by Jon Cleary
‘Goodnight, Magnus. Keep in touch.’
He touched her breast lightly, smiled in the darkness. ‘Like that? Some day when I’m even merrier than I am now, I’ll tell you why I’ve never married. Take care of yourself.’
She went into the house wondering what secret he had.
Her goodbye to George Biff was shorter and less complicated. They had had no discussion since Frank’s death; she had taken him enough into her confidence before that unexpected tragedy. She knew he would respect that confidence and she hoped he would ask no further questions of her. At least his attitude towards her had not changed: she still seemed to be in his favour.
‘You can have the Buick, George.’ He had never had a car of his own. ‘I’m sure Miss Nina would like you to have it.’
He was carrying bags out to pack them into the two cars that were taking Margaret, Sally, the nurse Ruth and the two children to the railroad station. Margaret had decided, for the children’s sake, that they should go by train and ship to Italy. Miss Stafford had, with her usual efficiency, arranged all the tickets, but she had hinted in her manner that she agreed with Edith, that Margaret and Sally were doing the wrong thing.
George shoved the bags into the trunk. ‘Your daddy always loans me a car when I want it. Dunno how he gonna feel, me having a car of my own.’
‘George, sometimes you sound like Uncle Tom when you talk about my father. He’s not nineteenth-century.’
He grinned. ‘I hear you girls sometimes, you talk like you think he just that.’ Then he sobered. ‘You take care over there, Miz Meg. You got all that other trouble behind you now. Don’t buy yourself any more.’
‘Thanks, George. For everything.’
The farewell to her parents was complicated. It was a quiet whirlpool of love and resentment; Edith and Lucas did not hide their hurt at this desertion. Francesca Minett, still in black, came to the station to say goodbye to her grandchildren; her farewell kiss to Margaret was perfunctory, as if the latter no longer meant anything in her life. Margaret, for her part, was suddenly glad to be leaving. Relationships in Italy should be much simpler than here.
‘We’ll come to see you after the elections,’ said Edith. ‘Your father will want a vacation.’
‘The country will be in good hands then,’ said Lucas. ‘You’re foolish to be leaving now. You should have gone when that feller Truman was re-elected back in ’48.’
A bell rang, a whistle blew, a voice cried All Abo-o-a-a-rd! They were sounds that were dying out, already echoes, but none of the travellers knew it then. The train rolled out of the station and Margaret looked back at the city that Magnus had told her she did not know and wondered whether she would be back in six weeks, six months or six years. She felt she was throwing off a corset that, though it had constrained her, had had its feeling of security. A corset: there’s a nineteenth-century thought.
‘I feel like starting a new life,’ said Sally, who had been told by her parents that she must return to Vassar in the new school year.
‘I wonder how people do that?’ And Margaret, going to live with his wife, wondered once again about Tim.
3
That year was a momentous one, at least for Republicans. For the first time in twenty years they at last had one of their own in the White House; God, who could have voted in a Republican primary any time He wished, was in His Heaven and all was right with the world again. President Eisenhower, who was not God and very soon began to look as if he wished he were not President, sent for Lucas and offered him a Cabinet post. Lucas, to everyone’s surprise, declined the offer. He had begun to feel that doors were closing on rooms in his life. He did not want to be in Washington when his daughters came home to Kansas City; and he was certain that eventually, if not soon, they would do that. He had to believe that they would or his whole life would collapse like a house of cards.
In the meantime his errant daughters had fallen in love with Italy and the Italians. By September Sally had decided that she was not going back to college and that brought Edith flying across the Atlantic with Miss Stafford; Lucas had to remain at home, caught up in the efforts to have General Eisenhower elected. There were arguments and tears between Edith and Sally, but the latter was adamant. Finally Edith flew back home, comforted by Miss Stafford, having extracted a promise from Nina and Margaret that they would never, never let Sally out of their sight.
Edith had been impressed by the villa Nina had leased on the Appia Antica. It was an old house that had belonged to a rich Fascist before the war, had been the headquarters of a German general during the war, and since the war had been the home of a successful black marketeer: it could not have picked a better set of owners for keeping it in the best of condition. The black marketeer had made his money and fled to Switzerland, where respectability could be bought at the border with a resident’s permit. He had recognized that de Gasperi’s Christian Democrats, frightened by the growing support for Togliatti’s Communists, were about to embark on a campaign against such corruption as his. Campaigns against corruption, in Italy, were almost as seasonal as the pasta harvest; but some were more serious than others. The black marketeer recognized that the government, pressed by the Americans who seemed to think that any country which accepted their aid had to be less corrupt than themselves, might even go so far as to throw him into the Regina di Coeli prison and forget all about him. Blaming the Americans for the pious influence, he set about finding an American tenant for his villa, extracted a ransom rent from her and left for Lugano and respectability.
‘It’s beautiful. Much better than that place you had in England.’ Edith had not meant to be tactless, but her thought processes of late had started to become muddled. ‘It must be full of history.’
‘The partisans shot seven Nazis out there in the garden,’ said Nina.
‘I wasn’t thinking of that sort of history.’ Edith was selective in her view of history; there were enough good things in the centuries past without paying attention to the bad. ‘Look at that furniture! I’d love to take some of it back with me. I wonder where your landlord got it?’
‘Probably stole it.’ Nina had no illusions about her landlord.
‘I love you all so much,’ said Edith and wept all the way back across the Atlantic, an emotional reaction that worried Pan American Airways, who thought there was something wrong with their service until assured by Miss Stafford that everything was all right.
The three Beaufort sisters settled down to enjoy Rome. Sally bought a car, an apple-green Maserati, and once more began to look and act like the old Sally, though there was a sheen of sophistication on the hoyden now. Nina had already become slightly Europeanized, helped by the fact that she had a better ear for languages than her sisters. Margaret was the one who found it hardest to adapt.
She was still troubled by guilt. At what had happened to Frank; at running away from her parents; but most of all, at having stolen Tim from Nina. He and Michael were still part of Nina’s life: a large silver-framed photo of the two of them stood on her dressing-table. She never mentioned them unless Margaret or Sally did, but she still had the private investigators on retainer in case they came across a clue to Tim’s and Michael’s whereabouts. And Margaret occasionally saw her stop in a crowd and look, with a mixed expression of pain and delight, at some passing man who would resemble Tim. The pain would be reflected in Margaret’s own face and she would pray that night that Nina would never learn of her and Tim’s deception of her.
In the spring of 1953 Sally announced that she was going to enter the Mille Miglia. That brought Lucas and Edith across the Atlantic faster than Sally would drive the 1000 kilometres around Italy.
‘You were supposed to be looking after her!’ Lucas thundered at his two elder daughters.
‘She’ll be killed!’ Edith would have preferred to have fainted instead of being as angry as she was; that might have brought her daughters to their senses, showed what they were doing to her. ‘I’ve seen how those Italians dri
ve!’
‘Mother, they are not going to run her off the road. She’ll be safer in this race than just driving around Rome day to day. They’ll all be going in the same direction. That’s something for Italians.’
Margaret had been angry and upset when Sally had told her and Nina what she intended doing. Both of them had tried to talk Sally out of it, but she had been wilful and stubborn and in the end they had given in. They knew she was an excellent driver and they knew, too, that she was not reckless. She drove fast but always within the outer limits of safety.
‘I think one of you should go with her,’ said Edith.
‘Mother – how illogical can you get?’
‘Then it must be dangerous!’ Logic, in Edith’s view, had nothing to do with mother love.
Margaret looked at her father. ‘Daddy, will you reason with her? She’s getting more dithery every day.’
‘Don’t add insult to injury,’ said Lucas. ‘Come outside.’
They went out into the garden, walked round the marble-faced swimming pool. It had been a cold winter and the air still had a chill to it. A gardener was trimming some frost-damaged shrubs and a houseman was pulling in leaves from the cold-looking water of the pool. Lucas shivered and put his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket.
‘Your mother hasn’t been the same since you all left home.’
‘Daddy, it had to happen sooner or later. She still has Prue.’
‘Prue isn’t enough. She’s not old enough yet. Your mother was looking forward to all of you growing up, being old enough to talk to, to take her into your confidence.’ He made his own confidence: ‘I was looking forward to it myself.’
‘Daddy,’ she said gently, ‘it’s always been hard to talk to you.’
He nodded, not looking at her. ‘I think it was all of you being girls – it would have been easier for me if I’d had sons. I tried with Tim and Frank – ’
‘You weren’t very successful.’ She still spoke gently, having no desire to hurt him further.
‘I was never close enough to them. I’m never comfortable with outsiders. I’m like that when I go to Washington. Perhaps it was my father’s fault. He and Mother, your grandmother, sheltered me too much.’
Oh Daddy, how can you be so blind? But it would be useless to point it out to him: he would forever go on trying to shelter his own children. It was too deeply engrained in his nature: they were Beauforts, a different species, and they had to be protected. Yet she knew, despite Magnus’s criticism of her lack of knowledge of what made Kansas City and by extension the rest of America tick, that she and her sisters were not so much different. Except, of course, in their wealth. The rich are different, someone (Fitzgerald? Hemingway?) had said. But whoever had said it had not been rich and really did not know.
The gardener went by, touched his cap, said Buongiorno, signore; and Lucas nodded acknowledgement and approval. Perhaps the Italians were not so bad after all: they had the proper respect for class. They knew nothing about democracy, of course, and that probably gave them an advantage. He had heard that President Eisenhower had been upset to learn that Washington could not be run like the Army. America could do with a dose of respect and discipline. It was a pleasure to see some proper respect here in this walled garden, even if he was not quite sure what the attitudes were outside it.
‘Don’t worry about us, Daddy. We’ll all come back some day, perhaps sooner than you expect. Why don’t you stay on with us for a while? Sally would love to know she had your moral support.’
‘She’ll get none from your mother, you know that. But all right. Can we stay here?’
‘It has twelve bedrooms and six bathrooms – why not?’
‘Can’t understand why they don’t build a bathroom to each bedroom. These Europeans seem afraid of plumbing.’
He knows no more than I do. ‘Have you been in Appalachia lately?’
He suddenly smiled and just as suddenly put his arm round her. She hid her surprise, not wanting to hurt him; but she had to thrust the stiffness from her body and relax within his embrace. She felt for his hand and held it.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘We can talk.’
‘Of course we can,’ she said and wanted to weep, knowing that it was too late.
Lucas and Edith stayed for a month. Sally, accompanied by a mechanic from the garage that serviced her car, went off to Brescia to practise for the Mille Miglia. Unlike most of the private starters in the annual race, she was not handicapped by lack of finance. The works teams drove round the 1000-kilometre route at least once, sometimes twice; most private drivers could not afford to do that, but Sally and her mechanic did it twice. She ran the car off the road once, but confided this only to Margaret and Nina.
‘I’m all right, so there’s no need to scare the pants off Mother. I’m having the dents hammered out and we’ll be there at the start tomorrow morning.’
Margaret, Nina and their parents had come up to Brescia the night before the race was to start. Sally was quartered in the town, but the rest of the Beauforts had had to stay in a hotel at the northern end of Lake Garda. Lucas, who never went to a sporting event of any kind in Kansas City, was not happy about travelling fifty miles to see the start and finish of a race, the greater part of which would be run well beyond the sight of him and everyone else in Brescia.
‘Ridiculous,’ he said. ‘At least at Indianapolis you can see them going round and round.’
‘I’d rather not see it,’ said Edith. ‘My heart would be in my mouth for the whole time – how long will it take you, darling?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sally. ‘Thirteen or fourteen hours, if I’m lucky. Maybe longer. I don’t expect to win. All I want to do is finish.’
‘I’ve always believed winning is important,’ said Lucas, forgetting himself.
‘It is not!’ said Edith. ‘You just finish, darling, that’s all I ask.’
Lucas was not happy when he learned he would have to stay up half the night to see his daughter start off down the Viale Rebuffone; even in his youth he would not have stayed up half the night to see Babe Ruth go to bat or Man O’ War run, supposing those two sports figures had competed at night. He had stayed up all night to hear Julia Lee and Count Basie and others, but that had been different. He was also not happy when he saw the size of the crowd in the Piazza Vittoria and the Viale Rebuffone and heard the noise of revving cars, brass bands, firecrackers and what seemed to be a million shouting, gesticulating Italians. His third daughter must be a lunatic to want to belong to such an atmosphere.
Sally, using money, had managed to get her parents and sisters a vantage point on a balcony overlooking the start. The first cars went off at nine o’clock, tiny family cars taking their drivers on their one day of glory in the year; at half-minute intervals up to ten o’clock and then at minute intervals after that, the cars continued to roll down the ramp and start the long journey. The noise was deafening and Margaret knew that her mother and father would be suffering headaches long before Sally got away. She persuaded them to go and lie down and the owner of the apartment, a motherly woman older than either Edith or Lucas, pushed them into a bedroom, chattering at them in Italian and oblivious of the fact that neither of them understood a word she was saying. She closed the bedroom door on them and shooed Margaret and Nina out for a breath of fresh air.
They went out for a breath of gasoline-and-oil-filled air. They fought their way through the crowd, several times having their bottoms pinched by men whose interest was not solely in the cars thumping down off the starting ramp. They found Sally and her mechanic standing beside the apple-green Maserati, both of them in driving overalls. With them was another driver whose back was to Margaret as she and Nina were squeezed out of the crowd into the tiny space beside the car.
‘Here’s another American driver,’ said Sally. ‘So I shan’t feel so isolated. My sisters Nina and Meg. Philip Mann.’
The driver turned and smiled at the arrivals. ‘Hello,’ said Philip Gentl
eman.
‘Mr Mann?’ said Margaret. ‘No longer gentle?’
‘What is this?’ said Sally and Nina.
‘A joke,’ said Margaret, suddenly afraid of giving herself away. ‘Mr Mann and I once met at a party.’
‘You know Kansas City then, Mr Mann?’ said Nina.
‘I was there only once. Your sister and I met only fleetingly.’
Then he excused himself and went away to his own car, a red Ferrari. Margaret said, ‘Is he here just for the Mille Miglia?’
‘In Italy you mean? No, he lives in Milan. He represents some Chicago investment firm. He’s attractive, don’t you think?’
‘I was thinking that,’ said Nina. ‘What a pity he doesn’t live in Rome.’
‘Maybe it’s just as well,’ said Margaret, for reasons of her own.
‘What’s the joke about gentle?’ said Sally. ‘Oh, I get it. Gentle Mann.’
‘Something like that,’ said Margaret. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’
The three of them had no difficulty in getting a table in a bar. Three beautiful American girls, one of them about to drive in the Mille Miglia, brought every man in the bar to his feet. They ordered Camparis and the bar owner brought them free, on the house, con molto fortuna. The bar throbbed with excitement and passion; a car thummed its engine out in the street and men moaned as if they were hearing the sound of love-making. There were no other women in the bar, but the Beaufort sisters did not feel and the men did not let them feel that they were breaking some rule of propriety. Sally, in her driver’s overalls, her helmet hanging by its strap from her arm like an outsize handbag, brought them all together in, as far as it was possible in an Italian bar, a sexless paean to the race.
Then it was time for Sally to leave. The entire bar stood and raised their glasses, blew her kisses, came to the door and cheered her. Flushed, laughing, eyes glistening, she went out with her sisters and across to her car, slipped into the driver’s seat beside the mechanic who was already waiting for her.