The Beaufort Sisters Read online

  Jon Cleary

  THE BEAUFORT

  SISTERS

  Copyright

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979

  Copyright © Jon Cleary 1979

  Jon Cleary asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780002220378

  Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780008139339

  Version: 2015-05-19

  Dedication

  To

  Shelagh

  and Freddie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: The Sisters

  Chapter Two: Nina

  Chapter Three: Nina

  Chapter Four: Nina

  Chapter Five: Margaret

  Chapter Six: Margaret

  Chapter Seven: Margaret

  Chapter Eight: Sally

  Chapter Nine: Sally

  Chapter Ten: Sally

  Chapter Eleven: Prue

  Chapter Twelve: Prue

  Chapter Thirteen: Tim and Lucas

  Chapter Fourteen: The Sisters

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  The Sisters

  1

  ‘Why are so many tennis players pigeon-toed?’ said Prue. ‘They’re very sexy-looking till you get to their feet.’

  ‘Why don’t we just watch the tennis?’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve paid for that, not conversation we could have at home.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Sally and half-raised her walking stick as if she might thump her sister with it. ‘Is this another tax deductible expense?’

  Prue put on her glasses, looked out at the four men on the court, frowned, pursed her lips, then took off the glasses. ‘What was I about to say? Something about sexiness in sport.’

  ‘Is sex a sport?’ said Nina. ‘All the manuals I’ve seen advertised, I thought it was a course in bedroom engineering.’

  The Beaufort sisters were sitting in the gold boxes, the most expensive, in the Kansas City municipal auditorium watching the World Professional Tennis Doubles championship. Collectively they were always known by their maiden name, even though all of them were married and all four had been married more than once. Sixteen years separated them from youngest to oldest: Prue was thirty-seven, Sally forty-one, Margaret forty-eight and Nina fifty-three. None of them had lost her beauty and together they attracted the eye of any man not suffering from cataracts or a lack of hormones; even college youths had been known to remark that maybe there was something to be said for older women if they all looked as good as the Beaufort sisters. Of course, for those who knew how much they were worth, their wealth added lustre to their beauty and not just because of all the creams, massage and hair styling it could buy for them. A woman is never better framed than when in the doorway of a bank in which she is a major stockholder.

  The tennis tournament was still in its early stages and the local citizens had not yet rushed to fill the huge indoor stadium. Only avid tennis fans and the country club set, and the Beauforts belonged, between them, to one or the other or both, had shown up this afternoon. The sound of racquets meeting ball echoed in the cavernous auditorium like the amplified sound of an accountant’s gut-string being torn apart. It was obvious that the players now on court were disturbed by the mocking acoustics of the near-empty galleries. None seemed more upset than Clive Harvest, one of the two Australians playing a South American pair.

  He was a tall muscular man, some years older than the other three men on court, with blond good looks and a set of expressions that seemed to jump back and forth between temper and laughter. He went up for a smash, misjudged it and put the ball well out of court; he cursed loudly and flung his racquet after the ball. Then he suddenly jumped the net, raced to each of his opponents, grabbed their hands and went through a pantomime of apology, retrieved his racquet and jumped back over the net. A lone spectator in the upper gallery, wanting to communicate with someone, anyone, gave him a loud Bronx cheer; Harvest saluted the compliment with two fingers. The two South Americans glowered in disgust and Harvest’s partner, a boy of about twenty, just looked embarrassed.

  ‘Mr Harvest,’ said the umpire from his throne, ‘if you’ve finished your little act, may we continue the match?’

  For a moment it looked as if Harvest were going to give the umpire the two-fingered salute; then suddenly he smiled, a broad flash of teeth in his tanned face, and looked genuinely contrite. ‘Sorry, Mr Baker. I’m a perfectionist, that’s my trouble. Missing an easy smash like that – ’

  ‘We all aim for perfection, Mr Harvest. Let’s try for a little less this afternoon, so that we can get this match finished.’

  There was scattered applause, but Harvest just looked around and smiled broadly, as if his antics and display of temper had been committed by someone who had already left the court.

  He won the next point and the game with a deft interception that split the two South Americans like a guerrilla’s bullet. As the two teams crossed over, pausing near the umpire’s chair to towel themselves, Harvest looked towards the Beaufort boxes. He had done the same thing several times during the match. It was impossible to tell who it was interested him; his glance was always too quick and casual. He was, however, more than casually interested in someone in the boxes.

  ‘I think I’ll go,’ said Nina. ‘This isn’t very interesting.’

  ‘You can’t walk out in the middle of a match!’ Margaret waved a protesting hand. Sometimes she acted as if she were the family matriarch. She was taller than her sisters, no hint of grey yet in her dark brown hair, and she carried herself in what Nina called Missouri Regal style. ‘It’s an insult to the players.’

  ‘That Australian has been insulting us spectators all afternoon,’ said Sally. ‘You don’t owe him any compliment, Nina.’

  Nina stood up, slipping her arms into the sleeves of the vicuna coat she had been wearing across her shoulders. She was the shortest of the sisters, a little too tall to be called petite; her golden blonde hair would have been darker if not for her weekly visit to her hairdresser. She was no better or more expensively dressed than her sisters, but she had just that extra touch of elegance. In Kansas City, Missouri, the Beauforts were the family and it was as if Nina had taken it upon herself to show outsiders that the citizens were not a
ll descendants of One-Eyed Ellis, Wild Bill Hickok and other, later rascals.

  She left the boxes, stares following her from the other boxes, and went out into the entrance lobby. George Biff, patient as a statue of himself, the light gleaming like points of humour in his ebony face, was waiting there. He touched the peak of his chauffeur’s cap with his maimed hand.

  ‘I get the car, Miz Nina. Be but two minutes, out front there.’

  ‘No, I’ll come with you, George.’

  The old black looked at her, seeing the nervous tension in her, wondering what had upset her. But he said nothing, led her out to the Rolls-Royce in the nearby parking lot.

  Going home in the car Nina sat gazing out the window with a face that seemed suddenly to have become younger, as if years had been wiped away from it. But then George Biff, watching her anxiously in the rear-view mirror, saw the frown appear between her eyes, and then her eyes close, but not before he had seen the glistening of tears.

  ‘You all right, Miz Nina?’

  ‘Yes.’ She did not open her eyes. ‘Just a headache.’

  The car purred along, George Biff making no attempt to get out of line in the traffic and overtake other cars. All the Beauforts had expensive cars, but only Nina had a Rolls-Royce, one of the few in the city. Margaret, who cared too much about such things, being political, thought it a little nouveau-riche for the Middle West, something one might expect from the new millionaires who wished to make their wealth conspicuous. But Nina had always had her own way and this was her second Rolls-Royce. Her only concession to inconspicuousness was that both cars had been black and that George Biff was under strict instructions not to show any arrogance in traffic. Not that a Rolls would have had much deference from the local wheelborne peasants.

  ‘Be on the Parkway in a minute. You just relax back there.’

  ‘I am relaxed.’ Nina opened her eyes. ‘Don’t be such an old fusspot, George. Sometimes I think you should have been a mammy.’

  George grinned. ‘Would of got me locked up, a black mammy chasing some of them black gals like I used to. Don’t think I ever heard of a gay black mammy. Here’s the Parkway. Nearly home.’

  2

  Ward Parkway runs south out of Kansas City and is lined with some of the more magnificent homes in the nation. There is no consistency of style, unless conspicuous expenditure of money is in itself a style. French Regency, English Tudor, Southern Colonial: the great-granddaughter of Scarlett O’Hara waves across the manicured lawns to a blue-rinsed Elizabeth R of Missouri. Yet even though the homes are symbols of the wealth of their owners, vulgarity, like the weeds in the expensive lawns, is not allowed to flourish. Reticence, if such a trait is possible in a $500,000 mansion set back only yards from a busy thoroughfare, is looked upon as desirable as being white, Protestant and Republican. Some Catholic Democrats managed to settle along the Parkway, most notably the political boss Tom Pendergast, but they appear to have done little to change the ideas of the majority as to what is right and proper for such an address. When a Catholic President moved into the White House, black crêpe was observed hanging in the windows of one or two of the older mansions. It is only fair to add that they did not hang crêpe in their windows when President Nixon moved out of the White House.

  The original Beaufort house had been one of the first to be built along the Parkway. Thaddeus Beaufort, the founder of the family fortune, built the house as he had built his wealth: solidly, conservatively and to last. The architect, made light-headed by the commission, had mixed his design but somehow avoided vulgarity; the mansion was an amalgam of English Elizabethan manor house and French chateau, without the libidinous air of either. The property had once taken up fifty acres of a whole block and had been known as Beaufort Park; a private park which the public hoi-polloi could only admire through the spiked iron-railing fence surrounding it. Peacocks, avian, not human, had strutted the lawns; Thaddeus, walking the paths of his estate every evening summer and winter, had always worn black. His wife Lucy wore only mauve; walking together, they offered no competition to the peacocks. Sunday afternoons the hoi-polloi would stand outside the iron railings and whistle at both the peacocks and the Beauforts, but got no recognition from either. Late in life Lucy bore her only child, Lucas, and he too was dressed in dark clothes as he grew out of babyhood. Walking their rounds, the father, mother and small boy looked like a tiny funeral cortège trying to find a graveside ceremony.

  Lucas grew up to marry Edith Pye, whose father was one of the principal stockholders in the Kansas City Railroad and who also owned half of Johnson County just over the State line in Kansas. When Thaddeus and Lucy died within six months of each other, in 1923, they left Lucas $220 million, which, with what Edith had inherited from her parents, made Lucas and Edith the richest couple in Missouri; all that in a day when income tax, compared to what was to come, was no more unbearable than an attack of hives. Lucas and Edith’s money continued to grow since, as any Wall Street farmer will tell you, there is no fertilizer better for growing money than other money.

  The Beauforts had never been as ostentatious in the display of their wealth as the rich in the East: the caliphs of New York and Newport had had a barbarous bad taste that had both frightened and offended Thaddeus. His granddaughters had inherited his discretion, to a degree; it was foolish to be too reclusive about one’s money, because that only aroused the suspicions of the tax men. Part of the land had been sold off, but the estate still covered just over twenty acres. Nina occupied the original big house and beside it, on the northern side of a private street, three other mansions, slightly less grand but still formidable, housed the other sisters. The peacocks had gone and so had most of the fifty servants and gardeners who had once worked on the estate. But no strangers, passing by the empty lawns, would have mistaken the houses for empty museums or institutions. The Beaufort sisters, even when not visible, had their own vibrancy.

  The Rolls-Royce pulled in through the big gates that still provided the main access to the estate. The uniformed security guard saluted Nina; as a child she had been saluted, less formally, by the guard’s father. The car went up the curving drive, past the big maples and the bright blaze of azaleas, and pulled up in front of the big main house. Nina got out, said a short thanks to George, went inside and straight up to the main bedroom that looked out towards the gates.

  She took off her dress and lay down on the wide double bed. Even in the years between her marriages, here at home and in the houses she had rented abroad, she had always slept in a double bed. As if the sleeping place beside her would, inevitably, once again be filled. As it had been, and happily, for the past three years.

  She had been lying there an hour when she heard the car coming up the drive.

  Downstairs George Biff, who doubled as butler on the latter’s day off, alerted by the security guard on the intercom, went to the front door and opened it as the tall blond young man got out of the red compact and came up the steps.

  Nina slipped on a robe and went out on to the gallery above the curving staircase. ‘What is it, George?’

  George looked up in surprise: his mistress normally never came asking who was at her door. ‘A Mr Harvest to see you, Miz Nina. He don’t say why he want to see you.’

  ‘Why do you want to see me, young man?’

  Harvest licked his lips, a hint of nervousness that one would not have expected in him. ‘Miss Beaufort – ’ His voice was tight; he cleared his throat. ‘I believe I am your son Michael.’

  Chapter Two

  Nina

  1

  Nina Beaufort met Tim Davoren in Hamburg in the fall of 1945, the happiest accident of her life up till then.

  It was not her first visit to Europe. In the spring of 1936 Lucas and Edith Beaufort took the three children they then had, Nina, Margaret and Sally, on a grand tour of the Continent. Lucas, who had been nurtured as an isolationist from an early age by his father, had not wanted to make the trip; if the family had to travel out of Missouri,
there were another forty-seven very good and interesting United States to be explored. But Edith, who had graduated from Vassar, a notoriously internationally-minded school, had insisted that she and the children needed more perspective than any American trip, even to outlandish California, could give them. So the three Beaufort sisters, aged twelve, seven and three, eager for perspective, whatever that was, left Kansas City with their parents, a governess, a nurse, George Biff and twenty-two pieces of luggage for New York and the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary.

  Once at sea and committed to the trip, Lucas, a man who cut his losses and made the most of what was left, began to enjoy himself. He smiled indulgently as his daughters paraded the deck singing Onward Townsend Soldiers, even though he detested the socialist crank, Francis Townsend, who was the New Messiah to pensioners all over America. He danced with Edith to the tune of The Music Goes Round and Round; he relaxed in a deck chair and read an advance copy of a book called Gone With The Wind and was glad that his Edith was not like Scarlett O’Hara. He went to the ship’s cinema with his wife and daughters and saw Shirley Temple in Captain January and wondered aloud why all American children could not be like the cute curly-haired charmer. When Nina threw up in the cinema, everyone put it down to sea-sickness.

  Lucas’ only bout of sea-sickness came when he learned that Tom Pendergast and his wife were also on board the Queen Mary. The political boss’ European trip had been well publicized before he left Kansas City; but, careful of the Irish vote, he had neglected to tell the reporters that he was travelling on a British ship. The Queen Mary was just passing the Statue of Liberty when Nina brought her father the news.

  ‘Stop the ship!’ Lucas ordered his wife.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Edith placidly. ‘Now settle down, sweetheart. It’s only for five days. You don’t have to walk arm in arm with the dreadful man all the way across the Atlantic.’