Spearfield's Daughter (34 page)

“I had to lay a ghost to rest, Jack.” That was not true: she was no longer being honest with him. Emma had never haunted her. But then she added, “She's been your ghost.”

He was making an effort to control himself. Women did the damnedest things: which, of course, made them women as much as their sex organs. “You should have told me.”

“I just have,” she said, woman-like.

“No, before.”

“You'd have told me to mind my own business. Or worse, gone down with me.”

“How did you get on with her?”

“Beautifully,” she said, putting the knife in.

He sighed, as if wounded. “I knew you would. You're a little alike.”

“No, we're not. That's only because you think all women are a little alike. I don't think Emma ever had any ambition, for one thing. She'd have made you a very good wife, a better one than I would, if you'd treated her as a wife.”

“Did she tell you I treated her as anything else?” He was wary: God knew what women talked about when they were together. Maybe not even God knew.

“Yes.” She would not tell him that Emma had told her of his hitting her. That was something between man and wife and Emma, perhaps, had gone further than she intended in telling her about it. “She said she was your
possession.
I can understand that. You'd like me to be the same.”

“That's all bull!” He tramped through a patch of crocuses, killing spring. She could see the violence in him now, more aware of it than ever before because now she was looking for it. “Christ Almighty, I love you, don't you understand that? I loved her, too.”

“
I didn't say you didn't. Your intentions are the best—but only for you. You'd never give me any independence, Jack.”

“You're bloody independent enough now. Why would it change?”

“If I became Lady Cruze—could I call myself that after a Mexican divorce? We'd have to ask Debrett about that.” The title had no appeal to her. The name Cruze would be a bigger cloud, throw a deeper shadow, than Spearfield once had. “If I married you, would you let me go on with my column, still appear on
Scope?
No, you wouldn't. You've said so. So there would go my independence.”

“You'd have another sort of independence. You'd have all the money you want to do anything you want. I could set up a charity trust, you could run that.”

She was too shrewd for him. “Jack, you'd be setting it up for yourself. You'd be its biggest beneficiary.”

“There you go again!”

They tramped round the park, arguing all the way and getting nowhere. She had made up her mind she wouldn't marry him, no matter what; but she did not know what else she was going to do. If she was to break off their relationship altogether, then she would have to leave the
Examiner;
Felicity Kidson had done that and now was women's editor of a rival newspaper. Cleo knew she would have little trouble in taking her column to another paper; the job on
Scope
would also be safe. But she would still be within reach of Jack, she would always stand the chance of running into him. The world, she had learned, above a certain level was just a collection of small exclusive parishes; only the vast poor and the drifting loner could escape those constricting circles. If she was to escape from Jack she would have to leave everything she had achieved in the three and a half years she had been in Britain. She had had to sacrifice nothing material to escape from being Sylvester Spearfield's daughter.

They had to go to dinner that evening at a neighbouring country house. As they drove through the soft twilight the mood between them was not soft; but she was more at ease with herself than he was with her or himself. But they would not embarrass their hosts, they would wear their good manners like cloaks.

Their host was a retired ambassador who had served in Moscow and Cairo and done a stint in Canberra as High Commissioner; he showed more scars from Canberra, because there he had been amongst
the
Commonwealth family. He was small and soft-voiced and big-eared, a wise rabbit.

“Welcome, Cleo. You're the only reason we invited Jack, you know.”

Cleo gave Jack a brilliant loving smile. It was a marvellous imitation and he gave her a reflection of it. “I'd never get anywhere without her, Hugo.”

All the other guests were retired ambassadors and their wives. Jack and Cleo were the only two non-Foreign Office people there; Cleo felt very foreign. The world was taken apart, a dissection of another collection of parishes, this time foreign capitals; then the ex-diplomats, no longer having to be diplomatic, put it together again, gerrymandering the world as they thought it should be. It was the sort of dinner party Cleo loved and knew she would miss.

“Kissinger is too thick-skinned. He wouldn't be stung if he were lost in a beehive.”

“I think we should invite Lee Kuan Yew to come and take over Westminster. After all, we used to invite foreign kings to take us over. Lee would have everyone in place in no time.”

“He'd deport half the academics. He can't stand beards.” They stroked their small moustaches, those who had them, and the cleanshaven ran their fingers down satisfactorily smooth cheeks.

“Good riddance.” Diplomats are suspicious of university staffs. Until, of course, they retire and are invited to become vice-chancellors.

“Take no notice of the men, Cleo,” said the hostess, all
crêpe de chine
and a yard wide. She had run a tight embassy in Moscow and Cairo and Canberra, running her husband with an equally tight rein. The Russians and the Arabs, behind her back, had called her The Gunboat, the Australians Big Bertha. “They're enjoying their retirement. They no longer have to compromise.”

“What do newspaper barons do when they retire?” Jack and the other men were in another room with their port and brandy and cigars, and another wife, ex-Peru and Spain, felt free to ask. Cleo was the youngest woman there and they looked at her with the wary envy of women who had learned to cloak their real feelings for sake of Queen and Country.

“Jack never discusses retirement. I think he's already discussing whom the
Examiner
should back for Prime Minister in 2001.”

They all warmed to her: they liked a woman who didn't take her husband (well, her lover) too seriously. Then the conversation turned to gossip. The world was their suburb, embassies the parish pump:
world
figures were caught with their pants down, their ladies in their underwear. It was the sort of gossip Cleo would miss when she left Jack.

Going home he said, as if reading her mind, “You enjoy all that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“So do I. The young fellow from the village—I often wonder if they know where I came from?”

“They'd know. But I don't think it would matter.”

“No, I suppose not. I'm safe.” He said it without thinking as if he had not heard what his secret tongue, the one that spoke to himself, had betrayed.

She looked sideways at him in the dimness of the car. He was staring straight ahead as they came up through the High Street of Chalfont St. Aidan; but he did not turn his head as they passed through the village under the midnight moon. He was seeing the village of thirty-five years ago and the boy in the bright sunshine of youth who, even then, had paid a down payment, if only ambition, on the big house on the hill.

“Safe from what?”

He came back out of the past. “What? Oh, nothing.”

But he had opened wider a chink into which she had peered before. For all his outward self-assurance, it seemed that he had built himself on sand. He instructed his newspapers to deride class-consciousness and suffered from it himself, like a weak chest. He had not gone to a right school or a right university; his education had been at the University of Experience, which grants no degrees, so no cap and gown can be worn. He went in through the front doors of the great houses in the land, but he knew where the back doors would be, something some of the owners would only hazily know. Even tonight, in the house where there was no real money, only privilege and connections, he had still felt an outsider. He had, Cleo realized, come back to live in Chalfont St. Aidan because that was where he felt safest. The villagers, who knew where he had come from, would never let him feel that he was looked down upon.

They slept together that night, but did not make love. She said she was tired and he did not persist. They went to sleep lying on their sides, her back tucked into his front and his arm resting on her hip. Once, during the night, she woke with a start when his arm tightened convulsively on her, as if she had tried to slip away from him.

VI

She finished her contract with United Television at the end of May and Simon Pally, the executive producer, offered her a new two-year contract with more money.

“You're worth it, Cleo. We want to protect our investment.”

“I'll think about it, Simon.”

“Someone else isn't laying bait for you?” He was a pale middle-aged man who had started in black-and-white television and seemed afraid of colour: he always dressed in grey and wore a black tie, as if in mourning for the early days of the BBC. But he knew the public taste as if he had taken it apart with a scalpel.
“Panorama
?”

“I'm not
Panorama
stuff, you know that. Robin Day would throttle himself with one of his bow-ties before he'd work with me. No, it's just that I want to think about the future. I'll let you know in plenty of time, Simon. Don't worry.”

“You're not thinking of getting married or anything, are you?” He was circumspect enough not to add,
to Lord Cruze.

She laughed. It was the practised laugh of the television interviewer, almost as good as her father's belly-laugh. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

But it struck her that maybe a lot of people expected her to marry Jack Cruze sooner or later.

Jack, realizing he was not going to be able to entice her on the two months' cruise to the Dodecanese, cancelled the rented yacht. He knew when to cut his losses and he was not a man to waste money; he could pay millions for a company but he hated to see even a hundred pounds go down the drain for nothing. As a compromise Cleo went with him to St. Tropez for two weeks, to a villa lent Jack by the Greek shipowner who had taken them on a cruise on his yacht last summer. It was another example of the parish relationships that Cleo had come to note: some people lent a lawn-mower, others lent a Mediterranean villa. Good neighbourliness was all relative.

The villa was on the hill above the town, surrounded by a high wall and giving Jack all the privacy he demanded. He came out of the house one morning and found Cleo sunbathing topless beside the pool. The sight went to his head.

“Put your top on! You'll give the garden boy a bloody hernia if he sees you!”

She
sat up and pulled on her shirt. “Jack, he can go down to the beach and see a hundred girls lying there topless. If he wants to swim out to the point he can see Brigitte Bardot lying there in the altogether—”

“I don't care a damn about Bardot and those other girls. While you're with me you're not going to flaunt your tits—”

“I'd rather you called them something else,” she said coldly through the perspiration that covered her. “And not boobs.”

It was just another of their small rows, but they were becoming increasingly regular. There were diversions and they saved the days and occasionally the nights. Jack spent half an hour on the phone every day to London; Cleo was tempted to sneak that half-hour to tan her bosom whole but decided it was not worth another row. They ate each evening in the villa, none of your good plain food but excellent dishes prepared by the ship-owner's French chef; Jack made his concession towards
entente
and made a pretence of liking the
haute
muck. After dinner they would stroll down to the town and pretend they were not noticed amongst the hordes of people promenading up and down the quay, most of whom only looked at other people to see the reflection of themselves in the passing eyes. Cleo made a mental note for her column: St. Tropez seemed to be evenly divided between exhibitionists and voyeurs. The exhibitionists sat on the after-decks of their yachts, sipping drinks and looking bored by the voyeurs; the voyeurs strolled up and down looking bored by the exhibitionists. Cleo had the feeling that at any moment both sides would suddenly change places, but that phenomenon never happened. She, for her part, was bored and only slightly amused by the poor theatre of the whole scene. Jack just sneered that he had never seen such a bunch of narcissistic poofs, tarts and layabouts; they were a good argument for Communism. Fortunately none of the poofs, tarts and layabouts heard him: Cleo feared they both might have finished up in the harbour.

She did notice the number of older men squiring very young women, many of the men older than Jack, the girls younger than herself. Jack noticed it, too; but neither of them made any comment on it. Though their relationship was now showing dents and bruises, neither of them wanted to cheapen it by comparing it to what they saw. But Cleo wondered how many of the young men at the tables along the quay looked at Jack's grey hair and made snide remarks.

On their third night along the quay a young man rose from where he was sitting with four other
bucks
and came towards Cleo and Jack. He was a beautiful young animal and he knew it and pretended to be nothing else. He was dressed all in brilliant white, as if he had stepped off the front of a packet of washing powder; he was so darkly tanned he might have been sprayed with mahogany floor stain. His trousers were so tight his sex equipment bulged like a misplaced goitre; his shirt was open to the waist, showing a gold chain and medallion that Jack thought wouldn't have been out of place round the neck of a lord mayor. His looks were dazzling, his smile a night-time glare and his conceit vividly splendent. He made Jack sick.