Chapter Nine
Kick
In the little upstairs study, Kick found her mother at her writing desk, as she had known she would.
The desk was placed against the window looking out onto Prince’s Gate Gardens at the back of the house – a scrappy patch of grass and trees, nothing like the grandeur of Hyde Park to the front.
‘Nothing distracting about that view,’ Rose had said when she first decided this was to be her study.
Kick, who had known exactly that she would choose it – and why – had nudged Eunice. Both had been careful not to laugh.
Beside Rose, there was a stack of envelopes addressed in her neat, spidery hand.
Thank-yous, invitations, letters of congratulation, of commendation, letters to the boys.
And her scrapbook. As Kick watched, Rose finished cutting something from a newspaper, dabbed the back with glue from the little pot that had its own special place on the desk, and pasted it onto a page.
Underneath the cutting she wrote something – the date, no doubt, a line perhaps with her recollections of the event.
‘Why?’ Kick had asked once, when she was much younger, watching her mother fill in an index card following a visit by the doctor to Bobby. ‘Laryngitis,’ her mother wrote, ‘salt water gargle.’
‘Lives need to be ordered,’ Rose had replied.
‘There are many of you, and if I don’t keep careful track, you will run wild.
I believe you will all go on to do great things, just as your father has, and my job is to keep account of that.
’ She never did specify what these ‘great things’ were to be.
At least not for the girls. For the boys – they all knew Joe Jnr was to one day be president of the United States of America.
In private, Kick and Jack called him ‘Pres’, in the same way they now called their father ‘Ambassador’ – it was a joke, or half a joke; the same as saying Jack would one day walk on the moon, except that when their father talked of such things he wasn’t joking.
‘There you are, Kathleen,’ Rose said now, not looking up.
Only her mother called her that. Kick sat in the armchair set beside the window.
The morning sun that came slanting in the corner fell onto her lap.
She felt she could almost have petted it.
She pulled her feet up onto the chair and tucked them in beside her.
At that, Rose did look up. Quickly, Kick put her feet down again, crossing them neatly at the ankles.
‘The Buckingham Palace Garden Party tomorrow?’ Her mother said.
‘Yes.’ Kick settled herself more comfortably.
‘We’re to be there for three and Their Majesties arrive at four.
Debo says white or cream, and lace or applique, not silk.
Oh, and gloves! She says it’s a scrum, and the shaking hands is endless.
Without gloves, your hands will be filthy.
It all sounds boring as anything.’ But she spoke affectionately.
So much of what had struck her at first as stuffy, or silly, in England – the excessive formalities and implacable bits of tradition – she was now indulgent of, even secretly thrilled by.
She had begun to delight in knowing what was expected.
Even though she still broke the rules, more and more she did it because she could, and not because she didn’t know what the rules were.
When she stayed sitting at a dinner table with the men rather than getting up to leave with her hostess, she knew very well what was expected of her.
And she also knew that her not leaving would be greeted by a laugh.
London society had decided she was to be indulged and petted rather than despised.
There was something in the knowledge that she clung to: a freedom, a way to be both inside and out.
But more than that. If London society was a game – and clearly it was a game, with very complicated rules – then she planned to win, same as she would win any game.
This was a way to do that. To beat all those English girls on their own turf, so that by the time she went home to America, she would know that she had started as the underdog and come out ahead.
And, she thought wryly, it was protection too.
It meant that if she really did do something terrible – ask the king a direct question or put on lipstick in public – well, they would forgive her.
‘I’ll need you to watch Rosemary,’ Rose said. ‘She is invited, and therefore must come, but I don’t want her out of our sight.’ Kick sighed. It was harder now to keep Rosemary from wandering if she took a mind to. She was stubborn and resisted the way their mother tried more and more to box her in.
‘Of course,’ she said. Because even more, she disliked the knowledge that her mother would use Rosie’s unruliness as an excuse to leave her out.
*
The garden party was even more boring than Debo had hinted.
‘Like Fourth of July celebrations but without the fireworks,’ Kick said, looking around at the crowds. ‘Or a race meeting without a race. Why do they all come?’
‘To see who else is here,’ Debo said.
‘Really? That’s it?’
‘What else?’ Debo opened her lace parasol and held it above her head. ‘Can’t we find some shade? It’s simply too hot.’
‘Any bit of shade I can see is full of old people,’ Kick said with a laugh.
‘That’s where they’re congregating, like horses in a field.
’ Her own parents were sitting defiantly in the open at a round table set up almost in the centre of the vast lawn.
Rose, face half-hidden under a smart broad-brimmed hat, was slim and elegant in cream.
Her father, distinguished in tails. Around them were some of the people Kick had learned were part of what was called the Cliveden Set – Lady Astor, Lord Halifax, others she didn’t yet know – whose views her father approved of.
But Kick was starting to understand that for all the British were so polite to each other, and invited these people to their balls and houses, they didn’t all think like that; like Lady Astor, like her father.
Not about Germany. Or anything, really. But then, that’s what old people did, she thought.
Disagreed with each other and tried to pretend that it mattered what someone said or another thought.
Presumably because they had nothing better to do. No more fun to have.
This lot certainly didn’t seem to be having much fun, she thought, looking at them huddled together, heads pushed forward into the centre of the table, presumably that they might better hear each other.
Only her mother sat back, angled away from the table, watching what went on around her.
She would, Kick knew, turn their way any moment.
She checked that Rosemary was still beside her, still neat and pretty.
‘I’m going to get more lemonade,’ Debo said. ‘Will you stay or come?’
‘I’ll stay,’ Kick said. ‘I can’t bring myself to push through that crowd again.
My heels sink into the ground and I feel like I’m hobbling.
Rosie and I can sit on the grass.’ They sat on their lace shawls and Rosie chatted about the dresses she liked.
Kick was conscious of the disapproving looks from people standing around them, but it was too hot to care.
The weather lay over everything like a damp blanket, as though to make sure nothing caught fire, she thought with a laugh.
She was in the middle of the laugh when Debo came back, with a couple of glasses and a tall young man with a high forehead and a thin smile who carried a jug of lemonade. ‘Billy Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington,’ Debo said. ‘Billy, Kathleen Kennedy, but we call her Kick.’
‘How d’you do?’ Billy said.
Terrible teeth, was Kick’s first thought.
Was it always to be her first thought in England?
But then he sat easily down beside her and Rosemary, folding up his long arms and legs in a pleasantly shabby set of tails, and poured them lemonade from the jug.
‘I hear an awful lot about you these days, you know,’ he said to Kick, with a smile that lit up his face and didn’t just twitch at his top lip.
‘Do you?’ she asked. ‘Nothing too terrible I hope?’ It was silly stuff, but he responded gallantly and soon he was chatting away to them – her and Rosemary both – while Debo watched.
Around them, people wandered past, many of them stopping to salute Billy, or put a hand on his shoulder as they went by.
The disapproving looks were far less, Kick saw, now that Billy sat with them.
When it was time to go he helped them to their feet, one after another, Kick last. He didn’t linger with her hand in his, as Jack or Joe’s friends would have, but ‘I might see you later,’ he said. ‘At the Mountbattens’?’
‘Oh, you will,’ Debo assured him. ‘Everyone wants a look at Edwina’s new flat. They say it’s the biggest flat in London. A penthouse, apparently,’ she opened her eyes wide, ‘whatever that could possibly be.’
‘It just means the top floor,’ Kick said with a laugh at Debo’s affectation.
‘Nothing to be too worried about.’ She laughed again and Billy laughed too.
A real laugh, she thought, not a polite English laugh.
And he looked at her for longer than English people usually looked.
Right at her, rather than slightly over her shoulder.
She wondered had Debo noticed. She needed someone to tell her she was right, not imagining things.
‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ she said as they went to find their cars.
But Debo didn’t seem to have noticed. She laughed. ‘You still haven’t met many Englishmen, have you? He’s really very ordinary. Simply thousands just like him. One day he’ll be Duke of Devonshire, but other than that, I doubt there’s anything at all to single him out.’