After breakfast and a bath, she decided not to sleep but to go for a walk.She was impatient to see how the city had changed – if at all – in the year since she had last been here.Would the old woman who sold packets of bread crusts to feed to the pigeons still be at the corner of Green Park?The same display of marbled writing paper in the stationery shop?But first a phonecall.She dialled the number from Chips’ library, looking around at the walls of green-and-gold leather-bound books.Anyone else, she would assume they had never been read, but with Chips, one never quite knew.
‘I’ve arrived,’ she said into the receiver when the phone was answered.
‘We’ll see you for tea,’ came the response.
Outside, she let herself luxuriate in the relief of walking without thought for who walked behind her.Striding out on streets that knew nothing of her and were content to be that way.She walked about as she wished, never looking over her shoulder, stopping to chat – the old lady with the crusts was indeed there – when she chose to, without a thought beyond what amused her.
Later, back at Number Five, with the man she knew to expect and two others who introduced themselves as ‘Mr White’, ‘Mr Black’ – so that she knew these were not their real names – she poured tea for herself, brought by Robert, and whiskey for them.
‘When do you leave?’Mr White asked her.
‘Tomorrow.I’ll take the train and then a taxi.I am expected.’
‘Very good.’He lit a cigar and settled back in his armchair.They talked openly then, even bluntly, of what Doris had seen in Berlin – was von Arent still close to Hitler?No, Doris thought not, there was an edge to him, a striving petulance that hadn’t been there before.And what of Hans Fritzsche?The coming man, if Doris wasn’t mistaken; close with Goebbels.
As they spoke – plainly and without allusion, their voices discreet but not whispers – she became aware that something inside her unknotted and unwound and relaxed, and how that was the first time she had realised the coiled tension was there at all.As though, she thought, it were like the snake in Berlin Zoo that was so perfectly camouflaged among the leaves and branches of its cage that it was only when it moved you saw it.
‘If you can do anything with the ambassador, do,’ Mr Black said.‘Anything that you can tell him that will incline him to push our cause with Roosevelt would be useful, but that’s the least important part of what you’re there for.It’s the prince you’re to concentrate on.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘What kind of man is he?Where do his sympathies really lie?Can he be trusted?Will he answer the purpose?That sort of thing.’
‘That sort of thing,’ Doris echoed, nodding.She didn’t say anything about Hannah, even though the girl was who she thought of always.She had wondered would she, but knew it would do no good even as she wondered.
Doris did what was asked of her because it was the best way to help the people she wanted to help.People like her aunt and cousins, Hannah and her family.And even though she knew that the men who gave her instruction, this Mr White and Mr Black, cared far less about these people than she did – they cared for big things: England’s safety, Europe’s stability, the dismantling of the Reich – all the same their intentions and hers meshed at times, overlapped in ways that might help the people she cared about.
She didn’t tell them that she cared for their plans only in as much as they assisted hers, and they didn’t tell her that her plans – her people – were unimportant, except incidentally, to them.
She supposed that no one told each other the full truth anymore.That was a luxury for more settled times.
‘Only telephone if you need to,’ Mr Black told her as they left.‘Better to have as little contact as possible.’She closed the library door after them, then opened the window to let out the smell of cigar smoke.Within half an hour there was nothing to show they had been there.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kelvedon, Essex
Honor
If she were to leave, go back to London, go to Elveden and her parents – go to the devil himself – would any of them even notice?Honor wondered.She was like a ghost in her own house, moving from room to room unnoticed and unlooked for.She drifted into conversations and drifted out again.Nothing depended on her, nothing waited or hurried for her.Anything that Chips didn’t do, Brigid did.Even Rose Kennedy seemed more knitted into the fabric of Kelvedon than Honor was, familiar already with the kitchens, Mrs Bath the cook, the head gardener.Her sharp-elbowed energy pushing into the house and grounds.Chips should have married someone like that, she thought.Such a person would have been a match for him.Not someone so …reluctant, she decided, was the word.She thought of Chips then with a different kind of wife.Someone like Rose or Emerald, whom he could consult with, plot with, scheme with.Would he have been proud of such a person?Yes, undoubtedly.Would he have watched them betray him with another man and spoken only of money?Undoubtedly not.
She looked into the library.No sign of the ambassador’s screen or projector.The room was still and withdrawn as though ashamed of the part it had played last night.What was the man thinking?What had he hoped, showing those terrible things?And how dared he presume to do so without a word?Again, she couldn’t help thinking of her mother.No one would have shown such images in a house where Lady Iveagh was, she thought.No one.
But by the time she got to the morning room, it was as though the day before had been wiped away.As if a maid with a mop had come and simply scrubbed it out.The tennis tournament had become a reality, and Brigid and Kick, cool in shorts and thin button-down shirts, were seated side by side at the breakfast table, empty plates pushed in front of them – china islands on the smooth polished surface – poring over a page on which they had written everyone’s names.‘Chips is good, but he cheats, so we need to match him with someone who will keep him honest,’ Brigid said as Honor came in.
‘Well then you may put him with Kick,’ Ambassador Kennedy said.‘She is the straightest person in the world.Wouldn’t know how to cheat if her life depended on it.’
Rose, beside him, looked composed in a crisp white cotton sundress.On the chair beside her was a broad-brimmed white hat.She nodded in agreement and said, ‘Duff, will you play?’Honor heard the use of his pet name – only Maureen, and her family, called him that – and wondered at it.Did the woman not understand the impertinence?Maureen, she noted, wasn’t down yet.Probably wouldn’t be for hours.Duff, head bent overThe Times, only looked up quickly and nodded once, then went back to his reading.
‘You can play with me, Duff,’ Brigid said.‘We are a good match.You are stronger, but you don’t concentrate as well as I.’
‘I had hopedImight be Lady Brigid’s partner,’ Fritzi, sitting opposite, said then.
‘You can play with Elizabeth,’ Brigid said.Kick giggled and Fritzi looked dashed.‘It’s because I know you to be good,’ Brigid added kindly.‘Chips has told me.And Elizabeth will need that.’
‘If she ever gets up,’ Chips said petulantly.He was sitting at the head of the table.Seeing Honor come in, he had patted the empty chair beside him.But Honor chose to ignore him, instead taking a cup of tea and going to sit in the armchair by the window.This was open and, beside it, a clematis had been encouraged to grow up and around.The sweet almond scent of the flowers came to her like a reminder that outside, elsewhere, there were other ways to be, other things to do, that had nothing to do with this house and these people.
‘What about Maureen?’Rose said then, looking around.She sat so straight it was as though she had stitched fine steel rods into the white cotton of her dress.She held an empty cup out towards her husband, who filled it from the silver coffee pot at the centre of the table.
