The Beaufort Sisters

by Jon Cleary

  Before she left she had a word with Martha. ‘I’m not going to ask you what you think of an aunt who spends a night with such a man – ’

  ‘Aunt Prue, people don’t judge other people by their morals any more – ’

  ‘The fact that you used the word morals gives me some hope for you. All I wanted to say was that you should not let Mr O’Farrell get you into his trailer. He is a social climber, as I suspected. While he was climbing over me last night – don’t laugh, darling. I don’t mean to be crude, though I suppose it sounds that way. The point is, he’d like to marry money. He’s making a great deal of money now, I’m sure, but he has no guarantee that it will go on. I don’t think he is the genius you think he is and some day the film backers will wake up to him. So beware. Learn what you can from him, but stay out of his trailer. Goodbye, darling. Socialize with the Indians. I’m sure they’re safer.’

  She went back home and assured Margaret that Martha was safe and working hard. ‘Don’t worry about her, Meg. While she’s out there she’s not going to give a thought to being a radical or protesting about Vietnam. She is, as they say among movie people, working her ass off.’

  ‘Delightful,’ said Margaret. ‘I wonder what Mother would say? A granddaughter of hers working her ass off for a transvestite poseur.’

  ‘Poseur, yes. But transvestite, no. Take my word for it.’

  ‘You aren’t having an affair with him, for God’s sake!’

  ‘No. We communed with nature one night, but that’s it. And I’ve warned Martha he’s not to be encouraged with any more invitations.’

  Martha completed her work on the film and came home without Mr O’Farrell. Nine months later the film was released and turned out to be a savagely extravagant corruption of the Lewis and Clark story. Fingal O’Farrell had as little respect for the figures of history as he had for history itself. Even Martha was shocked when she saw the finished film.

  Prue did not see O’Farrell again till the summer of 1971. She had been in France with Melanie, paying their annual visit to St Cast. Melanie was now eight, a pretty child who already showed promise of growing up to be a carbon copy of her mother. She was sharp-eyed and intelligent; her only failing was that she was uninterested in reading anything at all, sex books or anything else. Prue did not regret that she showed no interest in prurient literature, but she hoped that she was not going to rear a semi-literate daughter.

  Guy was politely affectionate to his daughter, but no more than that. Stephane was a politely solicitous grandmother. But she still had not forgiven Prue for walking out on her son and the air was always full of her darts on every one of Prue’s visits. In 1968, when Prue and Melanie had arrived for their visit two months after Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, the darts had been particularly sharp and poisoned. The failure to eliminate her greatest enemy, General de Gaulle, still rankled.

  Now, on this visit, Prue asked, ‘Do you ever see Colonel Raclot?’

  ‘Occasionally, perhaps once a year. He lives in Beirut.’

  ‘Would he be safe there? I thought the Arabs would have him on some sort of list because of his feelings over Algeria.’

  ‘He lives among the Christians there. The civilized ones.’

  ‘Most of whom, I suppose, would have been educated at the American University in Beirut.’

  ‘More probably here in France.’

  The darts flew both ways. At the end of her stay Prue thought that she, like the bowmen at Crecy, had come off best. But she determined there would be no more visits. Melanie, acutely observant, had already begun to remark that the atmosphere between the grown-ups was pretty bitchy.

  On the way home Prue and Melanie stopped off in London, staying at the Savoy where the Beaufort name still had its cachet. Melanie, who, unlike her mother, liked outdoor sports, said she wanted to go to Wimbledon so that she could tell Grandpa all about it when they went home. Prue called the London office of Beaufort Oil and next morning two tickets to the Centre Court were delivered to the hotel. It did not occur to Prue to ask how they had been obtained; so her daughter would probably grow up believing that tickets for Wimbledon were as easily available as tickets for the Underground. The chief executive of the London office, whose tickets they were, took the day off and watched the tennis at home on television. His wife, who had bought a new outfit for the occasion, got drunk on sherry and cursed all Americans, particularly those who never had a thought for the workers in the outposts of the Beaufort empire.

  Fingal O’Farrell and a very pretty English actress were sitting right behind the Beaufort seats. He had trimmed his beard now to a Van Dyke style, but his hair was still long. He was dressed in a white safari suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Prue thought he looked like Trader Horn before the African rot had got to him.

  ‘My dear lady!’ The players had not yet come out on to the court and he was able to play to the gallery without being told to shut up. He introduced his companion. ‘Miss Genevieve Mulligan, who will one day be a big star if she does as I tell her.’

  Miss Mulligan fluttered her eyelashes so violently that one of them came loose and she spent the rest of the afternoon trying to set it right again, much to the delight of Melanie who, now that she was at Wimbledon, found tennis was actually boring.

  O’Farrell treated the three females, as he called them, to strawberries and cream during a break between matches and then invited Prue to a cocktail party that evening at his house in Knightsbridge. ‘It’s a sort of farewell to myself. I’m off to Australia to do a film about one of their heroes, Ned Kelly. It’s been done before but not the way I shall do it. Do come this evening!’

  Prue, still suffering the effects of the visit to St Cast, decided that the party might help lighten her mood. The Savoy provided a woman to come in and sit with Melanie and she went off to the big house in a side street in Knightsbridge. When she arrived the party was already bubbling with the lava of gossip, backbiting and self-appreciation.

  ‘Egotism,’ said the actor-knight, ‘is the only – ism one can truly trust.’

  ‘It’s a pity four-letter words have become so chic,’ said the publisher. ‘Shit equals wit these days.’

  O’Farrell, in a blue silk kaftan this evening, welcomed Prue with more show than she wished. But he was intent on demonstrating whom he knew; Prue was to discover that the room was chockablock with fame and fortune. Fingal O’Farrell had to prop himself up with other celebrities.

  Prue disentangled herself from him and found herself beside a thickset man with a moustache and an amused, half-wondering expression on his blunt face. ‘He’s a bit overpowering, isn’t he? I don’t know why I got myself mixed up with him.’

  ‘Are you going to Australia with him on his new picture?’ She recognized his accent, though she had not met many Australians.

  ‘God knows why. I’m not the art director, I’m something he calls his artistic adviser. He hasn’t listened to any advice, I’ll bet, since his mother told him to get off her tit.’

  ‘Nicely put. But no compliment to his mother.’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t usually talk like that in front of women – the wife would kill me if she heard me. It must be the atmosphere. I’m Steve Hamill.’

  Prue introduced herself and he raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t catch your name when he yelled it out. I think I’d turned off.’ He sipped the beer he was drinking. ‘I knew your sister Nina years ago. She and her husband Tim were my first buyers. How are they?’

  ‘They separated. Nina’s all right, but we haven’t heard from Tim in ages.’

  ‘They broke up, eh? Who’d have believed it? The wife and I used to think they were the happiest married couple we knew. After ourselves,’ he added with a grin.

  ‘Is your wife here?’

  ‘Not a chance. She can’t stand our Irish friend. She’s hoping that while he’s out in Australia the abos will shove a spear into him.’

  ‘My sister still has your paintings. One of them is her favourite. A woman an
d two small children, done mostly in blues.’

  ‘That was the wife and kids. It was my favourite, too. I almost didn’t sell it, but we needed the money in those days. I owe her a painting. She and Tim gave me a thousand quid, told me it was an advance on the first painting of mine that had a thousand-quid price tag on it. I finally got there last year.’ He raised his glass to himself. ‘You’re looking at a thousand-quid-a-painting man. Well, actually two thousand quid. The gallery have put up their prices on me this year.’

  Prue took a glass from the tray of a passing waiter and raised it. ‘Congratulations, Mr Hamill. Nina will be delighted to know you’ve made it. But why do you need to bother with Mr O’Farrell?’

  ‘I got sucked in by flattery. It’s hard to resist being told you’re indispensable, that you’re the one man in the world a producer wants. But tonight – ’ He looked around him, then finished his beer. ‘I think I’ve just decided I’m dispensable. I’m going over to our Irish friend and give him the two-fingered salute and tell him – ’ He grinned. ‘No, no more crudity. Give my regards to Nina. And tell her my offer still stands. I’m having a show next month here in London. She can have her pick.’

  ‘Perhaps Tim feels he’s entitled to a choice, too.’

  Steve Hamill shook his head. ‘It was Nina’s money, not his. Maybe that was what broke ’em up, was it? Or am I being crude again?’

  ‘Crude but possibly correct. I just wouldn’t mention it if you should meet Nina.’

  ‘I’m crude but not dumb. If I were, the wife would have kicked me out years ago. Nice meeting you, Prue. Don’t get sucked in by O’Farrell. Oh, this is Clive Harvest. The place is full of bloody Aussies tonight. Watch ’em – they’re the greatest free-loaders you’ll ever meet. Except for Clive. He’s one of our tennis players. I’m a cricket fan myself.’

  He moved away through the throng and Prue looked up at the tall blond young man beside her. He was younger than she, handsome, tanned, a male animal with intelligent eyes and a smile that was somehow familiar.

  ‘I’m out of my depth here,’ he said. ‘Are you an actress or something?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by something. I’m not in movies, if that’s what you mean. Very much not in movies. I think I’m what they call a lady of leisure.’

  ‘You don’t look – Oh sorry. I thought you said a lady of pleasure. It’s a bit noisy here. You want to go out in the garden?’

  They drifted round the edge of the crowd and out into the small garden. The sky was still pale blue; some thin clouds were shot with the last rays of the sun that had left London and was heading for the West Country. Prue always found the summer evenings one of the more attractive features of England. But London no longer held the attraction for her that it had when she was younger.

  Harvest led Prue to a bench and they sat down. ‘I had a two-hour match this afternoon. The legs are a bit tired.’

  ‘At your age? I thought you tennis players could go on for hours.’

  ‘I save my strength for other things. A bloke doesn’t want to be playing tennis twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘What other things? Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t want to sound like one of those cocktail coquettes in the house there. Do girls fling themselves at you?’

  ‘Some of them do.’ He managed to sound modest.

  Physically, if not mentally, he had begun to interest her. Sexually she had been rather quiet over the past six months. A new man had come to town in Kansas City, Roger Devon IV: he always signed his name that way, a regal touch that looked out of place in KC. Devon money was Boston money and old; it had joined the newer Beaufort money to expand its oil and banking interests. The family was the sort that had scions instead of sons and Roger IV was the scion who had been sent to Kansas City as its representative. He and Prue had been attracted to each other at once, but back East he had a marriage that, if not on the rocks, was close to a rough shoreline. He was a gentleman of the old school, a species she thought had died out with her grandfather’s generation. His saving grace was that he was not a stuffed shirt as well. Against the yen of her body she had become a lady of the old school, a condition of which she had never thought herself capable. She was in love with Roger Devon IV and she would wait till he was divorced, an arrangement that was now in the works.

  In the meantime she was not in Kansas City, the evening was warm, this handsome young male animal … ‘Do tennis players eat dinner?’

  He took her to a small restaurant in Kensington where the food, the service and the space between tables was much less than she was accustomed to. He did not ask her much about herself, but, prompted by her, told her about himself. He ate as if he were starved and drank almost all the bottle of Spanish wine. She tasted the wine, then, with memories of St Cast on her tongue, told him she was not a wine drinker. Watching the way he ate and drank and remembering his complaint that his legs were gone, she wondered if the evening would progress any further than this table.

  ‘I’ll never be Number One,’ he said. ‘There are too many good players around now. But I make a living and I don’t know a better way of making it. If I were back home in an office, would I be taking a good-looking older woman to dinner?’

  ‘I don’t know. How old are the older women in Sydney?’ At thirty-one she wondered if Australian women were considered over the hill when they left their twenties.

  He smiled and once again there was that dim memory itching at the back of her mind. He was at that age, twenty-four or twenty-five she guessed, when his features were just starting to set into their own individuality; he was still young enough to remind her of a dozen faces and expressions. Perhaps he had copied it from some public personality: the world was full of young men smiling like Paul Newman.

  ‘My father’s very popular with older women. And some not so old. Your age.’

  ‘Thank you. I was beginning to feel senile there for a moment.’

  He smiled again: he had a certain charm, not very smooth but agreeable. ‘I think Dad and I might compete for you. Sometimes I see him out with a girl and I say Hello Dad, emphasizing the Dad. He could kill me, it sets his night right back on its heels.’

  ‘He must love you.’

  ‘He does, actually. He just wishes I’d go into the firm with him, that’s all we ever fight about. He’s in the import-export business. I’d just find it dull. Well, that’s dinner. It wasn’t very good, was it? I’m sorry. What are we going to do now?’

  She could not invite him back to the Savoy, not with Melanie in the other bedroom in the suite. ‘If I were a younger woman, what would we do?’

  He shook his head at his obtuseness. He stood up, came round and pulled her chair out for her. Almost a little too late in the evening he showed he could be gallant and attentive.

  ‘I’m sharing a flat with another guy just up the road. He’s been knocked out of both the singles and doubles, so he’s gone down to the country for a couple of days.’

  ‘Let’s be grateful to his opponents who knocked him out.’

  In bed she had no complaint with him. He released from her all the pent-up sexuality of the past six months, satisfied her not once but several times. At last she got out of bed, went into the bathroom and dressed there. She felt guilty, the first time she had ever felt that way getting out of a bed.

  She did not kiss Clive Harvest goodbye. ‘Good luck tomorrow. I hope you haven’t worn out all your strength.’

  ‘Are you coming to Wimbledon tomorrow?’

  ‘No, I’m leaving for home. I’ll tell you now, so there won’t be any complications if we run across each other again – though I don’t think it’s likely, I’m not a tennis fan. I’m divorced and have a little girl. I’m going home and I hope to be married again within three months. So goodbye, Clive, and thank you for a very nice evening. If we ever meet again, let’s be strangers.’

  He got out of bed, had the grace to pull on his shorts. ‘I won’t be stupid and ask if you were having a last fling. It was
too good for that, for both of us, I mean. I think I got a little education tonight. And I don’t mean just in there.’ He gestured at the bed.

  She did kiss him then. ‘We older women have our advantages.’

  She went back to Kansas City next day and in October of that year married Roger Devon IV in a quiet wedding on the Beaufort estate. Lucas, slowed down now but still standing straight and tall, had not felt so happy in a long time. He was certainly happy with his new son-in-law; and with Bruce Alburn and Charlie Luman. And he had hopes that Nina would at last make up her mind about Magnus McKea.

  2

  ‘It will be a relief to get away from Watergate,’ said Roger.

  ‘I’m just glad I’m not going with you,’ said Bruce. ‘I don’t think I’d like to be an American abroad right now. Especially a Republican.’

  ‘Maybe the British have the best idea,’ said Charlie. ‘I was talking to a British Airways pilot at Heathrow the other day. He said if any Prime Minister had done what Nixon’s done, he’d have been eased out before the shit hit the fan.’

  ‘The fan probably wouldn’t have been working anyway,’ said Lucas. ‘Not with all the strikes they have.’

  The four men were having lunch, not luncheon, in the private dining room on the top floor of the Beaufort Bank building. It was a ritual that Lucas had started three years ago when he had found that he had two able and likeable sons-in-law working under the one roof with him. He, Bruce and Roger lunched together every Friday and when Charlie was home from his overseas tours of duty he came along to the gathering. The four men liked and respected each other and the meal was one of the main pleasures of Lucas’s week.

  He was now seventy-four years old and though he owned more than one man’s fair share of the world’s wealth, it had become a world that held less and less appeal for him. He still looked less than his age, still held himself erect, still played tennis; but the years had eaten him away inside like a cancer. There were times when he woke in the morning wishing he had died during the night.