by Jon Cleary
“I’d rather Mrs. Brisson showed me around. I’d like the women’s view on Washington.” She smiled across the table at Louise, trying to tell her she had nothing to fear. “And on the Pentagon, too.”
Louise was polite, but she was not going to help put temptation in her husband’s path. At long last her forbearance was wearing thin. Attrition had never been a major tactic in American warfare, but Roger had (unwittingly, she was prepared to concede) raised it to a fine art. It had taken twenty-five years, but the war was coming to an end. She would be the loser, but she was going to lose with dignity.
“The Pentagon doesn’t recognize women,” she said.
“Just like the Courier,” said Cleo.
“You should repeat that to Claudine,” said Roger, in high good humour amongst the ladies. “She has the illusion that she is the Courier.”
“Do you think a newspaper is the true image of its publisher, Lord Cruze?” said Alain.
Jack smiled, sure now that the younger man was no real rival. He had studied Cleo well enough when they had been lovers, he knew when she showed real interest in a man. He had seen it only once, with Tom Border. Who, his sources told him, was safely out of the way now, married and living in Paris.
“Sometimes, not always. I don’t see any of my papers back in Britain as an image of me.”
“Is that true, Cleo?” Alain was prepared to cross swords with her or Cruze, though he would be handicapped by more than just his limp.
She could see he might make a fool of himself, which, for his sake, she did not want. “A cracked image. Would you agree with that, Lord Cruze?”
He saw that she was being diplomatic and he smiled, as proud of her as he had been in the good old days. “I’ll accept that.”
After lunch he sought out Claudine. He did not believe in wasting time; a Sunday without some business being done was a sterile day. The Anglican minister who had conducted the services at the church in Chalfont St. Aidan had a lot to answer for: he had preached too strongly on the work ethic. Claudine, on the other hand, believed that to work too hard was a sin. Rich Catholics have a separate faith.
“Jack, leave it till tomorrow—”
“I’ve got a full day tomorrow. Let’s talk now.” Which he proceeded to do without her permission. “. . . So that’s what I want. I’ll have Jerry Kibler put it officially to the board this week.”
“There’s no board meeting this week. We don’t meet till the fifteenth of next month.”
“I want a board meeting this week, preferably no later than Wednesday. You Americans are always accusing us Brits of not getting off our bums. Let’s see a little quick action on this side of the Atlantic.”
“Try not to be rude, Jack.”
“You’re rude all the time, Claudine. You just don’t use rude words.”
“I wish I saw you more often. I’d cut you down slice by slice to your boot-tops.”
“We’ll see. You’re going to be seeing more of me from now on. Well, you’ve heard what I want. What do you say?”
They were in her study, one of the smaller rooms of the great house. It was a woman’s room: none of your heavy desks and leather chairs and panelled walls. The walls were hung with pale pink and grey silk, her desk was one of Riesener’s later pieces, the chairs were by Sené; it had not escaped her that she had surrounded herself with furniture from the last great period before the French Revolution. But she would never lose her own head; the guillotine was a piece of furniture she would have used for her own ends if necessary.
“I can’t stop you putting Miss Spearfield on the board, that’s your prerogative. But as long as I’m publisher of the Courier there’ll be no managing editor over Mr. Lintas. He would walk out.”
“She wouldn’t be over him. But from what I see of the paper, if Lintas walked out it wouldn’t be any great loss.”
“He edits a very respected newspaper.”
“The Observer in London is even more respected, but it’s losing money. I haven’t bought into the Courier to watch it go on dying. It’ll be stone dead in five years, Claudine, if you don’t change it.”
“You want something like your dreadful Examiner.”
He grinned. “It doesn’t have to be like the Examiner. But the way it is, it makes the Congressional Record look like lively reading. I think Cleo could help change that image.”
She shook her head, in another of her obdurate moods. “Not as managing editor. I won’t allow that title.”
“As what then?”
“The furthest I would go would be to create the position of associate editor, junior to Jake Lintas. And he will have the final say.”
“Whom are you against? Me or Cleo?”
“Both of you,” she said with French candour.
“Well, we know where we stand.” He got up, offered her his arm as they went out of the study. “You and I shouldn’t fight Claudine. Together, we could set up our own dynasty.”
“That would necessitate our going to bed. I don’t think we could ever agree who should be on top.”
“Who’s being rude now?”
III
Monday morning Cleo rang P.J. at International. “P.J., you’ve dropped some hints that I might come to work for your magazine—”
“Darling, has the Courier fired you? Those goddam male chauvinists over there—I’ve heard about them—”
“No, I haven’t been fired. I just wondered if a job was still going with you.”
“Darling, there’s nothing I’d like better than to have you here with us. But Francine gave us the word only last week—we’re cutting back. We’ve been taken over, didn’t you know? One of those huge conglomerates with a name that makes them sound like they belong to the UN. They have ordered rationalization, love that word—”
It seemed that everyone was being taken over. “Thanks, P.J. How’s your love life?”
“Anything but rational. The man is still going home each weekend to his wife and I’m still nursing my guilt. How’s yours? I’ve seen you around several times with that divine Alain Roux.”
“We’re just good friends.” Or were.
“That’s what I tell my man. I wish to hell I could tell him something else.”
Cleo hung up, sat at her desk in the Courier’s newsroom. She looked around it, remarked once again its shabbiness compared to the bright spick-and-span atmosphere she remembered from the Examiner. It was like comparing the New York subway with the London underground, though she had read lately that the London system had begun to look dirty and rundown. If she took over here as managing editor she would have the room smartened up as one of her first priorities, as a first sign that the paper itself was going to be smartened up.
Coming back from Souillac last night, under pressure from his questioning, she had told Alain about Jack’s offer. “I haven’t made up my mind yet—”
He drove in silence for a while. He no longer had the Aston-Martin and now drove a dark blue Volvo; she had noticed a certain conservatism creeping into him in other small ways. She did not mind. She knew that in everyone, including herself, there was a conservative struggling to vote. Her father, the radical, had told her that.
“It won’t work, Cleo,” Alain said at last, concentrating as he took the car onto Route 3 for the run in to Manhattan. The Sunday evening traffic was thick but moving steadily, the cars full of people who had the glazed look of those who had just had their parole revoked. “Jake Lintas would undermine you every chance he got. There are at least a dozen guys who have worked in the news-room over twenty years. How do you think they’ll respond to a woman, a comparative Jane-come-lately and a foreigner to boot, coming in over them?”
“A foreigner to boot—that sounds just like Courier editorial writing. That’s one thing I’ll change if I take the job.”
“There’ll be a lot of other things changed, too. You and me, for instance.” He was still staring straight ahead.
“Probably.” She tried not to sound indifferen
t. She still liked him, but he could not expect any more of her than that.
“I thought we were heading somewhere. You and me, I mean.”
“Why did you think that?” She might as well have him bring it out in the open, though she had already made her guess.
“Well, we’ve been going out together regularly. Not as much as I’d like, but enough. We’ve been going to bed. You haven’t been doing that with anyone else.” Then he did look at her. “Have you?”
“If you weren’t driving, I’d belt you over the head for that. No, I haven’t. You’ve been to bed with other girls, some of them regularly, I’ll bet.”
“I wasn’t in love with those girls.”
“Oh, stone the crows!” The expression slipped out, one of her father’s old clichés to prove he was a dinki-di Aussie to the voters. But here she was being a foreigner to boot. “I’ve never once said I was in love with you. So what’s different about my going to bed with you and you going to bed with all those girls you weren’t in love with? You’re as bad as Jake Lintas and all those twenty-year men on the paper—one rule for you and another for the ladies. You make me sick!”
“Okay, I’m guilty of the double standard. I’m wrong and I’ll admit it. But if you take the job, who gets first call on you? Me or Cruze? He’s sure as hell not giving you the job because he thinks you’re some sort of miracle worker, that you can put the Courier back on its feet.”
She could see that his anger was making him say things that he might later regret; but that didn’t lessen her own anger. “I’ll tell you who gets first call on me—me! I’ve told him that and now I’m telling you. And as for the Courier, there’s no one else in sight, including you, who’s likely to get it back on its feet! Pull up, I want to get out!”
“We’re in the Lincoln Tunnel, for Christ’s sake!”
So they sat there at a distance from each other, steaming in the tinfoil of their anger. He dropped her outside her apartment, curtly said goodnight and drove off with a screech of tyres. She stood in the almost-dark street watching him, angry at him but now sorry for him. She turned and saw Mr. Kugel standing in the doorway of his store. Sausages hung behind him like fossilized blossoms, an aroma of spices floated out but gave up against the gritty air of Second Avenue. But Mr. Kugel had a dolorous humour, he would greet Armageddon with a wry grin and sell salami-on-rye to the camp followers.
“A lovers’ tiff, Miss Spearfield? Never worry. The guy always comes back. So the wife tells me.”
“I just sent him packing, Mr. Kugel. Why should I want him to come back? How’s the apple strudel?”
“Stale. The cherry is fresher. There, a big slice. Never eat your heart out over a man, that’s what the wife says. Eat a big meal instead.”
She had gone up to her apartment, eaten the extra large slice of cherry strudel, lain awake half the night with indigestion, got up this morning and come to the office, called P.J., and now here she was making up her mind whether to step off yet another cliff. She picked up the phone and called the Pierre.
“Jack, I’ll have dinner with you tonight.”
“Good. We’ll have it up here in my suite—”
With the bedroom right off the living-room . . . “No, Jack. I know a restaurant where they serve good sensible English cooking. The Tower of London—got that? I’ll meet you there at eight.”
“I don’t want to talk in a restaurant—” But she had hung up on him.
She hadn’t been to the restaurant since the killing of Apollo and Sirio. When she walked in the head waiter recognized her and quickly glanced over his shoulder, as if looking for some more of his guests who were about to be bumped off. She gave him her most dazzling smile, walked past him and down to the table where Jack was already seated. He rose, took her hand and kissed her on the cheek. We might be father and daughter having dinner together, she thought. But knew that if the same thought had occurred to him, it would have been wiped out at once.
“I hate talking business in a public place—”
“Relax, Jack. The good thing about this is that the tables aren’t cramped together. And another thing—most Americans in restaurants talk loudly. They won’t hear our discreet Commonwealth voices.”
“I’ve got the feeling you’re going to take the mickey out of me again.”
Her hand got away from her again in another of those instinctive gestures; it pressed his affectionately. “No, we’re the best of friends tonight. I’ll enjoy myself better than I did last time I was here.”
“What happened then?”
“I was dining here with two gangsters when they were shot.”
“I read about that.” He shook his head, looked around for more assassins; he was as nervous as the head waiter. “You’re always sticking your neck out.”
She nodded. “One way or the other.”
He caught her meaning. “Well, about the Courier. If you say yes, you go on the board. But Claudine won’t buy you as managing editor. The most she will go for is you as associate editor.”
“That would mean Jake Lintas still ran the paper.”
“I know. You’d just have to be persuasive.”
“That would never work with Mr. Lintas, not if I seduced him every night. He’d rather put the paper to bed than me.”
“Must be more wrong with the man than I thought. Well, do you want to give it a go?”
She was given time to think while the head waiter took their order. He didn’t know who Jack was, but he recognized an Englishman, though this one looked much more untidy than most of them who came here. Jack ordered the liver and bacon, then looked up from the menu at Cleo.
“What’s their bread-and-butter custard like?”
“I never got to taste it. They shot my last host just as I was about to take my first mouthful.” She looked at the head waiter, who seemed to have gone a little green. “Lord Cruze is a connoisseur of bread-and-butter custard. It had better be good.”
The head waiter bent his knee as if he were about to be knighted when he heard the title. “Of course, your lordship.”
He went away and Jack said, “He sounded like you that first time we met. He’s never been closer to the Tower of London than Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Don’t laugh. There’s a posh Chinese restaurant in London that has all Italian waiters . . . I’ll take the job.”
“Good. We’ll drink to that. Do they serve English champagne here?”
He was suddenly in a light-hearted mood, throwing off his nervousness with her, and Cleo threw off her own restraint towards him. The rest of the evening passed enjoyably; even the bread-and-butter custard came up to Jack’s hopes. They discussed what changes were needed to brighten up the Courier and were in agreement on them. Then they left the restaurant, bowed out by the head waiter and the Beefeater doorman as if they were Henry VIII and his current, if temporary, wife.
He had hired a limousine and took her home to Second Avenue. On the way he said, “How’s your father?”
“He tries to sound happy in his letters, but he’s not. I think he knows it’s all over for him now.”
“Well, it’s not all over for you. Some day he may be proud to be known as Cleo Spearfield’s father.”
“Maybe. But for his sake, I hope I don’t ever hear anyone say it.”
The car pulled up outside the shut and darkened delicatessen. He got out and looked around him. “You mean you live here?”
“Didn’t your sources tell you?” She said it without malice.
“All I had was your address. We’ll have to get you out of here.”
“Don’t rush me, Jack. I’ll move in my own good time.” She kissed him on the cheek, glad that she still lived above Kugel’s Deli. He would never try to go to bed with her in such surroundings. He had his snobberies, about rendezvous. “Thank you for the job. I shan’t let you down.”
“Good luck, Cleo. Let’s be the best of friends.” He got back into the car, not pushing his own luck at the moment, and was driven
away.
Cleo watched him go, then heard the car start up on the other side of the Avenue. She glanced across the street and saw what looked like a Volvo driving away. It was impossible to see who was in it.
15
I
IT SEEMED that Cleo’s fortunes on the Courier were in the same time slot as those of certain Presidents, though their fortunes were not the same. She had joined the Courier on the day Richard Nixon left the White House; she became associate editor of the paper on the day that Jimmy Carter was given the Democratic nomination for President. She did not go up to Madison Square Garden to cover the convention, though she would dearly have loved to; but she knew that Jake Lintas’s and the Courier’s sympathies were Republican and she did not want to get off on the wrong foot by showing where her own political sympathies might lie. She was not sure where they did lie because she believed that only by being apolitical could a newspaperman or woman be truly objective.
“You weren’t objective when you worked for the Examiner? Jack said.
“I was a columnist then, not an editor. I don’t want to be a biased one.”
“A biased editor is one who’s blind in one eye, Quentin used to say. An objective editor is one who’s blind in both. Keep both eyes open, be biased if you believe in something, and you can’t go wrong.”
The day after Cleo took over as associate editor, Alain resigned. Within a week he had closed up his apartment, sold the Volvo and left for Europe. He did not say goodbye to Cleo; indeed, he had not spoken to her since he had brought her home from that Sunday in the country. She was upset because she knew he would be unhappier than she was. She hoped his disappointment in her was inflated and could be let down in Europe by a girl who went to bed regularly and felt no commitment. Like so many women she thought that men got over their rejected love quicker and less painfully than women did. She had her own double standard.
Jake Lintas did not welcome his new associate. A new office, a tiny storeroom that had been converted for her use, was set up for Cleo. It looked out on to the newsroom and she kept the door wide open both for ventilation and to let it be known that she was available for anyone to consult her; at the end of the first day she wondered if she should not shut the door against the Arctic air drifting in from the Eskimos at their typewriters. When she went into the big room next to Jake Lintas’s for the conference of editors on the make-up of tomorrow’s paper she might just as well have hung herself on the wall as a decoration. But she kept her mouth shut and bided her time.