Spearfield's Daughter (10 page)

“I thought Mrs. Roux was one of the richest women in New York?”

“She is. But her money doesn't come from the
Courier.
It's a sort of family hobby. Her great-grandfather bought it a hundred years ago for a song.”

She wondered what a song had been worth a hundred years ago, but didn't ask. Though ambitious, she had no real interest in money in actual cash terms; a million or two either way, in today's terms, meant nothing to her. Which showed that, though not rich, she could think rich.

“Some hobby, to be able to have all that influence.”

“It doesn't have as much as it used to. Tell you the truth, it's a bit fuddy duddy. It's rather like working for the Yale Club's house magazine. But don't quote me.”

“I shan't, if you'll get me an interview with Mrs. Roux.”

He looked at his empty glass. “I knew you weren't plying me with beer for nothing. I'll try, but I have no influence with the Old Lady. I've never actually had a word with her. The Empress never gets down as far as the kitchen staff. They call her The Empress back in the New York office.”

They talked for another half hour, then he said, “How about dinner tonight?”

“I'm sorry, Tom. I already have a date. But some other time.”

If he was disappointed, he hid it well; he still had the same withdrawn look. “I'll see what I can
do
for you with the Old Lady.”

“The Old Lady—I got the impression that phrase doesn't fit her.”

“It's a generic term for all bosses. Don't you call Lord Cruze the Old Man?”

II

“Jack—” At their first dinner together, their second meal, he had told her to drop the
m'Lord.
“I'm going to Northern Ireland at the weekend. I want to interview Bernadette Devlin.”

“She'll be coming to London, interview her here. There's a chance you'll get hurt over there in Ulster.” He let his steak and kidney pie get cold; he was truly concerned for her. “I'll tell Quentin not to let you go.”

They were having dinner, their second, in the flat. So far he had not gone out in public with her; in private his behaviour had been impeccable. She felt safe, felt she was not being tested for the role of mistress. It was an employer-employee relationship; she knew that Massey-Folkes and some of the other senior executives came here occasionally for lunch or dinner. She did wonder, however, if Felicity Kidson had come here originally on the same basis.

She pushed a piece of kidney aside and looked for some steak in the pie. Mrs. Cromwell was still defending the barricades of English cooking; all over Britain another French revolution was taking place but Mrs. Cromwell was standing fast. All them trendies could cook what they liked, but she knew what was best.

“Jack, please don't interfere. I know whom I want to interview and where. I don't want to talk to Miss Devlin in the security of Westminster. I want to see what she's like back in her own bailiwick.”

“You take a lot for granted, talking to me like that. Eat your dinner.”

She resented his abrupt tone. “ Am I keeping Mrs. Cromwell waiting again?”

He glowered at her from under the hairy brows. “Dammit, you do everything you can to rub me up the wrong way. Why can't you get the chip off your shoulder? I don't care a damn where you interview the Devlin woman, so long as it's safe. I don't think you'll be safe in Ulster, not if the IRA knows you're working for me.”

She softened, apologized. “I appreciate your concern for me. Nevertheless, I'm going to Ulster.”

“Dammit, you're stubborn!”

Later,
after Mrs. Cromwell had joined her husband in bed in the servants' quarters beyond the kitchen, he led Cleo upstairs to his library. “I'll show you some films. Did you ever see Rudolph Valentino?”

“He was a little before my time.” She was amused. Did he see himself as the Sheik of Green Park?

The library was a big room, two of the walls lined to the ceiling with books. A small projection box was built into the third wall and a cinema screen came down out of the ceiling to cover the drapes on the fourth wall. She looked at the books while he loaded the projector. If he had read only half of what was on the shelves, he was well-read. The social as well as the political philosophers were there; there was history, biography and travel. There was no fiction, none at all: evidently he got all that from his silent films.

They watched
Monsieur Beaucaire.
She wanted to laugh at the flaring nostrils and the flashing eyes, but a glance at Cruze in the darkened room told her it would be the wrong thing to do. It was as if he were looking at home movies, a fantasy of his childhood. He lived in a past that was not his own, an escapism that had been created for his parents' generation. The film finished and he sat for a while, neither looking at her nor saying anything. Then he got up and went into the projection box. She sat in the darkness, wondering why he was taking so long to turn on the lights. Surely he wasn't going to run another Valentino film?

Then a single light came on and she turned round. He stood by a door that she hadn't noticed before, a section of the bookshelves that opened into his bedroom. He wore only his socks and suspenders.

“Great balls—” she said, and for a split second His Lordship was flattered, “—of fire! What are you doing?”

“Getting ready for bed.” He stood on one leg while he wrestled to undo a suspender.

She played dumb, a lady of the silent screen. “If you wanted me to leave, why didn't you just wind the clock and put the cat out?”

“All the clocks are electric and I don't have a cat. Take your clothes off.”

Oh my God, he does think he's the Sheik!
“Jack, put your clothes back on. You're old enough to be my father.”

“Let me give you some fatherly advice—don't ever say that to a man!” He stood there in fury and one sock. “Dammit, who do you think you are?”

She
was glad his eyes weren't flashing and his nostrils flaring; she didn't want to laugh if she could avoid it. “I know who I'm not. I'm not someone who goes to bed with the Boss—it's not in my contract.”

“You don't have a contract!”

“I do, you know. I got Quentin to give me one, just to cover any syndication rights. I never dreamed syndication would be something like this.”

His member quivered with fury, like an irate conductor's baton; she would have been happier with the flaring nostrils and flashing eyes. Then he turned and went into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Books tumbled out of the shelves:
The Wisdom of Confucius
lay at her feet. Confucius he say . . . she couldn't remember what Confucius had said, but guessed he would never have allowed himself to be rejected in just his socks and nothing else. She knew Jack Cruze would never forgive her for that. But it had been his own fault.

She let herself out of the flat and went home to her own place in South Kensington. She went to bed laughing. Women have no pity for men who make themselves look ridiculous in private or public. They prefer to do the demolition themselves.

III

She had a one-bedroom flat in a mansion block that still had a majority of older, conservative residents. The porter in the entrance lobby looked as if he might have been at Mafeking; the agents seemed to have put him there against an invasion of the swingers who were taking over South Kensington. Some of the older residents, those who were still capable of it, had their discreet affairs; and the porter turned a half-shut eye to strangers, male or female, who might sneak out in the early morning. So long as they
looked
respectable and didn't flaunt themselves, he didn't care what went on upstairs. A bit of breeding never hurt what the upper classes wanted to have on the side.

He had never thought of Miss Spearfield, being Australian, as upper class, but he was impressed when the big Rolls-Royce drew up outside and the chauffeur came in with a box of red roses. “Will you see Miss Spearfield gets these right away?”

“Will she know who they're from?” Meaning he'd like to know.

“
She'll know,” said Sid Cromwell, ready for another campaign at the florist's.

There was no note or card in the box, but when Cleo opened it and saw the red roses she did indeed know.

IV

“No, Mr. Border, I do not give exclusive interviews. I hated that press conference yesterday, but Farquhars thought it politic that I should hold it. I don't know that it achieved anything. All the cheap papers referred to me as the rich American heiress, as if I were still twenty-one.”

Claudine Roux was scrutinizing Tom Border while she talked to him. She was not over-impressed by what she saw; she did not like untidy men, or untidy women for that matter. But she liked his watchful eyes—they would miss nothing from here to any horizon—and though he was not handsome now he might be in years to come. She liked the thought of that, though not directly connecting the thought with him; looks were always more interesting when they were backed up by experience. She was sixty and still beautiful and though she admired the beauty of the young she did not yearn to be young again herself. There were, of course,
some
drawbacks to being older . . . but she never thought of herself as old and would have sacked Tom Border on the spot had she known he referred to her as the Old Lady.

“I think Miss Spearfield might be more discreet than that.” Tom was not sure he could make such a promise. He had looked up some of Cleo's pieces and “discreet” was in fact the last word he would have applied to them. But he wanted to get her her interview, if it was possible. He felt he owed her something, though he wasn't sure what.

“Mr. Border, I read the English newspapers, even tabloids like the
Examiner.
Miss Spearfield uses her little axe more frequently than Lizzie Borden did.”

Tom stood up, shrugged. “Maybe you're right, Mrs. Roux.”

“I usually am, Mr. Border. What are you doing this evening?”

Tom hung on to his eyebrows. “Well—nothing, I guess.”

“Don't look so shocked. I'm not in the habit of soliciting young men, certainly not those who work for me. I have to go to a dinner this evening and I prefer to choose my own partner rather than being burdened with some bore.”

He
chanced a half-smile: “You don't think I'd be a bore?”

“I shouldn't have asked you if I'd thought that. But you're not very gallant, Mr. Border. You're not rushing to accept my invitation.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Roux. My mother would be ashamed of me—she brought me up to have proper respect for ladies.”

“Old as well as young?”

“Both,” he said gallantly.

“Never forget older women, Mr. Border. Often all some of them have to look forward to is small courtesies.” She did not include herself in that group. She would always expect more than small courtesies—and get them.

She had not met Tom Border until yesterday, though she had seen his by-line in her paper. Although she owned the largest bundle of stock in the
Courier,
she never interfered with the paper below board level and knew none of the staff except the top executives. Empresses, she had read (she had read a great deal about empresses, and felt she understood Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria and Carlotta of Mexico), never concerned themselves with the palace drains. She thought the
Courier
just occasionally published sewage, but then so did all newspapers, even the
New York Times.
She hated muck-raking and after reading a scandalous story in the
Courier
always brought the matter up at board meetings.

“You are a good reporter, Mr. Border.”

“I think so, Mrs. Roux. I say that modestly, of course.”

“Of course. How else could you say it?” They smiled at each other, the empress and the new young man at court. But she did not have Catherine the Great's appetite for young lovers. New York in the second half of the twentieth century was not Moscow in the eighteenth century. That other empress had not had to suffer syndicated gossips, just those at court. “Do you have a dinner suit?”

Tom hadn't worn anything even semi-formal since his high school graduation. “No, but I guess I can hire one.”

“Do, and get one that fits you better than that sack you're wearing. Be here at the Connaught at seven forty-five. Sharp.”

“Yes, ma'am. May I ask where we're going for dinner? I like to be briefed.”
“
To Lord Cruze's.”

V

“I don't mind an occasional bleeding heart leader writer,” said Cruze, “but I don't want a haemophiliac.”

“Jack, dear boy, if you weren't so short yourself,” said the Tory shadow minister, “you wouldn't care a damn about the Little People.”

“Women give rape a bad name,” said the homosexual writer who had been raped only by critics.

Cleo and Tom, deaf to the sometimes soggy soufflé of conversation being passed round the dinner table, looked across at each other. Each had been surprised to see the other with their respective boss; even more, they were both shocked, puritanism welling up as it does in all lapsed Christians. One did not go out with one's boss, especially when the boss was so much older.

Later, in the drawing-room, Tom came and sat beside Cleo. He looked uncomfortable in the well-tailored dinner jacket: he needed room to move within his clothes. “You look beautiful tonight, Cleo old girl.”

She was in white, a virginal suggestion spoiled by the exposure of her bosom. “So do you, positively suave. Did you get that from Moss Bros? I thought so. You should get them to dress you all the time. Is that in honour of the Old Lady?”

He smiled, shook his head, sipped his brandy. He had had no experience of life at this level and he was enjoying himself. Maybe he should try for a life as a rich drifter.