Full Stop by Joan Smith Page B

for home. Honey promptly initiated a noisy quarrel with an oversized poodle which Loretta recognised as a
bichon frise
even as the lead slipped through her fingers and she realised she was contravening at least one and probably several of the city’s by-laws.
‘Don’t
let her off the lead’ Toni had warned, relating an incident in which a friend had been fined by the parks police. She hadn’t mentioned Honey’s hysterical dislike of dogs larger than herself and Loretta lunged forward, panting as she seized Honey’s collar and extricated her from the snarling mass of fur.
    â€˜Is he always so aggressive?’ the poodle’s owner inquired in a tone of detached interest when the dogs were eyeing each other from a safe distance. ‘You thought of taking him to a shrink?’
    Loretta didn’t waste time explaining Honey was a girl. She apologised curtly, hurried back to the flat and discovered that the dog had spent part of the hot, suffocating night chewing the handles of her weekend case. Thoroughly disgruntled and muttering under her breath, she scooped up all her belongings and put them out of Honey’s reach — shoes perched incongruously on bookshelves, her passport and spare cash on top of the fridge. So far the the dog had shown an interest only in leather but Loretta did not want to risk coming home and finding her air ticket punctured with teethmarks and sodden with canine saliva. Honey reacted as though it was a game, rearing up on her hind legs and barking noisily every time Loretta thought of a new hiding place. Either Toni’s neighbours were a tolerant lot or thewalls of the flat were thicker than she imagined, for no one banged on the front door to complain about the racket. She eventually escaped from the apartment block a few minutes before eleven, quite a lot later than she intended.
    Nodding to the lift attendant, who recognised her from her earlier outing with Honey, she waited for the lift to descend and compared Toni’s cramped flat, with its fearsome list of rules and regulations about everything from having visitors to stay to separating different types of rubbish for recycling, with her own house in Oxford. Loretta’s study, and her bedroom, were at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the canal; on sunny mornings she had breakfast outside on a small terrace, watching boats go by and smiling as her grey cat stalked bees and butterflies. He was a companionable animal and his vocal range was in an altogether more subtle register than the fusillade of growls and barks which Honey seemed to let loose on the slightest pretext. Loretta got out of the lift, reminding herself that the dog was only a puppy, and probably bewildered by the unexpected absence of her owner.
    Before setting off for the Metropolitan Museum Loretta had left a message for her American agent, Kelly Sibon. She also recorded a new outgoing message on Toni’s answering-machine, punctuated by strange chomping sounds as Honey worried a rubber bone, in case Kelly or John Tracey tried to contact her before she returned. Loretta frowned as she thought of Tracey, and as she emerged from the park on to Museum Mile she worried about what he would do if he had to leave the
Sunday Herald.
He freely admitted he had neither the desire nor the confidence to go freelance; when Loretta was offered a part-time lectureship at Oxford, enabling her to give up a job she hated in London, he had been both admiring and envious. Their situations were not dissimilar in that Loretta’s unhappiness had been brought about by what her former boss, the Professor of English at Fitzroy College, insisted on referring to as ‘new working practices’. He enthusiastically welcomed the idea of working more closely with industry, so much so that Loretta once lost hertemper at a staff meeting and snapped that she didn’t want to spend her working life turning out literate food department