Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  SPEARFIELD’S DAUGHTER

  Jon Cleary

  FOR BENJAMIN

  Copyright © 1982 by Sundowner Productions Pty Ltd

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any formwithout permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-819-3

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-148-4

  Cover photo © TK/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  MORE JON CLEARY EBOOKS

  SPEARFIELD’S DAUGHTER

  1

  I

  “YOU’RE SYLVESTER Spearfield’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  “Occasionally.”

  Cleo Spearfield knew she was being unnecessarily rude to the war correspondent from Melbourne. But he, a crude chauvinist, was accustomed to being snubbed by women and just grinned and walked on, satisfied that he had put her in her place.

  Tom Border looked after the Australian, then back at her. “Remind me never to ask you a question like that. Who is your father, anyway?”

  “Nobody. Go on with what you were saying.”

  Tom appraised her with a stare, then seemed to mentally shrug and went on with his thesis: “Wars are only benefit games for the generals. The poor grunts who have to fight the wars are necessary, but no career-minded man above the rank of colonel ever says they’re not expendable.”

  “I’m tired of all your male cynicism.”

  “That’s because you’re female, sentimental and compassionate. You also have a very nice swagger to your ass. Why did you come to the war, Cleo old girl?”

  “Because the mums back home in Australia are beginning to worry about their boys in a war that seems to be going all wrong. I thought I might be able to get at some of the truth.”

  But that, in itself, was only some of the truth. She had come to Vietnam to escape being Sylvester Spearfield’s daughter and to find her own name, if not fame.

  Her father, who saw himself as everyone’s guiding light and sometimes blinded himself with his own luminance, had once said to her, “Come to me when you’ve finished university. Whatever you want to do, I’m sure to know someone. Just don’t go into politics.”

  She knew he had given the same advice to her two brothers, who had listened to him and then gone into dentistry and meteorology, as if realizing the futility of competing against a famous father in his own field. Sylvester Spearfield had never been Prime Minister of Australia, but there were Prime Ministers who would never be remembered as long as the flamboyant Senator from New South Wales, the ex-trade union organizer who had risen to be a politician for whom even his old opponents, top management, now had a grudging but sincere admiration.

  “Afraid of the competition, Dad?” At both convent school and university she had already established a reputation as a radical. But all the newspaper reports on her activities called her her father’s daughter . . . Cleo Spearfield, daughter of the radical Senator, yesterday . . .

  Her father had let out the belly-laugh that the election crowds had once loved. Television had killed the belly-laugh as a campaign weapon and Sylvester had had difficulty in coming to terms with the living-room smile. “You’d lose your deposit every time you ran against me, sweetheart. I’ll still be in Parliament when your kids, my grandkids, are old enough to vote.”

  “You could retire and let me take your seat.”

  Her father had shaken his head with its long thick thatch. He had worn his hair long ever since he had gone into politics, liking to be thought of as one of the good old-time politicians, a man from Federation days, though he hadn’t been born when Australia became a nation. But fashion had caught up with him and now he was surrounded by others with long hair.

  “I’m not interested in creating a dynasty. You might turn out to be better than me. Then who’d remember me? I’d just be known as Cleo Spearfield’s father.”

  Which would serve him right, thought his daughter. She had decided then that she was going to be better than her father, but in another field. When she graduated and got a job on the Sydney Morning Post, he had reacted with mock disgust.

  “Whatever happened to the radical Cleo? How the hell did you con a conservative rag like the Post into taking you on?”

  “I think they’re trying to prove they’re not as reactionary as they really are. They’re also probably being spitefully funny, having the radical daughter of a radical Labour Senator on their women’s page.”

  “On the women’s page, eh? Try and subvert the blue-rinse set, sweetheart. Good luck.”

  But she hadn’t subverted the blue-rinse set; within three months she had been moved off the women’s page and on to general reporting. Within a year she had got her by-line, but all the readers knew she was her father’s daughter. She had longed to be Cleo Brown or Smith: Spearfield was too distinctive.

  Now, in 1968, she had decided to put distance, if nothing else, between herself and her father. She had applied to be sent to the Post’s London office, but they had turned her down. Then she had taken the plunge: “Send me to Vietnam. There’s no other Australian woman in the field there. Let me go and give the woman’s view.”

  The Post had never had a woman war correspondent; it did not even have a woman covering the small political wars in Canberra. But it had surprised her, after sitting on her application for two weeks. The editor had said, “All right, but don’t get yourself killed. And we want nothing radical, Cleo, none of your old anti-war stuff from your university days. Just good objective reporting.”

  Now Tom Border was saying, “The moms back home in America are also worrying about their boys in the war that’s going wrong every goddam day. But if ever we gentlemen—and ladies—” he bowed his head “—of the press told them the truth, they’d think we were un-American. The generals certainly would.”

  They were sitting on the terrace of the Continental Hotel. Above their heads the loudspeakers attached to the columns were blaring, taking all the mystery out of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Out on the streets Saigon flowed, scampered, jerked past like a back-projection scene that wasn’t quite in synchronization with what went on inside one’s head. Cleo had been here in Vietnam a month and she had begun to wonder if she would ever get any part of this war and this country into focus. She knew that many of the men, the press correspondents as well as the GIs, stoned themselves out of focus. Drugs, opium pills, cocaine, heroin, had become standard equipment, like a chow-tin or an M-16 rifle. The Australian officers had told her there was much less drug-taking amongst their men than amongst the Americans, but they had been guarded and she had wondered whether they were lying or trying not to be too critical of the Americans. She hadn’t pursued the question, however, and that had been when she had started to dodge the truth. She sipped her vermouth cassis and wondered how much more of the truth she would ignore before she went home.

  “I’m going up to An Bai tomorrow. You want to come?”

  As if he were asking her to a movie or a picnic. Tom Border had been in Vietnam over a year and soon he would be going home, to be replaced by another correspondent who would arrive full
of curiosity, looking for the truth, and would gradually become cynical and stoned and would wait only for his replacement. Though, come to think of it, she had never seen Tom stoned or even drunk, and never heard him mention that he took pills or smoked an opium pipe.

  “I was going anyway.”

  “You’re gutsy, Cleo old girl. You could sit here in Saigon on that beautiful ass of yours, like so many of the guys who don’t have beautiful asses, and write about the war from what they tell us at the Five O’Clock Follies. You swagger—”

  “I do not!” But she knew she did: she had inherited her father’s walk. Swaggering Sylvester, a newspaper had once called him, and he had let out the belly-laugh and swaggered even more.

  “You do, old girl. In that custom-tailored combat suit of yours, I have trouble distinguishing you from General Westmoreland. You and he are easily the two best-dressed Beautiful People this town has seen.”

  Which was more than could be said for him. No matter what he was dressed in, his clothes always seemed to fit him like a catcher’s glove, as if he had bought them in anticipation of middle-age spread. He was tall and bony and he might be handsome in twenty years’ time, when the bone in his face would be an advantage; he talked a lot, but she had noticed that his eyes often did not match his words, that they had a withdrawn look, as if his thoughts were a long way from his mouth. He was the correspondent for a small chain of Mid-West newspapers and she knew already that she would miss him when he went home next month.

  “But you’re gutsy and that makes you okay. I wish I could make you.”

  “Forget it, Tom. I didn’t come here to climb into bed with the first feller who asked me.”

  “I’ll bet I’m not the first who’s asked you. I mean that as a compliment.” He had a slow smile which gave him a certain charm missed by those who saw only his usual sober, watchful face.

  She had been invited to bed by at least two dozen men. There had been a brigadier-general who had sounded as if he were doing her a favour and dropping his rank; several colonels, a major, half a dozen captains and assorted press correspondents from Australia, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy; and a huge jet-black man from Nigeria, whose role she never did learn, who had suggested they go to bed and discuss the death of colonialism. She was not the only woman correspondent in Saigon and she was not the best-looking, but she was the newest and she had the most eye-catching figure. She had made a mistake having her suits made for her by the tailor on Tu Do; accustomed to making ao dais for the bar girls, he had assumed that she, too, wanted something tight that revealed her figure. Her looks were striking rather than beautiful; men would always gaze at her for there was a vibrancy about her that was more than just the flash of good white teeth and dark blue eyes. Though she didn’t know it, being only twenty-three, she had the sort of looks that would attract attention all her life. And would be both a blessing and a curse.

  She saw Pierre Cain coming across the square, dodging gracefully through the swarms of piranha-like Hondas. He came up on to the terrace, saw her and Tom, came along to their table and stood waiting to be asked to sit down. Part French, part Annamese, he had the best formal manners of each.

  “Sit down, Pierre,” said Tom. “You’re the best traffic-dodger I’ve ever seen. Twice there I thought one of those cowboys had got you.”

  Cain smiled. “We have an old superstition in Annam—” He spoke as if Annam still existed, as if the present situation were only transitory, and Annam would tomorrow be again as it always had been. In his mind he still lived in Indo-China, no matter what the foreigners now called it. “If a man is haunted, all he has to do is take the evil spirit close to a motorcycle or an automobile and it will be run down.”

  “What happens if the evil spirit gives you a push and you’re the one who’s run down?”

  Cain smiled again. “Then you are no longer haunted.”

  “Are you haunted now, Pierre?” said Cleo.

  He shrugged, turned away to order some mineral water, then looked back at them. “I have some disappointing news. No correspondents are being allowed into the An Bai area tomorrow.”

  Tom Border gave a Gallic shrug; but Cleo was angry. “Why not, for God’s sake? Isn’t that where they’ve had all the trouble with the VC? Are they afraid we might get hurt or something? Is that it?” She was afraid, but she would not admit it, not to men, even two men as sympathetic as Tom Border and Pierre Cain. “What’s gone wrong this time?”

  “They are bringing out our men and replacing them—it is to be an all-American operation.” He said it without bitterness or shame, as if it were natural to accept that this was now an almost all-American war. He was a liaison officer between the US and Vietnamese commands and had learned the diplomacy of swallowing one’s pride.

  Cleo looked at Tom, who said, “There you are, old girl. Nobody wants us.”

  “I don’t believe it. We were told only yesterday we could go up there . . .”

  “Brigadier-General Brisson—” Cain always gave everyone his exact rank; he had been an accountant in Hue before the war had swallowed him up—“I’m afraid he’s cancelled everything that was promised yesterday. He’s in charge of the An Bai operation. He says there will be no transport available for the press.”

  Cleo knew Roger Brisson; he was the brigadier-general who had invited her to bed. She had met him two days after her arrival in Saigon, at a reception at the American embassy for a party of US Congressmen come to visit the war. There had been few other correspondents there and none of the women from the press; nobody was interested in writing stories about anyone from Washington. But she was new and had gone along, to learn nothing except that General Brisson thought he was God’s gift to women and the war effort.

  He had taken her to dinner at the Caravelle Hotel, where he had shown he knew his way through a wine list as well as through a tactical plan. Outside, the White Mice, the Vietnamese police, paraded up and down, keeping the war at a safe distance. Come Armageddon, there will still be generals who will find time to dine properly.

  “Cleo? Is that a nickname?”

  “No, it’s short for Cleopatra. My mother was a romantic, she saw me growing up to sail my barge down the Murrumbidgee, conquering all before me.” Brigid Spearfield had been a country girl and all her reference points had been country towns, rivers, anywhere in the bush that helped her shut her mind against the city, which she had never accepted.

  “The Murrumbidgee?” Roger Brisson wondered if he had brought some sort of kook to dinner. Saigon was full of them, scores of them coming in and claiming to be representatives of the press. He decided it was time to get her out of public view into a more private place. “We’ll go back to my quarters after dinner.”

  “Is that an invitation to go to bed with you?”

  “Yes.” He always gave a direct answer to a direct question; it meant that down the chain of command there was never any confusion. Or should not be. “You could do far worse than me, but not any better. Not in this town.”

  He was handsome, trim and fit; the twenty years’ difference between them didn’t worry either of them. But Cleo knew the bed would be crowded, his ego would keep getting between them. “No, thank you.”

  He looked at her as if she should be put on a charge-sheet for conduct prejudicial to military order and good discipline. “You may be glad of my civilized company, you won’t find any of that amongst the press corps. That is, if you stay long enough. I don’t believe women have much stamina for war.”

  “You may well be right,” she had said, though she wondered what sort of answer Martha Gellhorn or Marguerite Higgins would have given him. Gellhorn who had been covering the Spanish Civil War when Brisson was not yet in high school and who was still writing about war; and Higgins who had slogged her way through Korea with the best of the men and died from a tropical disease picked up right here in Vietnam. “But some of us don’t find that disgraceful, General.”

  The evening had ended shor
tly after that. He had abruptly remembered that he had to attend a conference—there was a war to be won. She had seen him only once since then, going past in a Jeep across Lam Son Square; he had looked at her and through her, then turned and stared straight ahead. She had wanted to jeer and boo, something she would have done on campus in her university days. But anti-war demonstrations were out of place in Saigon.

  “Well, I’m going somewhere tomorrow,” she told Cain and Tom. “Where else can I get a ride to?”

  “Attagirl,” said Tom; then looked at Cain. “Send her somewhere healthy, Pierre. We don’t want to lose her.”

  “I’ll think of somewhere.” Cain raised his glass of mineral water and drank their health. Then he looked at the label on the bottle the waiter had left. “Vichy water. Do you think they bottle treachery?”

  But that had been another war, ending the year she was born, and Vichy meant nothing to Cleo.

  II

  She sat on her pack on the edge of the air-strip and listened to the obscenities, wondering when the English language had become so inadequate that nothing but four-letter words would do to describe everything from the war to the weather. Four-letter words had been very fashionable back on campus, as if the students of the day had been proving that education was a barrel of nightsoil, as her father would have called it. She had always had an aversion to such language and if she had not been such a radical in other matters she would have been called a prig by her fellow students. But whatever the language back on campus, she had heard nothing like the conversation of these American grunts.

  “The war’s nothing but fucking shit, I tell you.” He was nineteen and back home in Chappell, Nebraska, his mother would probably have told him to wash out his mouth with soap. “Only them motherfuckers back in Washington won’t admit it.”

  “I come out here to fight for the fucking gooks and all the fucking gooks done was fucking run away.”

  “Sensible motherfuckers. I been reading about the fucking wisdom of the East.”