Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “Don’t be embarrassed by the wheelchair, Miss Spearfield. I no longer am. Though I suppose it is easier for me. Did Jack tell you that I was a cripple?”

  “No, your aunts did.” She felt she was somehow betraying Jack. But he should have told her more about Emma.

  “Did he tell you anything about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you ever enquire?”

  “No.”

  “That’s strange. Most mistresses, most women, would want to know about a man’s wife, why he wasn’t living with her, who’d left whom. Why didn’t you want to know, Miss Spearfield?”

  “I’m not quite sure. Cowardice, perhaps. I don’t really know everything about Jack himself and I suppose I should after three years. Something but not everything.”

  “I was married to him only a year. So perhaps you know as much about him as I do.”

  “I don’t think so.” She said it gently, almost as a compliment.

  Emma cut the cream sponge cake. “Does he still like what he calls good plain food? He never did have any taste, in food I mean. In his women, yes.”

  “Thank you,” said Cleo, taking the slice of cake.

  Emma broke her cake with a silver fork. Cleo noticed she had beautiful hands, almost the hands of a young girl: as if, with her heart and legs crippled, she had concentrated on keeping young something that had remained unhurt. “I suppose I do know Jack better than most women, even though I haven’t seen him in ten years. Yes, he used to visit me, once a year. Ten years ago I told him not to come again. But I’ve been studying him, at a distance. We women don’t always see our men clearly when we’re in bed with them. Is he still demanding in bed?”

  “Demanding?” It wasn’t the word but the question itself that threw Cleo off-balance. She had not expected Emma to speak as frankly as this. But then she was the niece of two bordello-keepers, so why not? “He likes making love, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. I never minded—he was like a boy, trying to prove his stamina.”

  “But he was much younger then . . . He’s still the same. But, Lady Cruze, I didn’t come down here to talk about that.”

  “No, you didn’t, of course. Strange, the way we talk today, as if we’re all trying to prove we’re uninhibited by convention. Twenty, even ten years ago I wouldn’t have mentioned the subject. I suppose it’s because I watch a lot of television—the BBC plays seem to be courses in bedroom technique. I sometimes wonder if the producers and directors of such plays aren’t very successful with women in their private lives.” For the first time she smiled, a pleasant expression that took years off her face. “Don’t misjudge me. I’m not a frustrated middle-aged woman with a dirty raincoat. You’d never catch me wheeling myself into those sex cinemas I read about in Soho.”

  Cleo wondered what a woman in her physical circumstances did to relieve any sexual feelings she might have. Abruptly, to put the thought out of her mind, she said, “Did you love him?”

  The smile remained on her face, as if she had forgotten it. “Yes, I did. Very much. But I wouldn’t have if I’d remained with him.”

  “Why not?”

  She put down the half-eaten cake, looked out through the leaded windows at the garden. Tiny buds showed on a willow, like pale green tears; a bed of crocuses was a single patch of colour, like half-buried Christmas crackers. In the far distance a church tower showed above a barbed-wire frieze of tree branches. Wind-streaked clouds smeared the sky like strokes from a dry brush.

  “You know, John Constable lived not far from here. I have two of his paintings. I live very comfortably, as you can see. A lovely house, good furniture, paintings, books, the car you saw outside. Jack has always looked after me that way. Anything I asked for, I could have. All he wanted in return was a divorce. Which I never gave him.” She turned back to look at Cleo. “Never will.”

  “Because of your religion?”

  “Partly. Are you Catholic? Yes, you are. I remember you mentioned it once in your column, something about the Pope’s banning the Pill. But you’re not a strict one?”

  “No, not even a good one. But why did you say religion was only part of the reason for not giving Jack a divorce?”

  She sat looking at Cleo for several moments. The atmosphere between them had softened; they were not friends, but they were edging away from being rivals. Or enemies. “I shouldn’t want Jack to ruin another woman’s life the way he tried to ruin mine. Oh, I don’t mean this.” She tapped the arm of the wheelchair. “He wasn’t to blame for that. I thought so at the time and accused him of it, but I was wrong.”

  “What happened? Or would you rather not talk about it?”

  Again there was the long silence, then she said, “No, I’ll tell you about it. Jack seems to be more serious about you than he was about any of the others. And I don’t believe my aunts would have allowed you to come down here if they didn’t think you were—decent? Is that a word one can use about a woman? There are decent chaps, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention a decent woman.”

  “Men don’t expect women to be decent, not in that sense.”

  “No.” They were slowly reaching out for agreement, even if only on subjects that were so general and meant nothing to their immediate relationship. “I met Jack when I’d just turned twenty-one. My father was in the Indian army, then after India’s independence he went out and joined the East African Rifles in Kenya. I was educated at a convent school here in England and my aunts would look after me in midterm hols or whenever there wasn’t enough time to fly out to join my father—my mother died when I was seven. I knew by the time I was fifteen what sort of place my aunts ran, but for some reason I wasn’t shocked—it made me a sort of heroine in the dormitory with the other girls. The nuns would have died if they’d known what we used to talk about after lights out.”

  “I gather nuns are a bit more broad-minded these days. They have to be to survive.”

  “Probably. Well, after I’d left school I went out to live with my father in Kenya. Then he died, just before I turned twenty-one—that was in 1949, if you’re interested in how old I am.” She absent-mindedly ran a hand over her white hair, as if to say to take no notice of it. “I came back to England and I met Jack. No, not at my aunts’ house. They took me to a reception at the Dorchester and Jack was there. It was love at first sight for both of us. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  “Not quite. I think I’m what you’d call a myopic romantic. I like a second look at a man.”

  “Perhaps I’d have done better with your experience. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound so bitchy. I was utterly experienced in men. There was plenty of social life in Kenya, but I’d never found it very exciting and I never wanted to get myself involved with any young man there, in case I had to settle down with him and remain there forever. I never wanted to be a planter’s or a soldier’s wife.”

  “Then I can imagine you falling for Jack the way you did. He was already successful then, wasn’t he?”

  “Not the way he is today, but yes, he was successful. He also had a rough charm and something else—vitality?”

  “Yes, he has that. Still.”

  Emma poured herself another cup of tea, but left unfinished the cake on her plate. “Well, we married three months after we met. I thought I was going to have the most marvellous life any girl could have. But it never turned out like that, not at all. Even on our honeymoon he started managing me.”

  Suddenly Cleo knew why she had come. All during the drive down she had been telling herself she only wanted to see who and what Emma Cruze was. But no: she had come to see if she could stop herself from making the same mistake that Emma had. She settled back in her chair while Emma went on unravelling the life she had had with Jack Cruze.

  “He was so—possessive. I thought at first I might be wrong. I’d lived a life in which no one, neither my mother nor my father, had ever tried to run it the way Jack did. Of course the nuns tr
ied to run it, but that was just school discipline. But everything with Jack had to fit in with him. I wasn’t even allowed to go shopping on my own without telling him.”

  “He’s almost as bad, but not quite. But then I’m not married to him.”

  “Perhaps that makes the difference. You have a career of your own, too. I never did. I was just his possession.” It was as if she had not thought of the word before: she paused, as if to underline it. “He became jealous, fanatically so. Is he like that with you?”

  “Fanatically? No, I don’t think so. But I’ve never really given him any reason to be.” Nothing had happened with Tom Border, so why should Jack be fanatically jealous? Women and politicians: they could be selective about the degree of their sins. Her mother, a politician’s woman, had told her that.

  “Is he jealous at all?” Emma was beginning to read the nuances in Cleo’s voice.

  “Ye-es.” Then she said, “He is possessive. I think that’s why I’m here. To find out if he was like that with you.”

  “He was. After six months we began to fight about it—he had a dreadful temper in those days. I wanted to have a child, but I kept putting it off because I knew he’d—possess it, too.” She was still speaking calmly, but her hands had disappeared beneath the cashmere rug over her legs and Cleo could only imagine how agitated they might be. “Then one night we had a dreadful fight. He hit me, I thought he was going to kill me . . . Has he ever hit you?”

  “Only once. I threw a clock at him. I think it shocked him more than hurt him. He’s never been violent with me since, but it’s still there in him. The violence, I mean.”

  “Perhaps I should have done the same. I’d wanted to go away for a week to Biarritz with my aunts and he refused, said he wouldn’t let me out of his sight with them. When he hit me I stormed out of the house—that sounds melodramatic, but it’s what I did. It was a dreadful night and I ran out into the rain and thunder and lightning—” She stopped and, unexpectedly, smiled. “It was like a scene from one of his silent films, he’d already started his library of them then. Except there was all the dreadful noise of the storm. I got into one of the estate cars, he’d just bought St. Aidan’s House, and I started off for London—I was going to my aunts. I didn’t see the tree that had fallen across the road in the storm, not till the last moment. I woke up in hospital four hours later, my back broken and my legs crippled forever. They didn’t use the word paraplegic then, not the way they do now. Not in English county hospitals, anyway. They told me in nice undiplomatic language that I was a cripple and I’d never walk again. I blamed Jack for it and I refused to forgive him—I wouldn’t even let him see me. Not for three months, after I’d left the hospital and was in a convalescent home. By then I knew he wasn’t to blame, not for my being crippled. He came to see me and he was crippled—emotionally. Then he started talking about what he was going to do for me and I realized it was going to be the same all over again, only worse. Because I should have to let him organize my life. So I said I was never coming back to him and that was that. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make and for a year or two I thought I’d made a mistake. But then I came to know it was the right decision, the only one.”

  She suddenly looked exhausted. Cleo wondered how long it had been since Emma had talked as long and as frankly about what had happened to ruin her life. She said gently, “And you still don’t regret it?”

  Emma took her hands out from under the rug. There were weals across the back of them, as if her fingers had been clawing at them; but now they rested calmly in her lap. “No. I couldn’t have held him, not the way I am. He’d have had other women and I just could not have stood being so close to him and knowing about them. At least down here I only hear about them. I don’t smell their perfume on him, I don’t smell them.” The hands tightened, the voice hardened vulgarly for a moment. Then she relaxed, looked gently at Cleo. “I’m sorry. That’s insulting to you.”

  “If you had still been living with him, I should never have—” Her voice trailed off: it was not easy to give a name to oneself in front of the wife. “It’s insulting too, I suppose—but while you were out of sight, you were out of mind.”

  “Will you stay with him?” Now you’ve met me . . .

  “I shan’t marry him, if that’s what you mean.” Side-stepping the question, something women don’t mind between themselves though they abhor it between themselves and a man. “I’ll become a good Catholic, tell him I could never recognize a Mexican divorce.”

  “One shouldn’t use one’s religion like that.” She was truly devout, not socially pious.

  “The Church bends any of its own rules to keep another—it happens with all institutions. I think God laughs sometimes at the things done in his name.”

  “Are you really so cynical? I can never tell from your column.”

  Cleo smiled, completely at ease with her now. “Not really. But in a man’s world, how else does a woman survive? I grew up in a man’s world, politics, and now I’m working in another, the newspaper business. Even Dorothy Dix had to put her tongue in her cheek occasionally.”

  “Will you tell Jack you’ve been down to see me?”

  She had always been honest with him. “Yes.”

  Emma took her to the front door, wheeling her chair with skill. “One becomes good at it after so much practice. Jack used to make silly men’s jokes about women drivers . . . I suppose I was bad the night I crashed into the tree.”

  “Can you drive that?” Cleo nodded at the Rolls-Royce.

  “No. Mrs. Goodlet, my housekeeper, drives me. There’s an elevator contraption that lifts my chair into the car. I don’t sit in the house all day. We even drive to the South of France every summer for a fortnight. Jack takes care of everything—he was never mean. Part of his trouble is, I think, that he doesn’t really know how to use the power of money.”

  “Have you told him that? I have. I’ve tried to tell him that people are not corporations.”

  “He’ll never learn.” Emma held out her hand. “I’m glad we met. But I don’t think we should meet again. We should only finish up hating each other.”

  Cleo put the question carefully: “Do you hate Jack?”

  She hesitated. “Let’s say I haven’t forgiven him. Perhaps that is just as bad.”

  V

  That was Wednesday. Cleo waited till Saturday to tell Jack she had been down to Suffolk. In those three days she pondered on the bitterness that, no matter how well controlled and camouflaged, still lingered in Emma. She believed that everyone, even a saint, was capable of bitterness; a seasoning of wormwood was good for the soul, cleaning out the caries of sweet sympathy. She wondered if, as time and her relationship with Jack went on, she too would become bitter. The prospect filled her with apprehension.

  But she wasn’t apprehensive about telling him that she had seen Emma. She was blunt: “I went down to see your wife last Wednesday.”

  “You what?”

  They were at St. Aidan’s House, where it had all begun. They were walking in the park in the early spring sun. The weather had suddenly warmed in the past two days and colour had begun to appear in the pale green park. Wind-flowers, wood anemones, lay like flecks of old snow in the lee of shrubs; blossom cloaked a pear tree, turning it into a pale pyramid. A grass snake, lured by the con man sun, crossed the path up ahead, a green shiver across the eye. It’s the wrong season, Cleo thought: spring was a beginning, not an end.

  “I had to lay a ghost to rest, Jack.” That was not true: she was no longer being honest with him. Emma had never haunted her. But then she added, “She’s been your ghost.”

  He was making an effort to control himself. Women did the damnedest things: which, of course, made them women as much as their sex organs. “You should have told me.”

  “I just have,” she said, woman-like.

  “No, before.”

  “You’d have told me to mind my own business. Or worse, gone down with me.”

  “How
did you get on with her?”

  “Beautifully,” she said, putting the knife in.

  He sighed, as if wounded. “I knew you would. You’re a little alike.”

  “No, we’re not. That’s only because you think all women are a little alike. I don’t think Emma ever had any ambition, for one thing. She’d have made you a very good wife, a better one than I would, if you’d treated her as a wife.”

  “Did she tell you I treated her as anything else?” He was wary: God knew what women talked about when they were together. Maybe not even God knew.

  “Yes.” She would not tell him that Emma had told her of his hitting her. That was something between man and wife and Emma, perhaps, had gone further than she intended in telling her about it. “She said she was your possession. I can understand that. You’d like me to be the same.”

  “That’s all bull!” He tramped through a patch of crocuses, killing spring. She could see the violence in him now, more aware of it than ever before because now she was looking for it. “Christ Almighty, I love you, don’t you understand that? I loved her, too.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t. Your intentions are the best—but only for you. You’d never give me any independence, Jack.”

  “You’re bloody independent enough now. Why would it change?”

  “If I became Lady Cruze—could I call myself that after a Mexican divorce? We’d have to ask Debrett about that.” The title had no appeal to her. The name Cruze would be a bigger cloud, throw a deeper shadow, than Spearfield once had. “If I married you, would you let me go on with my column, still appear on Scope? No, you wouldn’t. You’ve said so. So there would go my independence.”

  “You’d have another sort of independence. You’d have all the money you want to do anything you want. I could set up a charity trust, you could run that.”

  She was too shrewd for him. “Jack, you’d be setting it up for yourself. You’d be its biggest beneficiary.”