Spearfield's Daughter (11 page)

“If I didn't know you better, I'd think you were jealous. I'm jealous of Lord Cruze.”

“There's no need to be. I'm just here to keep a chair warm till he finds another mistress.” She hoped she sounded convincing.

“He couldn't find a more beautiful ass to keep a chair warm.”

“I hope you two are not discussing me,” said Claudine Roux, sitting down opposite them.

“Not at all,” said Cleo, wondering how much she had heard.

She had not noticed if Mrs. Roux's ass was beautiful, but the rest of her certainly was. Back home in Australia, where the harsh sunlight rarely allowed a woman's beauty to last beyond middle age, she had
never
really looked to see if there were truly beautiful women amongst the elderly. She also had the fault of all youth, of setting a low age limit for beautiful women or handsome men. Secure in flesh and mind and the present tense, she did not bother herself with how she would look in the future.

“Lord Cruze has just been extolling your virtues,” said Claudine.

“Singular as well as plural, I hope?”

Claudine smiled, polishing her shield: she liked fencing with the young. “I've never believed that virtue has its own reward. Some celibate priest coined that one. Don't be shocked, Mr. Border. I'm not advocating permissiveness, just a little moderate immorality when the occasion calls for it.”

“How does one recognize the occasion?” said Cleo.

“My dear, I'm sure you'd know it. Get me some more coffee, would you, Mr. Border?” She looked after Tom as he moved away, then turned back to Cleo. “You and Mr. Border obviously know each other. Where did you meet?”

“In Vietnam.”

“Really? What were you doing there?”

“Protecting my virtue, mostly. When I wasn't doing that, I was covering the war.”

“Indeed?” She looked at Cleo with new interest, taking her out of the revealing white dress and putting her in combat-dress; though, of course, the white dinner-gown was also combat-dress for a different, undeclared war. “Did you ever meet my brother? General Brisson.”

Cleo almost ruined the white gown; her coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “Yes. Yes, I had dinner with him once.”

“Only once? Then you must have kept your virtue. Oh, I know my brother, Miss Spearfield. My sister-in-law calls his diversions his ‘supply troops.' I hope you were not one of them.”

“No, Mrs. Roux, I was not.” She put some ice into her voice.

“I'm sorry. I've offended you.”

Claudine's apology was sincere. She attacked more often than she intended; those who knew her would have laughed if she had claimed that it was a form of defence. But it was, had been ever since her father and her husband, both arrogant men, had died and left her in charge of the Brisson empire. She had never expected to be the empress, only the consort. Until Pierre Brisson and Henri Roux had died in the
same
plane crash twenty years ago, she had been content to be what everyone saw her as: the beautiful but dutiful daughter and wife, doting mother of an only son born in her late thirties because Henri had not wanted children before then, loving sister of an only brother who had had a brilliant if chequered career at West Point. Suddenly faced with responsibility after Roger had refused to leave the army and come home and run the empire, she had put up sharp pointed defences, an irony-railed fence. She had always had a sharp tongue, but only Henri had known of it, though he had never listened.

“You shouldn't jump to conclusions, Mrs. Roux. You've been studying me all evening. I'm sure you think I'm one of Lord Cruze's supply troops. I'm not. No more than Mr. Border is one of yours.”

“
Touché,
” said Claudine and took her coffee from Tom as he came back. “Miss Spearfield and I are getting on so well. She knew my brother, General Brisson, in Vietnam.”

“Yes?” Tom looked at Cleo out of the corner of his eye.

“Mrs. Roux knows his faults,” said Cleo blandly. “How he likes to dally.”

“Yes.” Tom kept his composure and his curiosity tight inside the well-fitting jacket.

Then Lord Cruze, having given enough time to his other guests, came over to join them. He sat on the edge of a chair, tie awry, jacket open, shirt creeping out of his trousers. Claudine looked at him with distaste and admiration: she had learned to do both living with Henri.

“I heard you talking with the French ambassador,” Cruze said. “You speak French fluently. I never thought Americans were good linguists.”

“We think the same about the English,” said Claudine, wondering why she was raising the American flag; she rarely did that at home. “My parents were French, Jack. My brother and I were born in France. My husband was French. It sort of runs in and out of the family.”

“I thought your family had been in America for generations. Somehow one doesn't think of the French as immigrants.”

“The French never think of themselves as immigrants, Jack. Other nationalities, yes, but never the French. Some of my ancestors owned plantations in Louisiana, owned them before the Louisiana Purchase. But each time a woman in the family found herself pregnant, she went back to France to have the child. It just so happened that my mother and I both married Frenchmen who later became American citizens. Reluctantly, I believe. My husband, for instance, pulled the blinds down on July the Fourth but let
off
fireworks on Bastille Day.”

Cruze envied people who could trace their families, and especially family influence, back through generations. He had tried tracing the Cruze and Brown families and had given up at his great-grandfather on each side: a family tree of shrivelled nonentities was not what he was looking for. He had got more pleasure, as a junior bank clerk, tracing the bank manager's signature.

He looked at the American sitting beside Cleo. He hadn't missed their glances at each other across the dinner table and he wondered if he had competition here. “What do you think of Britain, Mr. Border?”

“I'm still feeling my way, sir. They tell me London isn't Britain, just as New York isn't America. I'm going to start in the worst part, over in Belfast, and work my way back. I'm going there, this weekend.”

Cleo sat up, and glanced at Cruze. “I'm going there, too. But Lord Cruze has been trying to talk me out of it. He doesn't think women should expose themselves—” she lifted the front of her dress, caught Claudine's eye and smiled, “—to danger.”

“It's no place for women,” said Cruze. “The information I have is that it's going to get very dirty over there. Like your Vietnam.”

“No, never like Vietnam,” said Tom and looked sideways again at Cleo.

“Well, we'll see,” said Cleo. “We'll go to Belfast together, Tom, and compare notes. You can look after me for Lord Cruze.”

The two men looked at each other and smiled, but Cruze's smile was tight and Tom's tentative. Each of them was surprised at his own sudden jealousy.

“The young,” said Claudine, “they seem to enjoy war.”

Oh my God, thought Cleo, if you only knew who did enjoy it!

VI

The guests had gone and Cruze, tie off and collar loosened, sat in the drawing-room having a night-cap with Cleo. The extra staff who had come in to help Mrs. Cromwell had also gone; the Cromwells themselves were in bed. The huge flat was silent, and across Green Park Cleo heard a police car ringing its way down Constitution Hill. The bell had no real urgency about it, any more than would a carload of
carillonists
ting-a-linging their drunken way home. Soon, she had heard, all the cars would be equipped with sirens, bringing the city's tension properly up to date.

“Would you like to see a film?” Cruze had not felt so uncertain of himself with a woman in years.

“I'm too tired for Valentino, Jack.”

“How about Hoot Gibson?” He grinned, then looked at her carefully, as he might at a new executive he was about to employ. “You were a beautiful hostess tonight.”

“Was that what I was—the hostess?” She looked at him just as carefully, not looking for employment.

“Would you like to be?”

“Is that a proposal or a proposition?”

She stood up, straightening her dress over her hips. She wished now that she had worn a looser, less revealing gown; she had put it on without thinking about the possible consequences. She liked to show off her figure and she knew that men liked to look at it. But she had been naïve tonight. The women at the dinner party, all older than she, had read more into the tight, revealing gown than had occurred to her. She had advertised herself as Jack Cruze's latest girl.

“Dammit!” But he swallowed his annoyance and changed the subject. “Are you still going to Belfast? With that fellow what's-his-name?”

“Tom Border. You never forget names, Jack.”

“Is there something between you and him?”

She found her wrap, draped it round her shoulders. “He asked exactly the same about you. The answer in both cases is No. Call me a taxi, please, Jack.”

She had refused to allow him to send Sid Cromwell to pick her up and had told him at the same time that she was not to be driven home. To have accepted the Rolls-Royce as her transport would somehow have been, in her eyes, an acceptance of her role as more than just his dinner partner. Going home by taxi declared her independence.

He didn't argue. He rang downstairs to the night porter, then opened the front door of the flat and took her hand. “You're bloody annoying, Cleo. We could be good friends.”

“I thought we were.” Then she relented, kissed him on the cheek. “Goodnight, Jack. Don't take
me
for granted, that's all I ask.”

5

I

“NO, MISS
Devlin won't be letting herself give interviews to rags like the
Examiner.
Now if you were from
The Times
or the
Guardian
. . .”

“How about the
New York Courier
?”

“Ah, we'd have to think about that, wouldn't we? Boston and Brooklyn, we know about our support there, but New York . . .”

He was an old man, too old for war. But war had been his life if not his profession; he had fought in the Troubles, killed his share of Black-and-Tans. The young men were itching to take over, but he was one of those hanging on, protecting his authority as much as his fierce nationalism. He wore a cloth cap instead of a red-banded army cap, but he was just like the British generals had been in World War One. Tom Border had made a study of generals.

“I don't think you should judge me on what paper I work for,” said Cleo. “For all you know, I may be very sympathetic to Miss Devlin and the IRA.”

“You may be that, too. But there's no evidence, is there, not from your paper. No, Miss Devlin, she's saving herself to talk to the British press in London. She's a very intelligent lass, that one.” He tried to keep the surprise out of his voice, wondering why so many sensible fellers had voted for the girl. “Maybe you'd like to interview me. I knew all the big fellers, De Valera, Michael Collins, all them fellers.” He lived in the past, the battles had become a romance in his misted memory. “It was different then,” he added, pathetically.

Cleo and Tom left him, went out into the street and walked down past the narrow houses, grey and drab even in the August sunshine. They were aware of people watching them; lace curtains moved like white eyelids. On a street corner a group of youths stood still as Cleo and Tom came up to them; the
intruders,
for that was what they knew they were, had to step into the gutter to get by. They had come to the wrong address, in more ways than one.

“That guy was one of the Old Guard,” said Tom. “We should have gone looking for the young ones. Who gave you his name?”

“He rang me himself at the hotel, told me to come and see him first. I suppose someone at the hotel told him I was there but forgot to say what paper I was from.”

“Why didn't you get in touch with Bernadette Devlin direct?”

“I tried that, but she's not in Belfast this weekend, she's somewhere out in the country, they said.”

They came out of the side street, turned down the Falls Road, and were looking vainly for a taxi when they heard shouting and banging of drums. Coming up the road, spread right across it like a slow dark tide, was a procession; at its head marched two drummers and behind them, banging away to the same rhythm, was a line of youths with dustbin lids. A banner waved above the crowd, but the two young men holding the poles were marching too close together and the message on the banner sagged in on itself like a strangled shout.

“Here come the Young Turks,” said Cleo.

“Oh Jesus,” said Tom, looking the other way.

At the end of the block on which they stood a barricade was hastily being dragged into place. Police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary in glistening helmets and with plastic shields held up like a loose wall, were lining up behind the barricade. Behind them were the B-Specials, the civilian militia, their stiff-peaked caps held hard down on their heads by chin-straps, their pick-handle batons held at the ready. The silence at that end of the road was an eerie contrast to the shouting and banging of drums and lids, now louder still, from the other end.

Cleo suddenly realized they were in the middle of a rapidly diminishing no-man's land. She looked wildly around for escape; then banged on the front door immediately behind her. But she could have been thumping on the door of an empty house: the door remained shut, the lace curtains at the windows didn't move. The crowd, turning now into a mob as its anger and noise grew, was less than fifty yards away.

Two youths suddenly appeared on the roof of a house across the street. One of them swung his
arm
and a bottle, trailing a tiny wisp of smoke, flew through the air towards the barricades. The distance was too great; the Molotov cocktail hit one of several cars parked along the road. Instantly flames spread around the car; it seemed only a moment before it blew up with a roar. The car behind it caught fire, then the one in front of it. Then the air was full of smoke and stones and bottles and single spiked railings hurled as spears.