The Beaufort Sisters

by Jon Cleary

  ‘He’s looking for another son-in-law.’ They had reached a level in their relationship where they could talk without embarrassment.

  He held her hand as they walked along the path: from a distance they looked in love. Which they were, but not in a way that Lucas wanted. ‘Sally, I’m never going to risk it. Marriage, I mean. If I married you, or anyone else for that matter, and you got tired of never getting any proper sex and you went off and had it with some other guy, I’d go out of my mind. I’m not capable of an erection, but I sure as hell could get jealous.’

  ‘Maybe in our old age we’ll get together.’

  She had not been able to bring herself to tell him about Michele. He was terribly straight about sex; she could not imagine his being tolerant about any deviation. Though they did not preoccupy him, he talked of fags and dykes as if they were the worst result of Original Sin: what they got up to was too original for him. He would probably back off from Michele if he met her with more fear than if he were faced with the entire offensive line-up of the Green Bay Packers.

  ‘Maybe by then they’ll have solved my problem.’ He kissed her on the lips, holding her to him; his hands never touched her breasts, he was always as chaste in his embrace as a Victorian parson. One of the better ones. ‘Then, as they say, we’ll have a ball.’

  ‘Two,’ she said, and back in the house Lucas heard their loud laughter and wondered why such a happy pair would not announce their engagement.

  Chapter Ten

  Sally

  1

  Sally and Prue left for London.

  The British capital had finally put the war years behind it; a new generation was emerging who thought the biggest battles to be fought were to make a quick quid or get a bird into bed. A photographer married into the Royal Family, putting the royal seal on yet another profession. Hordes of young men rushed out of the East End and the provinces to buy cameras and be professional photographers; the glossy magazines were deluged with self-portraits of Cockney cameramen who appeared too busy to button up their shirt fronts; Britain had never seen so much chest hair since the Celts took off their pelts at their summer solstice wingdings. Later on it was to see the eye-level lowered as pubic hair, never before thought an adornment, was paraded on stage and in voguish magazines; pharmaceutical companies found a new market area for their shampoos. The country began to prosper, though only the sharpest made fortunes; Prime Minister Macmillan had campaigned at the last election on the slogan You’ve never had it so good, but a few still had it better than most. The term had not yet been coined, but the Swinging Sixties was beginning and London seemed to be the place to be.

  Sally and Prue rented a house in Wilton Crescent and settled in to lead a simple rich life, with Harrods as their corner grocery store and a cook-housekeeper and a manservant to take the load off their shoulders if the burden of living simply became too much. Sally bought herself an Aston Martin and once more took up racing, while Prue took up men. Again.

  ‘I led a virtuous life back in Kansas City.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ said Sally. ‘What sort of life did you lead with those men from Yale and the rest of the Ivy League?’

  ‘Interesting. I think I’m a controlled nympho.’

  ‘I never know when you’re kidding and when you’re not.’

  ‘Neither do the men. I don’t think I’m as basically honest as you and Nina. That’s been the downfall of both of you.’

  You don’t know me as well as you think you do. ‘You don’t think Meg is honest? I mean with men.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Prue confessed. ‘She plays things much closer to her chest than the rest of us. I still don’t know what she ever saw in Frank Minett. Something went wrong there and I don’t think it was all Frank’s fault. I never liked him, he was a bit too pushy, but he never deserved to have his brains blown out. Not even by himself.’

  In November 1961 the two sisters went to Hamburg where Sally had entered in a rally. She was partnered by the English girl who had raced with her previously in French rallies when Michele had made herself unavailable. Mary Venneker was a tall gangling girl who just missed being beautiful and finished up being handsome rather than pretty. She had a bosom rather too large for the slenderness of her body and expressive hands that were continually moving about as if looking for a place to rest.

  They stayed at the Atlantic and the first night at dinner Mary said, ‘I have someone coming by afterwards. Would you like to meet him? He’s years older than me and he’s too short, but he’s absolutely adorable and if I can get a hammerlock on him I’ll get him to marry me.’

  ‘Sounds an ideal match,’ said Prue. ‘Is this him coming across now?’

  He was in his late 40s but looked younger, except for his eyes. His hair was blond enough to hide any grey in it and under his beautifully cut suit his figure looked like that of a man who spent a lot of time on the tennis court or in the gymnasium or in the bed of a loving masseuse. But his eyes, Prue, the observer of eyes, decided, were too old to be rejuvenated by any health exercises.

  ‘Rudi darling!’ Mary rose up like a high-jumper; for a moment Sally thought that Rudi was going to disappear under Mary. She hugged him, kissed him, then introduced him. ‘Rudi Schnatz. Baron Rudolph von Schnatz. He is one of the burghers of Hamburg, but that’s only when he wants to become stuffy.’

  Rudi Schnatz bowed, but did not click his heels as Sally and Prue expected. ‘I once met your sister – I’ve forgotten her name. The one who was kidnapped down in Frankfurt. How is she? Is she still married to my English friend Tim Davoren?’

  Tim’s name was rarely mentioned now in the Beaufort family. ‘No,’ said Prue coolly. ‘They separated a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh? He didn’t say so.’

  Both sisters sat up as Schnatz sat down. ‘When was that?’

  Schnatz took the wine Mary poured for him, raised his glass to the three of them. ‘Ladies …’ He drank, wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief. Then for the first time he noticed that Sally and Prue were leaning forward impatiently. ‘When was it I met my friend Tim? Oh, two – no, three years ago. In Beirut.’

  ‘Beirut? Is he living there?’ Sally could feel herself pulsing with excitement. She’d be on the phone to Nina tonight, as soon as they found out where Tim could be found.

  Schnatz shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. We met by accident, in the casino there. He was there on business, as I was.’

  ‘What sort of business?’ Prue asked.

  ‘His or mine?’ He smiled. ‘No, you wouldn’t ask a rude question like that of me.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Mary Venneker, suddenly sounding defensive of her loved one. ‘He’s one of the pillars of this town. You are, aren’t you, Rudi?’

  ‘Every centimetre of me, Liebling. But I’ll answer Miss Beaufort’s question. I was there selling arms. A perfectly proper business these days, now we are no longer at war.’

  ‘Who do you sell to, then?’ said Sally.

  ‘Other people who want to go to war. Sounds cynical? It is,’ he said disarmingly. ‘But it is perfectly legitimate and governments recognize us. They don’t like to sell their obsolete equipment themselves, so they have people like me do it. Well, not exactly me. One of my companies. That was why my friend Tim was in Beirut. He was buying guns for someone. He was a very good soldier in the war, y’know. He would know all about guns.’

  ‘Did he tell you whom he was buying for?’

  ‘No. To tell you the truth, he did not seem very pleased to see me. We chatted for only a few minutes, then he was gone. I wanted to have dinner with him, chat over old times, but I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t at any of the best hotels.’ That must have sounded snobbish in his own ears because he said, ‘I mean, he looked as if that was where he would stay. Most successful looking.’

  Sally glanced at Prue, then both stood up. ‘Excuse us. We’re sure you don’t want us cluttering up your night together. Just don’t tire yourself out, Mary. We have to be on
the starting line at eight o’clock.’

  Mary had her long arm round Schnatz’s shoulder. They looked an incongruous pair, she long, gangling and untidy, he short, trim and impeccably smart. What seemed even more incongruous to Sally was that Schnatz seemed genuinely fond of the awkward English girl. She had the abrupt, unexpected image of him in the company of someone more like Michele.

  Upstairs in their suite looking out on the Altersee Prue said, ‘Well? Do we tell Nina?’

  ‘What’s to tell?’ Coming up in the elevator Sally had been thoughtful, trying to put herself in Nina’s place at the other end of the phone in Kansas City. ‘That he was alive and successful in Beirut two or three years ago?’

  ‘She could get those investigators of hers to go there and see if they could pick up his trail.’

  ‘And what if they pick up nothing? All her heartache starts all over again. She’s at last adjusted herself – well, as adjusted as she probably ever will be. I don’t know that she wants to see Tim again, not after all this time.’

  ‘There’s Michael. She wants to see him. He’d be – what? Fifteen now. She’ll still be wanting to see him when he’s fifty. I think we should tell her.’

  ‘Let’s sleep on it.’

  Prue, for all her sophisticated talk and her experience with college boys, had had no experience in heartache. Sally knew she could not explain to Prue how she understood what Nina might go through again if the ghosts of Tim and Michael were raised, only to disappear once more without trace. She knew how much she treasured the quiet interior she had achieved within herself; it might be as fragile as gelatine, but it was a haven after what she had gone through in the past eighteen months. She had the feeling that Nina had tried for and achieved the same repose; but it would be equally fragile, unable to bear the weight of further disappointment. Unless there was a certainty that Tim and Michael could be found, it was better that things were left as they were.

  In the morning Prue said, ‘I lay awake for a long time last night. In the end I decided you were right. You’d know more about unhappiness than I do.’

  ‘Maybe some day she’ll find them. But I’d rather she found them herself than us do it for her.’

  Sally and Mary spent the next two days touring in the rally, doing well but not well enough to gain a place. Sally did not mind; she was not competitive enough to think only of winning; the mere taking part gave her enough enjoyment. It filled in time, kept intact the vacuum of the quiet interior. It was selfish and self-indulgent, she knew; to have done charity work would also have filled in time, been more contributory than driving an expensive car around the back roads of Schleswig-Holstein. But charity work would have meant involvement in other people’s lives and she had not the strength to suffer other people’s suffering.

  When she and Mary returned to the hotel after the rally Prue and Rudi Schnatz were waiting for them. ‘Rudi wants us all to go out to his place in the country for the weekend. He’s having a shoot.’

  ‘There’ll be others there,’ said Schnatz. ‘Some business associates and their wives. And some unattached men.’

  Mary went off with Schnatz at once and Sally said, ‘I wish he’d marry her. She moons over him instead of navigating for me.’

  ‘Then we’ll work on them over the weekend. We’ll have them engaged by Sunday evening.’

  But Sally forgot all about Mary Venneker and Rudi Schnatz’s romance as soon as she arrived at the Schnatz country home. It was south-east of Ratzeburg, not far from the East German border, in flat rolling country that was losing its green under the winds of autumn. A manor house standing in the midst of its own farmlands, it had been in the Schnatz family for over a century, had been lost in the post-World War Two depression and now regained and restored by the last survivor of the family, Rudi. It was not an attractive house, but it had a solidity to it that suggested security, an ability to survive the tempests of men, their politics and their wars. Rudi, standing on the broad front steps to greet them, looked another man from the one they had met in Hamburg, one to whom tradition meant as much as, if not more than, business profits. His one unpatriotic note was that he was dressed in English tweed and looked more like an English squire than a German Junker.

  The other guests were waiting inside the house to meet the newcomers. As soon as she walked into the big, high-ceilinged drawing-room Sally saw Michele. She felt faint, as if the floor had suddenly opened up beneath her. It seemed to her that Michele floated forward, took both her hands so lightly and kissed her so softly on the cheek that she felt she was dreaming. But she could smell that scent that was Michele’s alone, the combination of skin and perfume that was as much a memory as the sight of the beautiful face, the sound of the husky voice and the touch of the experienced hands. She clutched Michele’s fingers in hers and returned the kiss. And was aware that Prue, eyes alert as ever, was watching them.

  ‘Darling, how marvellous!’ Michele said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Rudi said who was coming.’

  Sally introduced her to Prue, then was gently pulled across to meet Michele’s husband. She was shocked at the jealousy she felt as she approached the tall slender man with the skin slightly darker than Michele’s and the close-cropped black hair that looked as if it had been straightened. He had had a Belgian mother but his African father had prevailed in him. He looked to be about forty and Sally wondered what sort of white woman his mother had been that she had married a black man right after World War I. She was putting bad marks against him before she had even shaken hands with him, jealousy making her malicious.

  ‘Miss Beaufort.’ Gaston Onza’s English was more accented than his wife’s; he did not shake Sally’s hand but bent his head to brush it with his lips. The Belgian in him was not entirely submerged. ‘Michele has told me so much about you.’

  They exchanged the usual banalities, but they were observing each other closely. Michele, their mutual lover, stood off from them, watching them with cool, barely concealed amusement. Sally could feel everything breaking up inside her; the quiet interior was now a shattered glass ball that pierced her every time she looked at Michele. She knew now she had done the right thing in not calling Nina last night.

  ‘Rudi said you were here on business. You’re a long way from Leopoldville, M. Onza.’

  ‘Business and religion, they spread like the plague. My father could never get accustomed to the thought that men came all the way from Brussels to buy ivory from him. Then the missionaries came and tried to sell us Jesus Christ. My father never saw it as an even trade. He tried eating the missionaries but they were indigestible.’

  ‘Stop exaggerating, Gaston,’ said Michele.

  He smiled at her: lovingly? Sally wondered. But it was impossible to tell. ‘Since the Congo got its independence, Michele thinks we should act in more civilized ways. Don’t worry, cherie. I’m sure Miss Beaufort appreciates how civilized I am.’

  Later, in the bedroom the two sisters were sharing, Prue said, ‘So that’s the Michele.’

  ‘Who told you about her?’ Sally wondered why she was so much on the defensive.

  ‘Nina. I think she thought she was teaching me some of the facts of life. She did it in the nicest possible way – she wasn’t criticizing you.

  ‘Were you – well, shocked?’

  ‘Of course not. I suspected you were a bit that way years ago. With that Cindy whatever-her-name-was.’

  ‘Oh God! I should have known. Well?’ She waited on judgement.

  ‘Sal – please. Don’t look so – so vulnerable. It’s your life, it’s the way you are.’

  ‘You’re not shocked. But you’re – puzzled?’

  ‘We-ell. I suppose it’s because it’s the way I am. I mean, all I want is to be made love to by a man. Sometimes any man. Why do you do it? I mean, why a woman?’

  ‘I – I feel safer, I suppose. It’s hard to explain. Love-making with a girl isn’t all tenderness – you can get carried away, the same as with a man. When I’m with a man – ’
she was busy unpacking her suitcase, trying hard to make her words sound part of a natural everyday conversation – ‘I don’t hate what we’re doing. But I’m – I’m frightened. There’s more violence in a man’s love-making – don’t they call it the small death?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s for that reason. Sometimes after I’ve been with a really good man I feel just like dying. But I think it’s more from ecstatic exhaustion than anything else.’ Prue, as if to keep up the sham of an ordinary dialogue, began to unpack her own suitcase. ‘You’re sure – I mean you’re not suffering some sort of complex about Mother or Daddy?’

  Sally hung up a dress, not bothering to see if the creases fell out. Since Philip’s death she had once again lost interest in clothes; but she would have laughed if Prue had suggested that it in itself was another manifestation of her homosexuality. She laughed, too, at the suggestion that she was suffering from some fixation about her mother or father. She turned away from the closet and faced Prue squarely.

  ‘I never had any fantasy about Mother, if that’s what you mean. I loved her, but I never wanted to see myself in her image. And you know what she was like – she never tried to make us ashamed of our bodies. I’ve read that that can sometimes drive girls round the bend.’ She smiled, feeling more at ease now. ‘Though I don’t think I’m round the bend. I’m just, well, different from you and Nina and Meg, that’s all.’

  ‘You never resented Daddy for anything?’

  ‘Never. Except sometimes he favoured Nina more than the rest of us. But he’d have been a sainted marvel if he could have split himself equally four ways amongst us. No, I don’t think I have any complex about Daddy. But sometimes – ’ She paused. ‘Sometimes when I was with Michele, I was conscious of an anti-male prejudice. I didn’t hate all men, but I – resented them. For what they have, I suppose. It’s their world. And I’d resent Daddy along with the rest of them. Then I’d look at Michele and I could see that she would hold her own in any man’s world.’