Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  There was no Bligh on duty in the lobby; he had to let himself in with his own key. He dumped his bag in the lift and went up to Cleo’s floor. There was no answer to his ring on her front door, so he found his key to the door and opened it. He went in, calling her name almost like a child coming home; but the flat was empty. He could feel rage welling up inside him, the unreasonable fury of someone who expected everything to be exactly as he desired it: the welcome mat out, the bed turned down, Cleo in place. He stamped out of the flat, slamming the door, and went up to the penthouse. His mood worsened even further when he found there was no Sid or Mrs. Cromwell there, that he was alone.

  He took some aspirin for the headache that had taken hold of him after he had slammed out of Cleo’s flat, lay down on his bed without turning back the silk coverlet and tried to fall asleep; but couldn’t. He got up, wandered about the big bedroom, going to the window and looking out into Green Park, as if he might see Cleo walking there, feeling as lonely and neglected as he felt.

  He turned back, saw the television set and switched it on. He had no interest in sport other than his horse shows; but Wimbledon was as much a social event as a sporting one; who knows, with that Goolagong girl playing today, perhaps Cleo had gone down to Wimbledon to wave her Aussie flag or do a piece on the aboriginal girl. If she was down there, it might please her if he could talk with her about the women’s final, especially if Goolagong won.

  But Goolagong hadn’t won; the match was over. The camera was roving over the spectators; amongst the crowd he saw several men from the City and their wives. Then the camera paused, Cleo looked directly into it, straight at him. Then she turned away, smiled at the handsome young man who sat beside her holding her hand. The camera moved on, but Jack saw only a blur of colour, a screen full of distorted images, a writhing mangle of twisting lines like a coloured X-ray of guts in agony. He switched the set off with such fury that the knob came off in his hand.

  He sat down heavily on the bed, only half-believing what he had seen; yet jealousy had always told him that it was possible. Who was the man she was with? He had never seen him before. Was he just a young stud she had picked up for the day, were there others? He stabbed himself with thoughts; it was too early yet for anything more lethal. He lay back on the bed, praying that sleep would drown him, but he might as well have prayed for total amnesia.

  He would certainly never remember how he passed the time till he found himself in the kitchen making a cup of tea. The kitchen looked out on St. James’s Place. The street was narrow, the buildings crowding in on it; sound floated up as if out of a funnel. He heard a car drive up, then the sound of the car door being shut, then Cleo’s laugh. He leaned out of the window and looked down. She was standing beside a Daimler with the young man from Wimbledon. She put her hand to the young man’s cheek and he took her hand and kissed it. Then he said, “I’ll pick you up at eight,” and limped across to the hotel opposite, walking with the aid of a stick. A bloody cripple! Jack leaned against the sink, the cup and saucer rattling in his trembling hands.

  He was still standing there, his mind clouded with fuming jealousy, when his private phone rang in the drawing-room. He straightened up, took one step towards the kitchen door to go through into the main part of the flat, then stopped. He had never felt like this before, not even when Emma had run away from him; there had been no other man then. Love is a mutual selfishness and selfishness now took him over like a seizure. He remained rigid in the kitchen doorway, eyes shut, face distorted as he tried to shut his ears against the phone and the voice he knew was waiting to speak at the other end; for he was certain that it could be no one else, no one else existed but Cleo and the young man across the street. Then the ringing stopped and he opened his eyes, his face easing like a man who had just been released from torture.

  He went slowly into the main part of the flat and up to his bedroom. He sat down in a chair and gazed out at Green Park; but saw nothing of what was there. He knew he had lost Cleo; he had felt her slipping away from him over the past few months, ever since she had come back from the trial in Hamburg in March. Several times he had thought of hiring a private investigator to trail her to see if she was secretly meeting another man; but he had resisted the temptation, afraid of what she would do or say if she found out. But she was no longer his and he wondered who was the new man in her life. It wasn’t the American Tom Border, he had checked only a month ago that Border was working in New York, had not left there since his return from Hamburg in March. So who was the new man, the young man with the limp and the walking stick?

  In the next two hours the phone rang three times; but he did not answer it. He had no idea whether it was Cleo calling or someone else: it really didn’t matter. Just before eight he got up and went downstairs and out into the kitchen again. He was at the window, neck craned so that he could look directly down into the street, when Cleo came out, was greeted by the young man and got into the Daimler and was driven away. He had held his breath, almost as if afraid that he might be heard down there in the street. Now he let it out and it was like a long moan of pain.

  He went back upstairs to his study, poured himself a brandy and sat down again. He wished he had someone he could call: his mother, Quentin Massey-Folkes; but he had no one. He had another brandy, then he got up, closed the curtains and got out a copy of George O’Brien in The Iron Horse. He did not want to torture himself with fantasies tonight about Garbo or Crawford or Del Rio; he wanted escapism and the John Ford Western gave him that. But the film didn’t last long enough: he wanted the Iron Horse to carry him across the prairies for hours, maybe forever.

  When the film ended he switched on the lights and had another brandy. His head had begun to ache again, his eyes felt as if he had washed them with sand. He sat sunk in a depth of despair that he had never known before. He had known grief at his mother’s death, and shock and anger and a sense of loss when Emma had left him; but he had never known anything like this; he felt old, as if this time it was too late to start again. The exhaustion of the trip and the jet lag did not help; he had run from Marathon only to find that his news was a joke, the war had been lost, not won. Emotions curdled within him, as if he were slowly decaying from the inside. When he at last stood up his mind had ceased to think clearly: he was looking only for an end to it all.

  He got the pistol from the locked bottom drawer of his desk. He had bought it three years ago, on the advice of Quentin, when a crazed Biafran, fired by an editorial in the Examiner on the war then going on in Africa, had threatened to kill him. It was a Colt .45 automatic and it had never been fired, at least not by him; he had put it away in the drawer and never looked at it again till now. He loaded it from the box of cartridges he had bought at the same time. He did it all with the stiff slow movements of an automaton that had not been properly programmed.

  He went down in the lift with the same stiff measured movements and let himself into Cleo’s flat. He turned on the light in the living-room, put a chair just inside the doorway that faced the entrance; then he turned out the light and sat down in the chair, the automatic resting on his lap. He had no idea what time it was, but he had all the time left in the world. Because his world was going to end very soon.

  He dozed off once or twice, but at once snapped awake again. He had forgotten the other man, he felt no jealousy now, just a terrible depression that everything should end this way. Yet it was the only way.

  He heard the key in the lock and he sat up, raising the gun. The door opened and he saw Cleo and the man silhouetted against the light on the landing. Something told him to give her one more chance: if she closed the door in the man’s face, he would forgive her. The two of them stood there for a moment, then the man dropped his walking stick and took Cleo in his arms. She responded, pulling the man’s face down onto hers. Then Jack reached across and switched on the living-room light.

  He lifted the gun and pulled the trigger. He would never know whether his aim was bad or whether at the last
moment he did not want to kill Cleo. There was a loud crack, but Cleo didn’t fall. She let out a cry and put her hand to her side. Then Jack turned the gun up under his chin and pulled the trigger again. This time it jammed.

  He looked down at it angrily, strained his finger on the trigger; then he fell out of the chair and slumped unconscious on the floor. Cleo, still holding her side, walked unsteadily into the room and sat down on the couch. She looked at the inert Jack dumbly, unable to believe what had happened.

  Then Alain, standing over Jack, his bent leg making him look like a man ready to run away, said, “Are you all right?”

  She looked down at her side: a faint stain was showing where she had pressed the dress against the wound. “I think it just nicked me.”

  Alain bent down awkwardly and picked up the gun. Then he limped to the couch and sat down beside her. “Take your dress off.”

  She slipped the dress over her head with less pain than she had expected. The bullet had just nicked her side at the bottom of the rib cage. “I’m all right. Where did the bullet go?”

  “Never mind about that—it’s probably in the door or the wall.” He looked down at the still unconscious Jack. “Jesus Christ—why? It’s Lord Cruze, isn’t it?”

  Cleo, in her underwear now but unaware of it, dropped to her knees beside Jack. No longer worried about herself, she was worried about him; she feared that he might have had a stroke. He was breathing heavily, like a man coming out of a fit; she rolled him over on his back and put a cushion under his head. She slapped his face gently, took the glass of water Alain had got from the kitchen and tried to force it between the pale lips; but Jack gave no response. Then she stood up.

  “I’ll call his doctor. You’d better get out of here.”

  “Don’t be crazy! I’m not going to leave you alone with him!”

  “I’ll be all right. Please, Alain—go! If I need you, I can always come and get you. And don’t say a word about what’s happened. Nothing, you understand?”

  He went to protest, then changed his mind. He saw that she was in control of herself and the situation; for the time being it was better to let her have her own way. “Okay, but I’ll wait outside the hotel till the doctor comes, just in case. You better put something on that side of yours—I wouldn’t let the doc see it, just in case he wants to know the truth of what happened. What are you going to tell him anyway?”

  She was already at the phone. “Just that Jack collapsed . . . Dr. Hynd, thank God, you’re in town! Could you come over immediately—Lord Cruze has just had an attack. I don’t know—it could be his heart—”

  Dr. Hynd lived above his rooms in Sloane Street; she knew he would be here in less than ten minutes. She pushed Alain towards the front door, kissed him quickly on the cheek as she would one of her brothers; though she was in her underwear, sex had never been further from her mind than now. “I’ll talk to you in the morning, first thing. And remember—not a word—you weren’t even here.”

  “Do you want me to take the gun?”

  “No, leave it here. I’ll hide it somewhere.” She was suddenly thankful that the building was empty, that no one in any of the other flats had heard the gun go off.

  She closed the door on Alain, went to the bathroom, put some disinfectant on the small wound on her side, put a Band-Aid on it, went into her bedroom and put on a robe. She put the gun in a drawer of her dressing-table, then went back into the living-room. She sank on to the floor beside Jack, staring at him as if at a stranger; she shook her head in disbelief at what he had done. She stroked his forehead, pushing the grey curly hair back from it, thinking to herself how old and ill he looked, an inmate of the concentration camp of his own possessive jealous nature.

  Jack regained consciousness just as Dr. Hynd arrived. The latter, big and bluff, was not the best medical practitioner in London but he was discreet; he knew there were more forms of exposure than being adrift on a raft in the Atlantic. He had Cleo help him lift Jack on to the couch, then he made an examination.

  “Have you had an attack like this before, Lord Cruze?”

  Jack flicked a glance at Cleo before he answered. “No. It’s probably just overwork. Is it my heart?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hynd, but he had made the wrong diagnosis. “Medically, there’s no such thing, but you may have had what used to be called a brainstorm. Do you still have a headache?”

  Jack nodded, then winced. Other than for the one quick glance at her, he was ignoring Cleo. She was content for the moment to be ignored. She had her own headache, though it was mental and emotional.

  “It’s probably just a combination of things—exhaustion, jet lag, worry. And you’re getting on—” That was not very discreet. “Stay in bed tomorrow and I’ll come round and see you again. Then we’ll put you through some tests on Monday.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “No, I’ll see.” Hynd had his rich patients and knew when to pamper them; but he also had authority and knew when to use it. “I’m the doctor. We’ll have tests done on Monday.”

  When Hynd left Cleo and Jack at last looked directly at each other. She waited for him to say the first word and at last he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She was still fragile inside at the horror of what he had intended doing. She had known nothing of his having a gun; using it was the ultimate violence that she never expected. She could only dimly remember, as if her vision had been fragmented at the moment, the shot aimed at her; but, painfully sharply, she could still see him as he put the gun up under his chin and pulled the trigger. There had been no second shot that she heard, but in her mind there had been an explosion that still echoed.

  “I’m sorry, too—that you would even think of doing such a thing.”

  “It was like Hynd said—a brainstorm. I don’t know what got into me.” But he did, though he was not going to make any confession of it. “Who was that fellow?”

  “A friend.” She did not know how successful she might be, but she knew she had to keep Alain’s name out of it. Not to protect the Roux or Brisson names, but to protect him.

  “Have you been seeing him while my back’s been turned?”

  “No. Your back hasn’t been turned that much. Don’t let’s argue, Jack. You’re going up to bed.”

  He stood up, tottered a little but waved her away when she moved to help him. “I’ll be all right. Don’t bother to come up—”

  “Stop telling me what to do!” She could feel hysteria bubbling in her, reaction beginning to set in. “I’ll come up and sleep in the study, just in case—”

  “In case what?” But abruptly he wanted no more argument. Depression settled on him like a fog, all he wanted to do was sleep and forget.

  They went up in the lift, not speaking to each other, no contact at all between them other than the wariness in their eyes. She went ahead of him up to the main bedroom, turned down the coverlet and sheets while he stood and watched her listlessly, ready to succumb to the exhaustion and misery that weighed him down.

  “There you are. Goodnight, Jack. I’ll be downstairs, not in the study. There’s a bigger couch down there.”

  She went past him without touching him. He took off his clothes, let them lie where he dropped them and fell into bed. He was weeping when he fell asleep.

  Cleo did not sleep easily, though the long couch was comfortable enough. She rose early, went up to see that Jack was still asleep, then went downstairs to her own flat and called Alain in the Stafford.

  “Sorry to wake you—”

  “I’ve been awake most of the night worrying about you.”

  “Everything’s all right. I don’t want you to come across to the flat—just leave for Germany as you planned. He doesn’t know who you are and I’m not going to tell him. All I ask is that you never mention to anyone, anyone, what happened last night.”

  “You don’t owe him anything, Cleo. Not after what he tried to do.” He wanted to stay, to be by her side and protect her. But he knew she had
no feeling for him other than yesterday’s friendship, the warmth of a pleasant date that would have taken them to bed but no further. There was nothing in her voice to suggest that he meant anything more to her. “The man’s crazy—”

  “No.” Crazy with jealousy, perhaps; but that was between her and Jack and she was not going to burden Alain with it. “I can handle it, Alain. Please leave today. And it would be best if you didn’t write or phone me. Maybe we can have dinner again some time in New York.”

  “Will you be coming to New York?”

  “Possibly.” But she knew she wouldn’t be. “Goodbye, Alain.”

  She hung up and went back upstairs to the penthouse. She made tea and toast for herself in Mrs. Cromwell’s kitchen, ate it, then went up to the bedroom. Jack was still asleep. She went downstairs again and called St. Aidan’s House. Sid Cromwell answered.

  “Sid, Lord Cruze is back. You and Mrs. Cromwell had better return at once. He hasn’t been well and he needs to stay in bed for a day or two.”

  “We’ll be there as soon as we can. How bad is His Lordship?”

  “All he needs is some rest.” And some adjustment of thinking.

  Dr. Hynd arrived at nine o’clock, woke Jack and examined him again. “There’s an improvement. Go back to sleep, stay in bed for the rest of the day. We’ll be doing the tests at ten tomorrow morning.”

  Then Cleo and Jack were alone again and certain things had to be said. But Cleo could not bring herself to say them: she was cowardly, she was going to retreat under cover of silence. “Go back to sleep. Sid and Mrs. Cromwell should be here soon.”