You would have learned that Magnus had enhanced this fortunewhen he’d helped to develop a drug that was later approved and sold at a scandalously high price. What might have interested you, too, was the paragraph about what he wanted to do with the money. My father, who had rejected his own flesh and blood, was paradoxically very interested in immortalizing his legacy in bricks and mortar instead. In the eponymous Magnus Beaufort Library, to be specific.
Designed by a leading architect, a man who had worked on world-class buildings across the globe, the library was intended to be an exceptionally avant-garde and inspiring space, but also one of the most technologically advanced libraries and teaching spaces in the world.
Critics weighed in as soon as the plans were made public. They said the design was terrible and impossible to realize in the materials suggested, that the materials themselves were flawed and ugly, that the site was wrong, that the construction was going to run catastrophically over budget. They asked whether the millions and millions it would cost couldn’t be better spent elsewhere. They wrote that the Magnus Beaufort Library was a vanity project.
Mum said the same:Of course, Narcissus named it after himself.
My father went into whitewash mode, writing robust op-eds in defense of his library and throwing money at reading and literacy programs for children and in prisons. He released patents for his drug so that third-world countries could make it, but nobody forgot how many had died in such places while his company raked in millions in the West. Even as he broke a sweat ostentatiously doing good, even as they broke ground on the library, the controversy waged on. Magnus Beaufort had a PR problem, and it couldn’t have delighted my mother more.
The prospect of watching his library get built in a dominant position was one of the reasons I would never study or teach at Cambridge University. The other was the danger of running into one of my half siblings. There were three of them. I saw them on social media but had no idea whether they knew I existed or not.
Now, here I was, in my father’s arms, in his mews house, under the watchful eye of Diana Cornish. Magnus Beaufort and I had never touched before. A deeply buried part of me wanted him to hold me longer, but I was trembling because he felt so forbidden and because I was so angry with him.
Over his shoulder, I stared at the de Kooning painting, at the woman’s body exploded in streaks of fleshy paint. It was what he’d done to Mum. He’d blown her life up, and mine. I wrenched myself out of his grip.
“You look just like my mother,” Dad said. His eyes were glassy. With tears? I felt unbearably raw, and my anger flared. How could he be having amomentwhere he wasfeeling his feelingsbecause I reminded him of my grandmother, who I’d never met? It was too much.
I ran down the stairs so fast, I almost slipped, and ignored their shouts behind me. I didn’t stop to put my shoes on, just grabbed them and burst onto the street in my socks. I stood, shocked, blinking in the daylight, feeling as if the little street was pivoting around me. When I heard them behind me I took off.
I didn’t know where I was going. I just ran and walked and ran again until I felt like the mews house was lost behind me and I became aware of a stabbing pain in the side of my foot. I sank down with my back to someone’s wall in a quiet corner and tears rolled down my cheeks. I gripped my foot where it hurt, and when I took my hand away there was blood on it.
“She’s here!” My father knelt beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. I felt as if it was scorching me. I slapped it away.
“Fuck off!”
He stood up, backed away. He looked distraught. Cece was there. He said, “I don’t know if I should hug her.” It made me even more angry. If he was my father, he shouldknowthe right thing to do. Not that I did. I wanted never to see him again, but then I’d wanted him all my life and here he was. So. Very. Close.
Diana knelt beside me. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” She had a lot to answer for. I was so angry with her, and I could see in her eyes that she knew it.
My father said, “I think that foot needs attention.”
“It’s fine.” I stood up. Diana offered me her hand, but I ignored it. I tried to walk, but it hurt badly, and blood smeared the pavement. My sock was soaked red. I sat down again.
My father approached. I wrapped my arms around my knees defensively, but he didn’t touch me this time.
“Let us help you with that foot and my driver will take you anywhere you want afterward. I promise. I also think Diana has some explaining to do. To both of us.”
I looked at her. She nodded. My foot was throbbing like crazy. The sight of blood made me queasy. Something in me gave up fighting, and I let him help me up.
It was my first proper look at him. We had the same eyes. I knew there were similarities between us from when I’d obsessively searched the internet for pictures of him, but seeing it in the flesh was totally different. It was like a body shock, a too-real and therefore surreal replay of all the fantasies I’d ever had about meeting him.
I hated him for what he’d done to us. The way Mum told it, he’d refused to have anything to do with her after she got pregnant with me. It happened when they were young, but not too young. His family had money. He’d told her he loved her. But when push came to shove, he told her that she wasn’t “the right kind of girl” for his family, that he would be having nothing more to do with her, or with me.
Your father has a cold, cold heart.And the same eyes as me.
He offered me his arm, but I leaned on Diana and limped back to the house on her arm.
I was silent, but my anger was swelling. She’d ambushed me. Had she ambushed him, too? He’d made it sound that way, but Magnus Beaufort was a very good liar.
“The Biggest Project”
Feature,Telegraph Magazine
February 3, 2024
Libraries are in Magnus Beaufort’s family. He welcomed me to his home in Cambridge to talk about his latest project and why it’s personal.
