Chapter Thirty
Kick
The walk with her mother and Prince Fritzi was slow and dull.
Rose insisted on looking closely at all the plants, asking questions that the prince couldn’t answer.
To Kick’s annoyance, that didn’t stop him trying.
He ventured weak half-opinions – ‘perhaps a member of the dahlia family …’ – that were of no value.
There was nothing to distract her from thinking about Billy, even though she had sworn not to.
She must ask Brigid, she decided, what she thought.
The day was hot and really what she wanted was to swim.
Better still, float lazily in the cool water and watch the few clouds drift past. But Brigid had her heart set on a tournament, and so that is what they would do.
In any case, she thought, this lot weren’t the kind to spend a peaceful day by the pool.
Or anywhere, for that matter. Landing in amongst them was like being thrown into a bag of horse chestnuts. Spikey and prickly and secretive.
Maureen, with those large light-blue eyes darting everywhere – seeing everything, considering it, weighing it; reflecting a polished surface but with something churning behind it that Kick didn’t understand.
Chips, doing the exact same watching and assessing, but without the same sort of inner fire that was Maureen’s.
His was more an inner anxiousness, she thought, remembering the way he plucked at his sleeves, eyes darting from his wife to Kick’s mother, from her father to Duff and back again.
Honor, his poor dowdy wife, going about like someone had stuffed her with a bolster – badly, so that there were lumps everywhere – and sent her out to pretend to be a person; walking amongst them, saying things at intervals, but without really being part of any of it.
Then there was Fritzi, ‘King Midas’ son’ as she and Brigid now called him.
He was so golden, so burnished, so unreal.
A statue come to life; a boy become a statue.
She compared him in her mind with her brothers, Joe and Jack, her father – all three so full of life that it felt like a strong river inside them would break its banks sooner than be squashed down.
She wondered what Fritzi had done with that river to subdue it so.
‘He’s agitated,’ her father had said to her the evening before.
‘Something wrong with him.’ He didn’t say it as though he were sorry for Fritzi, but more as if he were curious.
Elizabeth – worn, a bit tattered, but at least she seemed real in her efforts to enjoy herself.
Her own parents, so much older than everyone else, even than Chips who must be next to them in age only he seemed more of an age with Maureen and Duff.
If anything, Kick thought, it was Honor who seemed the older of the two in that marriage.
Her parents’ age felt almost awkward, she thought, watching her mother bent – slim but stiff – over a bush with tiny white flowers that released a cloying scent into the air.
It was as if they were everyone’s parents, there to watch and judge, not to partake.
She knew her father would hate that. He liked to consider himself a central part of everything – even if it was Kick’s friends from school, gathered in the kitchen at Bronxville over ice-cream sodas, he would talk about the teachers and games as though he were one of them.
With Joe Jnr and Jack, it was even more pronounced.
Kick had heard – only ever by mistake – the way they talked about girls.
Not, she had thought, quietly shocked, the way father and sons should talk about girls.
More as if they were all three the same age, with the same interest. But surely that couldn’t be?
Her father was married. Her brothers were not.
The three were alike in many ways: a kind of outward chivalry – holding coats, holding doors, carrying parcels – that had beneath it something else entirely.
A mocking assessment that rated features individually and collectively.
So a girl might be forgiven for having small eyes if she had ‘a good bust’; long legs might offset a thick waist, and so on.
Kick tried not to hear these conversations – closing doors or leaving rooms so as to be away from them – but she knew the effect of them worked away at her all the same.
When she was younger, she would look at herself in the mirror, trying to see what they – what other men – might see.
Was her nose too big? Definitely. But did the generous size of her mouth camouflage that?
Maybe. Her eyes were too deep-set, but her teeth were even and her smile, she knew because she had been told so many times, could be ‘dazzling’.
But was that enough? Her hair was nothing remarkable – not blonde or brown but somewhere in between.
Her skin fair but freckled … It was only when she realised how unhappy she was making herself that she gave up.
By every comparison she had learned she was not ‘first rate’.
And so she decided she wouldn’t bother so much with the way she looked.
Instead, she had decided, aged maybe thirteen, she would try to have fun, as she phrased it to herself.
By that, she meant she would play tennis and not worry about how much she perspired.
She would swim and boat and not think of what the wind and salt did to her hair.
She would never be too tired to dance, too sophisticated to sit out a game of catch.
Whatever fun was going, she would grab it.
Because after all, she thought – for all her imperfections, people liked her. Men liked her. Rosemary, who was far more the ideal of beauty, did not have what she had. Other girls, prettier than Kick, didn’t have it either.
And yet these men – her men – were her measure, whether she approved of their ways or not.
They were ‘Man’, by whom all other men were instinctively judged, and usually found wanting.
Until now. Until Billy. It was their voices, their standards, that made her so uncertain of Billy’s regard for her.
As though she heard one of them, Joe perhaps, with a snigger, ‘Now that she’s so keen there’s nothing for it but to turn and run a mile,’ followed by the laughter of Jack and her father, all three united in despising any girl who made the mistake of being keen.
Had she, she wondered? She knew she had.
She also knew that it wasn’t in her to behave any other way.
She knew there were games around this stuff, she’d heard the men in her family often enough to know – well – what the rules were.
But she couldn’t, she told herself. She wouldn’t.
And until yesterday, with Billy, she had never felt that she should.
He had seemed keen too, and not bothering to hide it.
And then that terrible film. How strange, she thought, if he was indeed driven away, it wasn’t her keenness – unforgivable to Kennedy men – but rather her father’s politics and way of pushing that had done it.
‘You must be tired, Kathleen,’ Fritzi said, coming over to her then.
‘Not a bit,’ she said. ‘I’m only wondering how quickly the tournament will begin, and if there is time for a quick swim beforehand.’
‘How energetic you are,’ he said.
She couldn’t tell if he were impressed or disapproving. His face was schooled to give very little away. His lapse yesterday by the pool, when he had shut his eyes and looked suddenly tired and defenceless, was uncharacteristic.
‘My daughter is never tired,’ Rose said fondly. Kick tried to take her mother’s arm, but Rose stiffened instantly. ‘Let me get you a hair grip,’ she said, stepping away and reaching into her bag. ‘Your fringe is quite untidy.’