by Joan Smith
Loretta turned off the engine and sat quietly for a few seconds, letting her eyes get accustomed to the gloom. There were two paths leading away from the gate, one curving round to the front door of Spinners Cottage, the other stretching straight ahead to a second gate, then swerving right and disappearing round the low, pale bulk of Shore House. Loretta felt reluctant to get out of the car and wound down her window a couple of inches instead; she was immediately aware of a sound on her right, beyond the houses, the gentle sucking of the sea against a pebbled shore. She wasn’t far from the water, though she couldn’t really distinguish it from the sky in the narrow patch of light between Spinners Cottage and the trees.
She turned her head and looked through the windscreen, on which a light drizzle had begun to fall, slightly obscuring her view. Spinners Cottage, in spite of its name, was larger than its neighbour – was, in fact, a rather substantial building. Shore House, on the other hand, was tiny and had been painted a pale colour which gave it an unreal, almost floating aspect in the darkness. She could make out a couple of rectangular shapes on the lower floor which were obviously windows, but no door. It must be on the far side of the house, out of sight, and Loretta opened the car door to go and have a look, telling herself firmly that she would come to no harm. She was half out of her seat when the cold, damp air stung her face, reinforcing her reluctance to leave the car. What was the point of exposing herself to the elements in this bleak and lonely place? There wasn’t much to see – she didn’t even have a torch – and any clues that had been missed by the police would have been washed away by the rain.
Loretta pulled the door shut, too late; the dampness had already invaded the car’s interior. She shivered, clasping her hands together and blowing on them for warmth. The window on her side of the car was still slightly open and she hastily wound it up, trying to insulate herself from the bleak scene outside. She couldn’t imagine why Sandra had chosen to come here, what had drawn her away from the cosy flat in Islington to this desolate location. A shudder went through her at this thought; until now she had successfully kept at bay the images planted in her brain by Ghilardi’s photographs, but the blocking mechanism suddenly ceased to work. Loretta gripped the steering-wheel with both hands as she imagined Sandra running from Shore House, dragging open first one gate then another, hurling herself into her car. . . She turned to look over her shoulder as the film rolled on in her head, imagining the roar of an engine as Sandra set off too fast, the crump of the collision, the sound of breaking glass. Sandra’s bloodstained face rose before her and Loretta shook her head as if to dislodge the photographic image. She took a deep breath and leaned back against the head-rest. Why was she doing this to herself? She had been mad to come here, she should have listened to Ghilardi –
Loretta reached for the car keys and started the engine. She had begun to feel light-headed; hunger had a lot to do with it, but she could not deny that the day had turned into something of an ordeal. She put the car into reverse and rolled back and to her left, taking care to miss the outbuildings. Once she was driving away from Hardimans Deep she felt better, though she took care not to look too closely at the twisted trees which surrounded the car like a petrified forest. She picked up speed as soon as she had negotiated the sharp turn she remembered from her approach, eager to escape from the wood. It was still cold in the car and she turned on the heater, moving up into second gear and then third. The engine whined and complained; she dropped down a gear, reaching for the radio in the hope of soothing her nerves with the sound of human voices. She was relieved to hear the common sense tones of one of the presenters of Kaleidoscope, and reached the end of the drive in a calmer frame of mind.
As she was pulling out into the lane she saw headlights coming towards her. There wasn’t room for the two cars to pass, and the unknown driver stopped and reversed to a gap in the hedge so that Loretta could get by. The person in the driving-seat was simply a dark figure, and Loretta had no idea of the car’s make, but she had the distinct impression that he – if it was a he – turned to stare as she passed. She glanced in her rear-view mirror and saw the car turning down the track she had just left; she was seized by a momentary panic, a conviction that the car was going to stop and come after her, that the driver would demand to know what she had been up to at Hardimans Deep. The feeling was so strong that she increased her pressure on the accelerator and had to brake as she reached the junction which hadn’t appeared on Ghilardi’s map. Her heart was thumping and she turned up the radio before turning left, trying to interest herself in a discussion of an experimental production of Antony and Cleopatra with a Jamaican reggae singer in one of the leading roles. She found it hard to concentrate, preoccupied first by her unreasoning fear and then by the realization that she was behaving foolishly. The track to Shore House was far too narrow to allow anyone to make a three-point turn and come after her. Whoever had been driving the large car – she had noticed its size, if nothing else – would have had no choice but to keep going until he reached Hardimans Deep. In any case, what possible reason could he have for giving chase? Loretta turned down the over-efficient car heater and fixed her attention firmly on the review of the play. Did she agree with the female journalist who was claiming that the black Cleopatra emphasized the character’s ambivalent status as both queen and outsider? In her present frame of mind, Loretta really had no idea.
An hour and a half later she was sitting at a plastic-topped table in the restaurant of a motorway service station, pushing away an empty plate. She felt better for the meal, even though the standard fry-up probably wasn’t as good as the sandwiches she had watched Ghilardi consume at the café in Lymington. She sipped a glass of water, glad to be in a brightly lit room with lots of other people. Her back was stiff from driving, and her left arm ached a little; she sat up straight and brought both elbows backwards in an attempt to loosen her shoulders. She was over halfway to London but she didn’t feel like resuming her journey yet; her gaze fell on her shoulder-bag, which was on the seat next to her, and she put out a hand and undid the catch. She felt inside and drew out the morning’s post, taking the letter from Vixen Press from its envelope and re-reading it. A frown creased her brow: was she making a mistake in giving the book to a small feminist publishing house instead of one of the big academic presses like OUP? Susie Lathlean’s letter was uncritical in its enthusiasm, and there was no mention of sending the typescript to other authorities on American literature to canvass their opinion. On the other hand, hadn’t Loretta chosen Vixen precisely because it didn’t play by the usual rules? Loretta knew very well what her chief academic rivals would make of the book, that they would be scandalized by her treatment of Wharton’s sexuality and its relation to the novels. She should have more confidence in herself, she thought sternly; her argument was well-made, and the book’s flaws were very minor ones. The only real problem was the title; deciding she didn’t want to think about Vixen’s objections for the moment, Loretta put the letter on the table and picked up the unopened airmail envelope from John Tracey. She slid her fingers under the flap and tore it open, smoothing out two pages of flimsy paper covered in Tracey’s neat handwriting. She sipped her water and sat back to read, expecting the usual journalistic gossip and a query about how the arrangements for the divorce were progressing. Three-quarters of the way down the first page her mouth fell open, and she found herself re-reading the last paragraph in disbelief.
‘. . . not the sort of thing you can say over the phone’, Tracey had written, getting to the point only after a great deal of prevarication. ‘And the trouble with you, Loretta, is that I never know how you’re going to take things. But I thought it was only fair to come clean and let you know the reason I want a divorce, which is that I’m planning to get married again. This may come as a shock, and I suppose you’ll disapprove, in fact I’m sure you will, but I do know what I’m doing. So does Soulla – I met her the week I came out here, and we’ve had plenty of time to get to know each other. She is in
any case planning to come to London next year, as she’s hoping to get a place to do an MA – she’s just had a year off after getting her degree in Greece. . .’ Loretta blinked at this confirmation that she had read the paragraph correctly the first time: Tracey must be around twice the age of his fiancée.
‘Honestly,’ she said aloud, and looked up embarrassed when she realized someone was standing by her table.
‘You finished?’ A tall, thin boy with a white face and a paper cap on his dark hair was pointing to her greasy plate.
‘Oh yes, take it,’ Loretta said, eager to return to Tracey’s letter. ‘No – nothing else, thanks.’
She began reading again, discovering that the unknown Soulla was twenty-three years old, had a degree in financial administration, and was currently working in her father’s business, of which Tracey gave no details, in Nicosia.
‘We would both like,’ Tracey continued, halfway down the second page, ‘a traditional Cypriot wedding, though of course it’s impossible to set a date until things are sorted out at your end. Speaking of which, I’d be interested to know how all that’s going. I’ve talked to Soulla about you, and she’s very keen to meet you’ – Loretta’s eyes opened wide; she was not a little alarmed at the prospect – ‘and in fact we’d both like it very much if you could fly out for the wedding, whenever it may be. Meanwhile, drop me a line when you’ve got time and let me know how you are, and how long the divorce business is likely to take. Yours ever, John.’
Loretta sat for a while staring into space, Tracey’s letter in her hand. There was no reason why he shouldn’t get married again; unlike Loretta, he had had no doubts first time round, and didn’t appear to share her view of marriage as a patriarchal institution. Now that the initial shock was wearing off, she really didn’t think she minded. What was irritating – no, that wasn’t quite the right word, it was more a sense of disappointment that she felt – was the fact that he’d chosen a woman half his age and one from what Loretta suspected was an unreconstructedly macho culture. Someone, in other words, who probably hadn’t been touched by the feminism about which Tracey had made so many nervous jokes. And what on earth did a ‘traditional Cypriot wedding’ involve?
As Loretta returned the letter to its envelope, it occurred to her that she might be doing Soulla an injustice. The woman had been to university in Greece, where there was a small but active feminist movement led by Margaret Chant Papandreou, the American wife of the prime minister. It was quite possible that Soulla shared some of Loretta’s ideas; they might even get on rather well together when the meeting finally took place, a possibility which made Loretta smile. How would Tracey react to a sisterly alliance between his first and second wives?
She got up, paid her bill, and went out into the car park, conceding that the idea of Tracey’s new fiancée took some getting used to. For one thing it raised all sorts of practical questions, such as where the couple intended to live. Tracey had hung on to his house in Brixton – it was currently rented out to a very pleasant gay couple, one of whom was an actor with a small part in a West End play – but perhaps he and Soulla would want to buy a place together. Loretta realized that Tracey hadn’t mentioned his fiancée’s surname, and wondered about Soulla’s views on the subject; it had always galled him that Loretta refused to change hers.
She unlocked the car door, tossed her bag on to the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel. She felt exhausted in spite of the hot meal she’d recently eaten, usually a sure-fire way of restoring her energy. Tracey’s announcement, coming on top of all the other events of the day, had made her feel like the operator of an overloaded switchboard, struggling unsuccessfully to keep half a dozen lines uncrossed. She looked at her watch, remembering she’d intended to ring Robert when she got home, and wondered if she couldn’t put it off until tomorrow. He might still be sulking about Saturday night, and she really didn’t think she could cope. . . Loretta reached along the parcel shelf to where she kept her tapes, taking the first that came to hand and pushing it unseen into the cassette player. It turned out to be Joan Sutherland in the middle of the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor – a peculiarly appropriate choice, she thought, turning up the volume and starting the engine.
Chapter 9
Loretta pulled open a drawer of the London Library card index and ran her finger lightly along the top of its contents. She paused a third of the way in to check which bit of the alphabet she’d got to, then made a random plunge further inside. She was looking for a book by Baroness Orczy, a collection of detective stories under the title Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, and was delighted when she found a card bearing its details. She closed the drawer and set off for the lift to the upper floors where the Orczy novels were kept, stifling a yawn. She had slept badly after her trip to Lymington the previous day, and it was only the fact that the spring term began the next day that had prompted her to do some work. Towards the end of the previous year there had been a discussion among the more progressive members of the English department about the absence of popular fiction in the BA syllabus, and Loretta had been fired with enthusiasm for the idea of an optional series of tutorials on the detective novel. There was a serious point to her interest: women were so prominent in the field that she believed it would provide a starting-point for a debate on the question of whether there was an identifiably female form of fiction. Until Christmas the Edith Wharton book had prevented her from giving much thought to the structure of the course, but on Monday she had started drawing up a list of novels to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of the genre.
The lift doors opened and she stepped inside, still thinking about how to shape the course. It was important to go in with a strong proposal, for she was bound to meet stiff opposition from the traditionalists in the department. The lift moved upwards, came to a halt, and Loretta got out. She was turning towards the door into the fiction section when a stray and most unwelcome thought came to her: Sandra’s luggage was still sitting behind the back seat of her car. She had completely forgotten it the previous evening when she parked round the corner from her flat, so battered by the day’s events that she’d hurried straight home and run herself a hot bath. In fact, she hadn’t given the bags another thought after leaving the inquest with Derek Ghilardi, even though they’d been one of the reasons for her trip to Lymington. What was she to do? If only she’d remembered while she was talking to the detective, she could have handed them over there and then; who knows, they might turn out to contain a clue – something that would provide him with the evidence he needed to reopen the investigation. Loretta felt a moment’s excitement, as if she held the key which would unlock the secrets surrounding Sandra’s death, and then common sense returned, and with it a sense of deflation. It was highly unlikely that Sandra’s bags contained anything other than clothes and perhaps the odd book – Loretta remembered that Sandra had been reading some long historical tome over Christmas. She could ring Ghilardi, but would he be allowed to come all the way to London on a case that was officially closed? She wasn’t even sure that the police worked like that, Ghilardi would probably have to contact Scotland Yard and ask them to come round to her flat –
‘Oh, sorry.’ She moved hastily to one side, realizing she had been blocking the exit from the lift. A grey-haired woman with glasses glared at Loretta as she skirted round her, then disappeared through the door into the fiction section.
Loretta followed, still turning over the problem. She supposed she ought really to telephone Tom Neil and ask what he wanted done with the bags; strictly speaking, since he was Sandra’s next of kin, they were his property. She brightened slightly, thinking that she could suggest putting them on a train – Red Star, wasn’t that what the British Rail parcels service was called? Tom Neil or Ghilardi, that was the choice. . . She walked gingerly along the narrow corridor between the rows of shelves, trying to avoid getting her high heels stuck in the decorative ironwork floor. She always meant to wear flat shoes for her visits to the library, and she almost
always forgot. She reached the section she wanted, tugged a cord to put on the light between the high stacks of books, and turned left in search of Baroness Orczy. She was in luck; the book hadn’t been borrowed by another reader, and she put her worries to one side for a moment as she examined its old-fashioned illustrations. Lady Molly was a willowy, glamorous figure, and Loretta was all the more surprised to find an uncompromisingly feminist statement on the first page:
We of the Female Department are dreadfully snubbed by the men, though don’t tell me that women have, not ten times as much intuition as the blundering and sterner sex; my firm belief is that we shouldn’t have half so many undetected crimes if some of the so-called mysteries were put to the test of feminine investigation.
Loretta laughed out loud, closed the book, and returned to the narrow walkway, pausing to switch off the light between the stacks. She had to wait a couple of minutes for the lift, which she passed by dipping further into the pages of the book. Downstairs she signed for it, collected her coat and went out into the weak winter sunshine in St James’s Square.