The Beaufort Sisters

‘It could be from a sense of guilt. I don’t know, I’m not judging his charity. But he’s like a lot of rich men – we have them in England, too – as soon as the workers start demanding a little more, they think they’re endangered, they’re going to have another revolution on their hands. From what I’ve read, John D. Rockefeller was like your father. He gave away millions with one hand and with the other hit a worker over the head with an iron bar. I don’t mean he wielded the iron bar himself, but he condoned it when it was done by others.’

‘Daddy would never allow any violence.’

‘There’s going to be violence tomorrow when those scabs turn up.’

‘You better not go to work tomorrow, then. I don’t want you getting hurt.’

But when she woke in the morning he was already gone. Distressed, she couldn’t eat breakfast. She tried to bathe the baby, but he was in one of his playful moods and she got short-tempered with him and finally called in Inger to take over. She dressed without showering, careless of what she put on, then hurried across to the main house. Her mother was having breakfast in her bedroom, planning her day with Miss Stafford.

‘Where’s Daddy?’

Edith looked at her, then nodded at Miss Stafford. ‘That will be all, Portia. Tell one of the gardeners to look at the tennis court. Mr Beaufort was complaining about it night before last. He said he got some bad bounces.’

‘Another beautiful day,’ Miss Stafford said to Nina and went out of the bedroom.

‘Now what’s all this? You know your father is always downtown by this time. He’s in his office at eight every morning.’

‘Did he say if he was going down to the stockyards?’

‘He and I never discuss his business.’ But she patted the newspaper that lay on the bed beside her breakfast tray. It was yesterday’s Star; it was one of her idiosyncrasies that she always waited till the news was at least a day old before she read it. That way, she said, she got a better perspective on whether the doom-sayers of yesterday had been proved correct today. It also buttressed her optimism because the doom-sayers were usually wrong. ‘You’re worried about the strike? I think you can leave it safely with your father to deal with. He’s a reasonable man in business, they tell me.’

‘Mother, how would you know? You said you never discuss business with him. This strike is serious. And Daddy is being pigheaded about it. I’m worried, Mother. Tim has gone to work this morning – there’s going to be trouble – ’

‘Darling – ’ Edith put her tray aside, patted the bed. ‘Sit down here. I can’t remember when I last saw you so upset. You’ll have to trust Tim. That’s what wives must do – ’

‘Oh Jesus!’ Edith said nothing, but her face stiffened and a deep frown appeared between her eyes. Nina flopped on the bed, hugged her mother. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to swear. But you don’t know what could happen down there this morning. It’s not just a question of trusting Tim – ’

‘Darling, I know we both live a sheltered life. Me more than you. But I don’t think that even out there – ’ She waved a hand vaguely towards the windows, towards the green thrones of trees, the pikestaffs of the iron fence, the outer world beyond the moat of wealth. ‘Even out there I don’t think women interfere in their husbands’ affairs. We just have to trust that they know what they are doing, that they are doing the right thing – ’

‘One of them will have to be wrong this morning, Tim or Daddy. They can’t both be right, not about this strike. And I think Daddy is the one who’s wrong this time.’

Edith looked at the newspaper headline covering the strike story: perhaps the doom-sayers were going to be right after all. She was not foolish, she did not believe she lived in the best of all possible worlds, only in a tiny corner of it; but she had not been bred to go looking for what was wrong with the world, her plea for perspective was only play-acting and she knew it. Her equanimity was only cowardice genteelly disguised.

‘I’ll talk to him tonight – ’

‘It may be too late then.’ Nina kissed her mother, slid off the bed. ‘Whatever happens down at the stockyards today, there’s going to be a hell of a scene here tonight. I’m going to tell Daddy a few truths.’

She left her mother, ran downstairs, out of the house and back towards the stables where all the cars were garaged. She drove her MG out into the cobbled yard and almost ran down George Biff as he stepped in front of her.

‘Where you going, Miz Nina?’

‘None of your business! Out of the way – please, George!’

He came round, slipped into the passenger’s seat beside her. ‘You rushing off down to the yards, right? You damn foolish. You ain’t gonna solve nothing like that.’

‘I’m not trying to solve anything – all I want is to bring Mister Tim home before the trouble starts.’

George looked at his watch. ‘It gonna start, it already started. I talked to Mister Tim this morning when he come to get his car. He told me about them scabs coming in. You gonna drive or you want me to?’

She argued no further. It took them twenty-five minutes to get to the stockyards, caught as they were in the morning peak-hour traffic. One or two of Nina’s friends saw them, waved cheerfully; they had no problems, none of them had a husband on his way to do battle, scabs, scabs. The morning was already hot, the eye-scalding sunlight an omen in itself. As they drove down towards the yards the smell of livestock hit them suddenly, as if they had driven through an invisible gate into another atmosphere. Police cars blocked the roadway up ahead and beyond the cars they could see trucks and a crowd of men. Nina parked the car, switched off the engine and at once they heard the shouts and booing of the men above the bellowing of the cattle in the yards.

George Biff put a hand on Nina’s arm as she started to get out of the car, but she took his hand by the wrist and dropped it back on his knee. ‘I’m going up there, George, so don’t try and stop me. I want to know what’s happening.’

‘I can find out – ’

She relented. ‘We’ll find out together. Come on.’

As they got to the line of police cars a sergeant blocked their way. ‘Okay, you two, this is no place for you. You with the lady, boy?’

‘He’s with me, yes,’ said Nina, squarely facing the thickset, overweight officer. He had a Southern accent and she resented his calling George ‘boy’. She wondered what his attitude was towards the strikers. ‘My name is Davoren – my father owns the Beaufort Cattle Company, where all the trouble is.’

‘You can say that again, there’s trouble, all right.’ The sergeant’s tone hadn’t altered. He knew who she was, even if he hadn’t seen her before; but he wasn’t impressed by rich girls who took niggers driving with them in imported sports cars. ‘That’s why you better turn round and go back home. We’ll take care of the trouble if it gets any worse.’

A young policeman came running down from the trucks, looking hot, angry and as if wishing he were somewhere else. ‘Sarge, you better come on up there. Those pickets, they’re not gonna let the trucks through. It’s getting rough.’

‘You buzz off, you understand?’ the sergeant said to Nina, then he lumbered up the road after the young officer.

‘We better do what he says,’ said George, sweat beginning to glisten on his dark face. ‘Looks like it gonna get pretty bad in a minute.’

The yelling had increased and the horns of the trucks had begun to blare; strident echoes rang in Nina’s ears, Frankfurt and Kansas City merged, she was suddenly as afraid of the past as of the present. She started to run towards the disturbance, but George grabbed her arm, held her back. Utterly distraught now, as if the yelling and the truck horns blaring were an omen, she struggled against his grip. The cattle in the yards on either side of them began to mill, bellowing loudly, raising dust that blew up and floated across the road like the smoke of an explosion. Down here on the flats beside the river the sun bounced back from the roadway, splintered itself on the windshields of the police cars. The stockyards became a cauldron of heat and dust and panic and anger.

‘Stay here! Don’t come any closer – you hear me? Stay here!’

George pushed her back towards the MG, then turned and ran up towards the trucks and the yelling crowd.

In the front line of the crowd Tim was struggling to edge towards the side. He had no desire to be a ring-leader in what was going to be an ugly encounter. He had been standing talking to Bumper Cassidy, both of them watching the blocked trucks carrying the scab labour, when suddenly the situation had got out of hand. The pickets had been rocking the trucks, trying to force the drivers to reverse; one of the drivers lost his head, threw a wrench and a picket went down with blood gushing from his face. Next moment the whole mob had surged forward, pickets clambering to get up at the men in the trucks like pirates boarding a convoy of galleons. Whistles blew and the police came in at the mob of strikers from the other side of the trucks.

Tim knew he was in danger. Mob mindlessness had taken over; if there was a cool head among the three or four hundred men it was having no effect. Bumper Cassidy, beside Tim, had responded to the uproar with a reflex action; he was a big, bald-headed man who, if he was lost for words, was never lost for fists. A man fell out of a truck and Bumper hit him on the way down, stopping him for a moment in mid-air as if the blow from his fist was stronger than the pull of gravity. Then a police baton hit Bumper on the side of the head and he fell sideways against Tim, who went down in the stampede.

Tim fought his way to his feet, hitting out indiscriminately; a man he worked with every day, blind with rage, threw a punch at him and he just managed to duck under it. Choked with dust, blinded by sweat, gasping for breath in the stifling heat, he found himself being swept round in the mob as in a whirlpool. Suddenly he was on the edge of the big melée, but in a worse position; he thudded up against the railings of a yard, felt a searing pain across his belly as a steer’s horn swept by. He was spreadeagled against the fence, the fighting crowd behind him hammering him there; right in front of him the stampeding cattle thundered by, eyes white-wild, their bellowing as brutally bruising as if they were running him down. Their horns went dangerously close as some of them thudded into the fence; he fought to push himself away from the railings but the crowd threw its weight against him, unaware of him. For a moment he thought of trying to climb over the fence, but knew at once that that would mean almost certain death.

He began to fight his way along the fence, punching and swiping at everyone in his way. He had almost reached the edge of the crowd when something hit him behind the ear; he went down, dazed, had no strength to pull himself up again. Then he felt someone lifting him, a black man who was faintly familiar; he clung to the man as the latter began to drag him out of the riot. He was dimly aware of a policeman appearing out of nowhere, baton raised; the black man let go of Tim with one hand, swung at the policeman and the latter went down. Tim was dragged over the fallen officer, then the black man picked him up in a fireman’s lift and carried him out of the yelling, struggling crush and down the road. He was dumped into the seat of a car that was also vaguely familiar, he felt someone kiss him, then he passed out.

‘Get going, Miz Nina!’

Nina swung the MG round, ignoring the shouts of the police sergeant as he ran down towards them, and took the car down the road with a screech of tyres.

9

‘Disgraceful!’ Lucas looked as if his bones wanted to blow him apart; all arms and legs and rigid body, he stalked up and down his study. ‘The papers have got on to the story! The two of you down there like damned agitators. And George hitting that policeman – Goddam it, what got into you?’

‘You can’t blame George for anything he did – he was just trying to rescue Tim.’

Nina had never seen her father so angry; but she was surprised at her own total unconcern for his reaction. All she cared about at the moment was Tim, lying in their bedroom in the house across the lawns with twelve stitches in the wound in his belly, two broken ribs and a slight concussion. She was off-balance emotionally, as if there had been a subsidence within her, a breaking-up of levels that had sustained her all her life up till now. There had been worries and doubts in the sixteen months she had been married to Tim, all brought on by Tim’s sometimes prickly attitude towards her father: there had never been any open quarrel but at best his attitude had always been one of guarded geniality, his smile not hypocritical but a defence that neither of her parents had recognized as such and had never penetrated. The evidence had been growing in her mind for months, but only today had it all suddenly formed itself into a pattern that she acknowledged. It was no news to her that Tim had never really accepted her father, but it had come as a shock to learn that her father returned the attitude.

‘I’ve had to talk to the chief of police, get him to drop the charge against George. Damn it, you know what they could do to him – a Negro hitting a white officer! And you took George down there with you, let him get into that situation!’

‘I didn’t do any such thing!’ She never had fought with her father like this; she burned with both shame and temper. ‘George came of his own accord – to help me. And he went into the mob to help Tim because he had some spark of humanity in him – something I think you’ve forgotten!’

She had hurt him, she could see that, but he wasn’t a weak man: he did not retreat behind a whine of reproach for her betrayal. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. The company has always been fair with its workers – it isn’t inhumane to object to their greediness. They get a fair share in wages of the profits – ’

‘It’s nothing to the money we have!’

‘Don’t be naïve. You don’t run a business that way. The Cattle Company has to pay its own way – whatever else we have doesn’t enter into it. You’re talking like some woolly-minded socialist. If you got that from your husband – ’

‘I didn’t get it from my husband – he has a name or have you put it out of your mind? He’s never attempted any propaganda with me – I think he’d laugh his head off if you called him a socialist. I worked it out for myself – I think the men are entitled to what they’re asking for.’

‘They get a living wage – ’

‘A living wage isn’t enough! God, Daddy, you’re still in the last century – I don’t think I’ve ever looked at you properly. Grandfather must have put blinkers on you when you were born – ’

Her voice had risen; she was almost shouting. The study door opened and Edith came in quickly, closing it behind her. ‘I told myself I was not going to interfere. But this has gone on long enough and loudly enough – too loud, all the servants can hear you. I think you had better apologize to your father, Nina, then go home and cool down. You’d better cool down, too, Lucas – your voice has been just as loud as hers.’

‘I’m not going to apologize! Tell your husband to come into the twentieth century – he just doesn’t know what’s going on in the world!’

‘My husband?’ said Edith.

But Nina had already rushed out of the room, past George Biff standing in the hall, his face grey with pain and emotion; then she was running across the lawns, through the afternoon heat, like someone fleeing a catastrophe she couldn’t face. Margaret and Sally, coming up from the tennis court, called to her, but she didn’t hear them. She ran towards her own house, tears streaming down her face, but even in her distress she knew the house was no real haven, that it had never really belonged to her and Tim. It had been a gift from her parents and she ran now through the strings that bound it to the big house that dominated the park.

Tim lay flat on his back in the bed, a low pillow under his head. He tried to sit up when she came into the room, but winced in pain and lay back at once. ‘What’s the matter? For Christ’s sake – Nina! What happened?’

She had flopped on the foot of the bed, hand over her face, her head shaking from side to side. She struggled to control herself, the sobs coming up as great gobs of pain in her chest. He reached for her, but she got up and moved away, waving a dumb hand for him to remain lying down and not hurt himself. She should have stayed downstairs till she had composed herself, but she had come headlong up the stairs to the one true haven that was all her own, him.

He waited impatiently for her to tell him what had happened. At last she was in control of herself, had cooled down, as her mother had advised; she was tearless now, dried-out and cold, more than just cool. She told herself she owed no more allegiance to her mother and father.

‘I got nowhere with Daddy.’ She told Tim all that had been said and argued in her father’s study; as she talked, she felt the distance increasing between her parents’ house and her own. ‘He’s hopeless – he’ll never see things our way.’

He misunderstood her, thinking she was talking only about the strike. ‘Bumper phoned me – the men are going back to work. They haven’t announced it yet, but Bumper says they’ve all recognized now that they can’t win.’

She had to concentrate to think about the events of the morning: she had been preoccupied with the wide empty horizon of the future. ‘Oh – you mean they’re giving up? So easily?’

‘Don’t criticize them. It’s too easy for us – ’

‘But you were hurt – for them! Daddy will laugh at us – ’

‘I don’t think he’s that heartless or undiplomatic.’

She moved up closer to him on the bed, took one of his bandaged hands in hers. ‘Darling, let’s go away.’

He stared at her closely, his eyes wary in his bruised and grazed face. ‘You don’t mean just for a holiday, do you?’

‘No, I mean move away from here, go somewhere else to live. Anywhere – I don’t care – ’

‘I think you’d better sleep on it – ’

‘I don’t want to sleep on it! For God’s sake, stop being so damn careful of me – I’m not doing this just for you! I’m thinking of me – of us, both of us. And Michael – ’ She was infested with pessimism, was building fears on fears without any real foundation. She had been too well protected, even from the knowledge that her father had another set of loyalties, ones outside that to her and her sisters. ‘Let’s go to England! You’d like that – ’

He searched her face as if it were strange territory: he had never known her to look and sound like this. He sensed the seriousness in her: what she had just suggested may have come off the top of her head, but she felt it deeply. The decision she had made was bigger than her decision to marry him. But he wasn’t hurt by it.

‘All right, we’ll go back to England. But you have to promise me – we tell your parents together and you have to make them understand it was a joint decision on our part.’

‘But it isn’t – ’

‘Yes, it is. You may have suggested it, but you’re not to tell them you did. You’ll hurt them enough just by going – you don’t have to rub it in by letting them know you had to talk me into it.’

It was her turn to look searchingly. ‘Why are you being so careful of their feelings? They’ve never been that way about yours.’

‘I’m being careful for your sake, darling heart. You may want to come back here some day – ’

‘Never – ’

He shook his head on the pillow. ‘You’ll want to come back. Perhaps not to live, but you’ll want to come back for visits, long ones. There’s not just your parents – there are your sisters. You’re too attached to them to want to turn your back on them.’

10

Lucas and Edith took the news as Nina had expected: as if she had turned a gun on them. Lucas did not speak to her for two days, going out of his way to avoid her. But Edith, after her initial shock, did not surrender her daughter without a fight.

‘If we’ve made mistakes, Nina, then all I can ask is that you forgive us. It won’t happen again.’

‘It will, Mother. Daddy will never change. He thinks he owns us. Not just all of us, but Tim, too.’

‘You’re mistaking love for ownership. Maybe he shows it the wrong way, but it is love. I know him better than you.’

‘That’s why you can make excuses for him. But I can’t, Mother – not any longer.’

Then she tried to explain her departure to her sisters. She got them together in what had been the old nursery and was now a games and television room. But all the artefacts of their childhood were still there: dolls, toys, finger-paintings. It was a museum now for the older girls, but it was Prue’s retreat and domain. She was delighted to have her sisters as her guests. She sat playing with her dolls, only occasionally cocking an ear to the conversation. But Margaret and Sally were in tears.

‘Oh God!’ wailed Sally. ‘We’ll miss you terribly!’

Margaret wiped her eyes. ‘I suppose I knew marriage was going to break us up some day. But not like this. Daddy is like a zombie.’

‘I think I’d like a zombie doll,’ said Prue.

‘Oh God,’ said Sally; then wiped her eyes. ‘If you go, Nina, can I have your MG?’

‘How mercenary can you get?’ said Margaret. ‘Nina, how does Tim feel? We’re going to miss him as much as you. He’s part of the family.’

‘That’s just what he’s not. Daddy doesn’t think so. Will you come and see us when we’re in England?’

‘Of course,’ said all three; then all four of them had another big weep. ‘God, it’s just awful!’

Later Margaret walked back with Nina to the Davoren house. Purple clouds boiled above then and a wind whipped the trees to life. There were tornadoes further south, but so far no warnings had been issued for this area. It was a good day for being miserable.

‘If there’s anything I can do to help – ’

‘Better not take sides,’ said Nina, linking her arm in her sister’s. She had never been as close to Margaret as to Sally and Prue, but now she was grateful for Meg’s comfort and presence. She wanted someone to talk to, and her mother had failed her. ‘Just watch out when it comes time for you to fall in love. Please yourself, not Daddy. Is there anyone you’re serious about right now?’

‘No.’ But Margaret seemed to close up; Nina felt her arm stiffen slightly within her own. ‘Well, maybe. But we haven’t talked about it. I could be crazy about someone else this time next year. Did you fall in and out of love once a month when you were my age?’

‘I was crazy for half a dozen boys. It was a wonder I didn’t have half a dozen babies.’

‘You mean you went all the way with all of them?’

Nina laughed, beginning to feel a little better. Her sisters were indeed a comfort, she really was going to miss them. ‘I always said No at the last moment. I must have been a terrible tease. But I was afraid of losing them. I’m – I don’t know, I used to fall in love too easily. I did with Tim, all in a weekend.’

‘You’re not sorry about that, for God’s sake?’ Margaret pulled up, her arm jerking Nina to a halt.

‘Of course not. But I break out in a cold sweat sometimes. I mean I might have missed him, never met him, if I’d married one of the others.’

Margaret nodded. ‘I know what you mean. I’m trying to teach myself to be patient. But it’s hard, isn’t it? Oh, there’s Tim! I didn’t know he was up.’

‘He’s not supposed to be.’

But Tim was sitting in an armchair on the wide rear porch, a book open on his knees, a pitcher of lemonade on the cane table beside him. Inger, the maid, hovered over him, a Swedish angel who would gladly have fallen if the master had tempted her. Nina had already decided that, if she and Tim had not been leaving, then Inger would have had to go.