The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ at the same time and in the same place, Stoke Bayard, a village on the River Thames near Henley. The house was on a ten-acre island in the middle of the river, connected to the main bank by an arched bridge over a tributary of the main stream. The business was on the edge of the village, a boat-yard which built punts and skiffs and, in summer, rented them out to fishermen and picnickers who came down from London.

      The house was a pre-1914 summer pavilion, a seven-roomed folly or, as Tim described it, a family of gazebos. ‘I love it,’ said Nina. ‘It just proves not all the bad taste is in America.’

      ‘It’s not practical. We’ll freeze in winter.’

      But they went ahead anyway, because she insisted, and leased the house for a year and moved in as the best summer England could remember began to turn into an equally beautiful autumn. Tim took over the boat-yard and the one full-time worker as the last of the summer visitors began to dwindle away.

      The yard stood at a bend in the river and looked up to the house on the island. Tim would sometimes see Nina on their front lawn with Michael and they would wave to each other; life seemed idyllic, with his work so close to his home and no Lucas to worry about. He even forgot about the prospect of winter in the pavilion built for summer.

      His sole full-time employee was an Australian artist who lived opposite the island with his wife and two small daughters. He had done his apprenticeship as a boat-builder back home in Australia and he was still working at his trade while he established himself as an artist in England.

      ‘Australia is a bloody cultural desert.’ Steve Hamill was a short chunky man with a thick moustache and a rolling gait that suggested he had been a sailor; but he was scared of the water and couldn’t explain why he had become a builder of craft to sail upon it. ‘I suppose it’s like that in the Middle West, is it?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ said Tim. ‘I was never much of a one for culture.’

      ‘I’ve got no education to speak of, but I know where the soul of art is. Right here in Europe. All I’ve got to do is absorb it, get it into me, and then I’m going to be the most successful bloody artist ever came out of Aussie.’

      ‘Perhaps I’d better buy one of your paintings now while I can still afford your prices.’

      The Hamills lived in a large caravan which Steve had redecorated. It stood in one corner of a field like something forgotten by a carnival that had moved on. Near it he had built himself a small shed that was his studio.

      Eileen Hamill was a pretty girl with auburn-tinted bangs and a quiet manner that suggested she took a long view of everything. Her whole life seemed to be Steve and their two small girls; she was prepared to wait forever for him to be the artist he wanted to be. But Tim, who had now developed a very personal eye for such things, wondered how long her patience would survive the cramped, uncomfortable life in a caravan.

      While Tim looked at Steve’s paintings in the shed, Nina sat with Eileen in the caravan and sipped tea and ate home-made scones. The two small Hamill girls, delighted to have a living doll, played with Michael on the grass at the bottom of the caravan steps.

      ‘I grew up in the slums back in Melbourne,’ said Eileen. ‘The only time I ever got out of the city was when the local church took us on a picnic. To live like this – it’s heaven.’ Then she added, ‘Though I don’t know what it will be like in the winter.’

      Nina was still adjusting. Life for her had suddenly been reduced to a much smaller scale. She could not imagine living in the confined quarters of the caravan; she wondered how the Hamills made love, sleeping so close to their children. She couldn’t see herself under Tim with two pairs of bright curious eyes peering over his shoulder. She smothered a giggle at the thought, coughed and made out some tea had gone down the wrong way.

      ‘But at least it’s our own and it’s better than living right on top of each other as they do in London. Even in the slums back home we had a backyard. But we keep hoping we’ll have something bigger in a year or two. You have to, when you’re an artist. Hope, I mean.’

      Nina went across to the shed to look at the paintings. Taking Steve Hamill as no more than a working man with perhaps enough talent to have given him some ambition, she was surprised at the sensitivity of his paintings. His wife and his children were subjects in all his work, but they were not portraits; they were dream figures in a world in which the rough, casual Steve would have looked as out of place as a cubist dustman in a Watteau landscape. There were thoughts in Steve Hamill’s head that he could never express in words, that had to come out through his rough, broad-fingered hands.

      Nina and Tim bought three paintings and two sketches and Steve shook his head at them. ‘I hope you’re not being charitable.’

      ‘We’re buying them as an investment,’ said Tim.

      ‘You want your heads read. My stuff an investment? Well, it’s your money. I hope you’re not leaving yourself short.’ He and Eileen had no idea who Nina was, nor did anyone else in the village; she was enjoying her anonymity, the first time in her life she had not been a Beaufort. ‘How about twenty quid each for the paintings and a fiver for the two sketches? Or am I asking too much?’

      Going back to the pavilion, Tim carrying the paintings and Nina carrying Michael straddled across her hip, Nina said, ‘I wonder what it’s like to start at the bottom like that?’

      ‘You’ll never know, darling heart.’

      ‘I couldn’t live in cramped conditions like that. I was thinking, how do they make love with everything right on top of them? Including the children.’

      ‘The poor have had to do it that way for centuries. They hold their breath, which accounts for the pop-eyed look among the poor. It’s only the fortunate who can expose their privates in private. Shall we go in and try a little exposure?’

      ‘It’s five o’clock. Cinq à sept, as the French say. I’ve always wanted a lover to call on me before dinner. What shall we do with Michael?’

      ‘Hang him on the wall with the paintings.’

      2

      Autumn slipped into winter. The river lost its sparkle, the songbirds went south, the sun came out only occasionally as if it too was being rationed by the austerity-minded government. Tim and Nina made friends in the village, but gradually Nina began to feel homesick. Food and Christmas gift parcels arrived from Kansas City like insidious propaganda: come home, said every tin and package. But she said nothing and if Tim noticed any change in her, he also said nothing.

      She and Tim and Michael had Christmas dinner alone. The table was loaded, but all the food had come in cans from America. Each of them put on a brave face, but Michael was the only one who laughed and enjoyed himself without restraint. Tim had suggested having the Hamills join them, but they had gone up to spend Christmas with some Australian friends in Earls Court. Despite fires in every room the house was cold; it seemed to have a chill of its own that had nothing to do with the weather outside. A winter wind scavenged the trees, seeking the last of the leaves; yesterday’s rain had turned to ice under the hedgerows, like negatives of shadows. When the phone rang at four-o’clock in the afternoon Nina rushed to it as if it were a lifeline thrown to her across the Atlantic, though she knew nobody would call her from Kansas City.

      ‘We’re here,’ said her mother, sounding warm and comfortable, as if she herself were centrally heated.

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