Spearfield's Daughter (18 page)

Alain winced only slightly. “My uncle is a professional soldier, doing his duty. But this is a political war, not a military one.”

“Some people would say that all wars are political.”

“Or religious. But they still have to be fought by ordinary men who have to be led by professionals.” He knew he must sound as if he did not totally condemn the Pentagon and he wondered what his friends would say if they came up the slope to hear him. He was ambivalent in his feelings towards his uncle, but he was not going to attack him in public. Brissons just did not do that to each other.

“The
Courier,
of which your family is the biggest stockholder, is very much for the war.”

“
I don't write the editorials for the
Courier.
I wish I could, but that's not the way it works on newspapers. I'm sure you don't write the commercials that pay for this programme, right? But you'd like to, right?”

She would ban all pet food commercials, all close-ups of dogs golloping their chunky meals, of cats licking their lips like Chinese emperors who had just executed another hundred enemies. But United Television's programme directors would tell her to mind her own business. “I take it you haven't been drafted, Mr. Roux?”

“I got a deferment to finish my course. I got this yesterday.” He reached into his pocket, took out an envelope; it was so perfect it looked staged: “It's my draft notice. I have to report next week.”

“Will you report? Or will you dodge the draft?”

“I think that's between me and the draft board.” He laughed, not at her but straight into the camera, as if his only audience were the youth of the world.

“Cut!” said Roy Holden. “Marvellous, Mr. Roux! We'll use all of that. Maybe we'll come and do an epilogue when you're in the stockade or wherever they'll put you.”

Alain laughed again, but Cleo watching him, saw that this time the laugh was a little forced. “I'll send you a postcard.”

As he turned to go back down the slope to rejoin the Yale group Cleo said, “Would you have dinner with me tonight if you're free?”

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “That's a switch.”

“I don't have any designs on you. I'd just like to talk to you.”

“Sure, I'll be glad to. Will you call for me?”

She smiled, liking him, a young chap. “I'll do that. Whereabouts? I don't know New York at all.”

He gave her the address on Fifth Avenue. “I'll be waiting for you downstairs. I don't think you should meet my mother until I know what your intentions are.”

Cleo, for reasons she didn't bother to examine right then, did not mention she had already met Claudine Roux. “Eight o'clock. I'll let you choose the restaurant.
Scope
will be paying, so no expense spared.”

“Oh, to have an expense account,” said he, too rich to have one.

He
was waiting under the canopy outside the apartment building when she drew up in the cab. He suggested a restaurant on Lexington Avenue. “It's one of the few truly French places in New York. The food's so good the proprietor won't serve you any drinks that deaden the taste buds. Only aperitifs, nothing else. My mother goes there when she wants a quiet meal alone.”

“Will she be there this evening?”

“She's at the Met. She appears there regularly. She's one of their non-singing prima donnas.”

The restaurant was intimate, a bijou establishment where Cleo could see Claudine Roux coming in alone and yet not seeming alone: the staff would pay court to her all evening. The food was as good as Alain had promised, a change from Mrs. Cromwell's sensible dinners. Cleo had had far too many of them in the past few months and had begun to wonder if
her
taste buds had been deadened.

“Do you get on well with your mother?”

“Well enough. We have the usual thing between the generations these days. I mean we argue about the war, things like that. What about you and your mother?”

“My mother's dead.”

“Oh. Your father?”

“We never argue. Dad's always right, so my brothers and I just agree with him. It's easier.”

“What does he do? Is he in newspapers or TV?”

“He's a politician.”

“Oh God.” She noticed that he didn't swear, or at least hadn't done so in front of her. She wondered if that was the influence of Yale or his mother. “They're the worst sort, aren't they?”

“Not necessarily.” She had to defend the absent Sylvester. She knew that, for all his faults and egotism, he would defend her to strangers. “There are worse.”

“For instance?”

She had to think. “Self-made men, the achievers. The ones who can't understand why their kids don't want all the material things. My father isn't like that.”

“Do you want all the material things?” He seemed unaware of his smug position, the heir to the throne.

“Yes, a few of them. I'm no idealist, if that's what you're looking for.”

He
shook his head. “No, I don't think I am. That blonde girl this afternoon—Joan Temple. We talk about it, but we've decided we're from the wrong side of the tracks to be idealists. Both our families have too much money. Oh, I know,” he said, reading the unspoken remark on her face, “money should be no barrier. But it is, when it's all tied up the way our money is.” She looked at him, saying nothing, and after a while he nodded. “Okay, I want it both ways. Now you think I'm a hypocrite.”

“Not at all. I want it both ways, too. I'd like to be a £50,000-a-year idealist. That way, when I got to Heaven, I'd be seated with only the best. I'm an elitist idealist.”

He raised his glass to her, a Corton-Clois du Roi ‘61, ideal for elitists. “The best sort. Now where do we go after dinner? Your place or mine?”

“We go our separate ways. I'll put you in a taxi and pay the fare and tell the driver to see you get home safely.”

“Do you have a boy-friend or a husband?” He had noticed she wore no wedding ring, but that meant nothing these days.

“Yes.” Jack would be flattered to be called a boy. “Your mother has met him. Lord Cruze.”

He laughed, full-bellied; the intimacy of the place was shattered. The head waiter looked towards them reproachfully, but Alain didn't see him. “Really? Oh boy, can you pick ‘em!”

“Do you know him?”

“Only what I've read about him in
Time
and
Newsweek.
He's the successor to Lord Beaverbrook, isn't he?”

“He wouldn't like that. He thinks he's an original.”

“Is he? I mean for you?”

After a pause: “Yes.”

He had stopped laughing and was watching her. At last he said, “Why did you have dinner with me? I really thought this was going to lead to bed.”

The thought tempted her for the moment. “I don't know. I just wanted to have dinner with a young chap.”

He was sharp, like his mother. “Lord Cruze is a bit ancient?”

It was her turn to laugh. “Not quite. He's fifty, fifty-one—I'm not sure. You may not believe it,
but
men at that age are not past their prime. Righto, don't ask,” she said, reading the unspoken remark on
his
face. “I'm not going to discuss what he's like as a lover. We get on very well together.”

“But . . .”

“Well, yes. But . . .” She changed course. “I didn't tell you before—I've met your mother. At Lord Cruze's. I was quite impressed by her—she's a formidable lady. I wanted to see what sort of son she'd raised.”

He wasn't offended: he had become accustomed to being examined as part of his mother's handiwork. “Are you planning to do something on her? You'll never get anywhere near her, you know. Not for TV.”

“I'm not planning anything. I just wanted to see what was behind the First Lady of the New York press—that's what they called her in London.”

“Do you have that ambition? To be a First Lady?” He
was
sharp.

She liked him enough to be honest with him. “Yes.”

“Well, good luck.” He sounded as if he felt sorry for her. “Are you impressed with my mother's son?”

“Yes. You're a credit to her, if that's not too much of a put-down on you.”

He smiled; he had remarkable resilience. “No, I see what you mean. Mother is, as you say, a formidable lady. But she's also a very good mother. It can happen, you know. Is that what you want to be eventually? A formidable lady and a good mother?”

“Did you take feminine psychology at Yale?” She paid the bill with her American Express card. She wondered if the accounts department of United Television would query why she had to take out a rich woman's son. “I don't know about the formidable lady bit. I think your mother has more steel in her than I have. I mean that as a compliment.”

“Maybe.” He was flattered that she thought he understood feminine psychology. He'd seen no evidence of it himself, not with the girls he had known. “There's still time for you to develop it. The Empress didn't always have it.”

His mother was the Empress to him, too. But Cleo made no comment.

IV

When Cleo got back to her hotel on East 39th Street there was a message that Lord Cruze had called. She looked at her watch, saw that it would be two o'clock in the morning in England, decided not to call him and went to bed. At six o'clock the phone rang.

“I rang you twice last night. Where were you?”

“Jack, I'm only half-awake. Don't start on some sort of inquisition.”

There was a pause, then: “Sorry. But I missed you. I thought you might have called back.”

“By the time I got in, it was too late. I didn't want to wake you.”

“Where were you then, that it was so late?”

“It was late
your
time, not here. I'd been out to dinner.”

“Who with?”

This is ridiculous, she thought; but kept her tongue under control. “With Alain Roux, Mrs. Roux's son. I interviewed him.”

“What's he like?”

Young, handsome
. . . “A bit like his mother. A snob, I think.”

“Did you see her?”

“No. Do you want me to?” She didn't know why she said that, except perhaps to put some edge to her tongue.

He caught the sarcasm. “There you go again. . . When will you be back?”

“We're flying out tomorrow night.”

“Have dinner with me Monday night.”

“All right. But Jack—this time let's go to a French restaurant. I've gone off sensible English food.”

“Just so long as you haven't gone off Englishmen.” He laughed, but at 3,000 miles he sounded as if there was static in his throat.

V

On Sunday morning Alain told his mother that he had had dinner with Cleo. “She sent you her
regards.”

“How did you meet her?”

“She interviewed me.”

“What about? Us?”

“No, the war and the demonstration.”

“She did that at dinner? For her column?”

“No, the dinner was private, just social. She did the interview yesterday afternoon for her TV programme.”

“What did you tell her?”

“The same as I've told you. That I'm against it.”

They were at breakfast in the small breakfast-room that looked out on to the terrace. Claudine was having her usual croissant and coffee; but Alain was eating ranch style. She saw him gorging himself on bacon and eggs and brown hash (from a supermarket freezer for the metropolitan cowboy) and it only increased her annoyance with him.

“You should have been more discreet. God knows what the British will make of such a thing. Their newspapers love to snipe at us—they've never forgiven us for the War of Independence. I suppose it's the same with their television.”

“Are you afraid they'll snipe at us Brissons?” Both of them always thought of themselves as Brissons.

“We've kept our name out of the papers and off television. Up till now, that is.”

He played her at her own game: “Okay, Mother, let's not discuss it. Oh—” He took his draft notice out of his hip pocket and laid it on the table. “I got that on Friday.”

She knew at once what it was, though she had never seen one before. “Why didn't you tell me then?”

“I wanted to think about it.” He ate a mouthful of bacon and egg, chewing on it with an abstracted expression on his face, as if he were having breakfast alone and he was wondering what he would do with this free Sunday. Then he swallowed and looked across at her. “I'm going to go.”

“Where? Canada or wherever they all go? Sweden?”

“
There's no war in Canada or Sweden.” He smiled, being patient with her. “No, I'm not going to be a draft dodger. I'm going to Vietnam, if that's where they're going to send me. I'll bring you back the truth of what's going on out there.”

She didn't want the truth, not if he had to risk his life to bring it to her. “When will you be going?”

“Pretty soon. They don't waste any time. I shan't go back to Montana, I'll report straight from here.” Then he pushed his plate away from him and looked directly at her. “I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. But it would hurt you more if I did split for Canada, wouldn't it?”

No, it would not: but she could not separate her public image from her private self. She wondered how some mothers could proudly send their sons off to war, as the
Courier
editorials were always obliquely suggesting. “I have friends—perhaps we could have you posted to some army post here at home—”

She was surprised at the anger in his face; but all he said was, “No, Mother. No string-pulling.”