Page 73 of An Invitation to the Kennedys

Kick looked at him.‘Sometimes, I don’t know if you are joking,’ she said.

‘I think every generation says this,’ he said.

‘Says what?’

‘That they don’t want to be like the generation that has gone before them.In German we have a word for it.’

‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Brigid said.

‘Well, they can’t all mean it,’ Kick said.‘But I do.’Then, ‘Let’s go out, it’s hardly raining anymore.’

‘Shall we get coats?’That was Brigid.

‘Never mind coats.Let’s just go.’

‘May I come with you?’Fritzi asked.

‘Alright,’ Brigid said.‘But only if you come now and don’t start fussing.’

They set off, the three of them, across the gravel.‘If we stay on the path and keep off the lawns, we won’t be seen from the house,’ Brigid said.‘They’d only come after us.’

The path led to the front of the house, where they left it before it veered close to the drawing room windows.These were covered, the curtains drawn inside, but as Fritzi said, ‘You never know …’ Instead, they set off towards the stables, on a dirt track that was soggier, where their feet made almost no noise.It wasn’t true that the rain had stopped, but it had slowed to what Brigid, after some silent moments, described as ‘a wet trickle’.

‘Anyway, what brings you with us?’Kick asked Fritzi at last.‘Did you follow us?’

‘Not exactly.I wanted to get out of there and thought I might go to my room for an hour.But when I came into the hallway, I saw the two of you.There was something about the way you were, with the open door in front of you and the smell of evening that came through it – you looked like you were about to take flight.And I wanted to go with you.’

It was, Kick thought, the first thing she had heard him say that wasn’t dull to a fault, correct and lifeless.Brigid, too, must have noticed, because she smiled at him.‘How romantic.’And she wasn’t as mocking as she might have been.

He was different, out there in the slowing rain.Less pompous.More energetic.He even looked different, in the near-dark that was cut through by a strip of evening light widening a bright gap between sky and ground over to the west.

‘You know we call you King Midas’ son,’ Brigid said.

‘I heard you whispering it, but I didn’t think you meant me.At least,’ he corrected himself, ‘I thought you did mean me, but I couldn’t understand why, or what it meant.’

‘You didn’t seem like a real person,’ Brigid said.‘You seemed like the outline of a person, done by someone who didn’t know any actual real people.’

‘A boy, made out of gold.A statue created by mistake,’ Kick clarified.

‘I see.’He sounded hurt.‘And yet I am as real as anyone.’

‘You are now.Nearly, anyway,’ Brigid assured him.

‘Only nearly?’

‘Still a tiny hint of gold …’

‘I cannot help that.’He said it stiffly.

‘She’s teasing,’ Kick said.

Brigid, slightly ahead by now, ducked under a mass of laurel leaves and, turning, batted them back towards Fritzi so that the weight of water resting on them flew at him, drops landing on his face and chest.He laughed, and pushed the branch back at her.Except that the leaves had shed their covering of rain and simply made a swishing sound as they moved.

‘You know,’ he said then, ‘at times, I do feel like a statue.Everyone looking and looking at me, saying what I am and how I am made …’ He sounded plaintive.

‘Is this going to be a long chat about you?’Brigid asked.It was the kind of thing Maureen would say, Kick thought, but Brigid said it kindly.

‘No.I do not mean …’