What Men Say by Joan Smith

familiar spiel about the benefits of regular exercise. She had joined the previous November, seduced by an advert in the
Oxford Times
offering a free trial class, but she had quickly recognized that her fantasy of thrice-weekly workouts and a body like Madonna was exactly that—a fantasy.
    Bridget, who astonished Loretta by volunteering to join with her, had lost interest much sooner. Exercise was boring, she announced after a month in which she had tried just about every class on offer from beginners’ aerobics to jazz dance and the ungrammatical flex’n’stretch. Then she met Sam Becker at an early Christmas party and abandoned the gym altogether, telling Loretta with a demure smile that she needed all her energy for the best sex she’d ever had. Loretta returned from a dreary New Year’s Eve party at her sister’s house in Weybridge to find Bridget in even greater raptures over Sam, their amazing love life and the wonderful time they had spent together over Christmas. Going to the gym seemed tame by comparison, but Loretta suddenly had time on her hands; Bridget hardly seemed to notice that she had cancelled several long-standing engagements, or that their weekly trips to the cinema had been replaced by a perfunctory phone call.
    Suddenly in February, her affair with Sam seemed to be over. She turned up in Southmoor Road wearing dark glasses and sniffling into a crumpled handkerchief, saying the break had taken place a week before and she still could not bear to talk about it. Instead she plungedinto a hectic round of activity, accepting every party invitation that came along, signing up for French conversation classes at the Alliance Française in Polstead Road and begging Loretta to accompany her to a new dance class at the gym. Then, abruptly as he’d disappeared, Sam came back on the scene. Loretta could hardly believe her ears when, three or four weeks later, Bridget bought her dinner at Browns and announced that Sam had asked her to marry him; this revelation was soon followed by another, a telephone call in which Bridget gasped that she had just done a home pregnancy test and the result was positive. Unable to gauge from Bridget’s voice whether this was good news or bad, Loretta asked noncommittal questions which elicited that Bridget did not seem to know. She and Sam had
talked
about having a child, but nothing like as quickly; she had no idea how she was going to cope with getting married, moving house, editing a new edition of
Clarissa
and having a baby . . . She hadn’t even told him yet, she added—had rung Loretta first to get her own thoughts in order before she broke the news.
    Sam’s reaction, in the event, was unalloyed delight. He instantly accelerated their house-moving plans, taking Bridget on an exhausting tour of seven or eight addresses in and around Oxford each Saturday and Sunday until they settled on Thebes Farm. Money did not seem to be a problem—Loretta was astonished when Bridget showed her the details of a large detached house with a swimming pool in Rawlinson Road—and they signed a contract without even a hint of a buyer for Bridget’s solid but unexceptional semi. It had now been standing empty for several weeks and looked like remaining that way until there was a dramatic improvement in the housing market.
    It was nearly half past nine when Loretta emergedfrom the gym and ran lightly down the stairs into Park End Street. She felt and looked much better after a hot shower, her hair hanging in damp curls to her shoulders and the grubby jeans she had worn earlier replaced by flowered leggings and a big white shirt. In the deli two doors down she bought fresh white bread, unsalted butter, quince jelly and, as an afterthought, margarine and the least unappetizing brand of muesli she could find. Bridget had been fast asleep when she left—at any rate, there were no sounds of movement in her room when Loretta listened at the door