Spearfield's Daughter (39 page)

“I'll be all right,” she told Cheryl. “I just want to make sure I settle into the right job.”

She was living at home in the family house in Coogee, having it to herself most of the time. She had bought herself a second-hand Mini; that had been her major expense since coming back. She felt that she was drifting and, though she had not sat down and planned anything definite, she was throwing down no anchors. Not yet.

Jack had traced her to the house in Coogee and phoned her there. She remarked to herself that he had not written: he still would put nothing on paper to a woman. She was not disturbed when he rang her; she had expected a call sooner or later. A bunch of red roses had preceded the call, but she did not thank him for them or even mention them.

“I wish you'd come back,” he said. “We could make a new start.”

“It's all over, Jack.” Distance lent civility to their voices.

“You can have anything you wish, if you come back.”

The editorship of the
Examiner?
But she said, “That's not the point. It's just that we're finished. I wish you'd accept that—”

“I can't!”

She felt sorry for him; but that was all. “Goodbye, Jack. Please don't call me again.”

But he did, twice more; she hung up on him as soon as she heard his voice. Red roses came every day for a week; then abruptly there were no more deliveries, no more phone calls. But he hovered there on the horizon of her mind, just over the edge of the world, like a storm that had once buffeted her and might come again. She knew his power, that of his money and influence but, worst of all, of his jealousy. She only began to relax as the weeks went by and he did not turn up on the doorstep of the house in Coogee.

Then a Federal election was announced. Sylvester came up from Canberra blown up with
promises
to the voters and his own optimism. Labour had been twenty-three years in the wilderness: God, though not a recognized member of the Party, had promised to work an eighth day. “I think your mother, up there, has had a word in His ear. The Party can use you, too, sweetheart. I've talked to Gough Whitlam.”

“Dad, what do I know about recent Australian politics?” Now that she was home she was ashamed how little she had been interested in Australia while she had been away. Her sole interest had been Cleo Spearfield, another country altogether.

“You'll catch on in no time. We're going to waltz in, Cleo. The country has had twenty-three years of those other bastards—it's yelling out for a change.”

She worked well within the Party organization, because she had always been able to work with people. None of them was jealous of her, except some of the older women; but even those loosened up with her when she let drop hints that she was not interested in going to Canberra after Labour had won. She was still not sure where she would be going, but she knew she was not going anywhere where she would once more be just Sylvester Spearfield's daughter.

Sylvester was in his element during the campaign. There was an interest in the election such as Australia had not seen since the war; Cleo sometimes felt she was writing press releases for the Second Coming. She met Gough Whitlam and was impressed by the man; he was vain and intellectually arrogant, but he had a presence the look of a leader. The younger Party workers began to talk as if he could walk on water; the older ones, the Irish Catholics, muttered about sacrilege but worked just as hard, just in case he was The Lord. They knew that if they didn't, God might forget the Apostles who had spent twenty-three years in the wilderness of the electorates. There is no desert like a party district branch that does not have a sitting member in Parliament.

Cleo discovered, or re-discovered, that all was not sweet accord in the Party. Labour never needed outside enemies; it bred its own within the ranks. It knew it could do nothing about the enmities, so, being politically wise, it boasted that they were a measure of its true reform philosophy. The Liberals, who were conservative and not liberal, had their own dissensions, but pretended they were gentlemen and did their knifing in locked sound-proofed rooms. It was politics in any democracy in the world: only the accent was different.

On a warm December Sunday evening Labour came back into power. It seemed that three-
quarters
of the country got drunk on beer, wine and euphoria; the other quarter drank hemlock. All the family had gathered in the family home in Coogee to watch the results on television. Alexander and Madge, Labour down to Alex's red socks, floated about as if Utopia were just outside the garden gate. Perry and Cheryl, who had voted Liberal, afraid of capital gains tax and all the other secret Labour heresies, were there, wearing the smiles of Pompeians who had just bought a villa on Vesuvius for the view.

Alex, whose beer-belly now made him look pregnant, put his arm round Cleo's shoulders and looked across at their father. “I'm more pleased for him than I am for the Party. He's waited what seems like forever for this.”

“What's he going to get out of it?” She remembered Sylvester's confession in London that he had long ago given up dreaming of being Prime Minister. “Now that I've been working at headquarters, I've learned a few things. He's not a front runner for any of the plum jobs.”

Alex looked at her. “You're kidding.”

“I'm not. And I think Dad knows it now.”

“Oh Christ!” Alex shook his head, and looked as if he were about to weep into his beer. He was a meteorologist, accustomed to sudden changes, but he had taken the political weather for granted. “All that bloody effort over the years—they'll give him more than the crumbs, surely!”

Sylvester came across to them, belly-laughing as if there were still votes to be won. “I wish your mother were here—I'd have crowned her Queen tonight!” And he a republican.

Cleo looked at him, feeling sorry for him: she knew that he knew that all he was going to get would be the crumbs. She would never know what had happened and she would never ask him. Somewhere along the years he had made the wrong friends and the wrong enemies.

“Congratulations, Dad,” she said and kissed him.

A month later he got the very minor Ministry for Power, which gave him no power at all. He came home from Canberra and sat out on the back verandah and looked down at the surf rolling in on to Coogee beach. Back in the days when the family had all lived here, there had been a makeshift billiards room on this verandah. Sylvester and the boys had put up fibro walls at one end of the verandah; the walls had been too close to the table and certain shots had to be played with the billiard cue at an acute angle. But it had been another point round which the family had congregated, a green baize field where they had
played
out their friendly rivalries.

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.”