The Glass Ceiling

by Anabel Donald

  Pause. He didn’t know, I thought, down to earth with a bump. Wishful thinking to suppose he would.

  ‘The British Museum,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The British Museum. A vast, straggling building, repository of perhaps the chief distinction and dignity the British still possessed, full of innocent tourists and school parties and lovers and scholars and – and glass ceilings. But one particular one: the Reading Room ceiling. Where people studied books Elspeth hadn’t written, supplied by the institution that hadn’t recognized her

  I looked at my watch. 1:21. I took a deep breath, and thought. The phone line hummed between us: Barty was waiting. ‘Barty, I need you to clear the Museum, especially the round Reading Room. Bomb scare.’ No time to explain about ceilings.

  Pause. ‘How long do I have?’

  ‘Nine minutes.’

  ‘Sure?’ he said.

  Now wasn’t the time for doubts. ‘Dead sure,’ I said.

  He hesitated for only about two seconds, but it seemed much longer. Then he said, ‘Clear for one-thirty. You’d better be right, smartass,’ and rang off.

  Cool Haircut was appalled. ‘I say—’ he began.

  ‘All under control. I’m Alex Tanner, Anti-Terrorist Squad,’ I said, moving easily from one television genre to another. ‘Your country thanks you.’

  I thrust the mobile into his hands. ‘Will my country pay for the calls?’ he asked, recovering.

  ‘Submit Form TR82B. In triplicate,’ I said, and headed for the door. I had a mile to run. In eight minutes.

  It’s not easy to move quickly, dolled up. As I ran up Piccadilly to the Circus, the earrings slapping me with each stride, my tits bouncing, my patent leather flatties giving me only half-purchase on the pavements, I thought longingly of trainers and strong plain bras and sweatshirts and jeans. 99.9 per cent of the time, I could have done this on my head. Sod’s Law. Some feminists hold that women sacrifice too much in making themselves attractive to men. ‘Sisters, I’m with you,’ I said out loud, dodging through the Circus traffic and accelerating up Shaftesbury Avenue, keeping to the gutters because they were clear of the aimless wandering sightseers I kept knocking into.

  It was about a mile to the Museum. It could have been less. If Barty hadn’t managed to clear the place I could barrel straight into the Reading Room and make enough of a fuss to clear that, at least.

  I had a British Library Reader’s ticket in the card-case in my bag. I’d dip for it when I reached Charing Cross Road; I didn’t want to break my rhythm until I had to, for traffic. I was making good time, considering, and I accelerated for the last hundred yards to compensate for the time I’d lose in crossing the road.

  I wove through the queues of cars, groping in the bottom of my bag. Card-case, crammed full. I collect memberships and credit cards: they make me feel important.

  I was across Charing Cross Road, in the next section of Shaftesbury Avenue. I looked down at the cards in their little plastic folders. Flip video club, flip flip libraries, flip American Express, flip Visa, flip MOD.

  MOD? Ministry of Defence? I had to force myself not to drop my speed. Of course. I’d worked on a Germ Warfare doco and spent a day at a Top Secret Establishment. I’d had to wear an identity card on my lapel. And I’d kept it.

  MOD, it said, with my photograph. If you looked at the small print it was useless. But I wouldn’t give anyone a chance to.

  Yee-hah! I thought, running faster than I ever had in my life before.

  I’d been going for over five minutes now. What was the police response-time likely to be? Unless Barty’d gone straight for the Museum authorities. No, I could trust Barty. The Museum was such an obvious terrorist target that there must be a police incident procedure in place for it. And Barty knew how the IRA worked. He knew the police number they called to give bomb warnings, and the code words they used to show it was a genuine threat.

  New Oxford Street. I went straight over, hoping to hell that there were no provincials at the wheel in the stream of steady traffic.

  There weren’t. Brakes screamed and irascible, quick-reacting London drivers shouted and swore at me and I waved as I accelerated up Bloomsbury Street and realized that I hadn’t even mentioned to Barty that I expected him to use his IRA information to get the job done, that I just assumed he would.

  He had. He must have done. I turned into Great Russell Street and after a few strides I could see into the forecourt of the Museum behind the great black iron railings, and it was full of people. Full. Marshalled in groups by uniformed Museum staff.

  Barty, I love you, I thought as I slowed down, leant against the wall and gasped for breath. I checked my watch: 1:28. I’d done a six-minute mile, or thereabouts.

  And now I wanted to get inside and save the ceiling. I loved the Reading Room; God knew what it would cost to replace that ceiling. If the country could or would afford it.

  I heaved myself up and jogged between the crowds of people towards the wide shallow steps up to the front door. There were some uniformed police among the crowd and, I could hear from the screaming sirens, many more on their way, but none actually at the entrance. People were still hurrying out and I pushed myself in, against the crowd, flashing my MOD card at anyone who tried to stop me.

  In the middle of the great hall, near the gift shop, stood a group of people obviously directing operations. Several of them looked like senior plainclothes police. Damn. My MOD card wouldn’t wash with them, and police are trained to take things slowly and methodically. I skirted them cautiously and sidled up to the corridor leading to the Library entrance. A few Readers were still trickling out, women with straight hair and long drab skirts and big drab sweaters, men in dark suits or corduroy trousers and tweed jackets, looking mildly annoyed rather than alarmed.

  There must still be Library staff in there, I thought. They’d have to stay to clear it like the captain of a ship.

  I went in and looked up. The ceiling was intact, as I remembered it, a soaring cupola of lozenged glass cupping the pale blue and gold plasterwork of the lower walls. It must be eighty feet up, I thought. If that glass went it’d have killed someone. Maybe several people.

  I looked round the desks, padded with blue leather or leather-look plastic, arranged in rows like the spokes of a wheel radiating from the area in the centre where the Library staff worked. The desks were empty, I saw, and then I was pounced on.

  ‘Out! Out, please!’ said the only remaining man in the room, obviously a librarian. He was middle-aged and middle-height and middle-bald, and he had his knickers in a major twist, and I didn’t blame him. As far as he knew he and his precious Library were going to be blown to hell and gone any second now.

  ‘Alex Tanner, MOD,’ I said, and flashed my card at him. ‘We’ve had further information. The threat isn’t a bomb threat, it’s a specific threat to the ceiling.’

  He looked up. I looked up. All either of us could see was grey London light filtering through an elegant pattern of semi-opaque white glass.

  ‘If someone was going to smash that, how would they get up there? Can we stop them?’

  ‘We need to tell the Museum,’ he said agitatedly.

  ‘Aren’t you the Museum?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I’m the Library,’ he said. ‘There’s a walkway. And ladders. There’s access for cleaning. You can go through the Snow Gallery, or Paints and Drawings – MNLA. Or the 1850s book stack, if you’re Library.’

  ‘Go and tell them,’ I said. ‘Anyone. Get anyone up there, now. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘MOD,’ I said. ‘Priority. Do you want to save the ceiling or not?’

  He went.

  I looked at my watch: 1:30.

  And then I looked up and saw them. Figures, through the glass. At least two, but the glass was too opaque to see at all clearly. I stepped back, almost to the wall, and prepared to cover my eyes; but I couldn’t not watch. I had to see.

  Smash! One
of the twenty segments had gone, and the shards of glass sprayed out and down. I watched them fall. It was the section farthest from me; I was safe enough, though the thuds as the larger pieces sliced into the desks made me shudder.

  I looked up again. I could half see through the gap, two figures struggling. They looked male. One had a weapon – an axe? An ice-axe? I couldn’t see.

  Smash! Another section had gone, and one of the figures was slumped, awkwardly, over the gap. It was wide enough to slip through. If he was unconscious, he probably would.

  He looked unconscious. He looked familiar.

  It was Teddy.

  He was bleeding, badly. I watched blood stain some of the shattered pieces still clinging to the metal struts (iron?) that reinforced the ceiling, and start to drip over and down into the Reading Room.

  ‘Hold on!’ I shouted, as his weight started to shift. ‘Hold on!’ and I turned to run for help.

  As I turned, he slipped through the metal bars. His body seemed to float down, relaxed, riding the air like a stuntman doing a dead fall.

  He landed on his front across two desks, and I tried not to hear the noise as he landed, so I wouldn’t have to remember it, though I knew I would.

  I ran over to him. He was obviously dead. The upright of the desks had snapped his spine, and a side of his face was smashed in.

  I tried Emergency Aid anyway, even though the emergency was well past. I cleared his airway – I think a part of the bloody debris my fingers hooked out was splinters of bone from his face – and I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until someone pulled me away.

  They took me into an office. They talked at me as we went. I gathered that, officially, I was in deep trouble for impersonating an employee of the Ministry of Defence.

  Unofficially, the trouble went deeper. My fingers could still remember the boyish smoothness of the skin of his shattered face, and the patch of strong stubble he’d missed with the razor that morning, when he felt proud of himself for whatever he’d discovered that he thought would help me, when he thought that he was going to talk to me at eight-thirty and tell me all about it, and I’d be pleased.

  They were embarrassed when I started to cry. It wasn’t their fault; they weren’t being rough with me. Actually I think they were trying to be understanding, as far as official understanding ever goes. They couldn’t know why I was crying. I wasn’t sure myself; though when they called it shock that made them feel better.

  Saturday, 2 October

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I slept in, next morning. It was gone ten by the time I dragged myself downstairs and addressed myself to the task of making coffee.

  Coffee-making was about as complicated a task as I was up to. It was almost beyond me. I felt dead-legged and woollen-headed and as I finally gripped the mug and sipped and looked through the kitchen window at the bright clear sun outside, I seriously considered going back to bed for the day.

  The authorities had finally let me go latish the previous night. The Anti-Terrorist Squad had given up first. No IRA involvement, they muttered, sounding disappointed, and left me to the Special Branch.

  The Special Branch were slower on the uptake, or more thorough, or better manned. They kept at me for longer. Then, disappointed, they’d handed me over to the Ministry of Defence, who seemed excited by the prospect that anyone should want to impersonate them, and reluctant to drop me until they’d fully explored my motives. They finally, grudgingly, told me they weren’t going to press charges, and glided away.

  Then I was moved to a police station and the coppers had their turn. They hung on to me longest of all, since Teddy’s death was their business. I told them everything I knew about Elspeth. I suggested that Edward Webb was involved. I still didn’t know, myself, who the other figure on the ceiling at the Museum had been. It could have been Elspeth; it could have been Edward; it could even have been Grace, although I didn’t think so, and I didn’t suggest her to them.

  The police kept asking me if Teddy’s death was accidental. I didn’t know. I just described it to them, again and again, and felt worse about it each time.

  It wasn’t until I’d been with the police for hours that I began to wonder why they hadn’t caught the other person, or people, involved at the Museum. I asked them. They muttered about delay and confusion and public safety, and I realized through my apathy that they’d probably been so busy worrying about my impersonation that the librarian hadn’t managed to persuade them to get anybody up to the ceiling in time.

  Eventually the police drove me home and I gave them the Womun’s letters and envelopes for evidence, and the tape with her first call. Peter was there, and he looked after me. When I’d had a bath and gone to bed, he went to rescue Polly’s Golf, which would have been clamped or towed away long since.

  I’d fallen asleep before he got back so I didn’t know if he’d managed to find the car, I realized, and poured myself more coffee. Life was coming back to my brain. Slowly.

  I wondered what Melanie felt. Poor Melanie. And whether Grace had heard. And what Elspeth was doing, and if the police had found her.

  My brief interest slipped away. I didn’t want to think about it.

  I went into the living-room to lie on the sofa. The answering-machine light was flashing. Several messages, apparently. And a note: 9.30 a.m. Saturday. Have to go out, back about late afternoon – Golf parked outside, keys on hook in kitchen – Barty O’Neill rang, is coming round eleven o’clock – other messages on machine, nothing vital. Take good care, love Peter.

  I should have been relieved to get the car back. I should have felt something about Barty. I just went to lie on the sofa and closed my eyes, and tried to think of something that wasn’t Teddy.

  I must have fallen asleep because when the doorbell rang and I blinked at the video clock it was 11.07. I dragged through to the kitchen, opened the window, and whistled at the top of Barty’s head, ‘Keys coming down,’ I called, and chucked them.

  I was back on the sofa when he came in, my eyes closed.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he said gently.

  ‘I looked great yesterday,’ I said defensively. ‘I borrowed Polly’s green linen Armani jacket, and nobody looked at me oddly in Quaglino’s.’

  ‘Did you want them to?’

  ‘No, that’s the point. Ordinarily, they would have stared. Because I’m not the Quaglino’s type.’ I opened my eyes and looked at him. He’d sat down in the armchair opposite. He was wearing old brown corduroy trousers, a dark blue shirt and a once-expensive, now battered, brown knitted silk sweater. He didn’t look like the Quaglino’s type either He just looked like Barty, and I was so glad to see him that for a dreadful moment I thought I was going to cry again.

  ‘You’re completely wrong,’ he said.

  I never, never fail to rise to that. ‘I’m wrong?’ I snapped, sitting up. ‘What about?’

  ‘About nobody staring at you in Quaglino’s. According to my source, you announced our secret marriage and the imminent arrival of our baby to an enthralled audience of pre-lunch drinkers.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said. Then I started to laugh. I couldn’t not. ‘Who’s your source?’

  ‘I never—’ He began the first and only media commandment.

  ‘—reveal my sources,’ we both chanted together.

  ‘Do you mind?’ I said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About – about the baby.’

  ‘Not at all, though I have for some time hoped to play a part, however small, in its conception,’ he said primly.

  I tried not to laugh. ‘Jacqui’s just such a soap-opera birdwit,’ I said. ‘It was all I could think of.’

  ‘Don’t apologize. It was very well played,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Thanks for calling the police.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Who did you say you were?’

  ‘Semtex Sean.’

  ‘T
hat’s awful! You didn’t!’ I said, trying to look disapproving, and collapsing into laughter.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said.

  ‘You’re trying to cheer me up,’ I said accusingly. I hate being manipulated.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m succeeding.’

  The bang of the front door and footsteps on the stairs saved me from having to agree. Barty was frowning. ‘Barstow promised he’d stay out of the way,’ he said.

  The scratch of the key in the lock was followed by Nick. I introduced them. Nick nearly smiled at us both and wolf-whistled at me. ‘The program’s running,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t need me till Monday. Can I have a bath?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and she went upstairs.

  I explained who she was, briefly. Barty looked unsurprised. Then I told him about Kinross, his obsession, our deal and Nick’s help, and he looked even less surprised. ‘He might crack it, at that,’ he said. ‘Did you get the information you wanted?’

  ‘I did, but I haven’t even looked at it. I haven’t had time.’

  ‘Are you too upset to tell me what’s been going on?’ he said.

  I was piqued. ‘Too upset? Me?’ I swung my legs over the side of the sofa and sat up. It was only then I realized that I was naked.

  They must have been right. I was in shock. I’d had clues: the roughness of the sofa material against my flesh; Nick’s wolf-whistle. But I hadn’t picked them up. I’d been naked the whole time; I hadn’t known, and Barty – Barty’d said I looked terrible.

  I pulled myself together. I wasn’t going to let him know I hadn’t known. So I was a naturist, so what?

  ‘Why don’t you go and put something on?’ he said mischievously.

  He knew.

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine,’ I said. I had to butch it out. I arranged my limbs in as near an approximation as I could manage to the position of Goya’s Naked Maja, and I told him about the Womun in the Balaclava Helmet.

  Then I went upstairs.

  Then I blushed.