Page 68 of An Invitation to the Kennedys

‘And what is wrong with that?’Chips asked.

‘Everything is wrong with it!’

‘I would play, most willingly,’ Fritzi said cautiously, looking from Brigid to Chips, ‘if that is what is decided upon.’

‘No Murder in the Dark,’ Chips said again.‘Sorry, dear boy, it simply won’t do.But perhaps you and Lady Brigid would like to take a look at the watercolours in the Green Room?’His eyes gleamed so that he looked, Brigid thought, like an owl, tucked into that dim corner.

‘Watercolours!’she said irritably.‘The very idea.’She left, and Kick followed her, catching up with her on the stairs.‘What a spoilsport he is,’ she said again.‘Unless something ishisidea, and then he cannot hear no.But I’ve got an idea.’She grinned.‘One that will be fun, and will jolly well pay him back.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘A haunting!We’re going to create a ghost and scare the life out of them.’

‘Yes,’ Kick said instantly, ‘and let’s do it quickly, while they are all gathered there together.It will be much easier.’

They ran upstairs, to Kick’s room, and began to plan.They had got little further than agreeing to take the sheets off Brigid’s bed when there was a tap on the door.Elizabeth.

‘I say, what are you two doing?’she asked, eyes wide and round.‘And can I play too?It is simply no fun downstairs at all.’

‘You can,’ Brigid said.‘We are planning a haunting.A real live ghost story.’

‘The very thing!’Elizabeth agreed.‘How?’

Brigid explained about the sheets, and added that they hoped to borrow a lipstick from Kick’s mother, ‘to make it look bloody—’ when Elizabeth interrupted.

‘Wait.’She held up a hand.‘That’s all very well, but the real trick is to set the scene.It’s all about illusion.If you create the possibility of ghosts in their minds, they will be the quicker to believe that’s what it is.Otherwise someone will say, ‘Is that the water system acting up?’and they will all go around tapping at pipes.The real trick is to suggest, rather than say, and let them do the rest.’

‘She’s right!’Kick’s eyes gleamed.‘We need to set the scene!’

Chapter Thirty-Six

Doris

The ambassador asked a great many questions, listening closely to the answers, blue eyes steady in the way they held hers, as though considering not just what she said, but the way she said it.He asked simple questions – how many cars on the roads of Berlin, about the rail network, the price of basic items – and questions that were not simple: what sense of itself had Germany now, and how was that changed in the time since she had been there?Did she believe the German people were united?What were their feelings about the possibility of war?She answered as best she could, even though she could see that some of her answers displeased him.

‘What do you make of morale?’he asked.‘The mood of the people?’

‘It is hard to say,’ she answered truthfully.‘Bullish, mostly, but there are things to make them uneasy.People disappear.Families.Some go because they are afraid.Others simply vanish.’It was more than she’d said to Honor, or Chips.

‘These are Jewish families?’

‘Yes, but it unsettles others too.You cannot take a family out of a community and not leave a gap, a hole behind.And even if those families are no longer believed to be “German”, that is still true.’

‘I have heard the stories of disappearances.I believe them to be exaggerated.’

‘I do not.’

‘What have you seen that suggests they are not?’

‘You asked my impressions, and I’m giving them to you, that’s all.’

‘I don’t read much of this in your newspaper articles,’ he said, eyes shrewd behind his glasses.

‘You read my articles?’

‘I read everything.’

‘Well, that is not what I have been sent to write about.I am to write about daily life.’