by Jon Cleary
Two months later Simone had a miscarriage. He felt sicker and more distressed than she, but his condition was caused by guilt. Relief does not always make a person feel better.
16
I
JAKE LINTAS had agreed to retire as editor; he could read the writing on the wall at any distance you cared to name. He put on his homburg, got his golden handshake, gave no wishes at all to Cleo and went out of the newsroom and the Courier without a backward glance. Cleo watched him go and felt badly. She was ambitious but she had squeamish feet; she found it hard to keep her balance walking over others as she climbed the ladder. Suddenly she wished Jake Lintas had waited till he had reached the proper retiring age. But by then, of course, the Courier might have sunk and a ladder is of no use in a sea.
Two other senior editors, both on the verge of retirement, both of them not wanting to blight their newspaper careers by finishing up working under a woman, also resigned. One of them was the Washington bureau chief.
Cleo sent for Joe Hamlyn and Carl Fishburg. She had waited a couple of days before she had moved into Jake Lintas’s office; she wanted his chair bottom cold before she sat on it. It was only a small tactic, but she hoped all those in the newsroom had taken note of it. She might have to resort to such small tactics for quite some time.
Joe Hamlyn sat down, looking relaxed and easy with her. But Carl Fishburg was wary, as if he expected her to ask for his resignation. She had no intention of doing that: she knew how good a newspaperman he was and she wanted him on her side. He just had to be shaken out of the rut he had fallen into.
“I want one of you to take over the Washington bureau.”
“Isn’t that something the paper’s publisher should decide?” said Fishburg.
“Carl, you know that Mrs. Roux has been no more than the nominal publisher for years. Jake was the one who decided who got what jobs were going. If you want to take the matter to Mrs. Roux, I shan’t disagree—”
“Let’s hear what you have to say first,” said Joe Hamlyn.
Cleo gave them a quick summary of what she had in mind. “I want more punch. In every department and particularly from Washington. From now on the Courier is going to be non-party—”
“The Empress won’t like that.”
“I think she’ll accept it, if we don’t go over to being a propaganda sheet for the Democrats. I want someone down in Washington who can shake them up—the bureau as well as the politicians—”
Carl Fishburg suddenly relaxed. “It’s not for me, Cleo. I’m a New Yorker born and bred. I’ll stay on the city desk, if you don’t mind. I’d be lost down in Washington. I still think there’s Indians out there west of the Hudson River. Have they got inside toilets yet out in Los Angeles? May Jesus Christ and Sam Houston forgive me, I’ve never seen Texas and don’t want to. I could care less about the rest of America. I could care less for the guys who represent it.”
Cleo smiled at him in surprise. “You’re human, Carl.”
He smiled at her, the first time he had ever done so. “I’m beginning to think you may be, too.”
“I’m intruding on this love affair,” said Joe Hamlyn. “I think I better go to Washington.”
“Do you mean that? Your wife won’t mind moving?”
“She’ll probably raise hell. But if I tell her she might get to have tea and grits with Rosalynn Carter . . .” Then he turned serious: “I think you’re so damned right, Cleo. The paper’s got to be re-vamped, otherwise we’ll be out on our asses, no jobs at all, Washington or New York or anywhere. Maybe it’s time I got off my bony ass and went out and did something about it. Anyhow, I’ve always wanted to shoot down a few of those smug sons-of-bitches in Washington.”
So Joe Hamlyn went to Washington and within a month the news and comment coming out of the bureau showed there was a new gun in town. Cleo retired Bill Brenner and brought in the girl from Denver whom she had recommended to Jake Lintas. Ruby Milford was in her mid-twenties, a brown mouse with a soft voice and a dagger-like pen. There were protests from readers, including women readers, but Cleo ignored the letters and over the next six months Ruby Milford was accepted in the company of Herblock and Paul Conrad and other top political cartoonists; being a woman she was, of course, never considered to be quite as good as any of them. The editorials were sharpened, the wind cut out of them. More pictures were featured, giving Bill Puskas new enthusiasm. The Courier slowly began to change, a fact that brought no new readers and lost some of the older, more devoted ones.
Jack came over from London on his usual fortnightly trip. He took her to dinner at the Tower of London, certain now that it was a safe rendezvous and that the food, too, was safe.
“How’s it going?”
“Not too well, I’m afraid. Circulation’s down.” Cleo had felt dispirited when the circulation manager had given her the figures yesterday.
“Don’t worry.” He patted her hand, being fatherly but not recognizing it. “It’s bound to happen. You’ll lose the dead-wood readers before you attract the new ones. It was the same way when I took over the Examiner. Readers aren’t out there on street corners panting for a new-look Courier. They’ll discover you in their own good time.”
“How long will that be? Jack, I’m spending money while circulation is dropping. If circulation goes down again next month, so will the advertising lineage. I’m supposed to be saving the paper, not hurrying it into bankruptcy.” For the first time she had other people’s jobs resting on her and the responsibility weighed her down.
“I’ve never seen you like this. If there was anyone I knew with confidence, it was you.” Other than himself, of course, but he assumed she would take that for granted.
“Up till now I’ve always had a buffer between me and the public—an editor like myself. All I really had to do was write to please him and trust to his judgement. I was lucky I had such a good man in London as Quentin.”
“He couldn’t help you here. This is a different country, different tastes. You’ll do all right. Start swaggering again.”
She didn’t know she had stopped. She must look as dispirited as she felt.
“I’ll take you home. I’m glad you moved from that dump over that shop. That would be no place to be going back to, not when you feel like this.”
She had been going back to it for four years, sometimes feeling every bit as low as she did tonight. The night after Tom had told her he was married, the night her father and the Labour government had been kicked out of office, the night of Hal Rainer’s death . . . Did Jack think she had been nothing but happy for the past four years?
She had moved out of the apartment above Kugel’s Deli the week after she had moved into the editor’s chair. She had been afraid that Mr. Kugel would be offended, but he had presented her with a goodbye bouquet of mixed sausage, salami, knackwurst, grutzwurst, the fruit of his Second Avenue garden.
“Your age, Miss Spearfield, you oughta be moving up in the world, it’s only right. The editor of a big newspaper sleeping over a salami store, people will think it can’t be a very classy newspaper.”
“Maybe I’ll come back occasionally, Mr. Kugel. You can tell me what the man in the street is thinking.”
“Who cares what the man in the street is thinking? He’s an ignoramus. All those public opinion polls, you ever heard a constructive thought from the man in the street? He’s a complainer, nothing more. Take no notice of him,” said the man in the street from Second Avenue.
“You sound like an autocrat, Mr. Kugel.”
“What better to be? In the store I’m a hypocrite, you gotta be, you want the customers coming back. Between friends, I’m an autocrat. Good luck up on 89th Street. It’s nice neighbourhood. I win the lottery, I’ll move up there and be an autocrat all the time.”
The apartment on East 89th Street was not as large as the one Jack had provided for her in London; but it suggested more luxury than the one on Second Avenue and it did not smell of fresh bread, sausages and other odours tha
t she had never identified. A Puerto Rican woman came in every day and kept the place immaculate and Cleo was pleased to come home to it every evening. But it wasn’t home: that was still the old house in the street above the beach in Coogee. When she thought about it, which wasn’t often, she was surprised that her roots were still tangled in the soil she thought she had deserted forever.
Since she had moved into the new apartment Jack had taken to coming up with her for a goodnight drink. His behaviour was still that of a good friend. He would kiss her goodnight, but always on the cheek: he was being avuncular, as if trying to avoid being fatherly. She did not encourage him to be anything else: they were partners, not lovers.
This evening he sat down, made himself comfortable; she knew at once he was planning to stay the night. She sat down beside him, instead of opposite him as she usually did, and put her hand on his.
“Jack, what would be our future—well, my future—if we start up all over again? I’d walk out again if you started trying to own me the way you used to in London.”
“I’m not like that any more. I learned my lesson.”
“You’d still be jealous. That isn’t something you can educate yourself out of.”
“Probably. But if I didn’t love you so much, I shouldn’t be so jealous. One comes with the other. You’re lonely, Cleo—I can see it plain as day. So am I, perhaps more than you. There’s been no one in London to replace you and Quent.”
She lay back against the sofa on which they sat. She was lonely, he was right about that. The note to Tom months ago on the Rosa Fuchs story had been written as much out of personal loneliness as editorial approval; she had felt guilty about it after she had posted it. His reply had been cooler than she had expected, though she did not know why she should have expected more. He was married and happily so, she supposed: why should he care about her any more? Working on a morning newspaper solved the problem of lonely nights; by the time she was finished it was time to come home and fall into bed. But Saturdays had become empty days, holes in her life.
“It’s no use saying I’ll give it a trial. That sort of thing never works. It’s all the way or not at all with me.”
“I shouldn’t want it any other way. That’s why I’ve held back. I didn’t want to be coming over here for a bit on the side, as they say.”
“How often will you come to New York if—?” It was as if they were working out some business deal, making sure of all the option clauses.
“I shan’t move here—I can’t afford to do that. I don’t mean money-wise, I mean because of all I own in England. I have to live there to keep an eye on it. I have the company in the Bahamas that owns the stock in the Courier, but that’s nothing, it was just something I set up to buy into the paper.”
“You were taking a long bet on me, weren’t you?”
“I had to, Cleo. I needed you. I’ll come over more frequently than now, perhaps every weekend.”
“You won’t ask me whom I’ve been out with from Monday to Friday?” She smiled, but it was a serious question.
He smiled, too. “I told you, I’ve learned my lesson. What I don’t know, I shan’t grieve about.” And he would do his best not to imagine.
She stood up, took his hand. “I can’t promise you a good sensible breakfast. All I have is croissants and coffee.”
“I’ll survive.” He suddenly seemed to have shed years, he looked like the man she had met so long ago in England.
They went to bed like old lovers, with a mixture of caution and skill; love is as much a craft as an art and they were like craftsmen called back after a long lay-off. It wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but the pay was good. They woke in the morning and both of them, no matter how temporary the feeling might be, felt it was good to be back in harness. If nothing else, they had both forgotten their loneliness.
II
Roger Brisson rose from the body of the Congresswoman on a point of order. “Do you mind if I do this my way?”
“Get on with it, you waste so much time.” Representative Tripp was crisp and Californian, she liked things, herself included, done with quick efficiency. Foreplay was something only the unemployed could afford.
He sighed and rolled over on his back. He was losing his touch; or his sense of choice. Mary Tripp was not the only woman he had had in this bed since Louise had left him and gone back to Sands Point. So many of his affairs had begun to take on a slightly ludicrous note, as if he had somehow strayed into a French farce. No doors were opening and shutting, with characters popping in and out (though he would not be surprised if some night Louise popped in through a door); but some of the dialogue sounded as if it might have been written by an ultra-frank Neil Simon. It was a pity that heterosexuals like himself needed women to make love to.
“You’re starting to lose your muscle definition.” Mary Tripp was sitting up in bed, looking critically at him. She had just come back from California and, he presumed, a day at Muscle Beach or whatever they called it.
“I’m getting old,” he said, not meaning it.
He got up and went into the bathroom. Making love, he had always felt, was like attacking an enemy hill: if you lost the momentum, the best thing was to retreat and wait for a better opportunity. When he came back into the bedroom Representative Tripp was getting dressed.
“I better go. I’m late for a reception at the White House.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand the Carters? You keep calling him that peanut farmer.”
She was a Santa Barbara Republican, which meant she didn’t even eat peanuts; macadamias perhaps, but never peanuts. “It’s only in the course of duty. The whole town’s gone downhill since he arrived. Appearing on TV in his cardigan, for God’s sake!”
He was ambivalent about his feelings towards President Carter. He had admired Gerald Ford for his decency: the man from Michigan had been just the man to succeed Nixon. But decency was not enough: the world beyond Washington and Congress was too big for Ford. It might prove too big for Jimmy Carter; but Carter had talked to Roger about nominating him for the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The man from Georgia might not know what his foreign policy should be, but he knew a good man when he saw one. Or so the good man himself thought.
“Weren’t you invited to the reception?”
“I was,” he said, though he hadn’t been. He was learning the rules of the game in Washington, that you never allowed anyone to think you had been excluded from anything. “I have to go to the Indian embassy. I was committed to them first.”
They went out of Watergate separately, knowing the value of discretion in a town where gossip was as much a product as paperwork. They had been indiscreet once or twice early in their affair. He dimly remembered an evening at a charity ball, when he had had too much to drink, when he had been blinded by the sudden glare of a photographer’s flash; by the time his eyes had cleared of the glare, the photographer had vanished. He wondered if the photo had ever appeared in any scandal sheet, but he had heard nothing of it. Since Louise had left him he had tried to be less public in his affairs.
As soon as he walked into the Indian embassy Joe Hamlyn, from the Courier bureau, came up to him. “Hello, General. Is the Pentagon currying favour with India?”
He smiled. “Don’t use that, Mr. Hamlyn.”
“Are you going to India with the President in the new year?”
“Why should I be doing that?”
“Latrine rumours, General. They say you’ve been approached to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
He would never get over how much classified information was leaked in Washington. The KGB men at the Russian embassy must think theirs the plum posting of any in the world capitals; he wondered why they would bother to buy information when they could get so much free. Unless, of course, they were like all bureaucracies and had to spend this year’s budget or they would have next year’s reduced.
“There are four or five men senior to me, Mr. Hamlyn.”
“Ah yes, b
ut President Carter seems to delight in making surprise appointments.”
“I believe he’s looking around in Georgia to see if he can find a disused Confederate general. But don’t quote me,” he added hastily. It did not pay to joke with newspapermen.
Joe Hamlyn grinned. “I’d lose my job if I did. My boss is here this evening.”
“My sister?” said Roger in surprise.
Hamlyn’s grin widened. “I never think of Mrs. Roux as the boss—but don’t quote me. No, I mean my editor, Miss Spearfield.”
Cleo materialized out of a cluster of saris: the Indian women drifted away like water lilies. “Hello, General. Is Mrs. Brisson here with you?”
He was instantly on guard. She knows damn well Louise hasn’t been in Washington in over a year. That was classified information he knew would have leaked out. “My wife doesn’t particularly like Washington. It is not really a town for army wives.”
“I suppose not,” said Cleo, wondering in what sort of town army wives would feel at home. They were still camp followers, even if the camp was the Pentagon. “I must give Mrs. Brisson a ring when I get back to New York and ask her opinion of Washington.”
“Do that.” But he hoped she would not. He could imagine the flak if Louise gave her true opinion of Washington and the Pentagon; she would make Martha Mitchell sound like a soft-voiced diplomat. She had stopped being a good army wife and now had the potential threat of an enemy missile. “What are you doing here?”
“Just looking over our bureau, checking that Joe doesn’t have his hand in the petty cash.”
“Do we have petty cash?” said Hamlyn, happy with Washington and with his boss. “Nobody told me that. I thought we were supposed to pay our own way.”
“Is the Courier still strapped for money?” said Roger.
“Still,” said Cleo, closing the subject.
“How long have you been in town?”
Cleo looked at her watch. “Two hours.”
“Then you must be ready for dinner. Let me take you.”
