Spearfield's Daughter (64 page)

He stopped by Carl Fishburg's desk. When he had left here Carl had been faded and wilted; now he was a whole bouquet of welcome in himself. “Are you coming back to us, Tom?”

“If Cleo has a place for me.” He hoped that didn't sound too personal. Then he remembered that no one in the office would know how he felt about Cleo.

“We need a feature writer, Tom. There are plenty of young guys around, kids out of journalism school, but they all want to write like Tom Wolfe. The one in the white suit, not my Tom Wolfe. They drive the old guys who used to be on the copy desk nuts. The paper's livened up under Cleo, you've seen that, but she likes to stick to old-fashioned punctuation. Some of these young guys, they sit down at a machine and write a five hundred-word piece without drawing breath. They have to use
hopefully
every second line, misusing it every time, and no one ever taught them the difference between
who
and
whom.
How's the novel-writing or shouldn't I ask?”

“You shouldn't ask.” But Tom grinned, unoffended.

Cleo rose from her desk as he went into her office. She shook hands with him, then gestured at her open door and the glass wall that separated them from the newsroom. “I'd kiss you hello, but it might make the rest of the boys jealous. You look great, Tom. You haven't changed. Is that the old Harrods suit or are you being tailored by St. Vincent de Paul?”

It
was the old Harrods suit and he thought it still looked all right: it had been dry-cleaned only yesterday especially for this interview. “If you give me a job, I'll go out and buy a new one.”

They were like a couple trying to walk towards each other across thin ice-floes. “There's a job for you, Tom. I've talked about you with the other editors. Unfortunately the pay's not as high as I'd like to give you.”

“The money doesn't matter.” Then he gestured awkwardly. “Sorry. That sounds smug. I'm all right, I mean. I've still got something left of what I made out of my books.”

That added to the guilt he still felt about Simone. She (at Alain's insistence, he had guessed) had refused to take any settlement. He knew that Alain had more money (or anyway the promise of it) than he would ever have; but he had wanted Simone to take half their assets, if only as his penance. She had been adamant, however, and given him a sisterly kiss and told him she was sorry she had been such a failure. Women really knew how to wound you, even if they did it unwittingly.

“I understand Alain is coming back, too,” he said, giving himself a breather.

“I didn't know that. How is he?”

“It hasn't been announced yet? His marriage?”

“No.” Cleo knew at once that Claudine would have engineered that; her timing was always perfect. She just wondered why such an announcement had to be delayed till the proper moment. “I'm glad to hear it. Who's he marrying?”

He drew a deep breath: he must be short of wind. “My ex-wife. Simone.”

The ice-floes met, crumbled at the edges and drifted apart. There was silence in the room. Outside in the newsroom it seemed to Tom that everyone was listening; then he realized he had been waiting for the clattering, clacking sounds of the old newsroom. Then once again he remembered that nobody out there knew anything of what he had felt for Cleo. Still felt: as soon as he had walked into her office, saw her looking barely different from when he had last seen her, the old feeling had come tumbling back, almost throwing him off balance.

She, for her part, felt as if she might fall apart at any moment. Since he had called her yesterday and asked could he come see her, she had been preparing herself, as if she, and not he, was the one to be interviewed. She did not feel at all comfortable offering him a job; it gave her a dominance she did not want.
She
wondered why he had not gone to any of the other papers in town, but did not ask.

“It's a small world,” she said at last; then provided her own example: “I suppose you know who owns a fair parcel of stock in the
Courier?”

“Lord Cruze. Alain told me that.”

“What else did he tell you, Tom?”

But he could see people hovering outside the glass wall. He half-rose. “I'm taking up your time, Cleo. It's getting close to conference time, isn't it?”

She knew he had retreated; at once she had her doubts that anything could ever work between them again. She beat her own retreat, became the editor: “Tom, if you come to work I'll want to hold you to a contract. A two-year one. I don't want you drifting off again when you feel like it, not if I give you the job over the heads of some of the younger guys here.”

He was thirty-nine: suddenly she was telling him he was no longer young. He smiled as he stood up. “Cleo old girl—remember when I used to call you that? Are we both growing old? Do you still swagger?”

“I'd fire any of the men who said so.” But she smiled, aware that he was trying to ease things for both of them. He was not ready yet for personal questions; she should not have asked him what Alain had told him about Jack Cruze. “Will you sign a contract?”

“I'll think about it.” Then, realizing that sounded churlish, he added, “I hope you'd want me around that long.”

“Yes, I would. You'll fit in very well on the paper the way it is now.”

Three people were standing in the doorway. He edged his way out past them: “I'll call you tomorrow morning.”

She was impatient to see him before then, almost asked him to have supper with her after she left the office tonight. But they still had no solid ground beneath them and she trod carefully: “Have lunch with me. Where are you staying?”

“The Tuscany.”

A good middle-priced hotel: he was glad he had chosen it, it didn't sound too ostentatious in front of the people he would be coming to work amongst. He walked back up the newsroom, feeling
weaker
than when he had come in; he was more in love with her than he had ever been. It was frightening to find, more than halfway through your allotted span, that there were depths of feeling you had never plumbed.

Cleo attended to the matters brought to her; then had five minutes to herself before the four o'clock editorial conference. In her mind's eye she saw Tom as clearly as if he were still sitting across the desk from her. He was older and, she guessed, wiser: the withdrawn look in his eyes now suggested a reserved wisdom rather than a wariness. She wondered if she was any wiser herself; and doubted it. She should have told him there was no job for him on the paper and sent him away. She should not have allowed him to drift back into her life, though, to be sure, he did suggest that he might now carry an anchor.

The phone rang: it was Jack, watching her from across the Atlantic. Or so she thought, feeling guilty. “Dear girl—” He had taken to calling her that, sounding paternal. She tolerated it because she did not want to offend him. “I can't come over this weekend. Doc Hynd thinks I need to rest up a bit—”

“Jack—are you all right?” She was genuinely concerned for him. He was almost sixty, but still lived a programme that would have tired a man twenty years younger. She was angry with him because she was worried for him: “Dammit, I've been telling you to take it easy—”

“So now I'm doing it.”

“Are you sure it's nothing serious? Don't lie to me, Jack. I can always call Dr. Hynd.”

She had noticed over the past couple of months that he seemed lacking in his old vitality. It took him longer to get over the flight from London; there would be no love-making his first night in New York. They would go to an occasional dinner party or out to Souillac to one of Claudine's luncheons; sometimes they would go to the theatre or the ballet, though he went to the latter only to please her. More often than not he was content to, as he said, potter around. It was as if he flew the Atlantic each weekend to spend the sort of quiet two days that tired businessmen spent at home in the Home Counties.

“Dear girl, I'm all
right.
I'll be as right as pie next weekend. I'll miss you, Cleo. I wish you were here.”

“I wish I were, too.” She meant it, but for a different reason from the one he would take for granted. She was all at once afraid of what she was going to do to fill the suddenly empty weekend. If she were in London she would be that much farther from temptation. “Take care, Jack. I'll call you tomorrow.
Tell
Mrs. Cromwell to stuff you with sensible food.”

“There you go . . .” But he chuckled. “I love you, Cleo.”

III

She took Tom to lunch next day in the restaurant in Rockefeller Center. She had at first thought of taking him somewhere grander; but, like him, she had her own fear of ostentation. She did not want to show off in front of him, not even on the
Courier's
expense account. But Tom smiled at the deference shown to her by the
maîtresse d'
who took them to their table.

“I think I'll go back to Paris. New York is being taken over by women.”

“You can't give up without a fight.”

They were a little more at ease with each other today. But they took their time, looking at other people before they looked carefully at themselves. “That's a girl named P.J. Lagerlof over there. She works on
International
.”

“One of those, eh?”

“One of those—you mean a liberated woman? No, she's not. She has her problems.” Then she noticed that P.J.'s companion was someone she had not seen before, a handsome boy who could be two or three years younger than P.J. Maybe she no longer had a problem, maybe the married lover had gone back to his wife for good. Or bad. “What are you smiling at?”

Tom had sighted his own diversion. “Those two guys over there in the corner. They're both writers. I can guess what they're saying to each other, telling each other lies about their advances and their sales.”

“Is that what writers do?”

“It's all fiction to them.”

“You don't say
to us.
”

“I'm a newspaperman, Cleo. I just strayed from the True Path. Now I'm glad to be back. I'll take the job.”

“You don't want to discuss terms?”

“I'll trust you.”

She
turned away abruptly and looked out of the window. The towers of the Center had collected the breezes and turned them into a cauldron of wind; the flags on the line of poles outside flapped like the wings of birds of paradise whose bodies had been squeezed into the hollow staffs. She lowered her own flag, looked back at him.

“What are you doing this weekend?”

He hid his surprise at her direct approach. “Looking around for an apartment. I don't like hotel living.”

“I'll help you,” she said enthusiastically. Then she backed off, not wanting to force herself on him: “May I?”

“Of course.” If he was going to put down anchor, then he had to come to terms with the harbour-master. Or mistress.

P.J. and her companion stopped by the table on their way out. “Cleo, this is Colin Bygraves. We're being married next month.”

Cleo pressed her hand and kissed her cheek, feeling suddenly full of emotion. “All the happiness in the world for both of you. Will you live in New York?”

“Colin's from California—who in New York ever has a tan like that? I'm retiring, Cleo. I'm going to be a housewife and mother.”

She took away the sun-tanned bridegroom-and-father-to-be. He hadn't said a word, just stood there smiling in his Hollywood handsomeness, proud to be shown off.

“Is he what you women call a living doll?” Tom said.

“He didn't sound as if he had much to offer, did he? But I can't blame P.J. for marrying him.” She didn't explain what she meant by that and he didn't ask. Marriage, anyone's, was a subject to be avoided.

That afternoon she rang Jack at the flat in St. James's Place. He told her he had just had dinner—“liver and bacon”—and tomorrow he would be going down to St. Aidan's House. “I'm taking it easy, just as Doc Hynd said to.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then she hung up and immediately called Dr. Hynd. He told her that she was fortunate to catch him, that he was just about to go out to dinner.

“I hope you'll be eating something sensible.”

“
Not at all. I'm going to Le Gavroche at someone else's expense. I shall gorge myself on the richest dishes on the menu. I suppose you're calling me about Lord Cruze?”

“He says you've told him to rest up.”

“He drives himself too hard, he has a workload he should have shed ten years ago. He has an angina condition, a severe one. He will be all right if he slows down, takes care of himself and doesn't continue jetting across the Atlantic as if he were some airline pilot half his age. To put it bluntly, Miss Spearfield, that's the message you should try to get across to him. To be his age.”

“I'll do that.” She hung up with the feeling that Dr. Hynd, on his way to gorge himself at someone else's expense, did not approve of her. Perhaps he thought she was too rich and indigestible for a man like Jack who wouldn't act his age.

She put the
Courier
to bed that night with a feeling of excitement, not at what the paper contained but because it was the end of the week and tomorrow she would have her mind all to herself, to occupy it any way it cared to lurch. She was determined to have no plan, to let herself drift in the current that surrounded Tom.

They went looking at apartments. It was obvious that Tom had no real idea of what he wanted and he let Cleo take over. The rents, to him, sounded like purchase prices; she soon realized that Simone must have done all their flat-hunting; his mind was still in the price-bracket of the furnished two rooms he had lived in five or six years ago. On what was still a very healthy bank balance and the promise of thirty thousand dollars a year, he still had a welfare state anticipation of subsidized housing. Like her father, he thought inflation was criminal and therefore not to be encouraged. She would not ask him to write any pieces for the financial pages.