Spearfield's Daughter (27 page)

She wasn't sure that he hadn't meant it; she gave him the benefit of the doubt. “He actually loves me, Dad. I'm not just his kept woman. Oh, he's given me this flat, but I pay for everything else. I don't get an allowance or anything like that. I make good money—”

“More than me, I understand, much more. I asked him. You're a real success and I'm glad for you—that's what you came to London for. But—I don't know, maybe I'm old-fashioned. I just wish I had your mother to talk to, to see what she'd think of it. He's old enough to be your father.”

“I hope you didn't tell him that.”

“I did. It was the obvious thing to say.”

“He wouldn't have thought so.” She rolled her eyes in mock dismay.

Suddenly he laughed, not the belly-laugh but more like a gasping sigh of mirth. “Righto, you know your own mind. But I asked him a few other questions, too. We had a lot of time together while we were waiting to find out what was happening to you and Tom Border. He has a wife, do you know that? Have you ever met her?”

“No. She lives somewhere in the country. We've never talked about her.”

He threw up his hands in one of his old theatrical gestures; but he was playing to a constituency of only one. “Christ Almighty, sweetheart, you're breaking up a marriage—”

“I'm not. The marriage is finished. I don't like you thinking I'd do that—”

“All right, I apologize. But hell, what sort of future have you got with him? Do you just go on being his—his—”

“Mistress is the word, Dad. It's the one I like better than any of the others, even girl friend.”

“Okay, mistress. Do you go on like that till she dies? He told me she won't give him a divorce. And what about Tom Border? What is there between you and him?”

“Nothing,” she lied. “What makes you think there is?”

“Sweetheart, I've been reading politicians' faces for more years than I care to remember. If you can read those, everyone else's is an open book. That young bloke—” almost unintentionally he emphasized
young
“—he's head over heels in love with you. And you know it.”

She had always known how politically shrewd he was; no one in Australia had a better reputation
in
that regard. But with the conceit of women, especially young women, she had never credited him with much shrewdness in affairs of the heart. She had assumed he had closed his eyes and his mind to such things, had always left that to her mother and not bothered to interest himself after Brigid had died. She had seen him woo women voters, old and young, with all the charm of a political Casanova; but he had never hinted that he might know anything of what was in the electorate of their hearts, that he cared that they might be in love or in need of love. It set her back to realize that he had read her as easily as he might have read Hansard.

“Tom goes his own way. He's not interested in marrying a career woman.”

“Did he say that? You two must have had plenty of time to talk about things while you were at that farm.”

Now that she came to think about it, they had talked about surprisingly little: at least about themselves. They had skirted the subject of love in the same way they had avoided the subject of their possible death.

“He's never mentioned marriage. He thinks I'm too ambitious. All you men are the same.”

That was a mistake and he picked it up at once. “Lord Cruze, too. I got the idea he'd like you to settle down and be—well, settled down.”

“Be just his kept woman, you mean. Yes, he would. But I'm not going to accept that. Times have changed, Dad. Marriage isn't the be-all and end-all of a woman's life. It wasn't the be-all and end-all of your life. Mum always had to share you with the Labour Party. She said she sometimes felt she was in bed with the whole Labour Caucus, Ben Chifley, Arthur Calwell, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.”

“I know,” he admitted. “She told me that often enough. We had our rows about it. But we both believed in marriage, in our own. We were happy in it, one way and another. That's all I want for you, sweetheart. To be happy.”

She kissed him: it was the easiest answer. She was not happy now but she couldn't tell him so.

He stayed for two weeks. She hardly saw him in the last week. He was busy on political business with the other members of the all-party delegation that had arrived from Canberra; they made mental notes for reports that would never be written. Canberra talked to Westminster and vice versa, though Westminster gave only half an ear to the ex-colonials, since it believed that no worthwhile word had come from Down
Under
since Captain Cook had delivered his report two hundred years before. Both sides, however, agreed that you could never teach the voters anything; though that, too, was never recorded. A senator from Washington sat in as an observer on the conference and agreed with what was implied if not stated: that between elections none was so dumb as a voter and even at election time his intelligence was borrowed from the representative he intended to elect. Cleo, out of deference as a daughter and not as a voter, refrained from writing a column on the parliamentary conference.

She had written her story on the kidnapping and Massey-Folkes had spread it across two pages of the
Examiner.
She went on
Scope
on the Sunday night following her and Tom's rescue and told the story again, this time using the angle of rising terrorism in Europe; Roy Holden had put together enough visuals, from film by his own crew and from library stock, to make it a good feature. She narrated everything without dramatics but still made it sound like the greatest adventure since World War Two; the television critic on the
Daily Express,
a first-class chauvinist, headed his review, “An Evening at Home with Pearl White.” Nonetheless, it topped the ratings for that week. The viewers sat in the small forts of their living-rooms and bed-sits and looked at a real live heroine being modest about her escape from death and thought how nice it was that she was British, even if at one remove. The male viewers had their fantasies about being locked up with her for three days in a farmhouse bedroom; no pictures of Tom Border were shown and she mentioned his name only once; Roy Holden and Simon Pally, the producers, wanted only one star and she their very own. The female viewers noted that she was as well-dressed as on all her other appearances, looked for broken fingernails in the occasional close-ups of her hands and commented that if she had indeed been in any real danger it had left no blemishes on her. Men like their real-life heroines to look like the unreal goddesses of films; women prefer their heroines to be reasonable facsimiles of themselves. Goddesses need not necessarily have feet of clay but they are more believable if they have thick ankles. When Cleo got up and walked away from the camera with her swaggering walk the male viewers went with her into an imaginary bedroom. The women were already on their way to the bathroom or to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

On the morning of Sylvester's departure Cleo borrowed the Rolls-Royce and had Sid Cromwell drive her and him out to Heathrow. He had said goodbye to Jack Cruze the night before. They shook hands like two retired middle-weights who wished they were thirty years younger and they had another referee.

“
Look after her,” Sylvester had said and tried to make it sound like a threat. But he knew his voice would be faint from 12,000 miles away.

“Of course,” said Jack, who, in any case, had not expected any parental blessing.

“I don't know when I'll next be over,” said Sylvester. “Unless there's a wedding.”

Cleo, the referee, called
Time!
Or rather, she said, “It's late. It's time we turned in.”

At Heathrow next morning Cleo took her father up to the VIP room. “Did Jack Cruze arrange this?”

“Yes.” She didn't tell him that she also got this treatment each time she travelled. VIPs don't necessarily have to be important: it is enough to be a celebrity.

“Well, I guess you're a VIP yourself now. Do you need him to get you this sort of treatment?”

But she knew what he meant: do you need him, period, question mark. “Possibly not. Dad, let me work it out myself. I have a good life here. And though you may not believe it, Jack is part of it.”

He gave up; but his surrender was grudging. “If he offered to marry you, I'd find it easier to take . . . Righto, sweetheart. Like I said, all I want is for you to be happy. A father can never guarantee that for his kids. Not even a good one.”

“You've always been a good father.” She believed it at that moment.

He shook his head. “No. You were lucky, and so was I—you had a good mother . . . Will you be coming home for a visit?”

“Some time, I'm not sure when. Maybe after the next elections, to help you celebrate Labour's win.”

“That could be another two years. But we'll win, all right.”

“Where will Gough Whitlam put you in the Cabinet?”

“God knows. He's as unpredictable as the wind. That's what some of them call him, The Educated Wind.” Cleo knew there was no back-stabbing to equal that in the Labour Party. Whitlam, the Party leader, would some day look like the dummy target in a knife-throwing school. “I've got my eye on Foreign Affairs. I fancy myself as a foreign affairs expert now.”

She was wistfully sympathetic. “But you still dream of being Prime Minister?”

He laughed, but it was one for the voters, canned and on tap. “I gave up that dream when I went
into
the Senate. I just couldn't stand the in-fighting any more in the Party. I settled for the comfort of the Senate.”

It was the first time he had ever confessed to her that he was no longer ambitious for the top post. She should have realized it long ago, but she had been too concerned with her own ambitions. She had been so intent on getting out from under his shadow she had not noticed that the shadow had shortened.

“You hadn't noticed, had you?” he chided her gently. “You're like most people—you make up your mind about a person and most of you never bother to change it unless he or she does something harmful to you. The majority of people are lazy about their opinions.”

Lazy or myopic: she wasn't sure which. “I'll say some Hail Marys that you get the Foreign Affairs job.”

“You still pray?” She didn't, except when in danger; but she nodded. “That would please your mother. I prayed myself while I was sitting in that hotel in Hamburg.”

Then it was time for him to go. They kissed and embraced. He held her as if he were a dying man, as if he would never see her again; but she made no comment, just hugged him to her. She was weeping when he went out of the room, but she managed to hold the tears until his back was turned.

She stayed that night with Jack in the penthouse flat. Their love-making at first was awkward, as if they were making up after a major row; but when she was finally aroused she gave herself up to him completely. Her one worry after it, when he lay asleep beside her and she lay wide awake listening to the traffic in Piccadilly and down Constitution Hill, was whether she had been trying to convince him or herself that nothing had changed. As she fell asleep she heard a police car going along Piccadilly, its bells ringing their warning.

III

Tom Border lay that same night in a bed with his Parisian girl friend. She was a stewardess with Air France, a girl seemingly always on the wing, even when off-duty. She was the ideal solace for a man in love with another woman: she asked no questions, made no demands, took each day (and night) as it came. Her name was Simone and, though she didn't know it, she was a smaller edition of Cleo. Her ambition, too, was smaller: all she wanted out of life was to enjoy it.

Tom,
while in Paris, shared an apartment with an older man, Bill Dickey, who had lived in Paris for years and worked for the American embassy. He seemed to spend more than half his time out of Paris and Tom sometimes wondered if he was a CIA man; but he never asked, was just thankful that he could have the apartment to himself so often. It was on a narrow street off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in a building that had once been a mansion and was now a warren of small apartments, though the rooms were big. The rent was high, which was why Bill Dickey was glad to have a co-tenant.

In the morning Tom got up while Simone was still asleep and went out onto the tiny balcony and looked down in to the street. The opposite side of the street had no mansions, converted or otherwise; it was a row of apartment buildings above narrow-fronted shops. The baker's shop directly opposite was already open and he imagined he could smell the fresh bread he could see in the shop's window. A girl came out of the baker's and walked down the street, a long loaf held over her shoulder like a rifle; she looked jaunty, as if she had just spent a marvellous night and wanted everyone to know about it. Paris was the city for love: or so all the poets and writers who came from other places said. He knew it wasn't true. Love, and lovers, suffered just as many bruises in this city as in any other.

Simone, wrapped in a blanket, came to the door and looked over his shoulder. “You want to go after her? The one with the bread?” She always spoke English, except when she was making love, because she said his French gave her a headache. “Was it my fault that last night was not very good?” She didn't say it accusingly: she aimed to please.

“No,
chérie
.” He always tried to throw in a few French words to show he was trying. But he had the Mid-West ear for foreign languages and he knew he would never be a linguist, not even in bed where incoherence disguised the poor accent. “That was my fault.”

“You probably were thinking of your dreadful experience.” She had a genuinely sympathetic nature, not one taught her by Air France. He appreciated her caring for him, for not all the French cared about foreigners, especially Americans. “I once had a lover, a pilot, who escaped from a terrible crash—he was no good for six months afterwards.”