Their not-talking seemed to strike others as odd.Her mother sent volleys of significant looks in Kick’s direction, that slight drawing together of her finely pencilled eyebrows that wasn’t a frown, but was close, and that told Kick she didn’t like something she was doing or wearing.When Kick failed to respond, her mother was reduced to holding her gaze and shaking her head slightly.Kick looked back at her, eyes wide in innocent enquiry.Chips, meanwhile, seemed determined to find a job for Fritzi – ‘Darling boy, perhaps you would help me with this umbrella?’‘Could I ask you to go to the house for another cushion?Brigid will show you where.’Except that Brigid said, ‘Not I,’ lazily, and Fritzi, each time, did what Chips asked then returned to his seat beside Kick, so that Chips ended by looking cross and announced, ‘We might as well eat,’ quite sharply.
Lunch was almost like being back at Hyannis Port, Kick thought.Her mother’s influence was everywhere – in the food, the many salads and cold dishes, but also in the energy of conversation.Rather than the usual idle round of gossip and desultory tearing-apart of plays seen and books read, broad topics appeared and were debated vigorously.The table had been set up in the shade, and the chairs drawn close together that they might all fit, so that there was an energy to the kind of remarks that might have fallen flat if they were delivered at the long tables that were usual for meals in England – lost somewhere between the first and second salt cellars, abandoned between the decanters and flower arrangements.
Even so, when her father steered the conversation around to politics, Kick could see how hard he had to work at it.None of the others wanted that talk.They wriggled away from even his direct questions – ‘What do you make of the Sudetenland now?’– with polite dissemblings: ‘Seems a frightful mess,’ Billy’s father said soothingly.
‘Jolly complicated, I should think.’That was Billy.She knew they thought a great deal more than that, but didn’t want to discuss with the ambassador.
Kick squirmed at the transparency of her father’s efforts, and how much this was at odds with the English way of doing things.But he seemed not to care.Thwarted in one direction, he simply shifted to another.It was, she supposed, his great strength – he was neither tactful nor even particularly polite.Unembarrassed by their evasions, he simply asked the question again, in a different way.‘It’s a question of co-existence,’ he said at one point.Kick could almost hear Billy’s mother groan aloud.‘That’s the way of it now.Democracies and dictatorships, side by side, finding ways to live together.The idea of making the world over in an ideal image – well, that’s simply not the point any longer.’
‘So you would have us step back and let Germany do as she wishes?Grab with both hands land and territory and homes and farms that do not belong to them, then demand that we pretend they do?’Duff asked.
‘Co-existence,’ the ambassador insisted.‘It’s the only way.’
‘We must continue to seek peace,’ Chips said sonorously.He looked around.Only her father met his eye, nodding enthusiastically.
‘That’s so,’ he agreed.‘I suppose, even in the sorry event of a war, you won’t actually fight, Lord Devonshire?’he asked, laying his knife and fork neatly across an empty plate.
‘Of course we will fight,’ Lord Devonshire said wearily.‘I want war no more than you do.But if it comes to it, I will enlist, and my sons too.’
‘You can’t be serious?’Her father looked from the duke to Billy, then Andrew.
‘Naturally,’ Billy said.
‘Of course.’That was Andrew.‘I turned eighteen in January,’ he added proudly.
Kick saw the sudden alarmed twitch of his mother’s mouth, but she said nothing.
‘Some of us have joined up already,’ said Billy’s friend Hugo, eagerly, turning this way and that in his chair to look at them all.‘So as to be ready.’
‘Who is “us”?’her father asked.
‘A lot of the chaps who are at Cambridge with me,’ Hugo said.‘One wouldn’t want to wait for conscription.Wouldn’t look right.’
‘And so you rush to join, pledging yourselves to go and fight a war you cannot possibly win, in order tolook right?’Her father was incredulous, and with the bullying tone Kick knew from dinners at home.
‘I say, of course we’ll win,’ Hugo said, looking around again.Neither the duke nor Chips would meet his gaze, Kick saw.
‘What fools young men are,’ her father said.He said it angrily, the way he might have spoken to Joe Jnr or Jack if they had done something to annoy him.
Looking at her father’s angry face, the way all the other men at the table had drawn a little away from him and closer together, she thought again about what Jack had said when he first heard of the posting, and the laugh with which he had said it – ‘The least diplomatic person I ever met is to be America’s senior diplomat.Well I never,’ adding, ‘Roosevelt must know something we don’t.Or want something we don’t understand.’At the time, Kick had wondered what he meant and if he was just being clever.But it was true that her father was blunt and straight-talking, likely to antagonise and offend more than he was to placate.Why had he been sent here to deal with people so skilled at artfulness that they rarely said what they meant unless forced, yet understood each other perfectly?
‘It makes little difference if they enlist early or not,’ Billy’s father said stiffly.‘If it’s war, there will be conscription and they will go anyway.Might as well do the decent thing.’
‘The decent thing,’ the ambassador repeated scornfully.
‘At least we know Chips won’t be rushing to enlist,’ Elizabeth said, head to one side, eyes bright and round like a greedy bird, as she turned to her host.‘Such a relief,’ she added sweetly.
‘I will be far more useful where I am, in government,’ Chips said, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head, elbows resting complacently wide on either side of him.
‘So, Duff, that means you won’t go either?’Honor turned to him.
‘No,’ Maureen said swiftly.‘He iscertainlymore useful where he is.’She shot Chips a sarcastic look.
‘I wonder if Mr Chamberlain agrees,’ Chips murmured.
He looked as if he might say more, but Debo interrupted.‘Don’t,’ she said hurriedly.‘Don’t let’s.Not today.It’s so lovely, and feels so far away from awful things like enlisting and gas masks and blackouts.Talking only makes it worse.’She looked at Andrew as she spoke.
‘Indeed,’ Billy’s father said stiffly.‘Hardly the time.’
