by Jon Cleary
“He won’t do that. I’ve talked to him about it.”
“He doesn’t resent you, a family friend, having an affair with his wife?”
“You make it sound so sordid, Mother.”
A year or so ago she would have put him in his place for that remark. But she was losing her touch, her tongue had slowed down. She never read the sports pages in any newspaper, but she had heard some of her men friends talking about how their reflexes had slowed down on the tennis court. They now called themselves veterans, a word she would never, no matter what the condition of her tongue, apply to herself.
“What will you do if you and what’s-her-name—”
“Simone, Mother,” he said patiently.
The slip had been deliberate, a testing of his reflexes. “What will you do if she does marry you? Stay on here?”
He had rented an apartment just off the Avenue Montaigne; she was glad he still had a sense of place if not of behaviour. Weekends and for a month in summer he went down to the chateau at Souillac; she was pleased that he lived as a Brisson should. She did not, however, want to keep crossing the Atlantic to visit him. She wanted a more comfortable umbilical cord than TWA or Air France.
“No, we’ll come back to New York. I’ve had enough of doing nothing. I’d have been home before this if I hadn’t been waiting on Simone to make up her mind. I want to go back to the Courier.”
“Won’t that be awkward for you? Cleo now runs the paper.”
He smiled at her. “You mean you let her?”
“Between you and me, she is doing a far better job than I expected. We are now making a little money instead of losing a lot. I don’t like some of her innovations, but I just ignore them if they disturb me too much. That girl cartoonist Milford, for instance—she goes too far sometimes.”
“Not with Carter. As far as I’m concerned, no one can go too far with him.” His conservatism was growing, like an early case of hardening of the arteries. He had been pleased and relieved when Simone had told him she was an admirer of Giscard d’Estaing. She could be radical in bed, but that was a different matter. “But I agree with you—Cleo has improved the paper. What we have to watch is that it doesn’t become her paper.”
We: she did not miss that. “She may not have a place for you. Have you thought of that?”
“I think we could arrange that between us, couldn’t we?”
He’s still my son, she thought; collusion helped make blood thicker than water. Her French blood began to course, she hadn’t indulged in any intrigue for God knew how long. She had far too little to occupy her these days. “In what way?”
“The paper could do with an associate publisher. Someone there to handle the day to day stuff.”
“Cleo appears to do that.”
“It’s too much for her, especially if she’s editor.”
“You won’t come back now?”
“No, not till things are settled between me and Simone.”
Then Simone arrived at the apartment. Claudine had not met her before and she treated the girl to wary inspection. Simone, with a thrifty woman’s respect for money and position, was on her best behaviour. After an hour Claudine told herself that the girl, though a little rough round the edges, which was probably due to her experiences as an airline stewardess, had potential. She had no family, which was a plus: families, unless one was marrying into the best of them, were often the biggest handicap to a successful marriage. She took them to dinner at Lassere and was further pleased to see that Simone knew her food and wine. That meant she had at least worked in first class on Air France.
She delicately raised the subject of Simone’s husband; that is, she waited till they were having coffee: “I understand you and Mr. Border are contemplating divorce?”
They were speaking French, which has the proper formality for delicate subjects. “One has to think seriously about such a matter. I have explained to Alain that I do not treat marriage, or divorce, lightly.”
“A proper attitude. One wishes all young people thought that way.”
“It’s why I’ve never rushed into marriage,” said Alain.
What a pious hypocrite, thought Claudine; and loved him for his good sense. “Well, we shall just have to wait and see what happens. Will you take care of the bill, Alain?”
The girl had to be taught early that, if she married into the family, her mother-in-law was not going to be Madame Cornucopia. The look in Simone’s eyes told her that the girl had got the message. The women smiled at each other, halfway to being friends.
Claudine had returned to New York and kept in touch with both Alain and Simone by a weekly phone call. She never talked for long on the phone: the instrument, she had always said, was meant for communication not conversation. The Bell Telephone Company, aware of profits, might have disagreed with her, but she knew that the best conversation only came when the speakers were face to face. She was not going to converse with her probable daughter-in-law and not be able to read the girl’s face.
Now, talking with Roger, she read his face and pondered on how much he was keeping from her. He appeared to have quietened down over the past couple of months; not in his appearance, which seemed as confident and arrogant as ever, but in an inner atmosphere which he seemed to carry with him. As if, at the age of fifty-six, he had decided to be responsible and middle-aged. She began to think, perversely, that she had preferred him when he had been irresponsible and dashingly young.
“What is happening between you and Louise?”
“We are friends again.”
“A husband and wife who are friends? Ridiculous!”
“I’m on trial. She may take me back.”
This humility was sickening; what’s more, she didn’t believe it. He had been too long in Washington with that born-again Christian who thought prayer might help save the nation. A regular churchgoer, she believed prayer should be kept in its proper place, in church.
“What’s come over you, Roger? You sound as if you couldn’t lead in a waltz, let alone a cavalry charge.”
“I was never in the cavalry. I’ve always been what the British call the Poor Bloody Infantry. Claudine, I’m retiring from the Army. Unless a war breaks out, I’ve gone about as far as I can.”
“War can break out at any time.” She did not mean to sound encouraging but did.
“Not with this man in the White House.” He did not mean to be critical of President Carter. Though he would not have confessed it to anyone at the Pentagon, nor even to Claudine, he was no longer interested in war either as a profession or a sport. He had always, even when he had been enjoying battles in Korea and Vietnam, looked upon the Army as his self-imposed discipline; it had worked when he was young and it had worked up till a few years ago. Then he had come home to the Pentagon, risen to the rank of lieutenant-general: it had been left to himself to discipline himself and he had failed. He could not court-martial himself, so he would retire and aim higher.
“I am going to study foreign affairs.”
“You want to be an ambassador? You would be ideal for the Paris embassy.”
“No. I should like to be Secretary of State.”
She was not surprised by the extent of his ambition. She had never had any ambition of her own. If one was at the top, even only in one’s own estimation, what was there to aspire to? As a girl she had dreamed of being royal; but look at what had happened to Wallis Simpson. She looked at Roger shrewdly, assessing him. They loved each other, but there had always been restraint; ego got in the way of total unselfishness. Each wanted the best for the other, but only if it did not mean too much sacrifice on his or her part. Their trouble was (though the thought did not occur to her) that neither of them had ever been bruised by real suffering; true sorrow might have bound them closer, pushed the egos aside. She tried now to be objective about him and decided he had the material to be a good Secretary of State. Lately, with the exception of Henry Kissinger, she found it difficult to remember who the Secretaries of
State were or had been.
“I could help there. With the Courier, I mean.”
He shook his head: the last thing he wanted at the moment was any further help from Cleo. “All in good time. First, I have to get out of the Army.”
“Is Louise necessary for your plans?” That might account for his humility in his marriage.
“Not necessary, but helpful.”
“I suppose so. But one never knows in this day and age . . . I hope I’m dead before we have a married homosexual couple in the White House. I can’t see myself paying my respects to a First Lady named Fred.”
“I’ll stay on in Washington after I leave the Army. It will be the best base of operations.” He still thought militarily: the politics would come later.
“You’re looking a long way ahead, are you not? There may not be a Republican President next time around. They are talking about that actor as the candidate.” An actor to follow a peanut farmer: she wondered what the acid-penned Miss Milford would make of that in her cartoon.
“He won’t be the only candidate. I shall just have to be careful how I play my cards.”
“If I can be of any help . . .” She would be, of course: she would see to that. In the meantime Alain was coming home with his new bride. Well, Simone might not be new, but so much these days was discounted.
II
Tom Border, divorced but not really feeling free, still shackled by guilt, came home a month ahead of Alain and Simone. Plucking up courage and dampening his love, he went to see Cleo. He walked into the newsroom, which looked much brighter than he remembered it. Video display terminals seemed to have taken the character out of the people who sat in front of them; or was it that they seemed hidden behind the machines? The old copy editors’ horseshoe desk had gone and with it the men who had manned it; then Tom saw one or two of the old hands behind VDTs, pecking away at the keys like prisoners tapping out a message for help. He slowly made his way down the long room; despite the new atmosphere, the old feeling began to flow through him. He was like a gardener, banished for years to a hothouse, who had come back to a beloved garden that he had expected to find neglected and overgrown, only to see it blooming. The blooms might be force-fed with all the new equipment, but they were recognizable. He wanted to be part of the staff again.
He stopped by Carl Fishburg’s desk. When he had left here Carl had been faded and wilted; now he was a whole bouquet of welcome in himself. “Are you coming back to us, Tom?”
“If Cleo has a place for me.” He hoped that didn’t sound too personal. Then he remembered that no one in the office would know how he felt about Cleo.
“We need a feature writer, Tom. There are plenty of young guys around, kids out of journalism school, but they all want to write like Tom Wolfe. The one in the white suit, not my Tom Wolfe. They drive the old guys who used to be on the copy desk nuts. The paper’s livened up under Cleo, you’ve seen that, but she likes to stick to old-fashioned punctuation. Some of these young guys, they sit down at a machine and write a five hundred-word piece without drawing breath. They have to use hopefully every second line, misusing it every time, and no one ever taught them the difference between who and whom. How’s the novel-writing or shouldn’t I ask?”
“You shouldn’t ask.” But Tom grinned, unoffended.
Cleo rose from her desk as he went into her office. She shook hands with him, then gestured at her open door and the glass wall that separated them from the newsroom. “I’d kiss you hello, but it might make the rest of the boys jealous. You look great, Tom. You haven’t changed. Is that the old Harrods suit or are you being tailored by St. Vincent de Paul?”
It was the old Harrods suit and he thought it still looked all right: it had been dry-cleaned only yesterday especially for this interview. “If you give me a job, I’ll go out and buy a new one.”
They were like a couple trying to walk towards each other across thin ice-floes. “There’s a job for you, Tom. I’ve talked about you with the other editors. Unfortunately the pay’s not as high as I’d like to give you.”
“The money doesn’t matter.” Then he gestured awkwardly. “Sorry. That sounds smug. I’m all right, I mean. I’ve still got something left of what I made out of my books.”
That added to the guilt he still felt about Simone. She (at Alain’s insistence, he had guessed) had refused to take any settlement. He knew that Alain had more money (or anyway the promise of it) than he would ever have; but he had wanted Simone to take half their assets, if only as his penance. She had been adamant, however, and given him a sisterly kiss and told him she was sorry she had been such a failure. Women really knew how to wound you, even if they did it unwittingly.
“I understand Alain is coming back, too,” he said, giving himself a breather.
“I didn’t know that. How is he?”
“It hasn’t been announced yet? His marriage?”
“No.” Cleo knew at once that Claudine would have engineered that; her timing was always perfect. She just wondered why such an announcement had to be delayed till the proper moment. “I’m glad to hear it. Who’s he marrying?”
He drew a deep breath: he must be short of wind. “My ex-wife. Simone.”
The ice-floes met, crumbled at the edges and drifted apart. There was silence in the room. Outside in the newsroom it seemed to Tom that everyone was listening; then he realized he had been waiting for the clattering, clacking sounds of the old newsroom. Then once again he remembered that nobody out there knew anything of what he had felt for Cleo. Still felt: as soon as he had walked into her office, saw her looking barely different from when he had last seen her, the old feeling had come tumbling back, almost throwing him off balance.
She, for her part, felt as if she might fall apart at any moment. Since he had called her yesterday and asked could he come see her, she had been preparing herself, as if she, and not he, was the one to be interviewed. She did not feel at all comfortable offering him a job; it gave her a dominance she did not want. She wondered why he had not gone to any of the other papers in town, but did not ask.
“It’s a small world,” she said at last; then provided her own example: “I suppose you know who owns a fair parcel of stock in the Courier?”
“Lord Cruze. Alain told me that.”
“What else did he tell you, Tom?”
But he could see people hovering outside the glass wall. He half-rose. “I’m taking up your time, Cleo. It’s getting close to conference time, isn’t it?”
She knew he had retreated; at once she had her doubts that anything could ever work between them again. She beat her own retreat, became the editor: “Tom, if you come to work I’ll want to hold you to a contract. A two-year one. I don’t want you drifting off again when you feel like it, not if I give you the job over the heads of some of the younger guys here.”
He was thirty-nine: suddenly she was telling him he was no longer young. He smiled as he stood up. “Cleo old girl—remember when I used to call you that? Are we both growing old? Do you still swagger?”
“I’d fire any of the men who said so.” But she smiled, aware that he was trying to ease things for both of them. He was not ready yet for personal questions; she should not have asked him what Alain had told him about Jack Cruze. “Will you sign a contract?”
“I’ll think about it.” Then, realizing that sounded churlish, he added, “I hope you’d want me around that long.”
“Yes, I would. You’ll fit in very well on the paper the way it is now.”
Three people were standing in the doorway. He edged his way out past them: “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
She was impatient to see him before then, almost asked him to have supper with her after she left the office tonight. But they still had no solid ground beneath them and she trod carefully: “Have lunch with me. Where are you staying?”
“The Tuscany.”
A good middle-priced hotel: he was glad he had chosen it, it didn’t sound too ostentatious in front of th
e people he would be coming to work amongst. He walked back up the newsroom, feeling weaker than when he had come in; he was more in love with her than he had ever been. It was frightening to find, more than halfway through your allotted span, that there were depths of feeling you had never plumbed.
Cleo attended to the matters brought to her; then had five minutes to herself before the four o’clock editorial conference. In her mind’s eye she saw Tom as clearly as if he were still sitting across the desk from her. He was older and, she guessed, wiser: the withdrawn look in his eyes now suggested a reserved wisdom rather than a wariness. She wondered if she was any wiser herself; and doubted it. She should have told him there was no job for him on the paper and sent him away. She should not have allowed him to drift back into her life, though, to be sure, he did suggest that he might now carry an anchor.
The phone rang: it was Jack, watching her from across the Atlantic. Or so she thought, feeling guilty. “Dear girl—” He had taken to calling her that, sounding paternal. She tolerated it because she did not want to offend him. “I can’t come over this weekend. Doc Hynd thinks I need to rest up a bit—”
“Jack—are you all right?” She was genuinely concerned for him. He was almost sixty, but still lived a programme that would have tired a man twenty years younger. She was angry with him because she was worried for him: “Dammit, I’ve been telling you to take it easy—”
“So now I’m doing it.”
“Are you sure it’s nothing serious? Don’t lie to me, Jack. I can always call Dr. Hynd.”
She had noticed over the past couple of months that he seemed lacking in his old vitality. It took him longer to get over the flight from London; there would be no love-making his first night in New York. They would go to an occasional dinner party or out to Souillac to one of Claudine’s luncheons; sometimes they would go to the theatre or the ballet, though he went to the latter only to please her. More often than not he was content to, as he said, potter around. It was as if he flew the Atlantic each weekend to spend the sort of quiet two days that tired businessmen spent at home in the Home Counties.
