Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  She let herself out of the flat and went home to her own place in South Kensington. She went to bed laughing. Women have no pity for men who make themselves look ridiculous in private or public. They prefer to do the demolition themselves.

  III

  She had a one-bedroom flat in a mansion block that still had a majority of older, conservative residents. The porter in the entrance lobby looked as if he might have been at Mafeking; the agents seemed to have put him there against an invasion of the swingers who were taking over South Kensington. Some of the older residents, those who were still capable of it, had their discreet affairs; and the porter turned a half-shut eye to strangers, male or female, who might sneak out in the early morning. So long as they looked respectable and didn’t flaunt themselves, he didn’t care what went on upstairs. A bit of breeding never hurt what the upper classes wanted to have on the side.

  He had never thought of Miss Spearfield, being Australian, as upper class, but he was impressed when the big Rolls-Royce drew up outside and the chauffeur came in with a box of red roses. “Will you see Miss Spearfield gets these right away?”

  “Will she know who they’re from?” Meaning he’d like to know.

  “She’ll know,” said Sid Cromwell, ready for another campaign at the florist’s.

  There was no note or card in the box, but when Cleo opened it and saw the red roses she did indeed know.

  IV

  “No, Mr. Border, I do not give exclusive interviews. I hated that press conference yesterday, but Farquhars thought it politic that I should hold it. I don’t know that it achieved anything. All the cheap papers referred to me as the rich American heiress, as if I were still twenty-one.”

  Claudine Roux was scrutinizing Tom Border while she talked to him. She was not over-impressed by what she saw; she did not like untidy men, or untidy women for that matter. But she liked his watchful eyes—they would miss nothing from here to any horizon—and though he was not handsome now he might be in years to come. She liked the thought of that, though not directly connecting the thought with him; looks were always more interesting when they were backed up by experience. She was sixty and still beautiful and though she admired the beauty of the young she did not yearn to be young again herself. There were, of course, some drawbacks to being older . . . but she never thought of herself as old and would have sacked Tom Border on the spot had she known he referred to her as the Old Lady.

  “I think Miss Spearfield might be more discreet than that.” Tom was not sure he could make such a promise. He had looked up some of Cleo’s pieces and “discreet” was in fact the last word he would have applied to them. But he wanted to get her her interview, if it was possible. He felt he owed her something, though he wasn’t sure what.

  “Mr. Border, I read the English newspapers, even tabloids like the Examiner. Miss Spearfield uses her little axe more frequently than Lizzie Borden did.”

  Tom stood up, shrugged. “Maybe you’re right, Mrs. Roux.”

  “I usually am, Mr. Border. What are you doing this evening?”

  Tom hung on to his eyebrows. “Well—nothing, I guess.”

  “Don’t look so shocked. I’m not in the habit of soliciting young men, certainly not those who work for me. I have to go to a dinner this evening and I prefer to choose my own partner rather than being burdened with some bore.”

  He chanced a half-smile: “You don’t think I’d be a bore?”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you if I’d thought that. But you’re not very gallant, Mr. Border. You’re not rushing to accept my invitation.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Roux. My mother would be ashamed of me—she brought me up to have proper respect for ladies.”

  “Old as well as young?”

  “Both,” he said gallantly.

  “Never forget older women, Mr. Border. Often all some of them have to look forward to is small courtesies.” She did not include herself in that group. She would always expect more than small courtesies—and get them.

  She had not met Tom Border until yesterday, though she had seen his by-line in her paper. Although she owned the largest bundle of stock in the Courier, she never interfered with the paper below board level and knew none of the staff except the top executives. Empresses, she had read (she had read a great deal about empresses, and felt she understood Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria and Carlotta of Mexico), never concerned themselves with the palace drains. She thought the Courier just occasionally published sewage, but then so did all newspapers, even the New York Times. She hated muck-raking and after reading a scandalous story in the Courier always brought the matter up at board meetings.

  “You are a good reporter, Mr. Border.”

  “I think so, Mrs. Roux. I say that modestly, of course.”

  “Of course. How else could you say it?” They smiled at each other, the empress and the new young man at court. But she did not have Catherine the Great’s appetite for young lovers. New York in the second half of the twentieth century was not Moscow in the eighteenth century. That other empress had not had to suffer syndicated gossips, just those at court. “Do you have a dinner suit?”

  Tom hadn’t worn anything even semi-formal since his high school graduation. “No, but I guess I can hire one.”

  “Do, and get one that fits you better than that sack you’re wearing. Be here at the Connaught at seven forty-five. Sharp.”

  “Yes, ma’am. May I ask where we’re going for dinner? I like to be briefed.” “To Lord Cruze’s.”

  V

  “I don’t mind an occasional bleeding heart leader writer,” said Cruze, “but I don’t want a haemophiliac.”

  “Jack, dear boy, if you weren’t so short yourself,” said the Tory shadow minister, “you wouldn’t care a damn about the Little People.”

  “Women give rape a bad name,” said the homosexual writer who had been raped only by critics.

  Cleo and Tom, deaf to the sometimes soggy soufflé of conversation being passed round the dinner table, looked across at each other. Each had been surprised to see the other with their respective boss; even more, they were both shocked, puritanism welling up as it does in all lapsed Christians. One did not go out with one’s boss, especially when the boss was so much older.

  Later, in the drawing-room, Tom came and sat beside Cleo. He looked uncomfortable in the well-tailored dinner jacket: he needed room to move within his clothes. “You look beautiful tonight, Cleo old girl.”

  She was in white, a virginal suggestion spoiled by the exposure of her bosom. “So do you, positively suave. Did you get that from Moss Bros? I thought so. You should get them to dress you all the time. Is that in honour of the Old Lady?”

  He smiled, shook his head, sipped his brandy. He had had no experience of life at this level and he was enjoying himself. Maybe he should try for a life as a rich drifter.

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were jealous. I’m jealous of Lord Cruze.”

  “There’s no need to be. I’m just here to keep a chair warm till he finds another mistress.” She hoped she sounded convincing.

  “He couldn’t find a more beautiful ass to keep a chair warm.”

  “I hope you two are not discussing me,” said Claudine Roux, sitting down opposite them.

  “Not at all,” said Cleo, wondering how much she had heard.

  She had not noticed if Mrs. Roux’s ass was beautiful, but the rest of her certainly was. Back home in Australia, where the harsh sunlight rarely allowed a woman’s beauty to last beyond middle age, she had never really looked to see if there were truly beautiful women amongst the elderly. She also had the fault of all youth, of setting a low age limit for beautiful women or handsome men. Secure in flesh and mind and the present tense, she did not bother herself with how she would look in the future.

  “Lord Cruze has just been extolling your virtues,” said Claudine.

  “Singular as well as plural, I hope?”

  Claudine smiled, polishing her shield: s
he liked fencing with the young. “I’ve never believed that virtue has its own reward. Some celibate priest coined that one. Don’t be shocked, Mr. Border. I’m not advocating permissiveness, just a little moderate immorality when the occasion calls for it.”

  “How does one recognize the occasion?” said Cleo.

  “My dear, I’m sure you’d know it. Get me some more coffee, would you, Mr. Border?” She looked after Tom as he moved away, then turned back to Cleo. “You and Mr. Border obviously know each other. Where did you meet?”

  “In Vietnam.”

  “Really? What were you doing there?”

  “Protecting my virtue, mostly. When I wasn’t doing that, I was covering the war.”

  “Indeed?” She looked at Cleo with new interest, taking her out of the revealing white dress and putting her in combat-dress; though, of course, the white dinner-gown was also combat-dress for a different, undeclared war. “Did you ever meet my brother? General Brisson.”

  Cleo almost ruined the white gown; her coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “Yes. Yes, I had dinner with him once.”

  “Only once? Then you must have kept your virtue. Oh, I know my brother, Miss Spearfield. My sister-in-law calls his diversions his ‘supply troops.’ I hope you were not one of them.”

  “No, Mrs. Roux, I was not.” She put some ice into her voice.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve offended you.”

  Claudine’s apology was sincere. She attacked more often than she intended; those who knew her would have laughed if she had claimed that it was a form of defence. But it was, had been ever since her father and her husband, both arrogant men, had died and left her in charge of the Brisson empire. She had never expected to be the empress, only the consort. Until Pierre Brisson and Henri Roux had died in the same plane crash twenty years ago, she had been content to be what everyone saw her as: the beautiful but dutiful daughter and wife, doting mother of an only son born in her late thirties because Henri had not wanted children before then, loving sister of an only brother who had had a brilliant if chequered career at West Point. Suddenly faced with responsibility after Roger had refused to leave the army and come home and run the empire, she had put up sharp pointed defences, an irony-railed fence. She had always had a sharp tongue, but only Henri had known of it, though he had never listened.

  “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Mrs. Roux. You’ve been studying me all evening. I’m sure you think I’m one of Lord Cruze’s supply troops. I’m not. No more than Mr. Border is one of yours.”

  “Touché,” said Claudine and took her coffee from Tom as he came back. “Miss Spearfield and I are getting on so well. She knew my brother, General Brisson, in Vietnam.”

  “Yes?” Tom looked at Cleo out of the corner of his eye.

  “Mrs. Roux knows his faults,” said Cleo blandly. “How he likes to dally.”

  “Yes.” Tom kept his composure and his curiosity tight inside the well-fitting jacket.

  Then Lord Cruze, having given enough time to his other guests, came over to join them. He sat on the edge of a chair, tie awry, jacket open, shirt creeping out of his trousers. Claudine looked at him with distaste and admiration: she had learned to do both living with Henri.

  “I heard you talking with the French ambassador,” Cruze said. “You speak French fluently. I never thought Americans were good linguists.”

  “We think the same about the English,” said Claudine, wondering why she was raising the American flag; she rarely did that at home. “My parents were French, Jack. My brother and I were born in France. My husband was French. It sort of runs in and out of the family.”

  “I thought your family had been in America for generations. Somehow one doesn’t think of the French as immigrants.”

  “The French never think of themselves as immigrants, Jack. Other nationalities, yes, but never the French. Some of my ancestors owned plantations in Louisiana, owned them before the Louisiana Purchase. But each time a woman in the family found herself pregnant, she went back to France to have the child. It just so happened that my mother and I both married Frenchmen who later became American citizens. Reluctantly, I believe. My husband, for instance, pulled the blinds down on July the Fourth but let off fireworks on Bastille Day.”

  Cruze envied people who could trace their families, and especially family influence, back through generations. He had tried tracing the Cruze and Brown families and had given up at his great-grandfather on each side: a family tree of shrivelled nonentities was not what he was looking for. He had got more pleasure, as a junior bank clerk, tracing the bank manager’s signature.

  He looked at the American sitting beside Cleo. He hadn’t missed their glances at each other across the dinner table and he wondered if he had competition here. “What do you think of Britain, Mr. Border?”

  “I’m still feeling my way, sir. They tell me London isn’t Britain, just as New York isn’t America. I’m going to start in the worst part, over in Belfast, and work my way back. I’m going there, this weekend.”

  Cleo sat up, and glanced at Cruze. “I’m going there, too. But Lord Cruze has been trying to talk me out of it. He doesn’t think women should expose themselves—” she lifted the front of her dress, caught Claudine’s eye and smiled, “—to danger.”

  “It’s no place for women,” said Cruze. “The information I have is that it’s going to get very dirty over there. Like your Vietnam.”

  “No, never like Vietnam,” said Tom and looked sideways again at Cleo.

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Cleo. “We’ll go to Belfast together, Tom, and compare notes. You can look after me for Lord Cruze.”

  The two men looked at each other and smiled, but Cruze’s smile was tight and Tom’s tentative. Each of them was surprised at his own sudden jealousy.

  “The young,” said Claudine, “they seem to enjoy war.”

  Oh my God, thought Cleo, if you only knew who did enjoy it!

  VI

  The guests had gone and Cruze, tie off and collar loosened, sat in the drawing-room having a night-cap with Cleo. The extra staff who had come in to help Mrs. Cromwell had also gone; the Cromwells themselves were in bed. The huge flat was silent, and across Green Park Cleo heard a police car ringing its way down Constitution Hill. The bell had no real urgency about it, any more than would a carload of carillonists ting-a-linging their drunken way home. Soon, she had heard, all the cars would be equipped with sirens, bringing the city’s tension properly up to date.

  “Would you like to see a film?” Cruze had not felt so uncertain of himself with a woman in years.

  “I’m too tired for Valentino, Jack.”

  “How about Hoot Gibson?” He grinned, then looked at her carefully, as he might at a new executive he was about to employ. “You were a beautiful hostess tonight.”

  “Was that what I was—the hostess?” She looked at him just as carefully, not looking for employment.

  “Would you like to be?”

  “Is that a proposal or a proposition?”

  She stood up, straightening her dress over her hips. She wished now that she had worn a looser, less revealing gown; she had put it on without thinking about the possible consequences. She liked to show off her figure and she knew that men liked to look at it. But she had been naïve tonight. The women at the dinner party, all older than she, had read more into the tight, revealing gown than had occurred to her. She had advertised herself as Jack Cruze’s latest girl.

  “Dammit!” But he swallowed his annoyance and changed the subject. “Are you still going to Belfast? With that fellow what’s-his-name?”

  “Tom Border. You never forget names, Jack.”

  “Is there something between you and him?”

  She found her wrap, draped it round her shoulders. “He asked exactly the same about you. The answer in both cases is No. Call me a taxi, please, Jack.”

  She had refused to allow him to send Sid Cromwell to pick her up and had told him at the same time that she was not to be driven ho
me. To have accepted the Rolls-Royce as her transport would somehow have been, in her eyes, an acceptance of her role as more than just his dinner partner. Going home by taxi declared her independence.

  He didn’t argue. He rang downstairs to the night porter, then opened the front door of the flat and took her hand. “You’re bloody annoying, Cleo. We could be good friends.”

  “I thought we were.” Then she relented, kissed him on the cheek. “Goodnight, Jack. Don’t take me for granted, that’s all I ask.”

  5

  I

  “NO, MISS Devlin won’t be letting herself give interviews to rags like the Examiner. Now if you were from The Times or the Guardian . . .”

  “How about the New York Courier?”

  “Ah, we’d have to think about that, wouldn’t we? Boston and Brooklyn, we know about our support there, but New York . . .”

  He was an old man, too old for war. But war had been his life if not his profession; he had fought in the Troubles, killed his share of Black-and-Tans. The young men were itching to take over, but he was one of those hanging on, protecting his authority as much as his fierce nationalism. He wore a cloth cap instead of a red-banded army cap, but he was just like the British generals had been in World War One. Tom Border had made a study of generals.

  “I don’t think you should judge me on what paper I work for,” said Cleo. “For all you know, I may be very sympathetic to Miss Devlin and the IRA.”

  “You may be that, too. But there’s no evidence, is there, not from your paper. No, Miss Devlin, she’s saving herself to talk to the British press in London. She’s a very intelligent lass, that one.” He tried to keep the surprise out of his voice, wondering why so many sensible fellers had voted for the girl. “Maybe you’d like to interview me. I knew all the big fellers, De Valera, Michael Collins, all them fellers.” He lived in the past, the battles had become a romance in his misted memory. “It was different then,” he added, pathetically.