The Glass Ceiling

by Anabel Donald

  ‘And Fennel?’

  ‘What about Fennel?’

  ‘Didn’t he see Fennel? She was his child, after all.’

  ‘Grace never let Edward have anything to do with Fennel,’ said Barty. Then he laughed. Rather admiringly, I thought. ‘She said he was a competent lover but he’d be a lousy father.’

  Another car. A classic sports car, a long, low, black Jaguar XK something or other. An expensive, eccentric, amazin’, ‘look-at-me’ car. ‘That’ll be Grace’s car,’ I said as it parked behind the Audi. I couldn’t see the driver.

  Barty laughed.

  The Jaguar driver got out and walked forward to the Audi. I watched her in the wing mirror. She was in her late thirties, with jaw-length blonde hair, strong features and a designer trouser-suit.

  ‘Who the hell is this?’ I said.

  ‘The lawyer,’ said Barty and Nick in chorus.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Barty mischievously. ‘You expected a man. Concentrate, Alex, you’re with the sisterhood now.’

  ‘I’m a sister,’ I said defensively. I tried to be. When I remembered.

  ‘Sharpen up, then, sister,’ he said.

  Then Grace arrived. In a battered three-year-old Volvo estate.

  Grace wanted to go in first. The lawyer, Kate Fox, insisted on going with her. The rest of us followed in a cautious, straggling bunch. Melanie was grim-faced and silent and urban in her short-skirted suit and high heels. Nigel – a tallish, suited, well-kept, almost handsome man – was sulky.

  The rest of us stood at the gate and watched Grace and Kate walk the ten yards up the paved path through the half-wild, September garden to the front door.

  The cottage didn’t look inhabited. The front was yellow stone covered with honeysuckle; the deep small windows were dark. It was twilight. There should have been lights on inside, I thought, if Elspeth and Edward were there.

  We’d all come a long way, for nothing.

  But when Grace reached the front door she bent to pick up a large stone and groped under it. Her hand came up empty. She gave a ‘thumbs-up’ sign and used the key on her car keyring.

  Surely not even Grace would keep a key to her country cottage under a stone by the front door, I thought.

  She opened the door and they both went in.

  We waited.

  Then they came out again, with Elspeth. She was clutching something to her blocky chest, tightly.

  We walked forward to the door and the sweet scent of honeysuckle.

  Elspeth was crying. She only saw Melanie. She moved towards her and said, ‘I’m so sorry. So, so sorry. Oh, Melanie, I’m so sorry.’

  She opened her arms and Melanie went into them, and they clung together, and Melanie began to cry.

  And then I saw that what Elspeth was holding in her right hand, behind Melanie’s back, was a gun. A small hand-gun: a pistol.

  I went to take it, but Barty held my arm, and I stopped.

  Elspeth was talking. ‘It was an accident, Melanie. Teddy just turned up at the Museum and waited at the entrance and followed us. He’d found out about the plan. He heard you talking to me on the phone. He heard Alex’s name so he listened, he said. And he wanted to come along with his father and we had to do it on time otherwise we wouldn’t have got away, and I really wanted to annoy them. I did. But if I’d known – oh, Melanie, if I’d known— I’d never have taken him with us, of course, but then we got up there and Edward was going to kill himself and jump through the ceiling, but I didn’t know that, and Teddy tried to stop him, and then it happened. Edward didn’t mean it. He hasn’t spoken since . . . He won’t speak to me. He wants to die, Melanie. He couldn’t bear it, and neither can I. Teddy . . . My darling, darling Teddy . . .’

  ‘Bloody nonsense,’ said Nigel Meades.‘This is all childish,bloody nonsense.’ He gripped Melanie by the shoulders and tugged her backwards. Elspeth clung on more tightly: Melanie didn’t pull away from her.

  Barty tapped Nigel on the back. ‘Let her go,’ he said.

  Nigel turned on him. ‘What’s it to do with you?’ he said.

  ‘They’re friends of mine,’ said Barty. ‘Old friends. And they’re both upset.’

  ‘And I don’t know what to do with Edward,’ said Elspeth. ‘He was looking for Grace’s gun, so I took it, and I kept it down my bra. He didn’t know it was there. So then he went into the garage and he soaked himself with petrol, and he says he’s going to set light to himself. But he doesn’t have any matches, because I took those too. And then he fell asleep.’

  ‘When was that, Elspeth?’ said Grace.

  ‘About an hour ago. He fell asleep, because we couldn’t sleep last night, either of us. And I’ve been to look every five minutes or so. We should go and look again—’

  ‘Melanie, I’m going home,’ said Nigel. ‘We should never have come. This is too much for you. The last thing you need is to be involved with that maniac.’

  ‘He’s not a maniac,’ said Elspeth. ‘He’s ill, and you know it, Nigel.’ She was stroking Melanie’s back. ‘Take the gun, Grace,’ she said. ‘It’s getting in my way . . .’

  Grace took the gun and vanished inside the cottage.

  ‘We should go to Edward,’ said Elspeth. ‘Let’s go to Edward.’

  Melanie nodded and they started to walk round the side of the cottage, with Kate Fox in close attendance.

  Grace emerged from the front door and followed them.

  Nigel Meades cursed under his breath and followed Grace.

  Barty, Nick and I followed him.

  The garage was empty. Its doors were open and I could just see, through the dusk, Edward’s body inside, propped against the back wall. His arms clasped his knees and his head was bent, but as we got nearer he raised his head and screamed.

  There were no words: just a scream.

  Everyone stopped.

  In the quiet, I heard Melanie sobbing, and I could smell petrol.

  Edward screamed again, and then subsided into a wail. It wasn’t a child’s, but it wasn’t a thinking adult’s either. It was the nearest a human being could get to a dog’s bewildered whimper.

  Even Nigel was silenced. Then Grace spoke. ‘Edward,’ she said. ‘Hey, Edward, this is Grace.’

  ‘Hello, Grace,’ said Edward, almost normally. His voice was the true bass Teddy’s would have been, if Teddy had had time. ‘I want your gun.’

  ‘Now look here—’ Nigel began.

  ‘Coming over,’ said Grace, and lobbed it. It was a perfect under-arm lob: Edward had only to open his hands.

  Melanie cried out and tried to move, but Elspeth held her.

  ‘Kate,’ said Grace, ‘why don’t you go and call the police?’

  ‘I say—’ said Nigel.

  ‘I think I will,’ said Kate, already ten feet away and accelerating, as Edward scrabbled in his pocket.

  Barty had moved to a stand-pipe beside the garage and was putting a wide tub under it. I just heard the scrape of metal against metal as Edward loaded the pistol, before it was drowned by the thunder of water drumming into the tub.

  Nick was just behind me, her sloe eyes fixed on Edward’s hand, and the pistol. He lifted it to his temple and I turned to face her. ‘Nick!’ I said urgently, ‘behind you!’

  She spun round, only half taken-in, and as she moved I heard the shot, then a whoomph of igniting petrol vapour, then the splatter-splash of water.

  By the time I looked into the garage again there was no fire. Edward’s body was sodden. The light was almost gone: you couldn’t tell blood from water. Both were pools of darkness beside his head.

  Chapter Thirty

  Grace herded us into the cottage and turned on some lamps.‘Drinks all round, I think,’ she said. ‘Barty?’

  ‘Of course; said Barty, and disappeared through a door on the left. I looked around the room. It was living-room and dining-room both, with low ceilings and an uneven stone floor and plenty of chintz chairs which had probably last had spr
ings when they put out the ‘unsinkable’ press release for the maiden voyage of the Titanic. It also had its share of Grace clutter, with slight country variations such as binding-twine and gro-bags.

  Elspeth took Melanie up the stairs which led from a door beyond the fireplace. Nigel walked to the back of the room, past the dining-table, and stared resolutely through the french windows, his back to the room and his every muscle radiating disapproval. Kate and Grace were in conference by the telephone.

  ‘Sit down, Nick,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just about,’ she said shakily. ‘I’ve never— I’m glad I didn’t see it.’

  A normal kid, for once. ‘So’m I,’ I said, and perched on the arm of her chair.

  Barty came in with champagne glasses on a tray, full of a pink-tinted liquid, and handed them round. We all took one, except for Nigel. He said, ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘Kir Royale, Nigel,’ said Grace.

  ‘Any chance of a decent malt?’

  Barty went to a sideboard, took out a bottle, poured the drink and took it to him. ‘Glenmorangie all right?’ he said in the light voice he always used to cover his fury.

  Grace chuckled. ‘Say yes, Nigel, or you’ll get the glass in your face.’

  ‘We won’t be here long,’ he said ungraciously. ‘This’ll do.’ He walked over to the stairs and shouted up, ‘Melanie! We’re going!’

  She reappeared, with Elspeth behind her, and started to walk to the door, but then she subsided into a chair and said, ‘I’d just like to sit down for a moment, Nigel, if you don’t mind.’

  Kate Fox said mildly, ‘I must advise you that no one should leave before the police get here, Mr Meades.’

  He looked about to explode.

  ‘Elspeth,’ I said loudly. ‘I’d like to know why you did it. The whole thing.’

  She looked at me blankly. ‘Oh – of course, you don’t know. Well. It was for the publicity, you see.’

  She gave me her squirrel look; wilted, but would-be perky.

  ‘For the publicity?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. When Leona died her sales went up, and the same happened to Van Gogh. And I didn’t want to die, of course, but I thought death threats would be almost the same thing. And they’d re-publish my book, and people would read it. And it would help Grace and Melanie too, because they have books in the autumn list. And then it all went horribly wrong.’ She started to cry.

  ‘That was an accident,’ said Grace firmly. ‘A terrible accident.’

  ‘But now they’re both dead.’

  Grape knelt beside her and took her hands. ‘Drink up,’ she said, holding a glass to her lips. ‘Edward wanted to die. He should have died long ago. Teddy – Teddy is a tragedy. Nobody’s fault.’

  ‘I really thought, people should read my book. Women should. Because they need to know. They need to understand, about what keeps them down. The male conspiracy. I’m right, aren’t I, Grace?’

  ‘Hush,’ said Grace, smoothing her hair. ‘Not now.’

  Nigel had gone back to his feet-apart landowner stance, looking out of the french windows. ‘Male conspiracy, huh,’ he said with contempt. ‘There’s no such thing. There doesn’t need to be. You women can cock it up all by yourselves.’

  Most of us – Kate, Grace, Nick and me – stared at him with varying degrees of contemptuous pity; a gesture wasted on his back. Elspeth looked at Grace. Melanie cried.

  Then Grace said, mere mildly than I expected, with one eye on Melanie, ‘I see what you mean, Nigel. We make mistakes.’

  ‘Not just mistakes. Huge staggering bloody cock-ups, all the time, without us to help you.’

  ‘Whereas you think men don’t,’ said. Barty, lightly; ‘responsible as they are for most of the non-natural disasters in recorded history?’

  ‘That’s because men are recorded history,’ said Nigel, ‘and I don’t know whose side you think you’re on, O’Neill.’

  Then – fortunately – the police came.

  When I woke up, it was half past eleven. I blinked at the large cheap garish Mickey Mouse alarm-clock on the bedside table, which was wearing a condom on each ear, and tried to work out where I was. Grace’s bed, that was it. Grace’s bed in Grace’s cottage.

  I’d given my statement early on, to a minor policeman. The major ones were concentrating on Elspeth and dealing chiefly with Kate Fox. Then I’d had another drink and fallen asleep in my chair, and Grace had taken me upstairs to her room.

  I got out of bed and looked through the window. It was narrow and low; I had to bend my knees. It was a moonlit night, very still. The trees weren’t moving. The garden was empty: the police must have gone. I looked over to the layby. All our cars were still there.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with water, and then went downstairs.

  The dishevelled room had taken on a slightly raffish air. Nigel was sitting alone at the dining-table wading his way through a plateful of chops and mashed potatoes, with a near-empty bottle of claret at his elbow. Grace, Kate, Elspeth, Melanie, Nick and Barty were sitting cross-legged in a circle. There were two joints on the go. John Lennon was singing ‘Imagine’. Loudly.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again. This was time-travel, surely? I’d gone to sleep in the nineties and woken up in the sixties.

  But I’d also gone to sleep in a cottage bleak with grief and woken up to a party.

  Another Grace Experience.

  They moved over to make room for me and I sat down, between Grace and Barty. Such a suave pair.

  I sucked at the joint and passed it on.

  ‘We fooled you, didn’t we?’ said Elspeth, and she giggled.

  ‘You did,’ I agreed, trying not to sound too many joints behind. I had no idea what, specifically, she was talking about.

  ‘We did,’ said Melanie. ‘We did. We fooled you.’

  ‘You didn’t expect me to kill my own dog, did you?’ said Elspeth. ‘Poor Gunny, but he was ill, and decapitation isn’t painful, you know. Merciful, really. And he trusted me, so he wasn’t afraid.’

  ‘And you really thought I didn’t want you to know about Mopsy,’ said Melanie.

  ‘It was supposed to be a mystery,’ said Elspeth. ‘So you’d be interested. You were interested, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ I said. ‘Who killed Mopsy?’

  ‘I did,’ said Elspeth. ‘And I’ve said I’m sorry, Melanie, but you know I don’t approve of domestic pets.’

  ‘And then I dropped off the parcel,’ said Melanie, and took a deep pull at her joint. Her short skirt was up around her waist. She wasn’t wearing stockings and suspenders. She was wearing black tights.

  ‘And Grace helped me with the break-in at Melanie’s,’ said Elspeth. ‘Because we’re sisters.’

  ‘We’re sisters,’ said Melanie. ‘Grace?’

  ‘We’re sisters,’ said Grace. The chuckle was back, but I could hear a note of self-deprecating irony in it, too.

  ‘Any more claret?’ said Nigel.

  Melanie scrambled up and went to fetch him some. Elspeth explained to me, ‘Melanie loves Nigel. So we all love Nigel. It’s all right. Do you see, Alex? It’s all right?’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘And you must love Nigel too.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Say it. Say “I love Nigel.”’

  ‘I love Nigel,’ I said.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Barty, under his breath, and well under John Lennon, who was urging us to give peace a chance.

  ‘How could you stand it?’ I murmured.

  ‘The Clinton option,’ he said. ‘I didn’t inhale.’

  Melanie, having opened the bottle for Nigel, sat down again, and Elspeth grasped her hand and Kate’s. ‘You see,’ said Elspeth, ‘we did it all for us. And you.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘From the beginning. Back then. To smash the glass ceiling. For the sisters. Us and those who would come after us. Kate and you and Nick. So it wouldn’t be
as bad for you,’ said Elspeth. ‘And it isn’t, is it? Kate?’

  ‘It’s getting better,’ said Kate.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘It’s much better,’ I said.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Nick.

  Elspeth clapped. ‘See? She doesn’t even notice it. We’ve won.’ She punched her fist in the air in a victory gesture.

  ‘We’ve won,’ said Melanie, also punching the air. ‘Grace?’

  ‘We’ve won,’ said Grace, and raised her fist. That was the first time I’ve ever seen an ironic punch.

  One of the Beatles was assuring us that he’d get high with a little help from his friends.

  I took a joint from Barty and sucked it right down to my toes. The sixties were all that I had feared they would be.

  Sunday, 3 October

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Peter woke me up at eleven. With the Sunday papers, flump on my stomach, and a retreating shout, ‘Full fry-up on the table in fifteen minutes.’

  When I’d washed and dressed and joined him, he looked neat. The beard had gone and he was wearing ‘travel-for-work’ clothes: clean jeans, black polo, leather jacket, desert boots. The Sammy boxes with his camera equipment were stacked near the kitchen door.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ I said.

  ‘Thailand, I think. Or Singapore. It’s on the ticket. Three weeks’ work.’

  ‘Nature doco?’

  ‘Tragic treatment of Our British Prisoners in Fiendish Eastern Jail.’

  ‘Oh. Good deal?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  That meant good. I was pleased for him. I’d almost miss him, I thought, as I looked out at the overcast sky and the drizzle. ‘What’s the weather like over there this time of year?’ I said.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you a postcard, let you know.’

  When we’d been together, all those years ago, I’d hovered in the hall morning after morning for the postman, waiting for Peter’s scrawled cards, just in case he signed off ‘love’ instead of ‘see ya’ or ‘take care’. Now, it didn’t matter.