Chapter Twenty-Five
Kick
Kick sat over the end of a slice of toast, breaking the crust into pieces and crumbling them idly, and half-watched her reflection in the many shiny surfaces – the curved domes that covered dishes, the flat trays and slanted sides of teapots that were everywhere she looked; morning sun on polished silver.
The toast crusts had traces of marmalade on them and she had just realised her fingertips were sticky, when Chips came in.
‘Eddie Cavendish,’ he said loudly.
Kick looked up in a sudden panic. Here?
‘Just telephoned,’ Chips clarified, looking around at them all.
‘They are staying nearby, with the Blounts, and have said they will motor over later for a swim. On such a day, what could be more perfect?’ He threw his arms wide and Kick guessed it was not the thought of the weather that thrilled him, but the company.
‘Their sons, Billy and Andrew, come with them. A friend of Billy’s called Hugo.
And Deborah Mitford. Brigid, you must think of amusing games for the young people. ’
Kick felt her face grow hot and plump and knew it must be like fresh-risen bread, damp and swollen.
She looked up and found Brigid watching her, eyes dancing as she said, ‘I’m sure we can think of something.
’ She spoke to Chips, but it was Kick she looked at.
Kick didn’t know whether to laugh at her or frown her into discretion.
What if her mother saw? She shook her head the slightest bit.
‘I must plan lunch,’ Chips said, all energy. ‘We will eat outdoors, I think.’
‘That will be charming,’ said Rose. ‘May I help? At Hyannis Port, where we spend our summers, I ask Cook to prepare a great many salads and cold dishes. It is very pleasant to simply eat when we are hungry and nothing spoils.’
‘What a good idea,’ Chips said. Kick got the feeling that he would have thought anything at all a good idea just then. ‘Why not come with me and we can talk to Mrs Bath together?’
‘Are you going up to change?’ Brigid whispered, falling into step beside her as she left the morning room through the double doors that led straight to the garden. Outside was sunny and bright and somehow smooth; like a well-poached egg, Kick thought with a lurch of elation.
She looked down at her cream shorts, pale-green-and-white gingham shirt and white plimsolls. ‘Why? Should I?’
‘No, only I thought for sure you would. That always seems to be what the girls I know do, when meeting a chap they like. I must change, they squeal, and they run off and reappear in something frightful.’ Brigid laughed.
‘Do they really?’ Kick asked, stopping at a lavender bush. ‘I wonder do they know the change is a frightful one?’ She sounded amused.
‘Of course they do not!’ Brigid said. ‘They imagine they look simply wonderful.’
‘Well, I won’t change. I mean, what’s the point? We will only be outside anyway.’
‘I should have known you would not.’
‘So, what “amusing games” shall we arrange?’ Kick asked. ‘We can’t play the tennis tournament, darn it, because the court will not be ready. They are still painting lines. In any case, it is too hot.’ She pinched off a piece of lavender and sniffed at it.
‘Swim?’
‘Yes, but that will not keep us occupied for an entire day.’
‘Certainly it won’t keep you occupied for an entire day. Croquet?’
‘Boring!’ Kick made a face. ‘But if we make teams and put up a prize for the winners, it’ll be more interesting.’
‘What kind of prize?’
‘Doesn’t really matter. Anything, as long as it’s clear what it’s for.’
‘A tooth mug?’ Brigid asked with a laugh.
‘Perfectly daisy!’ Then, ‘What to do with Fritzi, though? He isn’t really the tooth mug type.’
‘Oh he’ll be alright.’
‘Isn’t Debo a pal?’ Kick asked then.
‘Certainly seems like it. But I don’t know how you have made her so. Those Mitford girls are terrifying. Diana,’ Brigid shuddered. ‘The way she looks at one, with those great big eyes of hers. And Nancy, so cutting she’s like a giant pair of dressmaking scissors.’
‘And yet Diana can be oh-so-nice too, you know? I went to supper there, and she was just darling. Unity too. Although she’s a funny one alright.’
‘Funny is not what most people call Unity. You should hear what Duff says about her. Calls her a traitor to the country, and would say worse except respect for Lord Redesdale holds him back a little.’
‘You should have seen her, that day of the Hyde Park riots … She came racing into the embassy for all the world like a fox with the hunt after it. Except the most brazen fox you ever saw. “I don’t care a bit,” she said, tossing her head.
And I could see she meant it … We had to persuade her not to go out and address them all from the steps of the embassy, and then only by saying Pa would be furious. ’
‘Imagine being that sure of anything,’ Brigid said, wondering.
‘I mean, so sure that you would stand up and defy anyone who didn’t agree with you.
It’s like half the fun, for Unity, is that everyone is against her.
Can you imagine? I can’t bear if people are cross with me even for the slightest thing.
And there’s Unity, delighted that the whole world is furious with her. ’
‘I say,’ Debo’s rather high voice came to them from the house, ‘there you are. Chips said we’d find you out here. He said you were plotting.’
‘And here we are. But only plotting for fun,’ Brigid called, waving her over. ‘Hullo, Billy. Hullo, Andrew.’
‘Jolly nice of you to invite us,’ Billy said as they crossed the lawn.
The boys wore white flannels and Billy had already taken his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves.
Debo wore wide navy trousers with a white-and-blue striped top and was fanning herself exaggeratedly with the brim of a straw hat.
‘I rather think you invited yourselves,’ Kick said. ‘But who can blame you, on a hot day, with rumours of a swimming pool.’
Andrew turned pink at the ears, but Billy laughed and said, ‘That’s it alright,’ then introduced the young man with them: ‘This is Hugo. I promised him tremendous fun, so you see, you mustn’t let me down.’
‘You make wild promises, and we must honour them?’ Kick asked with a laugh. ‘Well, alright then. Shall we start with a swim?’
‘Yes, please,’ Debo said, fanning her hat harder. ‘I feel like an ice cream that has begun to flop down the side of the cone. Isn’t it simply too hot?’
‘Not a bit,’ Kick insisted. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘You always say that,’ Billy said affectionately. ‘Even that day at Goodwood when it rained in a steady drip for hour after hour.’
‘Just perfect,’ Kick said with a grin. ‘Now, let’s swim. You can change in the pavilion.’
‘I wondered what it was,’ Hugo said. ‘Thought it might be a museum.’ By which Kick knew he thought it excessive, silly, even vulgar. That he was mocking it while pretending not to. The knowledge made her feel suddenly protective of Chips.
‘It’s very useful,’ she said firmly.
They changed – Debo into a pink-and-white bathing suit of such extraordinary modesty that Kick laughed out loud.
‘Don’t,’ Debo said, face screwed up in mock-pain, ‘it’s too awful.
But Farve insists. I may be the same age as you and Brigid but that counts for nothing with him.
And if it’s that or not be allowed go anywhere, then, well, it’s that … ’
‘You look darling,’ Kick assured her. ‘You always do.’
They didn’t swim so much as splash about, she thought, throwing water at each other and floating lazily in the shallow end, watched by the simpering terracotta ladies in their flouncy petticoats.
She swam lengths and Billy kept pace with her for a few, then dropped away, saying, ‘You are far more energetic than I.’ He pulled himself out of the water and went to lie on a reclining chair, water dripping off his bare chest and legs and down the sides of the chair onto the warm grey stone, where it quickly dried.
Kick did another couple of lengths, speeding up and down, turning gracefully in one fluid movement at either end, then climbed out and went to the chair beside him.
She stretched out, admiring the pearly polish on her toes and ruefully lamenting the freckles that dotted her calves.
But she realised she was conscious of her bare legs and arms in a way she never had been when swimming or sailing with the boys back home – Jack and Joe’s friends who came to Hyannis Port for the summers.
Invariably, these young men arrived half in love with whichever brother was their friend – especially Jack’s friends all adored him – and left almost more in love with Kick.
She tried not to mind that their highest expression of praise was ‘You’re like a female version of Jack … ’
She had gone out with one or two, but never paid them much attention. Never been conscious of them beyond that they were friendly, easy-going, sporty, like her brothers. Certainly not the way she now was conscious of Billy beside her.
He was pale, with a smattering of cinnamon-coloured freckles on his shoulders.
Thinner than her brothers, but wiry and stronger-looking than she had expected.
His height and the slight stoop all Englishmen seemed to affect had made him seem weedier.
Stripped of his beautifully tailored suits and shirts, he was muscled, with the arms and shoulders of a horseman.
She remembered hearing that he had rowed for Cambridge and thought she could see that in the flat stomach and lean legs.
Then she looked up and caught his eye and realised that he had seen her staring at him, and blushed horribly, turning quickly away.
The only consolation, she thought as she picked up a copy of the Tatler, was that he had blushed too.
The blushing was new, the self-consciousness, and so too was the pang she felt when Brigid came and sat on the edge of his chair in her bathing suit – a neat blue number that showed off her elegant legs. ‘What have you been doing at the Blounts?’ she asked Billy. ‘Fun party?’