Page 82 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
After breakfast, Doris made her way to the gardens and caught up with Brigid as she crossed the lawn to the pool.The grass was already dry after yesterday’s rain.
‘Are we not the luckiest people in England, to have a pool during such a summer?’Brigid asked her.
‘It more than makes up for the next ten years when it will be barely used,’ Doris agreed.
‘Will you swim now?’
‘No.Later.’
‘Tired?’Brigid asked mischievously.
‘So, you were listening.’
‘Impossible not to.’
‘I never feel,’ Doris said, as though she were changing the subject, ‘that being a guest in someone’s house means one owes them an account of every minute of one’s day.’
‘Or one’s night,’ Brigid agreed solemnly.
Doris laughed.She slowed her steps and the girl slowed with her.‘Very good.But what of you?I was about to say how very different you are, in the space of just little more than a year, but then I look at you, and I see that you aren’t.’She smiled.‘Under the new hairstyle and the London dresses, you’re the same as ever, I think.’
‘I should hope so!’Brigid said.‘I wouldn’t wish to change.’
‘And yet you are very much a young lady.’
‘If you say so.’She smoothed her hair as she said it, brushing a strand back from her face where it had blown loose, and tucked it in.Beyond her, the windows of the pool house reflected light onto the water that had its own light.
‘It is nothing to do with what I say.Chips, of course, has noticed too.’
‘He has.’
‘And thinks to cut you in on his schemes?’
‘He does.Oh, Doris,’ Brigid started to laugh, ‘you cannot imagine the chats we have!He likes to spend no end of time, he and I, in which he proposes young men he thinks are suitable, and asks for my opinion.And pretends to listen when I give it.Why, in the last month alone we have talked of Billy Cavendish, of David Ormsby-Gore.And each time, he turns over all their virtues and all their failings, exactly as though he were breeding horses – I swear I heard him say the Mannings were “too long in the back; too tall”.’
‘And you, what do you do?’
‘Nothing much.I let him talk, and I agree.But in the end, I will make up my own mind, you know.’
‘And what of Fritzi, who beneath the affectionate nickname is actually Prince Friedrich; what faults and virtues does he have, in Chips’ eyes?’Doris asked, looking sideways at Brigid.
‘No faults at all, only virtues.The most beautiful and eligible of young men.According to Chips, that is,’ she added hastily.
‘He is certainly beautiful.Perhaps …?’
‘Impossible!’Brigid shook her head.‘I may say little, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think.I will not let Chips choose for me, when he doesn’t know how to choose for himself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How can I possibly adopt the plan of a man who cannot see that his own marriage is gone disastrously wrong?’She stopped walking, stood still on the wet grass.‘Who can’t acknowledge the truth of that, or his own part in it?You Guinnesses are so stubborn, he says –not you, Brigid, but your sisters, even your wonderful mother.He pretends he means it fondly.Honor is not unhappy.She is set in ways that no longer suit her, but she is too stubborn to see that.If she would only listen, I could, I’m sure, tell her half-a-dozen things she could try… Imagine, I think he tried to tell me that all is not well between them … well, in the bedroom.’She blushed.
‘No!Even for Chips …’
‘Yes.In fact I’m certain of it.Only I would not let him.’
‘I should think not,’ Doris said.Then, ‘I didn’t know you saw so much.’
‘How can I not see?Anyone who is in the same house as them, the same room as them, must see.And feel.Sometimes I think unhappiness is something to be touched,’ she said.‘A blanket, woven in the air from all the sad thoughts, dropping around the shoulders of whoever is in company with those poor souls that think them.And Belgrave Square, for all its magnificence and Chips’ pride in it, is a sad place really.Every room seems thick with things that cannot be said, or hopes that cannot be filled.’She made a shrugging motion with her shoulders, as though to push the thought away.
