Spearfield's Daughter (5 page)

“I'm going to London.” Where sin and temptation abounded, but that was not the reason for her going.

That
surprised him. He had always supposed that she would want to stay close to home, to be comforted and supported. She was a radical like himself, of course, but radicalism in women never lasted. “Oh . . . well, I guess it's a good idea to see as much as you can before you marry and settle down. You want an introduction to anyone? Harold Wilson? He'd know someone in Fleet Street.”

“No, Dad. I want to do it on my own.”
Before I marry and settle down,
but she didn't add that, afraid of the bitter sarcasm on her tongue.

“Well, I suppose so. I did.”

“No, you didn't. You had Mum.”

He had the grace to look ashamed. “Do you think I've forgotten? Well, good luck, sweetheart. I hope the Poms appreciate you. How long will you be away?”

“I don't know, Dad. I'm ambitious. Some day I may own Fleet Street.” She laughed as she said it: still, it was a nice dream. One that had come to her only last night, the shaft of light on the road to London.

The Senate was in session in Canberra when she left Sydney for London and her father could not get away. He phoned her, wished her goodbye. Perhaps it was a bad connection (“Connections are always bad between Canberra and Sydney,” he had once said, but he had meant it in another context), but his voice seemed to break. He hung up hurriedly, saying he had just heard the division bells ring. She put the phone slowly back in its cradle and let the tears come. She felt guilty: as much as anything else, she was running away from him, from his name and what passed for fame in politics. She wondered if he had guessed.

Her brothers and sisters-in-law came to the airport to see her off. Her brothers, Alexander and Perry, short for Pericles (heroes both; or so her mother had hoped when she had christened them), hugged her to their beer bellies, the Great Australian Profile as she called it, and wished her the best of Aussie luck; in their own way they had tried to escape from their father by being as ordinary and plebeian as they could be. Her sisters-in-law, Madge and Cheryl, kissed her and, she sensed, envied her. They had both married young and if sin and temptation ever crossed their paths it would be in the form of some footballsy stud from the Leagues club, not a boulevardier from some Gomorrah like London, Paris or Rome.

Madge, the quiet sensible one, said, “I won't wish you the best of Aussie luck. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.”

Perry, who wasn't her husband, laughed and slapped Madge on the rump. “You girls don't know
when
you're well off.”

Cheryl said, “If you get into trouble, Cleo love, enjoy it. That's the best I can wish you.”

Suddenly she loved her sisters-in-law: us women against the male world. But she knew they were not women's libbers; and neither was she really. Men just goaded them into sounding that way.

Alexander, her elder brother, took her to the gate that led to Passport Control. “Don't think too harshly of Dad for not being here to say goodbye.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Of course I don't. He's been like this all our lives, hasn't he? We shouldn't have chosen a politician for a father.”

“No, this is different. He really wanted to be here. I talked to him last night—he called me. He didn't want you to think that he didn't care about you going away for so long. You're going away at the wrong time.”

“What do you mean?”

“He still thinks he has a chance of toppling Gough Whitlam as Leader. If he did, he'd be Prime Minister at the next election.”

Then I'm going away at absolutely the right time.

“He's got to be there in Canberra every minute, just in case Whitlam slips up.”

“Do you think he has a chance?”

Alex, vague and soft, more like his mother than his father, shrugged. “I hope so, for his sake. When you have as much ambition as he has . . .”

“I'm ambitious, too, Alex.”

“Then I hope you're never disappointed.” Then he smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “The best of Aussie luck, Sis.”

She went through into Passport Control. She showed her passport, then took her first step into the future. There was no turning back now, she had stepped off a cliff. It was a lovely feeling—almost, she guessed, like sky-diving. Her parachute, she hoped, would be her talent.

2

I

NOVEMBER IS
not a good month in which to land in London. No sensible invaders, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, or American tourists ever chose any time but summer to start their conquest of Britain; some summers, of course,
seemed
like November, but at least the invaders had chosen the proper time of the year. Cleo chose the worst of all possible times.

Snow covered the whole of eastern and northern Britain; London looked as if it had been dressed for a Dickens Christmas. A razor-sharp wind blew in from the Russian iceworks; ducks waltzed drunkenly on frozen ponds; mini-skirts and hot pants suddenly were, if not out of fashion, out of sight under long heavy coats. Noses were red and fingertips blue and permissive love, a recently-revived English custom, suffered a sharp set-back: it is difficult to be uninhibitedly orgiastic in front of a one-bar radiator.

In the United States Richard Nixon had been elected President and in England Enid Blyton had died; black crêpe was hung in Democratic wardrooms and in Kensington nurseries. The year was ending on the same gloomy note that had pervaded all the preceding months. In years to come people then in their youth would look back on that decade as the Swinging Sixties, forgetting the black periods. That year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, American youth was protesting about being drafted for a war it didn't believe in, the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia, an earthquake had killed 12,000 non-swingers in Iran. Cleo wondered why she had left the sunny bliss of ignorance that was the Australian climate. True, there had been anti-war demonstrations back home, but most of the population put on their sun-glasses, put their transistors to their ears, sank their lips into beer-foam, saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil.

She found a bed-sitting-room in a street off the Gloucester Road and for the first time in her life felt lonely. All at once she missed her mother. Brigid Spearfield had died in Cleo's last year at the Brigidine
Convent,
where the nuns had thought how lucky Cleo was to have a mother named after their patron saint and how discouraging it was for them to have such a female devil as a pupil. Cleo had cried for two days after her mother's death; then she had put her grief away inside her with her memories of her mother and got on with living. Now, in the dark, depressing flat she put the photo of Brigid on the chipped mantelpiece and wished that the serenely cheerful face could speak to her. She wanted someone to tell her she had done the right thing. There was no guarantee that Brigid, the least adventurous of women, would have told her that, but at least she would have offered her comfort. Brigid had always been very good at that. It only struck Cleo now, after she had got over the self-pity that had engulfed her, that there might have been times when Brigid herself would have welcomed some comfort, someone to tell her that she had done the right thing in always making herself subservient to Sylvester's ambitions.

Cleo went looking for work in Fleet Street. She was a little disappointed in the Street itself; somehow she had expected it to be wider, an avenue suggesting the power and influence it exerted. The buildings were unprepossessing but for the Law Courts at the western end; she hated the
Daily Express's
art deco home and the Greek-Egyptian (as if the architect had been looking both ways at once)
Daily Telegraph
building. The worst of all was the
Daily Examiner's
which looked as if it had started out to be a cathedral, decided to be a bank and finished up a barracks. She was only saved from total disillusionment with the Street when she went into the tiny courts hidden like cubby-holes for the affronted aesthetes off the main thoroughfare. She felt herself brushed by the ghosts of Johnson, Boswell and Dickens and decided to give Fleet Street another chance.

She knew a few Australian journalists working in London, but she did not go to them for advice or contacts. She was determined to make it on her own; if she was going to be independent, the flag had to be planted right at the start. The Fleet Street editors were unimpressed by this, though.

“There are too many Aussies working in the Street already. You're a bloody Mafia.”

“What makes you think you should start at the top? Try one of the provincial papers, start there like most of us did.”

“My dear girl, this is
The Times.
We haven't had a colonies correspondent since the turn of the century.”

“I don't want to be a bloody colonies correspondent! I want to write about
here—
Britain!”

The
Times
man had smiled, showed his Oxbridge politeness. “I was pulling your very attractive leg, Miss Spearfield. Why don't you try the
Telegraph?
They could do with a little Antipodean iconoclasm.”

She did not want to work for a newspaper that needed Antipodean iconoclasm. She got a job as a temporary secretary, but proved more temporary than her employer or she had anticipated. She left after one day when the employer, fired by her bosom and an electric radiator too close to his crotch, made a proposition to her that had nothing to do with the business of Thrackle and Gump, customs agents.

She had saved very little money in Sydney. After her mother had died, she had had the house almost to herself, since her father spent most of his time travelling or in Canberra. There had been no need to think of the rent or the gas and electricity bills or of putting something by for a rainy day. She had arrived in London with only a little over five hundred pounds. One hundred of which had gone in a bond on the flat. She began to wonder what the newspapers back home would say when it was learned that Sylvester Spearfield's daughter had joined the dole queue in Britain.

The girl in the next-door flat was an actress who, as she said, divided her time between being on the boards and being on her knees.

“When I'm not in a play or doing a bit on telly, I clean house for what I like to think is a select clientele. People in Mayfair. The only thing select about some of them is their address, but I can charge them a bit more than the usual.”

Her name was Pat Hamer, she came from Leeds and the Yorkshire accent came and went like a faint echo on a moorland wind. She was dark and pretty and had iron in her; she would never allow herself to be melted down for soap operas; she would play Lady Macbeth some day. In the meantime she played one-line parts as a maid in farces at the Whitehall Theatre. She and Cleo shared baked beans on toast in each other's rooms and each, secretly, wondered at the gutsy ambition of the other.

“Bluddy hell,” Pat said one day, “I missed out on a fantastic part today, right up my street. A prostitute from Leeds with a heart of solid brass. But the director had seen me in that bluddy thing at the Whitehall. All he could see me as was a maid in a short skirt with me boom showing.” When she was angry or disappointed, Leeds came to London. “So it's back to bluddy house-cleaning again. How's it going with you, luv?”

“Bluddy awful,” said Cleo, making a passable imitation of the accent. “If only I could latch on to
a
story that everyone else has missed . . . I'm thinking of going out and inventing one. How'd you like to be The Secret Mistress of a Royal Duke Who Tells All?”

“Nobody back home would believe it. My dad's a Communist shop steward.”

Christmas came and went, the gloom only relieved by a phone call from her father. “How are you, sweetheart? We're all missing you back here. We had Christmas dinner at Alex and Madge's, all of us, Perry and Cheryl and the kids. We had it beside the pool. It's been a marvellous day, a bit hot, but I suppose you wouldn't mind some of that now, eh?”

Why did he have to be so bloody hearty and cheerful? Did he think she was one of his voters? She looked out of her grimy window at a grim, grimy day; London was wrapped in dark clouds, snow and ice lay under a tree in the garden opposite like a mockery of fallen summer blossom. Her small radiator glowed in the gloomy room, looking no warmer than a neon sign on an Arctic highway.

“Has Fleet Street opened its arms to you yet?”

“Not yet, Dad.” It was better to be honest; he would guess the truth from her voice anyway. She was cold and lonely and miserable and she could not disguise the fact, even at 12,000 miles. She hated all those bastards beside their pools back in Sydney and she hoped every one of them would develop incurable sun cancers. “But the stars chart in the
Daily Mirror
says things will be better for Scorpios in 1969.”

“Stars charts are like political opinion polls, always just wide of the mark. But hang in there—isn't that the expression they use these days? If I can help at all . . . Harold Wilson? Or maybe Rupert Murdoch?”

“No, Dad. When I really need help, I'll cable you for the money to come home.”

“That's my girl. Keep trying, sweetheart.” But somewhere between Sydney and London his voice seemed to break. “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

She cried her eyes out, wiped them, put on some make-up and went out to a pub. From there she almost went home with a sentimental doctor from Adelaide who was doing a post-graduate course at Bart's. But he, too, lived in a bed-sit and abruptly she did not want to be made love to in a lumpy single bed in a chill room with stained wallpaper and the smell of last night's warmed-up TV dinner hanging in the air. If she was going to let herself be seduced as a comfort, she should at least ask for a double room at the Savoy or Claridges. She thanked the doctor for his invitation and went home to the Gloucester Road.