Chapter Thirty-Five
Brigid
Brigid changed out of her wet clothes quickly, pulling on a clean skirt and, because she was chilly after being soaked, a long-sleeved blouse.
‘How clever you are,’ she called as Minnie came in. ‘Always appearing exactly when you are needed. How do you do it?’
‘I heard you on the stairs,’ Minnie said. ‘And it could be no one but you. Galloping along.’
‘Gliding,’ Brigid insisted. ‘Like a swan. Will you button me up? They are so fiddly, and at the back. I cannot reach.’
Minnie pushed her hair away from her shoulders and began buttoning. ‘Mrs Kennedy is having a bath drawn,’ she said.
‘Goodness!’ Brigid was shocked. ‘Another? And she hasn’t even been out hunting.’
‘Apparently being wet is reason enough. But I understand that Americans are like that.’ Minnie had finished the buttons and was twitching Brigid’s skirt into place, smoothing the tweed over her hips.
‘Funny lot, aren’t they?’ Brigid said thoughtfully.
‘Kick is a dear, and jolly amusing. But so ruthless, Minnie, you cannot imagine. Beating me up and down the court until I quite felt I should like to beat her at something. Only I don’t know what.
It won’t be swimming,’ she added gloomily, ‘not after watching her this morning. Poor Fritzi could barely keep pace.’
‘That young man does not know what to keep pace with,’ Minnie said wisely.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He is like a puppy that hears its name called on all sides and doesn’t know which way to run. And his man, Albert, is the same.’
‘How?’
‘Busy about all sorts of things that shouldn’t concern him.’
‘Such as?’
‘Anything. He listens to everything, watches everything.’
‘Nosy,’ Brigid said, tying up her hair.
She went along the corridor to Kick’s room, tapped and went in. ‘I say, am I interrupting?’ she asked when she saw Rose was there.
‘I was just leaving,’ Rose said. She looked, Brigid thought, disapproving. But then, she seemed to mostly look like that. ‘My bath will be ready.’
‘What shall we do with the rest of the day?’ Brigid asked, throwing herself down on Kick’s bed. ‘That rain looks like it won’t let up, so there will be no more tennis or swimming, or even getting out of the house.’
‘At home on days like this, Cook would let us into the kitchen and we would bake,’ Kick said. ‘I once made a Key lime pie.’
‘How very odd,’ Brigid said. ‘I cannot see my sister letting us be a nuisance in the kitchens. I cannot see Cook letting her let us. No, it will have to be something else.’
‘Charades?’ Kick suggested. ‘We played at Hatfield when I went on a visit there …’ She trailed off. ‘Brigid, may I ask something?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Last night, the film my father showed …’
‘Dreadful,’ Brigid said firmly.
‘Dreadful,’ Kick agreed. ‘But afterwards, everyone walked out of the room so quietly and no one had a thing to say about it, except Elizabeth, who gave him a piece of her mind. And then when Billy was going, I tried to find some way to tell him that it wasn’t my idea, that I didn’t know anything about it, and he wouldn’t let me. ’
‘I imagine not,’ Brigid agreed.
‘But how am I to tell him if he won’t let me?’ she said, fidgeting with the things on her dressing table. ‘Do you think he’ll ever talk to me again?’ Kick finished miserably, face screwed up.
‘I don’t know,’ Brigid said slowly. ‘It’s rather hard for him …’
‘How much easier it would be to be you,’ Kick said. ‘Then I would be exactly what he knows and expects and all this would be just simple.’
‘But then he wouldn’t like you so much,’ Brigid said wisely. ‘After all, it’s not me he likes, or Irene, or any of us. It’s you. It’s not the girls his parents think are suitable—’
‘Princess Elizabeth,’ Kick said with a grin.
‘Exactly. If it’s going to be alright, it will be because you’re odd and adorable, and, just as Billy says, “utterly unexpected,” not despite it.’
‘If,’ Kick said morosely. ‘If?’
‘If, darling. You must know … well, how hard it is for someone like Billy, from a family like his, brought up the way he has been … It’s like those poor horses they still have for pumping water in some of the smaller villages.
They go around and around and around all day, turning the pump or grinding grain, and then on Sundays when they put them out into the fields, the poor things go around and around for hours before they remember they don’t have to.
That’s Billy now. Trying to set himself straight so he can reach you. ’
‘You don’t think he’ll succeed, do you?’
‘I don’t know. He has been going around for so very long. Just like all his family before him. Generations, going around the same pump …’
Kick went to the gramophone that stood on the window sill. In its neat red leather case it was, Brigid thought, like a vanity case or even a doctor’s bag. ‘Can you play something?’ she asked.
Kick put a record on then and the rhythmic sound of the needle bumping softly over grooves and scratches filled the air. Then the sound of a woman’s voice, energetic and languid both at once.
‘She’s called Billie Holiday,’ Kick said. ‘Mother hates that I listen to her.’
They were silent, letting the music fill up the space between them.
‘I can see why,’ Brigid said after a while.
‘That voice does rather make one want to do terribly bad things … or at least, to be out in a world where it’s possible to do such things.
’ She looked around the cosy, neat bedroom.
‘Do you ever want to kick and kick like a horse in a stall it hates? To break it all down?’ Then she laughed.
‘Of course you do. With a name like yours …’ She lay back on the bed, against the pillows, and Kick came and sat on the end of it, hands under her thighs, legs swinging in time to the music.
‘It’s not that I hate it,’ Brigid continued.
‘Not at all. But I do rather feel that it isn’t life, if you see what I mean?
Just sort of a waiting room for life. As though one were permanently sitting in the ladies’ first class at Paddington Station.
Lots of things put on for one’s entertainment, of course – lunches, and tennis, and visits, but none of it quite real. ’
‘I feel that more here than I did at home in New York,’ Kick said.
‘There, everyone did what they did, just like that. Here, there’s a very great deal of waiting around alright.
At first, I hated it. It made me so impatient.
I’m getting better at it. But I don’t know if that’s good – to be better at waiting around? ’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Brigid said with a laugh.
‘I can’t see you ever being very good at it.
’ Then, ‘I say, how untidy you are.’ She looked around the room, at the shoes scattered about the floor, the dressing table where an ivory-backed hairbrush lay surrounded by jars of cream, make-up, hair pins, a dusting of spilled powder over it all.
‘You sound like my mother,’ Kick said idly.
‘I’m sure I sound like everyone’s mother. Mine wouldn’t be able to stand for it. She’d tidy it herself rather than look at it.’
‘My mother believes I must do things for myself and won’t let her maid tidy after me.’
‘In case you marry a poor man?’ Brigid said sympathetically. Her own mother, Lady Iveagh, had drilled into her and Patsy that they mustn’t be wasteful or careless, for that very reason.
‘Goodness, no.’ Kick laughed. ‘Because it’s good for my soul. No one expects I’ll marry a poor man. I simply never meet any.’ Something about the bluntness with which Kick said it made Brigid feel awkward, so she didn’t respond.
The record ended and Kick got up to change it, putting on something lighter and quicker.
‘Charades is rather a good idea,’ Brigid said after a while.
‘Especially if Elizabeth will play. No one takes a costume more seriously than she does. I once went to a party where she wore only a bedsheet, twisted into what she claimed was a toga, only it was a single bedsheet and not any bit big enough for a toga.’ She began to giggle.
‘More like a napkin held over her lap. As though she went to dinner but forgot her clothes. Too funny! The others will be awfully sticky though,’ she continued.
‘Maureen won’t play, she only dresses up for her own games and tricks.
And Chips will only do it if there’s someone he terribly wants to impress. ’
‘And is there?’
‘No. I mean’ – she said hurriedly – ‘he wants to impress your parents, naturally, but not the way he would want to impress, well, someone royal.’
‘It’s OK,’ Kick said with a grin. ‘I won’t take offence.’ Then, ‘Well, what about Murder in the Dark? We play that a lot in the evenings at Hyannis Port. Although it barely gets properly dark there during the summer.’
‘We wouldn’t even have to wait,’ Brigid said eagerly, looking out at the rain. ‘Once we draw the curtains, it’ll be plenty dark enough in an hour at this rate. Come on, let’s go down.’
They were last to the drawing room. Everyone else was there, and all looking rather bored.
Except the ambassador and Doris, who sat apart and talked a lot together.
Chips and Fritzi stood at the bookshelves, Chips pointing something out to the boy.
Brigid caught the words ‘one of your ancestors’.
Maureen played a complicated version of Patience, batting off advice from Elizabeth, while Honor sat beside them, engrossed in her book.
Rose Kennedy had a book in her hands too, but she scarcely turned the pages, instead looking carefully around the room, giving everyone her attention for a moment, before moving on.
Perhaps, Brigid thought, she gave the most attention to Duff, who sat by himself with a newspaper.
He turned a page in one sharp movement so the paper crackled.
Outside, the wind cradled the house roughly, rocking it and throwing the occasional handful of rain against the windows.
‘You’re late,’ Maureen snapped, looking up.
‘Only a little,’ Brigid said soothingly. ‘And we have a jolly plan for what to do.’
‘Why do we need a plan?’ Maureen asked.
‘Of course we need a plan, isn’t that so, Kick?’
‘It’ll be fun,’ Kick said, as though reassuring a child.
Maureen frowned.
‘Murder in the Dark,’ Brigid said excitedly. ‘If we turned off all the lights and drew the curtains, this room would be dark already. All we need is to make cards, pick and play. There’s a murderer, a victim, a detective, and everyone else is an innocent party.’
‘Oh yes,’ Elizabeth said, getting up and coming over to them.
She looked, Brigid thought, decidedly odd – one of Honor’s flowered afternoon dresses looped up in handfuls around a belt so that it fell to just below her knees, and a cardigan dragged over her shoulders.
Her hair straggled. But her face was alight with excitement.
‘We could play in character? I was at a party once where we adopted parts as people from the novels of Miss Christie. I was Monsieur Poirot. It was the jolliest fun imaginable. I had a moustache drawn on with burned cork, and a silk scarf tossed over my shoulder.’
‘I suppose it might be amusing,’ Maureen said. She looked around the room. ‘Honor, you are clearly the sacrificial victim. And Duff, I rather think you are the murderer. You look like you could kill any one of us just now.’
‘Only you,’ Brigid heard Duff mutter, before snapping the pages of his paper.
Elizabeth must have heard too, because she said, with a sly grin, ‘We could play in couples. Only we’d need to work out, are the couples playing with one another, or against?’ She looked from Duff to Maureen. ‘And if against, are they to kill one another, or merely betray?’
‘You can’t choose,’ Kick said patiently. ‘That’s why we make cards. It’s all a secret. That’s the point of it.’
It was Chips who Brigid looked to then. She saw him glance over at the ambassador, one eyebrow faintly raised. Whatever he saw in Kennedy’s face caused him to turn and say firmly, ‘No Murder in the Dark. It’s a nursery game.’
‘Spoilsport!’ Brigid cried. ‘Fritzi, say something! Perhaps you have influence with him? It’s terrific fun, and otherwise you will all simply sit here and talk all afternoon.’
‘And what is wrong with that?’ Chips asked.
‘Everything is wrong with it!’
‘I would play, most willingly,’ Fritzi said cautiously, looking from Brigid to Chips, ‘if that is what is decided upon.’
‘No Murder in the Dark,’ Chips said again. ‘Sorry, dear boy, it simply won’t do. But perhaps you and Lady Brigid would like to take a look at the watercolours in the Green Room?’ His eyes gleamed so that he looked, Brigid thought, like an owl, tucked into that dim corner.
‘Watercolours!’ she said irritably. ‘The very idea.’ She left, and Kick followed her, catching up with her on the stairs.
‘What a spoilsport he is,’ she said again.
‘Unless something is his idea, and then he cannot hear no. But I’ve got an idea.
’ She grinned. ‘One that will be fun, and will jolly well pay him back.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘A haunting! We’re going to create a ghost and scare the life out of them.’
‘Yes,’ Kick said instantly, ‘and let’s do it quickly, while they are all gathered there together. It will be much easier.’
They ran upstairs, to Kick’s room, and began to plan. They had got little further than agreeing to take the sheets off Brigid’s bed when there was a tap on the door. Elizabeth.
‘I say, what are you two doing?’ she asked, eyes wide and round. ‘And can I play too? It is simply no fun downstairs at all.’
‘You can,’ Brigid said. ‘We are planning a haunting. A real live ghost story.’
‘The very thing!’ Elizabeth agreed. ‘How?’
Brigid explained about the sheets, and added that they hoped to borrow a lipstick from Kick’s mother, ‘to make it look bloody—’ when Elizabeth interrupted.
‘Wait.’ She held up a hand. ‘That’s all very well, but the real trick is to set the scene.
It’s all about illusion. If you create the possibility of ghosts in their minds, they will be the quicker to believe that’s what it is.
Otherwise someone will say, ‘Is that the water system acting up?’ and they will all go around tapping at pipes.
The real trick is to suggest, rather than say, and let them do the rest.’
‘She’s right!’ Kick’s eyes gleamed. ‘We need to set the scene!’