Читать книгу The Beaufort Sisters - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 19

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.’

‘You’re too cynical, Tim.’

‘No, just whimsical. You bring it on in me. Shall we go down and look at our house? The conditions there are a little better. Just.’

Lucas and Edith were appalled at the conditions that Nina and Michael had to live in; they didn’t appear to worry about Tim, he was English and accustomed to such living. They said nothing to him, though doing a poor job of disguising their reaction; but they had a lot to say to Nina when Tim took Margaret for a walk round the small island. Edith kept her mink coat on all the time, as if to emphasize her feeling that the fires, blazing though they were and supplemented by electric radiators, were useless in such a house.

‘You can’t live like this. You’ll have to get a better house. It’s not fair to Michael. He’ll grow up crippled with arthritis or something.’

‘I couldn’t live in these conditions myself,’ said Lucas. ‘We’ll have to do better for you.’

Nina shook her head. ‘This house was my mistake, not Tim’s. I’ll look around for something better. But you’re not to say a word to Tim, understand? He’s working hard and he’s perfectly happy.’

Out in the grounds Tim was saying, ‘Perhaps the boat-yard is not what I want for the rest of my life. But it’s a start.’

‘I still think you should have stayed in America,’ said Margaret. ‘You liked all our creature comforts, I know you did. You should have gone out to California, started something there.’

‘How did you know I liked the creature comforts?’

‘I know you better than you think. Prue used to say you were always looking at things, and you were. While you were, I was looking at you. And you lapped up everything the family could offer you. Everything but Daddy wanting to run you the way he runs the rest of us.’

They had been walking arm-in-arm, but now he moved away from her on the pretext of pulling off a switch from one of the willows that lined the river bank. He swung the switch back and forth, taking the heads off the yellow reed-feathers along the bank, like a destructive schoolboy who, for reasons he couldn’t name, had to abuse nature. Then he stopped, regretting the reed-feathers lying like gold dust on the thin snow that had fallen last night. He looked sideways at her, again like a schoolboy.

‘What else have you observed about me?’ He felt uncomfortable with her; her very youth somehow made her formidable. ‘Never mind, I don’t want to know. But obviously I should have been looking at you more closely.’

‘You could have done worse.’

At first he didn’t catch what she meant. Then he burst out laughing, more with surprise than amusement. ‘Meg, for Christ’s sake – ! I don’t play around – ’

‘I know that. That was why it was all so hopeless.’ She said it flatly, with no dramatics.

It might have been better if there had been dramatics: then he could have put it down to a crush on him. But he realized, with sickening certainty and no conceit, that she was in love with him. He slammed the willow switch against the trunk of a wych-elm, a substitute for her. He wanted to whip some sense into her, could feel the anger building in him as he stared at her.

‘Jesus God Almighty – Meg, do you know what you’re saying? Of course you do – ’ He saw the pain in her dark eyes. He threw the willow switch into the river, afraid of the angry trembling in his hands. He walked on and she fell into step beside him but did not put her arm in his this time. ‘Meg, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to put all this out of your head. I’m married to Nina and I’m in love with her and that’s that.’

‘Don’t you think I know it? I shouldn’t have told you. But it slipped out.’

‘You’ve got to be sensible – ’ He sounded as if he were talking to a schoolgirl; and he didn’t want to sound that way. This was far more serious, for himself as well as for her, than a fleeting schoolgirl fantasy. He began to wish she wasn’t so damned adult. ‘You’ll be unhappy, I suppose, for a while. But you’ll make me unhappy. And Nina, too, if she ever found out.’

‘She won’t. I’m not a bitch. And I said I’m sorry I told you.’

Out of habit he went to kiss her on the cheek, as he had done innumerable times; but at the last moment held himself back. ‘Let’s go back to the house. One thing I’m glad of – there are no tears.’

‘There may be tonight,’ she said. ‘But you’re safe for now.’

The Beauforts went back to London in the afternoon, Lucas and Edith convinced that Nina had condemned herself to a life of poverty, Margaret angry and ashamed that she had exposed her feelings to Tim. They stayed another week in London but did not come down to Stoke Bayard again. Tim and Nina went up to visit them and Nina stayed at the Savoy with Michael for a couple of nights. Edith and Lucas said nothing more about the way in which the Davorens were living, but when Tim came up on the last day Lucas took him aside.

‘I meant what I said, Tim. If you want to expand that boatyard, call on me. Don’t go to a bank. No point in getting into their clutches,’ he said with a banker’s smile.

Nor in yours, Lucas old chap. ‘I shan’t think of expanding for at least another year.’ He returned Lucas’s smile, turning the conversation into a joke between them: ‘If you want any help with the oil fields out in Abu Sadar, call on me. My Arabic is rusty, but I can always brush it up.’

‘Didn’t know you spoke Arabic. The young fellers all speak English out there, but the old guys never bother to learn. You’d think they would, dealing with us all the time.’

‘Just what we English used to say in our Empire days.’

‘You being whimsical again? You can’t joke about the Arabs. They’re going to be a pain in the ass to us some day. Well, now we’re off to Paris – Edith and Meg want to go. Never liked the French myself. They’re a pain in the ass, too. Never can trust them.’

‘What about the English?’

Lucas winked, refusing to take the bait. ‘Time we were leaving.’

Farewells were said. The Beauforts hugged Michael, squeezing affection into him as if giving him blood. Nina hugged and kissed her parents and sister; Tim watched carefully, alert for any sign that she wanted to go home with them. He shook hands with Lucas, kissed Edith on the cheek. Then he had to say goodbye to Margaret.

He took her hand, felt the tension in her fingers. ‘Enjoy Paris. I was there only once, but I loved it.’

‘Why don’t you come with us now?’

He kissed her quickly on the cheek, extricated his fingers from hers. ‘I’m a working man with a wife and kid to support.’

He turned away from her, still feeling the tension in her even though he was no longer touching her.