Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “They’ve taken her to some prison hospital.” Jack at last made his contribution, but his voice was awkward and a little harsh. He had two rivals in this car and that had never happened to him before, not for the affections of a woman.

  “Do they have the death sentence in Germany?” Cleo looked at Tom.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Right now I don’t care.” He had never hated anyone until he met the girl who had tried to kill him and Cleo. “She deserves everything she gets.”

  “That’s right,” said Jack, but didn’t look at him. Instead he looked at Cleo, wondering what he would have done if he had found her dead.

  Cleo gazed at the two men who loved her, then turned to her father: his was the easiest love to bear. “Let’s go straight back to London.”

  “That would be nice, sweetheart. Unfortunately, you can’t. The police want to interview you. I think you should have a good rest, see the coppers late this afternoon, then we’ll have dinner tonight. We’ll go back to London first thing tomorrow. That okay, Jack?”

  “A good idea,” said Jack, but he wondered how soon he was going to have Cleo to himself.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” said Tom. “I’ve got to file my story as soon as we get back to Hamburg. I’ll see the cops after that, then I have to go down to Paris, to our bureau there. I’ll take a rain-check on the dinner.” He looked at Cleo.

  “I wish you’d stay,” she said, avoiding looking at Jack.

  “Another time,” he said, and she heard the echo of her own voice. “I promise.”

  The car drew up outside the Vier Jahreszeiten and Tom said goodbye to Sylvester and Jack with the stiff formality of a diplomat at a failed summit meeting. Then he said to Cleo, “How do you feel?”

  “No swagger, none at all.”

  “You’ll get it back.”

  Police had got out of the escorting cars; newspaper reporters and television cameramen had appeared like magicians’ assistants, though without a puff of melodramatic smoke. A senior police officer spoke to Jack Cruze, naming a time when he wanted to see Cleo and Tom.

  While Jack’s attention was distracted, Cleo pressed Tom’s hand and whispered, “Yes, another time. Call me.”

  “Sure,” he said, but took his hand out of hers and gave it to Sylvester. “Take care of her, Mr. Spearfield.”

  “I will,” said Sylvester, but already knew how difficult it was going to be.

  Jack came back into the small circle, hesitated, then put out his hand to Tom. “Good luck, Mr. Border. I hope they give your story the spread it deserves.”

  “See they do the same for Cleo in the Examiner?” He couldn’t bring himself to say m’Lord or Your Lordship. It wasn’t just that he was an American. He was a rival in love.

  He left them at once and went up into the hotel, as if he were the only one staying there and they were dropping him off. Cleo posed for more pictures, including some by the Scope cameramen, she was hugged and kissed and welcomed back by Roy Holden, then she and her father and Jack Cruze went up into the hotel. The manager himself took them up to their suites.

  “I’ve moved you and Senator Spearfield, Lord Cruze. You now have three adjoining suites looking out on the lake. I’ll put someone in the corridor to see that you are not disturbed.”

  Cleo said, “Roy Holden will probably want to come up—”

  “No,” said Jack with authority. “Nobody comes up.”

  “That’s right,” said Sylvester, but he realized he had no authority here, not even with his daughter.

  The manager left and the three of them were alone. Cleo decided she was not going to sleep on the situation; it would be worse than a spiked mattress. Better that it was faced now than later. “You know about me and Jack, Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  It struck her that both men looked uncomfortable. Either she was too tired or she didn’t care—she wasn’t sure which—but for the present she felt no discomfort at all now that the subject was out into the open.

  “Well, you’d have known sooner or later. I was going to tell you when you came to London.”

  “I’d rather have found out that way.” He noticed that she did not ask if he approved—he guessed his disapproval was plain enough. “But you get some rest now. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  He kissed her and left, without another word to Jack. The latter had stood like a callow young suitor who had been told by a much older man that he was no longer welcome in his house. But when the door closed behind Sylvester he moved quickly to Cleo, took her in his arms and held her so tightly that she had difficulty in breathing. She didn’t protest, aware of the emotion she could feel trembling inside him. But she wondered that there was no tremor in herself.

  At last he let her go, though he kept his hands on her arms as he stood back from her. His eyes were glistening and he looked older than she had ever seen him look, old and exhausted. “The money was supposed to be picked up at seven-thirty this morning. When they didn’t put in an appearance, I—” He let her go, took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, “I felt like it was the end of everything. Then the police came and told us you were out there at that farm . . .”

  Suddenly she, too, was exhausted. “Tell me about it at dinner, Jack. I’m worn out.”

  “Of course.” He kissed her again, gently this time, holding her as if he thought she might crumble in his hand. “Sleep as long as you like. The police can wait.”

  When he had gone she undressed and got into bed. She looked around the big room, comparing the luxury of it with the bedroom she had shared with Tom the past three days. Another time, she thought. She was crying when she fell asleep, not for the immediate past but for the future. Tom wouldn’t call, she was sure of that.

  II

  She, Sylvester and Jack went back to London next day in the Examiner’s plane. She had been interviewed by the police and told that she would be required to come back to Germany as a material witness when Rosa Fuchs was brought to trial; she had promised she would do so, but already she knew she would be looking for some way to avoid it when the time came. Now the danger was over, now that she and Tom had come out of it unharmed, she had no feelings at all towards the surviving kidnapper. She did not hate Rosa Fuchs nor did she feel any pity for her. Psychologists wrote that often a love-hate relationship grew between prisoners and their kidnappers; but that hadn’t happened with her. Let the law take its course: she just wished she did not have to be a part of it.

  The night before they left for home she had had dinner with her father and Jack and each of the men had done his best to keep the mood light, to shield her from the friction between them. She could see the strain in both of them and she knew it was not just a hangover from her kidnapping; but she didn’t raise the subject of herself and Jack again, just divided her attention equally between him and Sylvester. She acted out her role as a journalist, saying she had to get all the facts for the story Quentin Massey-Folkes would be waiting for on her return to London. It was a role easier to play, for the couple of hours of the dinner, than daughter or mistress.

  “The money was left in a suitcase in a locker at the main railway station,” Jack said. “It was an obvious place and the police had it staked out. But they were going to pick it up in the morning rush hour and the chap who phoned us told us that if their pick-up man was followed and arrested, you and Border would be—well, you know what they would have done. They were that sort.”

  “The girl would have killed us,” said Cleo. “I don’t know about Kurt Hauser—we didn’t know him. The other one, Gerd Silber, I don’t think he would have touched us. Were the police going to follow the pick-up man?”

  “Yes,” said Sylvester, “but we talked them out of it. They were pretty reluctant, but I can see their point. There comes a time when you have to say no to these sort of ransom demands, I mean when they’re terrorists like this lot. Only thing is, when it’s someone of your own who’s been kidnapped you don’t care about law and order and jus
tice and all that.”

  “Did they ask the New York Courier for extra money for Tom? I’d just like to know if Mrs. Roux was as generous as you were for me, Jack.”

  “She rang me and said she would put up half the money. I told her we’d talk about it after the event.”

  “In the event, we saved you a quarter of a million quid. We’ll let him pay for dinner, Dad.”

  It was the only time during dinner when they all smiled at each other.

  They went back to London and Sylvester moved in to stay with Cleo in her flat. He looked around at the furnishings, saw that they were much more luxurious than anything in the house back in Coogee; then he walked to the big window and looked out at Green Park, now a green and gold park in the autumn sunlight. She waited for him to say something.

  At last he said, “You’ve got a beautiful view.”

  “What does that mean? That that’s all I’ve got?” She went and stood beside him, but they were looking at each other now rather than at the view. “What upsets you so much, Dad? That Jack’s so rich or that he’s so much older than me? Do you think I’m just a gold-digger?”

  “I haven’t heard that word since I was a kid. Are you?” Then she saw the pain in his face at his own remark. He turned away to look out of the window again. “I didn’t mean that, sweetheart.”

  She wasn’t sure that he hadn’t meant it; she gave him the benefit of the doubt. “He actually loves me, Dad. I’m not just his kept woman. Oh, he’s given me this flat, but I pay for everything else. I don’t get an allowance or anything like that. I make good money—”

  “More than me, I understand, much more. I asked him. You’re a real success and I’m glad for you—that’s what you came to London for. But—I don’t know, maybe I’m old-fashioned. I just wish I had your mother to talk to, to see what she’d think of it. He’s old enough to be your father.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell him that.”

  “I did. It was the obvious thing to say.”

  “He wouldn’t have thought so.” She rolled her eyes in mock dismay.

  Suddenly he laughed, not the belly-laugh but more like a gasping sigh of mirth. “Righto, you know your own mind. But I asked him a few other questions, too. We had a lot of time together while we were waiting to find out what was happening to you and Tom Border. He has a wife, do you know that? Have you ever met her?”

  “No. She lives somewhere in the country. We’ve never talked about her.”

  He threw up his hands in one of his old theatrical gestures; but he was playing to a constituency of only one. “Christ Almighty, sweetheart, you’re breaking up a marriage—”

  “I’m not. The marriage is finished. I don’t like you thinking I’d do that—”

  “All right, I apologize. But hell, what sort of future have you got with him? Do you just go on being his—his—”

  “Mistress is the word, Dad. It’s the one I like better than any of the others, even girl friend.”

  “Okay, mistress. Do you go on like that till she dies? He told me she won’t give him a divorce. And what about Tom Border? What is there between you and him?”

  “Nothing,” she lied. “What makes you think there is?”

  “Sweetheart, I’ve been reading politicians’ faces for more years than I care to remember. If you can read those, everyone else’s is an open book. That young bloke—” almost unintentionally he emphasized young “—he’s head over heels in love with you. And you know it.”

  She had always known how politically shrewd he was; no one in Australia had a better reputation in that regard. But with the conceit of women, especially young women, she had never credited him with much shrewdness in affairs of the heart. She had assumed he had closed his eyes and his mind to such things, had always left that to her mother and not bothered to interest himself after Brigid had died. She had seen him woo women voters, old and young, with all the charm of a political Casanova; but he had never hinted that he might know anything of what was in the electorate of their hearts, that he cared that they might be in love or in need of love. It set her back to realize that he had read her as easily as he might have read Hansard.

  “Tom goes his own way. He’s not interested in marrying a career woman.”

  “Did he say that? You two must have had plenty of time to talk about things while you were at that farm.”

  Now that she came to think about it, they had talked about surprisingly little: at least about themselves. They had skirted the subject of love in the same way they had avoided the subject of their possible death.

  “He’s never mentioned marriage. He thinks I’m too ambitious. All you men are the same.”

  That was a mistake and he picked it up at once. “Lord Cruze, too. I got the idea he’d like you to settle down and be—well, settled down.”

  “Be just his kept woman, you mean. Yes, he would. But I’m not going to accept that. Times have changed, Dad. Marriage isn’t the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your life. Mum always had to share you with the Labour Party. She said she sometimes felt she was in bed with the whole Labour Caucus, Ben Chifley, Arthur Calwell, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.”

  “I know,” he admitted. “She told me that often enough. We had our rows about it. But we both believed in marriage, in our own. We were happy in it, one way and another. That’s all I want for you, sweetheart. To be happy.”

  She kissed him: it was the easiest answer. She was not happy now but she couldn’t tell him so.

  He stayed for two weeks. She hardly saw him in the last week. He was busy on political business with the other members of the all-party delegation that had arrived from Canberra; they made mental notes for reports that would never be written. Canberra talked to Westminster and vice versa, though Westminster gave only half an ear to the ex-colonials, since it believed that no worthwhile word had come from Down Under since Captain Cook had delivered his report two hundred years before. Both sides, however, agreed that you could never teach the voters anything; though that, too, was never recorded. A senator from Washington sat in as an observer on the conference and agreed with what was implied if not stated: that between elections none was so dumb as a voter and even at election time his intelligence was borrowed from the representative he intended to elect. Cleo, out of deference as a daughter and not as a voter, refrained from writing a column on the parliamentary conference.

  She had written her story on the kidnapping and Massey-Folkes had spread it across two pages of the Examiner. She went on Scope on the Sunday night following her and Tom’s rescue and told the story again, this time using the angle of rising terrorism in Europe; Roy Holden had put together enough visuals, from film by his own crew and from library stock, to make it a good feature. She narrated everything without dramatics but still made it sound like the greatest adventure since World War Two; the television critic on the Daily Express, a first-class chauvinist, headed his review, “An Evening at Home with Pearl White.” Nonetheless, it topped the ratings for that week. The viewers sat in the small forts of their living-rooms and bed-sits and looked at a real live heroine being modest about her escape from death and thought how nice it was that she was British, even if at one remove. The male viewers had their fantasies about being locked up with her for three days in a farmhouse bedroom; no pictures of Tom Border were shown and she mentioned his name only once; Roy Holden and Simon Pally, the producers, wanted only one star and she their very own. The female viewers noted that she was as well-dressed as on all her other appearances, looked for broken fingernails in the occasional close-ups of her hands and commented that if she had indeed been in any real danger it had left no blemishes on her. Men like their real-life heroines to look like the unreal goddesses of films; women prefer their heroines to be reasonable facsimiles of themselves. Goddesses need not necessarily have feet of clay but they are more believable if they have thick ankles. When Cleo got up and walked away from the camera with her swaggering walk the male view
ers went with her into an imaginary bedroom. The women were already on their way to the bathroom or to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

  On the morning of Sylvester’s departure Cleo borrowed the Rolls-Royce and had Sid Cromwell drive her and him out to Heathrow. He had said goodbye to Jack Cruze the night before. They shook hands like two retired middle-weights who wished they were thirty years younger and they had another referee.

  “Look after her,” Sylvester had said and tried to make it sound like a threat. But he knew his voice would be faint from 12,000 miles away.

  “Of course,” said Jack, who, in any case, had not expected any parental blessing.

  “I don’t know when I’ll next be over,” said Sylvester. “Unless there’s a wedding.”

  Cleo, the referee, called Time! Or rather, she said, “It’s late. It’s time we turned in.”

  At Heathrow next morning Cleo took her father up to the VIP room. “Did Jack Cruze arrange this?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t tell him that she also got this treatment each time she travelled. VIPs don’t necessarily have to be important: it is enough to be a celebrity.

  “Well, I guess you’re a VIP yourself now. Do you need him to get you this sort of treatment?”

  But she knew what he meant: do you need him, period, question mark. “Possibly not. Dad, let me work it out myself. I have a good life here. And though you may not believe it, Jack is part of it.”

  He gave up; but his surrender was grudging. “If he offered to marry you, I’d find it easier to take . . . Righto, sweetheart. Like I said, all I want is for you to be happy. A father can never guarantee that for his kids. Not even a good one.”

  “You’ve always been a good father.” She believed it at that moment.

  He shook his head. “No. You were lucky, and so was I—you had a good mother . . . Will you be coming home for a visit?”

  “Some time, I’m not sure when. Maybe after the next elections, to help you celebrate Labour’s win.”