‘And young Kathleen; shall we be seeing much more of her, do you think?’
‘A dear girl,’ Billy’s father said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t imagine she’d be any sort of a match for any of our young men.Even if one did get her out from under the papal shadow.’
‘She must have so much to get back to, in America,’ Moucher said.
And Chips nodded and smiled and glowed with approval and pleasure.And Brigid, who could see what Kick wouldn’t quite admit – just how very much she liked Billy – thought how mean he was after all, to try to wreck her hopes so casually.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kick
Billy, Andrew, Hugo and Debo were easily persuaded to stay for dinner, especially when Chips said, ‘Ambassador Kennedy has sent to London for a projector and a screen, and plans to show us a film later.’
‘How splendid,’ Debo said.‘I wonder what it will be.Something new from Hollywood?Kick’s Papa gets all the very latest films.He used to be a producer, you know.’This to Billy, who looked startled.‘Perhaps something with Hedy Lamarr?’She looked wistful.‘Farve won’t allow us to see her films.’
Dinner was merry, as though the departure of the Devonshires had set them all a little freer.Kick watched how easily Billy conversed with everyone, whether it was talking about Cambridge with Duff, answering the many questions put to him by her mother, or making jokes with Elizabeth.She saw, too, how he looked over, often, to where she sat beside Fritzi.And stayed looking when she looked back.Their eyes met and tangled in a way that felt to her as though everything else at the table – the chatter and laughter, the food – was distant and background.
Her father was quiet but perhaps that was because he was thinking about the film.She hoped it would be a comedy.
Once dinner was over, they went immediately through to the library, where chairs had been placed in two rows before a screen that had been hung in the space between the windows.To Kick, it looked entirely familiar – they had a movie room in the basement of the house in Bronxville – but the others ooh-ed and ah-ed as though this were something special, arranging themselves in seats, dragging them this way and that, that they might have a better view.
She noticed that Billy was quick to take the chair beside hers, and even pulled it in a little closer to her.Her father was on her other side, with Brigid behind her.Chips, she saw, made sure to seat Fritzi beside Brigid, who edged her chair slightly away.Kick smiled to herself.
‘Lights, please,’ her father called, and the room was made dark.The footman operating the projector turned it on and Kick immediately relaxed into the familiar whirling sound that had heralded so many happy hours.
First, an uneven square of light, then the words ‘Flashes of Action’ appeared.Another lighted square, and ‘Actualities of the World War’, followed by ‘Signal Corps of the US Army’.Beside her, she felt Billy stir, and all around she could feel the disappointment.‘Not the latest Hollywood Funny, then,’ someone muttered.She thought it might have been Elizabeth.She half-turned in her seat to make an apologetic face at Brigid, and turned back to find the screen filled with men, swarms of them, boarding a troop ship.They were pouring up the gangplank and spreading out across the ship in a dense wave.So many that they were like sea birds, gathered thick on a rocky outcrop.
‘The Leviathan,’ words on the screen read.
‘Largest ship in the world,’ her father said.‘Over ten thousand troops left New York in her in 1918.’Beside Kick, Billy’s leg twitched.
The images on screen were now of men dancing, boxing, passing time as the great ship made her way across the ocean.‘I’d put a few bob on that chap,’ Hugo called out as two men squared up to one another and exchanged good-natured blows.Everyone laughed, except her father.
The steady lurching motion of the images made Kick feel sick, and where the camera panned out across the wide expanse of empty ocean, she felt an obscure terror.She was glad when the mighty ship reached France and disembarkation, spilling men like black dots, thousands of them, waving and grinning at the camera as they walked down the gangplank and onto French soil.There was chatter around the library now – Elizabeth was loudly asking was there nothing else to watch, while Hugo had started a story about his last visit to France, frequently interrupted by Brigid, who questioned him on everything he said.
The pictures changed, and one by one, they fell silent.Now, it was the landscape that was vast; empty fields and men spaced out in clusters, running in desperate, speeded-up motion from one paltry clump of trees to another.The silence was the worst of it, Kick thought, as she watched clouds of smoke and grit explode in front of her and watched men fall and struggle to rise, and fall again.Without sound, the film had a nightmare quality at once remote and immediate.She felt as though she was responsible for their fate, could have stopped the painful progress with a gesture, a hand up to say halt.Even though they had run and fought and lived and died twenty years ago.
Behind the lines of soldiers came the stretchers; men in twos with a strip of canvas between them, onto which they frantically tumbled bodies while the ground and air exploded around them.Not all the bodies were taken.Some were left where they had fallen.
Now the pictures were of a hole blown in the ground in which men lay and hunkered down like prairie dogs, one on top of the other.There was bandaging of legs, of knees, of heads, blood black and thick on the thin white screen.
‘Those were the lucky ones.’Her father’s voice.‘They were Americans.’
More landscape, picked out in fog and smoke.The figures were ghostly now, appearing and disappearing, crouching and running, swallowed up by white clouds then spat out again.Another change.This time a pretty French town with slated roofs.The kind she had visited often during her year at the convent in Paris.She watched – they all watched – as shells landed and roofs blew apart.
‘I think that’s enough.’Her mother, standing, motioned to the footman to turn on the lights.
As though a spell had been broken, everyone was suddenly on their feet, moving to get out of the room.Kick had expected angry questions – ‘Why?What?’– but there weren’t any.Even Duff left politely, standing aside for Maureen and saying, ‘After you, please.’The room had emptied like sand through a sieve, clean and swift.Kick busied herself taking down the screen the way she had been taught.She needed time.She didn’t want to see Billy’s face.
Only Elizabeth stayed behind, and her father.
‘What on earth was that?’Elizabeth asked, with a directness that was unusual for her.
‘That was a much-needed show of real life,’ Kick’s father said.‘Those young men talk of honour, of glory, with no thought for what war really is.And so I’ve shown them.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Elizabeth said quietly.‘They know.They talk of honour and glory to distract themselves from what they know very well is the reality.They have known what war means since they were children, when their fathers and older brothers went off to the same conflict you’ve now shown them pictures of.Billy’s father served in Egypt, then in Turkey.’
‘He didn’t say …’
