Spearfield's Daughter (31 page)

He looked like a dim reproduction of himself; thin, grey, all life gone from his eyes. She wanted to cry, but knew he would be angry if she did.

“I'm going down to the West Country, to a cottage I always meant to retire to. I'll be out of the way there.”

“Jack's going to miss you. We all are. The paper won't be the same without you, Quent.”

“I should hope not.” He had never been burdened with false modesty. “I've been here more years than anyone else, except some of the chaps in printing. I made it what it is. I hope you've learned a thing or two from me.”

“I have. Who's taking over from you?”

He
shrugged; it seemed a major effort, he looked so weak. “I've talked to half a dozen chaps for Jack. I don't think any of them is right. Well, maybe they're right for the paper—I don't know whether they're right for the Boss. He's not the easiest man to work for.”

They exchanged smiles. “What about Joe Brearly?”

“He doesn't want the job. He says he could never handle Jack.”

“What about me?” She had been thinking about it for the past twenty-four hours. It would bind her even more closely to Jack, but that couldn't be helped; she had come to Fleet Street to get to the top and this was the opportunity. “I can handle him.”

For a moment there was a spark of the old Quentin in the thin grey face. “Do you think you could do it? Ah, but why am I asking? If the Queen asked you to take over from her, you'd be up there on the throne like a shot.” Then he shook his head and subsided. “No, it wouldn't work, Cleo. There are too many men on the staff who think they've paid their dues and could do a better job than any woman. There's never been a woman editor of a newspaper in Britain and those chaps wouldn't stand by and let you, an Aussie to boot, be the first.”

“You're wrong in saying there's never been a woman editor. The first editor of the first daily paper in England, the
Courant,
was a woman. That was in 1700. She didn't last long, but she was the editor. It's time there was another one.”

He smiled shrewdly. “I knew about that woman, but I didn't think you would. You'd really like the job, wouldn't you? Well, try your luck with Jack. I can't back you, Cleo. It wouldn't be fair to some of the chaps I've worked with all these years. Between you and me, I don't think any one of them would be any better than you. But you're untried, Cleo. You've never even sat on a subs' desk, you've never made up a page—”

She looked out through the big glass wall at the newsroom. She could see the reporters at their desks getting into gear to report tomorrow's news. Some of them were typing, with their backs hunched, necks craned, in the posture of those who had never learned to touch-type; others sprawled in their chairs reading notes or other newspapers, the younger ones being studiously casual as if they had not yet quite fitted into their roles. On the sub-editors' desk older men were sharpening their blue pencils, sharpening their teeth as they prepared to teach the young reporters how to write terse, readable prose. Two or three
men
were grouped around the various editors' desks: the metropolitan desk, the provincial, the foreign. Copy boys sat at the far end of the room like cattle dogs waiting to be whistled up. Though the evening rush had yet to start, the huge room already had its own vibrancy, the sort of atmosphere that almost no other industry had. Because it
was
an industry: the production of news. And there were few products that had to be produced and sold so quickly.

The newsroom was only part of it. There were the circulation department, the advertising department, finance, personnel; and there was the printing department, the engine-room of the whole paper, where the printers, a race apart, grouped in the quaintly named union chapel, ruled as in another country. Journalists have the conceit that
they
are the paper, but without the other departments their typewriters would be just a battery of unheeded clacking.

She looked back at Quentin. “I think I'll ask Jack to try me.”

She did, that evening. She would have done better, perhaps, if she had asked him to marry her, though she would have got the same answer.

“No! Every bloody paper in the country, even
The Times,
would run something snide about Cruze making a present of the
Examiner
to his girl-friend—”

“Is that all you're afraid of?”

“No!” He was spearing her with exclamation marks. “I'm more afraid you'd make a mess of the paper! You know nothing about editing—”

“Men have been promoted to editor without editing experience. Or is it that you don't trust a woman?”

“You're too young. If you were ten years older, maybe—”

“Hugh Cudlipp was only twenty-four when he was made editor of the
Sunday Pictorial.
”

“He'd had years of experience.” He made it sound as if Cudlipp had started editing letter-blocks in his cradle. “No, I'm not giving you the job. The subject's closed.”

She did not lose her temper this time; she had half-expected the refusal. She had asked him down to her flat for dinner; she felt safer on her own ground. She had had dinner sent across from the Stafford Hotel opposite; she knew she was a poor cook, though Jack, with his palate, would not have been too critical. She had not wanted to do battle with him on a stomach fortified only by Mrs. Cromwell's cooking.
Mrs.
C. served Brussels sprouts and peas with everything, which would have made for windy argument.

“Does that mean I've gone as far as I can on the
Examiner?”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“Has someone else offered you a job? Murdoch or Max Aitken?”

She put down her spoon and sat back in her chair, giving her exasperation full rein. “Why do you always look for a rival? No, no one has offered me a job—though I'm sure I could get one if I wanted it. All I asked is, have I gone as far as I can go on the
Examiner?”

“For a few years, yes.”

“Well then, maybe I will look around to see what else is on offer.” The threat came off the top of her head, taking flight of its own accord.

He pushed his plate away from him: there was nothing as good as bread-and-butter pudding, not even chocolate velvet. “What do you want me to offer you? Maybe you can have one of the magazines.”

“I don't want to go onto a magazine. Every second week another story on the Royals. Or How to Bring Up Baby in the Seventies. Or Forty-seven Ways to Cook a Brussels Sprout.” Forty-six ways of which would be thrown out by Mrs. Cromwell. “Jack, I'm at a dead end. Oh, a very comfortable dead end, I'll admit that—a lot of women would give their eye-teeth and a lot more to be where I am. But I'm going to become very stale if I have to go on doing the same thing for the next ten years, till you think I'm old and experienced enough to edit the
Examiner
.”

“You could give up newspaper work altogether. And television, too.”

“And do what?” But she knew.

“I could take more time off and we could travel. I'd like to compete in more horse shows, some of the big ones in America, for instance. I could buy a yacht and we could spend more time cruising. There's a lot of the world I've only lately realized I've never seen. The out-of-the-way places. Machu Pichu, for instance. The Himalayas—”

“Woy Woy.”

“Of course.” Then he said, “Where's that?”

It was a village back home in Australia, north of Sydney and still clouded by the joke it had been
in
her father's youth when everyone had thought of it as a weekend retreat for drunken fishermen. It was now a respectable retirement retreat, but it was not Machu Pichu. She ignored his question and said, “Jack, you're talking about what
you
want to do for the next ten years. You'd better get some extra stickers for me, because you make me sound like baggage.”

He threw up his hands: for a moment she saw her father. “There you go! Always trying to put me in the wrong. We'd
share
all I've been talking about.”

“Who would I be? Your travelling companion? Your very good friend?”

He kept his hands on the table this time, did not say
There you go again.
Instead he said very quietly, “What would you like to be?”

Then she found she couldn't say
“Your wife.”
Instead she said, “Jack, what I want is not to be taken for granted. I've got no hold on you at all. If I gave up everything to be whatever I'd be, your travelling companion or your good friend or whatever other people would call me, and then in two or three years' time, or five or ten, if we fell out—where would I be? In my thirties, starting all over again. I have no idea what the competition will be like in two or three years, let alone ten. I might find it very hard to make it.”

“You wouldn't have to worry, I mean financially. I'll set up a trust for you.”

“No, Jack, it's not the money.” She said it honestly.

He got up, poured coffee for both of them from the percolator on a side table. He brought hers, kissed the top of her head, then sat down opposite her again. It was a small round table but, it struck her all at once, he still gave the impression that he was sitting at the head of it. Like the chairman of the board.

“I could try for a Mexican divorce and we could be married.”

He had never mentioned marriage before, nor had she. It had been a subject, like death, to be avoided. But she was not unprepared for it. “What would your wife think of that?”

“Not much. She's a Catholic, a strict one. They never recognize divorce at all. You should know that, you're a Catholic.”

A poor one. “Does English law recognize a Mexican divorce?”

“I don't know, I'd have to get my lawyers to check that. But we'd find a way—”

But lawyers were not going to make up her mind for her. She did not want to be Lady Cruze II,
not
if it meant he remained chairman of a board of two. She loved him, but not wholly; it was as if he were several men and she had love for only one of them. Also, a shadow on her conscience, there were the more than occasional thoughts of Tom. She thought she truly loved him, but there were moments when she wondered if he, too, were not several men. Perhaps her love was true only for not being tested.

“Would I keep working?”

“Why should you want to? You'd be my wife.”
Enough for any woman:
she could read the extra words in his face.

“I'll think about it.”

“Do that.” He sounded as if he were suggesting another merger. He can be so bloody unromantic, she thought: one of several men she didn't love.

III

But she had little time to think about being Lady Cruze II. Quentin Massey-Folkes died two days after leaving the office, before he had even set out for the cottage in the West Country. It was as if the
Examiner
had been his life raft; he slipped from it and was gone. Coming back from the funeral in the Rolls-Royce Jack broke down and Cleo put her arm round him and comforted him. She saw Sid Cromwell look at her in the driving mirror and nod approvingly.

At last Jack recovered, wiped his eyes and sat back. “I'm going to miss him.”

“I know that,” she said, and wanted to cry. But tears never comforted tears, not even if one took turns: they just made grief seem sentimental. Quentin had been a father-figure to her, but never one whose shadow blotted her out. “We'll all miss him.”

“Back to the flat, m'Lord?” said Sid Cromwell.

But Cleo got in first. “No, drop me at the
Examiner,
Sid.”

“Take the day off,” said Jack. “I want someone to talk to.”

“Later. First, I'm going back to the office to write Quentin's obituary. If Guy Tallon says anything—” Tallon, an old
Examiner
hand, had already been appointed editor “—I'll tell him you okayed it.”

“I'd like to write it myself.”

“You stick to your last, I'll stick to mine.”

She
had never written an obituary before. Her thoughts were maudlin and fulsome, but she didn't put those ones on paper. Massey-Folkes would have thrown out such a piece, no matter who the subject was; his ghost would come back and tear the place apart if such a column was written on himself. So she wrote with the ghost behind her and it was the best piece she had ever written. For once, the readers in the suburbs and provinces might understand that a man, with all the virtues and faults of all men, had sat in the editor's chair, that he had not been some god of cynicism and manipulation.

“That's him exactly as he was,” said Guy Tallon. He was short and plump and cheerful and he would never be the editor that his predecessor had been; but he knew it and that was his saving grace. “I shan't touch a word of it. Quent would have loved it. No bull in it. He hated bull.”

“Don't put my name to it,” said Cleo. “I think it should be a tribute from all of us.”

Tallon gave her a look that said he was seeing a new side to her. He didn't like career women because he was afraid of them; especially career women who slept with the Boss. He had never allowed himself to think there might be any modesty in Cleo. She might not be so difficult to work with, after all.

“I think the Boss will like it.”

“He'd better,” she said and smiled at him. But she would never take him into her confidence as she had Quentin.

With the death of Massey-Folkes it was almost as if Jack had decided that his and Cleo's future need not be discussed again. A new editor had been appointed, things would go on just as before. It was a deliberate ploy on his part. Though Emma had never changed hers, he liked to believe that if women's minds were not disturbed they would eventually be influenced by the stronger minds about them. He had no doubt which was the stronger mind of his and Cleo's: hers was just stubborn. Life, like his own mind, went on unchanged. There were dinners, horse shows, a quick trip to Nice for a three-day cruise with the Greek ship-owner; Cleo was given notice of what was going to happen but was never consulted. She said nothing, treating her resentment as if it were a social disease she wanted hidden from him. She was tired of argument because she was not sure what her own argument should be. Jack, had he known, would have said she was being a typical woman. Which, for better or worse, would have crystallized her argument into a Waterford vase thrown at his head. The vase always held the red roses and she would have thrown the roses, too.