Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “You should never be allowed out of America,” said Claudine. “This foreign air goes to your head.”

  Louise had no French blood, but each time she came to France she was more French than the French. She dropped into a chair, spread her legs as if practising for the can-can. “Roger, chéri, pour me some wine. Oh, isn’t it a marvellous day! On days like this I just want to sing and make love!”

  “Don’t attempt both at the same time,” said Claudine. “It might produce a hernia.”

  Roger smiled indulgently at his wife. He loved her sincerely and always had, but he knew he could not resist the lure of other, younger women. He had never formed any permanent, or even semi-permanent, relationship with the latter: they came and went like recruits in boot camp, and he always enjoyed coming home to Louise. She was a perfect soldier’s perfect wife, a solidly established base to fall back on. Strategy and tactics were as important for a good marriage as for a good war.

  Louise returned his smile, raised her glass to him. “I’m just glad to have you home from that dreadful war, darling.”

  “I understand we have no chance of winning it,” said Claudine.

  “That’s not true,” said Roger.

  But he did not want to talk about the war, not if Claudine had heard rumours from Washington, even if they were stale rumours a year old. He now regretted what had happened and admitted that he had been over-zealous. An Bai had been a festering sore for almost a year before he had ordered the attack on it; it was known that it harboured Viet Cong, though Intelligence had not been able to determine exactly how many. Villagers had been brought in and interrogated, but it had been like asking questions of statues. Frustrated, angered by an ambush that Intelligence thought had originated from VCs working out of the village, he had ordered the cleanout operation. His orders had been imprecise: he had meant all adult males to be eliminated, not the whole of the population. Something had got out of hand: maybe his orders had been misunderstood, maybe all the troops had been so stoned that the massacre had become just a party for them. He had interviewed the lieutenant in charge of the operation, who had not been on drugs. The lieutenant had been distressed to the point of collapse at what had happened and had insisted he had done everything he could to stop his men in their indiscriminate killing but had been unsuccessful. He, a junior officer who would have received his orders down the chain of command, had not queried those orders at the interview; he seemed more concerned with protecting his men from the consequences of what they had done while under the influence of drugs. If he had later queried the orders, when he had calmed down and was able to look at the whole mess in perspective, it seemed that he had kept his queries to himself. He, unlike the grunts under him, had been a career man; maybe someone higher up had talked him into the proper priorities. Roger did not know and had never gone back to enquire. He had turned his back on what had happened and hoped the lid would never be lifted again on what had been dumped in the latrine.

  “I’m on furlough. Let’s forget the war,” he said. “How’s the Courier doing? You said it was a headache.”

  “It’s not doing well at all, it’s lost money for the last five years. I don’t know what the solution is, except to turn it into a tabloid and hope for the best. Which I would never do. While I was in London I looked at successful papers there, ones like the Mirror and the Examiner. I’d never let the Courier sink to that level.”

  “Personally,” said Louise, “I’m going to miss the Daily News while we’re here in Europe.”

  “Why don’t you sell the Courier then?”

  Roger had never taken much interest in the family fortune. Each year his dividends came to him with a statement of the family holdings’ finances; he looked at the figures on the dividend cheque and rarely, if ever, read past the first page of the financial statement. All he knew was that each year the cheque was bigger than the previous year’s and that, as far as he was concerned, meant he did not have to worry. He was possibly the richest man in the US armed forces, but to talk about it or even think about it would be shameful. He had his standards. West Point, the home of so many impoverished officers, had taught him those.

  Claudine looked at him as if he had suggested that she should sell herself. “If you bothered to look at the paper’s constitution and refresh your memory, you would know that we cannot sell our stock unless there is a one hundred per cent takeover bid for the Courier. Father wrote in that clause when the paper went public forty years ago. He wanted us to have the controlling interest or be out of it altogether, so that if it should be turned into a cheap rag, our name would no longer be associated with it.”

  “What are the stock holdings?” Louise, a wealthy man’s daughter, had no interest in money other than the spending of it.

  Claudine wondered how she could be related to two such irresponsible fools. She herself had never worshipped money, though she had a proper respect for it. One could be as well bred in financial etiquette as in anything else.

  “I have thirty-five per cent and Roger has ten per cent of the Courier—we hold those through the holding company. The other fifty-five per cent is owned by general stockholders, none of whom, as far as I can remember, has more than ten per cent.”

  “Then if the paper is such a loser, why don’t you get all those stockholders together and suggest you look for a buyer?” Louise’s eyes sparkled with her idea, as if she had just discovered the secret of alchemy.

  Spenders, thought Claudine, have orgasms of piety when they suddenly have a thrifty notion. “If you can find a buyer, I’ll do that. So far I don’t think we could even give it away. Haven’t you noticed how many New York papers have died in the last twenty years? The Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram, the Journal-American. Father would be sick to his stomach if he could come back and see what has happened.”

  Pierre Brisson had loved his newspaper and the newspaper world. “I had a faint hope that I might be able to persuade Lord Cruze to buy it lock, stock and barrel, but he just shook his head and said it wasn’t his cup of tea. The English seem to do all their thinking over cups of tea.”

  “Lord Cruze? The man who owns the Examiner?” Louise might not worry herself about money but she knew who had it. “But he’d turn the Courier into the sort of cheap paper you’re talking about. A snappy tabloid,” she said, sounding almost wistful for such a thing in the family.

  “I shouldn’t care, if he bought us out completely. Then I could turn my back on it.” Claudine had a back for turning: all empresses have them. “Well, where are you going to live in Germany?”

  “Somewhere around Heidelberg,” said Louise. “The army has a house for us, but I thought I’d look for something better. You know what army houses are like.”

  Claudine didn’t; she did not believe in slumming. “It’s a pity you are not further south. There are some pretty villas in Baden-Baden.”

  Despite his love of the rich life, Roger smiled at the two women. “I don’t want to get on the front pages of the tabloids. The Daily News would have a field day if it learned an American divisional commander was trying to live like Mad Ludwig of Bavaria.”

  “Very sensible,” Claudine conceded. “None of the Brissons has ever been on the front pages. We should not start spoiling the record.”

  No, thought Roger. So don’t encourage rumours by listening to them and repeating them.

  II

  Louise found a very attractive house on the hills behind Heidelberg, half an hour’s drive from Roger’s divisional headquarters. The rent was three times what the army allowed its senior officers, but that was no problem for Louise. The house did not compare with any of the castles of the mad King of Bavaria, but it had hints of Rococo style that did not seem entirely appropriate for a United States army general. Pearl-handled pistols might be an accepted adornment, though Roger had more taste than that; and a personally designed, braid-encrusted cap might be tolerated on a top general. But a copy of the Amalienburg at Munich was not a setting from which
an American general should emerge each morning. But emerge from it each morning Roger did, and to hell with what his driver or his aide or the local natives thought. He was happy, as always, to be back with Louise and she was happy, too.

  One of the first correspondents to interview Roger when he took up his appointment was Tom Border, who was on roving assignment.

  “I’d rather you didn’t write a piece on me, Mr. Border. It would look too much like using the family paper for self-advertisement.”

  Tom thought self-advertisement would never have worried Major-General Brisson. “I just thought you might like to make a comparison between a command here and the one you had in Vietnam.”

  “Were you in Vietnam?” He had never been friendly with the press out there, even before An Bai. “Not with the Courier?”

  “No, sir, not with the Courier. But I was out there for over a year. All through ‘68.”

  Roger was suddenly aware that he might have stepped into a minefield. For the first time he looked carefully at this bony, untidy young man, noted the withdrawn look in the dark eyes. Was he imagining it or did so many of today’s young have that withdrawn, prove-it-to-me look? Even his nephew Alain had been wearing it last time he had seen him. Youth was growing too thoughtful; it had been different when he was young. Yet he knew he could not be more than fourteen or fifteen years older than this Tom Border.

  “One can’t compare it, Mr. Border.” What he meant was that if war came to Europe, it would be a nice clean war, the enemy easily recognizable. The Russians would never wear black pyjamas, try to look like coolies, be your laundry-boy during the day and your killer at night. “I really do think it would be better if you interviewed someone else in my command. Someone who doesn’t have an interest in a newspaper,” he added with his famous charming smile.

  “I’m sure I can find someone like that, General. But you’re unique—there’s no other divisional commander here who’s had combat experience in Vietnam. There are some GIs but no commanders.”

  “Well, maybe you can get something from those GIs.” That was a mistake, he realized at once. He had no idea where the men who had taken part in the An Bai operation had been posted. They could be here in Germany, walking booby traps. “Look, I’ll have my aide take you around the division. You can write anything you like, but keep me out of it except for naming me as divisional commander. Spare me my blushes.” He had not blushed since his nurse had tickled his testicles when he was six months old.

  Tom Border declined the offer and went off wondering if General Brisson was troubled now by what had happened at An Bai a year ago. But he could not pursue that line, not if he wanted to go on working for the Courier. He was enjoying the freedom that the Courier’s roving assignment gave him and though the expenses were not what the New York Times and Time men got, it was more than the Mid-West chain had paid him. He would pay the bill to Truth when it faced him, but he was not at this stage going looking for it. He had been corrupted by an expense account.

  He thought of Cleo more often than he cared to. On his second day in Paris he had seen a dark-haired girl with marvellous hips swaggering down the Champs Elysées and he had followed her, an apology on the tip of his tongue. He was both disappointed and relieved when the girl turned round and he saw that she wasn’t Cleo. It was that day that he decided to go to Germany: Paris was too close to London. Lovers are more haunted by the living than by ghosts.

  7

  I

  “I LIKE that swaggering walk of yours,” said Roy Holden, the producer. “It denotes confidence and that’s what we want on this programme.”

  Cleo had grown tired of being told that she swaggered. She never did it consciously; it was just the way her body moved. It was the way her father walked but she hated to see him swaggering down the street, like a riverboat gambler turned politician, confidence oozing out of him. She had confidence, but she did not like to think it oozed out of her.

  “Having told you that, I don’t want you to start exaggerating your walk.” Holden had played rugby for Oxford and wore his club pullover at all times, summer and winter, not to boast of his Blue but to hint to strangers that he hadn’t always been fat and lazy-looking. He had a pleasant plump face and a kind heart, which he attempted to hide since kind hearts, in television, were supposed to belong solely to compères of quiz programmes. “After all, this is supposed to be a serious programme.”

  “I thought it was a serious programme.”

  “No, love. Panorama is serious—Scope is only meant to sound serious. We package information, wrap it up nicely so that the low-brow and the middle-brow viewer can ease his confidence that he hasn’t devoted all his viewing time to watching Morecambe and Wise and Bless This House. But it’s flimflam, Cleo, nothing more. We show it on Sunday night, but I don’t know anyone who has gone out on Monday morning to mount a crusade on anything we’ve shown. That’s another thing—”

  “What?”

  “We have to work on your delivery. You say show-en, like most Australians—you all love to throw in a free syllable. And you speak too fast, most of you. I think the Australian drawl is a myth, except on certain words. Most of you gabble. And we can’t have gabble, not when we’re talking down to the masses.”

  “Is that what you do on Scope?”

  “Not only on Scope. We don’t want any fancy phrases, leave that to the trendy writers in the Sunday Times colour mag. Dull stuff is what we want, no long sentences and no polysyllables. Plenty of pauses—we’ll fill those in with visuals. And you have to hit certain key words. You must never overestimate the public’s attention span. The public like to hear the word public—it makes them feel we recognize them.”

  Cleo had heard a lot of cynicism in Fleet Street, but here at the Kennington studios of United Television it seemed to hang in the air like pollution. Or perhaps it was only in the offices of Scope. She had noticed a certain cynicism in the staff’s welcome to her when she had arrived to start her two weeks’ training. When her training was finished she was to be given a small guest spot for the first two weeks, then she was to be one of the three permanent reporters on the series. The spot for a guest reporter was to be eliminated; she had no doubt that she would be resented by those who had regularly filled the guest spots; they were all men and no man liked being put out of a job by a woman, especially one with what she had to sell.

  Lord Cruze’s name had never been mentioned, but she was sure that everybody knew whose favourite she was. She had her own cynical amusement at the thought. A man on his way to the top could sleep around and it was looked upon as no more than the deserved fruits of his success. If a woman with the same ambitions went to bed it was taken for granted that it was a means to an end.

  She took to television at once. She was totally unafraid of it. She could ignore it when necessary, confide in it, treat it as an accomplice in a joke: which meant that she accepted the audience as her partner. On the Monday morning after her first programme the television critics in Fleet Street swallowed their natural jealousy and lauded her. She was not an overnight star, but she glimmered enough to belong to the sixth magnitude in television’s constellation.

  Jack Cruze, against his own inclinations, was delighted with her success. “But it means you’re going to be recognized in public from now on.”

  “You mean you don’t want to be seen with me in public from now on.”

  He worked his eyebrows in a facial shrug. “Well, I do like to be discreet.”

  “Jack, everyone in Fleet Street knows about us by now.”

  “Well, yes . . . But I don’t think the general public wants to know, does it?”

  “Jack, I shan’t embarrass you. If the general public stops me in the street and asks me, I’ll say we’re just good friends.”

  “There you go, more guff.” But he kissed her, since they were in his flat and protected from the general public, and he felt proud and pleased and in love. So far he had not confessed that latter feeling to her.

&
nbsp; II

  A month after Claudine arrived back in New York there were widespread demonstrations throughout the country against the war in Vietnam. The Courier ran editorials backing the Administration’s pursuit of the war; but Claudine knew now that the war, if not lost, could not be won. She would not, however, have tolerated the Courier’s saying so. Her son Alain came home from Montana where he had been working on a ranch. The sight of him thrilled her as it always did: she was beautiful herself and she deserved to have such a handsome son. But he did look scruffy, as if he had just come straight from a cattle round-up and had not stopped to bathe or change. In the elegance of the Roux penthouse he looked very much out of place, a cowboy hippy.

  “You look marvellous,” she told him. “Healthier than I’ve ever seen you look. Life on the ranch suits you.”

  “That’s what I’d like to do eventually. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to take the place over.” The ranch, on the Yellowstone River, was part of the Brisson holdings, purchased by Henri Roux at the end of World War Two. Claudine had been there once, but was not at home there. “A little more experience and I could manage it okay.”

  “Why have you come home then? You’ve only been out there since mid-summer.”

  “I’m home for just a few days. The guys from Yale are putting together a group for next Saturday’s demonstration. I want to be with them.”

  She knew about the demonstration, the biggest, its organizers hoped, that New York had ever seen. “That’s ridiculous! Leaving your job, coming all this way . . . If you wanted to protest, why couldn’t you have done it in Montana?”