The Beaufort Sisters Read online

  Nina giggled and, though she was his favourite, her father glowered at her. ‘There is nothing to be laughed at about that man.’

  ‘Is he really so wicked, Daddy?’

  Mr Pendergast certainly didn’t look wicked. She and Margaret trailed him all across the ocean, spying on him from behind deck chairs, air funnels and lifeboats. He would wink at them and wave, as if they might be Democratic voters of the future, and they would wave back, though they never told their father. The elder Beauforts and the Pendergasts would occasionally pass each other and though Tom Pendergast would smile expansively, Lucas would only nod stiffly and pass on.

  Edith had wanted to visit Spain, but the Spanish, not knowing the Beauforts were coming, inconveniently started a war amongst themselves. So the family spent more time in Germany where Lucas and Edith, paying a courtesy call at the American Embassy in Berlin, were offered the chance to meet Adolf Hitler at a reception. Lucas was impressed by the charm and affability of Der Fuehrer and a week later he and Edith, with the children in tow, met Hitler again at a trade fair in Munich. The German leader showed his attraction for children and Nina, Margaret and Sally were photographed smiling up at the man they obviously thought would make a marvellous uncle. Back home the Kansas City Star ran the picture on Page One and everyone but the few Jews in the city remarked on the proper recognition that the élite of Kansas City had been given, much more than they got in New York or Washington.

  Nina, for her part, fell in love with the old towns and castles of Germany and determined to return some day on her own. As she grew older and moved into her teens she found it hard to believe the stories she now read about Hitler, but by the time she was in college she hated him and the Nazis as fiercely as did anyone she knew. Except perhaps the Jews, but there were not too many Jewish girls at Vassar.

  She graduated in June 1945. Her father had argued that she should go to a college nearer home, where she would not only be under his eye but also under the proper influences. But her mother, still talking about perspective, had prevailed and Nina had gone East to Sodom, Gomorrah and Vassar. She came home and told her parents she wanted to go to Europe with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and help re-build Germany.

  ‘Impossible,’ said her father and even her mother agreed. ‘You’re too young for such an adventure.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of it as an adventure,’ said Nina. ‘I thought of it as something I should do, a social duty if you like.’

  ‘There is plenty you can do right here in Kansas City.’ Lucas had missed his favourite all the time she had been East; he did not want to lose her again so soon, certainly not to foreigners who had got themselves into their own mess. ‘Returning GI’s, for instance. The Red Cross would be glad to have you help them.’

  ‘I want to go to Germany,’ said Nina stubbornly.

  ‘Why?’ asked her mother.

  But Nina couldn’t tell her parents that she wanted to escape from Kansas City, from being a Beaufort. ‘I’ve already applied to UNRRA, but they won’t have me. They said they wanted older people with more experience.’

  ‘You see?’ said her father. ‘Stay at home and join the Red Cross. I’ll buy you a new car.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, sweetheart,’ said Edith, who began to recognize in her daughter something of herself that she had forgotten. ‘You aren’t going to bribe her with an automobile. She still has the MG we gave her – ’

  ‘I’ll give that to Margaret,’ said Nina, glowing with zeal, feeling like a Missouri relative of Francis of Assisi.

  ‘Darling,’ said her mother, who reserved sweetheart for her husband, ‘these – UNRRA? – people do have a point, don’t they? About your being too young.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being young? Youth has more energy and maybe more compassion than older people.’

  ‘I knew she shouldn’t have gone to Vassar,’ said Lucas; then sighed because he knew he couldn’t refuse his favourite anything she asked. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Write to President Truman and ask him to have me put on the American team for UNRRA.’

  ‘Ask a favour of that feller in the White House? I’d rather commit suicide!’

  ‘You can’t,’ said Edith, who had her own way of deflating her husband. ‘The Nichols and the Kempers are coming to dinner tomorrow night. You can telephone President Truman. He’ll always take a call from Kansas City.’

  ‘Not when he hears who’s calling. He knows I can’t stand him.’

  ‘Just be thankful you don’t have to approach him through Tom Pendergast.’ The political boss had died six months before, a bright occurrence only dimmed for Lucas by the succession a little later of Harry Truman to the Presidency. ‘Call the White House now. Harry Truman is an early riser.’

  ‘Harry? When did you get so familiar with him?’

  But Lucas rang Harry Truman and the President spoke to someone who spoke to someone and in August 1945 Nina sailed for Europe as an accredited worker for UNRRA.

  On the night before she left home the four girls gathered in Nina’s room. Margaret was now almost sixteen, Sally was twelve and Prue, the late arrival, was five-and-a-bit. Nina had laid out the treasured possessions of her childhood and girlhood and invited her sisters to take their pick.

  ‘You’re not going to be a nun.’ Margaret was jealous of her sister’s chance for adventure. ‘You might want to keep these when you come back.’

  ‘Can I have your car?’ Sally was mechanical-minded and not interested in any of the things laid out on the bed. ‘I’ll drive it around the gardens.’

  Prue was picking over what was offered. ‘I’ll take them all,’ she said.

  Nina hugged her youngest sister, gazed at the other two. ‘I’m just the first. When you are all old enough, we should all go out and help the poor of the world.’

  ‘What’s the poor of the world?’ asked Prue.

  ‘I think we’d all look rather silly trying to be Sisters of Charity,’ said Margaret, practical-minded. ‘We can always get Daddy to write a cheque. The poor don’t want people like us fussing over them.’

  ‘They needn’t know who we are. We could always change our name!’

  ‘I don’t want to change my name,’ said Sally.

  ‘I do,’ said Prue. ‘I’d like to be called Mickey Rooney.’

  A few weeks later Nina wished she had changed her name before applying to UNRRA. She crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary on a return trip after it had transported almost a division of GI’s back home. The music this time was Rum and Coca-Cola, but there was no dancing; Tom Pendergast was dead, but a British merchant naval officer winked and waved at her and got no further than the political boss had nine years before. She landed in Southampton and flew from England to Frankfurt in Germany in a MATS cargo plane. She landed in Frankfurt on the day that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on the other side of the world; but the bang wasn’t heard and nobody seemed to hear or even feel the ripples spreading into the future. The UNRRA people were waiting for her, some of them with quite open hostility. They made it plain that they thought theirs was no job for spoiled rich kids with political pull. For the first time she realized there was a handicap to being a Beaufort.

  Her boss was a retired colonel who had worked with Herbert Hoover on the American Relief Administration after World War One. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Beaufort. I was young then and there was the same opposition towards me. But some day the young are going to take over the world.’ Then added, because he, too, had grown old, ‘God help it.’

  ‘Am I doing a good job, Colonel Shasta?’

  ‘As well as anyone on the team. I have to go up to Hamburg next week and see the British. Would you care to come with me as my driver and secretary?’

  ‘Won’t that cause gossip, Colonel?’

  ‘I hope it does. I’ll be flattered. But you’ll be safe with me, Miss Beaufort. I’m that old-fashioned sort, a faithful husband. My wife, who lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a
lso happens to have antennae than can pick up any immoral thoughts I may have on this side of the Atlantic. I believe it is called extrasexual perception.’

  So in October, two months after landing in Germany, Nina drove up to Hamburg with Colonel Shasta. She had become accustomed to the bomb damage she had seen around Frankfurt, but it was still a shock to pass through the towns on the way north and see how widespread was the destruction of Germany. They passed queues of people standing outside shops, Germans wearing the wardrobe of the defeated, half-uniforms, thin ersatz tweed, worn fur coats, and all with the same pale, hopeless faces. The jeep was halted by a military policeman at a cross-street and Nina became acutely aware of the people standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross. She was wearing for the first time the camel hair coat that her mother had had made for her and specially dyed a not-too-unbecoming khaki. She looked at a young girl her own age, saw the thin cotton dress covering the thin bony body; the girl stared back at her, face expressionless. Then Nina saw the envy and hate in the dark eyes and she turned away, too inexperienced in the expressions victors should wear.

  ‘Don’t show pity,’ said Colonel Shasta, who had been watching her. ‘That’s the last thing they want.’

  ‘It’s difficult not to show it.’

  ‘Tell that to the men who fought them.’

  They drove into Hamburg, crossed the Lombard Bridge and after getting lost several times at last found the office Colonel Shasta was looking for. It was in a large house two blocks back from the Altersee; next door to it was another large house that was a club for British officers. Except that they needed a coat of paint, neither house looked as if it had suffered at all from the war.

  ‘Rather grand, aren’t they?’ Nina said. ‘I wonder if any Germans still live around here?’

  ‘Every house in the street has been commandeered,’ said a voice behind her and Colonel Shasta. ‘The fruits of victory. I was told you were due here today. I’m Major Davoren, Commanding Officer of the unit that’s taken over this house. I’m afraid UNRRA has been moved to a larger but less attractive place than this.’

  He was dark-haired, good-looking, with a black moustache and dark eyes that might have been tired or just bored. He was tall, with heavy shoulders, and a certain ease of movement that suggested he might have been an athlete before the war. There was a row of ribbons on the breast of his battle tunic, including, Nina was to learn later, the ribbon of the Military Cross.

  ‘Could you have someone direct us?’ Shasta asked.

  ‘I’ll take you there myself.’ He got into the back of the jeep and, it seemed, looked at Nina for the first time. ‘Straight ahead, driver, then second right.’

  ‘This is Miss Beaufort,’ said Shasta, grinning. ‘I don’t think she is accustomed to being called Driver.’

  ‘Awfully sorry.’ But Davoren’s apology sounded perfunctory. ‘Shall we go, Miss Beaufort?’

  Nina let in the gears with a crash and the jeep jerked forward. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shasta grin again, but Major Davoren was behind her and she couldn’t see how he had reacted. She hoped she had snapped his head off.

  Five minutes later they drew up outside a large block of apartments that had been converted into offices. Shrapnel marks pitted the walls and there was a huge black scorch mark stretching up a side wall, as if someone had tried to burn a hole in it with a giant blowtorch. The block had none of the dignity of the house they had just left.

  ‘Blame us English,’ said Davoren. ‘I’m afraid the army is claiming all the best for itself. As I said, the fruits of victory.’

  ‘You don’t believe in rehabilitation for the Germans?’ said Nina.

  ‘The young and idealistic,’ said Davoren, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years older than Nina. ‘Could you spare me a few minutes with Miss Beaufort, Colonel?’

  ‘I’ll be inside.’ Shasta climbed out of the jeep. ‘Don’t scratch his eyes out. I think we’re still supposed to be allies.’

  He went into the apartment block, carrying his valise, and Davoren slid into the vacated seat beside Nina. ‘Well, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot.’

  ‘You have, not me.’

  ‘I’ve been fighting these bloody Germans for five and a half years. I’m not naturally vindictive, but I haven’t yet got round to feeling magnanimous. I lost my parents and my only sister in an air raid on London, wiped out by a V-2. What are you doing for dinner this evening?’

  She was surprised to hear herself say, ‘Nothing.’

  That was Friday and he took her to dinner at the Atlantic Hotel. The dining-room was full of British officers in khaki, Control Commission personnel in blue and German women in tow. There appeared to be no German men and only a few British women, all of whom looked with hatred at the Fraulein, none of whom was less than good-looking and most of whom were beautiful.

  ‘Fraternization doesn’t seem to worry you men. What would happen if one of those English girls came in here with a German man?’

  ‘She’d be shown the back door. We have to have standards, you know.’

  ‘Double standards, you mean.’

  ‘Of course. What else makes the world go round?’ But he smiled as he said it and his charm almost persuaded her that he only half-meant what he had said.

  He took her home early to the billet where she was staying for the weekend. ‘There’s a curfew on and some of the MP’s can get a bit bloody-minded if they catch an officer with a good-looking girl. Pity you’re not staying here at the Atlantic, you could have invited me up to your room.’

  She let that pass. ‘I stayed here with my parents when I was a child.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘You did it in style. I came to Hamburg for a week before the war. I stayed in a dreadful sleazy little room over behind the Reeperbahn. Girls kept knocking on my door all night.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  Saturday night he took her to a cabaret in the cellar of a bombed-out theatre. This time there were plenty of Germans, men as well as women; some of them looked remarkably well-fed for people whose official food ration was supposed to be only 1000 calories a day. Nina peered through the cigar and cigarette smoke, listened with her Berlitz-acquired ear to the conversations going on around her.

  ‘They are making business deals!’

  ‘Black marketeers,’ said Davoren. ‘This cabaret is the sort of stock exchange for it all. If you want to make any money on your PX issue, this is the place to come.’

  ‘I don’t need money.’ He knew nothing about her or her family; she revelled for the first time in anonymity, as if it were some sort of vice. ‘Do you come here and sell things?’

  ‘No. I’m not really interested in money. I shouldn’t say no to a fortune, but I don’t care for this piecemeal way of getting rich. Oh, I daresay in ten or fifteen years’ time some of those jokers will be fat, rich pillars of society – that is, if Germany ever gets off the ground again. And some of our own chaps are making a nice little bundle. But it’s not for me.’

  ‘Don’t you have any ambition? I don’t mean for this sort of thing. But – ’

  ‘Not really. I’m a day-to-day type. I’ll probably stay on in the army and if I don’t blot my copy-book I’ll retire as at least a brigadier. All that without having to fight another war – I’ll be dead before there’s another one.’

  ‘My God, what a limited vision!’

  ‘Oh, it has its compensations. You, for instance. Would I have met you if I’d been back in some office in London trying to make my fortune?’

  ‘What did you do before the war? Had you any ambition then?’

  ‘I had just come down from Cambridge when my country called me. I started out to be an archaeologist, studied Arabic, was going to dig up all Tutankhamen’s relatives. But I grew tired of that and I read History instead. One of the things I learned from that was that ambitious men usually finished up dead ahead of their appointed time.’

  ‘You should have met my grandfather. He w
as ambitious at ten and he lived till he was eighty.’

  ‘Ah, but did he succeed in his ambitions?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ she said and he smiled, mistaking her caution.

  Then a man came to their table, bowed to Nina, clicked his heels and shook hands with Davoren. He was small, blond, tanned, athletic: ten years ago Nina could see him springing off vaulting-horses into posters extolling the Youth Movement. Or spurting out of starting-blocks in pursuit of Jesse Owens and the other black Americans at the Berlin Olympic Games. Davoren named him as Oberleutnant Schnatz, late of the Luftwaffe.

  ‘A good German, aren’t you, Rudi? Well, not a Nazi. But his morals aren’t the best.’

  Schnatz smiled, unoffended. ‘Morality is only a matter of degree, Tim, you know that. After what we have been doing to each other for the past six years, what is a little black market?’

  ‘Rudi went to Oxford,’ Davoren explained. ‘They always had less concern for morality there than we at Cambridge. We played tennis against each other, each of us got a Blue. Baron von Cramm once tried to seduce him at Wimbledon, but I never got that far. What can I do for you, Rudi, though the answer is no, in advance.’

  Not even Vassar, let alone Kansas City and the Barstow School, had prepared Nina for the decadence she was witnessing. Two girls went dancing by, arms wrapped round each other, oblivious of the sneers of the men watching them. Three whores came in, sat down and were in business at once; three pink-cheeked British subalterns fell on them like choirboy rapists. Four men sat at a corner table, heads close together, greed giving them a family resemblance. Evil, or anyway sin, hung in the air as thick as the cigar and cigarette smoke and Nina shivered with the thrill of it. She knew that back in the Thirties Kansas City had been known as America’s Sin City, but it could never have been like this. Without knowing it she was suffering from the tourist’s astigmatism, seeing foreign evil as worse and much more interesting than the home-grown variety.

  ‘I understand your lady friend is an American. I’m looking for contacts in the American zone.’

  Nina saw Tim Davoren sit up a little straighter in his chair, felt his legs brush against hers under the table as they tensed. A thin blonde girl with a clown’s face had come out on to the small stage at the end of the cellar and was singing Little Sir Echo in German; or so Nina thought, till she caught some of the words and realized it was an obscene parody that had the audience who understood it holding their sides. But she was listening with only half an ear, more intent on Tim Davoren and Rudi Schnatz.