The Beaufort Sisters

by Jon Cleary

  ‘No government troops,’ said Kurt. ‘They came through here this morning, but Father Lebrun told them he hadn’t seen any of us in weeks.’

  ‘What have we here?’ said Father Lebrun in French and looked in at Sally and the dead Michele.

  ‘One dead and one with a badly shattered knee.’ Tim also spoke in French. ‘I don’t think you need to know the name of the dead woman, Father. Kurt and I will take her off into the bush and bury her – ’

  ‘No!’ Sally said fiercely.

  Tim put a comforting hand on her arm. ‘I’m afraid that’s the way it’s got to be – for Father Lebrun’s sake, if for no one else’s. He can’t afford to take sides, not even with the dead. Oh, this is Madame Mann, Father. I’ll move her on as soon as you can fix up her knee.’

  Father Lebrun looked at Sally; they were barely distinguishable shapes to each other. He had a smell of incense about him and she wondered if he had been at a service when Kurt had called him away. As if reading her thoughts he said, ‘I say Benediction once a week. It helps one’s faith – ’

  Sally went to say something: about faith, love, something like that. But the whole day, exhaustion, pain and grief, abruptly caught up with her. She lost consciousness, slipped into merciful blackness.

  When she woke she had a moment of panic trying to establish where she was. She was in a bed beneath a mosquito net; something was wrong with her right leg. She clutched at the net, tried to pull herself up. Then the net was lifted and Tim was soothing her. She stared at him: the sight of him only made her more disoriented. Then memory flooded back. She put a hand down to her leg, felt the splints starting at the middle of her thigh and running down below her knee.

  ‘Father Lebrun operated on you.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘One-thirty in the morning. Here.’ He handed her a drink that tasted of limes. She noticed that he was in a white soutane even more ragged than the priest’s had been. ‘I’m supposed to be another priest, just in case any of the patients notice me. You’re in Father Lebrun’s house. He thought it safer than putting you out in the ward with the other patients.’

  ‘How’s my leg?’

  He hesitated a moment. ‘Not good, I’m afraid. Unless the doctors back in the States can perform a miracle, he thinks you’re going to have a gammy leg from now on. I guess you’re lucky at that. Compared to Madame Onza.’

  ‘Did you bury her? Out in the bush, like some native? She wouldn’t have liked that.’ She wept quietly for the dead Michele: Africa had reclaimed her after all.

  Tim sat with his hand resting on hers: he could have been a priest comforting a sinner. But the image would not have pleased him: he had never been hypocritical about his own sins. ‘Sally, we’re going to have to move you from here very soon. Father Lebrun hasn’t said you have to go, but he’s in a hell of a situation. He’s here to care for the blacks, not people like us.’

  People like us: a phrase from home. ‘Tim – why did you run away? And take Michael with you? That was the cruellest thing. For Nina, I mean.’

  He let the net drop back between them as mosquitoes came humming in. She could just see him beyond the thin pale screen, his face half-lit by a small oil lamp on a side table. ‘I had my reasons for going.’

  ‘Nina never knew them. Or so she said.’

  ‘No, I don’t believe she did.’ He was silent for a while and she waited, hoping for some revelation. But there was none: ‘I took Michael with me because I wanted him to be my son, not your father’s grandson. You probably won’t understand that – you were too young to realize what it was like then. Perhaps he’s changed – your father, I mean. Has he?’

  She didn’t reply at once, looking for a truthful answer. ‘Maybe not all that much. Where is Michael now?’

  He shook his head. ‘He’s safe.’

  ‘Won’t you come back? Now I’ve found you –

  ‘You didn’t find me. We stumbled on each other. I’ve been afraid of something like this all these years, though I never dreamed I’d meet one of you out here. But coincidence never surprises me. It only surprises people who never get off their arses, who never expose themselves to chance.’ He looked at her. ‘You and I seem to be two of a kind.’

  ‘Are you coming back with me? Nina still loves you.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work, not after all this time. There’d be too many recriminations. And there’s still your father. Nina might forgive me. But he never would.’

  ‘Where have you been all these years? Have you been doing – this all the time?’

  He chuckled, a little sourly, she thought. ‘No. There’s just so much demand for mercenaries. The market may pick up, especially here in Africa, but up till now it hasn’t been much of a living.’

  ‘Do you call it a living, killing other men for money?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sally!’ He laughed. ‘Weren’t you bringing the money to pay us?’

  She had never been good at argument, mainly because she never thought matters out beforehand. She saw something crawling up the net and she reached up to brush it away, but Tim’s hand flicked it away first.

  ‘Cockroach. Don’t get out of bed without your shoes – you’ll have jiggers under your toenails before you know where you are. This isn’t Beaufort Park.’ He was only gently sarcastic. ‘I’m not coming back with you, Sally. And you have to promise me you won’t tell Nina or anyone else that we met.’

  ‘I can’t do that! How can you ask me to do that to her?’

  ‘It’ll be kinder – she’s probably got over it all by now.’

  ‘She hasn’t – ’

  Again he was silent: nor have you, she thought. ‘It’ll still be for the best. Don’t tell her.’

  ‘I can’t promise that – ’

  ‘You’ll have to. You owe me something, Sally. If it gets out why you were here – flying in with your lesbian girl-friend, bringing a million dollars of Beaufort money to pay some cheap mercenaries in a cheap little rebellion – ’

  ‘Stop it!’ She felt sick; she had not expected him to be as cruel and unprincipled as this. But why not? Hadn’t he been cruel to Nina? ‘You’re blackmailing me – ’

  ‘I know. But only to protect Michael. I’ve made a new life for him. He’s happy – ’

  ‘Where is he? How can a boy be happy when he doesn’t know who his mother is?’

  ‘He’s happy,’ he said doggedly. He stood up: she saw that the soutane was much too short for him, looked more like a dress. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  It was not easy to go back to sleep, despite her weariness. Her mind ached as much as her leg; she was crippled in more ways than one. She lay there, watching the cockroaches climb up the snowy hill of the net above her. She could hear the grunting chorus of frogs down by the river and from the hospital ward there came the sound of someone crying in a thin ululating wail, like an incantation against pain. She fell asleep just before daylight and did not waken when Father Lebrun looked in on her before he went across to his chapel to say morning Mass. He wondered what had brought her all this way to the Congo, but he had given up asking such questions years ago. He went across to the tiny chapel and, as he did every morning, prayed for an answer to the biggest question of all.

  Sally woke at noon when the priest and a black nurse brought her lunch. ‘It’s not much,’ he said. ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘Yes, Father. Thank you for what you have done for me.’

  He dismissed the nurse and sat down beside the bed. ‘Major Burgess has gone away.’ He put out a reassuring hand as he saw the look, a mixture of fear and surprise, on her face. ‘He’ll be back. He has to do something about his men. They aren’t going to be needed any more, I gather.’

  ‘How long will he be?’

  ‘A couple of days at least. But we couldn’t move you before then in any case. When he comes back, he’s going to take you over the border to Angola. It will be a long hard journey and I hope your leg stands up to it. It wou
ld be much easier for you to go over into Northern Rhodesia, but I understand you have reasons for not wanting any questions asked. The Portuguese tend to ask fewer questions than the British, at least out here. I think you should go into a hospital in Luanda for a few days when you get there, so that they can check on your leg. Then go home to America as soon as you can and have the American doctors look at it. They have everything available to help you.’ He said it wistfully rather than enviously.

  ‘Father, make out a list of what you need here. No, not what you need. Everything you’d like.’

  ‘Ah – ’ He smiled at her innocence. ‘I’d like the Mayo Clinic. No, Mrs Mann, a small donation would be welcome. But it isn’t necessary.’

  ‘You work here alone? I mean, are you the only white?’

  ‘There were two other priests here with me, but they were killed earlier this year. The government won’t allow our Order to send anyone out to replace them. So there’s only me and four black girls I’ve trained as nurses. We get by,’ he said, but it sounded more like a prayer than a statement.

  ‘What do you know about – Major Burgess?’ She almost tripped on Tim’s alias.

  Father Lebrun shrugged. ‘Just that he seems a nice man in a job I don’t admire. He’s been in this part of the country about six months, off and on. He seems to come and go.’

  ‘Where does he go to?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I’ve never asked.’ His tone was unexpectedly curt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. I was just curious, that’s all. He’s been so kind and helpful, for a stranger.’

  ‘That’s funny. I had the feeling you two knew each other.’

  ‘No.’ She hoped her lie didn’t show. ‘He’s just an attractive man, that’s all.’

  He smiled, showing teeth ruined by bad diet. ‘I’d forgotten how men and women react to each other out there – ’ He nodded vaguely. ‘Would you really care to send us some things for the mission? I could make out a small list.’

  ‘As large a list as you like, Father.’

  ‘Not too large. Otherwise the government would confiscate everything.’

  Over the next two days Sally had time to think. She found the heat uncomfortable and she struggled out of the Mother Hubbard night-gown and lay naked under the single rough sheet, only putting the gown back on when Father Lebrun came to examine her leg. She lay propped up in the bed gazing out the window. Natives came and went across the river in canoes that seemed to have no freeboard at all; on one occasion there was a hullabaloo as four men in two canoes chased away a large crocodile. In the early morning birds rose in a vari-coloured cacophony, drowning out the tinny sound of the chapel bell. During the day the heat lay like a depressing mood on the mission; people drifted in slow motion through the harsh green glare. It was a tiny world in which Sally knew, to her shame, that she could never play a part. Such sacrifice was beyond her.

  She thought of her talk with George Biff and what was happening with the blacks in America. The same was happening here in Africa, only the spectrum of hate and violence and revolution was going to be so much wider. George had accused her of not knowing what was happening in her own country; he could accuse her of the same thing here. She was here solely because of her love for Michele; she had not even wanted to ask the background to Gaston Onza’s planned coup. She wondered how selfish other people were: worlds fell apart but unless it was one’s own small world, how much did one care? She looked down at her leg under the hoops holding the sheet off it. She had been crippled in a cause that meant nothing to her.

  Tim came back late in the evening of the second day. He was alone, still driving the Land-Rover but no longer dressed in battle fatigues. He wore a bush jacket, slacks, desert boots and a battered slouch hat with a puggaree. She had seen pictures in magazines of professional hunters who looked exactly like him and she wondered if that was what he was when he was not a mercenary soldier. But she did not question him.

  ‘It’s going to take us at least three days to get to Luanda. You can go into hospital for a couple of days while they look at your leg. Then you can catch a plane for Lisbon. I think it’d be a good idea if you had someone meet you there.’

  ‘I don’t have any money – ’

  He grinned. ‘Never thought I’d hear a Beaufort say that. Never mind, I have enough to get you home.’

  They left at first light next morning. Sally was put on a mattress in the back of the Land-Rover; a canvas top had been rigged up, leaving the sides open. Tim had brought tinned food with him from wherever he had been; he said nothing about what had happened to his men and again Sally did not question him. She only wanted to go home, to break and forget all involvement with Africa. But she knew that was not going to be easy.

  She said goodbye to Father Lebrun. ‘You could do with so much more than what you have on your list – ’

  ‘I’m afraid if I asked for more it wouldn’t reach me. Perhaps you could give something to our Order?’ He was a man of charity, but to ask for it was difficult.

  She promised to do that. ‘Thank you, Father. And pray for me.’

  ‘Of course. And for you too, Major Burgess?’

  ‘There are more deserving cases, Father. Good luck.’

  They drove off, watched by natives standing like shadows among the morning shadows. Sally, propped up in the back of the truck, looked back at the diminishing white figure of the priest fading into nothingness as the sun came up over the trees and swallowed him.

  Several miles along the narrow road Tim pulled up. ‘I buried your friend over in there.’

  On an impulse she said, ‘May I see her grave?’

  ‘No.’ He was blunt but not unkind. ‘It’s just a heap of rocks. It wouldn’t do you any good, Sally.’

  She shook her head, but stopped herself from weeping. ‘She was so ambitious. She wanted to be the President’s wife, did you know that? I mean she wanted it, well, like a title or something.’

  ‘I’d heard people talk about her. What made you love her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ One couldn’t explain love; or anyway she could not. If it had been love: but it was too late now to examine that. As Tim had said, it wouldn’t do her any good. ‘I don’t think it was the sort of love you had for Nina.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way – ’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

  They drove on and Michele, under a cairn of stones, beautiful no longer and beyond the spur of ambition, dropped away into memory. Where love is at its least vulnerable.

  They camped that night on the border, though Sally would not have known had Tim not told her. ‘Lines on a map, that’s all. Nobody ever asked the blacks what they thought about who owned them. The joke is, the new black governments are jealous about the borders the whites gave them. I think Africa might be the original home of black comedy.’

  ‘Why do you never take anything seriously, Tim?’

  ‘Your father used to accuse me of being whimsical. He was wrong – and so are you. I take a great many things seriously. Including what’s happening out here.’

  ‘Then you’re going to stay on here?’

  He smiled at her across the camp fire. ‘Ah, you don’t get me that way. I told you – you drop a word to Nina or anyone that you met me and I’ll spill the beans about why you were here.’

  ‘Right now I don’t think I’d care.’

  ‘Care about someone but yourself, old girl.’

  ‘That sounds good coming from you!’

  ‘You’d be surprised how much I did care – still do. I left Kansas City because I cared for other people, not just for myself.’ Over the years he had come to believe that: self-justification is necessary in self-exile. He hadn’t the faith of Father Lebrun, another self-exile.

  He picked her up, put her back in the truck. ‘I’ll sleep in here, too, if you don’t mind. Just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  He grinned. ‘Beasties and things
that go bump in the night.’

  He lay down beside her on the floor of the truck. He had given his Schmeisser machine pistol to Kurt, who had gone looking for another war that needed mercenaries; now he carried a Springfield .30 rifle, a gun that either a soldier or a hunter might use. He loaded it and put it down between him and Sally.

  ‘Goodnight. I’m glad your father can’t see us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He had some idea that I slept with other women than Nina.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’ Margaret was only a dim memory now compared to Nina.

  Nothing came into the camp during the night; or if it did Sally did not hear it. They drove on again next morning, picking up a graded road that led through tiny settlements where Tim took on petrol and where natives congregated at the back of the Land-Rover and stared in silently at the white woman lying on the mattress. They came to a town slightly larger than those they had passed through and Tim pulled up outside a general store and post office run by a portly Portuguese who spent all his time picking at his teeth with an ivory toothpick.

  ‘We can send a cable from here – it will save time. By the time you get to Lisbon perhaps someone can be waiting there for you. Do you know Lisbon?’

  ‘I was there once for the Portuguese Grand Prix.’

  ‘Still mad on cars, eh? Where did you stay?’

  ‘The Ritz.’

  ‘Of course. Where else?’

  He wrote out the cable: Please meet me urgently in Lisbon Hotel Ritz. Explanations later. Sally. Then he came out to the truck. ‘Whom do I send it to?’

  ‘Nina. She goes under her maiden name now.’

  He looked at her steadily, eyes narrowed against the glare bouncing up from the red earth of the roadway. ‘Are you trying to score a point off me?’

  ‘No. I just think she’s the only one who could leave at a moment’s notice. And she’s reliable.’

  ‘She always was,’ he said and went back into the store and paid extra to make sure the storekeeper sent the cable off immediately. He addressed it to Miss Nina Beaufort. He felt a pang, that of the middle-aged man for the lost love of his younger days. There was an almost irresistible urge to add his own name to that of Sally. Explanations later. But no amount of explanation would alleviate the complications that would follow later.