by Jon Cleary
Madge, the quiet sensible one, said, “I won’t wish you the best of Aussie luck. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
Perry, who wasn’t her husband, laughed and slapped Madge on the rump. “You girls don’t know when you’re well off.”
Cheryl said, “If you get into trouble, Cleo love, enjoy it. That’s the best I can wish you.”
Suddenly she loved her sisters-in-law: us women against the male world. But she knew they were not women’s libbers; and neither was she really. Men just goaded them into sounding that way.
Alexander, her elder brother, took her to the gate that led to Passport Control. “Don’t think too harshly of Dad for not being here to say goodbye.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Of course I don’t. He’s been like this all our lives, hasn’t he? We shouldn’t have chosen a politician for a father.”
“No, this is different. He really wanted to be here. I talked to him last night—he called me. He didn’t want you to think that he didn’t care about you going away for so long. You’re going away at the wrong time.”
“What do you mean?”
“He still thinks he has a chance of toppling Gough Whitlam as Leader. If he did, he’d be Prime Minister at the next election.”
Then I’m going away at absolutely the right time.
“He’s got to be there in Canberra every minute, just in case Whitlam slips up.”
“Do you think he has a chance?”
Alex, vague and soft, more like his mother than his father, shrugged. “I hope so, for his sake. When you have as much ambition as he has . . .”
“I’m ambitious, too, Alex.”
“Then I hope you’re never disappointed.” Then he smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “The best of Aussie luck, Sis.”
She went through into Passport Control. She showed her passport, then took her first step into the future. There was no turning back now, she had stepped off a cliff. It was a lovely feeling—almost, she guessed, like sky-diving. Her parachute, she hoped, would be her talent.
2
I
NOVEMBER IS not a good month in which to land in London. No sensible invaders, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, or American tourists ever chose any time but summer to start their conquest of Britain; some summers, of course, seemed like November, but at least the invaders had chosen the proper time of the year. Cleo chose the worst of all possible times.
Snow covered the whole of eastern and northern Britain; London looked as if it had been dressed for a Dickens Christmas. A razor-sharp wind blew in from the Russian iceworks; ducks waltzed drunkenly on frozen ponds; mini-skirts and hot pants suddenly were, if not out of fashion, out of sight under long heavy coats. Noses were red and fingertips blue and permissive love, a recently-revived English custom, suffered a sharp set-back: it is difficult to be uninhibitedly orgiastic in front of a one-bar radiator.
In the United States Richard Nixon had been elected President and in England Enid Blyton had died; black crêpe was hung in Democratic wardrooms and in Kensington nurseries. The year was ending on the same gloomy note that had pervaded all the preceding months. In years to come people then in their youth would look back on that decade as the Swinging Sixties, forgetting the black periods. That year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, American youth was protesting about being drafted for a war it didn’t believe in, the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia, an earthquake had killed 12,000 non-swingers in Iran. Cleo wondered why she had left the sunny bliss of ignorance that was the Australian climate. True, there had been anti-war demonstrations back home, but most of the population put on their sun-glasses, put their transistors to their ears, sank their lips into beer-foam, saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil.
She found a bed-sitting-room in a street off the Gloucester Road and for the first time in her life felt lonely. All at once she missed her mother. Brigid Spearfield had died in Cleo’s last year at the Brigidine Convent, where the nuns had thought how lucky Cleo was to have a mother named after their patron saint and how discouraging it was for them to have such a female devil as a pupil. Cleo had cried for two days after her mother’s death; then she had put her grief away inside her with her memories of her mother and got on with living. Now, in the dark, depressing flat she put the photo of Brigid on the chipped mantelpiece and wished that the serenely cheerful face could speak to her. She wanted someone to tell her she had done the right thing. There was no guarantee that Brigid, the least adventurous of women, would have told her that, but at least she would have offered her comfort. Brigid had always been very good at that. It only struck Cleo now, after she had got over the self-pity that had engulfed her, that there might have been times when Brigid herself would have welcomed some comfort, someone to tell her that she had done the right thing in always making herself subservient to Sylvester’s ambitions.
Cleo went looking for work in Fleet Street. She was a little disappointed in the Street itself; somehow she had expected it to be wider, an avenue suggesting the power and influence it exerted. The buildings were unprepossessing but for the Law Courts at the western end; she hated the Daily Express’s art deco home and the Greek-Egyptian (as if the architect had been looking both ways at once) Daily Telegraph building. The worst of all was the Daily Examiner’s which looked as if it had started out to be a cathedral, decided to be a bank and finished up a barracks. She was only saved from total disillusionment with the Street when she went into the tiny courts hidden like cubby-holes for the affronted aesthetes off the main thoroughfare. She felt herself brushed by the ghosts of Johnson, Boswell and Dickens and decided to give Fleet Street another chance.
She knew a few Australian journalists working in London, but she did not go to them for advice or contacts. She was determined to make it on her own; if she was going to be independent, the flag had to be planted right at the start. The Fleet Street editors were unimpressed by this, though.
“There are too many Aussies working in the Street already. You’re a bloody Mafia.”
“What makes you think you should start at the top? Try one of the provincial papers, start there like most of us did.”
“My dear girl, this is The Times. We haven’t had a colonies correspondent since the turn of the century.”
“I don’t want to be a bloody colonies correspondent! I want to write about here—Britain!”
The Times man had smiled, showed his Oxbridge politeness. “I was pulling your very attractive leg, Miss Spearfield. Why don’t you try the Telegraph? They could do with a little Antipodean iconoclasm.”
She did not want to work for a newspaper that needed Antipodean iconoclasm. She got a job as a temporary secretary, but proved more temporary than her employer or she had anticipated. She left after one day when the employer, fired by her bosom and an electric radiator too close to his crotch, made a proposition to her that had nothing to do with the business of Thrackle and Gump, customs agents.
She had saved very little money in Sydney. After her mother had died, she had had the house almost to herself, since her father spent most of his time travelling or in Canberra. There had been no need to think of the rent or the gas and electricity bills or of putting something by for a rainy day. She had arrived in London with only a little over five hundred pounds. One hundred of which had gone in a bond on the flat. She began to wonder what the newspapers back home would say when it was learned that Sylvester Spearfield’s daughter had joined the dole queue in Britain.
The girl in the next-door flat was an actress who, as she said, divided her time between being on the boards and being on her knees.
“When I’m not in a play or doing a bit on telly, I clean house for what I like to think is a select clientele. People in Mayfair. The only thing select about some of them is their address, but I can charge them a bit more than the usual.”
Her name was Pat Hamer, she came from Leeds and the Yorkshire accent came and went like a faint echo on a moorland wind. She wa
s dark and pretty and had iron in her; she would never allow herself to be melted down for soap operas; she would play Lady Macbeth some day. In the meantime she played one-line parts as a maid in farces at the Whitehall Theatre. She and Cleo shared baked beans on toast in each other’s rooms and each, secretly, wondered at the gutsy ambition of the other.
“Bluddy hell,” Pat said one day, “I missed out on a fantastic part today, right up my street. A prostitute from Leeds with a heart of solid brass. But the director had seen me in that bluddy thing at the Whitehall. All he could see me as was a maid in a short skirt with me boom showing.” When she was angry or disappointed, Leeds came to London. “So it’s back to bluddy house-cleaning again. How’s it going with you, luv?”
“Bluddy awful,” said Cleo, making a passable imitation of the accent. “If only I could latch on to a story that everyone else has missed . . . I’m thinking of going out and inventing one. How’d you like to be The Secret Mistress of a Royal Duke Who Tells All?”
“Nobody back home would believe it. My dad’s a Communist shop steward.”
Christmas came and went, the gloom only relieved by a phone call from her father. “How are you, sweetheart? We’re all missing you back here. We had Christmas dinner at Alex and Madge’s, all of us, Perry and Cheryl and the kids. We had it beside the pool. It’s been a marvellous day, a bit hot, but I suppose you wouldn’t mind some of that now, eh?”
Why did he have to be so bloody hearty and cheerful? Did he think she was one of his voters? She looked out of her grimy window at a grim, grimy day; London was wrapped in dark clouds, snow and ice lay under a tree in the garden opposite like a mockery of fallen summer blossom. Her small radiator glowed in the gloomy room, looking no warmer than a neon sign on an Arctic highway.
“Has Fleet Street opened its arms to you yet?”
“Not yet, Dad.” It was better to be honest; he would guess the truth from her voice anyway. She was cold and lonely and miserable and she could not disguise the fact, even at 12,000 miles. She hated all those bastards beside their pools back in Sydney and she hoped every one of them would develop incurable sun cancers. “But the stars chart in the Daily Mirror says things will be better for Scorpios in 1969.”
“Stars charts are like political opinion polls, always just wide of the mark. But hang in there—isn’t that the expression they use these days? If I can help at all . . . Harold Wilson? Or maybe Rupert Murdoch?”
“No, Dad. When I really need help, I’ll cable you for the money to come home.”
“That’s my girl. Keep trying, sweetheart.” But somewhere between Sydney and London his voice seemed to break. “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
She cried her eyes out, wiped them, put on some make-up and went out to a pub. From there she almost went home with a sentimental doctor from Adelaide who was doing a post-graduate course at Bart’s. But he, too, lived in a bed-sit and abruptly she did not want to be made love to in a lumpy single bed in a chill room with stained wallpaper and the smell of last night’s warmed-up TV dinner hanging in the air. If she was going to let herself be seduced as a comfort, she should at least ask for a double room at the Savoy or Claridges. She thanked the doctor for his invitation and went home to the Gloucester Road.
She said prayers that night, the first for a long time, and wished she had gone to Midnight Mass last night. It would have pleased her mother, if Brigid was in a place to know of such things. Still, she went to bed feeling virtuous, even if it was only the cold that had kept her pants on.
II
Pat Hamer had gone back to Leeds for Christmas. She returned the day after New Year’s Day, went back to her house-cleaning chores and a week later knocked on Cleo’s door.
“Cleo, I think I’ve heard a story that might interest you. You know you’re always hearing about the poor being evicted? Do you think there’d be a story about the rich being kicked out of their home? My Red dad would say serves them bluddy well right, but you may think different.”
Cleo wasn’t immediately excited by the prospects of the story. “What’s it all about?”
“I didn’t get all of it. I was out in the hall dusting when I heard Mrs. Dysen, that’s the woman I work for Tuesdays, talking about it on the phone. She lives in Curzon Street and it seems that just down the street from her there are two old ladies who have lived in this house all their lives, born and bred there in fact. Now they’re to be kicked out because Bolingbroke’s, the gambling club next door to them, wants the house.”
Cleo did not want to look ungrateful, but she had to act very hard to look enthusiastic. Pat, the actress, was taken in by it. “It sounds a marvellous idea! What’s the address? I’ll get around there right away!”
But first she phoned the features editor of the Daily Examiner. “Mr. Brearly, the Examiner always likes stories about how the other half, the richer half, lives. Would you be interested in how the rich react to eviction?”
“Are they titled rich?” The Examiner, owned as it was by a lord, loved titles in its columns. The peerage and appendages who could not make The Times or the Daily Telegraph could always rely on a line or two in the Examiner. “We could take a para. for Gideon’s Diary.”
“Not the Diary, Mr. Brearly.” Gideon’s Diary was a social gossip column, a waste basket of trivia. This story might turn out to be no more than trivial, but she did not want it reduced to a short paragraph before she had written it. “I’ll do it as a feature or nothing.”
“You have cheek, Miss Spearfield. Okay, go ahead, but I promise you nothing. If it’s any good, it’ll need pictures.”
“If it’s any good, you’ll be rushing round there to take pictures.”
“Where?”
“Ah, that would be telling, Mr. Brearly.”
He chuckled. “You Aussies never trust us Poms, do you? When can I have it?”
She rugged herself up against the January cold. She wore her fake fur coat and her fake fur hat, all that she could afford, but she had enough style to make fake look like an endangered species. She did her best to look elegant; or at least not too unrefined to be knocking on the door of the rich, albeit about-to-be-evicted rich. The house in Curzon Street was itself elegant, a town house built in the days of gracious living and leisurely pursuits when society was not divided into halves, the rich and the poor, but into two per cent and them. The two per cent had lived hereabouts, standing on their doorsteps and turning west to breathe the then country air of Hyde Park, turning east to get a nose-wrinkling sniff of them. Cleo was surprised to find that the small brass knocker on the front door was shaped like a woman’s breast. She put that down to the whim of some eighteenth-century blade who had, at least, had the taste not to ornament his door with a pair of knockers.
A maid opened the door and Cleo told her she was from the Daily Examiner. “I should like to see Miss St. Martin—either of them.”
“Miss St. Martin, both of them, never have visitors without an appointment.” She shut the door in Cleo’s face.
Cleo stood there unperturbed. She had had doors shut in her face before; if journalists were not so nimble, they would be recognizable by their broken noses. Then, as she went down the few ice-covered steps to the frozen pavement, a taxi drew up at the kerb. An elderly woman in a mink coat and hat got out and immediately skidded across the pavement towards Cleo, who stepped out and threw her arms round her. Both of them thumped up against the iron railings that stopped people, on days like this, from plunging headlong into the basement area. They stood there in their furs, clutching each other like a couple of lesbian bears. Then Cleo burst out laughing.
“We must look a great pair. Just as well we didn’t finish up on our bottoms.”
The old lady straightened her hat, which had fallen down over one eye, and clung gingerly to the railings. “Thank you, my dear. I wonder if you would give this money to the driver, please? I dare not trust myself on that ice again.”
Cleo paid the taxi driver, who had remained in his seat
watching the performance: he was one of them. Then she went back and helped the elderly woman up the steps to the front door. “Would you be Miss St. Martin? I’d like to talk to you, if you could spare me a few minutes. I’m Cleo Spearfield, from the Daily Examiner.”
Miss St. Martin suddenly lost her warm smile, as if the ice had run up her thin legs and frozen any hospitality she might have been about to offer. “I’m grateful to you for saving me from a nasty fall, Miss Spearfield. But I never talk to newspaper people.”
“Miss St. Martin, I understand you’re about to lose the lease on this house, where you’ve lived all your life. I think that’s scandalous and so does my editor.” She was becoming proprietary towards the Examiner; there was no one in sight to deny her. “Perhaps we could help you in your fight against your landlord’s callousness.”
Something like a gleam of humour suddenly appeared in Miss St. Martin’s eye. She put her key in the door, opened it and stepped into the hallway. She stood there for a moment with her back to Cleo, then looked over her shoulder, her hat slipping forward over one eye again. “Why not? Your employer, Lord Cruze, used to be a—a friend of ours. Come in, my dear. We’ll have tea.”
Cleo stepped into luxurious elegance such as she had not expected. She had read that the English upper classes now lived in rather shabby refinement, as if tatty surroundings were now the proper mark of good breeding. There was nothing tatty about the St. Martin household. While Miss St. Martin slipped off her boots and put on some shoes from the closet, Cleo looked about her. The hall was hung with ornately framed mirrors, the walls papered with green silk. A wide doorway, its folding doors swept back, led into a double drawing-room where the walls were papered with yellow silk. Regency-striped, green and yellow silk drapes hung at the windows; all the chairs and couches were covered in silk. Highly polished antique tables were placed strategically about the room and in one corner stood a grand piano. There were more mirrors, all ornately framed, on the walls; but only a single painting, that of a voluptuous nude lying on what looked to be a replica of one of the room’s couches. As she sat down Cleo looked back through the doorway and saw that another wide doorway opened into a similar room on the other side of the hall. It was a moment before she realized that the Misses St. Martin must live in two houses. It was not going to be easy to write so sympathetically about two rich old ladies being thrown out of two houses.
