Spearfield's Daughter
Page 3
“But that was probably some local commander, a captain or a lieutenant, someone who’d gone round the bend or was stoned. But today—it was planned, it must have been. If General Brisson was there, then he’d okayed the massacre. Why did they suddenly cancel all transport for us?”
“It’s not the first time. We’re only Priority 3 when it comes to transport. Look—” he leaned forward across the table, all at once tense and concerned, “I can guess what happened—I believe you. But it’s like Jack Martin said to you back there in the press room—no editor is ever going to print the truth. They prefer to believe the mullarkey they get from their bureaux in Washington—they think we’re all junkies out here or alcoholics—”
“My paper will print it. It doesn’t always believe what Washington says—”
He sat back, relaxed and cynical again. “Well, good luck. But didn’t your late Prime Minister, the one who was drowned, say ‘All the way with LBJ?’ I just hope for your sake that your editor doesn’t subscribe to that. Now eat up your croustade de langonstes.” His accent was terrible, Missouri Provençal. “I’m going to take you to bed tonight and comfort you. I don’t think you should be left alone.”
Before she could answer that, Pierre Cain came into the restaurant with his wife. She was small and beautiful, an Annamese, with a look of sad dignity about her, as if she had lost everything that had meant anything to her but would never let her grief be public. Cain seated his wife at a table, told a waiter to attend to her, then came across to Cleo and Tom. As ever, he stood waiting as if he dare not sit down until invited. But this time, when Tom reached for a chair, he shook his head.
“This will only take a moment—I don’t like to desert my wife for too long. She is afraid of being alone—” Cleo looked at Tom, but Cain missed her glance. “Miss Spearfield, I heard what happened out at An Bai today, that you were there. Are you going to write the story?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Please do. But I have to warn you—if you do, your visa will be withdrawn and you’ll have to leave. Our government does everything the Americans ask.”
“Do you think I should write the story, Pierre?”
It was his turn to hesitate, then he nodded. “It should be written by someone. This is my country—I don’t think we should be the victims of both the Communists and the Americans.”
He bowed and went across the restaurant to his wife. As she ate her dinner, for which she now had no taste, Cleo looked across at them sitting stiffly opposite each other like strangers. Then she saw Madame Cain’s hand slide across the table and press her husband’s. It was only a small gesture, one that Cleo had seen dozens of times in restaurants in Sydney; but this time she wanted to weep. She bent her head, feeling the tears in her eyes.
“Something wrong?” said Tom.
“I’m feeling female, sentimental and compassionate.” She looked up at him and wiped her eyes with her napkin. “A cynic like you wouldn’t understand.”
He looked at her, then across at the Cains, then back at her. “I can understand people still being in love after twenty or thirty years. My folks still are. Only thing is, they’ve been luckier than those two over there. When things are like they are with the Cains, maybe all they have is each other. I don’t think they have any kids.”
It was almost as if she were looking at him for the first time. She had seen him virtually every day since she had been here and she had appreciated his company; though he talked about wanting to take her to bed, he had never made a physical pass at her; he had never come at her as strongly and bluntly as some of the other men with time on their hands in Saigon. Sometimes his cynicism annoyed her, but it was no worse than that of most of the other correspondents; God knows, in a year’s time, if she stayed here that long, she might be just as bad. She knew nothing of what he sent back to the chain of newspapers in the American Mid-West. She realized all at once that she knew nothing at all about him, that behind the withdrawn eyes was a total stranger.
“Who are you, Tom? What are you?”
He smiled, sipped his wine. “A Budweiser boy with pretensions maybe, I don’t know. I’m American provincial, right out of the mould. My dad’s people and my mother’s, too, came down the Wilderness Road out of Kentucky into Missouri nearly one hudred and fifty years ago. Dad’s a farmer, not a big one, but we’ve always lived comfortable. The farm’s outside a little town called Friendship in south-west Missouri and about the only excitement it’s ever known is when a tornado goes through every couple of years or so.”
“You came straight from there to here?”
“No. I went up to the University of Missouri, did journalism. I got a job on the Kansas City Star. I left there after a year and went to New York and the New York Times gave me a six months’ trial. At the end of it we parted company with no hard feelings on my part and no feelings at all on theirs—I was just another hick from the sticks who hadn’t made it. After that I just drifted—I even went to Europe for a year. Maybe that’s what I really am, a drifter. A newspaper bum. There are a lot of us. You only have to look around here in Saigon. A guy down at JUSPAO told me there are over 600 accredited correspondents in ‘Nam. There’s got to be a pretty fair number of bums amongst them, guys just chasing a story, any story.”
“I don’t think you’re like that. I mean, you’re not out here just chasing a story.”
“Why am I here?” He was smiling, but the eyes were darkly watchful.
“The same reason I am. You wanted to know.”
He put his big bony hand on hers. “I could love you, Cleo old girl.” He was still smiling and now the eyes had lightened. “Even with all your swagger.”
She knew there was no swagger in her tonight. “Are you married?”
He shook his head. “I got close a couple of times. But they were both homebodies, a girl in Friendship and one in Kansas City. If I’d married either of them and settled down and then one day come home and complained I’d got itchy feet, she’d have gone out and bought ajar of Foot Balm. I don’t think you’d do that.”
She didn’t answer that. What he had described would have fitted her own situation; there were two lovers back home in Sydney who had not understood why she had refused the security each had offered her. Even her father, the onetime drifter, the political bum, had hinted he would like her to settle down, be near him whenever he wanted to call on her.
“Where do you live? I mean here in Saigon?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Then he looked at her seriously. “Are you sure you want to come with me?”
She smiled, put her hand on his; she was full of such affectionate gestures. They were a weakness: men read more into them than she intended. “Tom, I don’t think you really want to go to bed with me. You’re scared.” She saw his eyes narrow, as if he had been hit; she was instantly sorry, for she did not like hurting people. She lifted his hand, kissed it as a penance. It was always the same: she dug her own quicksands, trying to compensate for her mistakes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
He had a two-room apartment in a dilapidated villa ten minutes by taxi from the restaurant. A French lawyer had owned the villa, but that had been in the days of French Indo-China; a dead flame tree stood in the front garden like a shattered memorial to what had once been. All the windows were covered with thick wire mesh and a guard, a young Vietnamese, stood at the front gates, a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“The other guys who live here are chopper pilots, Americans. A couple of times the VC came around with their calling card. Grenades. You scared?”
She smiled and suddenly he laughed, the first time she had heard a full laugh from him. He put his arm round her and they went upstairs to his apartment. She looked around it, but there was nothing in it to identify him. She wondered if all the other rooms in his drifter’s existence had been as bare.
She was surprised at his technique in bed; she had expected him to be smoother. He had apparently learned to
make love at an unarmed combat school; he reduced foreplay to a ten-second dash. She rolled out from beneath him.
“I’m not an obstacle course. God knows, I’m trying to make myself easy for you. Here, let me show you . . .”
“I don’t like the woman on top.”
“That’s just American male chauvinism.”
“What about Aussie men?”
“They’re different. They just think it’s pervy for the girl to be on top. Lie still!”
But it wasn’t satisfactory at all. The love-making was more acrobatic than passionate; like a couple of kangaroos trying to be human, she thought. She lay back after it and stared at the stained and cracked ceiling. Neither of them said anything and after a while she got up and dressed. He still lay in bed, watching her.
“That’s ruined everything, hasn’t it?” he said at last.
“Between us? Not necessarily. I just don’t think we’ll be going to bed again, that’s all.”
“I’m out of practice. I haven’t had a woman since I came out here. I don’t fancy the bar girls, getting the clap—”
“Get dressed and take me back to the Continental. I don’t like wandering around on my own at night.”
He was not the sort to make conversation to cover awkward silences. They sat without talking during the taxi ride back to the hotel, but when they reached it he got out and paid off the taxi driver.
“It’s goodnight here, Tom, not up in my room. Tonight was my fault as much as yours.”
She had the sense of guilt that she always had when she allowed a man to make love to her; she hadn’t entirely thrown off the influence of the nuns at the convent. She had been in love, or imagined herself to be, with each man at the moment; afterwards she had not been disillusioned with the man but with herself. She had been looking for love, not falling in love; the men had not been to blame for falling short of her dreams. She had never believed that sex was a way of leading to love; she knew enough to be able to separate sensation from emotion. But, like her mother, she was a romantic and tonight, suddenly and (she thought) inexplicably, she had felt romantic. And all Tom Border had wanted was a roll in the hay.
“I’m going into the bar.”
“Don’t get drunk on my account, Tom.”
He smiled, the old Tom Border again: withdrawn, watchful. “Just a glass of Budweiser, to remind me of home. Goodnight, Cleo old girl. Like you say, it was nobody’s fault.”
She was about to say, That wasn’t what I said; but didn’t. Never argue about your mistakes, her father, the politician, had said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Tom.”
IV
She dreamed that night of her home street in Coogee back in Sydney, with black-clad corpses lying in the roadway and faintly familiar figures (boys she had once known?) standing over them with guns. She woke in a sweat and it took her a long time to go back to sleep again. She wondered if dreams like this had first started the GIs on the need to get stoned.
In the morning she learned that Tom had gone up to Danang. She wondered where he would go from there and hoped he wouldn’t go looking for the worst of the war. Not with only three weeks to go before he went home for a visit to the farm outside—where was it? Where the only excitement was an occasional tornado.
She felt a sense of loss and wondered why: for God’s sake, she hadn’t been in love with him! The loudspeakers on the Continental terrace were playing a Rolling Stones number, 2000 Light Years From Home, Mick Jagger sending his comfort on a nice safe plastic disc. She got up and went looking for more evidence of what had happened at An Bai yesterday. But she might just as well have gone looking for true love amongst the bars.
She asked to see General Brisson and was told he was up-country; that afternoon she saw him in his Jeep going down Tu Do Street. She tried to find out which company from what regiment had gone into An Bai yesterday; but even that information wasn’t available. It took her two days to write her story and she had the sense not to cable it; she went down to the post office and mailed it special delivery. Then she went back to the Continental and waited; at night she had more nightmares, but after three nights they were gone; put away at the back of her mind for future torture. She was relieved and pleased that she did not feel she needed an opium pill.
She found after a day or two that she was also waiting for Tom Border to come back. But he didn’t and at the end of the week she learned he had been wounded in a Marines action up beyond Danang, not badly but enough to have him sent out on a plane going to Tokyo. She felt annoyed that he had gone without saying goodbye to her; but she went up to her room and wrote him a short note. She said she hoped he wasn’t badly wounded and would soon be well enough to go on drifting. She did not know where to send the letter and she would not go to the press office to ask the address of the head office of the chain of newspapers he represented. In the end she addressed it simply: Tom Border, care of Friendship, Missouri.
Next day she got a cable from the Sydney Morning Post recalling her.
V
“They won’t print my story, Dad—that’s why I’ve resigned!”
“Sweetheart, what did you expect? I believe your story and I’m sure the Post believes it. But they back the Government, they back the war. They couldn’t print subversive stuff like yours. It would be like asking Old Jack Pack to vote Labour.” John Pack was the fifth generation of the family that owned the Post. “Go and ask them for your job back, tell ‘em you had second thoughts.”
“God Almighty, how can you suggest such a thing? I’m not a bloody politician, I can’t compromise like you—”
He was not hurt by her remark, he had been too long in politics to be wounded by insults. The fun of politics for him was the insults; they were part of the masochism. Or so he said with the belly-laugh.
“Sweetheart, things like you describe happen in all wars.” He had not fought in World War Two. He had been in Parliament then, in his first term; he had also had a bad back, a heritage of his days as a sheep-shearer, and the army had rejected him. There were times when he regretted he had not gone to the war: he still dreamed of being a real hero, more than just a warrior with words. There had been snide remarks by Government members during the Vietnam debates about his never having seen a shot fired in anger, and those insults had hurt. “I remember an incident in New Guinea during World War Two. I heard about it, but none of us ever bothered to check it because it put our fellers in a bad light. They were supposed to have bayoneted something like a hundred wounded Japs rather than take them prisoner. They could have shot them, but they preferred to bayonet them. That was hushed up because God was supposed to be on our side and no Aussie mum wanted to be told her son was a murderer.”
She was prepared to believe anything about men: she was blind with rage and frustration. It was men who had killed her story. “That was over twenty years ago, before I was born. You men have always been fighting dirty wars . . . This is now, the war that’s going on right now!”
He could see it was pointless arguing with her. He, like most politicians, knew when an argument was lost. “All right. What are you going to do, then?”
They were in the house where she had been born, in Coogee, looking down towards the beach. Her mother, feeling secure in suburbia, had never wanted to leave here, at least not unless she could move back to the even better security of the bush. Her father, safe in a Labour seat (when he had been a Member of the House and not yet in the Senate), had always said he would never desert the voters who had given him his start. He ignored the fact that, as time went on, a lot of his voters prospered, moved to more affluent districts and began to vote for the other party. The house had none of the flamboyance of Sylvester: it was like Brigid Spearfield, solid, modest, a small fortress against the sins and temptations of a larger world. Not that much sin and temptation passed up and down the streets of Coogee.
“I’m going to London.” Where sin and temptation abounded, but that was not the reason for her going.
“No, Dad. I want to do it on my own.” Before I marry and settle down, but she didn’t add that, afraid of the bitter sarcasm on her tongue.
“Well, I suppose so. I did.”
“No, you didn’t. You had Mum.”
He had the grace to look ashamed. “Do you think I’ve forgotten? Well, good luck, sweetheart. I hope the Poms appreciate you. How long will you be away?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I’m ambitious. Some day I may own Fleet Street.” She laughed as she said it: still, it was a nice dream. One that had come to her only last night, the shaft of light on the road to London.
The Senate was in session in Canberra when she left Sydney for London and her father could not get away. He phoned her, wished her goodbye. Perhaps it was a bad connection (“Connections are always bad between Canberra and Sydney,” he had once said, but he had meant it in another context), but his voice seemed to break. He hung up hurriedly, saying he had just heard the division bells ring. She put the phone slowly back in its cradle and let the tears come. She felt guilty: as much as anything else, she was running away from him, from his name and what passed for fame in politics. She wondered if he had guessed.
Her brothers and sisters-in-law came to the airport to see her off. Her brothers, Alexander and Perry, short for Pericles (heroes both; or so her mother had hoped when she had christened them), hugged her to their beer bellies, the Great Australian Profile as she called it, and wished her the best of Aussie luck; in their own way they had tried to escape from their father by being as ordinary and plebeian as they could be. Her sisters-in-law, Madge and Cheryl, kissed her and, she sensed, envied her. They had both married young and if sin and temptation ever crossed their paths it would be in the form of some footballsy stud from the Leagues club, not a boulevardier from some Gomorrah like London, Paris or Rome.