Chapter Thirty-Eight
Kick
‘How I wish we’d never started that.’ Kick was in the hallway. She pulled open the side door and looked out. The garden smelled of earth and wet grass and the scent of flowers dragged down to the ground rather than released upon the air. Heavy and dense.
‘It did rather backfire,’ Brigid agreed. ‘I thought we’d play a trick on them, scare them a little bit …’
Kick thought about their feeble efforts to set the scene for a haunting, how eagerly everyone had joined in, and the horrid turn it had taken. ‘If ever a plan misfired …’ she agreed.
‘I never imagined there would be anything so awful as actual dead schoolgirls.’
‘How quickly it turned nasty. And only Doris was brave enough to speak out.’
‘She made it worse,’ Brigid said.
‘Not for me, she didn’t. It is hard to be despised, not for anything you’ve done, but merely for what you are.’
‘No one could despise you,’ Brigid said. She said it vaguely, the way one might reach out and pet a cat or dog, because it was there.
‘Diana Mitford said she admired the way I was so open about my religion,’ Kick said.
‘Did she? She can’t possibly have meant it.’
‘Why not?’ Kick was inclined to bristle.
‘Darling, it’s simply impossible, that’s all. Diana, of all people …’ Brigid laughed. ‘But you must be very flattered that she bothered to say anything of the sort.’
‘Must I?’ Kick asked shortly.
‘Why do grown-ups dislike and disapprove of so very many things?’ Brigid asked thoughtfully.
‘I can’t think of a thing I dislike – except for tapioca, and it really isn’t the same.
Do you think you gather hatred as you age, the way a rose grows hard, gnarled thorns so that you can tell how old a bush is by the viciousness of the thorns? ’
‘Let’s never be like that.’
‘I should think not!’ Brigid said with energy.
‘Like what?’ It was Fritzi, who had come up behind them in the hallway.
‘Like them.’ Kick jerked her head back towards the drawing room. ‘Like our parents.’
‘My parents aren’t here.’
Kick looked at him. ‘Sometimes, I don’t know if you are joking,’ she said.
‘I think every generation says this,’ he said.
‘Says what?’
‘That they don’t want to be like the generation that has gone before them. In German we have a word for it.’
‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Brigid said.
‘Well, they can’t all mean it,’ Kick said. ‘But I do.’ Then, ‘Let’s go out, it’s hardly raining anymore.’
‘Shall we get coats?’ That was Brigid.
‘Never mind coats. Let’s just go.’
‘May I come with you?’ Fritzi asked.
‘Alright,’ Brigid said. ‘But only if you come now and don’t start fussing.’
They set off, the three of them, across the gravel. ‘If we stay on the path and keep off the lawns, we won’t be seen from the house,’ Brigid said. ‘They’d only come after us.’
The path led to the front of the house, where they left it before it veered close to the drawing room windows.
These were covered, the curtains drawn inside, but as Fritzi said, ‘You never know …’ Instead, they set off towards the stables, on a dirt track that was soggier, where their feet made almost no noise.
It wasn’t true that the rain had stopped, but it had slowed to what Brigid, after some silent moments, described as ‘a wet trickle’.
‘Anyway, what brings you with us?’ Kick asked Fritzi at last. ‘Did you follow us?’
‘Not exactly. I wanted to get out of there and thought I might go to my room for an hour. But when I came into the hallway, I saw the two of you. There was something about the way you were, with the open door in front of you and the smell of evening that came through it – you looked like you were about to take flight. And I wanted to go with you.’
It was, Kick thought, the first thing she had heard him say that wasn’t dull to a fault, correct and lifeless. Brigid, too, must have noticed, because she smiled at him. ‘How romantic.’ And she wasn’t as mocking as she might have been.
He was different, out there in the slowing rain. Less pompous. More energetic. He even looked different, in the near-dark that was cut through by a strip of evening light widening a bright gap between sky and ground over to the west.
‘You know we call you King Midas’ son,’ Brigid said.
‘I heard you whispering it, but I didn’t think you meant me. At least,’ he corrected himself, ‘I thought you did mean me, but I couldn’t understand why, or what it meant.’
‘You didn’t seem like a real person,’ Brigid said. ‘You seemed like the outline of a person, done by someone who didn’t know any actual real people.’
‘A boy, made out of gold. A statue created by mistake,’ Kick clarified.
‘I see.’ He sounded hurt. ‘And yet I am as real as anyone.’
‘You are now. Nearly, anyway,’ Brigid assured him.
‘Only nearly?’
‘Still a tiny hint of gold …’
‘I cannot help that.’ He said it stiffly.
‘She’s teasing,’ Kick said.
Brigid, slightly ahead by now, ducked under a mass of laurel leaves and, turning, batted them back towards Fritzi so that the weight of water resting on them flew at him, drops landing on his face and chest. He laughed, and pushed the branch back at her.
Except that the leaves had shed their covering of rain and simply made a swishing sound as they moved.
‘You know,’ he said then, ‘at times, I do feel like a statue. Everyone looking and looking at me, saying what I am and how I am made …’ He sounded plaintive.
‘Is this going to be a long chat about you?’ Brigid asked. It was the kind of thing Maureen would say, Kick thought, but Brigid said it kindly.
‘No. I do not mean …’
‘Oh, it’s fine,’ she said, ‘go on. Get it off your chest, whatever it is.’
‘Just that,’ he said. ‘Everywhere, always, I am looked at. Considered. Observed.’
‘I think I know what that might be like …’ Brigid said thoughtfully. ‘I know why they look at me. But you – what is it that everyone looks for? Your wonderful good looks?’
Kick laughed. Fritzi too.
‘No, although I am told they are indeed wonderful.’
‘Do not fish,’ Brigid said. ‘You will get nothing.’
‘It is not my looks. It’s not even really me,’ he continued. ‘It’s what I might do. What I might be used for.’
‘Like a small pot,’ Brigid said. ‘One that might be a vase, or a place to keep pins, or bits of hair ribbon.’
‘Perhaps.’ He looked confused.
Kick laughed again. She was willing to bet no one had ever teased Fritzi the way Brigid teased him now. ‘You don’t have sisters, do you?’ she asked.
‘I do, two, but they are younger and I have been more with my brothers. Three, all older than me.’
‘Six of you? You are nearly up to Kennedy standards.’
‘When I marry, I should like many children. Five, at least. I would like them to be close in age and good friends with one another. Not like we were.’
‘I think you have to encourage children to be friends,’ Kick said. ‘You have to make them. And then they are.’
They had walked a good distance from the house by now, and came out of the clump of laurels. Ahead of them was lawn, but boggier and more pitted than the smooth green expanse by the tennis court and pool.
‘Who is Doris?’ he asked then.
‘I thought you knew her,’ Brigid said. ‘You seemed to, at the tennis.’
‘I’ve met her, but I don’t know her.’
‘She’s a friend of my sister. They were at school together ever so long ago. I think Doris might be Honor’s favourite person in the world.’
‘I see.’
‘Why? Is it because you danced with her and are now in love with her?’
‘No. More because she remembers.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, she was there, that night, with all the men of the SS command, who were invited by my grandfather to celebrate his grandsons joining the Luftwaffe.’
‘I don’t think I really know what that is,’ Brigid said.
‘It is the air force, like your RAF.’
‘I see. Go on.’
‘And your Doris was there too. I remember her so clearly.’
‘People do tend to. Men, especially.’ Brigid said it wistfully, Kick thought.
‘I think everyone was in love with her,’ Fritzi said. ‘Certainly I was.’ Beside her in the wet gloom, Kick felt Brigid stiffen. ‘But there she was, and now she is here, and I don’t know why.’
‘Must there be a why? She lives in Germany, in Berlin, you know, and I suppose must go to parties there, same as anyone would, and now she is here, to stay with Honor. It doesn’t seem so very mysterious to me. I mean, you were in Germany, at that party, and now you are here. Is it not the same?’
‘You are right. I was, and now I am. And so is she. And perhaps there is nothing strange at all.’ He looked more cheerful.
‘You are jumpy,’ Brigid said.
‘I feel I am watched, always. Here I’m watched because I am German; in Germany I am watched because of my family, my grandfather.’
‘Even now? After joining that old Luftwaffe?’
‘Oh yes. Maybe especially now. We joined because my father said we must. He said it was a useful bargain to strike. But I think maybe he was mistaken. He said it would show loyalty, and that was important. But it doesn’t seem like that will be enough after all.’
‘But are you loyal?’ Brigid asked. ‘If you are only showing loyalty, not meaning it, that might be more dangerous again …’
‘It depends to what. My father is loyal to the family.’
They slowed down and turned, all of them, to look back at the house. It stood, large and square, behind them. The windows on the ground floor showed light, fuzzy and muted, through closed curtains, while those of the top floors were in darkness.
‘How lonely it looks from here,’ Brigid said.
‘You’re thinking about the ghosts, aren’t you?’ That was Kick.
‘A little,’ Brigid admitted. ‘Imagine dying in a fire.’
‘Imagine dying at all,’ Kick said. Fritzi lit a cigarette, then took it from his mouth and offered it to Brigid, who shook her head.
He offered it to Kick. ‘Mother would kill me. But why not?’ She took the cigarette and, leaning back against the trunk of a tree, took a deep drag, blowing smoke out into the charcoal air.