Page 66 of An Invitation to the Kennedys

‘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.