Chapter Fifty-Four #2
‘Worried that she hasn’t heard from Doris and pestering Andrews to see if there has been any post or any phonecalls.
It seems there is a girl called Hannah arriving tomorrow.
Someone Doris knows from Berlin. Doris arranged it.
Actually, I think your father has something to do with it, only I don’t know what …
Anyway, Doris made the plans, and the hope is that the girl’s parents will follow later.
But now Honor has heard that Hannah travels alone – Michaels is to meet her at Euston station – not with Doris, and she can’t get Doris on the telephone, and she’s fretting.
There is never anyone in when she telephones to the flat in Berlin, and now so many days have gone by without hearing that she is in rather a state … ’
Teddy tapped at the door and put his head around to say, ‘Mother says you’re to come down.’ He was wearing a hat with paper stuck along the sides to make it round, like the Home Guard.
‘Alright. And don’t let Mother see you wearing that hat.’ And to Brigid, ‘She thinks we are all far too English.’ Then, ‘Come out with us tonight? Jack is here. He sails home with us on the Washington next week and tonight he’s taking me to the Café de Paris.’
‘Who else will be there?’
‘Billy has leave.’
‘I rather thought he might,’ Brigid said slyly.
‘He’s dining with his parents, but says he’ll meet us later.
He and Jack get on real well, you know,’ with one of her brightest smiles.
‘Jack’s thesis for Harvard is England’s Foreign Policy Since 1931.
Billy is helping him a whole lot.’ And she sang along with Glenn Miller’s band, about wishing long enough then wishing will make it so …
‘I told him Jack thought as he did, not like Pa,’ she continued then, ‘when we were at Kelvedon, but I don’t think he believed me.
Not until he met Jack. That changed everything.
’ She spoke with satisfaction. ‘They met at the Mountbattens when we went to lunch there, and had such a long talk. And the very next day, just as I had given up thinking he ever would, Billy asked me out. Only to the pictures, but still …’
‘Do you not think that when you go back to America all this will fade?’ Brigid asked as she climbed down, gesturing around the room and out towards the street outside.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. When you’re not here anymore, it – we – will all start to dwindle and recede and seem like a funny little dream you had? Everything in America is so much bigger and shinier and louder. Even your fridge.’ Brigid laughed.
‘Never,’ Kick declared. ‘Mother thinks my real life is back in America, but I know it’s not. It’s right here. Now, come on.’
That evening, she and Jack made their way to the Café de Paris through streets that were completely, carefully dark.
Blackouts had begun. They walked, even though it was more than half an hour, because Jack said he wanted to.
‘Can’t you feel how eerie it is?’ he said excitedly, as they made their slow way through Hyde Park, stepping around the slashed ground, then along Piccadilly, where the occasional car with black paint over its headlamps moved slowly past them, as though feeling its way into the night.
‘Don’t,’ Kick said.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t forget it’s real, that’s what. I know it’s easy to. To get all caught up like Teddy is in make-believe, because we will be going away. But don’t forget that after we are gone, our friends will all still be here.’
‘I’m not seven, Kick.’ He put his arm around her.
Around them, Kick could hear the tap-tapping of umbrellas and canes as people felt their way along from darkened lamppost to darkened lamppost. Jack seemed to know his way by instinct, leading them surely in and out of barriers and blockages.
‘I don’t forget that. And I know it’s just terrible.
’ He gave her shoulders a squeeze. ‘But how much more terrible would it be if there was no war? If they didn’t fight?
If they just rolled over again and again? ’
‘You’ve been talking to Billy again. Don’t let Pa hear you.’
The lighted sign had been switched off above the Café de Paris and the curtains drawn tight across the inside so that they nearly walked right past it.
Only at the last minute did Kick say, ‘Oh, we’re here.
’ And then, for a moment, she wondered did she even want to go in.
How dark it looked; how lonely, this place that had always streamed light and laughter.
But once inside and down the double staircase that circled the dancefloor and bar like a pair of friendly arms sleeved in red velvet, it was as gay as ever.
Every table was full, the bar was thick with people and the dancefloor filled with couples.
Jack found them a table and they sat close together.
Kick nodded and waved to anyone she knew, and Jack pointed out any girls he thought especially pretty. There was no sign of Billy yet.
‘Why is Pa in trouble?’ she asked after a while. ‘I see the papers say pretty terrible things about him. Is it because he’s sending us all home?’
‘Partly that. And partly because he said that democracies and dictatorships have to learn to live together in the same world, whether anyone likes it or not. And that this isn’t a cause for war.’
‘It’s no more than he said in the garden at Kelvedon last summer.’
‘But now he has said it publicly, and everyone is angry. The English are angry, Roosevelt is angry. I guess he’ll be recalled soon enough, only it suits Roosevelt to leave him where he is for now. Pa in disgrace is a fine thing for Roosevelt.’
‘How so?’
‘There’ll be no bid for the presidency now.’
‘The what?’
‘The presidency. Come on, Kick, surely you knew that’s what his plan was?’ He looked amused.
‘I hadn’t an idea in the world.’
They danced, then Jack went to dance with a girl Kick knew while she sat and watched. ‘Perhaps he’s not coming,’ she said when Jack came back.
‘He’ll come,’ Jack said. He didn’t need to ask who.
‘I don’t know why he likes me,’ she said then.
‘I do.’ Jack took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ve met enough English girls by now to see exactly why. They might be pretty – some are very beautiful, like that blonde girl over there – but they’re dull. You’re so different to them, you’re like a swan among ducklings.’
‘I thought I might be the exact opposite,’ Kick said. ‘A duckling, invisible among swans.’
‘Never.’
‘How nice you are, Jack.’
‘And how right. Look.’ He nudged her. Sure enough, there was Billy, tall and thin and elegant in his green-grey uniform, coming down the stairs. He had seen them and made straight for their table, despite the hands and voices that reached to detain him.
‘I say, frightfully sorry. Dinner took longer than expected.’ He asked Kick to dance, and she said yes, and saw Jack make his way over to the blonde girl.
On the dancefloor, pushed close together by the couples around them, Billy apologised again. ‘I had to have rather a long talk with my parents,’ he explained.
‘About the boarding school?’ Kick asked.
‘The what—? Oh, no. About you, if you must know.’
‘Why me?’ Her heart began to thump, like it had forgotten how to beat properly. She wondered could he feel it through the scratchy khaki of his jacket.
‘I said I was coming on to meet you, and they had rather a lot of questions. Why, and what did I mean by it; that sort of thing. They weren’t terribly thrilled with that rot you wrote for the Catholic Women’s League about the new pope,’ – he grinned – ‘the pale and wan figure who lifts his hand in the sign of the Cross. I rather thought my poor father might choke when he read that. Especially given that it was Cardinal Pacelli, who was turning into Pope …’
‘Pius XII,’ Kick supplied.
‘Yes, him. And everyone knows he’s an old friend.’
‘An acquaintance. And now pope, so … Anyway, I did think about it,’ Kick admitted.
‘But then I thought, I can’t be more like what they want me to be, because I don’t even know what that is.
I can just be myself.’ She stumbled as a couple, moving faster than the rather melancholy tempo of the song the West Indian orchestra were playing, bumped her.
‘Which may not be at all what they like, but it’s the best I can do. ’
‘In any case, I told them it didn’t matter.’ He spoke as though she hadn’t. ‘That I was jolly well going to keep seeing you.’
‘Oh, Billy, did you really?’ Kick knew her father would leave – either because Roosevelt recalled him, or because he couldn’t bear his post any longer – and that her mother would be pleased.
That Prince’s Gate would be packed up. And maybe she would have to sail on the Washington next week, because they would make her.
But she also knew – knew as surely as she knew how to find C on a piano, or the right way to throw a football – that she would come back.
America, no matter how hard she called it to mind, had little reality for her now.
In her memory, it was pale and candy-coloured and shallow.
It was all surface and reflection, it didn’t have the deeper layers that England did.
That way of getting inside her – the way that everything, from the smell of soot and sodden wool in London, to the sound of trees, the wind through old walls in the countryside – sat deeper within her than anything else ever had.
It was Billy, of course it was. But it wasn’t just Billy.
It was a recognition, a rightness, to here and herself here, that she couldn’t give up.
She’d go – she’d have to – to America, land of soda fountains and pool parties and college football games. But she’d be back. That was the important thing. Somehow I will come back, she told herself. I don’t know how, but I will. This is where I’m going to grow old and die, I swear it.
‘Tell me exactly what you said to them,’ she said to Billy, turning her face up to his so that he could kiss her if he wanted to.