Read Online Spearfield's Daughter by Jon Cleary - Free Book Online Page B

black tie and dinner jacket, he sometimes felt like an undertaker on night duty. He knew he was narrow-minded about trendiness, homosexuality, unisexuality, women’s liberation and all the other aberrations that had broken out during that decade, but he could not help it. Like so many men who had started out as crooks, he had a narrow moral outlook in many ways.
    He glanced sideways at her, still sour, and wondered what she would say in the morning when she got the farewell bunch of white roses. He always said farewell to his mistresses, whether of short or long standing, with white roses; they got red ones right up to the final bunch. He knew that his method of ending an affair was no secret, but he liked it that way: it meant that he did not have to write any farewell notes. He never put anything on paper to a woman.
    â€œYou’re getting old and crotchety, Jack. That was an absolutely fantastic party tonight.” She was thirty-eight backpedalling to eighteen. Unlike the other editors on his newspapers, she featured as much copy about herself as she did about other people. She had become a celebrity (a word he hated: he had written a memo to all his editors that it was never to be used in any of the Cruze Organization’s chain of papers), the trendiest of the trendies. She had been his mistress for three years, but the affair had started before she had begun wearing mini-skirts and putting more mascara on her face than Theda Bara.
    â€œYou look like Theda Bara.”
    â€œWho’s she, for Christ’s sake?” She hadn’t started swearing till she was thirty-seven; had had a modest tongue to match the cashmere cardigan and small diamond pin she had worn in those days. Now she came to the office wearing kaftans and yards of beads, looking as if she was the editor of Harper’s Souk. “Oh, her. You and your old film stars. Personally, I thought I looked more like Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters. That was the effect I was after.”
    â€œYou missed by a mile.”
    He owned one of the best private collections of silent films in the country. Other rich men collected paintings or porcelain or antique furniture, learned about Correggio or pâte tendre, Sèvres or Riesener; he was an authority on Griffith and Ince, Milton Sills and Vilma Banky. He had gone to see his first film when he was five years old, a Jack Hoxie Western, a print of which he now owned; ever since then films had been his escape from his preoccupation with money and power. He had never looked on sex as an escape: it was only another way of showing his power over women. He seduced his women with his money and power, which was a quicker method than that of lesser, poorer men. Once upon a time he had invested in charm, having no money or power, but the girls of those days had not been impressed and decided he was no Ronald Colman or William Powell. In any event, girls in that year were looking for Clark Gables, a type in short supply in the villages of Buckinghamshire.
    The car drew up outside Felicity’s block of flats in Chelsea; she had moved here last year from Hampstead. “I want to be right in the middle of the action,” she had said and waltzed up and down the King’s Road tearing off her cardigan and brassiere. Or so he had imagined: he came here only on rare occasions and never before midnight.
    â€œComing up, darling? I’m still high.”
    He waited for her to lasso him with the red feather boa: she was so damned gay, a debutante on the verge of the menopause. “Goodnight. Don’t trip over your boa.”
    He didn’t look back as the car drove away, but he knew she would be standing on the kerb staring after him, getting the message. But she was as tough as he was; she would go up to her flat and empty a vase and wait for the arrival of the white roses. He felt no regret or guilt, he had never told her he loved her or promised her anything. It had been the same with