by Jon Cleary
“What are you going to do?”
“Pack. Go back to sleep.”
“Cleo—where’s the gun?”
“I’ll get rid of it.”
“Will you forgive me?”
She was at the door, at a safe distance. “Yes—in time.”
Then she went out quickly and down to her flat again. She looked for the bullet that had been fired, something she had forgotten to do, and found it lodged in the door-jamb; it took her ten minutes to prise it out with a skewer and screwdriver from the kitchen. She put it and the gun in a plastic bag and took it into the bedroom. She packed four suitcases, mostly with clothes; she was surprised, when she came to take inventory, how little else she owned. A few books, a couple of paintings: everything else had been provided by the decorator with Jack’s money. She took the mink coat out of the closet and laid it on the bed; on it she put her jewel-box containing everything that Jack had bought her in the way of jewelry. Mrs. Cromwell, besides doing the penthouse, came down each Monday morning to collect the laundry: she could be trusted to see that the coat and the jewelry went upstairs to their rightful owner.
She rang downstairs to Bligh and asked him to call her a taxi, then to come up and pick up her bags.
Five minutes later she took a last look around the flat, saying goodbye to a life. She went out of the front door, closing it quietly behind her for the last time. Downstairs she got into the taxi and Bligh said, “Where to, Miss Spearfield?”
She had to lie to him, was sorry that she could not even say goodbye to him and thank him for his attentions while she had lived here; it was the same with Sid and Mrs. Cromwell. Even the staff miss out in a family row. She would send him and the Cromwells huge tips, which is more spendable than kind words. “To Paddington Station.”
But once they were out of St. James’s Place she leaned forward and told the taxi driver, “I’ve changed my mind, driver. Heathrow.”
“A woman’s privilege, miss.” The driver laughed. He had recognized his passenger: “You ever done a column on that, like? The missus, she’s allus telling me I oughta take notice about what you say. She says you ought be required reading, like, for every man in Britain. Does your boss ever read you?”
“Occasionally.” But he always mis-read her, or had lately.
At Heathrow Qantas told her she was fortunate. There were no first class seats left on the 747 going out at 1730, but there was one left in first class in the 707 leaving at 1700. She would have preferred the comfort of the bigger plane, but refugees can’t be choosers. It had not occurred to her that she might not get on a plane. She began to understand for the first time in a long while how pampered she had been in the past three years: when Scope or the Examiner had not been making her bookings for her, she had been flying in Jack’s private plane. Well, that was all over now.
She paid for her ticket and her excess baggage with her credit card, wondering, as she did so, how people had run away at weekends before credit cards were invented. She had exactly six pounds nine shillings in her wallet; thank God for American Express, saviour of fugitive women. “You have quite a while to wait, Miss Spearfield. Would you care to go up to the VIP room?”
No, that too was all over. “No, you have a Captain’s Club Room, haven’t you? I’ll go up there.”
But first she went for a walk. She found a waste bin and, like a terrorist planting a bomb, casting sly glances right and left of her, she dropped the plastic bag containing the gun and bullet into it. Then she went up to the Qantas private room and, collect, phoned her father at his flat in Canberra.
“Dad, could you come up to Sydney Tuesday morning? I’m coming home.”
“Great, sweetheart! A holiday or work?”
“Neither, Dad. I’m coming home.” There was an echo on the line: she heard her voice repeat coming home.
Even at that distance, over a bad connection, he did not miss the nuance in her voice. “Righto, sweetheart, we’ll talk about it when you get home. Have a good trip.”
The day dragged, as only airport time can. Then at last departure time approached. Half an hour before she was called to board the plane, she went down to one of the gift shops.
“Do you take orders for Interflora? I’d like a dozen white roses sent to Lord Cruze at this address.”
It was the cruellest thing she had ever done and she felt ashamed of the satisfaction it gave her.
11
I
“OH YES, you’re Senator Spearfield’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Back to taws, Cleo thought; but she smiled. “Yes. I’m to write special releases, stuff like that.”
“Well, I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do.” She was an old-timer, a woman who had been in Labour politics all her life but never given the opportunity to run for office. She knew her place, in the kitchen of elections, and she resented all these young trendies who were coming in to take over the Party. Especially this one, who looked as if she should be working for some silvertail Liberal.
It was November 1972; Cleo had been home almost five months. She had returned with a mixture of feelings; had she been too hasty, what sort of future did she have in Australia? Her father and her brothers and her sisters-in-law had greeted her as if she were indeed Cleopatra, home after having put Caesar in his place; they weren’t indiscreet enough to say so in so many words, but there was no mistaking the impression that their welcome home had an extra level of meaning to it. Australia was the place to be and to hell with the Poms.
“There’ll be an election soon and we’re going to romp in,” her father said. “Australia’s going to take off like a rocket. You’ve come home just in time, sweetheart. You’ll be in on the ground floor.”
“Doing what?”
“Anything you like. They’ll be looking for someone like you. The newspapers, TV, even government if you like. There’s going to be a lot of openings in government when we get in.”
There had been no openings in newspapers or television, at least not wide, well-paying ones. The Sydney Morning Post offered her a job on its women’s pages at less than half the Examiner had been paying her in London. She was interviewed on two talk shows on commercial channels and was both annoyed and amused at how she was cut down to size by the producers’ assistants and floor managers, some of whom sounded as if their voices had just broken. Television in Australia was only sixteen years old and it seemed to her that, on the floor anyway, it was being run by sixteen year-olds. It was her first experience of the local assassination syndrome, the cutting down of tall poppies. It had not occurred to her that she should be such a tall poppy as would need cutting down.
She made enquiries about working in television. The executives whom she saw were all polite but wary of her; it did not take her long to recognize that they were afraid of her. Not of her personally but of her experience. She was talking to men who had little talent, who had come into television on the ground floor, bringing their own ladders with them to higher floors. They had come from newspapers, radio, everywhere, it seemed, but television. They had built their little fortresses and they were not going to be white-anted by someone with top talent and wide experience. They were polite and they offered her jobs at salaries that were insulting, hoping she would refuse; just as politely, she thanked them for the offers and went away, hoping they would all drop dead. Later she heard stories of other expatriates who had come home, met the same treatment and gone away again.
Sydney had changed even in the time she had been away. Everywhere she looked there seemed to be the skeletons of new buildings. It was not a frontier town, its citizens were too fat and comfort-loving for that, but it gave the impression of being on the edge of an uncharted future. Beyond the boundaries of the city itself Australia stretched away with a vastness that Cleo, never an Outback girl, still failed to comprehend. Despite all her father’s and his friends’ optimism, she doubted if the continent would ever be conquered even in her lifetime. Now that she was home, she did not fee
l at home. She could not come to terms with Australia.
One day in September she had been driving up Pacific Highway on Sydney’s North Shore with Cheryl, her sister-in-law. The sky was cloudless, the wattle hung like golden smoke in gardens and for the moment she understood why so many people would never want to leave here; she remembered how in English winters she had pined for such a day as this. But there were more climates than just the weather.
Perry, her dentist brother, had found gold in other places besides his patients’ mouths; he had made a small fortune on the stock exchange, much to the disgust of Sylvester, who had an old Labour man’s dislike and suspicion of speculative investors. Perry and Cheryl now owned a house on half an acre in Killara, a weekender at Palm Beach and a half-interest in a vineyard at Mudgee; they also owned a Mercedes and a Jaguar E-type. On this spring day Cleo and Cheryl were in the white E-type with the hood down.
They pulled up at traffic lights at Crows Nest and a council truck pulled up alongside them. In it were half a dozen council workers in blue work singlets, shorts and floppy terry-towelling hats. They stared down at the two well-dressed women in the expensive car.
Then one of them spat over the side of the truck and said in a dry flat voice, “What’s it like to be down to your last hundred thousand, love?”
Cheryl stared straight ahead, but Cleo looked up at him, threw back her head and let go one of her father’s belly-laughs. The lights turned green, the council worker winked at her and the truck drove on. Cheryl gunned the E-type and swept ahead of it.
“You shouldn’t take any notice of them! They only resent what some people have got for themselves.”
“Cheryl, that’s the nicest put-down I’ve had since I came home. I don’t mind that sort of crack—somehow, to me, it’s Australian. I prefer it to some of the other put-downs I’ve had. That chap might have been envious, but I don’t think he was malicious. He’s probably thinking, good luck to ‘em.”
“Maybe—” Cheryl, still unaccustomed to the money they had almost suddenly acquired, was continually looking for people who might take it away from them. Tax men, revolutionaries, burglars: she had acquired a host of enemies. She had changed the subject: “What are you going to do, Cleo? You’ve been home over two months now.”
“I really don’t know.” Cleo had stopped laughing. She had been surprised in the change in Perry and Cheryl while she had been away and she did not feel entirely at ease with them. She had never despised money but she had never worshipped it. Each time she had been to their house, for dinner or a Sunday barbecue, the conversation had seemed to consist of no other subjects but investment tips, tax evasion schemes and retirement funds. She had already noticed that when her father was in Sydney from Canberra he declined invitations to Killara if Perry and Cheryl were having any of their friends to the house. “I’ll find something.”
“How are you off for money? Perry told me to ask you—”
“Does he want to give me an investment tip?” But that was too pointed a lance and she smiled to blunt it. “I’m all right. I brought a bit back with me.”
She had made no investments while she had lived in London, mainly because she had never been investment-minded. She had been surprised when she had written her bank, after her return home, and found out how much, despite high taxation, she had managed to save. Once again it occurred to her how pampered she had been, how much Jack had protected her from the day-to-day worries. Bills had been taken care of, transport provided: she had been wrong, though she had not lied, when she had told Sylvester she was not Jack’s kept woman. She had not paid her way as much as she had thought.
“I’ll be all right,” she told Cheryl. “I just want to make sure I settle into the right job.”
She was living at home in the family house in Coogee, having it to herself most of the time. She had bought herself a second-hand Mini; that had been her major expense since coming back. She felt that she was drifting and, though she had not sat down and planned anything definite, she was throwing down no anchors. Not yet.
Jack had traced her to the house in Coogee and phoned her there. She remarked to herself that he had not written: he still would put nothing on paper to a woman. She was not disturbed when he rang her; she had expected a call sooner or later. A bunch of red roses had preceded the call, but she did not thank him for them or even mention them.
“I wish you’d come back,” he said. “We could make a new start.”
“It’s all over, Jack.” Distance lent civility to their voices.
“You can have anything you wish, if you come back.”
The editorship of the Examiner? But she said, “That’s not the point. It’s just that we’re finished. I wish you’d accept that—”
“I can’t!”
She felt sorry for him; but that was all. “Goodbye, Jack. Please don’t call me again.”
But he did, twice more; she hung up on him as soon as she heard his voice. Red roses came every day for a week; then abruptly there were no more deliveries, no more phone calls. But he hovered there on the horizon of her mind, just over the edge of the world, like a storm that had once buffeted her and might come again. She knew his power, that of his money and influence but, worst of all, of his jealousy. She only began to relax as the weeks went by and he did not turn up on the doorstep of the house in Coogee.
Then a Federal election was announced. Sylvester came up from Canberra blown up with promises to the voters and his own optimism. Labour had been twenty-three years in the wilderness: God, though not a recognized member of the Party, had promised to work an eighth day. “I think your mother, up there, has had a word in His ear. The Party can use you, too, sweetheart. I’ve talked to Gough Whitlam.”
“Dad, what do I know about recent Australian politics?” Now that she was home she was ashamed how little she had been interested in Australia while she had been away. Her sole interest had been Cleo Spearfield, another country altogether.
“You’ll catch on in no time. We’re going to waltz in, Cleo. The country has had twenty-three years of those other bastards—it’s yelling out for a change.”
She worked well within the Party organization, because she had always been able to work with people. None of them was jealous of her, except some of the older women; but even those loosened up with her when she let drop hints that she was not interested in going to Canberra after Labour had won. She was still not sure where she would be going, but she knew she was not going anywhere where she would once more be just Sylvester Spearfield’s daughter.
Sylvester was in his element during the campaign. There was an interest in the election such as Australia had not seen since the war; Cleo sometimes felt she was writing press releases for the Second Coming. She met Gough Whitlam and was impressed by the man; he was vain and intellectually arrogant, but he had a presence the look of a leader. The younger Party workers began to talk as if he could walk on water; the older ones, the Irish Catholics, muttered about sacrilege but worked just as hard, just in case he was The Lord. They knew that if they didn’t, God might forget the Apostles who had spent twenty-three years in the wilderness of the electorates. There is no desert like a party district branch that does not have a sitting member in Parliament.
Cleo discovered, or re-discovered, that all was not sweet accord in the Party. Labour never needed outside enemies; it bred its own within the ranks. It knew it could do nothing about the enmities, so, being politically wise, it boasted that they were a measure of its true reform philosophy. The Liberals, who were conservative and not liberal, had their own dissensions, but pretended they were gentlemen and did their knifing in locked sound-proofed rooms. It was politics in any democracy in the world: only the accent was different.
On a warm December Sunday evening Labour came back into power. It seemed that three-quarters of the country got drunk on beer, wine and euphoria; the other quarter drank hemlock. All the family had gathered in the family home in Coogee to watch the results on television. A
lexander and Madge, Labour down to Alex’s red socks, floated about as if Utopia were just outside the garden gate. Perry and Cheryl, who had voted Liberal, afraid of capital gains tax and all the other secret Labour heresies, were there, wearing the smiles of Pompeians who had just bought a villa on Vesuvius for the view.
Alex, whose beer-belly now made him look pregnant, put his arm round Cleo’s shoulders and looked across at their father. “I’m more pleased for him than I am for the Party. He’s waited what seems like forever for this.”
“What’s he going to get out of it?” She remembered Sylvester’s confession in London that he had long ago given up dreaming of being Prime Minister. “Now that I’ve been working at headquarters, I’ve learned a few things. He’s not a front runner for any of the plum jobs.”
Alex looked at her. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. And I think Dad knows it now.”
“Oh Christ!” Alex shook his head, and looked as if he were about to weep into his beer. He was a meteorologist, accustomed to sudden changes, but he had taken the political weather for granted. “All that bloody effort over the years—they’ll give him more than the crumbs, surely!”
Sylvester came across to them, belly-laughing as if there were still votes to be won. “I wish your mother were here—I’d have crowned her Queen tonight!” And he a republican.
Cleo looked at him, feeling sorry for him: she knew that he knew that all he was going to get would be the crumbs. She would never know what had happened and she would never ask him. Somewhere along the years he had made the wrong friends and the wrong enemies.
“Congratulations, Dad,” she said and kissed him.
A month later he got the very minor Ministry for Power, which gave him no power at all. He came home from Canberra and sat out on the back verandah and looked down at the surf rolling in on to Coogee beach. Back in the days when the family had all lived here, there had been a makeshift billiards room on this verandah. Sylvester and the boys had put up fibro walls at one end of the verandah; the walls had been too close to the table and certain shots had to be played with the billiard cue at an acute angle. But it had been another point round which the family had congregated, a green baize field where they had played out their friendly rivalries.