Spearfield's Daughter (7 page)

Cleo suddenly saw her angle; but would the
Examiner
buy it? It was a tabloid and it ran pictures of
bosomy,
scantily-clad girls, but it was not the
News of the World,
it did not run stories on brothel-keepers. Or even on bordello ladies.

“How did you get into this—do you mind if I call it a business?—in the first place?”

“We started during the war, the last war—
your
war—”

“Not mine. Mine was,
is
, the Vietnam war.”

Miss Dorothy shook her head at the continuity of war. “Well, we started when we learned that some of our gentlemen friends, senior officers, were finding it difficult to meet the proper feminine company. All the girls, even those from good families, were chasing the Americans. So we did some recruiting—” she smiled at her choice of words “—and we found some very attractive young ladies who were willing to work for us. There were occasions when, if a buzz-bomb had dropped on our two houses, it would have eliminated half the brass of the British army.” The sisters smiled at each other, mirror images of genteel glee. “If the Germans had only known where to aim!”

“But how did you know—well, how did you know what to provide?”

“We had been to Paris in the 1920s,” said Miss Rose. “We sneaked away from our parents, we were rather naughty as young girls, and persuaded a French gentleman we knew to take us to one of the Paris bordellos. We never forgot what we saw.”

Miss Dorothy fanned herself with the lace napkin at the memory. “We used that establishment as our model, but we tried to make ours more tasteful.”

“More English?” said Cleo.

“Exactly,” said Miss Rose. “Nothing as obvious as red plush. The French do tend to overdo things when it comes to sex.”

“Please, Rose,” said Miss Dorothy, as if her sister had used a dirty word.

Cleo burst out laughing, and the sisters joined in. They could laugh at their gentility; it was part of their act, part of what they sold to English gentlemen who had physical needs.

Cleo asked for more tea, began to take notes.

An hour later she left the Misses St. Martin. “That was the nicest time I've had since I landed in London.”

“You must come and have tea with us again,” said Miss Rose. “We'd invite you to supper, but
you
have such a fine figure, some of our guests might mistake you for one of our girls.”

“If the
Examiner
doesn't buy my story, I may be back.”

“I was joking, my dear. We are closing our establishment at the end of the month. After that we shall devote ourselves to our church work.”

I'm having my leg pulled this time.
“Church work?”

“Oh yes. We go to Mass every Sunday down at Farm Street. The Jesuit fathers look on us as their most devout sinners. They'll be delighted when we give up sin.”

III

“It's marvellous,” said the
Examiner's
features editor. “But Felicity Kidson, our women's editor, wants to run it on her page. She'll give you a whole page with pictures. She's just discovered women's rights, God help us.”

“I'd like it run it as is, Mr. Brearly,” said Cleo. “I don't want the mickey taken out of those two nice old ladies.”

“That's the point—Felicity will run it exactly as you've written it.” He was a tiny man with a mop of grey hair who seemed to live in a continual miasma of cigarette smoke. He would like to have visited the Misses St. Martin's bordello, but Cleo's story had already told him he would not qualify as a guest. “I don't think our readers will give your nice old ladies as much sympathy as you seem to think. Let's face it, they're snobs. But the Mayfair Estates people won't like it, not since they've known about the brothel—”

“Bordello.”

“Okay, bordello. I didn't know there was a difference. Since they've known all about the bordello and done nothing about it.”

“I'll play down the snob angle and play up the bit about only English clients. It probably won't help the
Examiner's
Scottish edition, but you Poms will love it.”

“Now you're taking the mickey out of us.”

Which was exactly what Felicity Kidson said when Cleo went in to meet her. “But I don't mind that at all, darling. I think we English like having the mickey taken out of us, so long as it's not vicious. It proves we have a sense of humour about ourselves. Would you like a job with me?”

“
I was hoping you'd say that. Yes, I'd like very much to work for the
Examiner
.”

She had not wanted to work on the women's page, but it would be a start. It hurt her to think that she was having to start all over again, but this was England and England had always made foreigners start at the bottom. Except, of course, its imported kings.

“I have only one rule,” said Felicity. “I am the boss lady and don't ever forget it.” She smiled, not taking the sting out of the remark, just polishing it. “I know all about you ambitious Aussies.”

“I'm surprised you're offering me the job.”

“I like to live dangerously.” She flicked a gentle finger at the single red rose in the glass on her desk. “Good luck, darling.”

IV

That evening Cleo took Pat Hamer to dinner. “Dress up, Pat. We'll go to the Mirabelle.”

“Luv, that costs the earth! Please don't go off your head. Let's go to a steak house.”

“I owe you the best, Patricia. When you get your star part with the Old Vic, you can take me out for a champagne dinner.”

“Are we going to have champagne, too? Wait till I write and tell my dad about it. He'll die of shame.”

They went to the Mirabelle, two good-looking girls who got admiring glances from the stout, balding businessmen who stole surreptitious looks at them while their bouffant-haired wives weren't attending.

“They think we're a couple of tarts,” said Pat. Then, “Oh migord! There's Mrs. Dysen, one of the ladies I clean for!”

Mrs. Dysen, a formidable woman under her blonde helmet of hair, saw Pat and reared back as if she had just been pierced in a joust. Her face cracked in a mix of grimace and smile, then she turned her head away and took a sip of water, as if recovering from an unexpected assault.

“There goes
that
job,” said Pat.

But it did not matter. A week later she got a job with a company going on tour before coming into the West End. She gave up her bed-sit and said goodbye to Cleo and the two of them wished each
other
all the luck in the world. Cleo gave up her own bed-sit, went looking for something better and found it in South Kensington. Recklessly she took a year's lease on it with an option for a further year, leaving herself with exactly nine pounds to get her through to her first
Examiner
pay day. But she knew, as only the truly ambitious can tell themselves, that from now on she was safe from the dole queue. Though it was only the beginning of February even the sun broke through. True, it did only shine for an hour, as if it had come by to see if Britain was still there, but it was an omen.

Then a small package was delivered from Cartier in Bond Street. In it was a gold pen and a note written in a copperplate hand: “A small thanks for your splendid story. Our lease has been renewed for another 99 years. Do come and have tea with us again.”

The year looked as if it was going to be a good one. She rang home and told her father so. “I'm on my way, Dad.”

“Good for you, sweetheart.” But he sounded disappointed, as if he had lost something or someone.

3

I

JOHN CRUZE
, Lord Cruze of Chalfont St. Aidan, was tired of the Swinging Sixties. He wondered why he had bothered to go to tonight's party at the country house of Saul Petty; it had made him feel
old,
a state of mind that he tried to avoid as much as he did the thought of cancer. Everyone at the party, with the exception of himself and the host, had either been under twenty-five, or if they weren't, had tried to
look
under twenty-five. He thought there was nothing more pathetic than middle-aged swingers: they might try to put the clock back but their faces showed the true time. Tonight there had been men of his own age, fifty, pillars of the City looking decidedly shaky on their Twisting legs, the creaking of their bones competing with the clanging of the gold chains and medallions round their necks; there had been so many gold medals, he had felt he was at some geriatrics' Olympiad. There had also been their wives and mistresses, dressed in Chelsea boutique clothes that made them look as if they had looted their daughters' wardrobes. The girls under twenty-five, in hot pants and mini-skirts, had worn make-up that wouldn't have looked odd on a tribe of New Guinea hillmen; he reckoned there must have been enough mascara on display that night to have painted the hull of the
QE2.
Their escorts, hipless, chestless, shoulderless, the new fashion, looked as if they had been dressed by Cecil Beaton for the girls' parts in a revival of the Gaiety Girls; he had never seen so many ruffles. The band, six hipless, chestless, shoulderless hairy wrecks, all wearing dark glasses against the glare of the Chinese lanterns strung around the terrace of the house, were playing so loudly, it sounded as if they were also playing for a party in Brighton, some fifty miles away.

“You were bloody sour this evening,” said Felicity Kidson. “You didn't move out of your chair, just sat there like the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury all night.”

“I'm bloody sour now. I thought that was the Archbishop of Canterbury you were dancing with, till I saw it was Saul. What's he doing, getting dressed up like that at his age?”

The
glass partition of the Rolls-Royce Phantom was up and Sid Cromwell, the chauffeur, could not hear their conversation. Lord Cruze never worried what his servants thought about his actions, that would have put too much of a curb on his sex life; but he had never learned to ignore them when he conversed in front of them. Which was another reminder that he was not a true aristocrat, just another life peer.

“I don't know how Saul—he's what? Seventy-seven?—gets a kick out of something like tonight's bedlam. I noticed he wasn't wearing his hearing-aid.”

Felicity sighed and sank back into her long bright-red feather boa. She was wearing white satin jodhpurs, white boots and a sequined blue silk shirt open to the bottom button; with her bright red boa, he privately thought she looked like a French hairdresser on his way to an international rugby match; but he had given up making any comment on the way she dressed these days. Beside her, in his black tie and dinner jacket, he sometimes felt like an undertaker on night duty. He knew he was narrow-minded about trendiness, homosexuality, unisexuality, women's liberation and all the other aberrations that had broken out during that decade, but he could not help it. Like so many men who had started out as crooks, he had a narrow moral outlook in many ways.

He glanced sideways at her, still sour, and wondered what she would say in the morning when she got the farewell bunch of white roses. He always said farewell to his mistresses, whether of short or long standing, with white roses; they got red ones right up to the final bunch. He knew that his method of ending an affair was no secret, but he liked it that way: it meant that he did not have to write any farewell notes. He never put anything on paper to a woman.

“You're getting old and crotchety, Jack. That was an absolutely
fantastic
party tonight.” She was thirty-eight backpedalling to eighteen. Unlike the other editors on his newspapers, she featured as much copy about herself as she did about other people. She had become a celebrity (a word he hated: he had written a memo to all his editors that it was never to be used in any of the Cruze Organization's chain of papers), the trendiest of the trendies. She had been his mistress for three years, but the affair had started before she had begun wearing mini-skirts and putting more mascara on her face than Theda Bara.

“You look like Theda Bara.”

“Who's she, for Christ's sake?” She hadn't started swearing till she was thirty-seven; had had a
modest
tongue to match the cashmere cardigan and small diamond pin she had worn in those days. Now she came to the office wearing kaftans and yards of beads, looking as if she was the editor of
Harper's Souk.
“Oh,
her.
You and your old film stars. Personally, I thought I looked more like Joan Crawford in
Our Dancing Daughters.
That was the effect I was after.”

“You missed by a mile.”

He owned one of the best private collections of silent films in the country. Other rich men collected paintings or porcelain or antique furniture, learned about Correggio or
pâte tendre,
Sèvres or Riesener; he was an authority on Griffith and Ince, Milton Sills and Vilma Banky. He had gone to see his first film when he was five years old, a Jack Hoxie Western, a print of which he now owned; ever since then films had been his escape from his preoccupation with money and power. He had never looked on sex as an escape: it was only another way of showing his power over women. He seduced his women with his money and power, which was a quicker method than that of lesser, poorer men. Once upon a time he had invested in charm, having no money or power, but the girls of those days had not been impressed and decided he was no Ronald Colman or William Powell. In any event, girls in that year were looking for Clark Gables, a type in short supply in the villages of Buckinghamshire.

The car drew up outside Felicity's block of flats in Chelsea; she had moved here last year from Hampstead. “I want to be right in the middle of the action,” she had said and waltzed up and down the King's Road tearing off her cardigan and brassiere. Or so he had imagined: he came here only on rare occasions and never before midnight.