by Jon Cleary
The storekeeper spelled out the name. ‘B-e-a-u-f-o-r-t.’ It meant nothing to him, nor did Kansas City: his world stopped at the end of the dusty street, he was another self-exile. ‘It will go today, senor. Promptly.’
They drove on, stopped the second night in a small town with a single hotel. Tim found a doctor, an elderly man with straggly yellow-grey hair and the smell of cheap cigars about him. He looked at Sally’s leg and pronounced it all right.
‘But you could save yourself a lot of discomfort if you got them to fly a plane out from Luanda. They’re not cheap, but you’re not short of money, are you?’ Tim had told him they had been on a safari when Sally had had her accident. Women safari-hunters, especially Americans, were never short of money. ‘How much is my fee, did you say? What do American doctors charge?’
When the doctor had gone Sally said, ‘Do you have enough money to hire a plane to take us in? I’ll pay you back.’
He shook his head, smiling. ‘Where would you send it? You’d know where I was and, once you’re back with Nina, you might feel tempted … I don’t have enough to hire a plane and then put you on the one for Lisbon. You’ll just have to put up with another day in the Land-Rover.’
She had loved him when she had been a schoolgirl, but she had never really known him. She realized now that she would probably never really know him. She wondered if she still loved him, in a schoolgirl way, but she could not tell. But she felt certain that, if he ever returned to Kansas City, Nina would still love him.
They reached Luanda the next day, driving in past the trappings of colonialism: the solid white buildings that reminded the colonists of home, the statues of past governors, the flags fluttering from white-painted flagstaffs like imperialist totems.
‘The Portuguese were the first Europeans into Africa,’ said Tim, ‘and they may be the last out.’
‘Would you fight for them or the blacks if a war broke out here?’
‘I think I’m finished as a mercenary.’ She wondered if other mercenaries used the term to describe themselves; he did not appear embarrassed by or ashamed of it. ‘I took it up because, really, it seemed to be the only thing I was good at. Soldiering, I mean.’
‘Were you doing it when you met Rudi Schnatz in Beirut?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you need the money?’
‘That depends whose standards we’re using.’ The $250,000 Lucas had given him was in a bank in Switzerland, drawing six and a half per cent on American commercial bonds. Tax-free though it was, it did not allow him to live lavishly; but it was comforting to know that he and Michael would never be on the bread-line. ‘No, I took it up because it gave me something to do.’
‘Does Michael know what you do?’
‘No. He thinks I’m a part-time Big White Hunter. It fits his image of me.’
‘Does he love you?’
He thought of the boy in boarding-school in Nairobi: fair-haired like his mother, athletic, extraverted and easy-going. Who accepted that his mother was dead; but sometimes, memories of his babyhood stirring in him like a deep current, would ask questions that Tim had difficulty in answering. ‘Yes, I think so. We get on well together. That’s not something every father and son does.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘For your sake. But you shouldn’t deny Nina the same joy.’
He said nothing to that. He found the hospital and, without too much fuss, Sally was admitted. The doctors looked at her knee, shook their heads at the long-term prospects for it but said it was doing well enough for her to travel. Tim came back in the evening and said he had booked her out on a plane for Lisbon the following day. He handed her a hundred dollars in single bills.
‘I went to a bureau de change and got you dollars – you can use those anywhere. I can remember when the pound had the same usefulness,’ he added sardonically. He longed to go home to England, but he might be too easily found there. ‘I wish I could give you more, but that’s all I can spare at the moment. I have to get home myself.’
‘Where’s home?’ But she smiled when he smiled and shook his head. ‘I thought I might trap you.’
‘No. You and I have a bargain. I hope you’re a woman of honour.’
‘I’ll keep my part of the bargain, Tim. I owe you too much.’
He leaned over, kissed her on the cheek. ‘I loved all you Beaufort sisters.’
‘Do you have a new wife? Or a girl-friend?’
‘No new wife. But I get by. If you know where to look, there is always a pretty woman waiting to be consoled.’
‘Will you come to the airport tomorrow?’
‘Yes. I want to make sure you leave Africa. For your sake.’
‘And yours,’ she said and he didn’t deny it.
The plane took off early the next morning. She was carried on board on a stretcher and Tim went with her to say his final farewell. He kissed her again, on the lips this time. He felt an emotion he had not felt in years; he hoped that his eyes were not glistening. Again he felt the temptation to see Nina once more; all he had to do was sit back in the seat and buckle on the seat-belt. But reason, the bane of love and lovers, held him back. There had been aching periods of loneliness in the years past and there would be another one tonight. But he could never go back till Lucas and Margaret were dead. And by then it would be too late for what he and Nina had once had.
‘Goodbye, Sally. Take care. And don’t shed too many tears over Michele. It would never have worked out.’
From the plane’s window she saw him standing on the tarmac. He had put on dark glasses against the glare and under the slouch hat he could have been anyone, a stranger growing smaller and smaller as Africa grew larger about him. The plane climbed, the continent fell away under a wing, slipped into the past: a scribble of surf breaking on a palm-fringed shore, a stone-marked grave, the taste of lost love upon the lips.
5
Nina arrived in Lisbon the day after Sally checked into the Ritz. The flight up from Luanda had not been too uncomfortable. The hotel called a doctor who looked at the smashed knee and said that, if Senorita Beaufort insisted, there was no reason why she should not fly on in a day or two to America. Sally thanked him, then asked him to add his bill to the hotel’s. Next she cabled Magnus to send her money, sank back into the bed in the best suite in the hotel and slept till noon the next day. When she woke she phoned the man in Marseilles and told him she had crashed his plane and it was a total write-off. Because she did not want any enquiries by the insurance company, she asked him to send her a bill for the plane. She would pay for it out of the money in the bank in Zurich.
Then Nina arrived. ‘Where the hell have you been? A cable from some place called – ’ She looked at the cable she had taken from her handbag. ‘Vila Teixiera de Sousa. Where’s that, for God’s sake?’
‘Sit down. Please. I’ll tell you all about it.’ Which she did, leaving out only the most important item: Tim.
‘How did you get out of there?’
‘Some mercenaries brought me out. Professional soldiers. They were fighting for Michele’s husband. Oh Nin!’ She began to weep, more for Nina than for herself.
But Nina was not to know the reason. ‘Sal – it was for the best. You had no future with her. Prue told me you had met her again in Germany.’
They caught a Pan American plane out next day for New York. A day later they were home in Kansas City. She was admitted to hospital and a team of doctors looked at her knee. One look at their faces told her the worst.
‘You’ll be able to walk,’ said the senior surgeon, ‘but I’m afraid you’re always going to have a limp.’
‘The damage wasn’t done by the doctor who originally fixed me up?’ She did not want to think the worst of Father Lebrun.
‘No, we think he did as well as he possibly could have in the circumstances. I understand you were in a car accident somewhere in Africa, that right? Whoever he was, he did a good job. I doubt if any of us could have done a better one, not the way the knee was
shattered. I’m sorry, Miss Beaufort – ’
‘It’s all right.’ She had reached a stage of resignation that hovered on the thin edge between acceptance of the impending handicap and total depression. She would buy a silver-topped cane … She thought of Tony Gentleman, whose money she had used for a most unrespectable venture. He had got his revenge. ‘Do what you can for me, doctor.’
After the operation Lucas came alone to see her. He was still as straight-backed as ever but his face had aged and he no longer had the energy that used to fire him. He had lost interest in politics and had taken to having an occasional lunch with Harry Truman at the Kansas City Club, two old men who had buried their differences in the recognition that their respective worlds no longer belonged to them. President Truman’s place in history was safe and Lucas Beaufort’s fortune was still secure, but younger men were making their mark. Camelot had come to Washington and conglomerates, a word that brought shudders to Lucas, had come to the business world. Without admitting it to himself he was half-way to surrender, another word that would have brought a shudder to him if anyone should have suggested it.
‘Do I ask what you were doing in Africa or isn’t it any of my business?’
‘It was an adventure, Daddy.’ She had known he would ask the question and she had worked out her answer. ‘I was invited down there to see a friend and I thought it would be fun to fly all the way. It just didn’t work out as I’d planned, that was all.’
‘Did you get to see your friend?’
‘Yes. She was the one who arranged my passage back.’
There were other questions he wanted to ask, but he refrained. He and Edith had never had any secrets from each other – except the secret about Tim’s pay-off and disappearance. But he realized that there would always be secrets between his daughters and him. ‘Charlie Luman called the house last night.’
‘Good old Charlie.’
She was discharged from hospital a week later and went home to the big house. Margaret and Bruce were living in what had been Nina’s house and it was now legally theirs. Nina, Prue and Sally were now back in their old rooms in their father’s house. Sally had a feeling that life was turning backwards, but she had never indulged her imagination and she put the thought out of her mind.
Prue told her about Guy. ‘We’re going to be married in June. At his mother’s place in the Loire. A white wedding in the family at last. Do people really still believe that white signifies virginity?’
‘If they do, you should be the final disillusionment. How does Daddy feel about the marriage taking place in France?’
‘He didn’t argue.’ Prue was abruptly sober. ‘He seems to have given up on all of us. Poor Daddy.’
Magnus came to see Sally and she asked him to do her two favours. ‘There’s a list of things. Would you arrange for them to be sent to this mission in Katanga? Addressed to Father Lebrun.’
‘Katanga, eh?’
‘No questions, Magnus, please. The second thing is, arrange for the bank in Switzerland to send $250,000 to this mission Order in Belgium. The gift has to be anonymous.’
‘And I’m not allowed to ask any questions at all?’
‘None.’
A week later he came back to the house. ‘I asked a question of the bank in Zurich. I’m told the Gentleman account has been reduced by some four million dollars on your signature.’
‘That’s right.’
Magnus was surprised at her calm control: this was a new Sally. ‘I hope it was for a good cause.’
‘I thought it was at the time.’
‘Some day I hope you’ll tell me what happened out there in Africa. Tell it to me as your friend, not your lawyer.’
‘Never, Magnus.’
Chapter Eleven
Prue
1
Prudence Mary Beaufort was married to Guy Antoine, Comte de Belfrage, in June 1962, a quiet month in an otherwise eventful year. The marriage took place at the Belfrage chateau at St Cast near Saumur in the Loire valley. It was a Catholic ceremony, a fact that upset Lucas; he had done a little research and learned that Saumur was one of the old Protestant strongholds of France and he had expected the Belfrages to be Protestant. Though no true believer in religion, he preferred to be entangled with only one faith. Prue, for her part, had no qualms at all, since her belief or even interest in any religion was almost non-existent. It was Nina, the only one who had not done so, who remarked that the Beaufort sisters seemed to make a habit of marrying Catholics. Privately she wished Prue more luck than Margaret and Sally had had.
Lucas chartered a Boeing 707, filled it with the family, relatives and friends and flew them across the Atlantic for the wedding. Guy’s mother, Stephane, was filled with horror at the prospect of being invaded by such a horde of Americans, particularly a group coming out of the primitive Middle West, wherever that was. Guy had told her that Kansas City was actually a beautiful city and she had looked it up on a map, only to discover that it was over a thousand miles west of New York. She was an educated intelligent woman, but she was French provincial: her world was France. All else was Ultima Thule, including America.
The Middle Westerners turned out to be much less barbaric than she had expected. True, the women did have their hair done in a style that she thought had gone out with Marie Antoinette’s head, but their dressing was relatively smart, when one took into consideration how far they were from Paris.
Prue and Guy had consummated their union virtually every night they had been together for six months prior to the wedding ceremony; but Prue still managed to look unsullied and expectant, if not pregnant, in her traditional white wedding gown. Nina and Margaret and Sally added to the beauty close to the altar, and Martha and Emma were very pretty flower girls. Lucas, in tail-coat and grey silk cravat, looked handsome and dignified and younger than he had looked for years. Magnus, Bruce Alburn, Charlie Luman and all the other American male guests looked equally impressive. Stephane de Belfrage had to admit that, for cowboys, they were surprisingly civilized.
The guests were all accommodated in various hotels and inns in the Loire valley, Margaret, with her usual efficiency, making the arrangements and Lucas footing the bill. George Biff had been sent over in advance to Paris and he brought down Sidney Bechet and a full band to play real American music at the reception. Lucas took Stephane on to the dance floor, where everyone commented on what a handsome couple they made and politely made no comment on them at all regarding their dancing; Lucas had rhythm and kept beaming at Sidney Bechet every time he passed the band, but Stephane’s dancing seemed not to have advanced from the polonaise and she had never been very good even at that. Lucas’s Francophobia was not lessened while Stephane was in his arms, beautiful though she was.
After the wedding the Beauforts, their friends and relatives all went home; perhaps it was only coincidence that over the next twelve months construction was begun on two French-style chateaux in Mission Hills. Prue and Guy came back to St Cast from their honeymoon in Martinique, tanned, sated and still happy in each other’s company. The only cloud in their heaven was Guy’s mother.
Stephane insisted that Guy, as master of the de Belfrage estate, should live in the chateau: it was more than large enough for her and the newly-weds. Indeed it was: she had a large suite in one wing and Prue and Guy had an even larger suite in the opposite wing. The only dimension that was not taken into consideration was the one to accommodate temperaments. From the first day of her return it was evident to Prue who was still mistress of the chateau.
‘Guy darling,’ she said at the end of the first month, speaking in English because she did not trust her French in argument, ‘why can’t we live in Paris?’
‘My darling,’ he said in French; he had come to recognize Prue’s ploys, ‘it is impossible. I cannot run the estate from Paris. Especially now with the grape harvest coming in. We’ll go up to Paris for a few weeks just before Christmas.’
‘Then I think we’d better come to an understanding
with your mother,’ said Prue, still sticking to English. ‘I’m your wife, not the daughter of the house.’
He changed to English to placate her. ‘She will change. Give her time to adjust to the idea that I’m no longer hers but yours. Didn’t you tell me that your father could be too possessive? Mothers can be the same.’
Ah, but there was a difference, she thought. Lucas’s daughters had all shown their independence of him; but Guy would never rebel against his mother. There had been hints of Stephane’s dominance over Guy, but Prue, too much in love to care about minor problems, had ignored them. But now, part of the family, locked into the way of life in the chateau, she saw that the problems were going to be a long way from minor. Stephane would continue to run Guy’s life and, by projection, that of Guy’s wife.
‘Your mother is, I don’t know, different. I mean from what she was before we married. If I’d known – ’
Guy did not take that up: he wanted no doubts about their marriage so early in the piece. Things were different with his mother; and she had explained why. But he could not pass on the explanation to Prue. ‘Give her time, darling – please. She has had only me ever since my father died – ’
‘What was your father like? You’ve never told me anything about him.’
They were driving back from Saumur where they had been to lunch with some of Guy’s officer friends at the cavalry school. He had resigned his commission in the army three years before, but he had kept up certain friendships and each time he visited the cavalry school he regretted that his army life was behind him forever.
‘He was a man of honour,’ he said, speaking in French again. Prue, who had an ear almost as sharp as her eye, appreciated that the non-Parisian French sometimes spoke in an almost literary way, without embarrassment and as naturally as if they were speaking colloquially. ‘He was the acting-commander at the cavalry school in 1940. Americans would not have heard of it, but the students at the school, my father’s students, performed a beau geste that we still treasure. They left their classes and went north to fight the Germans. They were wiped out almost to a man, or rather a boy, for that was what most of them were. My father went with them, but he was not killed or even wounded. He looked around at his dead boys, he cursed the politicians who had given France away, then he shot himself. I was eight years old then and I remember standing by my mother’s side when one of my father’s students came home and told her what had happened. My mother did not cry, or at least not in front of me. All she said was that she understood why my father had done what he did and she hoped I would undertsand, too.’