Page 17 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
‘Why?’
‘Most people tell Mountbatten exactly what he wants to hear.So all he ever hears are his own thoughts echoed endlessly back at him.’
‘I wouldn’t do that even if I knew how.After all, what’s the point of a debate if everyone says what other people want to hear?’
‘No point at all.But what an unexpected person you are, Kathleen Kennedy.’
‘Kick.’
‘Kick.’He sounded faintly amused.
‘And is that something good, being unexpected?’
‘I don’t know,’ he responded slowly.And he began to show her things out on the skyline – ‘See that building …’ – so that she knew he was uncomfortable.Kick let him, all the while trying to puzzle out which bit was really him?Was it the bit where he was serious and worried, or the bit where he made jokes and laughed?And why was it so strange that she said what she meant?
She thought back to the exchange with Mountbatten and the thin man.How men liked to hear themselves talk, she decided.And war was just another of the things they liked to talk about.No different to sailing or hunting.None of it meant anything.It was no more real than Teddy boasting, ‘I will make the biggest sandcastle.I will jump the highest …’
Chapter Ten
Kick
‘We have been invited to Essex,’ Rose said when Kick arrived for the usual morning consultation some days later.‘A place called Kelvedon.Henry Channon – born in Chicago, but now an MP and married to Lady Honor Guinness.The week after next.’
‘But I don’t have to go, do I?’Kick asked.‘I told Debo I might stay a few days with her.’
‘I don’t want you staying anywhere Unity is to stay,’ Rose said sharply.‘Not since that incident in the park, applesauce though that all was.’
Kick’s lips twitched at hearing her mother say ‘applesauce’.It was one of her father’s expressions, and Kick had always marvelled that a man who didn’t curse could get so much vehemence into an innocent little word.
Then she thought about ‘the incident’.That had been Debo’s sister Unity Mitford – ‘defiance itself’, as Debo called her, half exasperated, half in admiration – wearing the black-and-red Swastika badge to a Labour Party rally that had been held across the road in Hyde Park, in open delight at the rumours that she was engaged to Herr Hitler.‘She’s no more engaged than I am,’ Debo had said, ‘only she can’t resist the trouble and fuss it’s causing.Unity is positively addicted to fuss.’
At the rally, the crowd had turned on her after she heckled one of the speakers.They had torn off her badge and trampled on it, then, giddy with their own daring, had made to drag Unity into the Serpentine and dunk her.She had escaped, twisting furiously out of their grasp, and run straight for Prince’s Gate, arriving breathless and laughing at the door with her jacket badly torn.Kick had brought her in and tidied her up.
‘I wonder you aren’t more scared,’ she had said, brushing Unity’s wiry hair back off her face that had a streak of mud on it.
‘Pooh!’Unity had replied, looking at herself in the mirror.‘I wasn’t scared a bit.’She reached a hand up to rub at the mud.Underneath was blood.‘I told them I couldn’t wait to become a German citizen, just as soon as ever I can.And I meant it.’Her eyes had blazed and her face – so like her beautiful sisters’, only larger, with a more pronounced chin and heavy-lidded eyes that turned down at the corners – had glowed with the excitement of being alone in her conviction.
‘Unity won’t be there,’ Kick said now.
‘All the same.I don’t like that girl.She’s troublesome.And in any case, the Channons would like very much to meet you.There will be other young people – Lady Brigid, Honor’s sister, who is exactly of an age with you.’
‘Must I really go?’Kick asked again, even though she had come to love these English country-house stays.The ancient houses and great estates varied, places with one name – Cliveden, Blenheim, Hatfield, Belvoir – arrogant in their modesty, or modest in their arrogance, she never could decide; but the rhythms of energy and idleness were almost identical.If they were invited to shoot, there were guns and dogs and men called ‘beaters’.If hunting was the thing it was horses, hounds, ‘the sound of bugles and beagles’, as Debo said.The mornings were early and intense, followed by blissful lazy afternoons of bath and rest and cocktails in the drawing room or on the lawn.One’s friends disappearing in their jerseys and skirts, reappearing for dinner draped in satins or silks in fabulous colours.Different creatures.As though with their evening clothes and hair pomade they had put on a new and languid grace.
Most of all, it was finding so much history everywhere – on the walls, in paintings and tapestries, carved into the stone, even in the layout of gardens.And the families, who seemed to be proud and ignorant at once of what lay around them.
‘We hardly see it,’ Debo had said airily when Kick remarked on this during a stay at Blenheim, invited by the Duke of Marlborough’s granddaughter, Sarah.
‘Oh, but you sure know it’s there,’ Kick had responded.‘Especially if anyone else looks like forgetting.’
‘Very true,’ Debo had said with a smile.‘How quick you are.’
‘It’s not that I’m quick, especially, only that I say things straight that you English never will.’
‘Not just us English,’ Debo had insisted.‘You say things “straight”, as you put it, that no one else anywhere ever will!’
But there were reasons not to leave London just now.Areason, if she was truthful.Billy.The idea of being away for days, even a whole week, well, she thought, it was awful.He might forget about her.Meet someone else.There was that Irene girl he used to go about with, Debo had said.She was the daughter of an earl or something.Since the night of the Mountbattens’ party when he had been so careful not to say it, Kick knew that Billy liked her – she was used to men liking her; her brothers’ friends always did – but that didn’t mean he would remember that he liked her if someone else distracted him.He didn’t ring her up the way other men did – proposing a drive, a drink.Not yet.But when they did see one another – once at a lunch given by Lady Spencer, twice at the Café de Paris and, yes, she knew that keeping such careful count was an instant giveaway – he was sure to talk to her, ask her to dance, stay by her side, in a way that was friendly.But something more too.
‘It doesn’t sound so much fun,’ she continued.‘Maybe I could invite the Guinness girl over here one afternoon instead?’That was just the ticket, she thought.Invite her over, ply her with cakes and sodas from the giant fridge in the kitchen Rose had had shipped over specially, play her the latest jazz records from America.And be free that night, every night, to go out, go to parties, and maybe bump into Billy.
