by Jon Cleary
Now the billiards table was long gone, as was the family cohesion. The fibro walls had been taken down and a bougainvillea allowed to run riot. It blazed like a purple bushfire and the sun, reflected from it, gave his face and head a violet hue. He looks Roman, Cleo thought, with that profile and that head. But he was not the noblest Roman nor the happiest, not today.
“I should have expected it,” he said. “The writing’s been on the wall, but I guess I’ve become illiterate.”
“Don’t joke, Dad. There’s no need to.”
“We haven’t done too well, either of us, have we? We’re both back almost where we started from.”
“Not quite. People didn’t know you when you first started. They do now.”
He was preoccupied with his own disappointment; he didn’t pay her the compliment of saying she, too, was well-known now. Or perhaps he knew that back here in Australia she was still known only as his daughter.
“Do you want to come to Canberra?” he said. “There’ll be good jobs going and the pay will be good.”
“On your staff?”
“If you want to. But it would look better if you worked for someone else. The voters can’t spell nepotism, but they know it when they see it.”
“No, thanks.” His shadow would be much smaller, but she did not want to stand in it.
“What are you going to do, then?”
She had asked herself the same question for the past three months and the answer had come to her last night. It seemed to her that the answers to all her problems came to her suddenly, not thought out but like instinctive movements for survival. She had gone to London almost on a whim, she had come home on the spur of a horrifying moment . . . Coming home as she had, there had been no time to think about what she expected from her return. She had arrived back without expectations; so now her disappointment was minimal. She had shied away from any involvement with men; one of her old lovers had rung her up and taken her out, but it had been like spending an evening with a boring stranger. There had been men at her brothers’ dinner parties and barbecues, with her sisters-in-law working hard as matchmakers, but none of the men had appealed to her. She had met one man, a journalist who worked for the Labour Party during the campaign, and he had been attractive; then she had realized he reminded her of Tom, and that sort of substitution held no future. She was going to run away again.
“There’s a government information office in New York. Could you get me a job there?”
He looked at her with pain. “Sweetheart, when are you going to settle down? You’re what—twenty-seven? I don’t mean settle down and have kids—I don’t know that you’re that sort.”
She didn’t know herself. She liked her small nephews and nieces and got on well with them, but she had never really thought about having children of her own. It was something that Jack had never brought up.
“But get yourself a decent job,” Sylvester said. “Something with a future.”
“I thought I had that in London. For a while, anyway.” She had told him no more than that she had left Jack, that she had taken his advice and decided that Jack was too old for her. Because she had taken his advice, he had not queried her any more on the break-up. No one likes his good advice watered down by other reasons. “No, Dad, I want to go to New York.”
He could recognize his own stubbornness in her. He sighed. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. But you can’t keep running round the world—”
She was glad he didn’t say keep running away. He, or his fame, had been the original reason for her escaping; but she had never resented him for it. But he was now a spent force, like the forgotten gold medal winners of two or three Olympics ago. She said very gently, “Dad, you kept running on the Canberra treadmill for years.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean—what did it get me? But I’d like you to achieve your ambition, whatever it is. I wouldn’t want to see two of us disappointed.”
She stood up and kissed him on top of his head. “At least your hair is still thick. No bald patch.”
He laughed, almost the old belly-laugh. “Well, that’s something. I’ll keep an eye out to see if Gough loses any on top.”
“You’ll have to stand on a chair.” The new Prime Minister was six feet four, or 193 centimetres. She still could not get accustomed to the new metric table and always laughed when she read that the police were looking for a bank robber 165 centimetres tall. It conjured up an image of a midget criminal standing on his toes to look over a bank counter and threaten the teller, who had to lean forward to find out what the hold-up man wanted. “Put your trunks on and we’ll go down for a swim.”
They hadn’t swum together since she had been at school. They were both strong swimmers and they went out beyond the breakers and floated on the swell, shutting their eyes against the sun and their minds against their futures. At last they caught a wave and came surging back to the beach, but it was the surf that drove them in, not their hopes.
They stood drying themselves while the surfies, all muscle and bleached hair, looked at the good sort with the boobs and the good sort looked at her father and saw the signs of approaching age. His hair was thick, but his muscles no longer were; she saw the crêpe under his upper arms, the slight sagging of what had once been a massive chest. She wanted to weep for him, seeing him already at the end of his life. Suddenly she leaned across and kissed him on the cheek; he smiled, not embarrassed or surprised, and squeezed her bare shoulder. The surfies turned away in disgust, wondering why a doll like her wasted herself on such an ossified oldie.
They did not recognize Sylvester and even if they had would not have been impressed. Politicians were the pits, man.
“We’ll go out for dinner tonight,” Sylvester said. “Over to Doyle’s.”
They ate that evening in the restaurant on the harbour foreshore. Cleo had oysters and John Dory, still the best seafood she had ever tasted, and a bottle of Hunter Valley white at a price that made European wines bottled gold. Sylvester looked at her as she watched the lights flickering on the harbour waters.
“You really want to leave all this? There’s no better place in the world to live.”
“It’s not enough, Dad. But some day I suppose I’ll come home to it. Most people seem to.”
“You won’t if you get to the top in New York.”
“I’m only going over there to work for the information office.”
“Don’t kid me, sweetheart. I don’t know what you have in mind, maybe you don’t even know yourself. But you’re not going to settle for being a government hack.”
Two couples stopped by their table and the men congratulated Sylvester on getting the Ministry of Power. Sylvester thanked them without irony, then said, putting the two women’s minds at rest, “This is my daughter Cleo.”
“Really?” said one of the women, brown and lean as a whippet, already having put the young girl and the old man to bed together. “You don’t look like your father.”
“He’s male,” said Cleo. “It always makes a difference.”
When the couples, bruised, moved on, Sylvester said, “That was a bit rugged, wasn’t it?”
“They thought I was your girl friend.”
“What’s wrong with that? I’m not that old.”
“Don’t start sounding like Jack Cruze.”
He let out the belly-laugh and those other diners who had recognized him said, “There’s old Sylvester, happy as Larry as usual.”
A week later he came home and said to Cleo, “There’s a vacancy in the office in New York, but it’s what they call a locally-engaged post. You’ll have to pay your own way to New York and all it pays is the minimum New York union rates. But it will give you an American C-l visa, which means you can stay in the States for as long as you work for a foreign government. It’s not much, sweetheart, but it was the best I could do. Everybody and his cousin are down in Canberra looking for a job. It’s not only jobs for the boys, but for the girls and hermaphrodites.”
> “I’ll take it. If I pay my own way to New York, no one can say there was any nepotism.”
A month later she left Sydney, stepping off another cliff but knowing this time she could glide. As she went through Passport Control she was swaggering, but it was unintentional. Life, as they say, is but a dream. She was out of practice, but she had not forgotten how to dream.
Sylvester had come to the airport to say goodbye. He watched her go, tears in his eyes, his own dreams now ashes in his skull.
II
Half a world away Jack Cruze had given up dreaming. For weeks he had nourished the hope that Cleo would come to her senses, which meant she would come back to him. He complained about the stubbornness of women, but was always surprised and annoyed by it. When Christmas came he looked hopefully for a card from her; the Queen sent him one, and the Prime Minister and the presidents of half a dozen countries; even the Governor-General of Australia, whom he had never met, sent him one. But not Cleo. He gave up then and looked around for another woman, this time one who had no career or ambition. He chose a divorced countess, closer to his own age, passionate but too indolent to be trendy or ambitious, the failings of his last two mistresses. But often during the night, after he had made love to the countess, he thought of Cleo. In the morning the countess would receive a dozen red roses. She thought they meant he loved her, something that meant nothing to her. She was not to know he sent them as a penance.
He was as engrossed in his business affairs as he had ever been. He continued with his show driving, winning more competitions than he lost. The countess, who, she had told him, had lost her virginity falling off a point-to-point rider and had never since liked the horse scene, never attended the shows with him. Which didn’t displease him, since she would have spoiled one of the few pleasures he had left.
He was still troubled by the memory of the attempted murder and suicide. After the shock of finding out that Cleo had disappeared, there had been the equally devastating, if delayed, shock at what he had tried to do. He had gone down to Cleo’s flat and searched for the gun but had not found it; that had troubled him, then he had credited Cleo with the good sense to get rid of it. He had rung the Stafford and, using his old Buckinghamshire accent, posed as a taxi driver: he had picked up a young American at the hotel, a man with a limp and a walking stick who had left a parcel in his taxi. Oh yes, that would be Mr. Roux, who had left that morning for the Continent. He had asked them to spell the name and they had: R-o-u-x, Mr. Alain Roux. He had thanked them, said he would bring the parcel to the hotel and hung up. Alain Roux, Claudine’s son, the young chap Cleo had had dinner with in New York—how long ago? It didn’t matter. Obviously they had kept in touch with each other, though reason told him they could not have met often, if at all.
Alain Roux would have to be watched, listened for. He knew too much, he had been a witness to attempted murder and suicide. The young could not be expected to keep their mouths shut: Jack was convinced of that, it was against the nature of the young. In his own youth he had been as close-mouthed as a lockjawed ant-eater, but one was always different from today’s generation; it was necessary to believe that, otherwise one lost confidence in oneself. But how was he to check that Alain Roux did not talk? All he could do was watch for the more obvious hints, such as gossip in American papers, where the law of libel was so much looser than here in Britain. Or for subtler hints, such as how Claudine treated him when next he saw her; but perhaps the wisest course there was to stay out of her way. For the next three months he waited for the bomb to go off (or the gun to be fired again, from across the Atlantic); but no sound was heard, no libel published. Yet he knew he would always have Alain Roux to fear.
On the other side of the Atlantic Alain kept his secret. He had had a father who never listened to him and he had a mother who preferred not to discuss awkward questions. He had grown up in an atmosphere where he learned to keep things to himself: he had a treasure-box of small secrets, like a hobby of which he was secretly ashamed. It was no effort to keep to himself what had happened in London. Besides, he was half in love with Cleo; he did not want to endanger his chances with her, in case he fell the other half. He was both honourable and selfish: he wanted to protect Cleo for himself. He was no different from other men in love, or halfway there.
So he said nothing to anyone, and guessed that Lord Cruze probably hated him more than he hated Cleo.
III
“I used to read your stuff in the Examiner, when I worked in London.” Stewart Norway was thin and wiry, had black curly hair, glasses and a shy friendly smile that hid one of the sharpest minds in Australian journalism. He was no government hack but, when asked, had taken this job as bureau chief because, if only for a time, he wanted to sell his country instead of newspapers. He would have laughed if anyone had called him a patriot, but that was what he was. It was becoming fashionable back home now to be patriotic and nationalistic, but he had been that way all his life. “Unfortunately, you won’t be able to write like that in this job. Frankly, Cleo, I was surprised when you wrote and said you wanted to come here.”
“I’ll be frank, too. It was the only way I could get a long-term visa. But I’ll give you my best, I promise. There’s just one thing—I’d like to write outside stuff, in my own time. The cost of living here in New York isn’t cheap.”
“I wish I could pay you more, but Canberra doesn’t believe the natives should be spoiled. Because you’re locally engaged, even though you’ve come all the way from Australia, you’re looked upon as a native. Okay, you can write outside stuff, just so long as you don’t get the bureau into bother. Where are you living?”
“For the time being, at a women’s hotel downtown. They don’t allow men above the ground floor. Lesbians are okay, but not men.”
Though he had been in newspapers all his life, Stew Norway was a little strait-laced. He was uncomfortable with talk about lesbians, even from such an obviously heterosexual girl as Cleo. At least he hoped she was heterosexual. You never knew these days, not with so many closet doors flying open like trapdoors.
The bureau was small, part of the Australian government offices in Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue. The rest of the staff were friendly but wary of Cleo; they knew who she had been in London and, like Stew Norway, they could not understand why she had taken the job. But within a week they found that she was friendly to them, had no airs and worked hard. Only the latter made her suspect: why work so hard for so little pay? They were all Americans, but they had learned the Australian suspicion of someone who appeared to like work.
She waited till she had been in New York two weeks, till she had got her bearings on herself as well as the city, before she called the Courier. Or rather, called the Courier to ask for Tom Border.
“Tom? This is Cleo.”
There was a noise at the other end of the phone as if he had sat down suddenly on an air cushion; or on his own lungs. “Cleo! Are you in New York? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Working.” She explained where she was, but not why.
But he asked, “Why, for God’s sake? A government job?” He was not old, but he had an old newspaperman’s suspicion of working for a government. “Your father’s not the Consul-General, is he?”
She laughed at the idea. “Dad—here? He’d set Australian-American relations back two hundred years. Can we have dinner or something?”
There was a slight hesitation, then he said, “Are you free now? Where are you—in Rockefeller Center? There’s a café downstairs, looks out on to the ice rink. We’ll have tea, be English.”
That was the last thing she wanted to be: afternoon tea had been a ritual with Jack. “Lovely. Half an hour?”
She told Stew Norway that she had an old friend on the Courier who might be a good contact for placement of pieces on Australia. It was strange, after all this time, to have to account to someone for her absence from the office, but she played the game strictly according to the rules. She didn’t want anyone in th
e office thinking that she thought herself above them. Privately she thought she was, but she was a modest egotist.
She was waiting in the café by the ice rink when Tom arrived. If that made her seem eager to see him, she didn’t care. He squeezed her hand, bent down and kissed her cheek, then sat down opposite her. They ordered tea and English muffins and strawberry jam and when it was brought England was as far away as ever; Europeans can imitate English habits, but Americans, more closely related, just fail. The tea was brewed from tea bags, the muffins tasted like doughnuts and the strawberry jam was a jelly. Mrs. Cromwell would have declared war.
They skated round themselves as delicately as the skaters outside were going round the rink. “What did you think of Rosa Fuchs’s sentence?”
That had been months ago, before she had left London to go home. “In a way I was glad they didn’t sentence her to death. That would have worried me.”
“Yes,” he said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Life imprisonment—I think I’d rather they hanged me. I sometimes think the anti-capital punishment people are more concerned with their own feelings than they are for the prisoners’.”
“I couldn’t care less about Rosa Fuchs,” she said emphatically, meaning let’s talk about us.
“Well, fancy you being here! Are you liking it?”
“Very much.” Especially right now.
He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. He looked out at the rink, at a girl in a bright red costume who floated like a firebird about the ice. He had never skated, the ice on the ponds down home had rarely been thick enough, and he envied the grace and sense of freedom that skaters could suggest. He looked back at Cleo
