by Jon Cleary
“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.
“Coming up, darling? I’m still high.”
He waited for her to lasso him with the red feather boa: she was so damned gay, a debutante on the verge of the menopause. “Goodnight. Don’t trip over your boa.”
He didn’t look back as the car drove away, but he knew she would be standing on the kerb staring after him, getting the message. But she was as tough as he was; she would go up to her flat and empty a vase and wait for the arrival of the white roses. He felt no regret or guilt, he had never told her he loved her or promised her anything. It had been the same with her as it had been with all the others since Emma had left him twenty years ago.
He pressed a button and the glass between him and Sid Cromwell slid down. “Sid, see about some roses for Miss Kidson first thing in the morning. White ones.”
“Big or little bunch, m’Lord?”
“Big.” After all she had lasted three years, even if there had been others at the same time.
Up front Sid Cromwell smiled to himself, made no comment. He had worked for Lord Cruze for fifteen years, from the very day the Boss had bought the Examiner, and since then he had sent enough bloody roses, red and white, to stock the Chelsea Flower Show. He saw himself as the Boss’s executioner, but at a safe distance: he was never close enough, when the women’s heads were chopped off, to see their tears or whatever it was women did when they got the shove. He had felt sorry for some of them, especially the young ones; but he was not sorry to see Miss Kidson go. She had begun to make the Boss look ridiculous and Sid Cromwell, a working man with a proper sense of class, did not like to see lords lose their dignity.
He’d go to the florist first thing in the morning and order a small bunch of white roses, maybe just half a dozen. The Boss wouldn’t know and Sid Cromwell felt he was entitled to make his own comment. Old-fashioned enough to believe in the dignity of lords, he also did not believe in career women.
II
“Who are you?” said Lord Cruze.
“I’m Cleo Spearfield. I work on the Examiner, my Lord.”
He eyed her from under a hairy brow. She had not said m’Lord, making it sound like one word as it should be sounded: she had said my Lord, stretching the two words into what sounded suspiciously like a send-up of him. He recognized the accent, remembered her by-line: another Australian come to Britain to take the mickey out of the Poms. He knew the name of every by-lined journalist on his papers, but he never went near the offices, neither to Fleet Street nor to the offices of the provincial papers; people might work for him for five, ten years, maybe more, and never be anything but faceless names to him. But he read every word they wrote and it did not take him long to size up their talent, their attitude and their prejudices. This one was an iconoclast, a word that never appeared in the plain-English pages of a tabloid like the Examiner.
“Who sent you?”
“Miss Kidson.”
The bitch. She had sent the Hatchet Lady to do a job on him. He knew the reputation and nickname that Miss Spearfield had earned for herself in Fleet Street over the past six months. Felicity had probably already resigned, was already talking to the Mirror or the Express; but before she relinquished control of her women’s page, relying on his boast that he never killed a story that his editors wanted to run, she would feature Miss Spearfield’s demolition of him. It would create a one-day sensation in Fleet Street, the home of sensation, and it would do him no real harm. But it would satisfy Felicity’s urge for revenge. He smiled, perversely pleased that Felicity felt something.
“Have you come to write something on me?”
“Just the Horse Show in general, my Lord.”
“No photos of me, you understand.”
It was an iron rule that no pictures of him ever appeared in his newspapers. He had his vanities, but seeing his picture spread across his own papers was not one of them. Besides, he knew he didn’t photograph well. He always looked shorter than he actually was, which was five feet seven; and his square face seemed to broaden in a camera’s lens, so that he looked as if he had a flat-topped head. His brows, heavy enough as they were, thickened into hairy awnings that left his eyes in shadow. Photographs made him look evil, and he wasn’t that at all, though not everyone took him at his word.
“You look very smart, my Lord.” Her face was very straight.
Her face was also damned attractive, he thought, taking another look at her. Not beautiful; but some of the most beautiful women he had known had been the dullest company and the worst lovers. Those eyes, those cheekbones, that almost-black hair cut in a bob with thick bangs: he always thought of it as the French look, because French apache dancers in his silent films always looked like that. But he doubted that this one would allow herself to be tossed about the floor as the women had been in the apache dances. She had a magnificent figure and she wasn’t dressed like a rebel teenager. Her legs were excellent, though she wasn’t advertising them; her skirt came down to her knees, leaving you hoping she might lift it to show you more. Under his driving-apron things began to stir, an old stallion sighting another filly.
“You look very smart, too.”
“I always dress for the occasion, my Lord.” She glanced around at the crowd at this horse and carriage show. “I’ve got the right legs for mini-skirts, but I don’t think the Queen would like them. Miniskirts, I mean, not my legs. The Duke might, but not the Queen.”
He wished she would not keep calling him my Lord. “Besides good legs, you also have a good opinion of yourself.”
“It’s the old Australian inferiority complex, my Lord. We always tend to over-compensate.”
She looked the last person in the world to have an inferiority complex,
Australian or not. But then his two grooms appeared and told him his number was about to be called. He got up on to the front seat of the four-wheeled carriage and was handed the reins of the four-horse team. Then the two grooms clambered up into the rear seat, took their places and waited while he adjusted the reins in his left hand.
“Good luck, my Lord. This is the dressage, isn’t it?” There was no sign of any tongue in her cheek, but he knew she was laughing at him.
“Yes.” Then he could have applied the long carriage-whip to himself when he heard himself say, “It shows how much control I have over those who work for me.”
“The horses, you mean?”
“Of course.” Damn it, why was he letting her upset him so?
When he had got his peerage five years ago he had looked around for a recreation that would give him more respectability in the eyes of those who still thought he was a nouveau riche upstart, yet another of the postwar Goths who were trying to take over Britain. He had power, through his newspapers, and he was accepted by those who thought power had its own respectability: politicians, financiers, union officials and the bosses of the London gangs. But he had not been accepted by the real Establishment, the old money that had had its own power long before the press barons, Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, created their fiefdoms. So he had studied his own newspapers and magazines; amongst the latter, the social journals had pointed the way. Horses: at certain times of the year the real Establishment was surrounded by horses, up to their hocks in breeding and manure. He could not ride well enough to hunt or play polo; if he was going to get involved with horses, he had to find some way to avoid throwing his leg over them. He bought two carriages, a phaeton and a four-wheeled dog-cart, and had them sent to his country estate. He engaged a coachman to instruct him and had been pleased to find that he was a natural driver—“One should drive a horse like one handles a woman, m’Lord. You have the right sort of hands for it.” Some of his women, he thought, would have been amused to hear that.
He had practised for a year, learning everything there was to know about driving show horses, and then had entered his first show. Typically, he had started at the top, at the Royal Windsor. Also typically, he had won, beating the Duke of Edinburgh into second place. He had not been invited to Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace on the strength of the win, but one of the lesser dukes had patted his winning horses, then given Cruze an encouraging nod. “Well done, old chap. Jolly good show.” It was almost as much a welcome as being admitted to the Order of the Garter.
He was accepted now. His horses were one of the three best teams in the country: they would have been invited to the Castle or the Palace if they could have been seated at table. In their stead, he had been invited and now he had no worries about his acceptance. Of course he was not and never would be a full member of the Establishment. He had enough horse-sense to realize that.
He settled his bowler firmly on his head, spread his driving-apron neatly about his legs and flexed his fingers inside the yellow gloves. He sat stiffly in his seat, the whip held at the proper angle in his right hand, all ready to go, Phaethon in a bowler hat. But he knew he was no Greek god and out of the corner of his eye he could see Miss Spearfield smiling at him, tongue well in cheek now.
When his number was called he started the horses off too fast. His left hand was all thumbs; the two lead horses and the two wheelers behind them felt in his hand as if they might gallop off in different directions. He got them under control while he stood at the Halt for inspection by the judges, but he knew he had already lost points. Then he started them off on the Walk, but they could feel the tension in his hand; he lost more points on that section. Behind him he could feel the restlessness of his grooms, though he knew they would be sitting as stiffly formal as always. He put the horses into the Working Trot, still trying to take the tension out of his fingers. But the reins—near-lead over his left forefinger; off-lead between forefinger and middle finger; near-wheel between the same fingers and under the off-lead rein; off-wheel between middle and third fingers—felt as tangled and unresponsive as spaghetti. When he put the horses into the Collected Trot he knew at once that he had not got it right. They should have had their necks raised, should be taking shorter steps, but he could see that they all seemed to have their heads at different levels and he could feel the off-lead horse, with a longer stride, pulling slightly to one side. He finished the course doing the Extended Trot and the Rein Back, but he knew he had never driven so badly.
He had no control over the horses, but worse, he had lost control of himself.
III
Cleo’s story appeared in the Examiner two days later, as if she had taken her time taking aim and getting her shots right. It was written tongue-in-cheek, a gentle horse-laugh at the horsey set. Cruze was mentioned only once, in the last line: “Lord Cruze was amongst the also-rans.”
He rang Quentin Massey-Folkes, the Examiner’s editor. “I want to see that Miss Spearfield. Tell her to come to lunch at the flat tomorrow, one o’clock sharp.”
Massey-Folkes had a name that should have had him working on The Times or the Tatler, but he was a tabloid man, happy with big headlines and near-nudes on Page Three. He had known Cruze when the latter had been no more than a knight and a new one at that; he had never called him Sir John and now he never called him m’Lord, except in front of underlings. “Jack, you’re not going to fire her, are you? That’s one of the best stories she’s ever done. I’ve just offered her the job as women’s editor. Felicity has resigned. But I suppose you know that?”
“I guessed she might,” he said cryptically; he knew his affairs were gossip fodder at the Examiner. “Are you trying to turn the women’s page into Private Eye or something? No wonder she’s called the Hatchet Lady. I think the Duke will horse-whip me next time he sees me.”
“Jack, she’s one of the best writers I’ve got. If I let her go, someone else will grab her—Rupert Murdoch would take her on like a shot. Better to have her on our side than agin us. Our readers can take her, Jack. They’re not all Bible-bashing Empire Loyalists.”
“Keep going, I may put her in your job.” But he smiled to himself. Quentin was the only one he ever allowed to rib him and then only when they were alone. He had no close men friends and he needed someone to play court jester and devil’s advocate. Quentin Massey-Folkes, cynical enough to be either or both, fitted the bill. “No wonder Beaverbrook sacked you when you were on the Express. Send the girl over, Quent. What did Felicity say when she resigned?”
“Just that she’d had a better offer.”
“She would.” He descended to the level of the court jester: “They all do.”
“How would I know, Jack? I’ve been married for twenty-two years. But I don’t think we’ll miss her.” Meaning both of them, the editor and the lover.
“No.”
He wondered, though. He had been troubled lately by empty hours, something he had not experienced since those weeks immediately after Emma had left him. He hung up the phone and looked across his bedroom into the mirror-wall. There sat his best company, on a replica of the bed that had provided so much company; but he had begun to wonder if it was enough, if himself and the bed were slowly emptying. Mirrors, too often, are empty of comfort.
IV
At first glance Cleo was impressed by the flat. Then, as she continued to look around, she realized that this was an interior decorator’s exercise, like the advertisements one saw in Harrods’ ground floor display section; she would not have been surprised to find price labels still hanging on the chairs and couches. Lord Cruze had written a blank cheque and the interior decorator had given him a blank residence but not a home.
There were two levels to the flat, with a staircase curving down from the upper level into the huge drawing-room. The western wall of that room was all glass through which one could see Green Park like a mural. Slantwise across the park was Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard fluttering in the breeze like regal washin
g: the Queen was at home.
“What are you thinking?”
“Does the Queen ever wave to anyone who lives on this side of the park?”
“Is that why you came to England, to poke fun at us?”
“No. I came here thinking I might climb to the top in Fleet Street. Be a sort of Rupert Murdoch in drag, if you like.” She sipped her sherry, smiling at her own naïveté. “But there’s never been a woman at the top in Fleet Street, has there? Certainly not on the Examiner. It’s the journal for the male chauvinist.”
“Do you usually tell your bosses what you think of their papers?”
He led her into the dining-room. There was a long dining-table with twenty chairs (she did a quick count); they sat at one end and the empty chairs stretched away down the table like unwanted guests. A blunt-faced cheerful woman brought in helpings of potted shrimps, beamed at His Lordship, cast Cleo a critical glance, then disappeared back into the kitchen.
“I told my last one what I thought.” She smiled at the memory; the Sydney Morning Post had been another male chauvinist domain. “After I’d resigned, of course.”
“Are you thinking of resigning from the Examiner?”
“Not immediately, my Lord.”
“You pronounce it m’Lord, all one word.”
“I know.” Then she smiled, a friendly smile that, against his will, brought an answering smile from himself. “I’m sorry, Lord Cruze. I have been taking the mickey out of you. But that seemed the safest way of having to face you. I knew why Felicity Kidson sent me to do that story on the horse show. You’re not half as forbidding as I’d been led to believe.”
“I can be when it’s necessary. We’ll have the main course now, Mrs. Cromwell.” Cleo’s potted shrimps were whipped away by Mrs. Cromwell, who appeared to be both cook and maid. “Mrs. Cromwell doesn’t like to be delayed in serving her main course.”
