The Glass Ceiling

by Anabel Donald

  I told her the story and showed her the letter. I didn’t tell her that the hamster had been stabbed. I intended to keep that information to myself until I’d made some sense of it.

  When I’d finished, she said, ‘I don’t understand. You got a parcel with a hamster in it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A dead hamster?’

  ‘Luckily for the hamster.’

  ‘But that’s ghastly. That’s – sick.’ She looked slightly sick herself. With all those dogs, perhaps she was an animal freak. Bomb humans so animals don’t suffer, that kind of thing.

  ‘Do you know what all this is about?’ I said. ‘Do you know who’s doing it, and what they mean? Is it a serious threat?’

  ‘I suppose one has to take all threats seriously,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I’m glad you think so. Macarthy and Slater didn’t.’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have any idea why this is happening, or who could be doing it?’

  ‘No idea at all,’ she said. ‘But it worries me.’ She looked worried. Her cheerfulness was gone, her face crumpled like an anxious child. ‘It can’t mean anything, really, can it? Poor Leona was killed in an accident, you know that, I suppose? She was driving back to London from here. She’d spent the weekend with me.’ She brushed tears from her chubby cheeks with a fist, then gulped her cocoa.

  ‘Did she often do that?’

  ‘Hardly ever, Once a year, perhaps. Sometimes twice, if I was lucky. But she always kept in touch, answered my letters, returned my calls. But the point is, you think this – person – put crosses by Leona’s name because she was dead; but she just died by accident, it wasn’t murder. So maybe this person’s just going to wait for us to die, and be glad when we do, not actually do anything to us.’ She looked at me quirkily, like a squirrel. ‘Has she actually done anything?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, nothing’s happened to me. How about Grace and Melanie? Any clues there?’

  ‘Apparently there’s recently been a break-in at Melanie’s – her son mentioned it – but she didn’t give me any reason to suppose it was connected to the Womun.’

  ‘Oh, it must have been, surely. Too much of a coincidence, otherwise. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Ms Driscoll—’

  ‘Elspeth, Elspeth, please.’

  ‘Elspeth, what do you think women really want?’

  ‘This woman wants more cocoa,’ said Elspeth. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, bustling from fridge to stove and back to the fridge. ‘I’m glad you dropped in for a natter. I always used to think I knew what women wanted, but then it all changed, because they got it. Sort of. In the late seventies and since. An equal go at things. A proper job. No one telling them not to bother their pretty little heads. But Grace always told me I was class-bound. She said proper education and free child-care was what mattered, and Leona said it would all be all right if women were fully orgasmic, but that seemed odd to me because men have always been fully orgasmic, haven’t they, and more men kill themselves than women. And Melanie wanted to get back at her father. Then she stopped trying, and married him. Children, I suppose. All women want children. I did myself, but it – never happened.’ She crashed the milk bottle against the fridge door, and it spilt. She went for a cloth, and mopped up, red in the face. ‘What do you think?’

  I’d been trying to follow her pin-ball thought-processes. ‘What do I think women want? Uh – I think it depends on the individual woman. If you recast the question as “What should women have?” then maybe it comes down to two things: economic opportunity and equal recognition for their emotional needs. But I haven’t read Freud, so I can’t answer the question as he framed it at all.’

  ‘You’re a post-modern feminist, then,’ she said heaping sugar into my mug. ‘Or perhaps a post-feminist. It’s a dreadful thing to admit, but I can’t tell the difference now. In my day we’d have called you a liberal. But I’m out of touch. Been out of touch for years. Did a lot of work for the cause until the early eighties. Published, too, in magazines, and of course I wrote my book.’

  She gave me the squirrel look again. I shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know the field. Tell me about it.’

  She sighed. ‘It didn’t make the impact I’d hoped. Not very many people did notice it, though I was reviewed in the women’s press, of course. It sold seven hundred and eighty-two copies. Not counting the comps.’

  ‘The comps?’

  ‘The free copies, sent out to reviewers, and of course my ten. And I bought in the remainders, when they were going to pulp them. I’ve still got them in the attic. You think people will want something, then they don’t. Such a – disappointment. A betrayal, even.’

  The pain still sounded raw. I wondered why: surely that’s what happened to most books? It was hard enough to get them published at all, let alone expect anyone to buy them. ‘What was it called?’ I said.

  ‘Wimmin,’ she said. ‘I thought at least some women might want to know . . . You can’t expect much from men, can you? But at least the sisters might. Well, never mind. Grace liked it. She’s a good judge, you know. She’s got an Alpha mind. The only one of us who had. I’m like Brave New World, you know. I’m glad I’m a Beta.’ She looked at me with fleeting anxiety. ‘Sorry, am I being too cliquey?’

  ‘Alpha – A, Beta – B, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future with people bred and conditioned to an intellectual class system,’ I said reassuringly.

  ‘Oh, good, I don’t meet people much . . . And I’ve never met a private investigator before, and I don’t expect they’re great readers on the whole, although why not, come to think of it? You must all wait about a lot, watching people, and so on. Plenty of time to catch up with your reading. Do you enjoy your profession?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Good. That’s very good. And it’s much better being self-employed; then you don’t have the irritations and petty jealousies of working with other people. You can organize things your way, and that’s very important if you’re a good organizer with an orderly mind. I found it a huge relief when I started working for myself. In a way. There are drawbacks, of course.’

  ‘Drawbacks?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘While you’re moving up in a large organization, you have the satisfaction of being appreciated, and the knowledge that any good you do is amplified by the importance of the institution you’re working for You can change the world. In a small way, of course, but you can.’

  ‘So why did you decide to go self-employed?’

  ‘Ah well. Reasons. Things weren’t easy. And I had a disappointment at work.’

  Again, the pain sounded raw.

  ‘What work did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s enough about me,’ she said. ‘So now, what are you going to do about your client? Keep working for her?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She sent me enough money for a day’s work and expenses, and I’ve already done that, so logically now that I’ve warned you all I should pack it in and get on with other things.’ I watched her, wondering if she hadn’t answered my question on purpose, and if so, whether she had a reason other than not wanting to discuss a matter which was clearly painful. She looked guileless, and hurt, but she was making an effort to speak briskly.

  ‘But you’re not sure?’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t found anything out yet. Not really. And I don’t like giving up, not knowing who she is and what it’s about. So I haven’t decided what I’ll do.’

  I didn’t get out of there until three o’clock. We’d moved on from cocoa to breakfast – Elspeth made a great fry-up – and set the world to rights.

  In between, I’d managed to learn little more about her. She was short of cash (the telephone had been cut off for non-payment of the account); she’d inherited the house from her parents (and hadn’t touched it since, by
the look of it, in the way of upkeep, though it was very tidy and very clean); she bred dogs (Kerry Blue Terriers – I didn’t even know what they looked like); she wasn’t married but I ‘friends visited her from time to time’.

  I made good time through the deserted country roads. When I hit the motorway with its heartening signs to London, I remembered something that didn’t fit. The man with the thong: he’d said something about Elspeth’s place, that I’d hear barking, but not just of the dogs. Which suggested that Elspeth’s was an eccentric household. Yet she hadn’t seemed to me to be particularly eccentric. Childlike, perhaps. Open in her responses. Not many people would welcome a stranger after midnight, feed them and settle down to chew the fat. But not the sort of eccentric that I’d call barking.

  She did have friends to stay, she’d said. Male or female? Barking or sane? There’d been signs of male occupation in the coats hanging up in the hallway off the kitchen, but they were just country-type coats, the sort that don’t belong to anyone but are kept for people to wear when they come to stay. They could have been Elspeth’s father’s coats.

  I hadn’t gone any further into the house than that.

  Had I just had breakfast with the Womun? Possibly. Her voice didn’t sound like the answering-machine voice, but it didn’t sound impossibly unlike either. That didn’t rule her out, anyway, any more than it had ruled out Grace. And she was slightly off-thewall, the kind of person who might enjoy little plans and secrets. On the other hand she’d seemed upset about the hamster, plus I couldn’t see what she’d have to gain from the enterprise. I couldn’t see what any of the three surviving Vestal Virgins had to gain. And I couldn’t see why neither Grace nor Melanie had told me what Elspeth had so readily admitted, that the Womun was a legacy from their Oxford past.

  Mahler’s Fifth Symphony had reached the Adagietto. I turned up the stereo, pressed the neat little, black buttons to open the electric windows, and blasted my way home to London.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’m not usually up at dawn unless I’ve worked all night, but it is a time of day I’m fond of in London. I left the motorway as the sun rose and drove through the almost-deserted streets, thinking that now, for an hour or so, the city would belong to me and the few thousands of real Londoners going to work or delivering milk or driving the buses, beginning the first steps on the treadmill that keeps the city going. Wordsworth was wrong. It isn’t an animal or a person, with a mighty heart: it’s a gigantic machine that needs to be driven by me and people like me. Not the visitors. Not the provincials up for the day or the City commuters in from their suburbs with their season tickets, or even the tourists that we should treat more kindly with their A-Zs and their affection for the Royal Family and overpriced marmalade and Genuine British Sweaters that are about as British as Tokyo because they’re designed for foreigners in bright colours because foreigners don’t like Genuine British Colour-Sense, which values shades of sludge. God bless their hard currencies and their soft hearts.

  I stopped Polly’s car outside my flat, and in the silence of the stopped engine realized that I was high on sleeplessness. What precise function did I have in this romantic fantasy? How many private investigators does a city need to keep going? Or television researchers? And when did you last meet a soft-hearted tourist?

  I opened the front door, stepped on an envelope, and didn’t register it until I was half-way up the first flight of stairs. I went back. It was addressed to me, in block capitals. I pulled my sweatshirt sleeve over my hand and picked it up through the material, just in case it was from the Womun, although if so she was using a different pen and style of printing, and carried it upstairs to my kitchen table.

  I made a cup of instant coffee, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and opened the envelope. Two hundred pounds in ten-pound notes, and a slip of paper.

  I’M DANGEROUS. TRY TO STOP ME!

  The Womun

  It was different writing. Either a different person, or the same person trying to look different. Either way it was another day’s work plus change for expenses on an assignment I didn’t want to give up. The more I investigated, the less sense it made. I liked that. Simple problems, with their simple solutions, were bread and butter. This was pure cake, even if, I thought, remembering the murdered hamster, it might be poisoned cake.

  Meanwhile I could grab two hours’ sleep, and the treadmill of the city could go right ahead without me. If I stayed awake longer, who knew what might happen? I might find myself voting for John Major or relocating to Little Snobbery on the Puddle.

  Peter brought me a cup of coffee at eight. I woke up with a start; you do, with hot liquid dripping on your face. It wasn’t deliberate, on his part. Just an annoying habit. He never concentrated when he carried mugs or cups, so there was often a trail of splashes behind him.

  He was bright-eyed and smug and ‘I’m awake and you’re not’-ish. Presumably his blonde had been good value. He wanted to sit and chat but I snubbed his enquiries about Barty, bawled him out about gossiping about me with his father and drenching me with coffee, sent him to vacuum the living-room and struggled towards the bath. No running today.

  When I came downstairs, clean, he’d finished the living-room and was making more coffee. I checked the answering machine: no calls. Damn Barty, why couldn’t he just return my call? Although it probably wouldn’t be difficult to locate him, I was reluctant to waste precious work time on it. Or reluctant to run after him.

  ‘I reckon I’ll finish the shelves today,’ said Peter.

  ‘Good,’ I said, staring at my action board through still-bleary eyes. What had I to do, immediately? There was the scribbled list I’d made last night of the names at the address in Harley Street that Arabella Trigg had visited. I’d start phoning them a bit later, but I’d keep the phone free for a while to give Ready Eddy a chance to get through with his information.

  Peter kept chattering on, asking me questions which I answered automatically, about my investigations into the Womun. Finally he said, ‘It seems to me you could do with talking to someone who’s known all these women at Oxford and since then, who can tell you about which of them is likely to be doing this, or who hated them when they were at college. That kind of stuff.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said absentmindedly.

  ‘Listen to me, Alex.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘No, you’re not. What did I just say?’

  ‘You said I needed to talk to an old friend of theirs. And you could be right. It might be a hassle to find one, though.’

  ‘Why don’t you start with him?’

  ‘Who?’

  He waved his hand towards my action board. ‘The guy who took the photograph.’

  I looked once more at the Virgins in Punt photograph. ‘How do you know a man took it?’

  ‘Are those women dykes?’

  ‘Not all of them, certainly. Maybe none of them. But what—’

  ‘Then I tell you they’re posing for a man. Listen to me, Alex, photography’s my business. Those girls are smiling at someone they know well, someone they trust, someone they fancy.’

  I looked again. He could be right.

  ‘Plus, there’s something else about it,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t noticed. Look at the framing. Look at the quality. That’s no ordinary happy snap. It’s bloody good. Bet you that guy went on to be a professional.’

  Which didn’t, of course, help me at all. But his first point might. I added ?foto to my action list on the board. Then the telephone rang.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, and plunged through to the living-room.

  It wasn’t Barty. It was a male voice, deep, young, almost familiar ‘Alex Tanner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Teddy. Teddy Webb.’ Melanie Slater’s son. I didn’t know why he called himself Webb. Maybe that was his father’s surname.

  ‘Hi, Teddy,’ I said, trying to sound pleased that he’d rung because he
sounded so delighted to be talking to me.

  ‘I want to come and see you. Would this morning be all right?’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I want to hire you. As a private investigator.’

  I hesitated, then I told him what I charged, not just because I didn’t want to work for nothing but also because I wanted to make sure he’d thought his pretext through. I haven’t much experience in dealing with adolescent males in the throes of a crush – I’m not obvious crush material – but I thought it likely that he just wanted to see me. I wanted to avoid wasting time; even more, I wanted to avoid the embarrassment of an unprepared Teddy wriggling and waving his wrists at me in confused supplication.

  It didn’t faze him. ‘I’ve got some money saved. Quite a lot, actually,’ he said proudly. One macho point to him, I supposed. Perhaps he could show me his model Ferrari. ‘It’ll be worth it to me.’

  ‘Then I expect we can do business. Aren’t you at school this morning?’

  ‘No, I’ve got a reading day, and I’ve already done the work, and now I’ve decided to go ahead with you I want to get it going as soon as possible.’

  ‘I can see you at eleven-thirty,’ I said. ‘I’ve lots on, so be on time. And I’ll expect a retainer, minimum four hundred pounds. In cash.’

  He didn’t gulp. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  Pause. Then, ‘Are you?’ he said.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Looking forward to it?’

  Hurt or lie. Just this once, Teddy, I thought, and after that it’s every infatuate for himself. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  Soon after that Nick arrived, bubbling, her baseball cap on backwards, full of Grace. Peter made more coffee, fed the toaster, and they crunched through half a loaf between them – I wasn’t hungry – and talked at me, simultaneously.

  ‘So I’ll get down to the shelves right after this, should be through by six. I’m out with Katie tonight, right, Alex, you don’t mind, do you? You’d like her. She’s great, guess how she spells her name?’