by Jon Cleary
“That could be another two years. But we’ll win, all right.”
“Where will Gough Whitlam put you in the Cabinet?”
“God knows. He’s as unpredictable as the wind. That’s what some of them call him, The Educated Wind.” Cleo knew there was no back-stabbing to equal that in the Labour Party. Whitlam, the Party leader, would some day look like the dummy target in a knife-throwing school. “I’ve got my eye on Foreign Affairs. I fancy myself as a foreign affairs expert now.”
She was wistfully sympathetic. “But you still dream of being Prime Minister?”
He laughed, but it was one for the voters, canned and on tap. “I gave up that dream when I went into the Senate. I just couldn’t stand the in-fighting any more in the Party. I settled for the comfort of the Senate.”
It was the first time he had ever confessed to her that he was no longer ambitious for the top post. She should have realized it long ago, but she had been too concerned with her own ambitions. She had been so intent on getting out from under his shadow she had not noticed that the shadow had shortened.
“You hadn’t noticed, had you?” he chided her gently. “You’re like most people—you make up your mind about a person and most of you never bother to change it unless he or she does something harmful to you. The majority of people are lazy about their opinions.”
Lazy or myopic: she wasn’t sure which. “I’ll say some Hail Marys that you get the Foreign Affairs job.”
“You still pray?” She didn’t, except when in danger; but she nodded. “That would please your mother. I prayed myself while I was sitting in that hotel in Hamburg.”
Then it was time for him to go. They kissed and embraced. He held her as if he were a dying man, as if he would never see her again; but she made no comment, just hugged him to her. She was weeping when he went out of the room, but she managed to hold the tears until his back was turned.
She stayed that night with Jack in the penthouse flat. Their love-making at first was awkward, as if they were making up after a major row; but when she was finally aroused she gave herself up to him completely. Her one worry after it, when he lay asleep beside her and she lay wide awake listening to the traffic in Piccadilly and down Constitution Hill, was whether she had been trying to convince him or herself that nothing had changed. As she fell asleep she heard a police car going along Piccadilly, its bells ringing their warning.
III
Tom Border lay that same night in a bed with his Parisian girl friend. She was a stewardess with Air France, a girl seemingly always on the wing, even when off-duty. She was the ideal solace for a man in love with another woman: she asked no questions, made no demands, took each day (and night) as it came. Her name was Simone and, though she didn’t know it, she was a smaller edition of Cleo. Her ambition, too, was smaller: all she wanted out of life was to enjoy it.
Tom, while in Paris, shared an apartment with an older man, Bill Dickey, who had lived in Paris for years and worked for the American embassy. He seemed to spend more than half his time out of Paris and Tom sometimes wondered if he was a CIA man; but he never asked, was just thankful that he could have the apartment to himself so often. It was on a narrow street off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in a building that had once been a mansion and was now a warren of small apartments, though the rooms were big. The rent was high, which was why Bill Dickey was glad to have a co-tenant.
In the morning Tom got up while Simone was still asleep and went out onto the tiny balcony and looked down in to the street. The opposite side of the street had no mansions, converted or otherwise; it was a row of apartment buildings above narrow-fronted shops. The baker’s shop directly opposite was already open and he imagined he could smell the fresh bread he could see in the shop’s window. A girl came out of the baker’s and walked down the street, a long loaf held over her shoulder like a rifle; she looked jaunty, as if she had just spent a marvellous night and wanted everyone to know about it. Paris was the city for love: or so all the poets and writers who came from other places said. He knew it wasn’t true. Love, and lovers, suffered just as many bruises in this city as in any other.
Simone, wrapped in a blanket, came to the door and looked over his shoulder. “You want to go after her? The one with the bread?” She always spoke English, except when she was making love, because she said his French gave her a headache. “Was it my fault that last night was not very good?” She didn’t say it accusingly: she aimed to please.
“No, chérie.” He always tried to throw in a few French words to show he was trying. But he had the Mid-West ear for foreign languages and he knew he would never be a linguist, not even in bed where incoherence disguised the poor accent. “That was my fault.”
“You probably were thinking of your dreadful experience.” She had a genuinely sympathetic nature, not one taught her by Air France. He appreciated her caring for him, for not all the French cared about foreigners, especially Americans. “I once had a lover, a pilot, who escaped from a terrible crash—he was no good for six months afterwards.”
“As a pilot?”
“No, idiot, as a lover.”
“I’m sure you cured him, chérie.”
“No. He became very faithful to his wife and she cured him. It was very touching and I was happy for him.” She was happy for all her lovers when they were happy, whether because of her or some other woman. She was totally without jealousy, which meant she was only in love with herself. But that didn’t spoil her charm and Tom knew that some day she would fall in love with someone other than herself and be as jealous and miserably happy as himself.
“Simone, I’m going back to New York.” He had made up his mind in the early hours of the morning, the thought dawning on him as the sun came up that he had to put an ocean between himself and Cleo.
“Ah, darling, that will complicate things.” She flew regularly on the Paris-New York run, and had lovers on both sides of the Atlantic.
He grinned and understood, felt no jealousy at all. They were perfect partners for love-making if not for love. “We’ll have dinner tonight at Le Grand Véfour. A farewell dinner.”
“You’re going so soon?” Then she added with French thriftiness, “But Le Grand Véfour? That is too expensive.”
She had never thought that he should spend money on her to get her favours. He kissed her and she let the blanket drop. Across the street the baker, who had come to his door to see what sort of day it would be, looked up and saw the American in his pyjamas and the naked girl embracing. It was going to be a good day, at least for those two, and he went back into his shop satisfied.
Simone went home to her widowed mother and Tom went into the Courier’s bureau office just off the Boulevard de la Madeleine. The Courier’s principal stockholder might own a chateau in the Dordogne and stay in Paris at the George V, but the Parisian employees of the paper worked in what Tom thought of as pre-Revolution squalor. Chuck Nevin, the bureau chief, had been there since the end of World War Two and sometimes sounded as if he might have been there much longer, might have interviewed Danton and Marat. He had the dark eye-pouches of a liverish Frenchman and an air of knowing there was nothing new in the world, that all the news he sent back to New York was only a re-hash of history.
“You want to go home? Well, I’ll have to talk to New York. What’ll I tell them?”
“Tell them I’m afraid that friends of those German kidnappers will come after me. Especially when I give evidence against that Rosa Fuchs.”
Nevin didn’t believe him; but he nodded his head. He would not have wanted to go through what Border had been through and he could not blame the younger man for using it as an excuse, even if there was another reason for his wanting to go home. “They can’t say no to that. Head office couldn’t afford to pay compensation to your folks if you were bumped off while working. Of course if you were bumped off in your own time . . .”
“Chuck, you’re too cynical even for me.”
“It’s the only way to live with t
he Frogs.”
“You wouldn’t want to live anywhere else but Paris.”
“True.” Chuck Nevin had a French wife and five French children, all of whom were anti-American. “How soon do you want to go home?”
“As soon as possible.”
“As soon as I can get a replacement. But God and the New York office protect me from young guys wanting to come over here and be the next Hemingway.”
Tom took Simone to dinner at Le Grand Véfour, he in his Harrods suit, she looking chic and beautiful and heart-achingly like Cleo in a Seventh Avenue Givenchy copy she had bought in New York. He said, “Have you always worn your hair like that?”
“No. I was going to change it back to my old style, till you told me you liked it this way.”
“Well, you can change it now, when I’m gone. Pull your bangs back.” She pushed them back and was another girl, a stranger. But he said gallantly, “You look beautiful either way.”
“Ah, chéri, you said that like a philosopher, not like a lover.”
“That’s my new role.” Diderot, another philosopher, had dined here, might even have sat at this very table. He looked around him, felt himself surrounded by ghosts, something he had never felt in the inexpensive restaurants he frequented in New York. “Philosophers live longer.”
“Do you want to live so long?”
“Yes.” Long enough for Jack Cruze to die and leave Cleo free.
IV
Claudine Roux went to Heidelberg to see Roger and to comfort Louise. She sometimes acted, Louise thought, as if she were the Commander-in-Chief; but she never mentioned the thought to Claudine or even Roger. Claudine would not have taken it as a jibe but as the proper analogy to her role in the Brisson family.
“You were very fortunate, Roger,” Claudine said, at home at once in the villa outside Heidelberg. She had looked around admiringly when she had arrived. Whatever else one might say about Louise, she had taste and knew the proper surroundings for a Brisson. “This may not be the last attempt on your life. I think you should ask for a new posting, preferably back to the United States. Don’t you agree, Louise?”
“I think that’s up to Roger.” Louise did not look forward to a Stateside posting. Army bases in the United States were dreary places and, as the alternative, she did not want to be left alone on Long Island, hoping that Roger could get home every second or third weekend. She liked the present posting, even if Roger was in danger. She had learned to live with the thought of his being in danger, but she could not live with army wives on a US home base. “They are going to tighten security about him.”
“I don’t want to come home yet,” said Roger, and Louise looked at him gratefully, though she knew he was only thinking of himself. “I’m doing a good job here, Claudine, and I think they realize it back in Washington.”
Claudine, seeing his ambition, was as surprised as if he had told her he was going over to the Russians or the Democrats. The army had always been his career, but she had always looked upon it as a self-imposed discipline where his natural brilliance would see that he was always one step above where the real discipline started. To hear him hint now, if only obliquely, that he aspired to something higher than the command of a division, surprised and pleased her.
“How much longer do you need to stay here to impress them? They don’t promote you posthumously, do they?” She always called a spade a spade, even a grave-digger’s one.
Louise put her hand to her breast, though she knew her heart was not beating any faster. “Don’t talk like that, Claudine! Roger will outlive both of us.”
“Possibly,” said Claudine, meaning possibly you but not me. “But a posting to the Pentagon would be safer and would bring him to much closer attention.”
“Hands off, Claudine,” said Roger, recognizing his sister’s mind already at work. “No string-pulling.”
“I don’t run the Pentagon. You flatter me.” But she liked the flattery and thought it not so far-fetched. She had had Army Secretaries and generals to dinner and not just for their conversation. She polished brass till the generals were dazzled by their own shine. “No, I think you’ll get it on your own merits, if you apply yourself.”
“Get what?” Louise said. Roger never told her any military intelligence, she had to pick it up from Time and Newsweek. “Roger, you’re not thinking of the Presidency?”
It seemed at that time that every other general was. Still, her ambition surprised both Roger and Claudine. They looked at her with new respect, though both thought she should have known better. Roger said, “Darling, I could never run for President. I had a French father and I was born in France.”
“Oh, of course. I forgot.” Louise thought the Constitution was a piece of bureaucracy designed to hold the truly good men down. “Well, what then?”
“There are lots of things,” said Roger, cautious now. He stood up, tall, handsome and commanding. He would make a wonderful President, thought both Claudine and Louise, their agreement showing in their faces. Roger was the only honest assessor of himself in the room; he knew he would never make even a good President. He had never been able to scratch any back but his own, and recent Presidents had proved that back-scratching between the White House and Congress was as necessary as a deficit Budget. He was no longer fooling himself as he once had. “Let’s have lunch. How is Alain these days?”
“His leg has mended, but he still has his limp.”
“Is he bitter about Vietnam?”
“If he is, he says nothing. He’s started work on the Courier.”
“What as?” said Louise. She adored Alain, her only nephew. “I always thought he wasn’t interested in the paper.”
“He would now like to be editor some day. I should like that. In all the time we have owned the Courier, no Brisson has ever actually run the paper.”
“Everyone’s on their way to the top,” said Louise and led the way into lunch. She sat at the top of the table, the only time she ever out-ranked the Brissons.
On the way back to New York Claudine stopped off in Paris to buy some clothes. She had worn Chanel dresses and suits since she had been old enough to choose her own wardrobe; her taste had always been classical, she had never had any time for the extravagances of Dior, Courrèges and some of the recent outlandish English designers. Coco Chanel had died this year and Claudine bought a dozen suits as a memorial to her favourite designer. And to ward off the thought that she herself might die before the classical gave way entirely to the bizarre.
From the George V she rang Chuck Nevin at the Courier bureau. “Everything satisfactory, M. Nevin?”
Chuck Nevin had spent twenty-five years learning not to say no to such a question. His own salary and expenses were good and he was not going to fight for those who worked for less. Live and let live as best they could, was his motto. He admired Marie Antoinette and thought Claudine was a reasonable facsimile thereof. “Everything is fine, Mme Roux.”
They always spoke French to each other, their only intimacy. “How is M. Border after his ordeal?”
“He’s here in Paris, Madame. He is going back to work in New York.”
“When?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Tell him to wait till Friday. He can travel back with me. I should like to talk to him.”
“Madame, he’ll be travelling economy class. It’s the paper’s policy.”
“He’ll be travelling first class with me, M. Nevin. Please arrange it. Tell him to look smart. He does tend to think he’s covering Skid Row.”
Tom, looking reasonably smart, called for Claudine at the George V in the limousine Chuck Nevin had ordered. He got out, inclined his head in a small bow and handed her into the car with a reasonable imitation of Gallic gallantry. She looked at him in his Harrods suit and nodded approvingly.
“Much better, Mr. Border. Clothes do make the man.”
“Make him what, Mrs. Roux?”
She cut a slice off him with the side of her eye. “Don’t b
e smart with me, young man.”
“I thought that was what you wanted me to be. Smart.”
He was going home, saying goodbye to his one true love, though she did not know it. He was drunk with regrets and, like all drunks, careless of the future. He was drifting towards being a drifter again.
But he knew when he was being churlish and at once said, “I apologize, Mrs. Roux. I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
“Did you have a row with your girl friend on the other side of the bed?” She gave him a thin smile. “I know what newspapermen are like, Mr. Border. I don’t keep company with them, but I know their habits and their morals. They are one of the few professions that parade their peccadilloes. They are like small boys smoking in the street.”
“I slept alone last night, Mrs. Roux.” Simone had left for New York yesterday morning. “No, I think I must be getting old. There was a time when I could leave a place, even home in Missouri, without any regrets.”
“Why are you coming back to New York then? Mr. Nevin told me it was your own request. Or were you really afraid that some other terrorists might come after you?”
He had considered the possibility but decided that Rosa Fuchs’s colleagues, if she had any left, would not waste their time and lives on him. But he said, feeling dishonest, “I was thinking of the others in the Courier’s office. There was a faint chance someone else might get killed . . .”
“Are you going to write a book about your experiences? Most journalists do.”
He had already had offers from three publishers: terrorism was a good theme that year. “I don’t think so. I may write a novel.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic. Are you a lazy man, Mr. Border?”
He grinned. “Will you sack me if I say yes?”
“No. I don’t admire lazy men, but some of them have a better sense of perspective than the achievers. Men on the run often don’t see what they pass by.”
At Orly airport the TWA ground staff and cabin crew treated Claudine as if she were the First Lady, if only for the day. Some of the staff and crew recognized Tom, when they saw his name, as a recent hero in Germany and thought how nice it was for Mme Roux to be so solicitous of one of her employees as to allow him to travel with her. That Claudine hardly gave him a glance until they were settled in their seats in the plane escaped the notice of the TWA staff. It is difficult to be watchful when being trampled underfoot.
