by Jon Cleary
“If you’re going to get to the top, never fool yourself. I mean don’t kid yourself you’re honest when you’re not, don’t have a double standard about scruples. The way television, commercial TV, is going, the only criterion will be how much money a programme makes. That’s why I invested in it—you should think the same way. You may make a reputation, get a little fame, but nobody in television is ever going to go down in history. The picture lasts only as long as you see it on the screen and even when they make tapes they eventually destroy them. In the end all that will count is how much money you made out of it.”
She did not agree with him, but she didn’t argue. He had the obsession she had heard from other men in the newspaper game, the reporters and columnists and editors: TV pictures would never last as long as the printed word. She thought she knew the power of television; she wanted to be part of it. But she felt uneasy at how easily she was accepting his cynical approach. She knew she could not be like that, never. She drew the sheet closer round her, feeling a little chill.
“Would you mind if I finished up rich? Met you on your own terms?”
He smiled, sure of himself. “I’ve been to bed with rich women. It makes no difference under the sheets.”
Rich men, poor men, it made no difference: they all liked to boast of their conquests. She wondered if she should tell him of her fortnightly teas with the Misses St. Martin. Or hadn’t he thought of his visits to their girls as conquests?
“Will you talk to them at United then?”
“Yes,” he said and all at once felt uncharacteristically nervous: he had come to what looked like a fork in the road, an unexpected one. “But I hate to interfere—”
“Interfere with me,” she said, knowing the value of vulgarity in bed.
VI
When she had arrived at St. Aidan’s House on Saturday morning she had been shown to a guest-room by Mrs. Cromwell. On Saturday night she slept with Jack Cruze in the big master bedroom. She was wakened on Sunday morning by the drapes being hauled back and sunlight flooding her in the huge bed. She rolled over, blinked at the silhouette against the glare.
“Please, Jack—”
“His Lordship’s gone over to Chequers—the Prime Minister called him first thing this morning. Time to get up, I’ve got me housework to do. The maid’s sick.”
“A house this size and there’s only one maid besides yourself?”
“His Lordship don’t like too many people around him. They come in and clean the house during the week, when he ain’t here. It’s the way he’s always been. He likes his privacy about his private affairs.” She trod on the word affairs, squashed it flat.
“Could you give me a little time to wake up, Mrs. Cromwell?” It had been a disturbed night, with Jack waking her up as if to let her know what the latest score was. But she hadn’t minded. She had been a year without sex and she had been hungry for it. “Then I’d like to have a bath.”
Mrs. Cromwell was bounding around the room, bending and straightening like a fussy hen, picking up His Lordship’s clothes where he had dropped them, fluffing up cushions in chairs. “Do you want some fresh flowers in here? Some don’t like flowers in a bedroom.”
Cleo sat up, pulling the sheet up around her. “You don’t seem surprised I’m here. Do you approve or not?”
“It ain’t my place to approve or disapprove. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. His Lordship’s always been very keen on the leg-over. All men are. My Sid used to be the same—still is, I suppose. He just don’t have the stamina any more. The working classes wear out quicker, I suppose. You want me to bring all your clothes in here?”
“Yes, please.”
She was moving in, though she did not know for how long. All she could hope was that she did not fool herself.
After she had bathed and dressed she toured the house and grounds. The house was larger than anything she had ever seen as a guest. It had been built during the Restoration and added to over the next hundred years; it displayed all the rational comfort and order of that period. She wandered through the long halls, admired the Mortlake tapestries, ran her hands almost sensuously over the Grinling Gibbons carvings, stopped by windows to admire again the landscaping by Capability Brown. In the huge library she found books on the family who had built the house; they had not been kingmakers but they had known the uses of power. She wondered if Jack had known the family’s history when, as a twelve-year-old, he had dreamed of owning this house some day.
She walked down through the park, stood at the end of the long avenue of beeches and looked back up at the house. Her first impression was not of the power that had once, and still, resided in the great house, but of the peacefulness of the park that surrounded it. Yesterday’s storm had cleared the air and sounds travelled smoothly on it: the tolling of the church bell in the distant village, the hum of a car going up a nearby lane, the song of a thrush somewhere beyond the beeches. Money could buy this sort of peace; and if one were powerful, one probably needed this occasional escape. She felt strangely at ease, but she knew the mood could not last, a thought which unsettled her. She wondered if, given the circumstances, she could spend her life in such peaceful surroundings, insulated against the storms and stresses of the outside world. And decided she couldn’t.
She was too much her father’s daughter. He had never settled for peace and security, as Brigid had wanted him to: they would have killed him as inevitably as some terminal disease. They might not kill her, but they would render her unhappy and useless. She had become Jack Cruze’s mistress, but she could not settle for being that alone.
He drove up the avenue as she began to walk back towards the house, in a scruffy-looking estate van. She got in beside him and kissed him like a good wife, or good mistress. He smiled in satisfaction, proud of himself.
“You look proud of yourself. Is that because the Prime Minister sent for you?”
“No, it’s because of you.” He meant it. He could not remember feeling like this since he had first fallen in love with Emma. “You like it here, don’t you? We’ll come down here as often as we can make it.”
“Every chance we get.” Then she said, “Will you speak to them at United tomorrow?”
“You never let up, do you?” But he was in high good humour. The PM had asked him for advice this morning; last night he had enjoyed more physical and emotional satisfaction than he had thought he was still capable of. He would give her anything she asked for. If he could give the PM what he asked for, the least he could do for Cleo, the best of them all since Emma, was to give her the same. “I’ll ring them first thing in the morning. Just one thing—don’t make a fool of yourself.”
“I’ll let you be the watchdog.”
“I shall be.” He felt immensely protective towards her, like a true lover. Or father: but he put that thought out of his mind at once.
6
I
ACROSS THE Channel, in the Dordogne in France, Claudine Roux looked steadily at her brother, who had always fooled himself.
“Roger, I heard rumours about a cover-up in Vietnam last year. You were supposed to be involved.”
“Where did you hear that claptrap?”
Roger Brisson spread some Périgord foie gras on toast, poured himself another glass of the estate’s Monbazillac. He appreciated the rich life, which is not always so with the rich who have inherited it; he savoured everything it offered, like a poor man who had won a lottery. It was one of his few endearing qualities, if indulgence is endearing. He sometimes regretted the wilfulness that had made him choose the army as a career, but now he saw the army as a proper discipline, one that he needed. He had joined the army against the wishes of his father and almost solely for that reason. But there had been another, lesser reason: in one of the rare moments when he had looked at himself objectively, he had decided that, as the wild play boy he then was, he had been heading for disaster. He had no confidence that he could reform himself; in a reckless moment he had chosen
the army to do it for him. There had been times at West Point when he had been on the verge of resigning; ironically and perversely it had been his father’s continued resentment of his choosing an army career that had kept him in it. He had served in the Korean War, distinguishing himself for his leadership and his bravery under fire. His father had eventually come to accept him as a soldier with a future and, without ever mentioning the surrender, withdrawn his objection to Roger’s army career. By then it was too late for him to resign from the army; he needed it more than it needed him. It was the only institution that would not indulge him as the rest of his small world, his family, his wife and his friends, had done.
“You know what rumours are like in wartime. They’re as numerous as bullets.”
“Don’t lie to me, Roger.” Since she had become head of the family, Claudine had become more domineering than their mother had ever been. But he tolerated her with good humour, she had relieved him of responsibilities heavier and more boring than the army laid on him. “Did something go wrong out there?”
“No.”
He had been called before the GOC and asked to explain why he had ordered the cleaning out of An Bai—the word “massacre” had not been used.
“You were stupid, Roger,” the GOC had said. “Maybe the village was a nest of VCs—”
“That was what Intelligence told us.”
“Okay, so it was. But we don’t kill women and kids—”
Contrary to what the briefing officer had been told to tell the press conference, he had not been in An Bai on the day. He wished he had been: he might have been able to prevent what had happened. But it had been no more than a company action, it had not needed the presence of a brigadier-general.
“My orders were misunderstood. The troops, I’m told, were stoned out of their minds. They were meant to eliminate all the men, that was all.”
“You know enough to issue orders that can’t be misunderstood. Your officers couldn’t have been stoned out of their minds when you gave them the orders. It’s a foul-up, Roger, but we’ll straighten it out. Just lie low till we get you something Stateside. We don’t want the goddam media making anything out of this.”
“What do I do now?”
“We’ll move you to a base area. No announcement, but if anyone from the media asks, it’ll be for health reasons.”
“I’d rather go back Stateside, if it’s going to be like that.”
“That would only raise questions—you haven’t been out here long enough to have completed your tour. You’ll stay. But the men in the An Bai operation will be split up and posted either Stateside or to Europe. They may talk individually, but it’s unlikely. Let’s hope to Christ they don’t. No soldier would want to boast that he gunned down women and children.”
“They’re not soldiers, they’re draftees. Nobody knows what they’ll talk about or who to.”
“Well, we’ll just have to trust to luck and some good old American decency. I don’t want any report written, nothing at all. There was no action at all at An Bai on that day, understand?”
“Yes, sir. How long do you think it will be before I can go back Stateside?”
“I don’t know. It could be another year. In the meantime be an inconspicuous base commander. I guess that will be a pain in the ass to a fighting man, but that’s the way it’s got to be. You made a mistake, Roger. You fought dirty in a dirty war and forgot to camouflage it.”
So he had gone to a base area, had dodged the media correspondents and spent a miserable twelve months. He learned that the Australian girl, Cleo Spearfield, had asked awkward questions at a briefing, but JUSPAO had stalled her; then her newspaper had recalled her and as the months went by he relaxed, felt safer from investigation. The only jarring note had been a visit one day from Major Pierre Cain.
“I thought you might like to know, sir—they are rebuilding An Bai.”
“Oh?” He kept his composure; he had always been a good actor. “I’m glad to hear of any rebuilding that goes on in your country, Major. It’s a change from demolition.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Cain, too, was a good actor; and he had inherited a bland, inscrutable look from his Annamese mother. He continued in French, “I must warn you, General. Certain of my countrymen know what happened at An Bai.”
Roger Brisson’s French was as fluent as Cain’s. “Major, that matter was taken out of my hands. I know nothing about it.”
“Of course not, General. Still, I thought you’d like to know about the rebuilding of An Bai. The problem is, they have to move in a whole new community. There are no survivors of the old one.”
Cain saluted and left. Roger’s aide, who spoke only English and that not always well, said, “Was he giving you some shit, sir?”
“No,” said Roger. “He was just recommending a new book by Racine.”
“Never heard of him, sir.”
Roger had felt safe with his tongue-in-cheek joke. Safer than he had felt in his conversation with Major Cain.
Then at long last his transfer came through; not Stateside as he had expected, but command of a division in NATO. He was promoted out of the way, a solution not necessarily confined to the army. He applied for two weeks’ furlough before taking up his command and now here he was at the Brisson chateau near Souillaç, enjoying the rich life till Claudine had tried to spoil it. He had been surprised and annoyed to find her here when he had arrived.
“I’ve been promoted to major-general and I’m on my way to my new command—it’s as simple as that. I suppose you got your rumour from one of your newspaper friends.”
“I got it from one of your Pentagon friends. He didn’t say what it was, just that you had been promoted out of harm’s way.”
“Some friend. Who was it?”
“Never mind, we’ll forget it.” She did not believe in pressing people, especially blood relatives, who did not want to talk. She was an empress who would never have used the rack: it only distorted the truth as well as the victims on it. She sipped her wine. “They tell me this is going to be an excellent vintage year. Not much quantity, but top quality. A relief, after last year.”
They were lunching on the terrace that looked down the steep hill to the tree-lined Dordogne River in the narrow valley. Down there the campers’ tents were huddled together like canvas tenements, everyone having a dogged holiday. August was the month when the French fled the congestion of their cities and towns to crowd together along rivers and down on the Riviera and on the beaches of Brittany and Normandy. A month of it, then they would go home, having proved their individualism. Up here on the terrace the two Americans, proud of their French blood, sat in splendid isolation.
The Brisson estate had been in the family for six centuries, since the reign of the quarrelsome and undistinguished Louis X. Survival had been a Brisson talent and the family had succeeded in choosing the right side, or at least in not antagonizing too much the wrong side in the wars and struggles of the succeeding centuries. Like the present-day French, they had been down south on what passed for a fourteenth-century vacation when the Black Prince of England had massacred the citizens of Limoges. In 1789, hearing rumours from Paris, they had abruptly become the most generous seigneurs for miles around, raising wages, kissing workers’ babies, cutting down on all ostentation. Then, when they saw from the writing on the chateau’s walls, the first samples of graffiti they had ever seen, that the peasants were not impressed, they took the hint and set a record time for the coach journey from Souillac to Bordeaux. There they had boarded a ship, hiding themselves in wine casks, thinking of themselves as vintage quality, and escaped to England. Unimpressed by the English who were unimpressed by them, they had sailed on from there to Louisiana, where an adventurous member of the family had already established a plantation.
The Souillac branch of the family hated the colony and the constant quarrels amongst the Americans and the British and the Spaniards and had been relieved and delighted when Napoleon invited them back in 1802. Since
then the family had chosen the right side to vote for, but its fortunes and numbers had dwindled until finally one of the Louisiana Brissons had come home. Members of the family were still scattered around France, like semi-precious stones, but the one remaining jewel was Claudine, who had inherited the estate from her father. She was la Comtesse, but she never used the title outside the estate. Comtesses were ten centimes a dozen.
“Why are you over here at this time of year?” asked Roger. “You usually don’t come till October.”
“I’ve bought Farquhar Press, the London publishers.”
“Whatever for? You’re always buying headaches.”
“I have only two headaches, Roger. You and the Courier.” She had a third, her son Alain, but she never confessed to anyone that he troubled her. “Ah, Louise!”
Louise Brisson half ran out on to the terrace; she always seemed to be running, as if chasing invisible buses. Her friends back in New York referred to her as a long-suffering wife, but there was no hint of suffering on her amiable, pretty face. Twenty years ago she had landed the catch of the season; she still enjoyed him, if only seasonally. She had always seen what a vain, philandering man Roger was, but she had thought that all he needed to bring out the hidden character in him was a good discerning woman; the first cave-woman had told herself the same thing as she recovered consciousness after the first blow with a club. As time went by Louise was discerning enough to see that there was no hidden character; it was all there on the handsome glittering surface. She had sensibly settled for less when she told herself there was no more, and never would be.
“I’ve been over in Brive, ferreting around in a little shop there.”
She was a collector, of anything and everything; it was mostly junk, but she never admitted as much. Her home at Sands Point on Long Island was a museum of trivia and it delighted her; she felt herself surrounded by bits of other people’s lives and that helped soothe her secret loneliness. Objets d’art, antique furniture, paintings: she never felt that they were bits of people’s lives. She would rather have had a jar of Rembrandt’s brushes than one of his paintings. She was the despair of her sister-in-law, but it never worried her. She certainly would not care to be surrounded by any bit of Claudine’s life.
