Chapter Twenty-Five #3
‘Jolly complicated, I should think.’ That was Billy. She knew they thought a great deal more than that, but didn’t want to discuss with the ambassador.
Kick squirmed at the transparency of her father’s efforts, and how much this was at odds with the English way of doing things.
But he seemed not to care. Thwarted in one direction, he simply shifted to another.
It was, she supposed, his great strength – he was neither tactful nor even particularly polite.
Unembarrassed by their evasions, he simply asked the question again, in a different way.
‘It’s a question of co-existence,’ he said at one point.
Kick could almost hear Billy’s mother groan aloud.
‘That’s the way of it now. Democracies and dictatorships, side by side, finding ways to live together.
The idea of making the world over in an ideal image – well, that’s simply not the point any longer. ’
‘So you would have us step back and let Germany do as she wishes? Grab with both hands land and territory and homes and farms that do not belong to them, then demand that we pretend they do?’ Duff asked.
‘Co-existence,’ the ambassador insisted. ‘It’s the only way.’
‘We must continue to seek peace,’ Chips said sonorously. He looked around. Only her father met his eye, nodding enthusiastically.
‘That’s so,’ he agreed. ‘I suppose, even in the sorry event of a war, you won’t actually fight, Lord Devonshire?’ he asked, laying his knife and fork neatly across an empty plate.
‘Of course we will fight,’ Lord Devonshire said wearily. ‘I want war no more than you do. But if it comes to it, I will enlist, and my sons too.’
‘You can’t be serious?’ Her father looked from the duke to Billy, then Andrew.
‘Naturally,’ Billy said.
‘Of course.’ That was Andrew. ‘I turned eighteen in January,’ he added proudly.
Kick saw the sudden alarmed twitch of his mother’s mouth, but she said nothing.
‘Some of us have joined up already,’ said Billy’s friend Hugo, eagerly, turning this way and that in his chair to look at them all. ‘So as to be ready.’
‘Who is “us”?’ her father asked.
‘A lot of the chaps who are at Cambridge with me,’ Hugo said. ‘One wouldn’t want to wait for conscription. Wouldn’t look right.’
‘And so you rush to join, pledging yourselves to go and fight a war you cannot possibly win, in order to look right?’ Her father was incredulous, and with the bullying tone Kick knew from dinners at home.
‘I say, of course we’ll win,’ Hugo said, looking around again. Neither the duke nor Chips would meet his gaze, Kick saw.
‘What fools young men are,’ her father said. He said it angrily, the way he might have spoken to Joe Jnr or Jack if they had done something to annoy him.
Looking at her father’s angry face, the way all the other men at the table had drawn a little away from him and closer together, she thought again about what Jack had said when he first heard of the posting, and the laugh with which he had said it – ‘The least diplomatic person I ever met is to be America’s senior diplomat.
Well I never,’ adding, ‘Roosevelt must know something we don’t.
Or want something we don’t understand.’ At the time, Kick had wondered what he meant and if he was just being clever.
But it was true that her father was blunt and straight-talking, likely to antagonise and offend more than he was to placate.
Why had he been sent here to deal with people so skilled at artfulness that they rarely said what they meant unless forced, yet understood each other perfectly?
‘It makes little difference if they enlist early or not,’ Billy’s father said stiffly. ‘If it’s war, there will be conscription and they will go anyway. Might as well do the decent thing.’
‘The decent thing,’ the ambassador repeated scornfully.
‘At least we know Chips won’t be rushing to enlist,’ Elizabeth said, head to one side, eyes bright and round like a greedy bird, as she turned to her host. ‘Such a relief,’ she added sweetly.
‘I will be far more useful where I am, in government,’ Chips said, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head, elbows resting complacently wide on either side of him.
‘So, Duff, that means you won’t go either?’ Honor turned to him.
‘No,’ Maureen said swiftly. ‘He is certainly more useful where he is.’ She shot Chips a sarcastic look.
‘I wonder if Mr Chamberlain agrees,’ Chips murmured.
He looked as if he might say more, but Debo interrupted. ‘Don’t,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Don’t let’s. Not today. It’s so lovely, and feels so far away from awful things like enlisting and gas masks and blackouts. Talking only makes it worse.’ She looked at Andrew as she spoke.
‘Indeed,’ Billy’s father said stiffly. ‘Hardly the time.’
Kick knew that her father didn’t believe in such things as a right time to pursue whatever it was he had set his sights on, or to have hard conversations, and was unsurprised when he leaned forward, his elbows heavy on the table, and said, ‘What I can’t understand is how you all behave as though war is a sure thing, a definite, when it is nothing of the sort.
Nor need it be.’ He glared around at them, neck sunk into his shoulders as though he would physically push his convictions onto them.
‘Britain isn’t ready for another war. Fight one, and she will lose. ’
‘She?’ Duff asked with heavy irony. ‘You mean us?’
‘Who will walk with me? I want to explore the gardens.’ It was Rose, standing hastily and looking around.
She had eaten, Kick saw, almost nothing.
The sight of her barely touched plate – food moved into discrete piles, entirely distinct one from another, asparagus spears lined up neatly alongside a small heap of garden peas, beside the scarlet O of a radish – made Kick want to hide her own enthusiastically cleared one.
But it was too late. Her mother had seen it.
Again, the eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch and Kick felt suddenly ungainly.
Large and sprawling alongside the doll-like neatness of her mother in her crisp linen dress.
‘I will,’ Billy’s mother said. The lines that etched her face were more evident. ‘Andrew, come with us.’ As though she would keep him close. ‘And Kathleen, perhaps you might join us?’
‘I thought I might change …’ Kick began.
‘I shouldn’t bother,’ the duchess said. ‘I thought you were walking by the river later?’
‘We’ll wait for you,’ Debo said.
‘No rush,’ Elizabeth agreed, lighting a cigarette and pushing her plate away.
Billy’s mother asked her questions that began with the garden and moved quickly on to other things. ‘Billy tells me you were in Italy. What did you see?’
‘I saw the pope,’ Kick said, eager to talk about her travels, her impressions. She looked up and saw the expression on Moucher’s face. ‘We saw the Raphaels,’ she amended hurriedly. ‘And a splendid Caravaggio.’
‘I believe Chatsworth is especially fine at this time of year,’ Rose said then.
The duchess look startled. As though Rose had said, ‘I believe birds nest in springtime’ or ‘I believe cows give milk.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed politely.
‘And that Mary Queen of Scots lived there for a time,’ Rose persisted. ‘How very interesting it must be.’
‘More like rotted away there,’ Andrew said cheerfully.
‘She was imprisoned. On Elizabeth I’s orders.
On and off for fifteen years. I’ll show you over her apartments if you come and stay,’ he said to Kick.
The duchess looked momentarily alarmed. Kick wondered was it at the idea of her coming to stay.
‘Why imprisoned?’ Rose asked.
‘Catholic,’ Andrew said, still cheerful. ‘Not to be trusted, you see.’ A sharp little silence fell then, broken quickly by the duchess asking, ‘I believe you have older boys, Mrs Ambassador. Do they ever visit?’
In all, it was an awkward walk; one in which Kick felt she was held up for comparison with something she didn’t understand.
Something that might have been a version of her own self, one that must be confirmed or denied, only she didn’t know which.
It felt as though there was a purpose to everything Billy’s mother asked, and that Kick’s answers were either too close or too far from what was expected.
And even though she was willing to mute her answers, to be whatever this woman wanted, she couldn’t, because she didn’t understand what that was.
The walk to the river took them through a meadow of tall grass and Kick, walking slightly behind, thought how soft it looked until you were standing in it, and then how much it scratched.
‘Jolly lunch?’ she heard Hugo say in an undertone to Billy.
‘I do think it’s hard luck on the old pair. They leave the Blounts to get away from Diana and that sewer Mosley, and come here only to be button-holed by His Excellency.’
Hugo sniggered and repeated, ‘Excellency.’
Billy turned a little then, and saw Kick. His face flushed, the freckles standing out dark against the red, and dropped back to her. ‘I say, that was rude. I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s alright.’ Kick struggled with the Kennedy part of herself that wanted to punch this young man for insulting her family, and the ever-growing part that wanted to listen to him, understand him.
‘I mean, I know he’s different, the way he does things.
I guess we all are. He means no harm. Or at least, he means only to do what he thinks he’s here to do, but I understand how strange his way must seem to you.
Can you see that he thinks another war is a truly terrible thing and wishes to prevent it? ’
‘I try to believe he means well.’
It would have to do.