Page 50 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
Kick knew that her father didn’t believe in such things as a right time to pursue whatever it was he had set his sights on, or to have hard conversations, and was unsurprised when he leaned forward, his elbows heavy on the table, and said, ‘What I can’t understand is how you all behave as though war is a sure thing, a definite, when it is nothing of the sort.Nor need it be.’He glared around at them, neck sunk into his shoulders as though he would physically push his convictions onto them.‘Britain isn’t ready for another war.Fight one, and she will lose.’
‘She?’ Duff asked with heavy irony.‘You mean us?’
‘Who will walk with me?I want to explore the gardens.’It was Rose, standing hastily and looking around.She had eaten, Kick saw, almost nothing.The sight of her barely touched plate – food moved into discrete piles, entirely distinct one from another, asparagus spears lined up neatly alongside a small heap of garden peas, beside the scarlet O of a radish – made Kick want to hide her own enthusiastically cleared one.But it was too late.Her mother had seen it.Again, the eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch and Kick felt suddenly ungainly.Large and sprawling alongside the doll-like neatness of her mother in her crisp linen dress.
‘I will,’ Billy’s mother said.The lines that etched her face were more evident.‘Andrew, come with us.’As though she would keep him close.‘And Kathleen, perhaps you might join us?’
‘I thought I might change …’ Kick began.
‘I shouldn’t bother,’ the duchess said.‘I thought you were walking by the river later?’
‘We’ll wait for you,’ Debo said.
‘No rush,’ Elizabeth agreed, lighting a cigarette and pushing her plate away.
Billy’s mother asked her questions that began with the garden and moved quickly on to other things.‘Billy tells me you were in Italy.What did you see?’
‘I saw the pope,’ Kick said, eager to talk about her travels, her impressions.She looked up and saw the expression on Moucher’s face.‘We saw the Raphaels,’ she amended hurriedly.‘And a splendid Caravaggio.’
‘I believe Chatsworth is especially fine at this time of year,’ Rose said then.
The duchess look startled.As though Rose had said, ‘I believe birds nest in springtime’ or ‘I believe cows give milk.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed politely.
‘And that Mary Queen of Scots lived there for a time,’ Rose persisted.‘How very interesting it must be.’
‘More like rotted away there,’ Andrew said cheerfully.‘She was imprisoned.On Elizabeth I’s orders.On and off for fifteen years.I’ll show you over her apartments if you come and stay,’ he said to Kick.The duchess looked momentarily alarmed.Kick wondered was it at the idea of her coming to stay.
‘Why imprisoned?’Rose asked.
‘Catholic,’ Andrew said, still cheerful.‘Not to be trusted, you see.’A sharp little silence fell then, broken quickly by the duchess asking, ‘I believe you have older boys, Mrs Ambassador.Do they ever visit?’
In all, it was an awkward walk; one in which Kick felt she was held up for comparison with something she didn’t understand.Something that might have been a version of her own self, one that must be confirmed or denied, only she didn’t know which.It felt as though there was a purpose to everything Billy’s mother asked, and that Kick’s answers were either too close or too far from what was expected.And even though she was willing to mute her answers, to be whatever this woman wanted, she couldn’t, because she didn’t understand what that was.
The walk to the river took them through a meadow of tall grass and Kick, walking slightly behind, thought how soft it looked until you were standing in it, and then how much it scratched.
‘Jolly lunch?’she heard Hugo say in an undertone to Billy.
‘I do think it’s hard luck on the old pair.They leave the Blounts to get away from Diana and that sewer Mosley, and come here only to be button-holed by His Excellency.’
Hugo sniggered and repeated, ‘Excellency.’
Billy turned a little then, and saw Kick.His face flushed, the freckles standing out dark against the red, and dropped back to her.‘I say, that was rude.I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s alright.’Kick struggled with the Kennedy part of herself that wanted to punch this young man for insulting her family, and the ever-growing part that wanted to listen to him, understand him.‘I mean, I know he’s different, the way he does things.I guess we all are.He means no harm.Or at least, he means only to do what he thinks he’s here to do, but I understand how strange his way must seem to you.Can you see that he thinks another war is a truly terrible thing and wishes to prevent it?’
‘I try to believe he means well.’
It would have to do.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Brigid
Brigid watched Kick play a masterful game of croquet.She didn’t win; Billy – who seemed almost not to play, so languidly did he make his way around the hoops – did, but she competed fiercely.Brigid was glad of it.She would have hated to see Kick hold herself back in order to be more appealing to the man she liked.
At first, she had thought Kick’s confessions – that she liked Billy, that her shoes had been taken and hidden and that she had understood she was being mocked and had decided to play along with that – merely showed that she was unsophisticated, naive.But over the last day she had come to realise that it wasn’t that.Instead, it was a kind of determination to be straight, as Brigid called it to herself.A deliberate choosing of the direct way, so that she was like someone approaching across a wide open lawn – nothing at all on either side to hide her or distract attention from her – rather than taking a stealthier route through shrubbery.There was something pretty brave about that, Brigid thought.She herself, she knew, could not do it.She was too conscious of who watched her – her mother, Chips, Honor, Maureen, everyone – to do anything so out in the open.
