Kitabı oku: «The Beaufort Sisters»

Jon Cleary

THE BEAUFORTSISTERS

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979

Copyright © Jon Cleary 1979

Jon Cleary asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780002220378

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780008139339

Version: 2015-05-19

Dedication

To

Shelagh

and Freddie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One: The Sisters

Chapter Two: Nina

Chapter Three: Nina

Chapter Four: Nina

Chapter Five: Margaret

Chapter Six: Margaret

Chapter Seven: Margaret

Chapter Eight: Sally

Chapter Nine: Sally

Chapter Ten: Sally

Chapter Eleven: Prue

Chapter Twelve: Prue

Chapter Thirteen: Tim and Lucas

Chapter Fourteen: The Sisters

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One
The Sisters
1

‘Why are so many tennis players pigeon-toed?’ said Prue. ‘They’re very sexy-looking till you get to their feet.’

‘Why don’t we just watch the tennis?’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve paid for that, not conversation we could have at home.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Sally and half-raised her walking stick as if she might thump her sister with it. ‘Is this another tax deductible expense?’

Prue put on her glasses, looked out at the four men on the court, frowned, pursed her lips, then took off the glasses. ‘What was I about to say? Something about sexiness in sport.’

‘Is sex a sport?’ said Nina. ‘All the manuals I’ve seen advertised, I thought it was a course in bedroom engineering.’

The Beaufort sisters were sitting in the gold boxes, the most expensive, in the Kansas City municipal auditorium watching the World Professional Tennis Doubles championship. Collectively they were always known by their maiden name, even though all of them were married and all four had been married more than once. Sixteen years separated them from youngest to oldest: Prue was thirty-seven, Sally forty-one, Margaret forty-eight and Nina fifty-three. None of them had lost her beauty and together they attracted the eye of any man not suffering from cataracts or a lack of hormones; even college youths had been known to remark that maybe there was something to be said for older women if they all looked as good as the Beaufort sisters. Of course, for those who knew how much they were worth, their wealth added lustre to their beauty and not just because of all the creams, massage and hair styling it could buy for them. A woman is never better framed than when in the doorway of a bank in which she is a major stockholder.

The tennis tournament was still in its early stages and the local citizens had not yet rushed to fill the huge indoor stadium. Only avid tennis fans and the country club set, and the Beauforts belonged, between them, to one or the other or both, had shown up this afternoon. The sound of racquets meeting ball echoed in the cavernous auditorium like the amplified sound of an accountant’s gut-string being torn apart. It was obvious that the players now on court were disturbed by the mocking acoustics of the near-empty galleries. None seemed more upset than Clive Harvest, one of the two Australians playing a South American pair.

He was a tall muscular man, some years older than the other three men on court, with blond good looks and a set of expressions that seemed to jump back and forth between temper and laughter. He went up for a smash, misjudged it and put the ball well out of court; he cursed loudly and flung his racquet after the ball. Then he suddenly jumped the net, raced to each of his opponents, grabbed their hands and went through a pantomime of apology, retrieved his racquet and jumped back over the net. A lone spectator in the upper gallery, wanting to communicate with someone, anyone, gave him a loud Bronx cheer; Harvest saluted the compliment with two fingers. The two South Americans glowered in disgust and Harvest’s partner, a boy of about twenty, just looked embarrassed.

‘Mr Harvest,’ said the umpire from his throne, ‘if you’ve finished your little act, may we continue the match?’

For a moment it looked as if Harvest were going to give the umpire the two-fingered salute; then suddenly he smiled, a broad flash of teeth in his tanned face, and looked genuinely contrite. ‘Sorry, Mr Baker. I’m a perfectionist, that’s my trouble. Missing an easy smash like that – ’

‘We all aim for perfection, Mr Harvest. Let’s try for a little less this afternoon, so that we can get this match finished.’

There was scattered applause, but Harvest just looked around and smiled broadly, as if his antics and display of temper had been committed by someone who had already left the court.

He won the next point and the game with a deft interception that split the two South Americans like a guerrilla’s bullet. As the two teams crossed over, pausing near the umpire’s chair to towel themselves, Harvest looked towards the Beaufort boxes. He had done the same thing several times during the match. It was impossible to tell who it was interested him; his glance was always too quick and casual. He was, however, more than casually interested in someone in the boxes.

‘I think I’ll go,’ said Nina. ‘This isn’t very interesting.’

‘You can’t walk out in the middle of a match!’ Margaret waved a protesting hand. Sometimes she acted as if she were the family matriarch. She was taller than her sisters, no hint of grey yet in her dark brown hair, and she carried herself in what Nina called Missouri Regal style. ‘It’s an insult to the players.’

‘That Australian has been insulting us spectators all afternoon,’ said Sally. ‘You don’t owe him any compliment, Nina.’

Nina stood up, slipping her arms into the sleeves of the vicuna coat she had been wearing across her shoulders. She was the shortest of the sisters, a little too tall to be called petite; her golden blonde hair would have been darker if not for her weekly visit to her hairdresser. She was no better or more expensively dressed than her sisters, but she had just that extra touch of elegance. In Kansas City, Missouri, the Beauforts were the family and it was as if Nina had taken it upon herself to show outsiders that the citizens were not all descendants of One-Eyed Ellis, Wild Bill Hickok and other, later rascals.

She left the boxes, stares following her from the other boxes, and went out into the entrance lobby. George Biff, patient as a statue of himself, the light gleaming like points of humour in his ebony face, was waiting there. He touched the peak of his chauffeur’s cap with his maimed hand.

‘I get the car, Miz Nina. Be but two minutes, out front there.’

‘No, I’ll come with you, George.’

The old black looked at her, seeing the nervous tension in her, wondering what had upset her. But he said nothing, led her out to the Rolls-Royce in the nearby parking lot.

Going home in the car Nina sat gazing out the window with a face that seemed suddenly to have become younger, as if years had been wiped away from it. But then George Biff, watching her anxiously in the rear-view mirror, saw the frown appear between her eyes, and then her eyes close, but not before he had seen the glistening of tears.

‘You all right, Miz Nina?’

‘Yes.’ She did not open her eyes. ‘Just a headache.’

The car purred along, George Biff making no attempt to get out of line in the traffic and overtake other cars. All the Beauforts had expensive cars, but only Nina had a Rolls-Royce, one of the few in the city. Margaret, who cared too much about such things, being political, thought it a little nouveau-riche for the Middle West, something one might expect from the new millionaires who wished to make their wealth conspicuous. But Nina had always had her own way and this was her second Rolls-Royce. Her only concession to inconspicuousness was that both cars had been black and that George Biff was under strict instructions not to show any arrogance in traffic. Not that a Rolls would have had much deference from the local wheelborne peasants.

‘Be on the Parkway in a minute. You just relax back there.’

‘I am relaxed.’ Nina opened her eyes. ‘Don’t be such an old fusspot, George. Sometimes I think you should have been a mammy.’

George grinned. ‘Would of got me locked up, a black mammy chasing some of them black gals like I used to. Don’t think I ever heard of a gay black mammy. Here’s the Parkway. Nearly home.’

2

Ward Parkway runs south out of Kansas City and is lined with some of the more magnificent homes in the nation. There is no consistency of style, unless conspicuous expenditure of money is in itself a style. French Regency, English Tudor, Southern Colonial: the great-granddaughter of Scarlett O’Hara waves across the manicured lawns to a blue-rinsed Elizabeth R of Missouri. Yet even though the homes are symbols of the wealth of their owners, vulgarity, like the weeds in the expensive lawns, is not allowed to flourish. Reticence, if such a trait is possible in a $500,000 mansion set back only yards from a busy thoroughfare, is looked upon as desirable as being white, Protestant and Republican. Some Catholic Democrats managed to settle along the Parkway, most notably the political boss Tom Pendergast, but they appear to have done little to change the ideas of the majority as to what is right and proper for such an address. When a Catholic President moved into the White House, black crêpe was observed hanging in the windows of one or two of the older mansions. It is only fair to add that they did not hang crêpe in their windows when President Nixon moved out of the White House.

The original Beaufort house had been one of the first to be built along the Parkway. Thaddeus Beaufort, the founder of the family fortune, built the house as he had built his wealth: solidly, conservatively and to last. The architect, made light-headed by the commission, had mixed his design but somehow avoided vulgarity; the mansion was an amalgam of English Elizabethan manor house and French chateau, without the libidinous air of either. The property had once taken up fifty acres of a whole block and had been known as Beaufort Park; a private park which the public hoi-polloi could only admire through the spiked iron-railing fence surrounding it. Peacocks, avian, not human, had strutted the lawns; Thaddeus, walking the paths of his estate every evening summer and winter, had always worn black. His wife Lucy wore only mauve; walking together, they offered no competition to the peacocks. Sunday afternoons the hoi-polloi would stand outside the iron railings and whistle at both the peacocks and the Beauforts, but got no recognition from either. Late in life Lucy bore her only child, Lucas, and he too was dressed in dark clothes as he grew out of babyhood. Walking their rounds, the father, mother and small boy looked like a tiny funeral cortège trying to find a graveside ceremony.

Lucas grew up to marry Edith Pye, whose father was one of the principal stockholders in the Kansas City Railroad and who also owned half of Johnson County just over the State line in Kansas. When Thaddeus and Lucy died within six months of each other, in 1923, they left Lucas $220 million, which, with what Edith had inherited from her parents, made Lucas and Edith the richest couple in Missouri; all that in a day when income tax, compared to what was to come, was no more unbearable than an attack of hives. Lucas and Edith’s money continued to grow since, as any Wall Street farmer will tell you, there is no fertilizer better for growing money than other money.

The Beauforts had never been as ostentatious in the display of their wealth as the rich in the East: the caliphs of New York and Newport had had a barbarous bad taste that had both frightened and offended Thaddeus. His granddaughters had inherited his discretion, to a degree; it was foolish to be too reclusive about one’s money, because that only aroused the suspicions of the tax men. Part of the land had been sold off, but the estate still covered just over twenty acres. Nina occupied the original big house and beside it, on the northern side of a private street, three other mansions, slightly less grand but still formidable, housed the other sisters. The peacocks had gone and so had most of the fifty servants and gardeners who had once worked on the estate. But no strangers, passing by the empty lawns, would have mistaken the houses for empty museums or institutions. The Beaufort sisters, even when not visible, had their own vibrancy.

The Rolls-Royce pulled in through the big gates that still provided the main access to the estate. The uniformed security guard saluted Nina; as a child she had been saluted, less formally, by the guard’s father. The car went up the curving drive, past the big maples and the bright blaze of azaleas, and pulled up in front of the big main house. Nina got out, said a short thanks to George, went inside and straight up to the main bedroom that looked out towards the gates.

She took off her dress and lay down on the wide double bed. Even in the years between her marriages, here at home and in the houses she had rented abroad, she had always slept in a double bed. As if the sleeping place beside her would, inevitably, once again be filled. As it had been, and happily, for the past three years.

She had been lying there an hour when she heard the car coming up the drive.

Downstairs George Biff, who doubled as butler on the latter’s day off, alerted by the security guard on the intercom, went to the front door and opened it as the tall blond young man got out of the red compact and came up the steps.

Nina slipped on a robe and went out on to the gallery above the curving staircase. ‘What is it, George?’

George looked up in surprise: his mistress normally never came asking who was at her door. ‘A Mr Harvest to see you, Miz Nina. He don’t say why he want to see you.’

‘Why do you want to see me, young man?’

Harvest licked his lips, a hint of nervousness that one would not have expected in him. ‘Miss Beaufort – ’ His voice was tight; he cleared his throat. ‘I believe I am your son Michael.’

Chapter Two
Nina
1

Nina Beaufort met Tim Davoren in Hamburg in the fall of 1945, the happiest accident of her life up till then.

It was not her first visit to Europe. In the spring of 1936 Lucas and Edith Beaufort took the three children they then had, Nina, Margaret and Sally, on a grand tour of the Continent. Lucas, who had been nurtured as an isolationist from an early age by his father, had not wanted to make the trip; if the family had to travel out of Missouri, there were another forty-seven very good and interesting United States to be explored. But Edith, who had graduated from Vassar, a notoriously internationally-minded school, had insisted that she and the children needed more perspective than any American trip, even to outlandish California, could give them. So the three Beaufort sisters, aged twelve, seven and three, eager for perspective, whatever that was, left Kansas City with their parents, a governess, a nurse, George Biff and twenty-two pieces of luggage for New York and the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary.

Once at sea and committed to the trip, Lucas, a man who cut his losses and made the most of what was left, began to enjoy himself. He smiled indulgently as his daughters paraded the deck singing Onward Townsend Soldiers, even though he detested the socialist crank, Francis Townsend, who was the New Messiah to pensioners all over America. He danced with Edith to the tune of The Music Goes Round and Round; he relaxed in a deck chair and read an advance copy of a book called Gone With The Wind and was glad that his Edith was not like Scarlett O’Hara. He went to the ship’s cinema with his wife and daughters and saw Shirley Temple in Captain January and wondered aloud why all American children could not be like the cute curly-haired charmer. When Nina threw up in the cinema, everyone put it down to sea-sickness.

Lucas’ only bout of sea-sickness came when he learned that Tom Pendergast and his wife were also on board the Queen Mary. The political boss’ European trip had been well publicized before he left Kansas City; but, careful of the Irish vote, he had neglected to tell the reporters that he was travelling on a British ship. The Queen Mary was just passing the Statue of Liberty when Nina brought her father the news.

‘Stop the ship!’ Lucas ordered his wife.

‘I can’t,’ said Edith placidly. ‘Now settle down, sweetheart. It’s only for five days. You don’t have to walk arm in arm with the dreadful man all the way across the Atlantic.’

Nina giggled and, though she was his favourite, her father glowered at her. ‘There is nothing to be laughed at about that man.’

‘Is he really so wicked, Daddy?’

Mr Pendergast certainly didn’t look wicked. She and Margaret trailed him all across the ocean, spying on him from behind deck chairs, air funnels and lifeboats. He would wink at them and wave, as if they might be Democratic voters of the future, and they would wave back, though they never told their father. The elder Beauforts and the Pendergasts would occasionally pass each other and though Tom Pendergast would smile expansively, Lucas would only nod stiffly and pass on.

Edith had wanted to visit Spain, but the Spanish, not knowing the Beauforts were coming, inconveniently started a war amongst themselves. So the family spent more time in Germany where Lucas and Edith, paying a courtesy call at the American Embassy in Berlin, were offered the chance to meet Adolf Hitler at a reception. Lucas was impressed by the charm and affability of Der Fuehrer and a week later he and Edith, with the children in tow, met Hitler again at a trade fair in Munich. The German leader showed his attraction for children and Nina, Margaret and Sally were photographed smiling up at the man they obviously thought would make a marvellous uncle. Back home the Kansas City Star ran the picture on Page One and everyone but the few Jews in the city remarked on the proper recognition that the élite of Kansas City had been given, much more than they got in New York or Washington.

Nina, for her part, fell in love with the old towns and castles of Germany and determined to return some day on her own. As she grew older and moved into her teens she found it hard to believe the stories she now read about Hitler, but by the time she was in college she hated him and the Nazis as fiercely as did anyone she knew. Except perhaps the Jews, but there were not too many Jewish girls at Vassar.

She graduated in June 1945. Her father had argued that she should go to a college nearer home, where she would not only be under his eye but also under the proper influences. But her mother, still talking about perspective, had prevailed and Nina had gone East to Sodom, Gomorrah and Vassar. She came home and told her parents she wanted to go to Europe with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and help re-build Germany.

‘Impossible,’ said her father and even her mother agreed. ‘You’re too young for such an adventure.’

‘I’m not thinking of it as an adventure,’ said Nina. ‘I thought of it as something I should do, a social duty if you like.’

‘There is plenty you can do right here in Kansas City.’ Lucas had missed his favourite all the time she had been East; he did not want to lose her again so soon, certainly not to foreigners who had got themselves into their own mess. ‘Returning GI’s, for instance. The Red Cross would be glad to have you help them.’

‘I want to go to Germany,’ said Nina stubbornly.

‘Why?’ asked her mother.

But Nina couldn’t tell her parents that she wanted to escape from Kansas City, from being a Beaufort. ‘I’ve already applied to UNRRA, but they won’t have me. They said they wanted older people with more experience.’

‘You see?’ said her father. ‘Stay at home and join the Red Cross. I’ll buy you a new car.’

‘Don’t be stupid, sweetheart,’ said Edith, who began to recognize in her daughter something of herself that she had forgotten. ‘You aren’t going to bribe her with an automobile. She still has the MG we gave her – ’

‘I’ll give that to Margaret,’ said Nina, glowing with zeal, feeling like a Missouri relative of Francis of Assisi.

‘Darling,’ said her mother, who reserved sweetheart for her husband, ‘these – UNRRA? – people do have a point, don’t they? About your being too young.’

‘What’s wrong with being young? Youth has more energy and maybe more compassion than older people.’

‘I knew she shouldn’t have gone to Vassar,’ said Lucas; then sighed because he knew he couldn’t refuse his favourite anything she asked. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Write to President Truman and ask him to have me put on the American team for UNRRA.’

‘Ask a favour of that feller in the White House? I’d rather commit suicide!’

‘You can’t,’ said Edith, who had her own way of deflating her husband. ‘The Nichols and the Kempers are coming to dinner tomorrow night. You can telephone President Truman. He’ll always take a call from Kansas City.’

‘Not when he hears who’s calling. He knows I can’t stand him.’

‘Just be thankful you don’t have to approach him through Tom Pendergast.’ The political boss had died six months before, a bright occurrence only dimmed for Lucas by the succession a little later of Harry Truman to the Presidency. ‘Call the White House now. Harry Truman is an early riser.’

‘Harry? When did you get so familiar with him?’

But Lucas rang Harry Truman and the President spoke to someone who spoke to someone and in August 1945 Nina sailed for Europe as an accredited worker for UNRRA.

On the night before she left home the four girls gathered in Nina’s room. Margaret was now almost sixteen, Sally was twelve and Prue, the late arrival, was five-and-a-bit. Nina had laid out the treasured possessions of her childhood and girlhood and invited her sisters to take their pick.

‘You’re not going to be a nun.’ Margaret was jealous of her sister’s chance for adventure. ‘You might want to keep these when you come back.’

‘Can I have your car?’ Sally was mechanical-minded and not interested in any of the things laid out on the bed. ‘I’ll drive it around the gardens.’

Prue was picking over what was offered. ‘I’ll take them all,’ she said.

Nina hugged her youngest sister, gazed at the other two. ‘I’m just the first. When you are all old enough, we should all go out and help the poor of the world.’

‘What’s the poor of the world?’ asked Prue.

‘I think we’d all look rather silly trying to be Sisters of Charity,’ said Margaret, practical-minded. ‘We can always get Daddy to write a cheque. The poor don’t want people like us fussing over them.’

‘They needn’t know who we are. We could always change our name!’

‘I don’t want to change my name,’ said Sally.

‘I do,’ said Prue. ‘I’d like to be called Mickey Rooney.’

A few weeks later Nina wished she had changed her name before applying to UNRRA. She crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary on a return trip after it had transported almost a division of GI’s back home. The music this time was Rum and Coca-Cola, but there was no dancing; Tom Pendergast was dead, but a British merchant naval officer winked and waved at her and got no further than the political boss had nine years before. She landed in Southampton and flew from England to Frankfurt in Germany in a MATS cargo plane. She landed in Frankfurt on the day that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on the other side of the world; but the bang wasn’t heard and nobody seemed to hear or even feel the ripples spreading into the future. The UNRRA people were waiting for her, some of them with quite open hostility. They made it plain that they thought theirs was no job for spoiled rich kids with political pull. For the first time she realized there was a handicap to being a Beaufort.

Her boss was a retired colonel who had worked with Herbert Hoover on the American Relief Administration after World War One. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Beaufort. I was young then and there was the same opposition towards me. But some day the young are going to take over the world.’ Then added, because he, too, had grown old, ‘God help it.’

‘Am I doing a good job, Colonel Shasta?’

‘As well as anyone on the team. I have to go up to Hamburg next week and see the British. Would you care to come with me as my driver and secretary?’

‘Won’t that cause gossip, Colonel?’

‘I hope it does. I’ll be flattered. But you’ll be safe with me, Miss Beaufort. I’m that old-fashioned sort, a faithful husband. My wife, who lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, also happens to have antennae than can pick up any immoral thoughts I may have on this side of the Atlantic. I believe it is called extrasexual perception.’

So in October, two months after landing in Germany, Nina drove up to Hamburg with Colonel Shasta. She had become accustomed to the bomb damage she had seen around Frankfurt, but it was still a shock to pass through the towns on the way north and see how widespread was the destruction of Germany. They passed queues of people standing outside shops, Germans wearing the wardrobe of the defeated, half-uniforms, thin ersatz tweed, worn fur coats, and all with the same pale, hopeless faces. The jeep was halted by a military policeman at a cross-street and Nina became acutely aware of the people standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross. She was wearing for the first time the camel hair coat that her mother had had made for her and specially dyed a not-too-unbecoming khaki. She looked at a young girl her own age, saw the thin cotton dress covering the thin bony body; the girl stared back at her, face expressionless. Then Nina saw the envy and hate in the dark eyes and she turned away, too inexperienced in the expressions victors should wear.

‘Don’t show pity,’ said Colonel Shasta, who had been watching her. ‘That’s the last thing they want.’

‘It’s difficult not to show it.’

‘Tell that to the men who fought them.’

They drove into Hamburg, crossed the Lombard Bridge and after getting lost several times at last found the office Colonel Shasta was looking for. It was in a large house two blocks back from the Altersee; next door to it was another large house that was a club for British officers. Except that they needed a coat of paint, neither house looked as if it had suffered at all from the war.

‘Rather grand, aren’t they?’ Nina said. ‘I wonder if any Germans still live around here?’

‘Every house in the street has been commandeered,’ said a voice behind her and Colonel Shasta. ‘The fruits of victory. I was told you were due here today. I’m Major Davoren, Commanding Officer of the unit that’s taken over this house. I’m afraid UNRRA has been moved to a larger but less attractive place than this.’

He was dark-haired, good-looking, with a black moustache and dark eyes that might have been tired or just bored. He was tall, with heavy shoulders, and a certain ease of movement that suggested he might have been an athlete before the war. There was a row of ribbons on the breast of his battle tunic, including, Nina was to learn later, the ribbon of the Military Cross.

‘Could you have someone direct us?’ Shasta asked.

‘I’ll take you there myself.’ He got into the back of the jeep and, it seemed, looked at Nina for the first time. ‘Straight ahead, driver, then second right.’

‘This is Miss Beaufort,’ said Shasta, grinning. ‘I don’t think she is accustomed to being called Driver.’

‘Awfully sorry.’ But Davoren’s apology sounded perfunctory. ‘Shall we go, Miss Beaufort?’

Nina let in the gears with a crash and the jeep jerked forward. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shasta grin again, but Major Davoren was behind her and she couldn’t see how he had reacted. She hoped she had snapped his head off.

Five minutes later they drew up outside a large block of apartments that had been converted into offices. Shrapnel marks pitted the walls and there was a huge black scorch mark stretching up a side wall, as if someone had tried to burn a hole in it with a giant blowtorch. The block had none of the dignity of the house they had just left.

‘Blame us English,’ said Davoren. ‘I’m afraid the army is claiming all the best for itself. As I said, the fruits of victory.’

‘You don’t believe in rehabilitation for the Germans?’ said Nina.

‘The young and idealistic,’ said Davoren, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years older than Nina. ‘Could you spare me a few minutes with Miss Beaufort, Colonel?’

‘I’ll be inside.’ Shasta climbed out of the jeep. ‘Don’t scratch his eyes out. I think we’re still supposed to be allies.’

He went into the apartment block, carrying his valise, and Davoren slid into the vacated seat beside Nina. ‘Well, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot.’

‘You have, not me.’

‘I’ve been fighting these bloody Germans for five and a half years. I’m not naturally vindictive, but I haven’t yet got round to feeling magnanimous. I lost my parents and my only sister in an air raid on London, wiped out by a V-2. What are you doing for dinner this evening?’

She was surprised to hear herself say, ‘Nothing.’

That was Friday and he took her to dinner at the Atlantic Hotel. The dining-room was full of British officers in khaki, Control Commission personnel in blue and German women in tow. There appeared to be no German men and only a few British women, all of whom looked with hatred at the Fraulein, none of whom was less than good-looking and most of whom were beautiful.

‘Fraternization doesn’t seem to worry you men. What would happen if one of those English girls came in here with a German man?’

‘She’d be shown the back door. We have to have standards, you know.’

‘Double standards, you mean.’

‘Of course. What else makes the world go round?’ But he smiled as he said it and his charm almost persuaded her that he only half-meant what he had said.

He took her home early to the billet where she was staying for the weekend. ‘There’s a curfew on and some of the MP’s can get a bit bloody-minded if they catch an officer with a good-looking girl. Pity you’re not staying here at the Atlantic, you could have invited me up to your room.’

She let that pass. ‘I stayed here with my parents when I was a child.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘You did it in style. I came to Hamburg for a week before the war. I stayed in a dreadful sleazy little room over behind the Reeperbahn. Girls kept knocking on my door all night.’

‘Poor you.’

Saturday night he took her to a cabaret in the cellar of a bombed-out theatre. This time there were plenty of Germans, men as well as women; some of them looked remarkably well-fed for people whose official food ration was supposed to be only 1000 calories a day. Nina peered through the cigar and cigarette smoke, listened with her Berlitz-acquired ear to the conversations going on around her.

‘They are making business deals!’

‘Black marketeers,’ said Davoren. ‘This cabaret is the sort of stock exchange for it all. If you want to make any money on your PX issue, this is the place to come.’

‘I don’t need money.’ He knew nothing about her or her family; she revelled for the first time in anonymity, as if it were some sort of vice. ‘Do you come here and sell things?’

‘No. I’m not really interested in money. I shouldn’t say no to a fortune, but I don’t care for this piecemeal way of getting rich. Oh, I daresay in ten or fifteen years’ time some of those jokers will be fat, rich pillars of society – that is, if Germany ever gets off the ground again. And some of our own chaps are making a nice little bundle. But it’s not for me.’

‘Don’t you have any ambition? I don’t mean for this sort of thing. But – ’

‘Not really. I’m a day-to-day type. I’ll probably stay on in the army and if I don’t blot my copy-book I’ll retire as at least a brigadier. All that without having to fight another war – I’ll be dead before there’s another one.’

‘My God, what a limited vision!’

‘Oh, it has its compensations. You, for instance. Would I have met you if I’d been back in some office in London trying to make my fortune?’

‘What did you do before the war? Had you any ambition then?’

‘I had just come down from Cambridge when my country called me. I started out to be an archaeologist, studied Arabic, was going to dig up all Tutankhamen’s relatives. But I grew tired of that and I read History instead. One of the things I learned from that was that ambitious men usually finished up dead ahead of their appointed time.’

‘You should have met my grandfather. He was ambitious at ten and he lived till he was eighty.’

‘Ah, but did he succeed in his ambitions?’

‘Up to a point,’ she said and he smiled, mistaking her caution.

Then a man came to their table, bowed to Nina, clicked his heels and shook hands with Davoren. He was small, blond, tanned, athletic: ten years ago Nina could see him springing off vaulting-horses into posters extolling the Youth Movement. Or spurting out of starting-blocks in pursuit of Jesse Owens and the other black Americans at the Berlin Olympic Games. Davoren named him as Oberleutnant Schnatz, late of the Luftwaffe.

‘A good German, aren’t you, Rudi? Well, not a Nazi. But his morals aren’t the best.’

Schnatz smiled, unoffended. ‘Morality is only a matter of degree, Tim, you know that. After what we have been doing to each other for the past six years, what is a little black market?’

‘Rudi went to Oxford,’ Davoren explained. ‘They always had less concern for morality there than we at Cambridge. We played tennis against each other, each of us got a Blue. Baron von Cramm once tried to seduce him at Wimbledon, but I never got that far. What can I do for you, Rudi, though the answer is no, in advance.’

Not even Vassar, let alone Kansas City and the Barstow School, had prepared Nina for the decadence she was witnessing. Two girls went dancing by, arms wrapped round each other, oblivious of the sneers of the men watching them. Three whores came in, sat down and were in business at once; three pink-cheeked British subalterns fell on them like choirboy rapists. Four men sat at a corner table, heads close together, greed giving them a family resemblance. Evil, or anyway sin, hung in the air as thick as the cigar and cigarette smoke and Nina shivered with the thrill of it. She knew that back in the Thirties Kansas City had been known as America’s Sin City, but it could never have been like this. Without knowing it she was suffering from the tourist’s astigmatism, seeing foreign evil as worse and much more interesting than the home-grown variety.

‘I understand your lady friend is an American. I’m looking for contacts in the American zone.’

Nina saw Tim Davoren sit up a little straighter in his chair, felt his legs brush against hers under the table as they tensed. A thin blonde girl with a clown’s face had come out on to the small stage at the end of the cellar and was singing Little Sir Echo in German; or so Nina thought, till she caught some of the words and realized it was an obscene parody that had the audience who understood it holding their sides. But she was listening with only half an ear, more intent on Tim Davoren and Rudi Schnatz.

‘Rudi old chap, you’re asking for a poke in the nose. British heavyweights have never been much good, but I think I could flatten you.’

‘You are twice my size, old chap. I’m not Max Schmeling.’

‘I shouldn’t have threatened you if you were.’

‘You may not be brave,’ said Nina, ‘but I’ll poke anyone in the nose who says you’re not gallant.’

Schnatz smiled, taking her remark as encouragement for himself. ‘Miss Beaufort, I would not wish to get you in trouble either with Major Davoren or your American authorities. But there is a lot of unrest in the American zone, I’m told. A lot of GI’s wish to go home. Some of them may like to make some money to take home with them. If you should hear – ’

‘Go away, Rudi,’ said Davoren, ‘and don’t trouble the lady. I mean it.’

Schnatz looked at him, then at Nina: neither of them was smiling. The rest of the room laughed its head off at the clown singer; the lesbians rose behind Schnatz, hand in hand, heading for their bed. He bowed to Nina, nodded to Davoren and went away, disappearing behind the lesbians into the smoke and laughter.

Davoren took Nina’s hand, pressed it. ‘I know Rudi wasn’t a Nazi and I don’t think he’s a criminal, not at heart. But if he should try to get in touch with you again, give him – I think you call it the bum’s rush. Those chaps are going to get into an awful lot of trouble one day.’

Sunday night he took her to bed, in his room in the big house where he was billeted with seven other officers. He was surprised when she told him she was a virgin and he lay back on the pillow and scratched his head as if puzzled and worried.

‘You mean you’ve never had a lover?’

‘Depends what you mean by lover. I don’t think I’ve actually been in love. I had crushes on several boys I met at college and I had what I suppose you call affairs. But all I did was some heavy petting. I never went all the way.’

‘All the way. It sounds like jumping off a cliff.’

‘To a girl, losing her virginity is like jumping off a cliff. You only do it once. Lose your virginity, I mean. After that I suppose it becomes, um, a habit.’

‘Don’t ever think of love-making as a habit. The postures of it are ludicrous, but it’s still a beautiful experience. And beautiful experiences are not the result of habit.’

‘How many girls have you made love to? You sound like Casanova. Where are you going?’

‘To get the international defence weapon – a French letter. You obviously haven’t come prepared.’

‘I think my father would die if I got pregnant.’

‘I don’t see the connection, unless American fathers have some sort of umbilical union with their daughters.’

‘Would you marry me if you got me pregnant?’

‘Are you proposing to me?’

‘I don’t know – am I? Good God, how things sneak up on you! I think I am in love with you.’

He kissed her gently. ‘You’re far too honest, darling heart. And too forward. You should have let me speak first.’

‘Shut up and get back into bed.’

But as he entered her she knew she had indeed spoken too soon, that he was not in love with her.

She went back to Frankfurt next morning with Colonel Shasta who asked her no questions but looked as if he had the answers anyway. All he said when they got back to Frankfurt was, ‘Take care, Nina. Germany right now is no place to make commitments. You’re very young.’

‘You sound like my father, Colonel.’

‘I’m trying to. I have a daughter your age back home.’ Then he asked his only question: ‘Does Major Davoren know who your family are?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’d better tell him, then. It may tell you, one way or the other, whether his intentions are honourable or not.’

But she didn’t tell Tim, at least not for a couple of months. They met each weekend in villages and towns between Frankfurt and Hamburg, finding accommodation in inns and small hotels that had not been requisitioned by the Military Government. By the time she found she was pregnant he had told her he loved her and she believed him. Or wanted to.

They were in a village on the border of the American and British zones. From the inn they could see the white empty fields stretching away under the grey sky; the dark green river appeared unmoving as it curved below the village. Beyond the river a small copse looked like stacked firewood, black and leafless; two blackbirds sat motionless on a fence, like ebony ornaments. It seemed to Nina that all the seasons had stopped forever in an eternal winter. Despite the fire in the grate in their bedroom she felt cold, colder and more miserable than she had ever felt in her life before.

‘I didn’t expect you to be pleased. But I hoped you’d – understand. At least that.’

He stood beside her at the window, but not touching her. From the side of the inn came shouts and laughter as some children fought their own war with snowballs.

‘I do understand – if that’s the word you want. I’m not an utter bastard, darling. And I’d be pleased, too – in other circumstances.’

‘What other circumstances?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me your family is rich? Really rich?’

‘Who told you?’ she demanded.

‘Simmer down. Wasn’t I supposed to know? Rudi Schnatz told me – evidently he made his contacts in the American zone after all. I suppose my English insularity is to blame – if I were really educated I should have known that you are right up there with Barbara Hutton and that other American heiress – Dorothy Duke? Doris Duke. But I’m not educated. I obviously took the wrong subjects at Cambridge.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake stop it! None of that’s important – ’

‘You thought it was or you would have told me. Were you afraid I’d fall in love with your money instead of you? You didn’t trust me, that’s the important point.’

She knew he was right. But she was too worried and upset to make concessions; unaccustomed to crises, she reacted selfishly. ‘What are we going to do then? I’m not going to have an abortion.’

‘Well, that leaves only one alternative, doesn’t it?’ He sounded disappointed that she had vetoed an abortion; or perhaps her angry and frightened ear only made him sound that way. ‘We’ll have to get married.’

‘Have to? Good God!’

The children had given up their snowball fight and gone elsewhere. The inn was suddenly quiet, listening. She bit her knuckles, stifling any further outburst. Ladies never made a show of themselves: her mother stood invisible in the corner of the room, telling her how to behave. But her mother would never have got herself into this situation and there was no knowing how she would have reacted if she had. All the decorum Nina had been taught in Kansas City meant nothing in a cold room in an inn in faraway Germany.

‘I think we’d better spend the rest of the weekend talking this over. I’m sorry I got you into this, darling. Really.’ He moved to take her in his arms, but she pulled away.

‘No, I want time to think. Don’t touch me – please. I can’t stay the weekend – Colonel Shasta wants me back in Frankfurt tonight. They are expecting trouble from the GI’s – there’s a lot of talk about demonstrations. They want to go home. Colonel Shasta wants us all off the streets, just in case.’

‘Do you want to go home, too?’

Suddenly she did want to go home. She felt miserable, frightened and selfish; the poor of the world would have to wait. Unconsciously she put a hand on her belly, as if the baby were already apparent. ‘I’ll have to. I don’t think UNRRA would want this sort of bundle for Europe.’

‘Stop that sort of talk! Cheapening yourself isn’t going to help.’

She did up her camel hair coat, pulled on her gloves. ‘We can’t talk to each other in this mood.’

‘I’d better see you back to Frankfurt.’

‘I’ll be all right. I’m not the helpless little mother just yet. I’ll call you during the week, when I’ve thought some more. No, don’t kiss me – ’ She was close to tears: to have him kiss her would be like turning a key in a dam.

‘I’ll marry you,’ he said quickly. ‘Despite your family.’

He had made a mistake in adding the last sentence. She shook her head, realizing how much she belonged to those back home. She hadn’t escaped by coming to Germany: she needed now, possibly always would, the security in which she had been brought up.

‘I’m part of our family and they’re part of me. That’s something we’d have to understand right from the beginning. They won’t be against you – why should you be against them?’

He sighed. ‘I wasn’t drawing battle lines. But if we marry, I’m marrying you, not them. I’d say the same whether they were rich or poor. I’ll ring tonight to see if you got back all right.’

Driving back to Frankfurt in the jeep Colonel Shasta had lent her, Nina was only half-aware of the traffic. She did not see the US Army truck that stayed behind her all the way from the village north of Kassel right through to the outskirts of Frankfurt. As she came into the city she had to slow; traffic had thickened and after a few blocks came to a halt. She leaned out of the jeep and up ahead caught glimpses of soldiers spread out in a thick human barricade across the road. She could hear chanting, loud and angry: she had never thought the word Home could have any threat to it. At once she felt frightened and looked about for a way to get out of the traffic jam. She was not normally nervous and she wondered if approaching motherhood made one so; then she ridiculed the thought, laughing at herself. The row with Tim had just upset her, all she really wanted was to get back to her billet and burst into tears.

‘We’ll get you out of this, Miss Beaufort.’ The GI, earflaps of his cap pulled down, thick woollen scarf wrapped round the lower half of his face so that his voice was muffled, had come up quietly beside the jeep. ‘It looks pretty ugly up ahead. Just back up and follow us.’

She wondered who the soldier was, that he knew her name. Probably someone she had met on one of her visits to a military office; it was impossible to recognize him behind the scarf and earflaps. She put the jeep into reverse and followed the army truck as it backed up and swung into a side street. The sound of the chanting demonstrators was drowned now by truck horns being punched to the rhythm of the chant. Then a shot rang out and the blaring horns and chanting suddenly stopped. A moment later there were angry shouts and the sound of breaking glass. In a moment of imagination she wondered if she was hearing echoes of the Thirties: had the streets of Frankfurt clamoured like this when the SS had been rounding up the Jews? Street lights came on in the gloomy afternoon and the scene all at once became theatrical, a little unreal, a grey newsreel from the past. But the angry, yelling soldiers streaming down through the stalled traffic were real enough, frighteningly so.

She looked back and saw the GI gesticulating to her from the back of the army truck, which had turned round and was facing down the side street. She slammed on the brakes of the jeep, jumped out and ran to the truck. The GI reached down, grabbed her hand and lifted her easily, as if she were no more than a small child, into the back of the truck. The canvas flaps were pulled down and abruptly she was in darkness.

‘Thanks. I’m glad you came – ’

Then a hand smothered her face and she smelled chloroform on the rag that was pressed against her nose and mouth. She struggled, but an arm held her, hurting her. Then the darkness turned to blackness.

2

‘My name is McKea, Magnus McKea,’ said the tall American major in a voice that sounded slightly English; Davoren wondered if he had been an actor before he had joined the army. ‘I’m with the legal staff down at Nuremberg on the War Crimes thing. Colonel Shasta suggested I should come up and see you. It’s about Miss Beaufort.’

Davoren laughed, leaning so far back in his chair to let the laugh out that he looked in danger of falling over backwards. He was in his office in the big house on the Kasselallee, the walls papered with maps that he no longer looked at. Orderlies came and went in the corridor beyond the open door, all of them armed with the piece of paper that made them look as if they were too busy to be asked to do something by an officer or NCO. He was safe in British Army occupied territory and here was some Yank come to accuse him of something that was the best joke he had heard in ages.

‘You mean Miss Beaufort’s condition is a war crime?’

Major McKea looked puzzled. ‘Don’t joke, Davoren. Kidnapping is a crime, period.’

Davoren sat up straight, suddenly sober. ‘Good Christ – she’s been kidnapped?’

‘Yesterday some time. She didn’t return to her billet last night – ’

‘I know. I rang the billet, but some girl said she thought she’d seen Miss Beaufort come in and go out again.’

‘She was mistaken. Miss Beaufort never got to her billet. Her jeep was found abandoned in a Frankfurt suburb last night. An hour later Colonel Shasta got a ransom note to be passed on as quickly as possible to her father. He signalled Washington and they got in touch with Kansas City. I was brought in to represent Mr Beaufort till he gets here – my father is the Beaufort family lawyer. Nina’s father is being flown over by the Air Force. He’s expected in Frankfurt sometime tomorrow.’

Davoren was silent, but his face was expressive enough; he was too close to the war, to the cheapness of life, to be hopeful. Then he looked across at McKea. ‘I’m sorry I laughed. It was a stupid private joke.’

‘You said something about Miss Beaufort’s condition. Is she pregnant?’

Davoren nodded. ‘Does her father know about me?’

‘I don’t know, unless Nina wrote him. I don’t think anyone knows about you, except Jack Shasta. He thought you should be told.’

‘Why didn’t he tell me last night?’

‘I don’t know. I guess he was too concerned with getting in touch with Nina’s father.’ He lit a pipe, puffed on it. ‘I’ve known Nina since she was just a kid. We were never close, she’s about ten or twelve years younger than I, but I always liked her.’

Davoren saw the enquiring look through the haze of pipe smoke. ‘I love her, if that’s what you’re asking me. I didn’t think of her as just someone to jump into bed with.’

McKea ran a hand over his crew-cut, thinning red hair. ‘I didn’t mean to imply – sorry.’

Davoren got up, closed the door against the traffic in the corridor. This was no longer British Army occupied territory: it was his own and very personal, too. He remained standing, his back to the maps on the wall. The maps were pre-war, marked with towns that now were only rubble: they only seemed to deepen the lack of hope he felt. Nina could be buried anywhere in the havoc.

‘Is there any hint of who’s kidnapped her?’

‘Nothing definite. We think it’s probably Krauts. God knows, they have enough reason to be asking for money.’ It was difficult to tell whether McKea was critical of or sympathetic to Germans. But then he said, ‘The country’s full of communists and socialists, you know.’

Magnus McKea came from one of the oldest families in Kansas City, Missouri, a family whose conservatism had a certain hoariness to it. The army, and Europe itself, had opened up his tolerance, but he still tended to suspect any liberal thought that fell into his head, as if it might be the beginning of a brain tumour. He had a slightly fruity voice that almost disguised his Middle West twang. He had been fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on one’s point of view and ear, to have had an English grandmother who had refused to speak to him if he spoke to her in what she described as a nasal infection. His grandmother, in earlier times, would have been scalped for her arrogance towards the natives. He had not enjoyed Europe, neither the war, the Nuremberg trials nor the havoc and misery that passed for conquered territory. All he wanted was to go home, but he had too much sense of duty to demonstrate towards that end.

‘Oh? I thought they’d all been killed off by the Nazis.’

McKea wasn’t sure whether Davoren meant to sound sardonic or not. ‘Not all of them. Half a million dollars, which is what they’re asking – what’s the matter?’

‘The Beauforts are that rich?’

‘I shouldn’t imagine Lucas Beaufort would miss half a million dollars. Finding the money is no problem – I believe he is bringing it with him this evening. In the meantime we’re looking for leads to the kidnappers, just in case – ’

‘Just in case they don’t hand Nina back to her father?’ Davoren tried to keep any emotion out of his voice; but he was suddenly afraid for Nina’s safety. ‘Are you expecting me to give you a lead?’

‘We thought you might have a suggestion – ’

Davoren clicked his fingers. ‘Rudi Schnatz! Do you have transport?’

‘I have a jeep and driver outside – ’

‘Let’s use it!’

McKea, a man accustomed to taking his time, had to hurry to keep up with Davoren as the Englishman led the way out of the house. They got into the jeep, Davoren gave the driver directions and twenty minutes later they pulled up outside a decrepit old house just off the Elbchaussee. On the other side of the street a row of bombed-out houses, like jagged gravestones, was an ugly testimony to the recent past. On a broken wall was scrawled a plea for the future: Let Communism Re-Build These!

‘You see?’ said McKea. ‘They’re not all dead.’

‘It’s in English. Maybe some of our chaps put that there.’

McKea said nothing, dismayed that communists might have fought on the wrong side; he had already decided that the Russians at Nuremberg were the enemy of the future. Even the British, usually so reliable, had tossed out Churchill for Attlee and his socialists.

Davoren led the way up the chipped and cracked marble steps to the house. This had once been one of the best areas of the city, but all its smug dignity and prosperity had gone with the bombs. Davoren thought of the ruined sections of London and wondered which would be re-built first. The Yanks were already talking of re-building Europe before the Russians got too strong.

Rudi Schnatz was in a worn woollen dressing-gown with some sort of crest on the pocket: his day was just beginning. ‘I say, old chap, it’s a bit strong, isn’t it, busting in on a chap like this?’

Davoren pushed into the two-roomed flat, away from the prying frightened faces that had already appeared at the other doors in the hallway and on the landing above. McKea, more polite, less belligerent, followed him, closing the door against the curious.

‘Rudi, I don’t have any time for manners.’ Through the open door to the bedroom Davoren saw a naked girl sit up in a big brass-railed bed; then she lay down quickly again, pulling the blankets up over her. ‘We’re looking for Miss Beaufort – she’s been kidnapped.’

Schnatz pulled his dressing-gown closer round his throat, almost a feminine gesture. ‘Please, Tim – you don’t think I’ve kidnapped her, do you?’

‘If I thought that, you’d be out in the jeep now and on your way to the Provosts. No, I want to know who your contacts are in the American zone. The ones who told you who Miss Beaufort was. Is.’ He corrected himself, like touching wood.

‘Are they the ones who have kidnapped her?’

‘We don’t know. For Christ’s sake stop wasting time with bloody questions – this has got nothing to do with you! Tell me who your contacts are, where we can find them!’

‘I don’t know that I can do that, old chap. Honour among thieves, you know – ’

Davoren grabbed him by the front of the dressing-gown and lifted him off the floor. The Englishman’s face was dark with anger, heightened by his bared teeth: he looked on the verge of a fit. ‘Tell me who they are, Schnatz, or I’ll break every bone in your body!’

There was a muffled scream from the other room. McKea crossed to the door and closed that one, too. He didn’t have the true spirit of the conqueror, he was too much the lawyer. He just hoped Davoren wouldn’t try to kill the little German, though it looked very possible. But he wouldn’t interfere, not in the British zone.

Schnatz struggled, unafraid, ready to fight the bigger man. He gasped something in German and Davoren let him go so that he fell back on his heels.

‘Who are they? Their names, bugger you, their names!’

Schnatz pushed back his long blond hair, shook his head. ‘You’re acting just like the Gestapo, old chap – ’

‘Their names!’

‘Burns and Hiscox. They are with the Supply outfit just outside Frankfurt on the road to Fulda – ’ Davoren was already on his way out of the room and Schnatz shouted after him: ‘Don’t tell them I sent you! If they’re not the ones, I’ll still need them – ’

Outside in the jeep Davoren said, ‘Drive me back to my office, I’ll get my own car and driver.’

‘I think you can safely leave it to us. After all, it’s in our zone – ’

‘Don’t start drawing bloody boundaries! Back to my office, driver, and get a move on!’

The driver looked at McKea: who did this goddam limey think he was? But McKea just nodded and the driver let in the gears and they sped back through the city.

Davoren picked up his own driver and the commandeered Mercedes which was his staff car. He invited McKea to ride with him in the more comfortable car and the American, after a moment’s hesitation, accepted. They sat in the back seat while the Mercedes sped down the autobahn after the jeep. Davoren had calmed down, seemed almost morosely quiet. McKea stared out at the passing countryside, now fading into the thickening dusk. He preferred Germany at night, when so much was hidden by darkness. It was a relief from what he read and listened to at Nuremberg during the day.

At last Davoren said, ‘What’s Old Man Beaufort like?’

‘Autocratic. Devoted to Nina – she’s his favourite. Until we find the kidnappers, he’ll probably choose you to blame for what’s happened. We’ll have to tell him, of course. I mean, about – ’ McKea could see the driver in front of them half-turn his head, one ear cocked to follow the conversation.

‘I’m already blaming myself,’ said Davoren, careless of the driver. ‘For everything.’

3

Nina had a headache and felt ill. So far she had had no morning sickness; but she was sick this morning. And cold and miserable and afraid. She sat on the floor of the bare room, wondering where she was. She could hear no sound from outside except the occasional harsh cry of a bird; she recognized country silence, remembering vacations spent on the Beaufort plantation down in the south-east corner of Missouri. The two men who had kidnapped her had fed her army rations last night and again this morning: at least they were not going to let her starve. They had given her two army blankets, but even with those and still wrapped in her camel hair coat, she had not been able to sleep for the cold. She had never felt worse in her whole life and only an effort kept her from breaking down and weeping helplessly at her plight.

The door was unlocked and one of the men came into the room with a mug of steaming coffee. He was the one who had been driving the truck and she had not seen him until she had woken up in this room last night. He was a small man, in uniform and wearing a parka with the hood up; Air Force dark glasses covered his eyes. In the gloom of the room, with the only light coming through the cracks of the boarded-up window and through the half-open door, it was impossible to distinguish his features. He was just a dark body and head with a rough soft voice.

‘Get this into you, honey. Sorry we can’t give you any heat, but we don’t want people coming around asking why smoke’s coming outa the chimney. If your daddy don’t fool around, you oughtn’t to be here too long.’

Nina stood up, took the mug and almost scalded her throat as she gulped down the coffee. The man stood looking at her and she suddenly felt even more afraid: was he going to rape her? She tightened her grip on the mug, ready to hurl it if he moved towards her.

‘I’m just looking at you.’ The man’s voice was most peculiar, as if he had a small bag of sand or gravel in his throat instead of a voice-box. ‘We put a price of half a million bucks on you. You think you’re worth that much?’

She almost said, My father would think I’m worth much more; but she was not so cold and miserable that her mind had stopped working. She suddenly realized how dangerous wealth could be. It was said that kidnapping in America had originated in Kansas City; people must have been abducted in colonial times, but it had been turned into a modern profession by gangsters in her home town. They had even kidnapped the city manager’s daughter; Lucas Beaufort had wanted to broadcast a plea that the kidnappers come back for the city manager, too. The spate of abductions had frightened the wealthy citizens and for a while no children of rich families went anywhere without an escort. When Nina had gone to college her father had wanted a private guard assigned to her, but the Vassar board had been firm that their campus should not be turned into a security camp. From her early teens Nina had been aware that great wealth made her and her sisters different from other children, but, despite her father’s concern, she had never really thought of it as endangering her. Now, chillingly, she knew better.

‘Why are you doing this?’

But even as she asked she knew it was a foolish question, and the man laughed. ‘You ain’t that dumb, Nina. We’re doing it for money. Ain’t that what your old man and his old man worked for, screwed people for? We come over here, us GI’s, to fight for a better world, that’s what they told us. You need money for a better world, if you’re gonna enjoy it properly. My partner and me, we been making a little on the side. But you’re worth more than a truck-load of cigarettes, more than a whole PX.’

‘They might hang you for kidnapping. They wouldn’t do that for selling things on the black market.’

‘The Krauts spent three years trying to shoot my ass off, but I survived. I think my luck’s gonna hold. Nobody’s gonna hang me. You work for UNRRA, but you don’t know nothing about the real world. The real world is made up of people without money, and I don’t mean just Krauts. We gotta take risks, we wanna get anywhere. You’re lucky, you’re never gonna have to take a risk in your whole goddam life!’

He sounded abruptly angry, though his voice didn’t rise. He went out of the room, slamming the door behind him and locking it. Nina put the mug down on the floor, began to walk round the room in an effort to turn the blocks of ice in her shoes back into feet. She heard an engine start up outside and she went to the window and tried to peer out through the thin cracks between the boards. But all she could see was snow, a blank white mockery.

The truck, or whatever it was, drove away. When its sound had faded she stood listening, ears alert for any sound in the house. She could hear nothing; then the house creaked as if to reassure her that she had been left alone. She made up her mind that she was going to escape.

She had always been a resourceful girl, though never as good at practical matters as Margaret and Sally. She hoped she could get herself out of a locked, boarded-up room. One could not be more practical than to know how to escape from kidnappers.

Buoyed up by her own determination, she began at once to seek a way out of the room. Ten minutes later she was as depressed and miserable as when the kidnapper with the husky voice had come in. There was nothing in the room that she could use as a club to bash the boards away from the window; the door was too stout to be broken open and the lock would have defied Jimmy Valentine or any other cracksman. She sank down to the floor beside the fireplace and began to weep.

Then something fell into the grate, a lump of soot, and she heard the flutter of wings in the chimney. She sat up, waited, then crawled into the fireplace and looked up. A film of soot floated down on to her face; but high up in the chimney she could see a small square of light. She withdrew from the fireplace, sat on her haunches and considered. Weighed her strength and size (would the chimney be too narrow and too high?) against the urge to escape. Weighed, too, her determination against her fear that the men would come back, find her trying to escape and vent their anger on her.

She measured the width of the chimney with her hands, decided it was wide enough to take her shoulders and hips. She took off her coat, knowing the bulk of it would handicap her once she began climbing up the narrow space. But she would need it once she was outside the house; she put the belt of it through the loop inside the collar, tied the belt round her waist and let the coat hang down between her legs. She pulled the knitted cap she wore down over her face to just above her eyes, pulled on her gloves. Then she crawled into the fireplace, stretched her arms above her, eased herself upright into the narrow blackness of the chimney and began to climb.

She was glad she was wearing stout winter shoes; she searched for and found tiny crevices in the chimney wall into which she drove her toes. The chimney had not been cleaned in years and she had climbed no more than her own height when she began to feel she was smothering. A bird suddenly fluttered out of the top of the chimney in a panic; soot cascaded down on her and she shut her eyes and turned her face downwards just in time. She lost her grip and went plunging down, scraping against the bricks, taking more soot with her. She hit the floor of the fireplace, feeling the jarring shock go right up through her body to her skull; but she remained upright, unable to fall over because the chimney held her like a brick corset. She held her breath, feeling the soot in a thick cloud about her face, waiting for it to settle, then she opened her eyes and stared into the blackness.

It seemed that every bone and muscle in her body hurt; her knees and ankles felt as if they might be broken. Her arms were trapped above her head; she could feel the pain where her elbows had been scraped as she fell. Her right knee felt as if there was an open wound in it and her right hip as if it had been kicked by a horse. She wanted to gasp for breath, but she was afraid that would mean sucking in a lungful of choking soot. She thought of the baby inside her, wondered if it was already beginning to miscarry. She was frighted, ready to scream, discovering, now, for the first time in her life, that she was claustrophobic.

But she held on to herself, didn’t bend her knees, kept herself upright in the black prison of the chimney. She was on the point of hysteria, but, without recognizing it, something of the iron she had inherited from her parents and grandparents kept her from breaking. She continued to stare into the blackness, smelling the burned wall only an inch or two from her face, willing herself to believe that it was not going to collapse in on her and smother her. She was no longer cold, she could feel sweat running down her face and body. Some instinct told her that all she had to do was survive the next minute or two. If she didn’t, if she gave in and retreated from the chimney, she knew she would never enter it again. And the chance of escape would be gone.

Then the hysteria passed, gone all of a sudden, as if wiped away by her will. She started to climb again, feeling more confident with every foot gained; soot continued to float down, but she ignored it, holding her breath till it had gone past. Her body was just one large ache, but she kept climbing, elbows, knees and ankles scraping against the brickwork. Then, all at once it seemed, the blackness turned to gloom, then there was light and a moment later her head cleared the top of the chimney.

She scrambled out, holding desperately to the chimney so that she would not slide off the snow-covered roof. She was on top of a farmhouse that was more ruin than building; the only rooms left intact were the one in which she had been imprisoned and the room immediately below it. The rest of the house was a shell; charred timbers, a tumble of bricks and a big bomb crater told their own story. All around her the fields lay white and empty.

It took her another five minutes to get down from the roof. Twice she almost fell; snow slid down beneath her like an avalanche and fell into the yard. Then she was down on the ground, stumbling through the mud and snow, running like a crazed person, whimpering like a child. She fell down twice before she realized she had tripped over the coat between her legs. She stood up, gasping for breath, giggling hysterically at herself, and struggled into the soot-blackened, mud-stained coat. Then, steadying herself, she walked out into the lane beside the yard and began to hurry away from the farm.

4

Davoren and McKea were stopped twice for speeding by military police, so that it was dark before they pulled into the warehouse on the Fulda road where the supply company was headquartered. The place seemed deserted and it took them a few minutes to find a soldier who could tell them where the adjutant was.

‘What an army!’ said Davoren. ‘How did you chaps manage to win the war?’

‘We won it, that’s the point. It’s over and everybody just wants to go home. Don’t you?’

But Davoren didn’t answer that, going instead to look for the adjutant, who told them, ‘Burns and Hiscox? Sure, they’re on weekend passes. They went off Friday night. I understand they do a little business on the side.’

‘You condone that?’ said Davoren.

The adjutant was fat, bald, homesick and not inclined to take any moralizing from an unknown Englishman ‘The war’s over, mac. Didn’t you know?’

Outside the office Davoren spat into the dirty snow in the cobbled yard. But he made no comment on the adjutant, just said. ‘Do we send your MP’s looking for Burns and Hiscox?’

‘We can’t go looking for them ourselves.’ McKea himself had a sour taste in his mouth at the sloppy moral attitude of the supply adjutant. ‘I understand how you feel, Davoren. But I think we have to do this through the proper channels.’

‘Bugger channels!’ Then Davoren threw up his arms and let out a loud sigh that was almost a moan of pain. ‘You’re right. But Jesus Christ – ’

‘Let’s go and see Jack Shasta. He may have heard something further.’

Colonel Shasta was in his office, even though it was Sunday night. ‘I’ve been trying to call you, but Hamburg said you’d left, didn’t know where you’d gone. It’s a helluva way to run an army, I must say.’

Davoren looked at McKea, grinned, looked back at Shasta. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

‘We’ve been doing some sleuthing,’ said McKea, all at once liking Davoren. ‘We think we might have a lead. If you get in touch with the Provost-Marshal – ’

‘There’s no need,’ said Shasta. ‘Miss Beaufort is safe.’

‘Where?’ The heart did not leap, said practical-minded medical men: but Davoren felt something rise in his chest. ‘Where, for God’s sake?’

She was asleep in her billet, a house on the edge of the bombed ruins of the old city. The other women in the house did not try to stop Davoren as he walked in, asked where Miss Beaufort’s room was and went straight upstairs and into the room without knocking. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her still asleep. She had been bathed and fed; her muddied and blackened clothes were in a heap in a corner of the room. But even in sleep her face showed the strain she had been under. She whimpered even as he looked at her and her body shook in a quick spasm. He bent and kissed her, feeling weak and empty himself, demolished by relief and love.

Nina opened her eyes, saw his face close to hers and started away in fear. Then she recognized him and her arms, the elbows decorated with chevrons of medical tape, came out from beneath the blankets and went round his neck.

‘Let’s go home.’

‘Just what I had in mind,’ he said, thinking of England.

5

They went home to Kansas City two months later.

Burns and Hiscox did not return from their weekend leave and were officially posted as deserters and never heard from again. Since kidnapping was not classified as a military crime, armies having indulged in it for centuries, they were not listed as suspected kidnappers. Military authorities, who had not even bothered to start a file on the Beaufort case, promptly forgot about it and went back to wondering what the hell one did with the peace when one had won a war. The black market continued to flourish, becoming a major industry, and the fed-up GI’s gave up demonstrating and went back to gold-bricking, fraternizing and all the other important functions of an occupation force.

And Lucas Beaufort returned to Kansas City with his half a million dollars still unpacked. But not before meeting Nina’s brand-new fiancé.

‘Are you sure of him?’ The army had given him a room which they kept for VIP’s. Generals, senators, even Bob Hope had stayed in the room, but Lucas was unimpressed. They had left no presence that made him feel he was in better company than himself. ‘He seems rather – cavalier, I think is the word.’

‘Wasn’t that what Grandfather was?’

‘Not towards your grandmother. Only towards his business partners.’ Lucas had no illusions about his father. ‘Major Davoren says he wants to take you back to England. But he admits he has no prospects there, none at all.’

‘I have my own money.’

‘I’m sure he knows that.’ Then, seeing the angry flush in her face, said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have, Daddy, and I’ll never forgive you for saying it. Not about the father of my baby.’

‘Dear God!’ Lucas normally had only a social relationship with the Almighty. He attended Sunday service at St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, where he sat in a reserved pew and wondered why God, if there was a God, answered the prayers of men like Roosevelt and Truman. ‘You mean you’re –?’

‘Pregnant. Enceinte. Schwanger. Or as the English put it, a bun in the oven.’ Then, because it hurt her to hurt him, she impulsively put her hand on his. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy – I shouldn’t have said that. But you made me so angry – you’re not being fair to Tim – ’

Lucas took her hand in his. His face had a handsome boniness to it, but only his family ever saw it softened into his true good looks. ‘Nina sweetheart, all I want is to be sure that you are happy. It’s just that I have to re-adjust – your mother and I always expected you to marry someone from back home – ’

‘That’s it, Daddy. You don’t really want me to have a mind of my own. You don’t want me to be anything but a Beaufort – ’

‘All right. I’ll talk to Major Davoren.’ Lucas didn’t know how to cope with a daughter who showed such independence. Already back in Kansas City Sally and even young Prue, only five years old, were showing they had minds of their own. Only Margaret, the one to whom he showed the least favouritism (and was ashamed for his prejudice), seemed content to do what her parents wanted. ‘But do you mind if I try to persuade him to come back to Kansas City? There’s no future in England, not under that fellow Attlee.’

Nina made the concession, now secretly wanting to go home to Missouri. She had had enough of Europe, or anyway post-war Europe. All her charity had been frozen out of her by her fear for her own safety. She was ashamed of her selfishness, but she was not the first to discover there are limits to one’s self-sacrifice; she was even more ashamed that her limits had been so shallow. The older hands had been right: she had just been a rich kid playing at being a do-gooder.

‘But don’t press him, Daddy. Let him make the decision.’

Tim Davoren had stayed in Frankfurt and later that day Lucas, who had been in the city only once before, took him on a guided tour. ‘This is where the Rothschilds began, did you know that?’

‘So I understand. Goethe, too.’

‘Gurter? Never heard of him.’ Lucas had not been interested in the humanities at college; stick to the money subjects, his father had advised him. ‘I was here in 1936. The Rothschild house was still standing then. Right over there.’

Tim Davoren knew he was being tested: for Nina’s sake he showed interest. ‘From small acorns etcetera, as they say in Kew Gardens.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucas, his suspicions rising again. ‘I take it you are not very interested in the making of money?’

‘I don’t think I have the talent for it.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily disqualify you. Gamblers have no talent, but they are interested in making money. Do you gamble?’

‘Not knowingly. But I suppose everyone gambles one way or another.’

‘What are your talents, may I ask? I understand you are a good soldier, that you won the Military Cross. It’s not much of a career, though, is it? Not in peace time.’

‘I’m getting out of the army. I thought I might try teaching.’

‘You’d soon tire of that,’ said Lucas, as if he had known Tim all his life. ‘You wouldn’t think of coming back to Kansas City?’

‘What would I do?’ Tim kept his voice deliberately flat, a characteristic he had just before he was about to erupt.

‘You could take your choice,’ said Lucas, not entirely undiplomatic. ‘Come back there and see what offers.’

Tim walked in silence letting his anger subside. He recognized that the older man was only trying to do the natural thing, protect his daughter. But he also recognized that Lucas was already trying to assert some authority over his future son-in-law. And that’s just not in your book, Tim old boy.

‘I’ll talk it over with Nina.’

Lucas walked in silence, too. Then he seemed to accept that he could ask for no more. He nodded, then said, ‘She tells me she is pregnant. How did that happen?’

‘The usual way,’ said Tim.

Lucas stopped, looked as if he were offended, then suddenly let out a gust of laughter, surprising Tim, who had decided that the older man had no sense of humour at all. ‘Of course! Damnfool question – damn good answer. I’ll tell her mother that. You’ll like her mother. Has a sense of humour, something I haven’t got. Gurter? You don’t mean Go-eth, the poet, do you? You don’t like poetry, do you?’

‘Only if it rhymes,’ said Tim, and Lucas seemed satisfied.

That evening Tim had dinner with Nina and her father, then took Nina back to her billet. He had sent the Mercedes and his driver back to Hamburg; they walked home through the ill-lit streets, careful of the ice on the cracked sidewalks. They stood just inside the doorway of her billet and, bundled up against the cold, embraced each other like a couple of bears.

‘Darling heart, you shouldn’t have told your father you were pregnant, not yet. You’re too honest. Never be more than discreetly honest with people you have to live with.’

‘Will that include you, too?’ She kissed him, silencing his answer. She still had not recovered from her ordeal and she was in no condition to suffer lovers’ truths. ‘Mother would have guessed in time. Girls usually don’t have babies six months after they’re married.’

‘Did what happened to you – there won’t be a miscarriage?’

‘I think he, or she, is going to be indestructible. I haven’t even felt nauseous.’ Then in the darkness, unable to see his face, she said, ‘You don’t mind going home with me to Kansas City?’

His head was stiff and unmoving against the light in the windows of the house opposite. ‘No,’ he said quietly.

But she wondered if he was being only discreetly honest with her. She was too afraid to ask. She drew the dark head towards her, felt for his lips with hers and kissed him, seeking a true answer there. But already she had learned that lips were no more truthful than the tongue.

Lucas Beaufort went back to Kansas City relieved and satisfied. Nina and Tim were married quietly by an army chaplain a week after he left, with Colonel Shasta and Major McKea as their witnesses. When Lucas arrived back in Missouri it was announced without fanfare that Miss Nina Beaufort, eldest daughter of Mr and Mrs Lucas T. Beaufort, had been quietly married three months earlier to Major Timothy Davoren, only son of the late Mr and Mrs Clive Davoren of London, England. If anyone in Kansas City wondered why a Beaufort girl, the first one to be married, should have wed so secretly, no one voiced their wonder in public. Not even when she arrived home in March 1946 obviously pregnant.

Word of the kidnapping had got out. However, since the kidnappee had escaped unhurt, the kidnappers had not been caught and no money had been handed over, editors gave the story only a narrow spread in their newspapers. Who in the rest of the world thought anyone from Kansas City was interesting? Even Harry Truman was at pains to say he came from Independence, though cynics said that was only a play on words to show he was not Tom Pendergast’s man. Anyone passing through the two places wasn’t sure where Kansas City ended and Independence began.

Edith Beaufort, adamant that she had to meet her new son-in-law before anyone else in Kansas City saw him, insisted that she and Lucas go to New York to meet the Davorens as they got off their ship. She liked Tim as soon as she met him and he liked her.

‘You’ll do,’ she told him. ‘You’re much better than I expected or hoped for.’

‘A bad advance report from Mr Beaufort?’

‘Just say unenthusiastic. You’re not American, specifically not from the Midwest, that’s the main thing against you. He ignores the fact that he’s only two generations removed himself from England. And his grandfather left under a cloud, as they say.’

‘No cloud over me,’ said Tim. ‘The sun shines on me all the time. Especially when Nina is around.’

‘Your charm is obvious, but I like it,’ said Edith. ‘If there is any charm from our local men, it’s accidental and biennial. My husband is a good example. But I love him, Tim, and I hope you will love Nina just as much.’

They rode back from New York in a private railroad car. Nina and her mother watched the two men gradually thaw towards each other, but the thawing was slow, like two polite icebergs cruising down from Greenland. They were half-way between Columbus, Ohio, and St Louis before Lucas slapped Tim on the knee at one of the latter’s jokes. By the time they got off at Kansas City they were Tim son and Lucas old chap and moved in a common cloud of cigar smoke. Nina and her mother felt the future was secure.

There were four cars at Union Station to meet the train. One car contained the other three Beaufort sisters and Edith’s secretary, Miss Stafford; one car was for Lucas and Edith; another was for the newly married couple; and the fourth took the luggage. They moved out to a fanfare of flash-bulbs from the press photographers.

‘Do you usually travel in convoy?’ said Tim as he and Nina settled back in the pre-war Packard.

‘Only for weddings and funerals. Darling, please – take it all for granted. Please?’

He laughed: nervously, it seemed to her, though she had never thought of him as having nerves. ‘I’m not overwhelmed, but I’m certainly whelmed. Even that – ’ He nodded at the glass partition which separated them from the chauffeur. ‘We have those in England still, but I thought it had all gone out in democratic America.’

‘Don’t refer to it as Democratic America,’ she said, misunderstanding his adjective. ‘Daddy is a Republican. This car belonged to my grandmother – you can see how old it is. She didn’t believe in servants listening to their mistress’ conversation. Neither do I. What’s wrong with a car with a glass partition?’

‘It’s not just the car. It’s just everything. The private railway carriage, your father bringing half a million dollars to Germany in a couple of suitcases … Take it for granted, she says.’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘You were born to it. I’ll try, my love, but don’t blame me if I occasionally get a glazed look in my eye.’ Then a little later he said, ‘What’s this?’

‘Home.’

‘Well, I suppose King George has to say the same when someone asks him about Buckingham Palace. Where are we going to live?’

‘We’re having our own suite for the time being, in that wing there. Daddy is going to build us a house in the park. Something smaller,’ she added as he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

‘Let it be as big as you want,’ he said expansively. ‘If I’m going to take it all for granted, I may as well not be cramped.’

Nina was relieved at how her three sisters took to Tim. ‘He’s absolutely out of this world!’ exclaimed Margaret. ‘He’s thrilling!’

Sally, equally thrilled, rolled her eyes in ecstasy. ‘And he’s got you pregnant – already! He’s a quick worker.’

‘Most husbands are,’ said Nina, wondering how much her mother had told her sisters. ‘That’s what wedding nights are for.’

‘Are you going to have a baby?’ asked Prue, already that mixture of shrewdness and romanticism that would plague her all her life. ‘You’re a bit fat. I’ll look after it if you don’t want it.’

‘We’ll look after it together, darling. What do you think of Tim?’

‘He’s got funny eyes. They’re always looking at things.’

Tim’s eyes were indeed always looking at things, Nina noticed as the weeks went by. He made no comment, but his eyes were too sharp and observant for someone who was resigned to taking everything for granted. And, as if his eyes were a mirror of her own, she began to see things from a new angle and in a different light. For the second time since meeting him she saw the family wealth as something not to be taken for granted. You think you’re worth that much? the kidnapper had asked her. And she wondered just what she was really worth in Tim’s eyes.

He had refused to take a job in the Beaufort bank or the oil company or the lumber business or with the railroad. He considered going to work for the granary company, but that would have meant living away from Kansas City and Nina refused to do that; small town living, or even small city, was not for her. The same reason ruled out living and working on the cotton plantation down-State. So he went to work for the Beaufort Cattle Company in the stockyards.

‘What do you know about cattle?’ Nina asked.

‘Nothing. But your father tells me he knows nothing about lumber, but he’s president of the company. Is that right, Lucas?’

‘He’s got you there, sweetheart.’ Lucas smiled at his daughter, telling her how pleased he now was with her husband. He had half-expected Tim to settle for the cushiest job offered him, but he had turned out to have a wide streak of independence in him. ‘But I have fellers who know the business and they see I don’t make any mistakes. I’m putting Tim in as a vice-president of the Cattle Company and he’ll soon learn.’

‘I think you misunderstood me, Lucas. I don’t want to start as a vice-president. I’d rather go in as an ordinary worker, right at the bottom.’

‘Cutting off the bull’s knackers,’ said Prue. ‘George took me down to see the man doing it.’

‘I think you had better eat alone in the nursery from now on,’ said Edith. ‘And, Lucas, I think you had better have a word with George.’

They were in the big panelled dining-room where Lucas insisted that they eat every evening. The table could seat thirty, but two leaves had been taken out of it, reducing it to a size that did not ridicule the family sitting at it. Nina and Tim sat on one side, the three younger sisters on the other, and Edith and Lucas sat at the ends. Thaddeus and Lucy Beaufort had always dressed for dinner, but when they died and Edith took over the running of the house she had abolished that rule. She loved dressing up, but the fun went out of it if one had to dress every night.