The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ cocky, too,’ said Lucas.

      ‘Would you make out the cheque to cash, just in case you decide to commit suicide before the banks open? I don’t want Magnus as your executor freezing all transactions.’

      The men grouped around the television set in Lucas’ study. A few women, Margaret included, hovered in the background. Edith had looked in once or twice, but like most of the women at the party she knew better than to intrude too much. When things were going bad politically, men found women a nuisance. Politics, Lucas had told her, was a male disease that the weaker sex should avoid.

      It was Nina, inoculated by too much champagne, who intruded. She breezed into the study, looked at the glum faces, then announced, ‘Cheer up, for God’s sake! It’s not going to be the end of the world if Truman wins!’

      ‘Darling heart,’ said Tim, the only cheerful face in the room, ‘you are risking being scalped. I believe the gentlemen here are just about to join the Indians.’

      Frank Minett laughed, then strangled it as several of the black-tied Indians looked at him as if he should be scalped. Margaret, sitting on the arm of his chair, cuffed his ear. Lucas didn’t even glance at him but looked at his favourite as if she had hit him with a poisoned arrow.

      ‘Nina, we’re not worried about the world. It’s what that feller can do to this country that concerns us. Now please stop acting like a high school cheer leader.’

      ‘I think I should make a confession – I voted for Mr Truman.’ She had not, but she was in a rebellious mood; something had gone wrong with her evening and she wasn’t sure what it was. ‘I’m disgusted that anyone from the Midwest could vote for a New Yorker like that Tom Dewey.’

      ‘I apologize for my daughter, gentlemen,’ said Lucas.

      ‘He feels like Mrs Brutus,’ said Tim. ‘Darling heart, you shouldn’t stab Caesar in this temple.’

      ‘I think you’re both drunk,’ said Margaret, coming to her father’s aid.

      ‘French champagne,’ said Tim. ‘It wouldn’t have happened if we had been drinking domestic stuff. Never trust the French. Remember saying that, Lucas?’

      ‘I hate to say it,’ said Magnus McKea, ‘but I think it’s all over. I shall go home and get drunk. On domestic bourbon.’

      ‘Spoken like an honourable loser,’ said Tim. He sounded as recklessly rebellious as Nina; she had never seen him so opposed to her father in public. He was smiling all the time, seemed in high good humour, but he was getting malicious satisfaction from the fact that he looked like winning his bet with Lucas. ‘I’ll be over in the morning, Lucas old chap. Shall we leave the wake, darling heart?’

      Nina took his arm, ‘Bear up, Daddy. You only have to wait another four years. Who knows whom you’ll find?’

      Next day, after he had collected his cheque from Lucas, Tim went downtown to the Muehlebach Hotel and managed to shake hands with President Truman. ‘My father-in-law Lucas Beaufort asked me to give you his congratulations, Mr President,’ he lied.

      The President’s eyes twinkled behind his glasses. ‘I’ll bet. Ask him if he’d like to come to Washington and work for me. I’m looking for someone to run the social welfare programme.’

      Tim went across and deposited his cheque in his account in the City and Country Bank. The teller’s eyes went up when he saw the amount and the signature; Tim was tempted to tell him what the cheque represented, but refrained. Last night’s champagne was now a sour taste in his mouth. There was also another sour taste, the memory of what had happened with Margaret in one of the empty rooms above the stables. His sense of guilt was doubled by the knowledge that he had enjoyed being with her and that he could be tempted again.

      He stood outside the bank in a drizzle of rain wondering where he might go. He was thinking of the ends of the earth, but eventually he went home. Or what, in today’s mood, passed for home.

      2

      Though they never came to open warfare and they were always polite to each other, the gap between Tim and Lucas widened. Nina only slowly became aware of it, because Tim never mentioned it. She also slowly became aware of a change in him, a retreat into himself. It was not so much a shutting-out of her as that he seemed to become absent-minded about her. He was just as passionate in bed; but then it is difficult to be absent-minded about sex unless one is a professional. But the light-hearted courting of her that had been such a custom of his was now only an occasional whim. She wondered if this was how it was with all marriages, if husbands and wives, though still in love, stopped being lovers. On a couple of occasions when he went off on business trips he neglected to phone her at night. She even, to her shame, began to look for signs that he was having an affair with another woman, but there was none. Her one stab of jealousy towards Margaret had already been forgotten, put out of her mind by the fact that Margaret’s time now seemed taken up with Frank Minett.

      ‘Is he getting serious?’ she asked one day when she had volunteered to pick up Margaret at the university. ‘Prue tells me he’s always hanging around the house.’

      ‘Prue notices too much. Yes, he’s serious. But I’m not. The trouble is, Daddy thinks he’s just great. He wants Frank to leave the university and go into the bank.’

      ‘I thought Frank’s subject was politics, not economics.’

      ‘Frank’s subject is anything that’s going to get him to the top.’

      ‘You sound as if you don’t like him.’

      ‘Oh, I like him all right. But I’d like to do my own choosing, not have Daddy do it for me – which is virtually what he’s doing. You were lucky. I mean, choosing Tim without any interference from Daddy.’

      ‘Oh, he tried to interfere. He’ll never forgive Tim for being independent.’ She paused. ‘Have you noticed any change in him lately? Tim, I mean.’

      Intent on driving, she did not notice Margaret’s careful glance at her. ‘No. Why?’

      Nina took her eyes off the road for a moment. ‘You sound as if I shouldn’t have asked you that question.’

      ‘Maybe that’s how I do feel. He’s your husband – we shouldn’t be talking about him.’

      ‘We’ve been talking about Frank.’ She knew she had made a mistake. If Margaret herself had been married it might have been different, but Margaret had no experience to draw upon, had, as far as she knew, never been in love, not really in love. ‘No, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s just that – well, Daddy’s turned his back on him. Tim’s not going to get anywhere in the oil company.’

      ‘How do you know? Has he told you?’

      Nina turned the car in through the gates of the estate, nodded to the security guard as he saluted them. ‘No. But I recognize the signs. It’s going to be the stockyards all over again. I’m beginning to think we should go away again.’

      ‘Where would you run to this time?’

      Nina jerked the car to a halt, skidding it in the gravel. ‘That sounds so – so brutal!’

      ‘It’s СКАЧАТЬ