by Jon Cleary
“You’re fishing for compliments. You know you have the sexiest voice since—” But he couldn’t remember the last sexy voice that had seduced him. Not his wife’s: she still sounded as if she were keeping goal for the Roedean hockey team.
“Since Theda Bara?”
“Did she have a sexy voice? Maybe you’d better ask His Nibs. That was what you were going to do all along, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Now she had made her decision, she felt no shame; or had immunized herself against it. She sat back in her chair, showing Massey-Folkes the legs he admired. “He’s sending me red roses.”
“Before we go any further—are you thinking of giving up your column?”
“No, of course not. I won’t desert you, Quentin.”
“Good. Now, are you talking to me as your editor or your surrogate father?” He had two daughters and he’d have skinned them alive if they’d accepted red roses from Jack Cruze. At the same time he wondered what Jack had that he didn’t, except, of course, money and power.
“Both.” She would never have asked her own father for advice on such a topic.
He sighed, looked out through the glass wall into the big newsroom, saw the various editors gathering to descend on him. Tomorrow’s paper seemed suddenly unimportant; he would rather sit here and admire her legs and give her fatherly advice.
“He demands payment, Cleo. You’ll never be the only one. Felicity lasted the longest, but even she never had a monopoly on him. He had a wife once, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“She left him after a year, no kids. I don’t even know if they were ever divorced. I could find out, but that’s his business. I never met her. She lives somewhere in East Anglia, Suffolk or somewhere. He still looks after her, I mean sees that she still lives comfortably. But he never goes near her or talks to her. I don’t know why she left him, but ever since that he’s had all the women his money could buy.”
“That’s nasty, Quentin. To him and to me.”
“You asked me, Cleo. All I’m saying is, if you want to set your price, make it high. And see you get more of a golden handshake than just a bunch of white roses.”
She stood up; the attempt at immunization had failed and she felt shame. “Do me a favour, Quentin. Whatever I decide to do, don’t talk about me to the other men.”
He looked out at the other editors ogling him through the glass wall. “I’d never do that, Cleo. If ever you want more advice . . .”
She smiled, but it was an effort. “You could never have run the women’s page.”
“You’d be surprised. There are still a lot of women who prefer a man’s advice, no matter how wrong it might be. You’re all masochists.”
IV
“That garden down there was designed by Capability Brown,” said Cruze. “I used to sneak up here when I was a kid down in the village and pinch eggs out of the birds’ nests. I’d sit up in that big elm over there and look at the house and one day I decided that some day I’d own it. I was twelve or thirteen, I think.”
“You’re kidding.”
He looked at her as if she were a child, or stupid. “You told me at lunch you’re ambitious. I thought you’d understand. You don’t have to be over twenty-one to be ambitious. I knew I wanted to be rich when I was about twelve years old. Setting myself to make a million pounds, or two million, wasn’t any good—after your first million, you’re not rich till you’ve made ten, fifty million. So I set this house as my target. When I could afford to buy it and have enough money to run it, I’d settle for being rich. Everything that’s come after it has been incidental.”
“Except the power.”
He lowered the hairy eyebrows, looked at her sideways. “Except the power. What’s your target?”
He had been away in the United States for the past five days. The Cruze Organization had a quarter-share in timber plantations and a pulp mill in the Carolinas and twice a year he went over to Charleston, one of his favourite cities, to talk with his American partners. When he had returned to London yesterday Cleo had called him at the flat and asked if she could see him.
“I’m going down to St. Aidan’s House,” he had said. “You want to join me for the weekend?”
He had noticed the hesitation on the line, but had waited. He had learned to be patient; up to a point, that is. He would have been patient only up to a point with God Himself.
Then she had said, “All right, Jack. Do I need to bring a dinner dress? I mean, am I playing hostess again?”
“No, there’ll be just you and me. For Saturday anyway. Maybe on Sunday I’ll have people in for lunch—” He never had a free weekend entirely to himself and he would have been worried if he had. Kings like to be reminded that they reign. “I’ll send Sid Cromwell to pick you up at your flat.”
Again there had been the slight hesitation, then she had said, “All right.”
He had known then that she had passed a fork in her road. He did not worry about his own road: he was too far down it now to worry about whether he took the right or the wrong fork. Or so he thought.
Now she was hesitating again and he repeated, “What’s your target?”
“Jack, I want to go into television. I’ll keep on with my column, but I want one of the spots on Scope.”
They were walking along the top of the hill behind the big house. In the distance, beyond the oaks and beeches that were a green battlement at the southern end of the great park, the Norman tower of a church rose up as a marker of where the village of Chalfont St. Aidan stood. Beyond it a black umbrella of storm was opening up and the humidity in the air could be felt being pushed ahead of it. He liked to sweat; it reminded him there was still juice in him. He had heard somewhere that the sweat glands dried out the older one got, but he had never bothered to check it. He turned a blind eye and a blank mind to the thought of growing old.
“I don’t interfere—”
“Jack, did you come all the way to where you are without once asking someone to interfere for you?”
“All the way.” He didn’t need to boast; he knew it was true. Then he relented, because he didn’t want to sound smug in front of her. “But I trod on a lot of people, kicked them in the knackers, caught them when they weren’t looking. The only thing I didn’t do was stab ‘em in the back. I’m not that sort.”
“That could happen to you some day. Be stabbed in the back, I mean.”
“Who by?” He smiled and took her hand. “By you? Come on, we’d better get back to the house or we’re going to get a wet tail.”
They hurried down the winding path, suddenly stopping as thunder hit them like shellfire. The air was stifling now and the light had become unnervingly bright, a last explosion before the storm extinguished it. The trees were strangely green and the long dry grass on the side of the hill had the brilliance of a mustard field. Then they saw the church tower disappear in the silvery rain and abruptly the light began to race towards them, contracting across the park as it surrendered to the darkness of the storm. They began to run.
They reached the house a moment before the rain pelted down. They dashed into the conservatory, and stood getting their breath, looking up at the rain trying to shatter the glass roof above them. They were both sweating, standing there amongst the palms and shrubs and creepers like lovers in a green jungle.
He put his hand on her arm and she turned towards him. For a moment it seemed to him that she turned her head away to look over her shoulder, as if she were taking a last look at something or someone. Then she put her lips to his and he tasted the sweet salt of her.
V
He might have got where he was by treading on people, kicking them in the knackers, catching them when they weren’t looking; but he was not a bull-at-a-gate lover in bed. Which surprised Cleo. Of all places, bed was where she had expected him to be brutal, proving his power where all men thought it counted.
Afterwards he got up and walked naked about the big bedroom. He had some conceit
about his physical condition. He would not have won any Mr. Universe contest or even been invited to pose with one of the voluptuous girls on Page Three of the Examiner, but he knew that he looked good for a fifty-year-old. He had muscular shoulders, a broad chest, a flat stomach and better than average bedroom equipment. Cleo thought he looked slightly ridiculous strutting about the room like a pole vaulter warming up for a second jump, but she had passed the point (the fork in the road) where she was going to laugh at him any more. She would laugh with him, or try to sound as if she were.
The storm had passed and the sun had come out again, streaming in through the windows. He paused by one of the windows and, looking out, said, “If I talk to them at United, how do I know you’ll produce the goods? There is more to being a good TV presenter than just sitting in front of a camera. Even I know that.”
He had never been in a television studio, refusing all invitations to interviews. He had been flattered when John Freeman had wanted him, a representative of the new tycoons, for the Face to Face series, to be one with the likes of King Hussein of Jordan and Stirling Moss, a national hero; but he had resisted the invitation and as time had passed it had become accepted that he would never appear on television. He might walk naked in front of the woman, any woman, he had in his bedroom, but there were parts of himself he never wanted exposed.
She sat up against the pillows, the sheet drawn up over her breasts. He noticed that all women, except the cheap brazen ones, always showed a little late modesty after making love. He was never sure whether it was guilt for their shamelessness minutes before or whether it was coquetry, another start to another session. She didn’t smoke, which pleased him, and he saw her reach into her handbag and take out something and pop it into her mouth.
“What’s that? The Pill?”
“I take that in the mornings. This is just a peppermint.”
He laughed, came back and sat down on the side of the bed. The Pill had been a great boon to men as well as women: it made life so much easier, less worrisome. Quentin Massey-Folkes had wanted to run an editorial in the Examiner protesting against Pope Paul’s encyclical against the Pill; he had borrowed a heading for it, Paul’s Epistle to the Fallopians. But Cruze had vetoed that; he didn’t want to get into a war with the Catholic Church, no matter how good it might be for circulation.
“We don’t want to get you pregnant.”
“We?” But she smiled and put her hand on his. “Well, I suppose it is a double act.”
“You’re asking me to do a double act with you in this TV business. If I say anything to them at United, they’re going to link my name with yours.”
“I always had the idea that that sort of thing didn’t worry you. Everyone at the Examiner linked you with Felicity.”
“That was different. She was women’s editor before I took up with her. I never gave her any extra clout on the paper.”
“I’m not asking you to give me any clout at United.” But that wasn’t true and she knew it. She had to be honest, even if devious: “Well yes, I guess I am. But they’ll kick me out if I’m no good. I’d kick myself out. I’d never make a fool of myself just to get to the top.”
“No, I don’t think you would. Television, more than any other business I can think of, has people at the top who are fools. I don’t mean the executives, they’re as shrewd as they come, I mean the performers. They fool themselves that they have talent and they haven’t. They don’t last long, they come and go like English tennis players or heavyweight boxers, but for a while they think they’ve made it. Newspapers could never stand the turnover they have in television.”
“You sound as if you hold TV in contempt.”
“I do.”
“Why did you invest in it, then?”
“Because I knew it would make money for me easier than anything else I’ve ever invested in. They came to me, told me what return I could expect and I gave them the money they asked for. Let me tell you something—”
“Put a robe on, Jack, or get back into bed. I find it a bit disconcerting talking to the Boss with his Old Feller staring me in the eye.”
“Old Feller? Where did you get that expression?”
“I used to hear my father using it with my brothers.”
He got into bed and she pulled the sheet up to his chest and tucked it in around him. They were like an old married couple. But neither of them thought of that. “Now tell me something . . .”
He wasn’t sure why he wanted to tell her about himself. He did not think he was in love with her, but he had not felt so confidential since he had first fallen in love with Emma. The love-making had been as good as he had ever experienced; but there had been something more to the feeling of being with her. She excited him as few women had, but there was more to her than sexual excitement. He had met ambitious women before, in and out of his bed, so it was not just that that they had in common. He wondered if it was because he had found her a good listener. He had had other women who listened, or had seemed to, but he had discovered as time went by that they hadn’t listened at all. No, he didn’t know why he felt he wanted to share confidences with her; except that she invited them. For all her swagger and her eye to the main chance, there was a sympathetic warmth about her that she could not hide even if she tried.
“I’ve always known where and how to make money. My father died in 1935, when I was sixteen. He’d never had any money to spare, he was a solicitor’s clerk and I’m afraid that was all he ever wanted to be. If he had any dreams, he never told me. It was my mother who gave me books to read about men who’d made good. Rockefeller and Carnegie in America, Selfridge in this country. She gave me other books, history, Shakespeare, Dickens, but I knew what I liked most. She got me a job in a bank in Aylesbury and told me I’d learn more about money there than in any books.”
Mrs. Cruze sounded like a robber baroness. But all Cleo said was, “It must have been nice to have such an encouraging mother.”
He looked sideways at her. “I know what you’re thinking. No, my mother wasn’t greedy, a money-grubber like that American woman Hetty Green. She wanted me to have something better than she and my father had had. The only talent I had was with figures—I always topped the class in mathematics at school. I wasn’t going to get rich, or even comfortable, as a lawyer or a writer or a university don. The only thing to do was put me where the money was and see how other people made theirs.”
“Did she trust you? I mean, did she think you would make your money honestly?”
“Yes, she did.” He was silent for a while, eyebrows drawn down in a deep frown. Conscience rarely troubled him and when it did he was at a loss at what to do about it; it was like a social disease one didn’t mention in polite company. But he mentioned it now: “I never told her how I made my first profits. I saw that the bank’s richest customers all owned property. So I embezzled £200 of the bank’s money—”
“You were good at figures, weren’t you?” She was wrapped in a sheet, but she tried not to sound like Justice. At least she was not blindfolded.
He grinned, all at once completely comfortable with her. “I was also a good forger—I had to forge the manager’s signature. The bank never found out. I went out and bought a plot of land for £150 and three months later sold it for £400. I put the £200 back into the bank’s accounts and nobody was any the wiser. And I had £250, my first capital. By 1939 I’d left the bank and gone to work for estate agents in London. I had £2,000 capital by then, all from buying and selling property, and I used to stay back at the office at night and go through the firm’s books looking for bargains in property. When war broke out I was on my way.”
She had put her hand up and was idly stroking the back of his neck. She felt comfortable with him now, comfortable with herself, was not troubled by conscience. She had made a commitment and found to her surprise that she had got more than she had hoped for. She liked being made love to by him, the man old enough to be her father.
“What a pity Hitler int
errupted you.”
Hitler had caused only a brief interruption in his career. But he had told her enough of his knavery; confidences, like flattery, could be taken too far. He did not tell her how he had immediately volunteered for the army, not out of patriotism but because he knew he would be deferred because he was the sole supporter of his widowed mother. He had volunteered because even then, at the start of a war that might last as long as the Great War or even longer, he was looking well ahead: when he eventually became successful he did not want to be branded as a man who had dodged war service. He was duly deferred and posted to a reserved occupation in a food factory, where he made more money on the black market selling the factory’s products. He had seen it as stealing from the rich, the government, to give (well, sell) to the middle classes; he would have sold to the poor, if they had had enough money to pay his prices. He did, however, work hard at the factory and by the end of the war was assistant general manager and was awarded an MBE. A year after the end of the war he bought the factory with the profits from selling its products on the black market, going back to the bank where he had started his career for the extra finance he needed for the purchase. He would like to have told her that bit, since she had a sense of humour, but he thought he would keep that until he was more certain of her.
“Hitler interrupted everyone,” he said piously. “When the war was over I went into army disposals. I sold everything the army no longer wanted—blankets, jerry-cans, lorries, guns—everything. I made a packet and I was on my way. My mother died in 1950—”
She made a sympathetic noise. She wanted to ask him about his wife; but didn’t. She had the feeling that he was going to give bits of himself to her, piecemeal, and she was prepared to wait. Naked though he was, she was beginning to realize she had never met a man who had so many layers to him.
“I bought my first newspaper, a suburban one down in Kent, in 1951. Two years later I bought my first provincial paper. By then I knew I wanted something more than just money. Now let me tell you something—”
“Yes?” She was patient with him. In a way he was like her father, every lesson had to be prefaced by stories of his own experience.
