Page 21 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
‘I will think,’ Doris said.‘I will see if there is anything …’
‘Maybe you know someone,’ Beatrice persisted, so that Doris understood just how far need outstripped manners in this diffident woman.‘Someone who can help us?’
‘I will see,’ Doris said again.
‘Thank you.’
Hannah came back then.‘I really think I have the hang of it now,’ she said.‘Will you hear me?’She played the Dvorák piece again, from start to finish, brows creased in concentration above the chin rest.It was no better, Doris thought, not at all, but Hannah was delighted.‘I cannot wait to play for Herr Meinder,’ she said, ‘when my lessons start again.’She went back to her room to put the violin away.
‘Her lessons won’t start again,’ Beatrice said bitterly.‘Herr Meinder no longer teaches her.Heno longer finds that it is possible.’She made a tight, twisting movement with her hands, as though scraping something from them, then picked up her darning again.‘So many things, it seems, are no longer possible …’
Back in her own apartment that evening, Doris put a record on the gramophone as she dressed to go out, and began to list to herself the people who might help.There were many, she thought joyfully, trying on a dress of cream lace.And yet, as she listed the names to herself, with every one there came to her reasons why she could not ask them.Until she realised that it was only one reason; each time, the same reason.And that she was the reason.To intervene – to try and help – put everything she did at risk.By reaching out a hand to help this family, she rocked a boat that was barely steady.She exposed herself to being understood in a way that she couldn’t be understood.All the work she did – the meetings that weren’t meetings, the chance encounters that weren’t chance, the lunches and parties, the little bits of news and whispered gossip that came her way and were moved by her onwards to where others might find value in them – all that became impossible if she was seen to act in any way for Beatrice, Hannah, her father.To become friends with them or allow her life to tangle with theirs was to threaten everything else she did.
The knowledge was hateful.She resisted it.Until, having tried to bend it in her mind every which way, she realised there was no resisting.To help them was to expose herself.She finished dressing and went to dinner and then a nightclub and was so very charming, so sophisticated and amusing, that a man she had long set her sights on because he was known to be close to Herr Göring drove her home as dawn was breaking and tried to kiss her.She let him, but only for a moment.
‘I must go up,’ she murmured.‘Thehausmeisteris such a disapproving fellow, you cannot imagine …’
He laughed and she rested her head briefly on his shoulder.
‘You will visit me,’ he said urgently, ‘at my lakeschloss.You must!’
‘I would love to.’And she went upstairs and brushed her hair until her head hurt, because that was better than crying.
The next day, crossing the brown marble lobby, Doris saw Beatrice and Hannah come towards her.She waved and stepped briskly past them.‘I’m just on my way out,’ she called.Beatrice smiled and nodded.And did the same a few days later when Doris, seeing them at the lift, said, ‘I have forgotten my purse, I must go back for it.Don’t stop the lift for me.’
After that, a card was pushed under her door, inviting her to take tea again.She wrote a note of regret, put it under their door and walked quickly away.She heard her name called as she reached her own apartment, but pretended she had not and shut the door smartly behind her.
It didn’t take very long, she thought sadly.Not long at all, before Beatrice understood and walked past Doris with no more than a nod when they encountered one another.Hannah took a little longer, but soon she too, guided by her mother’s hand pressing into her shoulder, her mother’s quickened step and curt greeting, stopped trying to talk to Doris.Soon, they no longer ran into each other, and Doris wondered did they plan their entrances and exits carefully to avoid her, as she now did to avoid them?If so, it was for the best.
And all the while, she waited, every day, for the sounds of Hannah’s violin.She found that if she opened the little window in the bathroom that looked onto the dark side street, she could hear better.She would get up in the morning, when the first sounds started, open the window and get back in to bed, and listen as Hannah scraped her way through the Dvorák, bits of Beethoven, some old hymns that Doris half knew.She never got any better, but hearing her, knowing she was still there, was the greatest comfort.
Chapter Twelve
London
Kick
The ‘tiny supper with friends’ was in Diana’s little house in Eaton Square, and turned out to be Diana, Debo, Unity – Kick had deliberately not asked would she be there, in order to be able to answer truthfully when her mother asked, ‘I don’t know, but I don’t expect so’ – and Diana’s husband, Sir Oswald Mosley.Kick had found him alarming the few times they had met – although Debo insisted he was ‘a perfect lamb really’ – and knew her father would be furious to think she had dined with him; ‘I don’t say he’s all wrong,’ was the ambassador’s view of Mosley, ‘but the man’s intemperate, and his mob of fascists are a menace.’Distance, Kick,she remembered him saying.Distance …
With Mosley was a man called David Envers who was small where Mosley was tall, quiet where Mosley was talkative, indifferent where Mosley was charming, and otherwise like him in every way.
‘How sweet of you to come,’ Diana said, swooping in and kissing her on both cheeks.Kick was tall, but Diana was taller, and seemed taller again because of how she held herself, all drawn upwards.‘I know we have met, but I feel this time we are really to be friends.’She smiled and pressed Kick’s hands, which she held in both of hers.To Kick, who had always seen Diana as coldly glamorous – remote as one of the white-bright stars that shone on black winter nights – this sudden rush of approval was intoxicating.
They ate tiny birds – quail, someone said – that had been roasted whole, with a red wine and mushroom sauce.The food was served at a small round table, polished and bare, no tablecloth, just silver cutlery.And Diana herself brought it in – no footmen, no butlers – although she laughed when Kick asked had she done the cooking.
‘I dare you to say you did,’ Unity said, looking at her sister.‘I dare you, that’s all.’Kick wondered how she was brave enough to mock someone as terrifying as Diana.
But Diana just smiled.‘Found out!’she said.‘I didn’t.I couldn’t.I have tried.Boud will tell you’ – Boud, Kick knew, was Unity – ‘a chicken, simply cooked, with lashings of cream.Only it was too dreadful.As hard as that old pheasant Maureen Guinness serves night after night at Clandeboye, should one be unwise enough to go there.Like eating actual gunshot.Too mortifying, wasn’t it, darling?’she added, turning to Mosley, who looked back at her with eyes that were dark and shiny like coal in an outdoor scuttle where the rain runs off it, leaving it slick but not wet.‘Since then, I leave it to Mrs Taylor.’
‘I don’t need you to cook,’ Mosley said, taking her hand and kissing it.‘That is not what I need in a wife.’He turned her hand over and slowly kissed the soft white underside of her wrist.Kick felt herself blushing and ducked her head.Imagine married people behaving like that?But then, she knew they weren’t married very long.Maybe that was it.She looked up and found David Envers watching her, an almost sympathetic look on his impassive face.
‘Darling, do stop,’ Unity said to Diana, flicking her eyes to Kick, ‘pas devant les enfants.’
‘French, Boud?’Diana said.‘How unlike you.’
‘Thoroughly,’ Unity agreed.‘You know how I hate all things French – almost as much as I love all things German.Butle mot justeis stillle mot juste.’
Everyone laughed at that, and Kick saw that here, with these people, Unity wasn’t the absurd, half-mad figure she was made out to be by the rest of the world.Here, they had drawn up their own rules and code, and by them, Unity was someone funny, sweet, precious.She wondered what to make of that.
