Spearfield's Daughter (43 page)

“You might do a piece on that for us. But enough about business. I get the feeling you could be getting more out of this town than you are. I mean after office hours.”

“I don't rush into things.”

A man stopped by their table to say hello to P.J. He was tall and heavily built, with the thick rubbery skin that Cleo had come to notice on some healthy American men, as if the flesh were applied freshly each morning over their bones. He was dressed in a dark flannel suit and wore a button-down shirt
with
a silk tie. He looked as if he wore it as a uniform each day, but was at ease in it. He said a few words to P.J., gave Cleo a charming smile and a quick appraising look and passed on.

“He's with Socony, in finance or something. He's just going through his second divorce, he's marvellous in bed, so I'm told, and I wouldn't get into the hay with him, or the sand, if I was alone with him on a desert isle. He's the worst sort, he
talks.
A girl goes to bed with him, every guy in the Yale Club knows about it the next day. You have to watch out, Cleo. American men say that we women have cut their balls off, but they've only got themselves to blame. I don't think women are natural castrators, do you?”

It was surgery she had never contemplated, at least not knowingly. “Do you have a man?”

P.J. nodded and looked sad, an expression that lay oddly on her vivacious, beautiful face. “He's married, unfortunately. I see him from Monday to Friday, then he goes home to his wife in Philadelphia and I feel as guilty as hell all weekend. I go to church on Sunday and pray for forgiveness for breaking up a happy home, then on Monday he comes back and I welcome him with open arms and open legs. I'm disgusting, really.”

Cleo made no comment, but wondered if she would open her arms (and her legs) to Tom if he wanted to see her Monday to Friday. But knew that she wouldn't, not while he was happily married to—Simone? She had only dimly taken in the name of his wife when he had mentioned it.

“I'm a very moral girl, actually,” said P.J. “My father is an Episcopalian minister up in New Hampshire and I respect everything he believes in. I think the Ten Commandments make much better reading than anything we ever print in
International.
Unfortunately, I have a body that's not moral at all and I'm in love with a married man.”

“P.J., why are you telling me all this? I'm a perfect—well, an imperfect stranger—”

“I honestly don't know, Cleo. Yes, I do.” She blinked and Cleo was shocked to see the shine of tears in the beautiful blue eyes. “I just saw my man across the room there—he's gone now. He was having lunch with his wife.”

Oh God, Cleo thought, don't let Tom come back to New York. Let him settle forever in California with his wife, let him take her to lunch there, let me never see them together.

Cleo accepted the commission to write two more articles and Gus Green, delighted with his new client, had her price raised. She was no longer on the breadline, albeit it had been fancy bread, and she felt a
re-
awakening of her ambitions. She took an excursion trip round Manhattan Island and looked at what she might some day conquer. She felt a certain trepidation: there were battlements to be scaled, certain of the taller buildings stood like castle keeps. Had she the talent to batter down the gates? How many other would-be knights and Joans of Arc had arrived here and failed, they and their descendants still trapped in the moats of the Lower East Side or up in Spanish Harlem? She knew the geography of the city, though she had seen very little of it. All she had to learn and conquer was the climate.

She worked diligently at the bureau, writing pieces about Australia, telling Americans more than they really wanted to know about Down Under. She did articles, short and long, on the Barrier Reef, the revival of the arts under the Labour government, the terrors of funnel-web spiders, the gastronomic delights of the pavlova, the lamington and the iced vo-vo (that one done tongue in cheek but taken seriously by American readers, who were so ignorant of Australia they believed anything they read) and the honoured place of racehorses in the Australian pantheon. But while she dispensed information about her own country she began to learn all that she could about the country she had, she had now decided, come to conquer.

She learned a few things about American men. She went out occasionally with P.J. on a double date and soon caught on that P.J.'s married lover was quite happy with the arrangement as it stood and had no intention of making an honest woman of P.J. Cleo never raised the matter with P.J. because she also caught on that the latter was so in love she was ready to settle for any arrangement her married man suggested. For her own part Cleo enjoyed herself with a couple of the dates P.J. brought along but none of them interested her enough for any regular dating. One night, feeling in need of sex, she went to bed with her date for that night, an editor from one of the larger publishers. He treated her as if she were a tyro writer, editing everything she attempted in their love-making and imposing his own format on the exercise. When he rang her the next morning she sent him a rejection slip.

Time and the seasons slipped by. She went up to New Hampshire with P.J. for Christmas, but felt an intruder in the Lagerlof family. The night before she left Manhattan she called her father and her brothers and sisters-in-law and felt worse for hearing their voices. She felt homesick, something she had told herself she would never feel.

“How are things, sweetheart?”

“Fine, Dad.” She had a sizeable income now from her magazine pieces. But she hadn't come to
America
just to make money. “How are things with you?”

“Fine.” But she knew at once that they were lying to each other. “I've been hoping I might get over to see you, but Gough seems to be the one who's doing all the travelling these days. No chance of you coming home?”

“Not yet awhile.” She was homesick but going home would be no cure.

“Well, good luck for 1974, sweetheart. Who knows, we may both be on top at the end of the year.”

Another six months went by. Her bank account grew, but she seemed to be standing still; she might finish up a rich fossil. She had moments of panic when it seemed that the years, her best years, were going down the drain like water. Then one hot steamy day in mid-summer Stewart Norway called her into his office.

“Cleo, I've got some bad news. I'm going to have to put you off. Canberra has decided it will spend more money here and they're sending over another journalist. I recommended they appoint you from here, since you were on the spot, but I'm afraid the job had already been promised to someone back home. You know what politics are like.”

“That means I lose my visa?” She knew at once what it meant.

“I'm afraid so. I'll see what I can do about getting you an extension, but I think it would be for six months at the most.”

Her first reaction was to call her father and ask him to do something. She knew that he could; he might have lost out on a senior Cabinet post, but he still had clout in the Party. But the word would get out that he had used his influence and once again she would be back where she had started: Senator Spearfield's daughter, the girl who had to use her father to keep her job.

“How long before you sack me, Stew?”

He looked most unhappy. “I wish you could think of a better way of putting it, love. I'm not sacking you. Canberra has put a gun at my head and told me I have to let you go. So don't say I'm sacking you. I'll tell them I can't let you go under a month. You make an application for a change of visa and I'll see what I can do about backing you up. But it will only be for a limited period and that's not good enough, right? You're hoping you can settle here. That's what you've got in mind, isn't it?”

“
Yes. How would you like to come back in your old age and find I owned New York?”

He shook his head in mock wonder. “Normally, ambitious women give me a pain in the neck—” He grinned his slightly buck-toothed smile. “I know, I'm a typical Aussie male chauvinist. But you . . . Well, I'd like to see you get to the top. I don't think you'd stomp over a man to get there.”

“Don't flatter me, Stew. There are some men back in Canberra I'd stomp on if I could get to them.”

But she realized now that this time she had been pushed off the cliff. She had been teetering on the edge for too long, almost as if she had lost her courage or her ambition. She had been shaken, as a stopped watch might be, and got going again.

She went to see Gus Green and explained her problem. “I'm staying here, Gus, no matter what. I'll be a wetback if I have to, I'll swim across the East River and back. I can't get immigrant status—the Australian quota is filled for the next seven years or something.”

“I've had other clients who have had the same problem. You got to marry a US citizen—you don't want that, do you? I'd marry you myself, if it wasn't for the wife—or you got to work for some organization that says it needs you here. Or you can get some Congressman to put through private legislation. You know a Congressman?”

“No.” She sat for a moment or two in silence, then she said reluctantly, because she did not like the thought that had slipped into her mind, “But I know an organization that I might be able to persuade that it needs me. Or anyway someone in the organization.”

Gus Green chewed a fat lip. “Cleo, don't sell yourself. To some guy, I mean. I've seen too many dames go the wrong route doing that.”

I've seen this one go the same route.
“I'll be careful, Gus. I'll be dealing with a gentleman.”

“Who said you could trust one of them?” said Gus Green, who'd never claimed to be a gentleman.

She rang Alain at the
Courier.
She thought he was going to jump through the phone at her. “Cleo! For crying out loud—where the hell are you? Here in
New York
? How about dinner tonight?”

Well, at least he was free if he could offer her dinner on the spur of the moment. “Alain, this is business. I'm after a job.”

He
had been laughing at the other end of the phone, but abruptly he sobered. “There's something wrong?”

“In a way.”

“Lord Cruze? I still haven't forgiven the son-of-a-bitch—”

“No, Alain, it's not him. It's the US government.”

“Oh
them
!” He laughed again. “So long as you're not involved in Watergate, we can help you there. So how about dinner? Oh hell—I've just remembered. You see? You've made me forget what day of the week it is. I have to go out to the country with my mother.”

“Well, it can wait till next week—”

“No, wait a minute. You sound worried. If Uncle Sam is on your back you can't spend all weekend worrying about him. Come out to the country with me. It's a house party. I'll tell Mother you're my date.”

She didn't want to face Claudine Roux, not while she was about to ask Claudine's son for a job on the
Courier.
“No, I think it would be better if I waited till you come back to town—”

But he wouldn't hear of that. “Cleo, I can't wait that long to see you! Good Christ—” he suddenly sounded passionate, as if the memory of two years still burned in him “—I haven't seen you since . . . No, you're coming out to Souillac.” She didn't catch the name properly and she thought it was probably Indian; somehow she could not see Claudine in Indian territory. “Where do I pick you up? There's no dressing-up—it's just casual—”

She gave in. “Alain, your mother hasn't been casual since she was in diapers and I doubt if she was then.”

He laughed, sounding like the college boy she had met oh, so many years ago. Time and the world were slipping by: maybe he was right, she couldn't afford to waste even a weekend.

He picked her up in an Aston-Martin convertible, one with automatic transmission: a sports car designed not to exclude cripples. He didn't get out of the car when he drew up outside the delicatessen; she was watching for him and waved to him from her window when she saw him. She went down to him, dumped her case in the back seat and climbed in beside him. She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek, all at once glad to see him. He'd been an old friend, if only for one day.

“
Where's your mother? You're not luring me into the country for what you hope will be an illicit weekend, are you?”

“She went out to the house at lunchtime.” He put a hand on her arm, looked at her carefully. She had dressed casually but with care, not just for him but for his mother. She had always believed that, outside of the bedroom, all women dressed for the approval of other women. “You look great. No visible scars.”

“No invisible ones, either.” But that wasn't true: but then he was talking about Jack, not Tom.

They went through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey and headed north up Route 3. It struck Cleo that this was the first time, in the seventeen months she had been here, she had been into this part of New Jersey; maybe Claudine Roux did live in Indian territory after all. As they drove along through the warm summer's day they exchanged notes on what each of them had been doing for the past two years. Alain was hurt when he learned that she had been in New York since February of last year.

“Hell, why didn't you get in touch with me before this?”

“Alain, I almost got you into a lot of trouble last time we met. I didn't know what had happened to you in the meantime. You might have married—”

He shook his head. “There have been some near-misses, but no missus.”

“Well, I just stayed away, that's all. I've always been half-afraid that Jack might pop up again.”

“What would you do if he did?”

“I don't know.” She changed the subject: “I'm ashamed to say I only called you because I want help. I want to stay in America.”