Spearfield's Daughter (72 page)

Sylvester said, “I remember something Willy Brandt told some of us when we were over in Europe on a junket several years ago. He said all Western politicians had promised the voters too much and we were never going to be able to deliver. I'd add to that. We promised them so much they've now all become greedy. I grew up as a union organizer. In those days we thought about the unemployed as much as we did about the employed—because the unemployed had been our mates. Not any more. All the blokes in work, especially the tradesmen, have become little capitalists interested only in Number One.”

“It's the way of human nature,” said Jack, who had always been interested in Number One. “I'm surprised it took you so long to realize it.”

Sylvester nodded reluctantly, sipped his scotch: disillusion needed the best of salves. “I've been spouting off in the Senate for years about rich tax dodgers—they've been getting away with murder back home. Then a couple of months ago I saw some brickies—bricklayers—working on a place next door to my house. They were all being paid in cash at the end of the day. I got the builder on the side and asked him what was going on. He told me if he didn't pay the brickies in cash, they'd go somewhere else and work for
a
builder who would. They were making five hundred dollars a week and declaring only half of it as income.” He shook his head. “I've spent more than half my life working for people like that and I find out they're just like the bastards I've been fighting against.”

“People like me?” said Jack.

Sylvester nodded solemnly; then abruptly let out the belly-laugh. Jack grinned at him and the two touched glasses and drank to each other. Jack knew that life was just a Hall of Mirrors: the trick was to recognize that each and every one of the distorted reflections was part of the truth. Sylvester believed that the mirrors were to blame, that they had been put in by some shoddy builder. Jack, who could feel sorry for himself in love but not in business, felt sorry for his newfound, if only temporary, friend.

When they landed at Kennedy, Cleo was waiting for Sylvester. Jack was catching a connecting flight to Charleston, but Sylvester grabbed him by the arm and told him he had to meet Cleo.

“Jack, you're still her boss. Some day you're going to have to meet her again, talk to her. Do it now while I'm with you, it'll be less awkward. If she sees how friendly I am with you, she's got to accept you.”

It's a case of
me
accepting
her,
Jack thought; but didn't voice the thought. Against his own instincts he went out to meet Cleo; and immediately wished he hadn't. She looked as beautiful in his eyes as she ever had; the memories of her flesh enveloped him till he felt he was going to break out in a sweat. But the effect on him wasn't all physical; the presence of her, which had nothing to do with her face or body, weakened him till he felt he was ready to fall at her feet. Her smile, her voice, the occasional sidelong glance from her eyes bruised him like blows; but behind all the surface attraction that was killing him was the core of her. It was indefinable, as it is in any person: it was, he guessed, her deepest nature, the one he had found amongst all the mirrors.

“Emma wished to be remembered to you.” It wasn't what he had meant to say, but the words slipped into the vacuum on his tongue.

“She was at Dorothy's funeral? I felt guilty—I should have been there.”

“Well, we can't be everywhere at once.”

“No.”

It was Sylvester who broke up the meeting, recognizing he had done the wrong thing in bringing
them
together. He shook Jack's hand warmly, said he would look him up next time he came to London—“You never know, I might get Malcolm Fraser to put me in the House of Lords. That's the last haven for idealists, isn't it?”—and took Cleo out to the limousine she had waiting for them.

Jack watched them go; it was like watching his life recede. He stood there in the midst of the bustling, careless crowd, an untidy, forlorn multi-millionaire who looked in need of Travellers' Aid.

IV

Going into Manhattan in the limousine Cleo said, “Did he suggest coming out to meet me or did you?”

“I did. It was a mistake, wasn't it? I'm sorry, sweetheart.”

“It was harder for him than it was for me. I have Tom. He has no one. I have some news for you, something I hope you'll like. Tom and I are being married Saturday. You can give me away.”

He had always been an emotional man; he could hardly see her for tears as he hugged her. “Oh sweetheart, I'm so bloody happy for you! I don't know Tom, I can hardly remember what he looks like. But if he's the one for you, then he's all right. You've taken your time, God knows—”

“That's why I know he's the one. He's at my apartment now. You'll like him. You'd bloody well better,” she threatened.

He grinned, kissed her warmly on the cheek. The years fell away, he felt he was embracing the child he had adored all that time ago when he and Brigid would sit and watch their youngest and wonder what traps lay ahead of her. She had negotiated a lot of traps since then, but he was not so cynical as to think that marriage was one. He might no longer believe in the voters but he still believed in love and romance.

“There's just one thing,” Cleo said. “I made the mistake of mentioning at a board meeting yesterday that you were arriving. Claudine Roux, my other boss besides Jack, the big boss, if you like, is having a dinner party for some Republican senators. I gather it's for her brother's benefit. He's the one who was the general and now he's trying to be a foreign affairs expert. He and Claudine thought it would be a good idea to have a voice from Down Under.”

“Whoever listened to us in Washington? We peed all over the Senate floor back home when Mal
Fraser
came to Washington and Jimmy Carter introduced him as ‘my friend John Fraser.' They had to draw him a map to show him where Australia was, just north of the American base at the South Pole, someone said. Shall I speak English or give them a bit of aboriginal dialect?”

“Be on your best behaviour. I don't want any of your Aussie ocker image. Do you have a better suit than that?”

“No.”

“Crumbs, you look worse than Tom. And Jack, too. Why have I always surrounded myself with bums?”

The two bums greeted each other warily, since Sylvester was offering his daughter and Tom was offering only himself. But within ten minutes Sylvester was convinced Cleo had made a good choice; and Tom relaxed, knowing he was accepted. Cleo watched them with the self-satisfied smile of a successful match-maker.

“Are you coming to this dinner tonight?” Sylvester asked.

“No, the help hasn't been invited,” said Tom, relieved that he had not been. Alain and Simone would probably be at the dinner and he did not want to face them, not so close to his wedding day. He would be better prepared to face them, if he had to, when he was properly anchored.

“I've never met this Mrs. Roux. I gather she's something worse than Lucrezia Borgia.”

“Only on her good days,” said Cleo. “Come on, Dad, I'll drop you off at your hotel. I have to go back to the paper for a couple of hours. I'll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

When she picked him up she looked at him in surprise. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I was kidding this afternoon. When I knew I was coming home this way, I decided I wouldn't disgrace you any more. I went to Harrods and bought this suit.”

“Tom bought a suit there. Once.”

“He is a bit of a bum, isn't he? But it suits him. The same with me. Notice this shirt? I bought it at some pansy shop in Jermyn Street, cost me the bloody earth. The salesman kept trying to make us a couple of consenting adults.”

“You look marvellous. Now behave as well as you look and they will think Australia is civilized.”

Claudine was all regal charm, Catherine greeting a minor prince from Outer Mongolia. “Is this
your
first visit to America, Senator?”

“I first came here in 1936. I jumped the rattler—rode the rods, as you call it—from San Francisco to Chicago. I came across to see Harry Bridges—remember him? He was an Aussie who ran your West Coast waterfront. Then I went on to an IWW conference. The Wobblies, you remember? Industrial Workers of the World. They were trying to revive them, but it never came to anything.”

“1936?” said Claudine. “I think my late husband and I were tiger-shooting in India that year.”

Sylvester didn't let go with the belly-laugh. He smiled and shook his head and Claudine returned the smile. “I've been heckled many times, Mrs. Roux, but never like this. You win.”

“I always do, Senator. Now may I have your arm to go into dinner? You are sitting on my right.” A few moments later, sitting at the head of the table, she looked at her butler. “What is the main wine this evening?”

“A Margaux, 1937, madame.”

“1937. Was that a good year for the Wobblies, Senator?”

“I don't know,” said Sylvester. “I was back home shooting rabbits.”

Oh Dad, Cleo thought, I love you! She settled down to enjoy the dinner as much as possible, knowing he was going to hold Australia's end up. She was surprised at her own nationalism; she had never flown the flag except when she felt she was being put down as an Australian. Sylvester had never been anything but what he was tonight, a patriot, and all at once she determined, if only for tonight, to be her father's daughter.

But there was no need to wave the flag. Everyone at the table listened to Sylvester and Roger; not everyone agreed with them and they didn't always agree with each other, but the argument was good-tempered and well-informed. Louise had come with Roger, and Cleo wondered if they were living together again. Several times Louise glanced across the table and smiled at her, but she appeared amused by rather than interested in the talk. She's come to terms with herself, if not Roger, Cleo thought.
Let Tom and me always come to terms with each other.

From opposite sides of the table Cleo and Simone watched each other carefully. It was the first time Cleo had met Alain's wife, Tom's ex-wife; the two of them, in a way, had more in common than anyone else at the table. Simone was slim and svelte, her hair worn in a chignon; Alain had made her get rid
of
the bangs. Cleo could see what any man would see in her; she just wondered what was that little extra that, in Tom's and Alain's eyes, put her on a par with herself. She had no vanity, but she liked to put a true value on herself. From further up the table Alain, who might have given her at least half the answer, watched her with the same carefulness. Claudine, not missing a point, open in her gaze, watched them all.

“I liked that story on the terrorists in the
Courier,
Miss Spearfield.” The Senator from the Mid-West, silver-haired and smooth, a Van Cleef and Arpels version of Sylvester, sat on Cleo's right. “You were properly rough on them. But I thought the editorial on the Shah went too far.”

“So did I,” said Alain.

“Not at all,” said Roger, and Cleo didn't have to defend herself. “The
Courier
needs to take some definite stands these days.”

“You have a definite enough one on the Mafia,” said the Senator from New England, plump and shiny-skinned, as if New England rock had been pulverized and made into a mud-ball. “You really named names there. The mobsters out in Chicago and Kansas City can't be too happy.”

“That's our policy now,” said Cleo, aware of Alain's cold stare. “Naming names.”

When the dinner party broke up Claudine put her hand on Sylvester's arm. “I hope this won't be the last time you'll visit us, Senator.”

“Now Cleo's settled here I'll be coming over as often as I can. I might even ask Mal Fraser to appoint me Consul-General.”

“Why don't you?”

He laughed, softly; he wouldn't trust her as far as he could throw her with his arthritic shoulder, but he liked her. “I still have a few old friends back home in the Party. If President Carter made you ambassador to somewhere, would your friends speak to you?”

“I see your point, Senator. Except that I have never worried about what my friends think of me.”

“That's the difference between us. You'd never have felt at home in the Wobblies.”

“I'll try hard not to regret what I've missed.”

Going back to his hotel in the limousine, he said, “What's wrong between you and Mrs. Roux's son?”

“You don't miss much, do you?” She explained what the personal position had been; he made no
comment.
He was an old-fashioned father who believed in the double standard, especially for daughters. “Now I'm not sure whether he's being personal, getting his own back on me, or he's suddenly just got plain ambitious. He makes it pretty clear he doesn't like the way I run the paper.”

“Who's winning?”

“I am, so far. But if ever Jack Cruze sold his interest in the paper, I think I'd be out on my neck.”

“Is he likely to do that?”

“I don't know. I could never bring myself to ask him not to sell. He doesn't owe me anything, not any more.”

The limousine drew up outside the Pierre, where Cleo had booked him in. She would have preferred to have had him stay with her in the apartment, but the second bedroom had been converted into a study and it would have meant his sleeping on a couch in the living-room. On top of that Tom was now sleeping every night at her apartment, having virtually abandoned Kips Bay Plaza. It had been easier all round to book her father into the Pierre at her expense and give him some of the luxury that, because of his stubborn ideals, he had dodged all his life.

“Come up for a drink.”

“I'm tired, Dad. And I have to go back to the office for half an hour—”