Read Online Full Stop by Joan Smith - Free Book Online

managers for Marks & Spencer.
    Unlike Loretta, John Tracey usually described himself as apolitical but from the little he’d said in phone calls to San Francisco he seemed to be finding the brash new regime at the
Sunday Herald
hard to take. He was pessimistic about his chances of finding a staff job on another newspaper, even though he had recently won two awards for his reporting of events in Eastern Europe. Just before she left England Loretta had rather diffidently suggested that he should write a book about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, whereupon he rolled his eyes upwards and said: ‘You write the books, Loretta. I’m a fifteen-hundred-words man.’
    The fountains outside the Met were turned off, apparently for maintenance work. Loretta climbed the graceful stone steps, putting Tracey’s problems out of her mind as she reached the top and went inside. In the lofty atrium she heard an eager buzz of conversation in several languages — tour guides briefing their charges, sleek women in gold jewellery discussing where to have lunch, tired children complaining and plucking at their mothers’ sleeves. She was surprised by how familiar it all seemed, from the graceful pillars fronting the wide staircase to the great urns of fresh flowers whose sweet perfume floated on the artificially cool air. It was a relief just to escape the clammy late-morning heat, which had drawn out a film of sweat on her bare arms, and Loretta stood for a moment, enjoying the change. She put her hands in the pockets of her trousers and lifted her head, expecting to find Rosa Bonheur’s flamboyant canvas of a horse fair, but saw in its place a florid picture which looked like a Tiepolo. A glance round the atrium revealed three others in the same style, a special display Loretta assumed, and she wasted no more time on them. She handed over the $7 entrance fee, clipped a metal badge on the collar of her shirt to show she’d paid, and went upstairs.
    She had allowed herself an hour or so before lunch, knowingfrom past experience that her senses gradually became exhausted before the visual richness of Ghirlandaio, Bronzino, Giovanni di Paolo. Looking at pictures was like gorging on chocolate, she thought, strolling from room to room, the appetite feeding on itself until quite suddenly it was sated, and nausea threatened. She hadn’t quite reached that point when she stopped in front of a Filippo Lippi she hadn’t seen before, an unconventional portrait of a couple in profile. The woman’s elaborate dress and graceful figure filled most of the frame, literally relegating her husband to the margins, and Loretta wondered whether the unusual composition reflected the woman’s superior wealth or rank. There was an unspoken intimacy between the sitters, a hint of a smile on the woman’s face which suggested smothered amusement, and Loretta suddenly felt like an intruder on some intensely private moment. She stepped back, uncertain whether the sexual history she had conjectured was really present or had been prompted by her knowledge of the artist’s own prodigious carnal appetites. The effect faded with distance, almost as if it cut the painting down to size, and Loretta noticed for the first time that the woman’s hands were quite awkwardly depicted. She looked down at her watch, realised she was hungry and decided it was time for lunch.
    To get to the ground floor restaurant she had to retrace her steps, a route which took her past a very small Sassetta, the
Journey of the Magi,
which had been almost completely obscured by a party of Japanese tourists when she passed it earlier. This time the room was almost empty and Loretta paused for a moment, entranced by the tiny figures and characteristic Sienese colours — limpid pinks, purplish blues and drab greens. One of the tiny horses carried a brown monkey, so brilliantly rendered that Loretta thought Sassetta must have painted it from