Tuesday, 28 September
Chapter Seven
The alarm went off at seven-thirty and I woke feeling happy without knowing why. I lay in bed sipping mineral water from the bottle I’d left on the bedside table (clue: I must have been half-smashed and brought the water up to ward off dehydration), looking at the ceiling, and clawing my way back to consciousness. Ceiling. Barty. I waited for the rush of embarrassment: it came, but half-strength. I didn’t blush.
Then I remembered. The night before, somewhere during the second bottle of wine, I’d decided what to do about seeing him. It had seemed exhilaratingly right at the time. It still looked right now. It had two great assets: simplicity and honesty.
I’d take my morning run up to his house (which would save me from having to dress up for him), pick up my watch, cadge breakfast, and tell him I was sorry it had all gone wrong and I didn’t know what to do. Then see how it went. I was almost looking forward to it.
I went down to the kitchen for coffee and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of clutter. I’d wimped out at eleven the night before and left Peter to clear up. The cooker was splashed with tomato sauce, the saucepans were still soaking and he’d wiped the work surfaces with a tea-towel, but apart from that he hadn’t done a bad job.
Two cups of coffee and a glass of water later I was alive enough to wash and dress. I stuck my head out of the bathroom window to get a fix on the weather: overcast, maybe rain later, but quite warm – over sixty degrees already. I put on my brightest-coloured T-shirt, light blue, my newest pair of track-suit bottoms, and an extra dollop of moisturizer. My hair’s very short so there were no major decisions to be made there, but I moussed it and rubbed my fingers through the roots a few times for lift.
I don’t look at my face very much, but doing my hair I couldn’t avoid it. I have green eyes. They looked especially green: they do, when I’m happy. So I changed to a green T-shirt for consistency, put on my Reeboks and went down to my desk in the living-room to write a note to stick on the door for Nick, warning her to keep ringing the bell till she woke Peter.
On my desk, next to the telephone, was my watch.
I expected it so little that at first I didn’t see it, but pushed it aside to take some paper. Then I registered.
‘Peter! Peter!’ I shouted in a work voice. ‘In here. Now!’
He stumbled from the spare room wearing only his natural pelt of hair (I’d forgotten quite how hairy he was) and a pair of boxer shorts with ‘Goodnight’ printed all over them in different languages. ‘What is it?’
‘How did my watch get here?’
‘Is that all?’ he groaned. ‘Do you have any orange juice?’
‘Not till you answer my question.’
He collapsed on to the sofa. ‘Barty O’Neill came by last night. After you’d crashed out. After I’d crashed out, come to that. I let him in and told him you were in bed, and he left the watch and went. I’d’ve given him a drink but he seemed pissed off. Funny, that. He’s an easy-going bloke usually.’
‘What were you wearing?’
‘This.’
‘Just the boxer shorts?’
‘Yes.’
I went to get him the orange juice, to give myself time to think. Barty must have leapt to the wrong conclusion, like someone in a cheap romantic novel. He must have thought I was sleeping with Peter. I understood the misunderstandings in a romance: the author had to stretch out the plot. It was bloody annoying if it had happened in real life, and maybe I was flattering myself that he’d mind. But Peter was right. Barty’d worked with Peter but he didn’t know him well, and Barty’s manners are on the smooth side of good; under normal circumstances even if he’d felt pissed off he wouldn’t have let Peter see it.
I could just pick up the telephone and sort it out there and then, but I didn’t want to be overheard. I’d have to get Peter out of the flat first.
I went back into the living-room. ‘Here’s your juice.’
‘Thanks. Hey, I just thought of something. You told me last year Barty fancied you. Maybe he’s jealous.’
‘Maybe he is,’ I said snappishly.
‘Then I’ve done you a favour, haven’t I? You said last year you didn’t fancy him. So if he thinks you’re spoken for, he’ll lay off, won’t he, no bones broken.’
‘That was last year,’ I said. There must have been something in my tone, because Peter stopped kidding and sat up.
‘Shit, Alex, don’t tell me he’s the love of your life.’
‘There ain’t no such thing.’
‘Flavour of the month?’
‘Flavour of the week, anyway.’
I sat down on the sofa beside him and he put an arm around me. ‘What’s the state of play with you two, then? Has he had his leg over?’
‘No,’ I said. I shrugged off his arm but I didn’t get up. I wanted his comments. He was about as different from Barty as a man could be, but that still left him with insights I couldn’t have, because he was male and I wasn’t.
‘Has he tried?’
‘Yes. And then I tried to let him. The night before last. While you were watching the rugby, when my parcel arrived.’
‘You tried to let him? Couldn’t he get it up? Poor guy.’ He gave a smug, MCP chuckle and I stamped on his bare foot with my Reebok. Not very hard.
He howled anyway. ‘What’s that for? I’m being caring, for Chrissake, and before breakfast.’
‘It was me, Peter. My fault. I was frightened.’
‘Frightened? Of sex? You?’
He was genuinely astonished, and I was surprised.
‘I didn’t want to be a disappointment to him.’
‘In bed? That doesn’t make sense. You’re fine in bed. It’s out of it you can be such a bossy ball-busting cow, but he must know that anyway.’
It was my turn to be astonished. ‘I’m fine in bed?’
‘Better than fine. A natural. But let me get this straight. The night before last he takes you to bed and it goes down like a concrete overcoat. Last night he drops by to have another go, and gets me in my boxers? No wonder the poor guy was pissed off. He’d be sensitive, too, at his age.’
‘He’s not old.’
‘Well over forty.’
‘Forty-three.’
‘OK, whatever. You’ve got to explain, Alex. Give him a bell now.’
‘I will as soon as you’re dressed and out.’
‘Do I have to? Can’t I just get in the bath, run the water and sing “Bat out of Hell”? I couldn’t listen then.’
‘I’d know you were there. And I hate Meatloaf. And the caff on the corner does great bacon sarnies.’
He went, grumbling, to dress and I went for more coffee.
Then Nick arrived, plastic bags and all. She nodded at me as I let her in.
I wasn’t in the mood for games. ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Answer me in words, or you’re fired.’
‘Good morning,’ she mumbled. I pointed in the direction of the stairs and she headed on up. I didn’t mind her being in the flat while I talked; she didn’t count.
‘Ten minutes,’ said Peter on his way through. ‘Then I’m back, so get your lovers’ quarrel sorted sharpish.’
I shut the flat door behind him and listened for his footsteps down the stairs and Nick’s bathwater running before dialling Barty.
Three rings, then a pick-up. I was prepared for Barty or for the answerphone but it was neither. It was a woman’s voice, the sort of perky customer-relations-trained voice that tries to sell you double-glazing.
‘Mr O’Neill’s answering service. Can I help you?’
Answering service? What was this?
‘Can I speak to Mr O’Neill, please?’
‘I’m afraid he’s not currently available. May I take a message?’
I wasn’t about to tell her that Alex Tanner wasn’t bonking Peter Barstow, which was the only message I had. ‘Is Barty away?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not permitted to divulge that infor
mation,’ said the voice.
Stuff it, I thought. ‘Just say Alex Tanner rang,’ I managed, and rang off.
The rest of the morning was work. I rang Grace Macarthy’s number I didn’t have particularly high hopes: she was genuinely famous, very likely to be away or busy or too important to see me, but she lived closeish so I tried her first. She was in. She answered the phone; she bubbled over at me. She thought it sounded like fun, and was ready to see me any time that day.
Soon, was my answer. Work would take my mind off Barty. Work would keep Nick off my back and stop me having to talk to her. I very much wanted to be alone, but if I couldn’t be, then better that Nick was concentrating on work rather than me.
When Nick came down fresh from her bath she looked like a normal teenager. She’d put on a baseball cap; it covered all her bare patches of scalp. Now I could see what the unharmed fringe round her lower scalp was for. Her hair-cutting was a crafty and premeditated piece of self-mutilation because it left her to a certain extent presentable. If the person you were presenting her to didn’t mind baseball caps.
Grace Macarthy apparently didn’t. She answered her own door very soon after I rang the bell of her ramshackle terraced West Hampstead house. ‘Alex Tanner? And . . .?’
I introduced Nick. Grace gave us both a wide smile and a friendly, determined handshake. She looked as if she’d been working out, sweating a little, wearing leotard, tights, legwarmers, and a sweatband round her forehead. She had a strong, young-looking body and the well-known hawklike face, with mid-brown permed hair piled on top of her head, and knowing eyes. The face was more lined than I’d expected.
‘Thanks for seeing us at such short notice,’ I said as we followed her through a dark narrow hall cluttered with two bicycles, several black plastic rubbish bags and a rowing machine, towards an amateurish-sounding version of one of the songs from Cabaret played on keyboard and drums.
The hall smelt of dry rot. I’d smelt it several times in the six months I’d flat-hunted, a while back, and I hastily revised her house price downwards. I’d reckoned two hundred thousand: it was a tall, narrow Victorian terraced house on four floors and a basement, probably five bedrooms, two bathrooms, in a shabby but rising residential area. But if the house had dry rot God only knew what the repairs could cost, and I’d noticed settlement cracks around the front doorway.
She stopped and turned to me when I spoke and said, ‘The workmen start on the dry rot next week.’
She’d guessed what I was thinking. Her eyes were not just knowing but quick, I realized, and I cranked up my reactions a notch. She wouldn’t be easy to read. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Poor you.’
‘I like workmen,’ she said, and gave a sexy chuckle. ‘Talking of which’ – she led us into a long room which took up the entire ground floor apart from the hall – ‘meet Tadeuscz and Frederic; Alex and Nick.’
They were in their late twenties, probably Poles, judging from the names. Certainly Eastern Europeans from their flashy cheap clothes and pale pasty faces. The one at the keyboard was tall, broad and tasty, with long blond locky hair. The one on drums was shorter, narrower and darker.
They both stood up and bowed. ‘Tadeuscz,’ said the dark one.
‘Frederic,’ said the blond one. Standing up, he was really tall – almost as tall as Barty, who’s six-four.
Nick nodded. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Help yourself to coffee if you’d like some and grab yourselves chairs,’ said Grace, ‘then hang on for ten minutes or so, if you don’t mind. We need to finish rehearsal before Tad and Fred go to work.’
‘What are you rehearsing for?’ I said, waving Nick towards the instant coffee and kettle visible near the large Aga range.
‘We’re doing a turn for Children in Need,’ said Grace. She was being considerate, or patronizing, saying ‘we’, because there was no way the great British public would want to see Tad and Fred making fools of themselves. It was Amazin’ Grace Macarthy they’d want to see.
I sat listening to Tad and Fred stumble through the intro to the song, and then Grace started to sing. She didn’t exactly sing. She said the words, on the beat, with much interpretation. It wasn’t a musical rendering but it was powerful and rather dramatic. Not at all like Liza Minelli. Nor was her voice quality particularly like the Womun’s voice on my tape: too hard, too clear; though if she was even a passable mimic she could have adapted it.
Nick was very taken with her. She watched the song, and the dance, with close attention, while the kettle boiled, switched itself off and cooled down. I wasn’t going to nag her. I rather enjoyed sitting alone in my own silence amid the noise, looking round the room.
It was one of the most jumbled rooms I’ve ever been in. It must have been forty feet long by about twenty wide. The end nearest the back of the house, where we were, was basically a kitchen, with the Aga range and the sink and fridge and work surfaces down each side and a long narrow scrubbed kitchen table in the middle, with wooden chairs round it, where I was sitting. The keyboard and drum kit were in a bay at the back, just in front of the windows leading to the garden beyond. The garden was a slope upwards: the house, like so many in that part of West Hampstead, was built on the side of a hill and probably had a deep damp cellar at the front.
The part of the room towards the front of the house was a living-room. The walls were painted dark red. It had sofas and chairs, all in various stages of decline and dilapidation, and wallto-ceiling bookcases except around the doors and the fireplace, which had last night’s fire still smouldering. There were tables and chests against the walls and an eclectic accumulation of statues and boxes from any and every ethnic source. Some of them looked valuable. All of them were covered with a layer of fine ash from the wood fire, and several of the bowls held incongruous objects, like discarded coffee cups and a Wellington boot.
The kitchen area was no less jumbled. Every work surface was entirely covered with objects, some predictable like a Moulinex mixer and several jars crammed with wooden spoons and spatulas, some of them less obviously kitchen, like a bulging expandable paper file, expanded to the limit of its powers and beyond, spilling bills and receipts and scraps of paper into the fruit bowl next to it, which was already piled high with oranges and blackening bananas and several tubes of hand cream.
How could she live like that? And how could one person generate so much clutter?
At last, Tad and Fred went to work. They were building labourers, apparently, and they wisely weren’t giving up the day job. I was relieved when the front door closed behind them. Now, perhaps, we could get on with the interview. Besides, I was a touch irritated by the atmosphere of adulation. Tad, Fred and Nick all looked at Grace as if she was an unexploded bomb or the promise of all their futures.
I couldn’t see it, myself, but then I’m not a groupie by temperament, and if I see everybody succumbing to someone’s charm my instinct is to dig m my heels and refuse to budge. But, to be fair, she wasn’t dull. In fact she was mildly exhilarating.
Not exhilarating enough to distract me, however. So with the departure of Tad and Fred I hoped we could get to the point, but Grace offered us toast and marmalade, as if she was taking care of us, and Nick picked up on that. Funny. Sudden melting of glacier. I’d thought she didn’t like being taken care of, in fact with me she’d resisted it, but obviously Grace was different.
So we lived through the making of the toast in a toaster disinterred from a basket of laundry, and the adjustment of the shade of toast Nick wanted and the particular flavour of marmalade Nick wanted, Grace then played ‘hunt the jar’ and finally found the lemon marmalade in her drinks cupboard in the living-room area.
We’d been there over half an hour, by then, and I was beginning to lose patience. The room annoyed me. I feel clutter like a threat. The world is chaotic enough without letting the chaos into your house to lap around your knees, or in Grace’s case around your throat.
When Nick was established with her toast, I started to ta
lk to Grace, but she said: ‘Hang on a minute. I think we should go to my study to talk, it’ll be easier.’
Reluctantly, I followed her up the stairs. Nick would have followed her into heavy artillery fire. Grace opened a door on the first floor and led us into her study.
It was the neatest place I had ever seen. Filing cabinets, white walls, windows with blinds, a desk clear of everything except a small computer and a fax. Utterly different from everything else I had seen in the house.
She smiled at me. It was on the surface a warm, understanding smile, but I thought it mischievous. ‘Alex will be happier here,’ she said. ‘Won’t you, Alex?’
In one sense I was. In another, fundamentally, I wasn’t. She was one of those people who specialize in instant character-readings, and on the evidence so far she was spot on. A clever woman.
People who think they’re clever are often just a little less clever than they think they are, but Grace was turning out so unpredictable I wouldn’t even rely on that, in her case. One thing I was absolutely sure of, and that was that I’d have to concentrate if I was going to get anything out of her, certainly if I was going to get anything that she didn’t want to let me see. Good people-readers are also very good at deception because they know what clues not to give.
Before we even sat down I said, ‘I expect Melanie Slater’s told you most of the background.’ I didn’t know, of course, that Melanie had rung her, but the chances were that she had, and I didn’t think that Grace would necessarily choose to lie.
She hesitated briefly before she answered, and I thought I was doing OK. ‘She told me a little about it, yes. But I’d prefer to hear the story from you.’ She sat down behind the bare desk, full of confidence, with the glow of fame about her like a halo.
I don’t mind famous people; I meet a lot of them, and I’m not envious of their position. I’d hate not to be able to hide myself in a crowd. But I’ve often tried to work out where the glow comes from. Maybe they have it to start with, and that’s why they succeed. Maybe it comes from being photographed so much that they glide automatically from pose to pose.
The Glass Ceiling Page 5
