Spearfield's Daughter (30 page)

He smiled. “Let's do that.”

It was all very civilized, which is no way for true lovers to act. The policeman and the driver, relieved that their charges were still unharmed, welcomed them back as if they were greeting State dignitaries. The drove on to the Vier Jahreszeiten.

As the car pulled up Cleo leaned close to Tom and kissed him on the lips. He held her shoulder but didn't pull her to him. He could hold a naked girl in his arms on a balcony in Paris but he couldn't
embrace
his real love in the back seat of a Hamburg police car. He returned her kiss, but there was a moratorium on any passion between them. Perhaps in ten years . . . Another time, she had said.

“Take care,” he said.

“You, too.” And felt suddenly lonely. There were more things to be afraid of than terrorists.

II

In June, on a bright summer's day when all the British looked smugly at the foreign tourists who made rude remarks about Britain's weather, Quentin Massey-Folkes resigned as editor of the
Examiner.
He was dying, of cancer, but Jack Cruze refused to let this be discussed. He would have barred obituaries from the
Examiner
except that they made such good reading for the living. For all the living except himself, that is.

Cleo had watched with agony the deterioration of Massey-Folkes. She had deep affection for him and thought he deserved to die gracefully and at his leisure. It almost hurt her to see how affected Jack was by Quentin's illness.

Jack had not been easy to get on with since her return from Germany in March. There may have been a change in her own attitude; she didn't know and preferred not to examine herself too deeply. Jack had known that Tom Border had been in Hamburg, but he made no mention of him at all. They bickered more often, an occupational hazard for those who live together; but they did not live together, and she saw the possibility of such a state of affairs looking fainter and fainter. The same thought had occurred to Jack, for he became more and more possessive.

“You can forget your column for July and August,” he had said to her in mid-May. “We're going on a cruise to the Dodecanese Islands. You and I alone most of the way, but we'll pick up a few people at Piraeus. I've rented a yacht, a big one. A hundred-and-twenty-footer.”

The size meant nothing to her; she was in a mood that day to have refused the
QE2.
“Two months is too long for my column to be out of the paper.”

“All right, you can send it from the yacht.”

“What will I write about? I write for ordinary people, not silvertails.” Silvertails was one of her father's favourite expressions; he used it for everyone making more money than himself. It went down well
with
the voters back home, ninety-nine per cent of whom aspired to be silvertails. She had introduced the word into her column and a Socialist MP at Westminster had paid her the ultimate compliment of using it in the Commons.

“The poor like to read about the rich,” said the silvertail in the room with her.

“I don't deny that. But only if I'm writing about them from the outside—taking the mickey out of them, if you like. They're not going to be happy about me living
la dolce vita
with you on the back end of a boat, especially a hundred-and-twenty-footer. They might buy you and me in a rowing boat on Staines reservoir, but I think that's about as far as they'd go.”

“There you go again. I try to do things to please you.”

“Jack, a little consultation would help. You're trying to run my
life
.”

“I'm trying to protect you from yourself. All you think about is your damned work. You haven't stopped since you came back from Hamburg in March, you don't even seem to want to take time to think. Every time I suggest something, you're busy.”

“We see each other at least three nights a week.”

“It's not enough!” His temper was rising.

“Well, that's too bloody bad!” She lost her own temper, something she had rarely done with him in the past. “My life's my own—I don't belong to you—not yet.”

Then he hit her. She had seen the suppressed violence in him before, something he seemed to keep under control as if he were afraid of what it would do to him as much as to someone else. She had seen it break out of him only once, when he thrashed at a fractious horse with his whip. There had been only the two furious lashes, then he had stopped, trembling as much as the whipped horse. Now he hit her across the face, jerking her head sideways with the force of his open hand.

She staggered back, blinded by shock more than by the sudden sting across her cheek. Then she picked up the small battery-run carriage clock on a table against one wall and hurled it at him. Fortunately she was still stunned and her aim was not good; otherwise she might have killed him. It struck him a glancing blow on top of the head and crashed to the floor on the far side of the room. He staggered back, one hand clutching his head, as taken aback by her violence as she had been by his.

She left him then, sailing out of his flat in full fury, all swagger gone, an Amazon who had given
more
than she had got. She slammed the front door and, to add to his own fury, the security alarm was somehow triggered and bells began ringing. Sid and Mrs. Cromwell came running from the kitchen and the hall porter burst out of the lift and banged on the front door. Jack Cruze, blood running from the cut on his head but soaking into his thick hair, told them to get the bloody bells fixed, then stamped upstairs to his study. Sid Cromwell picked up the smashed clock and nodded appreciatively; Miss Spearfield had given the Boss the time of day in a way he probably had not expected but had certainly deserved. Sid knew his boss's failings better than Jack did himself.

Upstairs in the library Jack got out a print of Greta Garbo in
Flesh and the Devil,
and lost himself in a fantasy of the woman who had been the dream goddess of his youth. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding, but there was a bump under the grey curls and he had a slight headache. When he went to bed he fell into another dream; Cleo was both flesh and the devil. He woke in the morning gritty-eyed, his headache worse. Erotic dreams are too exotic a course for a man in his fifties.

He sent her a dozen red roses and she called him at lunch-time, making him wait and suffer. “All right, Jack, I forgive you. But don't ever hit me again or that's the end between us.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper like that. It won't happen again.”

That night she slept with him in the penthouse flat and he woke next morning with fresh eyes and a clear head. Which proved to him that the actual exercise was far better than the fantasy, if only to induce sleep. But you never tell your loved one she is as good as Valium.

A week later she played hostess at a dinner in the flat. There were sixteen guests, which virtually split the dinner into two parties. Jack sat at one end of the long table and she at the other. The guest of honour was a Sheik from one of the Trucial States; his wife was safely back home in the harem, so he brought Rhonda Buick, the ex-beauty queen. She was introduced as his public relations adviser, but it was obvious there were also private relations between them. The Sheik sat on Cleo's right and was polite, but his eyes kept straying down the table to where Miss Buick sat with Jack Cruze.

“I hope Miss Buick has made things smooth for you here in London,” said Cleo.

“Oh yes, yes. Very smooth. English women have many talents.”

“Thank you,” said Cleo being English for the evening. She supposed that, in a way, she was no better than Rhonda Buick. She looked down the table at Jack, who employed her, though he didn't think
she
made things smooth for him. Then she turned to the man on her left. “What about the talents of American women, Mr. Kibler?”

Jerome Kibler was a New York banker, small, dapper and burdened with a giggle which made a low joke of high finance. But since he had got out of the army twenty-six years ago, coming out as a paymaster sergeant who had spent the war studying the stock market, confident that God, the Allies and Wall Street would win, he had piled dollar upon dollar and now sat on a heap where virtually everyone but the men at the very top in Wall Street, men on old heaps of money, looked up at him. He was Jewish and a friend of the Sheik, whose investments he supervised in the United States.

“American men are frightened of their women's talents.” His laugh turned into a giggle, as it always did.

“Are you all afraid of the Women's Liberation movement? What do you think of all this bra-burning?”

“We're advising our clients to sell their stock in Maiden-form.” Again the giggle. It was a pity he couldn't control it, because he was a nice, intelligent man and Cleo liked him at once. “No, seriously, we think it's a good thing. Or anyway I do. The Women's Lib thing, I mean, not the bra-burning. In my own bank we're promoting women to top positions. I think we're ahead of most banks in that respect.”

The Sheik shook his head. “You are buying trouble, Jerry. I hope I shan't have to deal with a woman when I come to New York next time.”

“Oh, I'm sure Mr. Kibler will protect you against that danger,” said Cleo.

The Sheik was not dense, just bigoted. He smiled, light winking on the gold at each corner of his mouth. “I come from an old-fashioned society, Miss Spearfield. If I were younger and not the ruler of my country, perhaps I could be more liberal.”

“What about the Sheik at the other end of the table?” said Kibler and didn't giggle. “What does he think about liberated women?”

Impulsively Cleo put a hand on his and laughed. “Mr. Kibler, Lord Cruze could take over from Sheik Abdullah tomorrow and the women in that man's country would never know the difference.”

The Sheik and Kibler laughed and all three looked down the table at Jack. His stare was frozen, and Cleo frowned, wondering what was on his mind; then she realized her hand was still on Jerry Kibler's.
Oh
God, she thought, this is ridiculous. He was now even jealous of their dinner guests.

Perversely she looked directly at Kibler, widened her smile as if she were trying to wrap him in it and said, “Mr. Kibler, would you have lunch with me tomorrow? I'd like to do a column on the place of women in the world of banking.”

“I'd be delighted. But let me take you. I like to keep a few of the old conventions.”

She didn't argue. She had only suggested having lunch with him to annoy Jack, another old convention.

Afterwards, over coffee in the drawing-room, Cleo said to Rhonda Buick, “Business seems to be improving. The PR business, I mean.”

Miss Buick, wide-eyed and innocent of all but major crimes said, “I know what you mean, Cleo. We're both getting on, you know. You just woke up earlier than I did to the fact that older men are more reliable than young guys with their payments.”

“What
is
the going rate at the harem?”

“I'll let you know,” said Miss Buick, spooning sugar into her coffee and her smile. “You may be out of a job some day.”

They parted the best of enemies. Miss Buick left early with the Sheik, warning him of the heavy day he had tomorrow. He went eagerly, as if looking forward to a heavy night.

Later, when the last guests had gone out of the door, Jack said at once, “What was going on between you and Jerry Kibler?”

“He's taking me to lunch tomorrow. We're going to talk about women in banking.”

“Is that all you're going to talk about?”

“Goodnight, Jack.” She went out of the flat, slamming the door behind her but this time not setting off any alarm.

Except in him. He opened the door to call her back, but the landing outside was already empty; she must have gone down the stairs without waiting for the lift. He closed the door and went into his bedroom, undressed and got into bed. Billie Dove, Lilian Tashman, even Garbo could not comfort him tonight. He knew that at times lately he had been acting like a jealous youth, someone with no experience of women, but he could not help himself. He had learned to live with the absence of Emma, but she had been
gone
more than twenty years now; in less time one learns to live without a leg or both legs. Even an hour's absence by Cleo was like trying to live without his head. He used that analogy rather than
without his heart.
He was head over heels in love but still not romantic.

In the morning he called Emma, but Emma's housekeeper answered the phone, went away and came back to say that Lady Cruze could not come to the phone; she was otherwise engaged. He slammed the phone down as if it were a bludgeon across the back of Emma's neck.

He and Cleo made up again. She did her column on women in banking and Jerry Kibler read it, rang her to say he liked it, giggled at some of her remarks and went back to New York, asking her to look him up if ever she came to America again. She said she would and forgot him.

Then Quentin Massey-Folkes resigned. Cleo was in the
Examiner's
news-room on his last day there. She could have written her column at home, but she went into the office on the three days when her column appeared and wrote it there; sitting at a small desk in a far corner of the big room. It was her way of showing that she still considered herself part of the paper's staff. Whether the rest of the staff appreciated her presence, she did not know, but no one sneered at her and she thought, or hoped, she had not lost her early popularity. She had swagger and confidence, but, as far as she knew, no one had ever accused her of having a big head.

She finished her column, handed it to a boy to take to the features editor, who was still Joe Brearly, the man who had given her her first job on the paper. Then she walked down the long room and into Quentin's office.