Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “Dear girl, I’m all right. I’ll be as right as pie next weekend. I’ll miss you, Cleo. I wish you were here.”

  “I wish I were, too.” She meant it, but for a different reason from the one he would take for granted. She was all at once afraid of what she was going to do to fill the suddenly empty weekend. If she were in London she would be that much farther from temptation. “Take care, Jack. I’ll call you tomorrow. Tell Mrs. Cromwell to stuff you with sensible food.”

  “There you go . . .” But he chuckled. “I love you, Cleo.”

  III

  She took Tom to lunch next day in the restaurant in Rockefeller Center. She had at first thought of taking him somewhere grander; but, like him, she had her own fear of ostentation. She did not want to show off in front of him, not even on the Courier’s expense account. But Tom smiled at the deference shown to her by the maîtresse d’ who took them to their table.

  “I think I’ll go back to Paris. New York is being taken over by women.”

  “You can’t give up without a fight.”

  They were a little more at ease with each other today. But they took their time, looking at other people before they looked carefully at themselves. “That’s a girl named P.J. Lagerlof over there. She works on International.”

  “One of those, eh?”

  “One of those—you mean a liberated woman? No, she’s not. She has her problems.” Then she noticed that P.J.’s companion was someone she had not seen before, a handsome boy who could be two or three years younger than P.J. Maybe she no longer had a problem, maybe the married lover had gone back to his wife for good. Or bad. “What are you smiling at?”

  Tom had sighted his own diversion. “Those two guys over there in the corner. They’re both writers. I can guess what they’re saying to each other, telling each other lies about their advances and their sales.”

  “Is that what writers do?”

  “It’s all fiction to them.”

  “You don’t say to us.”

  “I’m a newspaperman, Cleo. I just strayed from the True Path. Now I’m glad to be back. I’ll take the job.”

  “You don’t want to discuss terms?”

  “I’ll trust you.”

  She turned away abruptly and looked out of the window. The towers of the Center had collected the breezes and turned them into a cauldron of wind; the flags on the line of poles outside flapped like the wings of birds of paradise whose bodies had been squeezed into the hollow staffs. She lowered her own flag, looked back at him.

  “What are you doing this weekend?”

  He hid his surprise at her direct approach. “Looking around for an apartment. I don’t like hotel living.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said enthusiastically. Then she backed off, not wanting to force herself on him: “May I?”

  “Of course.” If he was going to put down anchor, then he had to come to terms with the harbour-master. Or mistress.

  P.J. and her companion stopped by the table on their way out. “Cleo, this is Colin Bygraves. We’re being married next month.”

  Cleo pressed her hand and kissed her cheek, feeling suddenly full of emotion. “All the happiness in the world for both of you. Will you live in New York?”

  “Colin’s from California—who in New York ever has a tan like that? I’m retiring, Cleo. I’m going to be a housewife and mother.”

  She took away the sun-tanned bridegroom-and-father-to-be. He hadn’t said a word, just stood there smiling in his Hollywood handsomeness, proud to be shown off.

  “Is he what you women call a living doll?” Tom said.

  “He didn’t sound as if he had much to offer, did he? But I can’t blame P.J. for marrying him.” She didn’t explain what she meant by that and he didn’t ask. Marriage, anyone’s, was a subject to be avoided.

  That afternoon she rang Jack at the flat in St. James’s Place. He told her he had just had dinner—“liver and bacon”—and tomorrow he would be going down to St. Aidan’s House. “I’m taking it easy, just as Doc Hynd said to.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, then she hung up and immediately called Dr. Hynd. He told her that she was fortunate to catch him, that he was just about to go out to dinner.

  “I hope you’ll be eating something sensible.”

  “Not at all. I’m going to Le Gavroche at someone else’s expense. I shall gorge myself on the richest dishes on the menu. I suppose you’re calling me about Lord Cruze?”

  “He says you’ve told him to rest up.”

  “He drives himself too hard, he has a workload he should have shed ten years ago. He has an angina condition, a severe one. He will be all right if he slows down, takes care of himself and doesn’t continue jetting across the Atlantic as if he were some airline pilot half his age. To put it bluntly, Miss Spearfield, that’s the message you should try to get across to him. To be his age.”

  “I’ll do that.” She hung up with the feeling that Dr. Hynd, on his way to gorge himself at someone else’s expense, did not approve of her. Perhaps he thought she was too rich and indigestible for a man like Jack who wouldn’t act his age.

  She put the Courier to bed that night with a feeling of excitement, not at what the paper contained but because it was the end of the week and tomorrow she would have her mind all to herself, to occupy it any way it cared to lurch. She was determined to have no plan, to let herself drift in the current that surrounded Tom.

  They went looking at apartments. It was obvious that Tom had no real idea of what he wanted and he let Cleo take over. The rents, to him, sounded like purchase prices; she soon realized that Simone must have done all their flat-hunting; his mind was still in the price-bracket of the furnished two rooms he had lived in five or six years ago. On what was still a very healthy bank balance and the promise of thirty thousand dollars a year, he still had a welfare state anticipation of subsidized housing. Like her father, he thought inflation was criminal and therefore not to be encouraged. She would not ask him to write any pieces for the financial pages.

  “Does it hurt you to spend money?” she asked.

  “I guess it does. I never look at bank statements, so I don’t think you could accuse me of hoarding it. I just hate spending it, that’s all. Nine hundred bucks a month for this!”

  They had looked at seven apartments so far. Finally they came to one in Kips Bay Plaza. It had a view (the Con Edison smokestacks, the New York University Medical Center, four square inches of the East River), the rent was $612 a month and it was immediately available. It had the added advantage of not being in the neighbourhood of her own apartment on East 89th Street.

  “Now we’ll go and look at furniture. Just the essentials, a bed and a chair and a table. You can do the rest at your leisure.”

  “You’re just like Simone, a real manager.”

  “Don’t let’s make comparisons.” But she said it lightly, glad in a way that he could bring his ex-wife into the conversation without too much embarrassment. She knew she would feel more awkward herself when she had to mention Jack.

  She took him to W & J Sloane’s, spending his money with all the profligacy of a woman not married to him, telling him (though not convincing him) that in the long run expensive furniture was the best buy. Then the expedition was finished, daylight was gone and evening, the dangerous time, was upon them.

  “I’ll take you to dinner,” he said. “McDonald’s. Since you haven’t left me any cash for anything better.”

  “No, I’ll save your last few cents. We’ll buy a take-home gourmet dinner and go back to my place.”

  “A take-home gourmet dinner—they’ll be freeze-packing sex next. Can’t you cook?”

  It struck her then how little they really knew about each other. We’ve been in love for all these years and we know nothing of the everyday things that go to make us what we are. Long distance pen pals who had never met probably knew more about each other.

  “I’m the world’s worst. Put my cooking alongside a TV dinner and Crai
g Claiborne would take the TV dinner every time.”

  He shook his head. “The illusions I’ve had about you all these years.”

  They were as easy with each other now as ten-year lovers should be. She took his hand and led him to a French delicatessen whose owner, showing how the French could be corrupted when they emigrated, made up take-away dinners. Tom, showing his own taste, bought a bottle of Corton Renardes—“though maybe a six-pack of Budweiser would be more appropriate.”

  The food was filling, if nothing else; the wine was mood-inducing. When he put down his glass, came round the table and kissed her, it was the natural end of the day. She felt no guilt or concern, because it was as if the walls of her apartment were those of a time capsule. The past and the future had nothing to do with this joyously full Saturday.

  They went to bed as if they had been doing it every Saturday for the past ten years: but it was not the Saturday night routine love-making of a married couple. Nor was it a roll in the hay, as it had been for him all that time ago in Saigon. They showed the value of experience to each other, not just of the mechanics but of the emotion of love-making. When she wept after her climax he understood and did not ask her why.

  Then the phone rang, a pistol-shot from London.

  She knew at once who it would be. She got out of bed, went out to the kitchen and took the call there.

  “You didn’t phone,” Jack said accusingly.

  “My phone has been out of order. I haven’t been able to call out.” She was more ashamed of how easily she lied than she was of what she had been doing with Tom. “I didn’t want to go out—it’s raining cats and dogs here.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie. “How are you?”

  “Lonely.” He sounded so self-pitying she wanted to laugh; not cruelly, but because he sounded genuinely funny. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m about to wash up my dinner dishes and go to bed. I watched TV for a while.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Barney Miller.” She had no idea if the show ran on Saturday night or what time it was screened: she didn’t care, at least not tonight. She was standing naked in her kitchen being quizzed about her every idle moment: she could feel all the old chains being linked together around her. “You shouldn’t be calling me now. What time is it over there?”

  “The middle of the night.”

  She knew that the middle of the night was not an hour marked on any clock: it was a state of mind. Suddenly she was not angry with him for what she had thought was his old possessiveness. He was genuinely lonely.

  “I’ve been lying here thinking—” He sounded tentative, as if apprehensive of her answer. “What would you say if I came to live in New York for six months of the year?”

  Oh God, she thought, what a time to ask me! She could see her nakedness reflected faintly in the glass front of the old-fashioned kitchen dresser; she could feel Tom’s semen drying on the inside of one of her legs; then Tom, naked as herself, was standing in the kitchen doorway. Yet another pistol, not Tom’s, was being pointed at her.

  “We’ll talk about it.” She did not call him by name, not with Tom standing only three feet from her. “In the meantime do what Dr. Hynd said and take it easy. I’ll call you tomorrow. Not in the middle of the night.”

  “I love you.” It sounded plaintive, but three thousand miles can do ventriloquial tricks with a person’s voice.

  “I know that.” She could say no more, could not tell him that she loved him. Not with Tom’s hand squeezing her bare buttock. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  She hung up and Tom, letting go of her buttock, said, “I know who that was.”

  Something of her mother came out in her: she needed to be modestly covered if she was going to talk seriously. Even whores, she guessed, put on something before they discussed price. She brushed past Tom, went into the bedroom and put on a robe. She picked up Tom’s boxer shorts, came out into the living room and tossed them to him.

  “A little decorum, I see.” He pulled on the shorts and sat down in what, over the time he had been coming to the apartment, had become Jack’s favourite chair. “You’re right. I’ve never been able to understand how nudists can have serious conversations. For about ninety-eight per cent of his time, a man’s genitals must be about the most ridiculous, useless appendages ever hung on him. They tend to lower the tone of any serious conversation.”

  “Oh shut up!” she said angrily.

  There was silence between them for a while, then he said quietly, “I’m not going to share you with him.”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.” But the time capsule had been shattered.

  “Well, you better.”

  She shook her head in despair; she could not argue with him now. “I know. I tried not to think about it—all I wanted was to have some time with you that wouldn’t be spoiled. Every time we’ve been together . . .” Her voice trailed off. She stared at him in Jack’s chair, looking as if he—belonged there. Which he did. “We can’t break up again, not now.”

  “No.” He knew it would be torture to stay in New York, but there was a certain amount of masochism in all love. “But you’ll have to tell him.”

  She nodded, afraid of the prospect.

  “When?”

  “Oh God, I don’t know!” Then she quietened down. “He’ll be over next weekend, if he’s well enough. He has a heart condition.”

  “Oh Jesus!” It was Tom’s turn to shake his head. “He stacks everything in his favour, doesn’t he?” She gave him a hard reproachful look and he threw up his hands resignedly. “Okay, that’s not fair. He can’t help his health. But he has everything else going for him.”

  “I’m as much to blame as he is. Maybe more.”

  He didn’t argue with her on that point. Abruptly he stood up. “Do you want some coffee?”

  Coffee had become a prop, like the telephone in stage plays. Brazil, the saviour of emotional situations. She followed him into the kitchen, looked at him in surprise as he searched for bread, found it and dropped two slices into the toaster.

  “I always get hungry in situations like this,” he said.

  “Have you had many of them?”

  “Three times. In Saigon, in Hamburg and that day I told you I was married to Simone. I put on weight when I’m unhappy. Watch me over the next few weeks.”

  She turned him towards her, kissed him on the lips. “I’m the opposite, I get thin.”

  “Well, we should balance things out.”

  The talk was flip, a smokescreen. Suddenly he pulled her into him and kissed her savagely. She responded, then pulled away from him and dredged up a laugh.

  “Just as well we don’t wear dentures.” The laugh was another smokescreen; but life, she knew, was like that. “They’d be halfway down our throats choking us.”

  The smokescreen lasted the rest of the weekend till she had to leave for the office on Sunday afternoon. Occasionally they came out into the open with each other, to sustain their love. If everything else had been out of kilter, their love-making hadn’t. Sex is heartless, so to be enjoyed.

  IV

  Cleo had made some changes to the staffing. She had conferred with Claudine, as the publisher, and been a little surprised at the latter’s co-operation.

  “I am not stupid,” said Claudine, “I know that Jake Lintas tried to run a one-man band. If you feel we need a managing editor, we’ll have one. Titles really don’t mean anything.” Not unless they were hereditary and noble. She would rather have been a princess than a publisher, though not of some small principality.

  “No, I don’t want a managing editor.” Cleo, since coming to America, a land of no nobility, had learned the value of titles. “I want to make Joe Hamlyn assistant managing editor.”

  “What happens to the post of managing editor?”

  “I’ll fill that myself, though I prefer to be called editor.”

  Claudine smiled. She knew the public would never appreciate what a managing editor was, the man res
ponsible for all news operations except the editorial pages. But they understood the term editor, or thought they did, and Cleo wanted the public to know who she was.

  “You are ambitious, aren’t you?”

  “Only for the paper,” said Cleo. Their smiles were white lies.

  So Joe Hamlyn was brought back from Washington to be assistant managing editor, a title he had the grace not to question. Other editors were given more responsibility in their departments. By the time Tom came to work on the Courier, there was more team-work on the paper than there ever had been under Jake Lintas.

  Tom came to the office on Monday afternoon. “When do I start?”

  “As soon as you like.”

  “There’s a national story I’d like to do, about organized crime. I know it’s been done before, several times. But I’d like to go out to Kansas City and find out why Hal Rainer was murdered.”

  “No!” Then she regained control of herself. “I blame myself for Hal’s death. I’m not going to have you risking your life for the same story. Hal was killed because he’d found out too much about Tony Rossano. Let it rest at that.”

  “Cleo old girl—” He was totally relaxed, he sounded like the Tom Border she had known in the dangerous days in Vietnam. “You’ll have to separate the editor from that other girl. I don’t want any favours.”

  “I’m not doing you a favour trying to stop you from being killed!” Her voice rose again, then she looked up as Carl Fishburg knocked on her open door and came into the office.

  “You two fighting already?”

  “This damfool wants to go out to Kansas City and risk getting what Hal got.”

  “It’d be a good story,” said Carl, safe at the city desk. “It wouldn’t be mine, but I’d be glad to lend him to Joe.”

  Joe Hamlyn stood in the doorway, one hand cupped to his ear. “Someone going to loan me something?”

  Tom explained what he had in mind. “But Cleo wants to be protective. Have you ever heard of an editor being protective towards his reporters?”

  “I’ve never been guilty of it myself,” said Joe.