Chapter Forty-One #2
‘Perhaps your house is not as well run as you like to think,’ Doris replied. ‘Perhaps Andrews goes to bed earlier than you know, and cheats by doing his rounds in the morning.’ She saw the footman who stood beside the sideboard, ready to lift the dome on any dish, stiffen.
‘Perhaps,’ Chips said with sly delight. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it was Fritzi’s man who took the responsibility.
He was up and about at the same early hour.
I watched him walking in the direction of the stables.
Did you meet him, on your early walk?’ He opened his eyes very wide and looked at Doris, waiting for an answer.
‘No,’ she said, turning towards the toast dish and uncovering it before the footman could reach it. ‘I did not. I saw no one at all.’ She took two slices of toast, then a heap of mushrooms. ‘But then, I wasn’t looking. Not peering around and watching. Not like you, Chips.’
‘I wasn’t peering,’ he said with dignity.
‘Or watching. I heard a noise and just happened to look out the window, that’s all.
I saw you fumbling with the locked door, and then I looked the other way and I saw Albert making his way towards the stables, and I thought, I wonder did those two meet? That’s all.’
‘How did you get in?’ Rose asked. She took a tiny bite of toast-and-marmalade, then laid the slice down.
‘Honor came down and opened the door,’ Doris said cheerfully.
‘And really, none of it was nearly as exciting as Chips has made it out. An early walk, on such a beautiful day. One of the servants must have noticed the door I left on the latch, and very properly locked it. But Chips does love a mystery. If he can’t find them, he invents them.
Even so, I don’t know why he thinks five on a summer’s morning is so very early. ’
‘No,’ Rose agreed, ‘I am often up at that time.’
‘But in that coat …’ Chips pursued.
‘First thing that came to hand,’ Doris countered.
‘Now, please don’t spend any more of your valuable time on me.
I know you have an excursion to plan.’ She smiled sweetly at Chips and, taking her plate, retired to the far end of the table.
‘Duff,’ she muttered, ‘if you have forgiven me, give me some of your newspaper, for the love of God, that I may hide in it.’ Duff’s lips twitched.
He handed her a section from the middle of The Times and they both bent their heads low over the print.
‘I have ordered the cars for eleven,’ Chips said. ‘That means we will reach the outskirts of Colchester shortly after midday. We can take lunch with us. Honor has had a bad night and won’t be joining us.’
‘And I alas am unable,’ Doris said. ‘There are things I must do here.’
‘As am I.’ Duff looked up. ‘I must make a phonecall. Chips, may I borrow the library for an hour?’
‘Yes, of course, but really, it’s too bad! I had thought we would be a larger party. I don’t imagine for one moment that Elizabeth will be down in time.’
‘Probably for the best,’ Rose said with a chilly smile.
She couldn’t fathom Elizabeth at all, Doris had noticed.
Indifferent to Elizabeth’s charm – which was grown patchy, but still considerable when she marshalled it – all Rose saw was the immense fecklessness and indulgence.
The drinking, the smoking, the foolish remarks that were never, really, as foolish as they seemed.
But this was lost on the Kennedy parents, who observed her with mistrust.
‘Brigid and Kathleen, you will both come with us?’
‘Yes, but may we swim first?’
‘And Fritzi?’
‘Happily. I believe these ruins are particularly fine.’ Doris watched as Brigid rolled her eyes.
Watched too as Fritzi saw her doing it and, instead of being offended, grinned at her.
She smiled to herself. And looked up to find Chips watching her, one eyebrow raised.
She shook her head slightly and bent over her newspaper again.
After breakfast, Doris made her way to the gardens and caught up with Brigid as she crossed the lawn to the pool. The grass was already dry after yesterday’s rain.
‘Are we not the luckiest people in England, to have a pool during such a summer?’ Brigid asked her.
‘It more than makes up for the next ten years when it will be barely used,’ Doris agreed.
‘Will you swim now?’
‘No. Later.’
‘Tired?’ Brigid asked mischievously.
‘So, you were listening.’
‘Impossible not to.’
‘I never feel,’ Doris said, as though she were changing the subject, ‘that being a guest in someone’s house means one owes them an account of every minute of one’s day.’
‘Or one’s night,’ Brigid agreed solemnly.
Doris laughed. She slowed her steps and the girl slowed with her.
‘Very good. But what of you? I was about to say how very different you are, in the space of just little more than a year, but then I look at you, and I see that you aren’t.
’ She smiled. ‘Under the new hairstyle and the London dresses, you’re the same as ever, I think. ’
‘I should hope so!’ Brigid said. ‘I wouldn’t wish to change.’
‘And yet you are very much a young lady.’
‘If you say so.’ She smoothed her hair as she said it, brushing a strand back from her face where it had blown loose, and tucked it in. Beyond her, the windows of the pool house reflected light onto the water that had its own light.
‘It is nothing to do with what I say. Chips, of course, has noticed too.’
‘He has.’
‘And thinks to cut you in on his schemes?’
‘He does. Oh, Doris,’ Brigid started to laugh, ‘you cannot imagine the chats we have! He likes to spend no end of time, he and I, in which he proposes young men he thinks are suitable, and asks for my opinion. And pretends to listen when I give it. Why, in the last month alone we have talked of Billy Cavendish, of David Ormsby-Gore. And each time, he turns over all their virtues and all their failings, exactly as though he were breeding horses – I swear I heard him say the Mannings were “too long in the back; too tall”.’
‘And you, what do you do?’
‘Nothing much. I let him talk, and I agree. But in the end, I will make up my own mind, you know.’
‘And what of Fritzi, who beneath the affectionate nickname is actually Prince Friedrich; what faults and virtues does he have, in Chips’ eyes?’ Doris asked, looking sideways at Brigid.
‘No faults at all, only virtues. The most beautiful and eligible of young men. According to Chips, that is,’ she added hastily.
‘He is certainly beautiful. Perhaps …?’
‘Impossible!’ Brigid shook her head. ‘I may say little, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think. I will not let Chips choose for me, when he doesn’t know how to choose for himself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How can I possibly adopt the plan of a man who cannot see that his own marriage is gone disastrously wrong?’ She stopped walking, stood still on the wet grass.
‘Who can’t acknowledge the truth of that, or his own part in it?
You Guinnesses are so stubborn, he says – not you, Brigid, but your sisters, even your wonderful mother.
He pretends he means it fondly. Honor is not unhappy.
She is set in ways that no longer suit her, but she is too stubborn to see that.
If she would only listen, I could, I’m sure, tell her half-a-dozen things she could try …
Imagine, I think he tried to tell me that all is not well between them … well, in the bedroom.’ She blushed.
‘No! Even for Chips …’
‘Yes. In fact I’m certain of it. Only I would not let him.’
‘I should think not,’ Doris said. Then, ‘I didn’t know you saw so much.’
‘How can I not see? Anyone who is in the same house as them, the same room as them, must see. And feel. Sometimes I think unhappiness is something to be touched,’ she said.
‘A blanket, woven in the air from all the sad thoughts, dropping around the shoulders of whoever is in company with those poor souls that think them. And Belgrave Square, for all its magnificence and Chips’ pride in it, is a sad place really.
Every room seems thick with things that cannot be said, or hopes that cannot be filled.
’ She made a shrugging motion with her shoulders, as though to push the thought away.
‘Poor Honor,’ Doris said.
They began walking again, and reached the swimming pool. Brigid made no move to change, just dropped her towel on the little wrought-iron table. Behind them, a bird sang urgently into the still morning. Perhaps it knew the gathering heat would soon defeat it, Doris thought.
‘Yes. But I do not know what to do for her. I have tried, you know.’ Brigid looked earnestly at her. ‘I really have. Patsy too. But we do not know what to say and she will not talk to us; behaves as though we’re still in the schoolroom and too young to be told. I’m glad you’re back.’
‘I’m glad too.’
Kick came into sight, running towards them from the house, already changed into her bathing suit, a white towelling robe draped over it.
‘Sometimes I look at Honor and I think – that’s what Chips wants for me,’ Brigid blurted out, just before Kick came into earshot.
‘A husband who hardly knows me and hardly considers me. A marriage just like his. And then sometimes I think he would be happy to replace my sister with me, should she really leave him. And that’s why he doesn’t push harder for Fritzi or Billy Cavendish. ’
Doris was too shocked to respond. She stood and said nothing, and then it was too late.
‘I’ll race you,’ Kick called, reaching them and throwing off her robe.
From the far end, she executed a perfect dive and swam the length of the pool underwater, surfacing to call, ‘Come on, Biddy! Hurry up!’ In all that sparkling water, she was, Doris thought, as though made of water too; just as quick and shining and supple.
She sat and watched the girls swim and splash, remembering the elastic bounce of youth and how quickly misery could be swapped for joy.
She saw Fritzi arrive and tell them it was time to leave, that Chips was impatient.
He waved to her, and asked how she did, but he didn’t blush, or linger, or try to find an excuse to sit with her. Doris smiled to herself.
She had known he would be here, of course she had, but not how he would be here; the friendship with Brigid and Kick that made him an actual person, out of uniform and suddenly real.
How naive he seemed when no longer yoked to the ugly Nazi pageantry of cross and badge.
Last night, when the three of them had come back from their walk, cheeks pink, brimming with mischief and something else – something that had overtaken them out there in the evening air – she had known instantly that her plans must change.
She had learned – long learned – to have many plans, all mutable, so that she might always be in motion towards a goal that shifted frequently, as circumstances shifted.
Always the same goal, but aimed at by different routes.
She had learned to abandon one plan and follow another, even while she looked to do nothing much at all.
To make use of circumstances as she found them and to keep her net wide open.
And so, after the tennis tournament in which they had played so well side by side, when Albert had tried to kiss her, rain streaming down his face, she had let him.
Later, when she twigged that there was, or might be, some glimmer of friendship between Brigid and Fritzi, she had been glad to have another plan already part begun that she might switch her efforts to.
She had seen immediately that this – Brigid and Fritzi – was a scheme of Chips’, which made her suspicious that it could be any good.
And yet, she had also seen an affection in the way Brigid and Fritzi looked at one another, that might be nothing and might be something if only they were left alone.
How funny that the person most likely to destroy Chips’ plans was Chips himself.
Either way, she decided, she would do nothing.
She would not build upon that early admiration for her that Fritzi had shown in Berlin.
She would be cool and distant and avoid any kind of intimate conversation.
It was exactly what she’d been told not to do – make her own plans.
How lucky there was Albert! A plan begun without any great foresight.
Rather, she thought with a smile, like coming across a safety pin and picking it up and putting it in a pocket, in case, only to find sometime later that a tear required it.
How pleased one felt then, to put a hand in and discover that casually collected thing.
Except it wasn’t casual, not exactly, but rather the knowledge born of experience – anything might prove useful; turn nothing away.
Let things found by chance be gathered by design.
She didn’t yet know what she expected, or even hoped, of Albert.
Only that he was more than he said, and at such a time, that was enough.
Perhaps he was simply a crook and had a bad past to hide.
Perhaps he was in love with the wrong person, or had once been close to a dubious politician.
But perhaps it was more? If he was here with Fritzi then it might well be more.
Whatever it was, Doris intended to find out.
She sighed, and stretched in the morning sun and yawned.
She was tired, she knew it. Tired from having to be so constantly in motion, always planning and watching; tired too from the need to be charming and seductive, to flatter men and find out what they knew without ever asking. Well, it wouldn’t be for much longer.