Spearfield's Daughter (32 page)

Cleo
now felt strongly that her career, indeed her life, was at a standstill.
Scope,
coming back after the summer break, held its place in the ratings and, Roy Holden told her, she was now looked upon as the Number One reporter—“but don't tell the other chaps.” Her column, even to her own eyes, sometimes seemed a little tired, but the fan mail, for and against the subjects she raised in it, was just as big as ever. She began, however, to wonder how long she could go on before she turned into a well-paid hack.

Christmas came and went, spent at St. Aidan's House. Jack gave her a mink coat, something she had previously refused to accept: it had seemed to her too much the uniform of a kept woman. This Christmas he wouldn't take no as an answer and she surrendered to the luxury of the coat; her soul, she told herself, was still her own but now it would be warmer. She bought him, with the advice of his coachman, a new set of harness; but if she had hinted that she wanted to put a rein on him, he gave no response. He still laid down their programme, the year ahead was all his.

On a cold March day in 1972 she went to have tea with the Misses St. Martin. Last year she had gone regularly once a fortnight to have a little tea, a little chat with them; this year she had been only once, her spare time taken up with Jack. They understood, they had told her when she had phoned them: Jack had always been a demanding man.

“What did you mean when you said Jack had always been demanding?”

They were having tea in the rear drawing-room which faced out on to the tiny garden. The house had remained unchanged except that the painting of the nude girl had been replaced by a Turner seascape. It was as if the St. Martin sisters, too old now for the pleasures of the flesh, did not want to be reminded of them. The sensuality of Turner's colours was enough for them.

“Not with us,” said Dorothy. “I didn't mean with us. We never tolerated that sort of client. Not that he was a client of ours for very long.”

“No more than two or three times,” said Rose. She was a lady, but she had a madam's memory for figures. One didn't run a successful brothel, or bordello, with loose housekeeping. “Then he met Emma.”

Cleo kept her cup steady in its saucer. “Emma? Lady Cruze?”

“Of course.” Dorothy offered the plate of petits-fours. “Do take one. We've never mentioned her when you have been here before—you never did, so we thought perhaps we shouldn't. Come to think
of
it, we've never said much about Jack Cruze.”

“We've always been discreet about our clients,” said Rose. “We had to be, with the gentlemen we had here. Though Jack, of course, is more than a client. He'd prefer to forget why he first came to our house, I'm sure.”

“Did he meet Emma here?”

“Of course, where else?”

“She was one of your girls?”

“Good heavens, no!” The St. Martin sisters sang a chorus. “She is our niece.”

Cleo put down her cup and saucer and left the petit-four untouched on her plate. She knew that all the men she worked with thought she was coldly calculating:
they
had foresight, but she was calculating. None of them knew how often she worked on impulse: “Do you think she would see me if I went down to visit her?”

The two sisters looked at each other, then back at her. “Why should you want to do that?”

“Because very soon I have to make a decision about—well, about the rest of my life, I suppose.”

“Has Jack asked you to marry him?”

“In a way. He's suggested he get a Mexican divorce.”

Dorothy St. Martin sighed, put down her cup and saucer, wiped her lips delicately with the lace napkin. She knew the demands of men's carnality and had catered for them; certain sins were forgivable. But she did not believe a man should be relieved of his sacred vows, not when it meant hurting her favourite niece. She used her religion to excuse herself her own inability to forgive.

“Does he love you?”

“Yes.” She said it with certainty and without conceit.

“Do you love him?” said Rose.

My surrogate mothers, Cleo thought, two ex-bordello-keepers. “Yes and no. Or does that make me sound as if I don't know my own mind?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy. “But so many women in love are like that. Men, too. Being in love isn't a cut-and-dried state of mind.”

“She reads a lot,” Rose explained with a smile. “Colette, Elizabeth Bowen, Germaine Greer,
Marjorie
Proops. You, too, but you never write much about love, do you?”

“I've never dared to,” said Cleo. She had made notes on it: Love is an Illusory Fact, Love is a Factual Illusion, Love is a Race from Go to Woe. But her readers would have contradicted her no matter what she had written. There were more ways of being in love than Cupid, who was never very bright anyway, could have counted. “Were you ever in love?”

“Of course!” They looked at her as if she had asked them if they were kind to animals. They were female and English and only English men doubted their capacity for love. “Both of us. Twice.”

“What happened?”

“War happened,” said Dorothy. “Both of us lost our young men in 1918, at Amiens. They were brothers.”

“We fell in love again. They were not brothers, but they might well have been. They were both cads.” Rose mopped up the crumbs of her petits-fours with her cake-fork. “After that, it hardly seemed worthwhile trying again.”

Cleo felt unutterably sad for both of them. And wondered if, in years to come, she would remember Tom as these two old women remembered their dead heroes and their cads.

“Would you marry Jack if he got—a Mexican divorce?” Dorothy said it as if it were a sin just to utter it.

“I don't know. That's why I'd like to see Emma. It might clarify the confusion I'm in.”

“Or make it worse.” But the sisters looked at each other. “Should we?”

“I'll understand if she says no,” said Cleo, airborne now as she had taken the plunge.

“Telephone her,” Dorothy said to Rose and the latter, with an encouraging smile to Cleo, rose and went out of the room. “Rose has a better way with her than I have. I tend to land on other people's feelings feet first.”

“I don't believe that. You have a heart of gold.”

“All bordello-keepers are supposed to have one of those,” said Dorothy. “It isn't true. One would be out of business within a month.”

“How are the priests down at Farm Street?” It was a non-sequitur that could have slandered the Jesuits, though slander has never been a hair-shirt to them.

“
Delightful men. We had three of them to tea last week.”

Cleo looked up at the Turner on the wall, wondered what the priests would have thought of the previous occupant of the space. Then Rose came back, all smiles.

“She will see you. She suggests tomorrow, if that would suit you. Tea at four.”

Tea at four, the meeting of the estranged wife and the current mistress: it was all so—lady-like? Cleo took out her gold pen and wrote down the address Rose gave her. Then she held up the pen.

“It's been my lucky charm.”

“May it continue to be,” said Dorothy; then added, “Be kind to Emma. Life hasn't been easy for her.”

“Should you tell me something about her?”

Again the sisters looked at each other. Then Rose said, “I think you should form your own impression. But you do know she is crippled?”

Cleo was shocked. “Jack's told me nothing about her.”

Dorothy sighed at the perfidy and callousness of men. “She will tell you how it happened, if she wishes to. Good luck, my dear.”

IV

Cleo still had no car of her own, but rented one whenever she needed it. She usually rented one of the more expensive ones, a Volvo or sometimes a Jaguar, something to fit her image of a successful columnist and one of the smaller TV stars; the British aristocracy might turn its back on ostentation, but the middle and working classes liked to judge a bestseller by its cover. Today, however, she was not going to flaunt her success, whether in her career or with Jack, in front of Emma Cruze, for whom life had not been easy. She drove down to Suffolk in a Ford Escort.

It was the sort of day when she still pined for the climate of Sydney. A cold wind blew in from the east: Siberia, it seemed, was just across the Channel. The buds on the fruit trees were pale, as if it were still too early for any colour; cows stood miserably in the fields, facing west like mournful refugees at a border. A man sat on a tractor in the corner of the field, as if he had ploughed himself into it and didn't know how to get out; crows cawed at him with the mocking laughter of dying consumptives. It was
appropriate
weather for going in cold on another man's wife.

Preston St. William was in Constable country, a village that seemed hardly to have changed since the painter's day. A few bungalows and a row of Victorian workmen's cottages stood on the outskirts, but they didn't belong, and looked like newcomers waiting to age enough to be admitted to the old people's home. Preston St. William had been here when the medieval wool trade with Flanders had been at its height; it had been here, under other names, when the Romans and the Normans had come up from the coast. It struck her that she had never been to this part of England before and she wondered if, by some sort of hypnosis, Jack had kept it out of her mind.

Malton Hall was sixteenth-century: half-timbered, with a tile roof that rippled in places like a tent disturbed by breeze, it made an anachronism of the Rolls-Royce standing outside the front door. Life might not have been easy for Emma Cruze, but it looked as if it might have been worse. Cleo drove the Ford Escort up the gravelled drive and parked behind the big black car.

The front door was opened by a housekeeper. In other circumstances she might have been warm and cheerful; today she gave Cleo a cold, suspicious eye. She could have been an East Anglian cousin to Mrs. Cromwell: she knew a kept woman when she opened the door to one.

“Lady Cruze is expecting you,” she said in a voice that suggested Cleo might also be the mistress of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Emma Cruze sat in a wheelchair in a low-ceilinged sitting-room that looked out on to a large garden still recovering from winter. A fire burned in the big brick fireplace and the colours of the furniture and drapes gave added warmth to the room. But Emma herself, like her housekeeper, was cool.

“You look exactly like you do on television, Miss Spearfield.”

“How's that, Lady Cruze?” It was odd to be calling someone Lady Cruze. There had been occasions when hotel clerks and restaurant waiters in foreign cities had slipped up, when she had been with Jack, and called
her
Lady Cruze.

“As if you own the camera.”

“I don't feel any sense of ownership today.”

“Not even of my husband?”

“If I felt that, I don't think I'd be here, do you?”

They
were studying each other, opponents at the ladies' fencing school; there would be no name-calling or hair-pulling, just neat blood-letting thrusts. Emma had the advantage: she had seen the exterior Cleo Spearfield on the television screen, got an insight into her mind through her column; now she was waiting to see what morals the girl had. She had been waiting twenty years for some woman to come demanding Jack's freedom.

Cleo had to start from scratch. She had had no idea what Emma would look like and she had been surprised at the beauty of the older woman. A niece of the two good-looking St. Martin sisters could be expected to have some looks: but Emma had not expected that an embittered, neglected and crippled woman could still retain her beauty the way Emma had. Certainly there was a frailness to her beauty, as if Emma sat inside a thin, delicate mask; certainly her almost-white hair made her look older than she could possibly be. But Emma Cruze had not allowed herself to forget what she once must have been, a very beautiful girl.

The housekeeper brought tea. There were small sandwiches, scones and strawberry jam, a cream sponge cake, all on a silver tray and with cups and saucers and plates of delicate china. Emma said, pouring tea, “Afternoon tea is my favourite meal of the day. Do you have to watch your figure?”

“A little—I put it on here and there. Do you have to watch yours?” Then she stumbled as she took her foot out of her mouth: “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

“Don't be embarrassed by the wheelchair, Miss Spearfield. I no longer am. Though I suppose it is easier for me. Did Jack tell you that I was a cripple?”

“No, your aunts did.” She felt she was somehow betraying Jack. But he should have told her more about Emma.

“Did he tell you anything about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever enquire?”

“No.”

“That's strange. Most mistresses, most
women,
would want to know about a man's wife, why he wasn't living with her, who'd left whom. Why didn't you want to know, Miss Spearfield?”

“I'm not quite sure. Cowardice, perhaps. I don't really know everything about Jack himself and I
suppose
I should after three years. Something but not everything.”

“I was married to him only a year. So perhaps you know as much about him as I do.”

“I don't think so.” She said it gently, almost as a compliment.

Emma cut the cream sponge cake. “Does he still like what he calls good plain food? He never did have any taste, in food I mean. In his women, yes.”

“Thank you,” said Cleo, taking the slice of cake.

Emma broke her cake with a silver fork. Cleo noticed she had beautiful hands, almost the hands of a young girl: as if, with her heart and legs crippled, she had concentrated on keeping young something that had remained unhurt. “I suppose I do know Jack better than most women, even though I haven't seen him in ten years. Yes, he used to visit me, once a year. Ten years ago I told him not to come again. But I've been studying him, at a distance. We women don't always see our men clearly when we're in bed with them. Is he still demanding in bed?”