualize what she had seen when she opened the bedroom door the night before. A head on the pillow, facing away from her, the hair cut in such a way that she had been sure the figure was a man. Bed linen covering the rest of the body, which had not at the time struck her as strange, but which now seemed out of place in the current hot weather. Could it really have been a body? She knew that it could.

  But she was not sure. Perhaps the man had been sleeping, and was attacked after she left the flat that morning. In that case, she had no proof that he was dead. In fact, if he was dead, where was the body? Surely the murderer would not attempt to move it in broad daylight? Could the victim have survived the attack, used the sheets to stem the blood, and managed to get out and get help? The situation was full of imponderables. What could she tell the police? Little more than that she had arrived at the flat and found bloodstains there. And what was her own position? She could not help the police by directing them to the flaf’s owner - she did not even know the names of all four English people who shared the lease. Nor could she put them in touch with Andrew, through whom she came to be staying at the flat: he was enjoying a late summer idyll on a Greek island with an English artist he had met on holiday the year before. She could remember neither the name of the island nor that of the artist, her knowledge of the latter being limited to the facts that he had lived there for ten years and painted bulls. The French authorities, famous for their orderly minds, might construe her vagueness as highly suspicious. And wasn’t there some peculiarity of French law which said you were guilty until proved innocent? It would make things even worse if she admitted she had probably spent the previous night in the flat with the victim.

  A new thought occurred to her, causing a sharp intake of breath. Her mother, she was forgetting about her mother. She had to be back in England on Monday to take her mother to hospital. Mrs Lawson was so terrified by the prospect of her hysterectomy that her daughter doubted whether she would turn up if left to her own devices. But if Loretta reported what she had found at the flat, her chance of getting back in time to stick to this schedule seemed remote. The police were hardly likely to allow their sole potential witness –or suspect, she thought with a shudder - to leave the country only hours after raising the alarm. The more she considered it, the less she liked the idea of going to the authorities. Her reluctance was reinforced by her sudden recollection of Andrew’s account of the difficulties he had encountered while teaching in Paris during les événements of 1968. It had taken days of dogged negotiation to bail out some of his students who had been accidentally caught up in the riots, he had told her, adding that it would take at least a murder to get him within sight of a French police station again. Of course, what had happened in rue Roland might be a murder, but - she always came back to this - she simply did not know. Perhaps she could make an anonymous phone call to the police, tipping them off to come and have a look at the flat? On second thoughts, she decided, it might be better to wait until she was at the station next day, when she was well on her way to leaving the country. Even if the call were traced, it would be too late to do anything about finding her. Meanwhile, there was no question of her spending another night at the flat; it was not, she hoped, too late to find a hotel, even if it were not the sort of place in which she would normally choose to stay.

  Now that she had decided on a course of action, Loretta felt much calmer. She got up to leave the flat, but suddenly stopped. She had been searching the apartment for a human being; she had not looked for anything that might be a clue as to what had happened. She went back to the door of the bedroom in which she had made her discovery, and paused on the threshold. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and peered inside. Averting her eyes from the mess on the bed, she glanced quickly round the rest of the room.

  A heap of blankets lay on the floor at the foot of the bed; with a shudder, she decided her stomach was not up to examining them for further stains. The rest of the room was curiously devoid of personal objects, and she was relieved to be able to back out and close the door. A search of the room where she had slept the night before proved similarly unproductive. She returned to the living-room, taking in for the first time the evidence of occasional occupation: a large bottle of olive oil on a shelf above the primitive cooker bore the date of purchase, two months earlier, on its label. The same date, scribbled in Biro, appeared on several packets and tins further along the same shelf; whoever used the flat in July had evidently stocked up on groceries. But there was nothing of more recent date. Loretta decided to give up the hunt for clues, and bent to pick up her bags.

  Her eye fell on a cheap wooden bookcase, half concealed by the chair she had been sitting in earlier, and she automatically moved closer. She could never resist discovering other people’s taste in books. T
he shelves contained an impressive array of green-jacketed Penguins, including Mischief and Green for Danger. She wondered which of the four co-tenants shared her liking for crime novels. She spotted a much-used guide to Paris, drew it out, and found to her satisfaction that it had been published in 1968. As she put it back, the book next to it caught her attention. Unlike the other volumes in the bookcase, it was shiny and new. Twisting her head to read the title, Loretta gave a little gasp of surprise. The author’s name, Toby Mac-Gregor, meant nothing to her, but the title gave away a great deal. The Resurrection of Little Nell, it said, and, in smaller letters, A Challenge to the Authority of Charles Dickens. What on earth was a deconstructionist text doing in the flat? Deconstruction was the literary fad that had succeeded structuralism, and she considered it even more pretentious and silly than its predecessor. As far as Loretta was concerned, the purpose of the movement was to state the obvious in as convoluted a way as possible, thereby creating a mystique. The trick was to ignore the advice she’d been given at school, and never use a short word when a long one would do. It certainly wasn’t the sort of book that Andrew would be interested in: he was a historian, and a traditionalist at that. Nor had he given the impression that the unknown Gardner, or either of the other co-tenants, lectured in English, let alone that any of them had deconstructionist leanings. Sharing Loretta’s scorn for the whole business, it was unlikely that he would have forgone such an opportunity for shared mirth.