The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
‘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.