Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “Can you skate?”

  “No. The only sport I was any good at was surfing. I did a lot of that while I was home this summer.” They were like strangers on a train, sharing a meal in the restaurant car. At last she said, “I hear you’ve written a novel.”

  He nodded. “It’s based pretty loosely on a kidnapping in Germany some time ago.”

  “Am I in it?” Hoping she was.

  Some authors delight in talking about their books, written or unwritten: the Irish are masters at the latter. Others are secretive or just embarrassed, as if they were being asked to write their own reviews. Which all writers, shy or otherwise, would love to do.

  “I’m not sure. I guess there are bits and pieces of you in it.”

  “Physical bits and pieces? Or something else of me?” Then she smiled and put her hand on his and some of the constraint between them fell away. “No, don’t tell me. I’ll read it. When does it come out?”

  “Two weeks’ time.”

  “How do they think it will go?” She said nothing about Alain and what he had told her about the book.

  His grin was almost an aw shucks one: he couldn’t boast, not to her. “I can’t quite believe it. It—” he said it,—not I, “it’s got both a Literary Guild and a Readers Digest Condensed Books choice. Exeter House, they’re my publishers, are doing a first printing of 100,000. We’ve sold the paperback rights—He paused.

  “Well, go on. I never get embarrassed when money’s mentioned.”

  “Half a million dollars, of which I get half. Exeter gets the other half, as the hardback publisher.” He sounded as if he were trying to excuse himself having so much money.

  “Movies?”

  “It’s been bought by an independent producer who’s going to make it for Universal.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand. Plus what I’ll get for doing the screenplay. That’s what I wanted to tell you . . .”

  But she had sat back, at last letting all her surprise and pleasure for him come out of her in a wide gasping smile. “Tom—I’m thrilled for you! God, how successful can you be? And you’re sitting there like nothing’s happened to you, still trying to sound like the Budweiser boy from the bush . . . Look at you, still in your Harrods’ sale suit! And that same old topcoat! Couldn’t you have even tried to look successful, just for my sake? No, you come here in disguise, trying to make me feel sorry for you—”

  “Cleo, shut up, please.” He was smiling, pleased that she was so obviously pleased for him. Then the smile died: “I have to tell you something—”

  “No, tell me over dinner tonight. I have to get back to the office—no, really. I’m a worker. This isn’t like working on a newspaper—”

  “Cleo old girl—” He held her by the wrist. “I can’t take you to dinner tonight—I have a date. And I’m leaving for California in the morning. You were lucky to catch me at the Courier. I was there cleaning out my desk.”

  She could feel him hurting her wrist, so strong was the pressure of his grip. She could feel the emotion in him and she stopped being gay and pleased, for him or for herself. She knew at once that everything was not as she had hoped.

  “I can’t get out of going to California—I start work on the script next Monday. But that’s not the real reason I can’t have dinner with you tonight. Cleo, there’s a girl . . .”

  She gently eased her wrist out of his grip. “Well, I suppose there had to be. I don’t know why, somehow I never saw you settled down—” It struck her that their roles had been reversed. He was the success now; she was the drifter. For she had really been nothing else for the past eight months. “But you’re not a drifter any more, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m a married man.”

  IV

  Tom settled into the seat beside Simone, smiled at her as she took his hand. “I hate flying when I’m not working,” she said. “I have too much time to think about what might happen.”

  “TWA have guaranteed me personally that they will deliver us safely to Los Angeles.” He looked sideways at her, loving her but not in the same way as he still loved Cleo.

  He was sardonically amused at what had happened. The drifter who had avoided commitment for so long had at last drifted into marriage.

  “I’m so happy for you, chéri.” He could feel her nails digging into his palm; she never held back on any of her feelings. “I’ve been saying prayers that everything will turn out just so well in Hollywood. That you have no fights with the producer, that you write a wonderful screenplay, that—”

  “That you and I are not spoiled by it all.” He squeezed her hand, but not hard enough to hurt her. He had hurt her enough, though so far she did not know it.

  He had never told her about his feelings for Cleo. After he had returned from Hamburg almost twelve months ago he had been determined to put Cleo out of his mind. Once, in a desperately low mood, he had been tempted to write her, but had resisted the temptation; heavy hearts use heavy pens and he did not want Cleo feeling sorry for him. He had settled down to finishing his novel; but that had filled in only another month. Then Simone had rung him.

  “Tom, I have two whole days in New York and no one to talk to.”

  He had been more than just glad to see her again. She was still with Air France but no longer with the New York boy friend; he had been a pilot, but Tom had never asked with which airline. Perhaps he had been transferred to another base, he may even have crashed; Tom didn’t bother to enquire. That was how it had always been between him and Simone: no questions asked, no lies told.

  Then the first week in July she had called to say that her mother had died and she would not be coming to New York that week. When she did arrive two weeks later there was a difference in her; he had never seen her sad and it gave a new depth to her. She turned to him for comfort and he gave it, because he had a natural sympathy for those in need of it. At first he had thought he was no more than her American comforter; then he realized she looked on him as her only one. She was like him: she had dozens of acquaintances but no close friends. Each time he met her he noticed the growing difference in her: she was as content to be with him as she had once been eager to go to bed with him.

  In the last week in that same month he had learned of Cleo’s leaving the Examiner.

  “Have you heard the news?” Alain Roux said one morning in the Courier’s newsroom. “Your friend Cleo Spearfield has left the Examiner in London.”

  “What do you mean—left?”

  “Up and left.” Alain had returned only the day before from his vacation in Europe. He looked so tanned and fit that when he was standing still the walking stick seemed to be an affectation.

  “Has she gone to another paper?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s just disappeared.”

  “Where’d you get all this?”

  “On the grapevine.”

  Alain’s grapevine had been no more than a telephone cable; he had been the grape-picker. Against Cleo’s warning, though she had given him her unlisted number on his insistence, he had called her from Heidelberg on the Monday morning; there had been no answer from the flat. He had bought all the English newspapers to see if there was any mention of her or Lord Cruze; there had been none. He had not enjoyed his four days with Roger and Louise; he had been too distracted by the memory of what had happened in London. But he had been polite and grateful for their efforts to entertain him; then he had gone on to Italy. There he continued to buy the English newspapers every day, but still there was nothing about Cleo or Lord Cruze. He began to wonder if there had been a reconciliation. He had heard his mother, wise in such observations, say that most women were gluttons for punishment when it came to men. He doubted if that were true, especially in the case of Cleo.

  The day before he left Rome for New York he called the flat once more, again got no answer. Then he called the Examiner, was told by the switch girl that Miss Spearfield was no longer with them. He hesitated, then too
k a risk.

  “May I speak to the features editor? My name is Roux. I’m with the New York Courier.”

  Joe Brearly came on the line. “What’s it about, Mr. Roux?”

  “I’ve been asked to look for some features we could buy for the Courier. Miss Spearfield’s name came up. We couldn’t use all her stuff, most of it would be too local, but some of it . . .”

  “She’s no longer with us, Mr. Roux.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe I could deal direct with her. Do you know where she’s gone?”

  There was a slight pause on the line. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Roux.”

  “She’s not retiring or marrying or anything like that?”

  There was a coughing laugh. “You’d better ask her, Mr. Roux. If you can find her.”

  He hadn’t tried any further to find her. She was obviously safe; and he was not concerned with how Lord Cruze was. The man was patently a megalomaniac in love as well as in business; he would not have cared if Cruze had indeed suffered a stroke or a heart attack. Just so long as he caused no further harm to Cleo.

  But he told none of this to Tom Border, who was not a close enough friend of Cleo’s to be told any more. “She’s just retired, I guess. Maybe she’s gone somewhere to write a book, like you.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” They were both cautious, without either of them seeing it in the other. “Well, she’d have a lot of material.”

  “I guess so.” More than you realize, Tom. “How’s your own book going?”

  “Looking good.”

  Tom had no phone number for Cleo other than at the Examiner, but he knew it would be useless to call her there. He thought of writing her care of the Examiner in the hope that the letter would be sent on; then he wondered what he had to say beyond what he had said on the Lombard bridge in Hamburg. So he had waited, hoping that she would write him; but he heard nothing. Wherever she had gone, she had not taken any thoughts of him with her. He had his pride, which, along with reason and commonsense, is one of the banes of lovers.

  Then things began to happen with his novel. Success glimmered on the horizon, then rose in a blaze. It did not go to his head; instead it went to his heart. He suddenly found he wanted someone to share it with; and Simone was the natural one, because she was at hand. His parents and his sister wrote from Missouri to tell him how pleased they were for him; they asked for nothing because, he knew, it would not occur to them. He went home to Friendship for a weekend; on the spur of the moment, because she had three days off in New York, he took Simone with him. He took his mother a Cartier bracelet and his sister a gold watch; he went to Abercrombie and Fitch and bought his father an English sporting rifle. They berated him for his extravagance, but were delighted with the gifts. They were more delighted with Simone.

  “Is it serious?” his mother asked him. Olive Border was a countrywoman, as bony as her son but with a certain beauty that appealed to men who did not like chocolate box looks; she had her own morals, but realized that Tom lived by a different set. He and Simone would sleep in different rooms in her house, but she did not care how they slept in New York. “I’ve read that Frenchwomen make good wives, but Frenchmen make lousy husbands.”

  “You’ve been reading Playboy again. I wish you’d give up those centrefolds, Mom—”

  Simone had watched the interplay in the Border family; the only child of a widow, she had had none of that. There was a surrounding warmth here that she had never known; her mother had loved her and she had loved her mother, but two people do not make a family circle. She had liked Clem Border and he had been captivated by her.

  “Bring her down here again, Tom,” he had said when Tom and Simone were leaving. “I’ve always been suspicious of the French. But a man would have to be tetched to be suspicious of Simone. Is it serious between you?”

  Tom had embraced his father. Clem Border was a plain man whose best feature was the honesty that shone out of his long lean face; with most people, even women, that was enough. “You’re getting to be as bad as Mom, trying to match-make.”

  “I’ve never tried it with any of the others your mother lined up for you. But that girl’s got something different.”

  “It’s only because you’ve never seen a French girl before. All weekend you’ve been waiting for her to do the can-can.”

  Tom had looked across at Simone saying goodbye to his mother and sister. Paris-born-and-bred, she looked at home with this Mid-West farm family; he saw that it was more than the commercial bonhomie that she had been taught as a stewardess. The French had come down through here in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but only as traders; the explorer Du Tisne had been through here at much the same time. But there was no French influence around Friendship now; none other than what Simone was exerting. She was doing it without effort, so easy did she feel with his family, and he was sure she was not doing it deliberately. There was no calculation about Simone. She met everyone on the same terms. The family had already married her, if he hadn’t.

  He married her in December, the week before Christmas. By then he no longer thought about Cleo, though sometimes he had to put the thought of her out of his mind. He had not heard from her and he could only guess where she might be. The week before he and Simone married there was a small item in the Courier that a new government had been returned in Australia and he thought of her then and wondered if she had been home to celebrate her father’s triumph. But by then he and Simone were part of each other’s life, even if subject to Air France schedules. By then, too, he knew he was going to be rich. Not rich by Brisson standards, but good enough. “You must get someone to look after your money,” Simone had said and he knew that she did not mean herself.

  “I’ve never met anyone thriftier than you.”

  “You need someone who understands money.”

  “I think you understand it. I’d trust you with it.” She was suddenly ahead of him, though she hadn’t meant to be. “Tom, are you proposing to me?”

  He was as surprised as she was; but he had the grace not to show it. He could show the French a thing or two when it came to gallantry. “I guess I am,” he said with laconic Missouri courtliness. “What do you say?”

  “I am Catholic,” she said. “It would be for keeps.” Ah, the Catholics, he thought: who else uses sin the way they do? She had been sleeping with him for almost three years now; but all that had been only a venial sin in her eyes. Now she was warning him she would never commit the mortal sin of divorce.

  But he was wrong: she was only warning him that she was not interested in a trial marriage. She had told him she was a Catholic because she wanted to be married by a priest in a church. “My mother would have wanted it, chéri. I do not want to be married at City Hall. That is too much like asking for a certificate, like being naturalized or something. I do not want to be naturalized a wife.”

  “I’m Baptist, or I was. I don’t think it’ll upset my folks too much if I’m not married a Baptist. Would you like to go out to Friendship to be married? I used to go to high school with the guy who’s now the local priest, a nice guy named Tony Briano.”

  So they were married. She loved him and he almost loved her; he liked her and he was happy with her and that, more often than not, is good enough. Cleo, who had never given him happiness, only dreams of it, faded more and more in his memory. Until yesterday.

  And now he and Simone were bound for Hollywood, where everything, including happiness, was make-believe.

  “We’ll make out,” he said and prayed that they would.

  12

  I

  OVER THE next six months history, as it so often does, wrote its small messages; newspaper headlines wrote the messages large, but copy-editors are never remembered as historians. One large message was that oil was never going to be cheap again, though no one at the time realized just what an effect the raising of oil prices would have on the world’s economy. The man in the street was concerned only with the state of his own economy and he hated those
Arab sons-of-bitches who were going to make him pay a cent or two more for a gallon of gasoline.

  Cleo had no car and so no worries about paying more for gasoline. But she needed more money. She had moved out of the women’s hotel into a tiny apartment above a delicatessen on Second Avenue. It was noisy and dark, but it was clean and the rent was reasonable if one thought in terms of ransom money; but she was in the gut, if not the heart, of New York. In peak hour the traffic crawled past and, if she was home by then, she would look out from her second-storey window at the morose citizens heading for what purgatory that time of day offered them. They would look at each other, she with interest, wondering why all New Yorkers should look so unhappy, and they with suspicion, wondering if the smiling dame at the window was on the game. Once a youth waved to her and she waved back; but the bus driver, a misanthrope like most of his passengers, picked up speed and took the youth away before romance could blossom. Cleo figured it was safe to fall in love with boys in passing buses; there was no commitment there, the bus schedules didn’t allow for it. In the meantime New York, and America, had to be conquered.

  And more money was needed if that was to be done. Her bureau salary was not enough to live on in this location; and she was determined she was not going to move off Manhattan. Her capital was shrinking and she reckoned (though she was a poor reckoner when it came to money) that it would all be gone in another few months. Immigrants from Eastern Europe had landed in America with far less than she had and had fought their way upwards, some even reaching the top. But she had been spoiled by the three years of success in London; she had grown soft, taking luxury for granted. She was not prepared to sell apples or herrings from a sidewalk barrow. Australians, like the French, never see themselves as immigrants.

  She looked at the Courier and decided it would never buy any of the freelance articles that she might write. The paper was duller and stodgier than she had imagined; it was like reading soggy sponge cake. Besides, she did not want to renew her acquaintance with Alain. Then she went to see an agent.