Spearfield's Daughter by Jon Cleary Read Free Book Online

unimpressed by this, though.
    â€œThere are too many Aussies working in the Street already. You’re a bloody Mafia.”
    â€œWhat makes you think you should start at the top? Try one of the provincial papers, start there like most of us did.”
    â€œMy dear girl, this is The Times. We haven’t had a colonies correspondent since the turn of the century.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWhen 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.
    â€œBluddy 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?”
    â€œBluddy 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?”
    â€œNobody 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