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. But le mot juste is still le 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.
‘How is your German coming along?’ Diana asked.
‘Badly. You know how too frightful it is to learn foreign languages.’ Unity shuddered.
‘And how simply mortifying to try and speak them. But I am determined, so that by the time my engagement to Hitler is announced for real –’ she looked hard at Kick as she said this, a mean little smile at the corners of her mouth ‘– I will at least be able to manage a few sentences.’
‘Boud, don’t stir.’ That was Debo, who gave Kick an apologetic grin as she said it.
Kick was relieved at the grin. She did hope Unity wouldn’t start going on about Hitler.
Dinner was one thing, but she knew well what her father meant about distance, even when she pretended she didn’t.
Sometimes conversations had a way of leaping ahead of her, often only half-explained, so that she struggled to understand exactly what was being said, but knew she had somehow ventured beyond ‘distance’.
The three sisters were funny together, Kick thought, watching the way they teased each other, finished each other’s sentences, made jokes that no one else understood.
It was as though they had their own private language – a blur of nursery slang, references to old jokes and half-finished phrases.
They were by turns sharp and affectionate, and quite unlike the open competition, the eager engagement, of Kick and her older brothers.
And yet, they were like them too. Exactly as Debo had said – a family that was a tribe, with their own customs. She and her brothers and sisters were the same.
How many times had someone said, ‘You Kennedys, you’re too much’, with affection, or resentment?
Mosley watched the sisters indulgently in a way that reminded Kick of something but she couldn’t recall precisely what, until Unity demanded, ‘What did you think of the Führer’s speech yesterday? Did you see how it was reported in The Times?’
‘Better than it was reported elsewhere,’ Envers said.
But Mosley put a hand up. ‘Hush, Unity,’ he said. ‘We said no politics tonight.’
Unity looked as though she wouldn’t heed him, opened her mouth defiantly, then closed it and shrugged. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘but it’s not politics to me.’
And then Kick understood. He was like her father, at Hyannis Port, conducting discussion around the lunch and dinner table as though his children were a choir attuned to his baton; calling up now this voice, now that, bringing them out then stowing them away again.
The base notes that were Joe Jnr and Jack; hers a contralto maybe; the girls, Eunice, Pat and Jean, altos; and the little boys, sopranos still, but with depth there.
She looked at Mosley, who looked back at her.
‘Kathleen,’ he said, ‘why don’t you tell us what you think of England – and us English? You’ve had long enough to consider us all. And I don’t imagine you are slow to opinions.’
‘Oh, Kick loves everything English,’ Debo said. ‘Especially anything beginning with B …’
‘Why B?’ Unity demanded. Diana looked from Kick to Debo and raised her thin eyebrows to high arches. ‘Why B?’ Unity asked again, looking from Kick to Debo to Diana. ‘I hate when no one tells me things!’
Kick could see they were making a big fuss of her, but didn’t understand why until, after dinner, when, instead of sitting over their port, the men came straight into the drawing room, and Mosley came to sit beside her.
Swiftly, Diana crossed the room and sat on Kick’s other side.
It was, Kick thought nervously, like sitting between two large cats.
Mosley asked her more questions – about England, about America – that were broad and innocent, and yet made Kick feel uncomfortably as though she was telling secrets when she tried to answer them.
He listened so closely to everything she said, smoking cigarette after cigarette, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth away from her, that if he hadn’t been married, if his wife hadn’t been sitting so close to Kick that their arms were touching, if she hadn’t reached over and taken Kick’s hand at the very moment that Mosley said, ‘I do want us all to be friends,’ Kick would have thought he was making a pass.
As it was, she didn’t know what to think, and so she said something polite, casting for an excuse to remove her hand from Diana’s.
Diana must have felt the twitch that meant she wanted it released, but she squeezed tighter.
Then, letting go of Kick’s hand, she ran a finger lightly down her cheek. ‘What pretty freckles you have.’
‘My mother says I need to wear a hat, that English girls are never so freckled,’ she blurted out.
‘A pity for English girls,’ Diana said lightly.
She couldn’t mean it, Kick thought, looking at the smooth creaminess of Diana’s face. But she felt a warm glow that she had bothered to say it.
‘I hear you have met the pope,’ Mosley said.
‘I have,’ Kick said, eager to tell her story. ‘I was in Rome for Holy Week a few years ago, and I met His Holiness and Il Duce on the very same day, can you imagine?’
‘I can try,’ Mosley said, twinkling warmly at her. ‘If I’m right, it was a family friend who made the audience with His Holiness possible?’ Did he choke, just a tiny bit, on the word Holiness? Kick wondered.
‘Cardinal Pacelli,’ Kick agreed, remembering the cardinal who had been so kind to her on her trip to the Vatican, and how, when he had come to America a year later, he had stayed with her family in Bronxville.
‘The very man.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I hope to,’ Mosley said.
‘Did you know,’ Diana interjected with a laugh, her large eyes with their tiny pupils – black dots swimming in a sea of pale blue – open wide, ‘that in Leeds, there are so many Catholic members of the British Union of Fascists that Mosley’s nickname is “The Pope”?’