Chapter Forty-Five
Brigid
‘I knew this outing was a mistake,’ Brigid muttered to Kick after they had wandered around for an hour or so, peering at a series of tumbled-down walls that meandered in and out of each other in a way that looked purposeful, if one could be bothered to decipher the purpose.
There was a wind up there on the downs. She wished she’d brought a cardigan.
‘It’s kind of interesting, no?’
‘No.’
Kick looked at the place in front of her where a series of stone steps had been cut into the ground. ‘This looks like it was a swimming pool. It’s very like the one at Kelvedon. Same size, same shape. I wonder did a lot of Roman versions of us play around in it?’
‘Who cares if they did?’ Brigid wandered off.
The day, she thought, had been deathly. The way Kick’s mother enthused about the ruins – apparently they were part of an old bathhouse or something – made her want to scream.
Rose asked a million questions and put forward a million theories: ‘This must be where they …’ Even Chips began to flag.
As for the ambassador, he took a quick and cursory look, pronounced it ‘very interesting’, then went to sit in the motorcar with the newspaper and a writing pad, saying he must work.
Brigid could see him now, chewing the end of his fountain pen.
Standing there in the brisk force of the wind, she realised how tightly Kelvedon was squashed into its sheltered hollow.
Like being in a closed fist, she thought, wrapped tight and hot inside something that yielded to a push but did not willingly open.
She stretched her arms out on either side, leaning into the wind that seemed as though it would bear her up.
She revelled in the space, the expanse of land around her that travelled on in rolls of springy turf, to the horizon.
Was it really only a few days since they arrived?
It felt as though they had all been cooped up in that house for far longer, boiling and suffocating together.
‘You look like you’re about to float away,’ Fritzi said, coming to stand beside her.
‘Don’t you feel like you could just let go, and the wind would hold you up?’
‘It wouldn’t.’
She sighed. ‘I know it wouldn’t, I said don’t you feel like it would. Go on, lean back, into it. Put your arms out and let it take over.’ He did as she said, cautiously – ‘Arms further out!’ she instructed – then smiled.
‘I see what you mean. Like the old feather beds in my grandfather’s schloss. They were stuffed so full, it was like flying. I used to imagine I was on the back of an enormous goose, soaring above the Swabian mountains.’
Brigid burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You. On a giant goose.’
He smiled at her. ‘I imagined that I could see everything below, not just the schloss with all its turrets and flags flying, but the villages with their little houses, the fields, the farmers, their beasts. Women churning butter, brewing beer, even sewing tiny pieces of fabric together to make quilts.’
‘You know, that’s the first thing I’ve heard you say that isn’t entirely practical,’ Brigid said thoughtfully. ‘Just as I had given up believing there was anything romantic to you at all.’
‘It’s not that I am unromantic,’ he protested. ‘It is that this is not a time for romance.’
‘I don’t know,’ Brigid said lazily. ‘Others seem to think it is. Kick, and maybe Billy.’ She looked sideways at Fritzi, but he didn’t seem interested in whatever she was hinting at.
‘The threat of war, of change, talk of young men enlisting. I mean, I know it’s horrid, but surely there is something a little romantic about it? ’
‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘For me, it is only alarming.’
‘Why? You start these things, and then you don’t finish them.’ Severely. ‘What exactly is so alarming for you? More than for others? Most young men are silly about war.’
‘I feel I am a tethered goat – made to stand and be seen that I may bring the lions prowling around me,’ he said bitterly. ‘And they in turn may be seen and be shot. Or seen and approached, I am not even sure which.’
‘Who are the lions?’ Brigid asked, trying to follow his thoughts, which – just like the giant goose – were so unlike his usual practicalities.
‘I don’t know that either. Only, I know that my family are part of it, and that they think less of me than they do of themselves.’
‘They throw you out, like bait, to see who will be drawn?’
‘Exactly.’
She felt suddenly sorry for him. His English was no longer faultless. If anything, he struggled to express himself, and where he struggled, there was the hint, now, of an accent. Instead of the polished young man, he seemed confused. Unhappy. Human.
‘You could say no,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Of course you could,’ she insisted, impatient.
‘But I don’t know what to say no to, because no one has asked me anything.’
‘You really don’t know?’
‘No, and maybe there is nothing to know. Maybe I have made it all up. But I don’t think so.
And sometimes I think even your uncle, Chips, knows more than I do.
And I do know that I despise what my family has become – we are lapdogs, a pekinese with a bow around its neck, that Hitler may pet and tease and show off.
My father thinks that we play the Nazis at a clever game, but we don’t. They play us.’
‘So many plays and plots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘First lions and now dogs … You know how silly this all sounds?’
‘Only for someone who has always lived in England. In Germany, everyone has been scared and suspicious for a long time.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ she said, suddenly brusque.
‘I think not only is this a lot of nonsense, it’s a lot of dangerous nonsense.
It’s just the kind of thing that starts almost like a game – and indeed you sound to me like you are showing off – but ends up being far too serious when the wrong person decides to take it seriously. ’
‘You are surprising,’ he said then. ‘I thought you were just like English girls. Tennis. Horses. Always hearty. Secretly embarrassed by opera—’
‘Not so secretly,’ she said.
‘—fonder of dogs than people. A person made in a mould that has already turned out thousands of others.’
‘Well, I didn’t have a very good impression of you either,’ she said with a laugh.
‘I know that. King Midas’ son.’ He laughed and Brigid did too.
‘What are you both laughing at?’ Kick came upon them. She had a bottle of lemonade which she offered first to Brigid, who accepted and took a long swig, then Fritzi, who refused with a shake of his head.
‘Nothing here, that’s for sure,’ Brigid said. ‘Surely we must be finished exploring by now?’
‘You obviously don’t know my mother,’ Kick said wryly. ‘Not while there is a stone unturned, a question unasked.’
‘I almost feel sorry for Chips,’ Brigid said gloomily. ‘Though not as sorry as I feel for myself.’
‘He does seem to have run out of answers,’ Fritzi agreed. ‘I’ve seen him looking quite desperately at the guidebook twice now.’
‘That’s my mother for you,’ Kick said.
It was, Brigid thought, exasperated, but also fond, even admiring. She could hear Rose now ‘… imagine the hub of activity this must have been? A place for everyone to meet and tell their news.’
Despite herself, Brigid found that she was imagining – a girl like herself, with the same dreams and worries, with a store of sad and happy memories, little songs that she sang, a pet name her mother called her.
A girl who worried that her hair was too coarse and her eyes less pretty than her sister’s.
Who had come here with a basket and the hope of meeting someone in particular.
Whose heart thumped hard just like Brigid’s did.
And that girl, who was just as real for a second as she herself was, had grown and changed and lived and died and been remembered and then forgotten.
The thought made Brigid dizzy because of what it meant. If that girl had been real, then she too, just as real, would one day be nothing.
‘Are you alright?’ Kick asked. ‘You look awfully odd.’
‘I’m hungry.’
The picnic was as dreadful as picnics usually were, Brigid decided.
No spot was comfortable once you actually sat there.
The plaid blanket was hairy, and scratched at her bare legs so that she had to sit on her sunhat, which crushed it.
The food, so pretty-looking packed into the big wicker basket in porcelain containers with pewter lids, then laid out on the patterned china plates, was altogether less appealing when you had to fight for it with wasps and ants.
The ambassador took his sandwiches back to the car with him.
His wife sat on a rock with Chips and made the best of it in a way that was elegant and determined and disappointed and was, Brigid thought, the way she did almost everything.
She and Kick and Fritzi ate a great deal and drank lemonade from a stone bottle that was still cold, but the many different foods – chicken, tongue, a potato salad – made her feel sick. She was still chilly.
‘Take my jacket,’ Fritzi said, seeing her shiver. He placed it around her shoulders.
‘Thank you.’ She found now that being warmer made her feel sleepy. She stretched out on the lumpy ground and shut her eyes. Lying flat, the wind was less noticeable, and she had just begun to drift off to the sound of Kick and Fritzi chatting beside her when Chips bustled up.
‘Time to get on,’ he said. ‘Will you pack up the picnic? We’ve been gone quite long enough.’
What, she wondered, did he imagine might have happened in their absence?
It was surprisingly hard to pack the basket back as it had been when they opened it.
Only Fritzi seemed able to get the hang of it: ‘The preserve jar goes into the tea mug, see? And the plates stack – dinner plate, side plate, saucer – one on top of the other, before you buckle them back in again.’ He wouldn’t allow Brigid to tumble the dishes and cutlery in any old how, saying, ‘But it won’t close if you do that. ’
‘Who cares? The servants can put it right when we get back to the house.’
But he wouldn’t, insisting on everything in its rightful place, until Brigid handed him his jacket back in fury and went to sit in the maroon-coloured Rolls Royce with Kick, saying, ‘No room, you’ll have to ride in the other car,’ when he tried to join them.
‘But there are more people in the other car …’ he said, momentarily confused.
‘No room,’ she said again and shut the door.
‘My mother won’t allow the windows down. He’ll be like a dog, desperate for air,’ Kick said. She rolled her window right down. ‘But I think you’re being pretty hard on him.’
‘Did you see how he fussed over the butter tin? As though it had diamonds or something in it.’
‘He’s meticulous, that’s all.’
‘Fussy.’ Her early sympathy for him was gone, she found. Probably he had just made all that stuff up, about being surrounded and watched. ‘What shall we do when we get back? There’ll be heaps of time before dinner.’
‘I’ll teach you to dance the Big Apple. It’s harder than it looks and you need a lot of people to do it right, because you have to make a big circle, but I can show you the steps. You and Fritzi can dance together.’
‘If he can dance,’ Brigid said. ‘I hate a man who can’t dance.’
‘We’ll ask him.’