Chapter Ten
Kick
‘We have been invited to Essex,’ Rose said when Kick arrived for the usual morning consultation some days later. ‘A place called Kelvedon. Henry Channon – born in Chicago, but now an MP and married to Lady Honor Guinness. The week after next.’
‘But I don’t have to go, do I?’ Kick asked. ‘I told Debo I might stay a few days with her.’
‘I don’t want you staying anywhere Unity is to stay,’ Rose said sharply. ‘Not since that incident in the park, applesauce though that all was.’
Kick’s lips twitched at hearing her mother say ‘applesauce’. It was one of her father’s expressions, and Kick had always marvelled that a man who didn’t curse could get so much vehemence into an innocent little word.
Then she thought about ‘the incident’. That had been Debo’s sister Unity Mitford – ‘defiance itself’, as Debo called her, half exasperated, half in admiration – wearing the black-and-red Swastika badge to a Labour Party rally that had been held across the road in Hyde Park, in open delight at the rumours that she was engaged to Herr Hitler.
‘She’s no more engaged than I am,’ Debo had said, ‘only she can’t resist the trouble and fuss it’s causing. Unity is positively addicted to fuss.’
At the rally, the crowd had turned on her after she heckled one of the speakers.
They had torn off her badge and trampled on it, then, giddy with their own daring, had made to drag Unity into the Serpentine and dunk her.
She had escaped, twisting furiously out of their grasp, and run straight for Prince’s Gate, arriving breathless and laughing at the door with her jacket badly torn.
Kick had brought her in and tidied her up.
‘I wonder you aren’t more scared,’ she had said, brushing Unity’s wiry hair back off her face that had a streak of mud on it.
‘Pooh!’ Unity had replied, looking at herself in the mirror.
‘I wasn’t scared a bit.’ She reached a hand up to rub at the mud.
Underneath was blood. ‘I told them I couldn’t wait to become a German citizen, just as soon as ever I can.
And I meant it.’ Her eyes had blazed and her face – so like her beautiful sisters’, only larger, with a more pronounced chin and heavy-lidded eyes that turned down at the corners – had glowed with the excitement of being alone in her conviction.
‘Unity won’t be there,’ Kick said now.
‘All the same. I don’t like that girl. She’s troublesome. And in any case, the Channons would like very much to meet you. There will be other young people – Lady Brigid, Honor’s sister, who is exactly of an age with you.’
‘Must I really go?’ Kick asked again, even though she had come to love these English country-house stays.
The ancient houses and great estates varied, places with one name – Cliveden, Blenheim, Hatfield, Belvoir – arrogant in their modesty, or modest in their arrogance, she never could decide; but the rhythms of energy and idleness were almost identical.
If they were invited to shoot, there were guns and dogs and men called ‘beaters’.
If hunting was the thing it was horses, hounds, ‘the sound of bugles and beagles’, as Debo said.
The mornings were early and intense, followed by blissful lazy afternoons of bath and rest and cocktails in the drawing room or on the lawn.
One’s friends disappearing in their jerseys and skirts, reappearing for dinner draped in satins or silks in fabulous colours.
Different creatures. As though with their evening clothes and hair pomade they had put on a new and languid grace.
Most of all, it was finding so much history everywhere – on the walls, in paintings and tapestries, carved into the stone, even in the layout of gardens. And the families, who seemed to be proud and ignorant at once of what lay around them.
‘We hardly see it,’ Debo had said airily when Kick remarked on this during a stay at Blenheim, invited by the Duke of Marlborough’s granddaughter, Sarah.
‘Oh, but you sure know it’s there,’ Kick had responded. ‘Especially if anyone else looks like forgetting.’
‘Very true,’ Debo had said with a smile. ‘How quick you are.’
‘It’s not that I’m quick, especially, only that I say things straight that you English never will.’
‘Not just us English,’ Debo had insisted. ‘You say things “straight”, as you put it, that no one else anywhere ever will!’
But there were reasons not to leave London just now.
A reason, if she was truthful. Billy. The idea of being away for days, even a whole week, well, she thought, it was awful.
He might forget about her. Meet someone else.
There was that Irene girl he used to go about with, Debo had said.
She was the daughter of an earl or something.
Since the night of the Mountbattens’ party when he had been so careful not to say it, Kick knew that Billy liked her – she was used to men liking her; her brothers’ friends always did – but that didn’t mean he would remember that he liked her if someone else distracted him.
He didn’t ring her up the way other men did – proposing a drive, a drink.
Not yet. But when they did see one another – once at a lunch given by Lady Spencer, twice at the Café de Paris and, yes, she knew that keeping such careful count was an instant giveaway – he was sure to talk to her, ask her to dance, stay by her side, in a way that was friendly. But something more too.
‘It doesn’t sound so much fun,’ she continued.
‘Maybe I could invite the Guinness girl over here one afternoon instead?’ That was just the ticket, she thought.
Invite her over, ply her with cakes and sodas from the giant fridge in the kitchen Rose had had shipped over specially, play her the latest jazz records from America.
And be free that night, every night, to go out, go to parties, and maybe bump into Billy.
But Rose gave a tight smile. ‘It’s not for fun, Kathleen dear. It’s serious. All of this is serious. Now, take a hat when you go out. You really must keep the sun from your face. English girls are never so freckled.’
Dismissed, Kick telephoned to Debo. ‘I wish I wasn’t going,’ she said, ‘but once Mother has made up her mind, well, it isn’t at all possible to change it. This is what comes of playing hostess all those weeks before she arrived; somehow I’m now part of the package, like Pa has two wives with him.’
Debo laughed. ‘How absurd you are. But you’ll enjoy it. Honor is terribly dull, but Brigid is a dear.’
‘Maybe. But why now?’ Kick wailed. ‘Just when it feels like …’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, like something interesting might be about to happen …’
‘Something interesting …’ Debo mocked. ‘You may as well say his name, darling; you aren’t at all good at hiding it. Well, maybe something can be worked out.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘I don’t know yet. But come for dinner at Diana’s tomorrow? Nothing terribly formal, just a tiny supper with friends? She particularly told me to say “Please be a darling and don’t say no because it will be simply too dreary without you to cheer us all up”.’
‘In that case how could I possibly say no?’ Kick said with a laugh.
Her father put his head around the door then. ‘Walk me to my appointment?’
Kick said goodbye and ran to get a hat before he could change his mind, or her mother could interfere.
They walked briskly through Hyde Park where the trees were thick with summer leaves that rustled, green and important, in the breeze. ‘How are you finding it?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I love it,’ she assured him.
‘You do, don’t you?’ He considered her. ‘And what do you make of them?’ He waved his hand to take in the park, the crescent of houses behind them, the people walking sedately by.
‘Well,’ she said, then paused. ‘I think they might not be exactly what I thought.’
‘In what way?’
‘I thought at first that no one was ever serious,’ she explained. ‘Everything, always, a joke. But now I’m not so sure. Or at least, if it is a joke, it’s not just a joke.’
‘Insincerity,’ he agreed. ‘Damned irritating.’
‘I don’t think it’s exactly insincerity,’ she tried to explain. ‘Just that they go about things differently.’
‘I hear you coming in at all hours,’ he said then.
‘Mother knows,’ she said quickly. And Rose did.
At least, she knew Kick was out. Just not where.
Or how late she came home. Rose wouldn’t approve of nightclubs, not at all.
And so Kick didn’t tell her. We went on, she would say, vaguely, when Rose asked.
It was a phrase she’d picked up from Debo.
A useful one. ‘Someone always sees me home,’ she assured him.
‘David or Hugh, any of those fellows.’ Not Billy. Not yet.
‘And what do these young men say about the situation with Germany?’ he asked, direct as always.
‘Last night Hugh Fraser said that at least if they were called up they wouldn’t have to sit through any more of Lady Furness’ terrible dinners …’
‘Idiotic pup!’ her father said angrily.
‘I don’t think he meant it …’
But the ambassador wasn’t listening. ‘They all told me that England was a spent force,’ he said, poking hard at the ground with his sturdy ivory-topped cane. ‘If anything, it seems worse than that.’
‘Is that what you meant when you said they were madder than you’d hoped?’
‘Yes. There’s a disregard for consequences …
They’d sleepwalk into trouble, led by that old war horse Churchill, if it wasn’t for Chamberlain.
Well, they’ll get no help from me. No, sir.
And without America, even Churchill’s enthusiasm is dampened.
’ He spoke with satisfaction. ‘Oh I know what they say about me,’ he continued.
‘That darned Randolph, Churchill’s idiot son –’ he put on a sneering English accent ‘– “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy …”’
Kick flinched. She hadn’t heard that one, although she had begun to hear whispers that her father didn’t have ‘enough stomach for a fight’.
‘But I don’t care,’ he continued. ‘Let ’em say what they like.
I know what war is. If I can prevent it, why, I’ll take all they can throw at me.
And if preventing it means taking tea with Channon, followed by dinner with Lady Cunard, then drinks with von Ribbentrop, I’ll do it. I’ll talk to anyone who’ll talk to me.’
‘You’re like the girl at the party everyone wants to dance with,’ she said with a gurgle of laughter. She preferred that to the idea that he was ‘yellow’.
‘You could say that. Although from what I hear, that girl is you.’
‘Sometimes,’ she said modestly. Then, curious, ‘So what really is the difference between Churchill and Chamberlain?’ She heard the names mentioned so often, but hadn’t got them straight in her head.
‘They are the two sides of this coin,’ the ambassador explained. ‘Churchill wants ultimatums, shows of strength. Chamberlain is a diplomat, a man of compromise and peace. Right now, there are more who favour Chamberlain’s way, but Churchill is gaining ground.’
‘Churchill bad, Chamberlain good, I’ll keep that in mind.’
‘Keep distance in mind,’ he said. ‘Don’t be drawn in. Don’t give your opinions or agree too heartily with others. Be friendly, but don’t be friends.’
‘Distance. Got it,’ Kick said. But she spoke absently, already thinking about dinner with Diana Mitford. What would she wear?