The Beaufort Sisters Page 11

  ‘Not really. Certainly not without you and Michael.’

  ‘It’s no place for women and children, not yet awhile.’ Lucas looked at the dessert trolley as a waiter approached with it. ‘I’ll try the baked custard. You’ll only need six months out there. You’ll get the feel of the business and then you can come home to Kansas City, to head office. Don’t you want dessert, Nina?’

  ‘And what do I do?’ Nina dismissed the waiter and the dessert trolley without looking at either. ‘Sit here in London twiddling my thumbs?’

  ‘I think what your father is suggesting is that you should go back to Kansas City. Or is that a wild guess, Lucas?’ The sarcasm was as smooth as the baked custard which he, too, had ordered.

  ‘Do you need to go to the ladies’ room?’ Lucas said to Nina.

  ‘No, I don’t! Dammit, Daddy, what are you trying to do?’

  ‘Tim will go into marketing when he comes back to head office. That suit you, Tim?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Go and powder your nose, Nina. When you come back we’ll have it all worked out.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ She looked at Tim for support, but he shook his head, a gentle movement that she almost missed. But his message was in his eyes: your old man has won, darling heart. Abruptly she stood up, almost knocking over a waiter, and plunged blindly across the room and out to the ladies’ room.

  ‘Do you agree she and Michael should come home?’

  ‘As she asked you, Lucas, what are you trying to do? Are you stuffing me and having me mounted like some sort of trophy?’

  ‘This is good custard. Think I’ll have some more. Stuffing you? I take it that’s a euphemism for a stronger term. No, I’m not. I’ll remind you, you came to me asking for a job. I didn’t have you flooded out of the boat-yard.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that.’

  ‘Cut out your whimsy. That’s your trouble, you don’t take anything seriously enough.’

  ‘You’re wrong there, Lucas old chap. I know this is bloody serious. You’re trying to break up my marriage.’

  ‘That’s where you are wrong. I’m not trying to break up your marriage. But I don’t want my daughter and my only grandchild traipsing round the world after you while you try to make a living at trades you have no training for. I can make a good career for you in oil. You’re intelligent and if you can sell oil as well as you sell yourself, you’ll be a success in no time.’

  ‘You’re a past-master at flattery.’

  Lucas ignored the comment. ‘I can’t bring you in cold and dump you on the marketing vice-president back home. That’s why you have to go out to Abu Sadar. While you’re out there Nina and Michael can live in comfort back home in your own house.’

  ‘I still feel I’m being stuffed. But as the ladies say, if rape is inevitable you may as well lie back and enjoy it. No ladies of my acquaintance, I hasten to add.’

  ‘You’d never need to rape any woman. You’re too good a salesman.’

  ‘No more flattery. It’s going to my head. Yes, I think I’ll have some more baked custard. I’ll probably get nothing like this out in Abu Sadar. Unless you’ll send me food parcels?’

  Lucas smiled, knowing he had won. ‘I’ll see if Sears Roebuck send food parcels.’

  Nina came back, face made up, spirit repaired. Before she even sat down she knew that everything had been decided, that her father, this time with the acquiescence of her husband, had claimed her back into the family. She was angry at Tim for his surrender, but her anger at herself was only slightly less. She would be glad to be returning home.

  ‘I think I’ll have some dessert, after all. No, not baked custard. I’ll have a couple of éclairs. I always over-eat when I’m unhappy. When do you leave for Abu Sadar?’

  ‘He goes as soon as possible,’ said Lucas. ‘I’ll stay on until you’re ready to leave, then you and Michael can come home with me. The Queen Mary is sailing next week.’

  ‘How appropriate. Just like old times.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with old times.’

  ‘There is if you persist in trying to hang on to them. I see you’re ready for your coffee. I’ll have a double brandy with mine.’

  ‘The good life,’ said Tim, trying to salvage something out of the lunch, the past and the future. ‘I thought we had said goodbye to it, but it seems I was wrong.’

  Chapter Four

  Nina

  1

  It was another two months before Tim and Nina got away to their respective destinations. Lucas, an army of staff always standing by to do his bidding, had little idea what faced a man in a one-man business. The boat-yard could not be disposed of by just walking away from it; over the two months Tim gained an education in the failure of a business if in nothing else. Steve Hamill stayed on till the final winding-up.

  He protested in strong terms when Tim said he and Eileen and the two children were to stay on at the hotel in Henley with the Davorens. ‘I can’t fork out that sort of money! I’ll spend the rest of my life paying you back.’

  ‘It comes out of business expenses. You won’t have to pay it back. No argument, Steve.’

  On the last day Tim gave him a cheque for a thousand pounds. It was Nina who insisted that the Hamills be given that much and the money came from her own account. ‘Two years’ wages!’ said Steve. ‘What’s going on? I don’t want charity, mate. I know who Nina is now. The wife did a bit of looking up – she got in touch with the American embassy, they told her who Old Man Beaufort was – ’

  ‘It’s not charity. It’s a down payment on your first painting that has a thousand pounds price tag on it.’

  ‘You want your head read. If ever I get more than two hundred and fifty quid for a painting of mine – ’ He looked at the cheque and Tim saw the temptation in his face. ‘Money. It drugs you, doesn’t it?’

  The question was too much on target, though he was sure Steve had not meant it to be personal.

  They said goodbye to the Hamills and went up to London by train. The Jaguar SS had been disposed of and a property developer had bought the boat-yard site, wreckage and all. They checked into the Savoy again and Nina went shopping while Tim spent a week in the London office of Beaufort Oil. Nights they spent making love.

  ‘I’ll be worn out by the time I get to Abu Sadar.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’ He was highly sexed, something that had never troubled her in the past. But now there was just the lurking doubt. ‘Then you won’t be chasing the Arab girls up the date palms.’

  ‘I’d never think of doing it up a date palm. I’m going to miss you. I don’t mean just this. But you, just being with you.’

  She could only answer him with tears, clinging to him as if she were losing him forever. They had not discussed her father; all they talked about was what they would do when the six months’ separation was up. When it came time for them to say goodbye down at Southampton, where Nina was to board the ship for New York, she was surprised at how emotional Tim became when he held Michael for the last time. There were tears in his eyes as he kissed the child.

  ‘Don’t let your father take him over. He’s our son and that’s what he’s going to stay. He’s not going to be known as Lucas’ grandson. Promise me?’

  ‘I promise. If he has to have a surrogate father, how about George Biff?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better. Goodbye, darling heart. Don’t look at any other chaps.’

  ‘Let’s make love as a final reminder.’

  ‘Here? I don’t think the sports deck was meant for that sort of sport.’

  The ship sailed and Tim went back to London and two days later flew out to the Middle East. He hated the place: the desert, the discomfort, the tightly enclosed living among the small oil community. But he hid his feelings from those he worked with and was popular with them. He became acquainted with some of the American-educated young men and idly wondered if, as Lucas had predicted, they would provide trouble in the future.

  He had been the
re three months when he flew up to Beirut with one of the engineers. The engineer, who had a girl friend, left him to his own devices. He met an English dancer from one of the night clubs, took her home and went to bed with her. In the morning she asked him for fifty pounds.

  ‘I don’t do it for love, love. When my legs have gone and my bosom’s drooping, I want to live in as much luxury as I can afford. I’m the original whore with a heart of gold. Only I have it in a bank and I keep adding to it every week.’

  He handed her the money. ‘That’s penance, not payment.’

  She kissed him. ‘You married men. Your conscience stands up as your cock goes down. Shall I see you again?’

  ‘I think not. Take care of your bullion.’

  He went back to Abu Sadar, wondering how many people in Kansas City would think of him as a male whore when he went back there.

  Nina had arrived home with mixed feelings that stayed with her like a dull fever for a month after her return. She missed Tim and she hated her father for what he had done to them. But she welcomed the security and warmth of being back home with her sisters.

  ‘How’s your love life?’ she asked Margaret.

  ‘She’s going out with an ancient man.’ Prue was now seven, bright and observant; she still had the innocence of childhood but was looking forward to losing it. ‘He’s a professor.’

  ‘He’s not a full professor and he’s only twenty-eight, for God’s sake.’ Margaret, trying to please her father, had elected to go to the University of Missouri instead of Vassar; but Lucas, disappointing her again, had taken her decision for granted. ‘He’s teaching me politics.’

  ‘Hah-hah,’ said Sally, who was beginning to show some of the beauty of her older sisters. She was still a tomboy, still mad about cars, but Nina noticed that when a boy called on Saturday evening to take her out she was as feminine as any of them. She had begun to learn that boys didn’t like kissing a grease-stained cheek, no matter how mechanical-minded they were. ‘That Frank Minett is more interested in Daddy than he is in you.’

  ‘What about you? Who’s your regular boy-friend?’

  ‘She’s got dozens,’ said Prue, the gossip columnist. ‘She goes out with anyone who’s got a sports car. She’s going to get into trouble some day, that’s what I heard Daddy tell Mother.’

  ‘Not in a sports car,’ said Nina, winking at Margaret and Sally. ‘Where does this child get her education?’

  ‘Reading books. She reads everything she can find. She brought home Forever Amber the other day from school. God knows where she got it.’

  ‘I think I’d like to have lived in olden times,’ said Prue. ‘Men liked women in those days.’

  That six months was, up till then, the most drawn-out period Nina had ever lived through. Each day fell reluctantly from the calendar; a week was a long treadmill that never got her anywhere. She attended dinner parties put on by her parents, went to other parties with Margaret, took up with old schoolfriends; but all the distractions were only a way of filling in time and were not always successful. Sometimes, desperately hungry for Tim, she thought of taking off to join him but she knew she could not take Michael with her and she put the idea out of her mind. Once again she began to spoil Michael, lavishing on him all the attention that normally he would have had to share with his father.

  That year, 1948, spun itself slowly off the globe and into the fog of history. The new nation of Israel was proclaimed; Arab armies invaded Palestine. Nina suddenly worried that Tim might be caught up in another war; but he wrote her reassuringly, telling her that the Arabs would never be united against a common foe. President Truman announced that the 80th Congress was the worst in history, a judgement that Lucas agreed with, though it gave his Republican conscience a hernia to say so. The Russians blockaded Berlin and some people began to wonder if Germany was to be another battleground so soon. Thomas E. Dewey was nominated as the Republican candidate for the coming Presidential elections and Lucas accepted a nomination to the Missouri Republican committee; Harry Truman was nominated again by the Democrats and Lucas at once gave a quarter of a million dollars to the Dewey campaign – ‘It’s worth it to get rid of that feller Truman.’ General Pershing, D. W. Griffiths and Babe Ruth died within a month of each other, each of them taking a little glory with them into the grave. The New Look, which had come in the year before, turned into an Old Look; but bobby-socks were still fashionable, proving that bobby-soxers were not as fickle as their older sisters.

  Dr Kinsey appeared, to tell the world what it had long suspected, that the next door neighbours had their secrets too; people who had thought they were perverts suddenly discovered they were normal and rushed back to bed, some even neglecting to pull down the blinds. Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living was published and some people, who never looked at an author’s name, bought it thinking it was a sequel to Dr Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Women readers anxiously waited for Dr Kinsey’s promised book on female sexual behaviour, hoping to learn something that their husbands the dirty beasts, had experienced with the whores out at tha place on the edge of town. The months spun slowly away and Nina, careless of news or history, waited for Tim to come home.

  He arrived back in time for Michael’s second birthday. ‘Good God, how he’s grown! What’s George been doing – stretching him?’

  ‘He thinks George is God Almighty. You’re going to have your nose put out of joint for a while. He doesn’t remember you, you know.’

  ‘Do you?’

  She kissed him hungrily, glad that she had insisted that none of the family should come to the airport with her. ‘Don’t ever let us be separated again. I’ve practically dried up inside. I’ve had such a yen for you.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said, the dancer in Beirut forgotten.

  Nina had bought a new car, a Buick, which she drove herself. Michael sat between them, looking up curiously at this stranger, not frightened of him but still cautious. ‘I thought you said he could talk?’

  ‘Give him time. He’s got to get used to having a strange man playing around with his mother.’

  ‘I hope he’s not going to be a two-year-old prude.’ He smiled at his son, who continued to look suspicious. ‘What does he think of his grandfather? Is he God Almighty too?’

  She drove in silence for a while, as if concentrating on getting him home unscathed. She wondered if he felt that he was coming home, but was afraid to ask him.

  ‘Don’t start fighting with him, please darling.’

  ‘There won’t be any fighting. I’m a pacifist in family matters now. Totally spineless. I just want the major share of my son’s attention and affection, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ she promised, not wanting to spoil a moment of his homecoming. ‘Look, he’s already smiling at you. He has your smile, you know. Everyone comments on it.’

  He looked steadily at her for a moment, then he relaxed and grinned at his son. ‘Five teeth. Is that my smile?’

  The reunion with the family went off without incident. Tim was kissed warmly by Edith, Margaret, Sally and Prue, Lucas just as warmly shook hands. He was part of the family again and no one seemed to have any doubts that he might want it otherwise. Nina watched him being charming to everyone, but behind the smile and the banter she sensed a certain restraint, a reserve of feeling that he was not going to squander on this first day home.

  She had been living in their own house ever since she had first returned from England and today she had prepared the place specially for him. He had always liked flowers, azaleas and camellias being his favourites, and every room glowed with their colours. She introduced him to the new staff she had engaged on her return, a cook and two housemaids, then she took him into the living-room. On the wall above the fireplace was one of Steve Hamill’s paintings.

  ‘The other paintings are in your study and the sketches in our bedroom. The more I look at them, the more I like them.’

  He looked around the room, but in hi
s mind’s eye he was looking all around the house and the estate. It was all so much better than anything he had lived in since leaving here a year ago. For want of a better phrase, let’s say I’ve come home.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the sketches in the bedroom.’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  A long time later she would remember that first night of reunion. It was perfect: the playing with Michael before he was put to bed, the dinner alone for just the two of them, the love-making when they went to bed for the night. She had never been happier, her mind completely wrapped in the joys of the moment; she did not have to make any conscious effort to shut out tomorrow, the world was just this house and time was only now. Even the pain of the six months’ separation was forgotten.

  Tim went to work in the oil company and, as far as Nina could judge, seemed happy and successful in his job. He went out of town, to New York, Washington, Chicago on business, but he was never away for more than two nights and he always called her each night. September became October; then November and the elections loomed. Republicans across the nation, Lucas not least of all, prepared to welcome President Dewey.

  ‘We must have a party,’ said Lucas. ‘We’ll have something to celebrate – a man of our own in the White House after sixteen years of those goddam Democrats. We’ll have the party on Election Night.’

  ‘Mightn’t that be a little premature?’ said Tim. ‘I’m not so sure that Truman won’t win.’

  ‘Care for a small bet? I’ll give you ten to one.’

  It was a moment before Tim said quietly, ‘All right. I’ll put up five thousand dollars.’

  Lucas looked as if he was going to laugh, then he frowned as he saw that Tim was serious. ‘That’s a lot of money for you. You’ve never been a gambling man before.’

  ‘No. But didn’t you once tell me that this country was built by men who took chances? Your father included.’

  ‘They didn’t back losing Presidents. Still, if you want to throw your money away … Five thousand. That’s half what the company’s paying you a year, isn’t it?’