The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
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‘We’ll let you know if there is, Magnus. Will you handle my funds for me, send money across when we need it?’
She was alone with McKea for the moment. There was a tacit agreement between her and Tim that they would need her money to live comfortably in England, but she had become self-conscious about it, as if it were some sort of family birthmark better left ignored. She welcomed the idea of Magnus as her own lawyer, even if he was also her father’s.
Magnus himself was a little dubious. ‘I’m your father’s lawyer first. If there’s any conflict of interest, I’m afraid I’ll have to take his side.’
‘We’ll risk that. I’m hoping any disagreement between Daddy and us is over for good.’
The final farewells were said at home, then George drove them to Union Station. Lucas had decided against a public goodbye, in case there should be a reporter or two waiting. It was as if he saw Nina’s going away as some sort of defeat for himself: he didn’t want it spread across the newspapers for all to see. It was bad enough that people in their own circle knew what had happened, even if they could only guess at the reason for the Davorens’ departure.
George carried Michael into the station. ‘I’m gonna miss him, Miz Nina.’ Michael, a year old now, laughed without restraint, the only one young enough not to feel the pain of the occasion. ‘Gonna miss you and Mister Tim, too.’
The Davorens crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, a booking that Nina had sentimentally insisted upon. They spent a month at the Savoy while they looked about for a place in the country. Tim raised no objection to their staying at the hotel, even though Nina was footing the bill; she wondered if he was letting her indulge them before they got down to living on his terms.
They found a house to lease and a business to buy 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.’
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