The Beaufort Sisters Read online

  ‘You can stop off and visit us in England when you’re on your way to the Gulf.’

  ‘I won’t be going out there, I’ve got fellers to do that. But Edith and I will come and visit you – ’ He put out his hand, for a moment looked as if he was going to break down and plead with Tim to stay, not to take his favourite daughter away from him. ‘We’ll come whenever you ask us.’

  The departure was a quiet one, with no farewell parties. Nina went round and said goodbye to her friends, discovering only as she was leaving them that none of them was really close to her. Tim went back to the stockyards only once, to say goodbye to Bumper Cassidy, who wished him well and invited him back for the next strike – ‘Next time we’re gonna get what we ask for.’

  Magnus McKea, home now from Europe, glad to have Nuremberg behind him, came to say goodbye to both of them. ‘My father is retiring and I’m taking over the law office. That means I’ll be dealing with your father direct, Nina. If there’s anything – ’

  ‘We’ll let you know if there is, Magnus. Will you handle my funds for me, send money across when we need it?’

  She was alone with McKea for the moment. There was a tacit agreement between her and Tim that they would need her money to live comfortably in England, but she had become self-conscious about it, as if it were some sort of family birthmark better left ignored. She welcomed the idea of Magnus as her own lawyer, even if he was also her father’s.

  Magnus himself was a little dubious. ‘I’m your father’s lawyer first. If there’s any conflict of interest, I’m afraid I’ll have to take his side.’

  ‘We’ll risk that. I’m hoping any disagreement between Daddy and us is over for good.’

  The final farewells were said at home, then George drove them to Union Station. Lucas had decided against a public goodbye, in case there should be a reporter or two waiting. It was as if he saw Nina’s going away as some sort of defeat for himself: he didn’t want it spread across the newspapers for all to see. It was bad enough that people in their own circle knew what had happened, even if they could only guess at the reason for the Davorens’ departure.

  George carried Michael into the station. ‘I’m gonna miss him, Miz Nina.’ Michael, a year old now, laughed without restraint, the only one young enough not to feel the pain of the occasion. ‘Gonna miss you and Mister Tim, too.’

  The Davorens crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, a booking that Nina had sentimentally insisted upon. They spent a month at the Savoy while they looked about for a place in the country. Tim raised no objection to their staying at the hotel, even though Nina was footing the bill; she wondered if he was letting her indulge them before they got down to living on his terms.

  They found a house to lease and a business to buy at the same time and in the same place, Stoke Bayard, a village on the River Thames near Henley. The house was on a ten-acre island in the middle of the river, connected to the main bank by an arched bridge over a tributary of the main stream. The business was on the edge of the village, a boat-yard which built punts and skiffs and, in summer, rented them out to fishermen and picnickers who came down from London.

  The house was a pre-1914 summer pavilion, a seven-roomed folly or, as Tim described it, a family of gazebos. ‘I love it,’ said Nina. ‘It just proves not all the bad taste is in America.’

  ‘It’s not practical. We’ll freeze in winter.’

  But they went ahead anyway, because she insisted, and leased the house for a year and moved in as the best summer England could remember began to turn into an equally beautiful autumn. Tim took over the boat-yard and the one full-time worker as the last of the summer visitors began to dwindle away.

  The yard stood at a bend in the river and looked up to the house on the island. Tim would sometimes see Nina on their front lawn with Michael and they would wave to each other; life seemed idyllic, with his work so close to his home and no Lucas to worry about. He even forgot about the prospect of winter in the pavilion built for summer.

  His sole full-time employee was an Australian artist who lived opposite the island with his wife and two small daughters. He had done his apprenticeship as a boat-builder back home in Australia and he was still working at his trade while he established himself as an artist in England.

  ‘Australia is a bloody cultural desert.’ Steve Hamill was a short chunky man with a thick moustache and a rolling gait that suggested he had been a sailor; but he was scared of the water and couldn’t explain why he had become a builder of craft to sail upon it. ‘I suppose it’s like that in the Middle West, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tim. ‘I was never much of a one for culture.’

  ‘I’ve got no education to speak of, but I know where the soul of art is. Right here in Europe. All I’ve got to do is absorb it, get it into me, and then I’m going to be the most successful bloody artist ever came out of Aussie.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better buy one of your paintings now while I can still afford your prices.’

  The Hamills lived in a large caravan which Steve had redecorated. It stood in one corner of a field like something forgotten by a carnival that had moved on. Near it he had built himself a small shed that was his studio.

  Eileen Hamill was a pretty girl with auburn-tinted bangs and a quiet manner that suggested she took a long view of everything. Her whole life seemed to be Steve and their two small girls; she was prepared to wait forever for him to be the artist he wanted to be. But Tim, who had now developed a very personal eye for such things, wondered how long her patience would survive the cramped, uncomfortable life in a caravan.

  While Tim looked at Steve’s paintings in the shed, Nina sat with Eileen in the caravan and sipped tea and ate home-made scones. The two small Hamill girls, delighted to have a living doll, played with Michael on the grass at the bottom of the caravan steps.

  ‘I grew up in the slums back in Melbourne,’ said Eileen. ‘The only time I ever got out of the city was when the local church took us on a picnic. To live like this – it’s heaven.’ Then she added, ‘Though I don’t know what it will be like in the winter.’

  Nina was still adjusting. Life for her had suddenly been reduced to a much smaller scale. She could not imagine living in the confined quarters of the caravan; she wondered how the Hamills made love, sleeping so close to their children. She couldn’t see herself under Tim with two pairs of bright curious eyes peering over his shoulder. She smothered a giggle at the thought, coughed and made out some tea had gone down the wrong way.

  ‘But at least it’s our own and it’s better than living right on top of each other as they do in London. Even in the slums back home we had a backyard. But we keep hoping we’ll have something bigger in a year or two. You have to, when you’re an artist. Hope, I mean.’

  Nina went across to the shed to look at the paintings. Taking Steve Hamill as no more than a working man with perhaps enough talent to have given him some ambition, she was surprised at the sensitivity of his paintings. His wife and his children were subjects in all his work, but they were not portraits; they were dream figures in a world in which the rough, casual Steve would have looked as out of place as a cubist dustman in a Watteau landscape. There were thoughts in Steve Hamill’s head that he could never express in words, that had to come out through his rough, broad-fingered hands.

  Nina and Tim bought three paintings and two sketches and Steve shook his head at them. ‘I hope you’re not being charitable.’

  ‘We’re buying them as an investment,’ said Tim.

  ‘You want your heads read. My stuff an investment? Well, it’s your money. I hope you’re not leaving yourself short.’ He and Eileen had no idea who Nina was, nor did anyone else in the village; she was enjoying her anonymity, the first time in her life she had not been a Beaufort. ‘How about twenty quid each for the paintings and a fiver for the two sketches? Or am I asking too much?’

  Going back to the pavilion, Tim carrying the paintings and Nina carrying Michael straddled across her hip,
Nina said, ‘I wonder what it’s like to start at the bottom like that?’

  ‘You’ll never know, darling heart.’

  ‘I couldn’t live in cramped conditions like that. I was thinking, how do they make love with everything right on top of them? Including the children.’

  ‘The poor have had to do it that way for centuries. They hold their breath, which accounts for the pop-eyed look among the poor. It’s only the fortunate who can expose their privates in private. Shall we go in and try a little exposure?’

  ‘It’s five o’clock. Cinq à sept, as the French say. I’ve always wanted a lover to call on me before dinner. What shall we do with Michael?’

  ‘Hang him on the wall with the paintings.’

  2

  Autumn slipped into winter. The river lost its sparkle, the songbirds went south, the sun came out only occasionally as if it too was being rationed by the austerity-minded government. Tim and Nina made friends in the village, but gradually Nina began to feel homesick. Food and Christmas gift parcels arrived from Kansas City like insidious propaganda: come home, said every tin and package. But she said nothing and if Tim noticed any change in her, he also said nothing.

  She and Tim and Michael had Christmas dinner alone. The table was loaded, but all the food had come in cans from America. Each of them put on a brave face, but Michael was the only one who laughed and enjoyed himself without restraint. Tim had suggested having the Hamills join them, but they had gone up to spend Christmas with some Australian friends in Earls Court. Despite fires in every room the house was cold; it seemed to have a chill of its own that had nothing to do with the weather outside. A winter wind scavenged the trees, seeking the last of the leaves; yesterday’s rain had turned to ice under the hedgerows, like negatives of shadows. When the phone rang at four-o’clock in the afternoon Nina rushed to it as if it were a lifeline thrown to her across the Atlantic, though she knew nobody would call her from Kansas City.

  ‘We’re here,’ said her mother, sounding warm and comfortable, as if she herself were centrally heated.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In London, of course. At the Savoy. We were going to surprise you, be down with you for Christmas dinner, but the boat was delayed by storms. We – ’

  ‘Mother, who’s we? All of you?’

  ‘No, just your father and Meg. Your father had to come over on business – ’

  ‘What about Sally and Prue?’ She wanted to see them all. She still couldn’t believe her mother was in England, knew this had to be a dream and she might as well dream for the most.

  ‘Sally’s been left with a tutor. She’s been neglecting her school work for that blessed car you gave her. Can you imagine, she got only nine per cent in history. American history, too.’

  Nina laughed and laughed: Oh God, she was glad to hear anything about any of them! ‘Prue?’

  ‘Has the measles. How is my grandson? How do we get down to see you?’

  ‘Mother, we’ll come up!’ All at once she didn’t want her parents to see where she and Tim were living; not in this season with the house as cold as it was. She was afraid they would use it as an excuse to criticize Tim, blame him for making her and Michael live in such Spartan conditions. She did not want her Christmas, which had suddenly become Christmas, spoiled. ‘We’ll have dinner at the hotel with you … No, we were going to have it tonight anyway … No, I don’t have enough for us all …’

  ‘Two Christmas dinners in a day?’ said Tim.

  They drove up to London in the pre-war Jaguar SS they had bought when they had moved down to the country. There was still petrol rationing, but Tim got a business quota for the boat-yard and, in the spirit of spivvery of the times, each weekend he filched a gallon or two and it added to the small family allowance they got. Being able to drive up to London was a luxury in itself, another way of feeling rich.

  ‘Why didn’t you ask them down to the house?’

  ‘I thought you’d like a break – ’

  He said nothing and she knew she hadn’t convinced him.

  But any uneasiness vanished as soon as the family reunion took place. Her parents greeted Tim with the same warmth as they did her. It seemed that all was forgotten and this was a new start. Nina went into the main bedroom of the hotel suite with her mother, Margaret and Michael, the latter swamped with attention from his grandmother and aunt. Lucas and Tim sat down in chairs by the window and looked out on the dark river and the bombed ruins along the south bank.

  ‘Nina’s letters said you were doing well with your boat business.’

  Tim himself had never written and he wondered how much Nina had boasted of him as a successful boatman. He said cautiously, ‘It’s too early to tell. I took over at the end of the season. I shan’t really know how things will go till the end of next summer.’

  ‘Well, if you need any finance … Or shouldn’t I offer that?’

  ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’ But the last thing he would ever do, he told himself, would be to accept money from Lucas. ‘Why are you here? Edith said you were on business.’

  ‘The oil company is expanding. We’re setting up an office in London, then we plan to branch out with gas stations all over the country. I’m afraid I’m an internationalist now. Never thought I would be, but a man has to change, I guess.’

  ‘How’s the project going in the Middle East?’

  ‘Abu Sadar? The place is floating on oil. Our only problem is keeping on the right side of the Sultan. He’s okay, but he’s got some sons who want to meddle. We’re starting to educate them in America now, you know? Bringing the young fellers to Harvard, Caltech, places like that. A mistake, I think. Educate the natives, you buy trouble for yourselves. Their ignorance is your bliss.’

  ‘That one of your own?’

  Lucas laughed, slapped Tim on the knee: the armistice was complete. ‘I think it was one of your Foreign Ministers talking about the British Empire. Well, shall we go down to dinner? I guess you’re hungry as a horse?’

  ‘A whole stable,’ said Tim, wondering if he looked as stuffed as he felt.

  The Savoy produced a cot and Michael, worn out by all the fuss made of him, was put to bed in the care of a chambermaid. Then the Beauforts and the Davorens all went down to dinner.

  Tim sat between Margaret and Edith; it was the former who engaged him. He had never seen her so animated and voluble; she kept grabbing his arm to turn him back to her every time he attempted to say a word to Edith. She looked beautiful and, yes, sexy (he was surprised to find himself looking at her in that light). It occurred to him as he looked across the table that, compared to Margaret, Nina looked tired and drab. He chided himself, because he knew it was his fault.

  ‘Nina looks tired.’ Edith managed to get a word in. ‘Has she been unwell?’

  ‘The excitement has just got to her.’ But he knew it was more than that.

  ‘We miss her, Tim. I have to tell you that, even though you’ll dislike me for it. We miss you, too. And that last isn’t an afterthought.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t!’ Margaret grabbed his arm from the other side, swivelling him round; at least she was preventing him from eating, a relief he hadn’t expected. ‘We all do miss you! We’re here for a week, you’ve got to spend every day with us – ’

  ‘I’m a working man – ’

  ‘Oh bushwah! Close your old boat-yard down – give your men a vacation – ’

  ‘With pay? That would give your father a stroke.’

  But nothing, it seemed, would give Lucas a stroke right now. All his attention was on Nina; he had re-possessed his favourite, if only temporarily. He caught Tim’s glance and he flashed a smile, the across-the-table smile, the dental fireworks that mean nothing. Or did the smile mean nothing? Tim wondered if there wasn’t a spark of triumph in it, that Lucas was beginning a new battle in which he had already made a gain.

  Edith suggested that Tim and Nina stay up in town that night, but Tim, feeling perverse, said they would have to go back. ‘But
tomorrow is a holiday,’ said Nina. ‘Boxing Day.’

  ‘You never know, there may be some fools wanting to go out on the river.’

  ‘Business is business,’ said Lucas understandingly, nodding in agreement. Then: ‘But maybe Nina and Michael could stay.’

  Did he say that too innocently? Tim looked across at Nina and was disappointed to see how eagerly she had greeted her father’s suggestion. He felt suddenly jealous; and then, just as abruptly, didn’t care. The other side of the coin of jealousy was indifference; it was his first experience of how the coin could flip without warning.

  ‘Stay a couple of nights,’ he said, ‘then bring your mother and father and Meg down to our place. I’m sure they want to see where we live.’

  Nina’s face was blank. ‘A good idea.’

  Nina and Michael, her parents and Margaret, came down by chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce the day after Boxing Day. The big car rolled through the village and the villagers stopped and looked after it when they saw Nina sitting in the car. It drew up at the boat-yard and Steve Hamill came into the office where Tim was struggling with a stock list.

  ‘The wife’s outside. Yours, not mine. In a bloody great Rolls. I must say she looks at home in it.’

  Tim went out to the car. It was a cold day, a wind coming in from the ice-works of Russia, and only Lucas got out of the car. ‘Nice little place. Bit primitive though, isn’t it?’

  ‘We preserve the primitive here in England. It’s part of our tradition.’ He tried to keep the acid off his tongue; he wasn’t looking for another battle. ‘It seems to work.’

  ‘Couldn’t work in these conditions myself.’

  ‘Lucas – ’ He couldn’t resist it; even so he diluted the acid with a smile. ‘You’ve always worked in a board-room. These conditions here are no worse than those I worked in at the stockyards. Did the chaps there ever get their raise?’

  ‘No. But we gave them a fifty-dollar bonus for Christmas.’

  ‘Your place in Heaven is assured.’