Full Stop

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Authors: Joan Smith
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book easily and returned to the phone.
    â€˜What’s her name?’
    â€˜Rosenstein. Dr Hester Rosenstein.’
    Loretta read out the number. ‘Toni, before you go.’ She hesitated, not sure what to say, and in the end asked baldly: ‘Do you know anyone called Michael?’
    â€˜Michael? Sure. Why? Did someone leave a message?’
    â€˜Ye-es.’
    â€˜Didn’t he give his last name? It’s most likely Michael Koganovich, we’ve been developing a new course together, he said he’d call before he went off to Rome for the summer. Have you read his work on Derrida? He has a very interesting perspective on — shit, I don’t have many of these things left and I have to call Dr Rosenstein.’
    Loretta realised this was not the time to discuss obscene phone calls. ‘Ring me later,’ she said, ‘I’m going to be out all day but you can get me between five and seven. Toni?
Toni?
    The line went dead, presumably because Toni had cut the connection in her eagerness to ring Dr Rosenstein. Loretta wondered idly what it was all about, having got used to the way Americans routinely hooked up with an array of specialists, approaching them direct instead of waiting months for referralsas happened under the NHS. The system was faster than the British one, much more expensive, and Loretta had a suspicion that it resulted in unnecessary medical treatment, particularly operations. The bath was almost full and she turned off the taps, removed Toni’s robe and stepped into the water. Perhaps she was having tests, Loretta speculated as she added more cold, trying to recall exactly what Toni had said the previous afternoon — something about how difficult it was to conceive at her age. It would explain why she had sounded so distracted a few moments ago.
    The bathroom door, which Loretta hadn’t fully closed, swung eerily open as if propelled by an invisible hand. Getting more used to the set-up in the flat, Loretta postponed her panic about intruders and waited for Honey to appear. Sure enough, she was rewarded by a series of peremptory barks; the dog, it seemed, was reluctant to cross the threshold into the bathroom, perhaps because she associated it with doggy shampoo and other unwelcome grooming procedures.
    â€˜Five minutes, dog,’ Loretta sang out, and slid deeper into the perfumed water.
    Central Park was hillier than Loretta remembered, and teeming with people. Half of New York seemed to have been lured out by the prospect of brilliant sunshine when the mist cleared, and she was continually overtaken by joggers, roller skaters and even the occasional pony and trap. Loretta turned to watch one of them clip-clop smartly into the distance, surprised by the realisation that at the turn of the century this would have been an everyday form of transport even in New York. Her impression of the city as a twentieth-century creation, with entrepreneurs competing with each other to build higher and better, was so vivid that she hardly connected it with the city she knew from the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Smiling to herself, and wondering if she’d have time over the weekend to visit Washington Square, Loretta resumed her walk across the park. There was a relaxed, almost carnival atmosphere in spite of theheat, and the fact that virtually everyone except Loretta was wearing some variation on sports gear — tubular cycling shorts, track suit bottoms, vests in acid purples and greens — fostered the illusion that she was on the periphery of some major sporting event. It was certainly more pleasant than the narrow, scrubby strip of land sandwiched between Riverside Drive and the fast-moving traffic on Henry Hudson Parkway where she had walked Honey earlier that morning.
    The dog had dragged her on a zigzag course, sniffing the ground and setting off on trails which petered out in dusty earth until Loretta decided she had had enough and turned

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