by Jon Cleary
‘How is my sister taking it?’
‘Not so good. You don’t look no better, Miz Meg.’
‘Thank you, George. You’ve always been a comfort.’
She paused with her hand on the closed door to the drawing-room. She had found it difficult to believe Nina when the latter had phoned her ten minutes ago, as she had come into her house on her return from the tennis matches. Nina had sounded almost incoherent: excited, joyful, yet afraid. And Margaret, too, was afraid. The long-ago past threatened to open up like a pit.
She knocked, went into the drawing-room and closed the doors behind her. Nina was seated in a chair by the fireplace. Opposite her sat the Australian tennis player: Something-or-other (Cliff?) Harvest. He stood up and she saw that he was taller than he had appeared on the court earlier this afternoon. He also seemed less graceful, awkward even. Or certainly uncomfortable.
‘This is my sister, Mrs Alburn,’ said Nina. ‘Or your Aunt Margaret.’
‘Not yet, not quite,’ said Margaret; but smiled. ‘Are you really Michael? Is he?’ She looked at Nina, not waiting for him to answer.
‘I don’t know – ’ Nina gestured helplessly. ‘Thank you for coming over, Meg. I’m in shock, I guess – my legs feel like glass – ’
‘It’s natural – after all these years.’ Margaret sat down, feeling her own legs weakening. ‘If you are Michael, Mr Harvest, where is your father?’
‘Dead. Or anyway presumed dead.’ He hesitated, then sat down on the couch opposite the sisters, crossed his long legs awkwardly. ‘He disappeared three years ago in the Middle East.’
Margaret examined him frankly, while she struggled to make her memory, which she had tried to smother for so long, come alive. She looked for Tim in him and, with a pang, saw the resemblance. Not a great one, but it was there: the smile, not quite so ready as Tim’s but faintly familiar, the good-humouredly mocking eyes. His face also had some of the Beaufort bone in it; and his hair was the colour that Nina’s had once been. But physical resemblance meant nothing. Newspapers, when short of news, were always running pictures of look-alikes of the famous. This man Harvest would not be here if he had not thought he could offer at least some resemblance to Tim and Nina. But she did not examine too closely just then why she wanted him to be an impostor.
Harvest looked at Nina. ‘Do you think I’m your son?’
‘I don’t know. This afternoon – ’
‘I know. I saw you looking at me – that was what gave me the confidence to come here.’
‘I could see something of your – of my late husband in you. But not your antics – ’ Margaret remarked Nina’s reserve: she was trying hard not to give too much of herself away too soon. ‘He was always a gentleman.’
Not always, thought Margaret.
‘You sound like a mother.’ Harvest grinned, a little more relaxed. ‘I think you could blame my antics on Dad. In a way. I was a pretty spoiled kid, till I rebelled against him and we had our arguments.’
Nina sat in silence, studying him, her feelings showing in her face. She wants to accept him, Margaret thought. And determined that acceptance must be put off till she had made her own decision.
Then something Harvest had said a moment ago suddenly registered, like a shot from far away. ‘You say Tim is dead?’
‘Tim? Oh, Dad. He called himself James, James Harvest. I didn’t know our name was Davoren till I opened his letter. I have it here.’
Margaret sat as silent as Nina. If Tim was dead, then at last she was free: for she had loved him as much as Nina had. She watched as Harvest handed Nina a letter. Nina read it carefully, then looked blankly at Margaret as the latter held out her hand for it.
‘Let me read it.’
‘But it’s not for you – ’
‘It was not for you, either. It was for Mr Harvest. Let me see it.’
Nina surrendered the letter. It was typewritten and it had all the correct facts: according to it, Clive Harvest was really Michael Davoren. But Tim had made one legal mistake. She re-folded the letter and handed it back to Harvest.
‘You don’t look impressed.’ He sat up, leaning forward.
‘Your father would have made it easier for you if he had signed his name instead of just Dad. That signature means nothing.’
‘The letter’s addressed to me, not to some lawyer. You’re not making it easy for me, are you?’
‘Don’t be sharp with me!’
‘Meg – please – ’ But Nina did not protest too strongly.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Harvest said slowly and sank back into the couch. ‘All right, I apologize. If I’d known it was going to be like this – ’
Margaret glanced at Nina, who was still studying the man opposite her. She wondered what image Nina had built up in her mind of what her son, if he ever returned, would look like. Margaret herself had hardly given a thought to the missing Michael; all her memories, which she thought she had stifled for good and forever, had been of Tim. Perhaps Nina had thought her son would look like this man, but she must be thrown off-balance to find that he was now an Australian. The flat accent, the drawling of one syllable into two (‘know-en’); none of it suggested the almost mellifluous voice that had been Tim’s. If anything it was closer to the flat Midwest twang, which all the Beaufort sisters had been taught to avoid.
‘If your father died three years ago, why did you wait so long?’
‘It was a year before I went back home. I’ve spent most of my time playing tennis in Europe and here in the States. There was nothing to go back to, there’d only been Dad and me. He’d moved twice since I’d left home – so there was no home to go back to. Nothing I could call home. I left everything to the lawyers – they tidied up the estate. They knew nothing about the safe deposit box – that was in a bank in Zurich. I only found out about that by accident. I went back to Sydney eventually and they gave me all Dad’s personal belongings. Including a box of papers, business papers. There was an address of a bank in Switzerland, just a scribbled note tucked away in a book about tennis. It was marking the page where there was a photo of me.’
‘So you decided to play detective?’ Margaret said.
‘No, not right then.’ He bit his lip, stared at her; then recovered and went on, ‘It was only late last year I did anything about it. I was in Zurich for a tournament and I went and looked up the bank. The letter was there in the safe deposit box. There was something else. A quarter of a million dollars’ worth of bonds that Dad had bought back in 1949. The bank manager told me Dad came there every year and drew the interest in cash.’
‘A quarter of a million?’ Nina looked at Margaret. ‘Tim never had that much money in his life.’
‘Your story sounds less and less believable, Mr Harvest,’ said Margaret; then softened her tone as she saw the look on Nina’s face. ‘But that isn’t to say we don’t believe you.’
‘No?’ Again the smile was faintly familiar, a mocking grin in a dusty mirror. ‘I only half-believe it myself. Dad was something of a liar – well, maybe not a liar. But he never told the entire truth. Not to me or anyone else, as far as I could gather.’
‘Tell us what happened. Everything.’
‘My whole life story? I can’t do that.’
‘Just the outline. Where you have been the past twenty-eight years.’
He clasped his big hands together, held them between his knees. He’s ill at ease, Margaret thought: now he has to produce the truth himself. Or what he hopes will sound like the truth.
‘You read in that letter what happened when we left here – when was it?’
It was a date Margaret had forgotten, but Nina remembered it: ‘August 20, 1949.’
Harvest nodded, as if impressed by Nina’s memory. ‘I suppose that was it. Dad doesn’t mention the date, but you can see when he wrote the letter – twenty-eighth September nineteen forty-nine. We must have gone back to England through Canada – ’
‘We traced you that far.’ Nina’s voice was steadier now, she seemed to have r
egained her composure. Margaret decided to leave the questioning to her. ‘Your grand – my father had private investigators working on it for a year. We never found out how my husband managed to get a child across an international border without a passport. You were entered on my passport.’
‘I guess there are ways and means. Obviously it worried him. The letter says he had to get forged passports when he got back to England and changed our names. He even had a forged birth certificate for me – I saw it years later. I suppose you can get anything if you have the money.’ He looked around the room, but it was evident he was seeing far beyond these walls, right to the very limits of the Beaufort empire. ‘We never seemed to be short. Or not by ordinary standards. But then everything’s relative, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not very profound, Mr Harvest,’ said Margaret.
He gave her a hard stare, recognizing an opponent. Then he looked directly again at Nina. ‘Well, after England we went out to Kenya. I grew up there, or I did till I was, I don’t know, fourteen, I guess. Dad had a partnership with another bloke in a mining survey firm. He would sometimes be gone for weeks on end. Sometimes I used to think he was into something else, but I was never sure. He could be pretty secretive at times.’
‘Why did you leave Africa?’
‘Dad never really explained it to me. He just suddenly decided to go – it was after he came from one of his trips, I remember that – and we went.’ He searched for something in the sisters’ faces, a hint that they were beginning to believe him; but there was nothing. He went on, a listlessness creeping into his voice: ‘Sydney wasn’t bad. We lived pretty comfortably and he sent me to a good school. That was where I found out I could play tennis. Dad was good and he encouraged me. At first.’
‘At first?’
‘When he found out I wanted to make a career of it, that’s when our arguments started. He wanted me to go into the business with him, but I knew I couldn’t face that. I don’t think he liked it himself, sitting there in an office all day trying to act like a businessman. I know how much he used to look forward to his trips to the Middle East.’
‘Why was he so much against your making a career of tennis?’
‘He said I’d never be good enough to get to the top. He was right – ’ Again there was the self-mocking smile that nagged like a nerve-end at the sisters’ memories. ‘I’m number ninety-nine in the world pro listings right now. Next year I could be number one hundred and ninety-nine.
‘How degrading, to be ranked like that. Don’t you feel jealous of the men above you?’
‘Up to a point. That’s what keeps me going, trying to beat them any way I can. The clowning helps put some of them off. Some of them. Most of them are getting used to me now.’
‘Why do you try so hard?’
‘I’ll have to retire in a couple of years, I guess. Top-liners like Rosewall can go on till they’re old men, but promoters don’t give contracts to middle-aged second-raters. I’ve been on the world circuit for twelve years now. I’ve got used to the good life.’
Nina stiffened, as if listening: to an echo perhaps? Then she said, ‘But if your father left you a quarter of a million dollars, you should be able to afford a reasonably good life.’
‘Yes,’ he said carefully, looking directly at her, blinkering himself against the richly good life that surrounded them.
Margaret said, ‘You said your father was presumed dead. Was his body never recovered?’
‘No, he just disappeared. It was three months before I knew of it – we’d often go that long without writing each other. Then one of his friends in Sydney wrote me asking if I knew where Dad was. He had this business, taking rugs and textiles into Australia and taking opals to the Middle East, but as I said, he could have been into something else. I don’t mean drug-smuggling. He was pretty cranky about any sort of drugs. Maybe I was trying to glamorize him, but sometimes I wondered if he was in intelligence work.’
‘You found no trace of him?’
‘None.’ All at once he looked sad, as if he had lost something he hadn’t known he had valued so much till it was too late. ‘I went to Beirut, but I couldn’t stay there – I had tournament commitments. And the police weren’t very helpful. They had a file on him, half a page, but that was all. I just kept hoping he’d turn up.’
‘Beirut?’ said Nina. ‘When was this?’
‘You mean when he disappeared? The end of 1974. Why?’
‘Nothing,’ said Nina and looked at Margaret.
‘There will have to be proper enquiries.’ Margaret decided it was time she took over again. ‘Our attorneys will need to talk to you, Mr Harvest. How long will you be in Kansas City?’
He stood up, leaving before he was dismissed. ‘That depends on how we go in the tournament. If we’re put out tomorrow night, there’s no point in hanging around. We’re due to play in Houston next week.’
‘Our attorneys will need more than an hour or two with you.’
‘Then we’d better win tomorrow night.’
Nina stood up. ‘I’ll come to see you play. Good luck.’
‘Will you be there, Mrs Alburn? There seemed to be a challenge in his voice.
‘We have boxes for every night. If you have time, perhaps you can meet one of our attorneys informally. Mr McKea. My sister’s husband,’ she added, watching him carefully.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the Beaufort name sticks in my mind. Thanks for seeing me.’
The two sisters went with him out of the drawing-room, Margaret riding hard on Nina to see that she did not suddenly break down and claim him as her son. George Biff was standing in the hall.
Nina said, ‘Mr Harvest, this is George Biff. Do you remember him?’
Harvest was either a good actor or his puzzled effort at memory was genuine. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember this house at all.’
‘We didn’t live in this house,’ said Nina.
That seemed to put Harvest off-balance. Then he recovered and put out his hand. ‘Hello, George.’
The old black man was stiff and formal, not the George who had played with a laughing child on the lawns years ago.
‘You don’t recognize him, George?’ Margaret said.
‘No, Miz Meg. I know who he supposed to be, but I don’t recognize him.’
Nina looked disappointed, but said nothing. Harvest said an awkward goodbye and went out to his car. Only then did Nina say, ‘I think I was waiting for you to okay him, George.’
‘Don’t you recognize him, Miz Nina?’ Nina said nothing and after a glance at Margaret, George went on, ‘I watched him playing tennis this afternoon. I was standing down behind your box. Unless I remember wrong, he play right-handed. Michael was left-handed.’
Nina abruptly spun round and went back into the drawing-room. Margaret lowered her voice. ‘I think you did recognize him, George.’
‘No, Miz Meg. We don’t wanna drag all that up again after all them years, do we? She nearly forgotten about him.’
Margaret shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She’s never forgotten him.’
‘Still think it ain’t gonna do her no good. Or any of us. I think you thinking like me. Ain’t that so?’
But she, too, did not answer, afraid of giving herself away. She went back into the drawing-room, closing the doors. Nina stood at a window gazing out at the house that had once been hers. It was Margaret’s now, but it was the one from which Tim and Michael had disappeared all those years ago.
‘Do you think we should have taken him over to your place? Just in case he remembered something of it.’
‘He wouldn’t remember anything – there’s nothing in it now that was there when you lived in it. He never once glanced up at that picture.’ She nodded at the painting above the fireplace. ‘That’s all you have left of what you had in those days.’
Nina did not appear to be listening, as if thoughts were tumbling through her mind too fast for her to dwell on them. ‘Did you hear what he said
about Beirut? Tim could have been there when Daddy was kidnapped. I wonder – no, it’s too bizarre.’
‘You wonder what?’
‘If the man who took the money to try and ransom Daddy and Roger was – no, it couldn’t have been.’
It could have been, Margaret thought. But her mind was already hardening towards a decision. It ain’t gonna do her no good. Or any of us. ‘That could be part of his story. It was in all the newspapers that Daddy was kidnapped and killed in Beirut. Mr Harvest is shrewd. He hasn’t spent all this time making up his mind whether to come to us, without also making up a good story.’
2
‘You played very well tonight,’ said Magnus. ‘Considering.’
‘Considering I had something on my mind? The questions you asked me this afternoon – ’
‘I’m sorry about that. It would have been better if we could have left it till after the tournament – or till you were knocked out. But now you’re in the quarter-finals. Have you always been a right-handed player?’
‘Is that a trick question, Mr McKea? You’re not doing a Perry Mason on me, are you?’
‘If ever we get to court, which I hope we shan’t, they’ll throw questions like that at you. Were you always right-handed?’
‘No, I wasn’t. I was left-handed till I was thirteen. I broke my left elbow and it was left a bit weak. I learned to do everything right-hand then. How will that stand up in court?’
‘Plausible, Mr Harvest. You seem to have most of the answers.’
They were at the party being given by Beaufort Oil, part-sponsors of the tennis tournament, at the Mission Hills country club. The Beauforts belonged to both the Kansas City country club and Mission Hills. Both clubs had limited membership and a long waiting list, but no club ever refused a Beaufort who wanted to become a member; to have refused would have been like a temple barring its senior vestal virgins, though one would have had to allow for a certain degree of defloration.
Talk bounced lightly, like amateurs’ balls; a lob here, a gentle volley there, always waiting to be put away by the professionals’ cynical experience. Girls left themselves open to love games; mothers fluttered around like nervous line umpires. Fathers, brothers and boy-friends nodded knowingly at the professionals’ talk, held their glasses in the John Newcombe grip and were careful of their drinker’s elbow, which they had just discovered was similar to tennis elbow. The pros succeeded in hiding their boredom, because this was the affluent life to which they all aspired, for which they were wearing themselves out night after night and day after day on tennis courts across the world. Footballers and ice hockey players and baseballers were never asked to mingle with the rich country club set; that was just for tennis players and golfers and the better class of card sharp. The pros smiled covertly at each other, God’s Chosen Jocks.