‘Yes, and even then it was another hour, I would say.’It felt strange to tell Elizabeth anything.She couldn’t remember ever having had a real conversation with her.
‘Curious, aren’t they,’ Elizabeth mused, ‘those night vigils?I sometimes imagine I am the last person left alive, and that the world will end come dawn and I am simply watching, and waiting, for this end – in order to see it through, you know?’
Honor shuddered.It was much too close to what she herself felt; only Elizabeth seemed to find the fantasy interesting, even amusing.To Honor, it was terrifying; a dark loneliness so complete that she sometimes thought she would never speak again, never feel the touch of another person’s hand to hers.‘How dramatic you are,’ she said quickly.
‘Well, what do you do?’
‘I make lists,’ Honor said, shrugging.‘Of things I must do.’
Elizabeth laughed.‘Of course.’Then, ‘I used to have the most divine doctor, who gave me these little yellow pills that put me out like a light.Sometimes for days at a time.It was so simply heaven, you cannot imagine.If there was something I didn’t care for, or someone I was sick of, I simply counted out the pills – a couple more than he said – and swallowed them, and that was me gone, out, away.’She gazed off in silent contemplation.Then, sadly, ‘The police found him and got terribly cross and took away his licence.So now I am back just as I was.’
‘They have put you with Fritzi, for the tennis,’ Honor said, to change the conversation.‘I think they will want to begin soon.’
‘The cardboard prince,’ Elizabeth said.‘How furious he must be.I amn’t in his plans at all.’
‘Does he have plans?’Did everyone have plans?
‘Oh yes.Only he can’t work out how to put his plans in motion.’Elizabeth gave a gurgle of laughter.‘And that indecision may cost him everything.’
Honor was going to ask more – ask Elizabeth to be more definite in what she said – but she had already lost interest in the conversation.
‘Pass me a cigarette,’ she said, and Honor did, privately wondering how she could possibly sit there in bed and smoke, surrounded by last night’s squalor.
‘May I open a window?’Honor asked.
‘No.And I say, I’m going to need a pair of shoes.I can’t play tennis in anything I have.’
‘I’ll have Molly find you something.But speaking of plans, I think you are getting in the way of Maureen’s.’
‘Duff?’
‘Yes, Duff.’
‘Serves her right,’ Elizabeth said, suddenly vicious.‘Though it’s not my fault that he’d rather stay up with a bottle of brandy than go to bed with her.’
‘I’ll send Molly to you.’Honor felt how much she needed to get out and away.
‘Yes, run away, there’s a dear.’Elizabeth stretched out her legs and lay back against the headboard.She took a deep drag of her cigarette and reached an arm to flick ash into the half-full glass of water on the bedside table.The sheet held up under her arms began to slip.
Honor hurried out.
Chapter Thirty
Kick
The walk with her mother and Prince Fritzi was slow and dull.Rose insisted on looking closely at all the plants, asking questions that the prince couldn’t answer.To Kick’s annoyance, that didn’t stop him trying.He ventured weak half-opinions – ‘perhaps a member of the dahlia family …’ – that were of no value.There was nothing to distract her from thinking about Billy, even though she had sworn not to.She must ask Brigid, she decided, what she thought.
The day was hot and really what she wanted was to swim.Better still, float lazily in the cool water and watch the few clouds drift past.But Brigid had her heart set on a tournament, and so that is what they would do.In any case, she thought, this lot weren’t the kind to spend a peaceful day by the pool.Or anywhere, for that matter.Landing in amongst them was like being thrown into a bag of horse chestnuts.Spikey and prickly and secretive.
Maureen, with those large light-blue eyes darting everywhere – seeing everything, considering it, weighing it; reflecting a polished surface but with something churning behind it that Kick didn’t understand.Chips, doing the exact same watching and assessing, but without the same sort of inner fire that was Maureen’s.His was more an inner anxiousness, she thought, remembering the way he plucked at his sleeves, eyes darting from his wife to Kick’s mother, from her father to Duff and back again.
Honor, his poor dowdy wife, going about like someone had stuffed her with a bolster – badly, so that there were lumps everywhere – and sent her out to pretend to be a person; walking amongst them, saying things at intervals, but without really being part of any of it.Then there was Fritzi, ‘King Midas’ son’ as she and Brigid now called him.He was so golden, so burnished, so unreal.A statue come to life; a boy become a statue.She compared him in her mind with her brothers, Joe and Jack, her father – all three so full of life that it felt like a strong river inside them would break its banks sooner than be squashed down.She wondered what Fritzi had done with that river to subdue it so.‘He’s agitated,’ her father had said to her the evening before.‘Something wrong with him.’He didn’t say it as though he were sorry for Fritzi, but more as if he were curious.
Elizabeth – worn, a bit tattered, but at least she seemed real in her efforts to enjoy herself.Her own parents, so much older than everyone else, even than Chips who must be next to them in age only he seemed more of an age with Maureen and Duff.If anything, Kick thought, it was Honor who seemed the older of the two in that marriage.Her parents’ age felt almost awkward, she thought, watching her mother bent – slim but stiff – over a bush with tiny white flowers that released a cloying scent into the air.It was as if they were everyone’s parents, there to watch and judge, not to partake.
She knew her father would hate that.He liked to consider himself a central part of everything – even if it was Kick’s friends from school, gathered in the kitchen at Bronxville over ice-cream sodas, he would talk about the teachers and games as though he were one of them.With Joe Jnr and Jack, it was even more pronounced.Kick had heard – only ever by mistake – the way they talked about girls.Not, she had thought, quietly shocked, the way father and sons should talk about girls.More as if they were all three the same age, with the same interest.But surely that couldn’t be?Her father was married.Her brothers were not.
The three were alike in many ways: a kind of outward chivalry – holding coats, holding doors, carrying parcels – that had beneath it something else entirely.A mocking assessment that rated features individually and collectively.So a girl might be forgiven for having small eyes if she had ‘a good bust’; long legs might offset a thick waist, and so on.Kick tried not to hear these conversations – closing doors or leaving rooms so as to be away from them – but she knew the effect of them worked away at her all the same.When she was younger, she would look at herself in the mirror, trying to see what they – what other men – might see.Was her nose too big?Definitely.But did the generous size of her mouth camouflage that?Maybe.Her eyes were too deep-set, but her teeth were even and her smile, she knew because she had been told so many times, could be ‘dazzling’.But was that enough?Her hair was nothing remarkable – not blonde or brown but somewhere in between.Her skin fair but freckled … It was only when she realised how unhappy she was making herself that she gave up.
