Spearfield's Daughter (19 page)

Later, when he had gone out, she went into her bedroom, shut her door against interruption by one of the maids, and wept. It was the first time she had shed tears since his birth.

That evening she went to Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral and prayed for his safe return. She went home confident that God had listened to her. She didn't ask much of Him, but when she did she expected service.

Alain reported with his draft, but found he was not expected to join the other draftees going to boot camp. He was being sent south to another camp to start an Intelligence course.

“How do I rate that, sir? I thought I should learn first how the army works.”

“You've done six months ROTC, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then that oughta give you an idea how the army works.” But the captain behind the desk, battle-scarred with cynicism as much as anything else, looked up at him. “You also got an uncle, General Brisson, right? I guess he told you all you need to know, right?”

Alain knew then that strings had been pulled after all, not by his uncle but by his mother. “I'd rather go to boot camp first, sir. I did that ROTC bit when I first went to college. I dropped out—they said
I'
d never make officer material.”

“They don't say anything here about making you an officer down at this course. All it says here is that's where you gotta report. Here's your ticket. North Carolina oughta be pretty nice this time of year. Give my regards to your uncle, if you ever see him.”

Alain didn't blame the captain for his attitude. “I'll do that, sir.”

He thought of calling his mother, blasting her for pulling the strings as she had done, then decided it would be a waste of time. She would tell him she didn't want to discuss it.

In the train taking him south he looked out at the countryside, grey-green, faded red and brown, like a tinted etching, under the fall sky. A small town went by: a white church steeple, a neon sign above a tavern, tattered bunting flapping in the wind above a used car lot. A man on a horse (a horse? Alain tried to look back, but the man was already gone from view) waited at the railroad crossing like someone from another era: a messenger who had arrived too late, he thought.
Oh Christ, do the messages ever get through in time?
He was twenty-two years old and he was beginning to think that no one ever listened to him, least of all his mother.

He began, for the first time, to think of dying in Vietnam. Up till now the thought had not occurred to him, but now all at once he was frightened by it.

A girl stood in the aisle beside him. “Is this seat taken?”

“No.” She was no knock-out, but she was attractive and looked cheerful. “It's all yours.”

She sat down, arranged herself as some women do, as if taking a long lease on where they've planted their bottoms. Then she looked at him. “I was watching you from across the aisle, I was in that window seat there. You looked lonely. Sort of sad. You're going into the army, aren't you?”

He looked at her with a spark of interest. “How did you know? You're pretty perceptive.”

“I just know. I study boys your age, the ones who have to go to the war. What were you thinking about? Your folks, your girl-friend?”

“Me.” All at once she was a nuisance. “Actually, I was thinking about being killed.”

“You shouldn't. Think about living. Jesus will take care of you.” She put her hand in the large cloth bag on her lap, then handed him a booklet. “He takes care of all of us. It's all here, in this book.”

“Do you ride the trains looking for guys like me?” He said it facetiously.

“
Yes,” she replied, seriously.

Suddenly, against his whole nature, he wanted to shout at her, be cruel to her. What made her think Jesus had all the answers? The priests at his prep school had lost him years ago; their messages had never got through. He had run away from them and now, out of kindness, he got up to run away from this busybody.

“What's your name, miss?”

“Lola Ann Fluegler.”

“Well, Lola Ann, when I meet up with Jesus, I'll tell Him you're busy spreading His word. But if you should be talking to Him, ask Him why He doesn't stop the goddam war.”

“It's a war against Communism, against the Anti-Christ.”

Oh God, he thought, how old is she? The same age as myself, younger? What would she be like in middle age? Still riding trains, looking for young men to fight the Anti-Christ?

His anger all at once ran out of him. “I'm sorry, Lola Ann. Some day you're going to be sadder than me.”

He went down the aisle, his legs abruptly weak, hardly holding him up against the swaying of the train. He wondered if, after all, he might be killed, if at some crossing in Vietnam the pale horseman, Death, would be waiting for him with the final message of all.

VII

He went to Vietnam three months later, in February 1970. Within a week he learned from the grunts, the men who were fighting it, that the truth was that the war could not be won. Two weeks later he was wounded, when the Jeep in which he was travelling hit a land-mine. The two men with him were killed and he sustained wounds to his knee that meant he would limp for the rest of his life. The doctors and nurses in the field hospital were surprised that he could laugh about it.

“It could have been worse,” he told them. “I was looking for a horseman with a message.”

They guessed he must have been stoned out of his mind when he went into action.

8

I

THE SIXTIES
went out and the Seventies came in. Politicians, economists, philosophers, fashion designers and astrologers were asked for their opinions on the decade ahead. They were all cautious and the man in the street suffered from platitude sickness.

Over the next year Cleo became more and more well-known. If Cleo Spearfield wasn't exactly a household name, like Bird's Eye fish fingers or Spillers dog food, it did conjure up a face and figure for millions of television viewers. Her column was moved to a more prominent place in the
Examiner
and occasionally the paper featured her picture on its billboards. She was herself at last, her own woman, no longer Sylvester Spearfield's daughter. She was still Lord Cruze's mistress, but such a distinction was not the subject of common gossip in the households of Britain.

The fantasy of the Swinging Sixties died away, like a slowing swing in a children's playground when everyone has grown up and moved on. A few still struggled to keep alive the euphoria: boutiques, bistros and pop bands; but it was like Paris of the Twenties, kept going for the tourists rushing to experience it before the Depression of the Thirties took root. No one expected another Depression in Britain, something like that could never happen again, but a certain exhaustion had set in. The British had been too long out of training to become marathon hedonists.

Labour went out of power to be replaced by the Tories and Mr. Heath. The latter, a bachelor, an organist and a racing yachtsman, three pursuits the voters didn't expect from their Prime Ministers, came in with a lot of goodwill from everyone but the far Left and the old guard Right. As time went by he would find that the middle ground in politics is often where the shooting range is just right from both extremes.

Cleo and Jack Craze's relationship settled into a sort of freelance marriage: there was no contract but both kept working at their alliance. Cruze continued to win events at horse shows, Cleo's presence no
longer
tangling his reins; the male members of the horse set gave Cleo mental pats on her flanks and told each other she was a fine mare. She played hostess at the Cruze dinner parties, even persuading Mrs. Cromwell to experiment a little with the menus: Mrs. C. went so far as to make her raspberry flan with French pastry but that was as far as she was prepared to stray beyond national boundaries. Sometimes, in the quiet hour after such dinner parties, Cleo marvelled at her own ease amongst the company Jack had invited; hostessing, like prostitution, is a trade for which some have a talent and some don't. She charmed ambassadors and Cabinet ministers and tycoons, if not always their wives, and held her own in the dinner table conversation; that was something she had inherited from her father, something for which she did not resent him. She and Jack went to Antibes in the summer and joined a Greek shipowner for a Mediterranean cruise on his steam yacht; she appeared on deck in a bikini and the Greek at the wheel almost ran the yacht straight into Italy, so blinded was he by lust. Jack Cruze, stomach tucked in, muscles painfully bulged, felt pride as he saw the young chaps gloating over her. He told himself his money hadn't bought her, just made a down payment: now she loved him for himself. Though so far she hadn't said so in so many words.

The war ground on in Vietnam: everyone seemed to know it was finished but no one knew how to stop it. Edward Kennedy, shaking the waters of Chappaquiddick from himself, began to be heard again; Irish Indians once more began circling the White House. President Nixon retreated from America, the country held at bay by a two-man wall, Haldeman and Erlichman. Americans turned to a television star for a guide to what to believe: Walter Cronkite became the American Pope.

“I'd love to have that sort of influence.” Cleo and Cruze were sitting in his study looking at a CBS clip featured in a
Panorama
programme on the American scene.

“Forget it.” Jack Cruze was at ease, in pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. Cleo had begun buying his clothes for him, but Turnbull and Asser, when told for whom she was buying, had cut their labels out of their shirts and pyjamas and gowns: they knew a poor advertisement when they heard of him. “You're too good-looking to be influential. If ever a woman is going to have that sort of influence in this country, she's got to be the homely, motherly sort. Like they have in detergent commercials. You come on the screen and half the men in the country say, I wonder what she's like in bed? They're not listening to you because they want to be reassured.”

“What about the women? Maybe I could influence them.”

He
shook his head. “They like you, I think. But if you and Mrs. Whitehouse ran against each other in a by-election, she'd romp in.” Mrs. Whitehouse had come to prominence in the past couple of years, leading a detergent crusade against smut on television. “She's married and doesn't shove her chest out the way you do.”

“My chest would have nothing to do with it.”

“Let me tell you about breasts. When I bought the
Examiner
it was a dull newspaper that backed the Liberal Party and sold about as many copies as the Libs had paid-up members. The English have always loved tits, so I gave ‘em to them. In brassieres, of course—that was 1955, remember. You couldn't have Anthony Eden and bare tits on the same page. Circulation doubled in a year, trebled within five years. I don't know whether the Libs continued to buy the paper, but the Labour voters came in from all over the country. The average British working man loves tits and bums more than he does the Welfare State—give him a choice of Raquel Welch for a weekend and a top pension for life and see what he takes. In 1964 we backed Labour to win—I'm a Tory, but I knew who the
Examiner's
readers were going to vote for. On election day we featured a girl with the biggest tits in London, a Labour rosette on each nipple and that was all. People laughed and the intellectual Labourites, the dons from the universities, said it was disgusting. But it helped Labour win. In the New Year's Honours List a little while later Harold Wilson gave me my life peerage. He still calls me Lord Tits when we're alone.”

“Well, if I put a Union Jack on each breast—” she hated the word
tit
, but let him use it, “maybe they'll vote for me.”

“You missed my point. They didn't vote for the girl with the tits. They all knew what she was, a come-on for them to buy the
Examiner.
She was part of the ballyhoo of the campaign, but it was what we said in the editorial that counted with them. If we'd run a picture of Mary Wilson, as nice a woman as you can find, with rosettes on her tits, Labour would have been swamped. Be satisfied with what you've achieved so far, Cleo. You're the best-looking reporter in this country, but you're no female messiah.”

Don't tell me what I should do!
But she didn't say that, just got up and switched off the television set. “I'm going down to my flat. I have some reading to do.”

He had bought her a flat in this building and she had moved into it, against her better judgement. It was nowhere near as large as his duplex, but it was bigger than the flat in the mansion block in South
Kensington,
and it looked out on to Green Park, a view she found both attractive and restful. She knew that he had never bought a flat for any of his previous mistresses, though he had paid the rent for some; he had certainly never brought any of them to live in the same building as himself. It was tantamount to asking her to live with him, a proposal of some sort of marriage, and she had realized that, by her acceptance, it had been a commitment for both of them. Much more, she suspected, than either of them had bargained for when she had first gone to bed with him that weekend at St. Aidan's House.

“What sort of reading?” On the nights when they did not sleep together he liked her to stay up here with him until he was ready to say goodnight.

“I'm going to Hamburg tomorrow.
Scope
is doing a piece on the NATO exercises.”

“Dammit, you're off again! I wanted us to go down to Antibes. I've rented a yacht.” He had never bought a yacht because, with their high running costs, he had never been convinced they were a sound capital investment. He still counted the pounds, if not the pennies.