Spearfield's Daughter (14 page)

“Put a robe on, Jack, or get back into bed. I find it a bit disconcerting talking to the Boss with his Old Feller staring me in the eye.”

“Old Feller? Where did you get that expression?”

“I used to hear my father using it with my brothers.”

He got into bed and she pulled the sheet up to his chest and tucked it in around him. They were like an old married couple. But neither of them thought of that. “Now tell me something . . .”

He wasn't sure why he wanted to tell her about himself. He did not think he was in love with her, but he had not felt so confidential since he had first fallen in love with Emma. The love-making had been as good as he had ever experienced; but there had been something more to the feeling of being with her. She excited him as few women had, but there was more to her than sexual excitement. He had met ambitious women before, in and out of his bed, so it was not just that that they had in common. He wondered if it was because he had found her a good listener. He had had other women who listened, or had seemed to, but he had discovered as time went by that they hadn't listened at all. No, he didn't know why he felt he wanted to share confidences with her; except that she invited them. For all her swagger and her eye to the main chance, there was a sympathetic warmth about her that she could not hide even if she tried.

“I've always known where and how to make money. My father died in 1935, when I was sixteen. He'd never had any money to spare, he was a solicitor's clerk and I'm afraid that was all he ever wanted to be. If he had any dreams, he never told me. It was my mother who gave me books to read about men who'd made good. Rockefeller and Carnegie in America, Selfridge in this country. She gave me other books,
history,
Shakespeare, Dickens, but I knew what I liked most. She got me a job in a bank in Aylesbury and told me I'd learn more about money there than in any books.”

Mrs. Cruze sounded like a robber baroness. But all Cleo said was, “It must have been nice to have such an encouraging mother.”

He looked sideways at her. “I know what you're thinking. No, my mother wasn't greedy, a money-grubber like that American woman Hetty Green. She wanted me to have something better than she and my father had had. The only talent I had was with figures—I always topped the class in mathematics at school. I wasn't going to get rich, or even comfortable, as a lawyer or a writer or a university don. The only thing to do was put me where the money was and see how other people made theirs.”

“Did she trust you? I mean, did she think you would make your money honestly?”

“Yes, she did.” He was silent for a while, eyebrows drawn down in a deep frown. Conscience rarely troubled him and when it did he was at a loss at what to do about it; it was like a social disease one didn't mention in polite company. But he mentioned it now: “I never told her how I made my first profits. I saw that the bank's richest customers all owned property. So I embezzled £200 of the bank's money—”

“You
were
good at figures, weren't you?” She was wrapped in a sheet, but she tried not to sound like Justice. At least she was not blindfolded.

He grinned, all at once completely comfortable with her. “I was also a good forger—I had to forge the manager's signature. The bank never found out. I went out and bought a plot of land for £150 and three months later sold it for £400. I put the £200 back into the bank's accounts and nobody was any the wiser. And I had £250, my first capital. By 1939 I'd left the bank and gone to work for estate agents in London. I had £2,000 capital by then, all from buying and selling property, and I used to stay back at the office at night and go through the firm's books looking for bargains in property. When war broke out I was on my way.”

She had put her hand up and was idly stroking the back of his neck. She felt comfortable with him now, comfortable with herself, was not troubled by conscience. She had made a commitment and found to her surprise that she had got more than she had hoped for. She liked being made love to by him, the man old enough to be her father.

“What a pity Hitler interrupted you.”

Hitler
had caused only a brief interruption in his career. But he had told her enough of his knavery; confidences, like flattery, could be taken too far. He did not tell her how he had immediately volunteered for the army, not out of patriotism but because he knew he would be deferred because he was the sole supporter of his widowed mother. He had volunteered because even then, at the start of a war that might last as long as the Great War or even longer, he was looking well ahead: when he eventually became successful he did not want to be branded as a man who had dodged war service. He was duly deferred and posted to a reserved occupation in a food factory, where he made more money on the black market selling the factory's products. He had seen it as stealing from the rich, the government, to give (well, sell) to the middle classes; he would have sold to the poor, if they had had enough money to pay his prices. He did, however, work hard at the factory and by the end of the war was assistant general manager and was awarded an MBE. A year after the end of the war he bought the factory with the profits from selling its products on the black market, going back to the bank where he had started his career for the extra finance he needed for the purchase. He would like to have told her that bit, since she had a sense of humour, but he thought he would keep that until he was more certain of her.

“Hitler interrupted everyone,” he said piously. “When the war was over I went into army disposals. I sold everything the army no longer wanted—blankets, jerry-cans, lorries, guns—everything. I made a packet and I was on my way. My mother died in 1950—”

She made a sympathetic noise. She wanted to ask him about his wife; but didn't. She had the feeling that he was going to give bits of himself to her, piecemeal, and she was prepared to wait. Naked though he was, she was beginning to realize she had never met a man who had so many layers to him.

“I bought my first newspaper, a suburban one down in Kent, in 1951. Two years later I bought my first provincial paper. By then I knew I wanted something more than just money. Now let me tell you something—”

“Yes?” She was patient with him. In a way he was like her father, every lesson had to be prefaced by stories of his own experience.

“If you're going to get to the top, never fool yourself. I mean don't kid yourself you're honest when you're not, don't have a double standard about scruples. The way television, commercial TV, is going, the only criterion will be how much money a programme makes. That's why I invested in it—you should
think
the same way. You may make a reputation, get a little fame, but nobody in television is ever going to go down in history. The picture lasts only as long as you see it on the screen and even when they make tapes they eventually destroy them. In the end all that will count is how much money you made out of it.”

She did not agree with him, but she didn't argue. He had the obsession she had heard from other men in the newspaper game, the reporters and columnists and editors: TV pictures would never last as long as the printed word. She thought she knew the power of television; she wanted to be part of it. But she felt uneasy at how easily she was accepting his cynical approach. She knew she could not be like that, never. She drew the sheet closer round her, feeling a little chill.

“Would you mind if I finished up rich? Met you on your own terms?”

He smiled, sure of himself. “I've been to bed with rich women. It makes no difference under the sheets.”

Rich men, poor men, it made no difference: they all liked to boast of their conquests. She wondered if she should tell him of her fortnightly teas with the Misses St. Martin. Or hadn't he thought of his visits to their girls as conquests?

“Will you talk to them at United then?”

“Yes,” he said and all at once felt uncharacteristically nervous: he had come to what looked like a fork in the road, an unexpected one. “But I hate to interfere—”

“Interfere with me,” she said, knowing the value of vulgarity in bed.

VI

When she had arrived at St. Aidan's House on Saturday morning she had been shown to a guest-room by Mrs. Cromwell. On Saturday night she slept with Jack Cruze in the big master bedroom. She was wakened on Sunday morning by the drapes being hauled back and sunlight flooding her in the huge bed. She rolled over, blinked at the silhouette against the glare.

“Please, Jack—”

“His Lordship's gone over to Chequers—the Prime Minister called him first thing this morning. Time to get up, I've got me housework to do. The maid's sick.”

“A house this size and there's only one maid besides yourself?”

“
His Lordship don't like too many people around him. They come in and clean the house during the week, when he ain't here. It's the way he's always been. He likes his privacy about his private affairs.” She trod on the word
affairs,
squashed it flat.

“Could you give me a little time to wake up, Mrs. Cromwell?” It had been a disturbed night, with Jack waking her up as if to let her know what the latest score was. But she hadn't minded. She had been a year without sex and she had been hungry for it. “Then I'd like to have a bath.”

Mrs. Cromwell was bounding around the room, bending and straightening like a fussy hen, picking up His Lordship's clothes where he had dropped them, fluffing up cushions in chairs. “Do you want some fresh flowers in here? Some don't like flowers in a bedroom.”

Cleo sat up, pulling the sheet up around her. “You don't seem surprised I'm here. Do you approve or not?”

“It ain't my place to approve or disapprove. You're not the first and you won't be the last. His Lordship's always been very keen on the leg-over. All men are. My Sid used to be the same—still is, I suppose. He just don't have the stamina any more. The working classes wear out quicker, I suppose. You want me to bring all your clothes in here?”

“Yes, please.”

She was moving in, though she did not know for how long. All she could hope was that she did not fool herself.

After she had bathed and dressed she toured the house and grounds. The house was larger than anything she had ever seen as a guest. It had been built during the Restoration and added to over the next hundred years; it displayed all the rational comfort and order of that period. She wandered through the long halls, admired the Mortlake tapestries, ran her hands almost sensuously over the Grinling Gibbons carvings, stopped by windows to admire again the landscaping by Capability Brown. In the huge library she found books on the family who had built the house; they had not been kingmakers but they had known the uses of power. She wondered if Jack had known the family's history when, as a twelve-year-old, he had dreamed of owning this house some day.

She walked down through the park, stood at the end of the long avenue of beeches and looked back up at the house. Her first impression was not of the power that had once, and still, resided in the great
house,
but of the peacefulness of the park that surrounded it. Yesterday's storm had cleared the air and sounds travelled smoothly on it: the tolling of the church bell in the distant village, the hum of a car going up a nearby lane, the song of a thrush somewhere beyond the beeches. Money could buy this sort of peace; and if one were powerful, one probably needed this occasional escape. She felt strangely at ease, but she knew the mood could not last, a thought which unsettled her. She wondered if, given the circumstances, she could spend her life in such peaceful surroundings, insulated against the storms and stresses of the outside world. And decided she couldn't.

She was too much her father's daughter. He had never settled for peace and security, as Brigid had wanted him to: they would have killed him as inevitably as some terminal disease. They might not kill her, but they would render her unhappy and useless. She had become Jack Cruze's mistress, but she could not settle for being that alone.

He drove up the avenue as she began to walk back towards the house, in a scruffy-looking estate van. She got in beside him and kissed him like a good wife, or good mistress. He smiled in satisfaction, proud of himself.

“You look proud of yourself. Is that because the Prime Minister sent for you?”

“No, it's because of you.” He meant it. He could not remember feeling like this since he had first fallen in love with Emma. “You like it here, don't you? We'll come down here as often as we can make it.”

“Every chance we get.” Then she said, “Will you speak to them at United tomorrow?”

“You never let up, do you?” But he was in high good humour. The PM had asked him for advice this morning; last night he had enjoyed more physical and emotional satisfaction than he had thought he was still capable of. He would give her anything she asked for. If he could give the PM what he asked for, the least he could do for Cleo, the best of them all since Emma, was to give her the same. “I'll ring them first thing in the morning. Just one thing—don't make a fool of yourself.”

“I'll let you be the watchdog.”

“I shall be.” He felt immensely protective towards her, like a true lover. Or father: but he put that thought out of his mind at once.

6

I

ACROSS THE
Channel, in the Dordogne in France, Claudine Roux looked steadily at her brother, who had always fooled himself.

“Roger, I heard rumours about a cover-up in Vietnam last year. You were supposed to be involved.”

“Where did you hear that claptrap?”

Roger Brisson spread some Périgord
foie gras
on toast, poured himself another glass of the estate's Monbazillac. He appreciated the rich life, which is not always so with the rich who have inherited it; he savoured everything it offered, like a poor man who had won a lottery. It was one of his few endearing qualities, if indulgence is endearing. He sometimes regretted the wilfulness that had made him choose the army as a career, but now he saw the army as a proper discipline, one that he needed. He had joined the army against the wishes of his father and almost solely for that reason. But there had been another, lesser reason: in one of the rare moments when he had looked at himself objectively, he had decided that, as the wild play boy he then was, he had been heading for disaster. He had no confidence that he could reform himself; in a reckless moment he had chosen the army to do it for him. There had been times at West Point when he had been on the verge of resigning; ironically and perversely it had been his father's continued resentment of his choosing an army career that had kept him in it. He had served in the Korean War, distinguishing himself for his leadership and his bravery under fire. His father had eventually come to accept him as a soldier with a future and, without ever mentioning the surrender, withdrawn his objection to Roger's army career. By then it was too late for him to resign from the army; he needed it more than it needed him. It was the only institution that would not indulge him as the rest of his small world, his family, his wife and his friends, had done.