Page 53 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
‘Of course he didn’t.’Elizabeth was scornful.‘Hugo’s brother, William, is buried in Normandy.His father came home but left half of himself behind at Verdun.These young men have grown up knowing what war means.They soaked it in with the very air they breathed.They don’t talk of it, I grant, but that’s different and doesn’t mean what you think it means.And now you’ve rubbed their noses in it.’
‘It is to avoid another war that I did it,’ her father said.‘After this, they might think twice before they rush to join up.’
‘Do you think, for one second, that they will not enlist, should it indeed be war?’Elizabeth asked, almost conversationally.How strange that it should be her, Kick thought.‘They will, you know.Only now, they will do it without ever a shred of illusion to comfort themselves.This was a bad night’s work.’
‘It was necessary,’ her father insisted, but he spoke to a room empty except for Kick.Elizabeth had gone.Kick kept her head down, busying herself with folding the screen away, so that she need not look at him.He stood awhile, she thought he even tried to catch her eye, but she kept her gaze firmly where it could not be intercepted, and after another moment, he too left.He shut the door behind him so that Kick was alone.Why, she thought, had he done this?Yes, there were the reasons he had given Elizabeth – to make clear the reality of war, to cut through the talk of honour and duty to an ugly truth.But there was something else too in what he had done, and it took her some time to understand it.
It was that he didn’t see these young men as quite real, she realised when she had tidied the screen away and put back all the chairs against the walls, motioning ‘no’ with a shake of her head to the footman who came in to do it.He didn’t understand that they were as real as his own sons.Maybe it was their Englishness.Their habits of indirectness in conversation, the faintly cartoonish way they behaved according to a code.Maybe it was simply that they weren’t American, and therefore no concern of his.But certainly, he hadn’t behaved towards them as though he understood that beneath the careful, stiff exteriors they were flesh and blood and bone and fear and hope, the same as any men.
By the time she was able to leave the library, the party had broken up.Billy, Andrew and Hugo stood by the open front door.At the bottom of the steps, the motorcar had been brought around and waited, headlights on so that two beams of light lay across the gravel of the driveway.
‘Debo will be down directly,’ Andrew said.He spoke to the air behind Kick, not meeting her eyes.‘She has gone to fetch her coat.’Billy stayed quiet and she had no idea what to say to him.What could she possibly say?She couldn’t apologise for her father – that would be disloyal, and Kennedys were unfailingly loyal – but neither could she pretend that nothing had happened.She stood there awkwardly and was almost grateful for the English habit of dissembling when Hugo said, ‘Yes, it’s jolly late, we’d better be getting back.The Blounts will wonder where we are.’
‘I’ll walk you out,’ she said.She stepped through the open door and into the night-time world beyond.The air smelled like a pond, she thought, thick and wet, teeming with mysterious life she couldn’t see.At the bottom of the steps, she watched a squadron of pale moths dancing in the beams of the car headlights.‘Will they fly away when the car starts to move?’she wondered aloud.
‘No.’Billy had come down the steps with her.He stood close behind.‘They will linger too long, and be crushed against the windscreen as we drive.’His breath on the back of her neck was warm.The feel of him so close behind her made her want to lean back and rest her weight against him.‘The glass will be thick with bits of wing and leg and broken bodies by the time we get back.’
She forced herself to straighten up.‘I didn’t know.’It was the most she could say.
‘I suppose you didn’t,’ he agreed.And just when she was about to cry out ‘He did not mean it.Or at least, he did, but he did not mean what you think he meant …’ he spared her.
‘It doesn’t matter, you know.’
‘How does it not matter?’
‘None of it matters.What he says, what my father says, Chamberlain.Any of them.Whatever they think, they don’t make any of this, they just respond to it.We all do.’
‘My brother Jack thinks the same as you do,’ she said.‘He doesn’t think like my father.He thinks like you.’It was the closest she could come to disowning her father’s views.Would it be enough?
‘Does he?’He was, as always, polite, but the politeness now was like glass behind which he hid.She could see him.He looked the same, but she could not reach him.Could not feel him or know him.
After he left she thought about what she had really wanted to say – ‘I don’t believe him anymore.I believe you.’ But you couldn’t blurt a thing like that out.Especially when the feeling of it was so new and strange.All her life she had believed her father.Believed what he said, what he did.And now, she didn’t.She didn’t know the moment it had started, this change in her.Maybe that evening at the Mountbattens when Billy had gently shown her the absurdity of Americans coming to tell them what they must and must not do?But she knew the moment it had crystalised.There, in the library, against a screen of dying men.The pity of it was that she was too late.Just as she felt herself moving beyond her father, she felt Billy pull away from her.Politely, maybe with regret, but also decisively.
She stood and watched the lights of the motorcar down the long driveway, until they turned a corner at the gate lodge and were lost in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
London
Doris
One look at the front of Number Five Belgrave Square and Doris knew Honor wasn’t there.It was a feeling, she thought, walking up the three steps and in under the portico to ring the bell, rather than anything visible.Something about the vast façade that turned itself away from her.And the door wasn’t opened immediately, as it should have been.She felt, suddenly, the full exhaustion of her journey.The hours by train, through Germany and then France, watching the countryside flicker past.The Night Ferry from Paris, leaving the gloomy Gare du Nord and depositing her at Victoria Station that morning at five minutes past nine.Her face felt tight and dirty.Inside her gloves, her hands were sticky.
Behind her, the taxi driver was removing her luggage from the boot and lining it up on the pavement.She wondered should she tell him to wait.If Honor wasn’t here, perhaps she should go to a hotel.
The door opened.Robert, the footman, stood there, not Andrews.Definitely Honor wasn’t here.
‘Miss Coates.’
‘Robert.’The taxi was already gone.Now she would have to call for another one.She sighed.
‘Madame said to expect you.’Robert stood aside, ushering her in.‘They are at Kelvedon, where Mrs Channon hopes you will join them, but meanwhile your usual room is ready for you.’
Dear Honor.Doris felt her eyes prickly with grateful tears.How tired she must be.She never cried.
‘May I bring you some breakfast?’Robert continued.‘I will have your luggage brought up immediately.’
‘Thank you, Robert.’
