by Jon Cleary
“There you go again!”
They tramped round the park, arguing all the way and getting nowhere. She had made up her mind she wouldn’t marry him, no matter what; but she did not know what else she was going to do. If she was to break off their relationship altogether, then she would have to leave the Examiner; Felicity Kidson had done that and now was women’s editor of a rival newspaper. Cleo knew she would have little trouble in taking her column to another paper; the job on Scope would also be safe. But she would still be within reach of Jack, she would always stand the chance of running into him. The world, she had learned, above a certain level was just a collection of small exclusive parishes; only the vast poor and the drifting loner could escape those constricting circles. If she was to escape from Jack she would have to leave everything she had achieved in the three and a half years she had been in Britain. She had had to sacrifice nothing material to escape from being Sylvester Spearfield’s daughter.
They had to go to dinner that evening at a neighbouring country house. As they drove through the soft twilight the mood between them was not soft; but she was more at ease with herself than he was with her or himself. But they would not embarrass their hosts, they would wear their good manners like cloaks.
Their host was a retired ambassador who had served in Moscow and Cairo and done a stint in Canberra as High Commissioner; he showed more scars from Canberra, because there he had been amongst the Commonwealth family. He was small and soft-voiced and big-eared, a wise rabbit.
“Welcome, Cleo. You’re the only reason we invited Jack, you know.”
Cleo gave Jack a brilliant loving smile. It was a marvellous imitation and he gave her a reflection of it. “I’d never get anywhere without her, Hugo.”
All the other guests were retired ambassadors and their wives. Jack and Cleo were the only two non-Foreign Office people there; Cleo felt very foreign. The world was taken apart, a dissection of another collection of parishes, this time foreign capitals; then the ex-diplomats, no longer having to be diplomatic, put it together again, gerrymandering the world as they thought it should be. It was the sort of dinner party Cleo loved and knew she would miss.
“Kissinger is too thick-skinned. He wouldn’t be stung if he were lost in a beehive.”
“I think we should invite Lee Kuan Yew to come and take over Westminster. After all, we used to invite foreign kings to take us over. Lee would have everyone in place in no time.”
“He’d deport half the academics. He can’t stand beards.” They stroked their small moustaches, those who had them, and the cleanshaven ran their fingers down satisfactorily smooth cheeks.
“Good riddance.” Diplomats are suspicious of university staffs. Until, of course, they retire and are invited to become vice-chancellors.
“Take no notice of the men, Cleo,” said the hostess, all crêpe de chine and a yard wide. She had run a tight embassy in Moscow and Cairo and Canberra, running her husband with an equally tight rein. The Russians and the Arabs, behind her back, had called her The Gunboat, the Australians Big Bertha. “They’re enjoying their retirement. They no longer have to compromise.”
“What do newspaper barons do when they retire?” Jack and the other men were in another room with their port and brandy and cigars, and another wife, ex-Peru and Spain, felt free to ask. Cleo was the youngest woman there and they looked at her with the wary envy of women who had learned to cloak their real feelings for sake of Queen and Country.
“Jack never discusses retirement. I think he’s already discussing whom the Examiner should back for Prime Minister in 2001.”
They all warmed to her: they liked a woman who didn’t take her husband (well, her lover) too seriously. Then the conversation turned to gossip. The world was their suburb, embassies the parish pump: world figures were caught with their pants down, their ladies in their underwear. It was the sort of gossip Cleo would miss when she left Jack.
Going home he said, as if reading her mind, “You enjoy all that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. The young fellow from the village—I often wonder if they know where I came from?”
“They’d know. But I don’t think it would matter.”
“No, I suppose not. I’m safe.” He said it without thinking as if he had not heard what his secret tongue, the one that spoke to himself, had betrayed.
She looked sideways at him in the dimness of the car. He was staring straight ahead as they came up through the High Street of Chalfont St. Aidan; but he did not turn his head as they passed through the village under the midnight moon. He was seeing the village of thirty-five years ago and the boy in the bright sunshine of youth who, even then, had paid a down payment, if only ambition, on the big house on the hill.
“Safe from what?”
He came back out of the past. “What? Oh, nothing.”
But he had opened wider a chink into which she had peered before. For all his outward self-assurance, it seemed that he had built himself on sand. He instructed his newspapers to deride class-consciousness and suffered from it himself, like a weak chest. He had not gone to a right school or a right university; his education had been at the University of Experience, which grants no degrees, so no cap and gown can be worn. He went in through the front doors of the great houses in the land, but he knew where the back doors would be, something some of the owners would only hazily know. Even tonight, in the house where there was no real money, only privilege and connections, he had still felt an outsider. He had, Cleo realized, come back to live in Chalfont St. Aidan because that was where he felt safest. The villagers, who knew where he had come from, would never let him feel that he was looked down upon.
They slept together that night, but did not make love. She said she was tired and he did not persist. They went to sleep lying on their sides, her back tucked into his front and his arm resting on her hip. Once, during the night, she woke with a start when his arm tightened convulsively on her, as if she had tried to slip away from him.
VI
She finished her contract with United Television at the end of May and Simon Pally, the executive producer, offered her a new two-year contract with more money.
“You’re worth it, Cleo. We want to protect our investment.”
“I’ll think about it, Simon.”
“Someone else isn’t laying bait for you?” He was a pale middle-aged man who had started in black-and-white television and seemed afraid of colour: he always dressed in grey and wore a black tie, as if in mourning for the early days of the BBC. But he knew the public taste as if he had taken it apart with a scalpel. “Panorama?”
“I’m not Panorama stuff, you know that. Robin Day would throttle himself with one of his bow-ties before he’d work with me. No, it’s just that I want to think about the future. I’ll let you know in plenty of time, Simon. Don’t worry.”
“You’re not thinking of getting married or anything, are you?” He was circumspect enough not to add, to Lord Cruze.
She laughed. It was the practised laugh of the television interviewer, almost as good as her father’s belly-laugh. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
But it struck her that maybe a lot of people expected her to marry Jack Cruze sooner or later.
Jack, realizing he was not going to be able to entice her on the two months’ cruise to the Dodecanese, cancelled the rented yacht. He knew when to cut his losses and he was not a man to waste money; he could pay millions for a company but he hated to see even a hundred pounds go down the drain for nothing. As a compromise Cleo went with him to St. Tropez for two weeks, to a villa lent Jack by the Greek shipowner who had taken them on a cruise on his yacht last summer. It was another example of the parish relationships that Cleo had come to note: some people lent a lawn-mower, others lent a Mediterranean villa. Good neighbourliness was all relative.
The villa was on the hill above the town, surrounded by a high wall and giving Jack all the privacy he demanded. He came out of the house one morning
and found Cleo sunbathing topless beside the pool. The sight went to his head.
“Put your top on! You’ll give the garden boy a bloody hernia if he sees you!”
She sat up and pulled on her shirt. “Jack, he can go down to the beach and see a hundred girls lying there topless. If he wants to swim out to the point he can see Brigitte Bardot lying there in the altogether—”
“I don’t care a damn about Bardot and those other girls. While you’re with me you’re not going to flaunt your tits—”
“I’d rather you called them something else,” she said coldly through the perspiration that covered her. “And not boobs.”
It was just another of their small rows, but they were becoming increasingly regular. There were diversions and they saved the days and occasionally the nights. Jack spent half an hour on the phone every day to London; Cleo was tempted to sneak that half-hour to tan her bosom whole but decided it was not worth another row. They ate each evening in the villa, none of your good plain food but excellent dishes prepared by the ship-owner’s French chef; Jack made his concession towards entente and made a pretence of liking the haute muck. After dinner they would stroll down to the town and pretend they were not noticed amongst the hordes of people promenading up and down the quay, most of whom only looked at other people to see the reflection of themselves in the passing eyes. Cleo made a mental note for her column: St. Tropez seemed to be evenly divided between exhibitionists and voyeurs. The exhibitionists sat on the after-decks of their yachts, sipping drinks and looking bored by the voyeurs; the voyeurs strolled up and down looking bored by the exhibitionists. Cleo had the feeling that at any moment both sides would suddenly change places, but that phenomenon never happened. She, for her part, was bored and only slightly amused by the poor theatre of the whole scene. Jack just sneered that he had never seen such a bunch of narcissistic poofs, tarts and layabouts; they were a good argument for Communism. Fortunately none of the poofs, tarts and layabouts heard him: Cleo feared they both might have finished up in the harbour.
She did notice the number of older men squiring very young women, many of the men older than Jack, the girls younger than herself. Jack noticed it, too; but neither of them made any comment on it. Though their relationship was now showing dents and bruises, neither of them wanted to cheapen it by comparing it to what they saw. But Cleo wondered how many of the young men at the tables along the quay looked at Jack’s grey hair and made snide remarks.
On their third night along the quay a young man rose from where he was sitting with four other bucks and came towards Cleo and Jack. He was a beautiful young animal and he knew it and pretended to be nothing else. He was dressed all in brilliant white, as if he had stepped off the front of a packet of washing powder; he was so darkly tanned he might have been sprayed with mahogany floor stain. His trousers were so tight his sex equipment bulged like a misplaced goitre; his shirt was open to the waist, showing a gold chain and medallion that Jack thought wouldn’t have been out of place round the neck of a lord mayor. His looks were dazzling, his smile a night-time glare and his conceit vividly splendent. He made Jack sick.
“M’sieu, when you have finished walking your daughter, may I take over?”
Cleo knew it was a joke, an insulting one; she could see the other four expensively-dressed louts grinning in the background. It was probably a routine with them, each one of them dared to take his turn at taking the mickey out of the older men. It had been going on since humans had come out of the caves and started promenading.
Then she saw Jack boil up and she knew he was going to hit the youth. She stepped in front of him and looked directly into the dark mocking face and the mouthful of teeth inviting someone to smash them. She could feel the itch in her own fist.
“Piss off, smart-arse,” she said in the best lady-like accent she could manage. “When I want to play with little boys, I’ll let you know. Now go back to playing with yourself, if you can find it.”
She took Jack’s arm, feeling the violence still trembling in him, and without being too apparent steered him on their way along the quay. The buck was standing where they had left him, the smile still on his face but looking now like a boxer’s slipped mouthguard; some passers-by, those who spoke English, had heard Cleo and were laughing at him. At their table his four companions were also laughing: there is no team loyalty amongst boulevardiers. He had just been castrated, if only for the moment, and they were laughing at him as someone laughs at a comic who slips on a banana skin, glad that it hadn’t happened to them.
“I’d have killed the young bugger!” But Jack was subsiding as she discreetly pressed his arm. “Who do those young shits think they are?”
“Watch your language.”
“What about yours?” Then he laughed and she felt all the violence go out of him as if he had been flushed of it. He even tried to joke against himself: “I don’t think I’d like a daughter of mine using language like that.”
She squeezed his arm, had the sense and sensitivity not to say, Righto, Dad.
They had declared a truce in the bedroom; so they fought each other in the love act each night. A week of it, every night, sometimes twice a day, began to wear Cleo more than Jack. She now had to pretend she enjoyed going to bed with him. Sometimes she did enjoy it; but more often than not it was now a concession, as if she had become a bored but dutiful wife. She despised herself, felt she was now doing it only for the favours he bestowed on her. Which, since she had a conscience, made it harder for her to be ardent. Meanwhile, during the day she wore dark glasses to hide her tired eyes and Jack was as clear-eyed as any Indian scout in The Covered Wagon.
If he noticed her faked ardour, he made no mention of it. He could not cut his losses with her; he would be bankrupt if he let her go. So he made love with all the vigour he could muster, as if, trying to avoid misery, he might die on top of her. Sometimes, after she had reversed their positions and ridden him, he would lie in the dim room and be content to die there and then.
They went back to London after two weeks. The world had gone on while they were away, not missing either of them. Cleo went back to writing her column. She went through the last fortnight’s papers looking for items that might be worth commenting on, but saw nothing that would make a column. The Australian cricket team was in England again; there had been a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at a complex called Watergate in Washington; Evonne Goolagong was preparing to defend her Wimbledon title. So, stuck for want of a subject, she wrote a satirical piece on St. Tropez and got some complimentary fan mail from a Tass correspondent. It was the doldrums season and she began to wish she had stayed longer in St. Tropez or even gone to the Dodecanese. She even thought of a quick trip home to Australia, but that would probably only cause another argument with Jack.
He now wanted to see her every night. Since the death of Massey-Folkes he had felt a loneliness that, despite his attempts to fight it, persisted like a stubborn cold. He had a hundred acquaintances, but, since the death of Quentin, no friends. He had never totally unburdened himself to Quentin, but he realized now that, obliquely but deliberately, he had taken most of his problems to the cynical, amiable editor. Quentin had listened and, also obliquely, given advice. Their friendship had been deeper than Jack realized till Quentin was gone.
The second week in July he went off to Charleston, South Carolina, on business. He tried to persuade Cleo to go with him and she was tempted; then she said no, deciding that a week alone to think about him would be more productive than a week with him. She went to the airport with him and they kissed goodbye like loving husband and wife.
He had been gone three days when Alain Roux turned up on her doorstep, literally. Bligh, the hall porter, called from downstairs on the Saturday morning. “Miss Spearfield, there is a Mr. Alain—” he paused, as if he were reading from a visiting card, “Roux, R-o-u-x, down here to see you.”
She was still in a robe, but she had already bathed and her face and hair were done. She loo
ked in the mirror beside the phone, then said, “Please ask him to come up.” Then she wondered why she had looked in the mirror.
She opened the door to him and even in the first few moments saw how he had changed in the two and a half years since she had seen him last. The college boy had gone; in his place was an older man, though still young. But the restlessness had disappeared; he walked now to a different pace. Then she saw the silver-topped walking stick.
“You have an unlisted number, otherwise I’d have called you. But I’m staying over the road at the Stafford. They know I’m from the Courier and I happen to have the same waiter serving me who serves you and Lord Cruze. He mentioned that the famous Miss Spearfield often dines there. So . . .”
“I’ll have to speak to him. Sending strange men to pound on my door. Come in, Alain. Can I take your stick?”
“I better keep it. I get a bit shaky in the leg when I’m walking on a surface I’m not used to.”
“Oh. Stupid—” She chided herself. “Was that from Vietnam? Tom Border did mention you’d been wounded—”
He had noticed her discomfiture. “Don’t let it bother you, Cleo. I’ve got used to it. Mother thinks it makes me look distinguished. I’m the only distinguished-looking junior sub-editor on the New York Courier.” There was no bitter self-pity in his voice. He sat down and looked around. “A very nice place. From what Mother said, I always thought the English lived rather tattily. But Mother’s a snob.”
“So were you.”
“I’ve got worse.” He smiled and for the first time she saw the lines in his face. Pain had left its mark on him and she saw that the wound in his leg had spread: his hopes had been irreparably damaged, his soul scarred. He saw the concern on her face and the quick second glance at the leg stuck straight out in front of him. He tapped it with the stick. “Please ignore it, Cleo. I’ve got over it. There are a lot of things I wanted to do that I’ll never be able to do—I was aiming some day to climb Everest, did I tell you that? I was also a very good fancy skater, not Olympic class but still pretty good. No skating now, no mountain-climbing. I got pretty sour about losing all that. Then I looked at guys in wheelchairs, paraplegics and quadriplegics—”
