Peter sat up, concentrating. ‘So this Slater woman was a feminist once?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So it looks as if this is a list of feminists? That’s what Power and Macarthy are.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why the crosses after Leona Power?’
I could hardly believe he didn’t know. But, come to that, there aren’t too many news bulletins in a hut in Alaska. ‘Because she’s dead,’ I said. ‘She died last month.’
Chapter Two
Peter was interested. ‘Do you think this woman killed her?’
‘I don’t see how she can have. It was a car accident, one of those flukes. She was driving on a country road on her way back to London from some place in the sticks, and a driver coming the other way had a heart attack, lost control and hit her head-on. As far as I remember from the inquest.’
I’d probably got it right: facts are my business and I have a fly-paper memory.
‘But if she doesn’t mean she’s killed her, what does she mean, Stop me if you can?’
‘I don’t know, Peter,’ I said rather crossly. ‘How should I know?’
‘You know most things,’ he said. ‘Or claim to.’
‘Stop bitching . . . Watch the rugby.’
‘This accident, it sounds like an act of God, right? Like you’re walking along and an engine falls off an aeroplane and lands on your head.’
‘Sort of.’
‘So nobody could have fixed it except God. Maybe she thinks she’s God. Just like I said, a nutter.’
We both looked at the hamster.
‘Or maybe the crosses mean something else,’ I said. ‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter to eleven.’
‘Pass me the telephone.’ I needed to know who Elspeth Driscoll was, and if she was a feminist of any kind my old mate Jordan would know. It wasn’t too late to ring her: she seldom went to bed before three in the morning.
When Jordan answered, I identified myself then held the receiver away from my ear. She always coughed, but she coughed longest on the telephone, on other people’s time. I’d noticed a while back that when she rang me, which was seldom – I often needed her information; she seldom needed mine, and though she was gay she didn’t fancy me – she coughed much less.
When the spasm was over, there was a silence. She’d gone to fetch her cigarettes, her lighter and an ashtray. I waited till she’d sat down again and lit up. I was lucky she hadn’t changed the music on the CD player and cooked a four-course meal while she was at it.
Peter watched me in astonishment. ‘Who’re you calling?’ he said.
‘Jordan.’
‘You’re with a man,’ the receiver quacked accusingly.
‘Not a man. Only Peter,’ I said. ‘My long-ago cameraman. A friendly blast from the past. Listen, Jordan, who’s Elspeth Driscoll?’
She coughed again. ‘How much detail do you want?’
‘Anything you have.’
‘I’ve got her phone number. I called for a comment three weeks ago, when I was doing a tribute to Leona Power for the Guardian. If you need any more, you’ll have to find it yourself. She hasn’t done anything that I can remember since . . . oh, the early seventies.’
‘What did she do then?’
‘She was still one of the Vestal Virgins. At Oxford. It was a pioneering women’s group, for England. They were much further ahead in the States, of course. It was led by Macarthy and Power.’
‘Was Melanie Slater a Vestal Virgin?’
‘Yes, she was,’ snapped Jordan, who is very competitive about information. ‘If you know so much about it, why are you asking me?’
‘I’m asking you because you know everything about women’s movements and I know very little,’ I said, ‘and that’s all the grovelling you’ll get, so take it and like it. Tell me about the Vestal Virgins.’
‘Power and Macarthy were the co-founders. They were a bit older than the others, because though they were undergraduates they’d both already taken degrees in their own countries, Power in America – Vassar, I think – and Macarthy in New Zealand. They were in Oxford on scholarships, and had a lot more savvy than the other two. Slater and Driscoll. And a lot more brains.’
She coughed, spluttered, and left the phone.
I put the receiver down, drained my beer, and went to the kitchen to fetch two more. When I came back the receiver was quacking. ‘Tanner? Tanner? Get your buns back here. Now.’
‘I’m here,’ I said mildly. ‘I needed more beer.’ I passed one to Peter.
‘Did you see my Guardian piece?’
‘No.’
‘It has a quote from Driscoll. And a photograph. The Vestal Virgins in a punt on the Isis, 1969. Weren’t we all young and beautiful then?’
I’d been five. Jordan must have been in her late thirties: she was well past sixty now, and looked like a hyperactive monkey, brown and thin and shrivelled and jerky. I try never to alienate a contact, however. ‘Yes,’ I said nostalgically. ‘Those were the days.’
‘Starring in “Show and Tell” at nursery school, were you?’ she said sarkily. I like that about Jordan. She’s an unguided missile: you never know where she’ll come at you from. Flattering her is a challenge. ‘D’you want me to fax it through now?’
‘Yes, do that. And give me her telephone number, would you? And Macarthy’s? I’ve got Melanie Slater’s.’
‘I don’t have them to hand. Tomorrow morning do you?’
‘Tonight would be better.’
‘Not for me. You’ve interrupted a love tryst, and I’m getting right back to it when I’ve finished this ciggy. You’ll get it tomorrow morning and like it.’
‘I’ll like it.’
‘Are you going to tell me why you want to know?’
‘Not right now. I wouldn’t want to hold up the course of true love, would I? What’s she like?’
‘Young, gorgeous and dim as the lighting in a New York bar. Talk to you soon. Hey – I’ve just remembered something else about Driscoll. D’you want it?’
‘Please.’
‘She wrote a book. A feminist book. Published in the mid-eighties. Total crap. Grace tried to drum up some kind of reviewing for it but it died the death. ’Bye.’
She hung up on her cough: I hung up too, and waited until the article inched and clicked its way out of the fax. It was more than A4 size: Jordan had had to cut it up. The photographs came first. A familiar picture of Leona Power, a studio one which she’d been using for publicity for the last two years or so, because I remembered it from displays in booksellers’ windows. It was backlit and flattering, but she didn’t need much flattering anyway. She’d had a beautiful face, fine-boned and delicate, and it had aged well. Like many Americans, she inhabited the time warp Skilful Beauty Care: it could have been her in her early thirties. Her blonde hair still looked alive and young. Good hairdressers, good make-up. She’d never neglected appearances. She’d thought they were important, and for her they had been. I’d read some of her work and it was mostly collections of what other people thought and said. Not a great original thinker, Leona Power, but she could always be relied on to look pretty and smile.
The photograph I really wanted came through next. The Vestal Virgins in their punt. Four young faces, four young women in tiny late-sixties skirts, all legs. Grace Macarthy’s legs dominated the photograph, partly because they were so long, partly because she was the only one standing up, because she was poling the punt. She was a very tall woman, with a handsome face, hawklike rather than puddingy, despite her youth. She had plenty of thick straight sixties hair and her eyes looked straight into the camera. The others were posing. She wasn’t. She was impatient and she held her punt-pole like an offensive weapon.
Peter’d got up from the sofa and was looking over my shoulder. ‘She’s a knockout,’ he said.
‘Which one?’ Macarthy was magnificent; the other three all looked similar to me, pretty, forgettable, young.
‘That one.’ He poin
ted to a girl in the front of the picture. She had very short hair, large eyes, a little pointed chin. According to the caption under the photo it was Elspeth Driscoll. You couldn’t tell from looking at her then what she’d look like now.
And I’d never have recognized any of the three kittenish child/ women of the picture in the hard-faced Melanie ‘Shoot Single Mothers’ Slater I’d interviewed. Not for a moment.
‘Alex, where’s this glass ceiling, then?’ said Peter. He was back at the letter again.
‘It’s not a thing or a place, it’s a feminist idea,’ I said. ‘It’s the invisible barrier men put up to stop women being really successful – rising to be High Court judges or top bankers or chairmen of international companies or consultants in top hospitals or –’
‘Yeah, yeah, I get the point. But some of them are.’
‘Not nearly enough.’
‘All that stuff’s out of date. Everything’s changed. I had a female sound recordist working with me last year, for Chrissake. She was a real dog. Built like a brick shithouse.’
‘Was she a good sound recordist?’
‘All right. No, be fair, she was good. But she looked like hell.’
I took a deep breath. Some time when we were on location together for a month I’d raise his consciousness. Maybe.
He went on. ‘So this sounds like paranoid bullshit to me.’
‘Paranoid cowshit, perhaps. I don’t agree. I think there is a glass ceiling, but right now I’m more interested in how the Womun plans to smash it. I can’t see that killing feminists will help.’
‘You say the Melanie Slater woman is anti-feminist? Killing her might.’
‘But why Grace Macarthy? None of it makes sense,’ I said.
‘So what’re you going to do about it, then?’ said Peter, his eyes pulling back to the television. He wanted to watch the rest of the rugby video, I could see, and I didn’t mind: he was more hindrance than help, anyway.
‘I’m going to work a day for the Womun in the Balaclava Helmet,’ I said. ‘Nutcase or not, she’s paid for it. After that . . . we’ll see.’
Monday, 27 September
Chapter Three
I didn’t sleep, of course. Not much. Not with having someone else in the flat with me. Peter didn’t go to bed until two and then the silence was even more disturbing than the rugby had been. I worked my way through two early Dick Francises (would I have been any better in bed with Sid Halley? Probably, he was crippled) and fell asleep trying not to think about Barty. Our bedroom catastrophe hadn’t been his fault, I knew. He’d done all the right things: it was just that he’d been trying to do them to me, and I’d been terrified. Or anxious. Or embarrassed. Or self-conscious. Or all the above. Maybe, I kept thinking, maybe I was condemned to a series of relationships that were only successful if I didn’t respect the person I was having a relationship with.
I got up at seven, after two hours’ sleep, and went for a run around Wormwood Scrubs. After a mile I felt better. When you run you don’t think, you ruminate; and embarrassment goes away with the pumping of your legs and the blood thumping in your ears. I started ruminating about the Womun’s letter and what she meant by I know what Wimmin really want. The question was originally Freud’s, I thought, and he hadn’t come up with an answer. Wisely, in my view. It was a silly question: too general, and possibly reflecting no more than his own neurotic need for control.
And how, exactly, did she intend to smash the glass ceiling?
Running, I’d also forgotten Peter. When I got back, luckily, he was still asleep in the tiny spare bedroom off my living-room. His snores filled the flat. I had a bath, then retreated into the kitchen, closed the door behind me, put the radio on – Classic FM – and did the washing-up while I was waiting for the coffee to perk. I had to decide how best to deploy a day’s work for my no-show hamster-sending client.
My morning was almost full already: I had an appointment at nine-thirty and another at twelve. I also had a back-log of paperwork to clear. Until three months ago, I’d never let the paperwork pile up. Then I’d acquired a temporary assistant, Claudia. Not an employee: I couldn’t afford one. A rich kid who paid me to train her. After a while she’d been useful and I got to rely on her. Last week Claudia’d left for Paris and a year’s training course at a media school (a fill-in before she went to Harvard) and all the word-processing and filing she would have done was silting up my desk in the living-room.
That would have to wait. So would the Womun in the Balaclava Helmet, at least till the afternoon, by which time Jordan should have faxed me the telephone numbers of Macarthy and Driscoll. So would the hamster, which was lying in a plastic bag on the second shelf of my fridge.
When I left the flat at nine Peter was still asleep. I propped a note on the telephone: Out at least until early afternoon. That would give him a chance to watch rugby in the morning and get out of the flat for the rest of the day. I hoped. I was almost out of the door when I remembered his appetite and his just-woken lack of grip and went back to add a PS to my note: Dead hamster in fridge. Do not eat.
My first appointment wasn’t likely to be profitable. I’d wriggled for two weeks to get out of it, ignoring the messages Claudia kept passing on, and then the messages left on the answerphone, but finally Mary’s insistent voice whining ‘Please call back, Alex’ wore me down. She thought I owed her. She’d been my social worker since I was four, when the Social Services first tumbled to the fact that I was living in an unheated, filthy flat with a woman (my mother) who was well out of her head most of the time and who conducted her life according to instructions given by the Voices of Clark Gable and the Pope, neither of whom seemed to know much about child nutrition.
After that Mary moved my mother in and out of mental hospitals and me in and out of foster homes. None of her efforts had been particularly successful but she had tried, she’d never given up, she’d always been there for me. Or so she repeatedly said, though I’d never wanted her there. Wherever that was.
We’d parted company when I turned eighteen and could officially look after myself, and I hadn’t seen her since, though she’d rung occasionally, particularly at the beginning, and still sent me birthday cards. Now she wanted me to meet her in a coffee-shop in Queensway at nine-thirty. ‘I need your help,’ she’d said.
She’d spent fourteen years being there for me. Now I’d spend thirty minutes in a coffee-shop for her. The least I could do, I suppose.
I was early to the meet – I’d walked, and overestimated how long it would take – but she was earlier. She sat at a small table by the window of the half-empty Austrian coffee-shop, sorting through a sheaf of documents, occasionally making notes. Just outside the window, Queensway was crowded. A mixed neighbourhood: cosmopolitan, half-rootless, many of the residents transient Arabs or Turks or middle-Europeans with a ballast of well-off English, still in September topped up with end-of-summer tourists shopping till they dropped. It was a cool, blue-sky day, with a bright but heat-free sun, and before I went in to Mary I lingered on the pavement admiring the range of languages represented in the foreign newspapers rack outside the next-door newsagent.
I don’t pray. Who’s to pray to? But if I’d been a believer I’d have been thanking God to be twenty-nine and healthy and self-employed and independent and in London. And I hadn’t thought about Barty once since my run . . . although I was now, of course.
I pushed him aside with the door to the coffee-shop, and went in.
Mary must by now be in her early fifties but she doesn’t look it. She’s one of those narrow women with dark straight greasy shoulder-length hair and sallow acne skin who look thirty-five when they’re twenty and don’t abandon that position till they’re old. She’d always looked tired; she looked tired now, and she was bundled up against the cold in layers of beige/brown/paprika garments which had probably been produced by tribal collectives in the Third World.
We got through the ‘how was I’ and ‘what had I been doing’ and ‘did I wan
t a cake with my coffee’ (I did: I never pass up free food) in double-quick time because the pattern of our relationship had been set early on: she talked, I listened. When I was a child I’d thought it was because she was an egomaniac. Now, relaxing a little, I realized she’d probably done it to set me at my ease. While we waited for the coffee and cakes she told me what she’d done in the eleven years since we’d last met.
Career-wise, she’d kept rising, and was now high up in the Social Services hierarchy; that’s why, I supposed, she could afford her clothes, which although unattractive would probably not have been cheap. Her emotional life was less successful. Oliver, her live-in lover, had left her to explore his sexuality and set up house with a male West Indian probation officer. However, Mary now had three cats and a tidy flat and was considering a Ph.D. course with the Open University.
I nodded supportively whenever she paused, helped the waitress wedge the cups and plates on to our tiny round fake marble table, and waited for Mary to come to the point. Finally, she did. ‘I want you to provide a work-experience placement for one of my clients,’ she said.
The word ‘client’ had always got up my nose. I’d never been a client; I’d been a victim or a child at risk or a pain in the butt. Mum had never been a client either. She’d been a mental patient or an incompetent mother or an unlucky human being. But in Mary’s jargon we’d only been clients. She probably thought of her acne as a dermatological challenge.
‘Tell me about the client,’ I said.
‘Nick Straker’s her name. Seventeen, in care, placed with foster parents, just beginning her second year at a sixth-form college doing four A Levels.’
‘If she’s just beginning the academic year, why’s she doing work experience now?’
‘She isn’t attending college regularly.’
‘Is she attending at all?’
‘No.’
‘Can’t she keep up with the lessons?’
‘She’s well ahead in all her subjects. She got full marks in her summer examinations.’
The Glass Ceiling Page 2