‘You have so many, of course. Thirteen, isn’t it?’
Mrs Kennedy smiled thinly. ‘Nine.’ Madame Quo had two boys, Merlin, if you please, and Edward.
‘How is your daughter Rosemary?’ Madame Quo asked, toying with one of her spectacular jade earrings, which were a vivid green and no doubt ancient and priceless, unless they came from Hong Kong. ‘Such an original young lady.’ She accompanied this with a pitying smile on her smooth face, indicating that ‘original’ was intended in this context to signify ‘crazy as a coot’.
‘She’s doing extremely well,’ Mrs Kennedy said robustly. ‘She has just qualified as a nursery school teacher. She loves the little ones.’
‘Ah,’ Madame Quo said sympathetically, turning her head to toy with the earring on the other side. ‘My sons and I are heading to Tucson. We always spend the winter in Arizona. Such a perfect winter climate.’
This gave Mrs Kennedy a much-needed opening. ‘Oh it is, it is. By a coincidence, we met the lady from whom you rented a house last year, Mrs Robert G. Nelson. A charming person.’
Madame Quo nodded blandly at this sally, though it must have stung. The Mrs Robert G. Nelson in question had won damages of several hundred dollars against Madame Quo for stolen silverware, broken china, and the house left in a disgusting state. So much for Chinese culture.
Mrs Kennedy turned her back on Madame Quo and addressed herself to Fanny Ward, who was painted like a doll, and wearing an extraordinary garment of luridly flowered silk, gathered in a jewelled knot right over her you-know-what, as though anyone were still interested in that.
‘I was so sad to say goodbye to their Majesties. They told me that they intend to remain in London, whatever happens.’
Miss Ward was looking glazed. She had already spent a couple of hours in the bar, hoisting back gin and tonics. She nodded a little too vigorously now, making the feathers in her extraordinary headdress dance. It contained what must surely be real diamonds, and was perched on top of what must surely be a wig, a very unconvincing one. ‘Not lacking in courage,’ she said, enunciating very distinctly. ‘And the dear girls. Wanting to do their part, they told me. A beacon of inspiration.’
‘I presume there are air-raid shelters in Buckingham Palace?’
‘Basements. Lots of them,’ Miss Ward agreed, her feathers nodding. Her famous eyes, heavily ringed with mascara, were bloodshot oysters tonight. Perhaps she’d been crying, or trying too hard not to. ‘So brave. Not running away, like us.’
‘I am not running away,’ Madame Quo said sharply. ‘I always spend the winter in Arizona. I shall be back to London in the spring.’
‘Nonsense,’ Miss Ward said. ‘Why should you? Not your war.’
‘It is very much our war. For us it began in 1931. Manchuria, Shanghai, Nanking. Ten million Chinese are dead. Your turn, now. The Japanese are already preparing to attack America and Britain.’
‘Now, now, no warmongering,’ Mrs Kennedy said.
‘You would be a fool not to know that’s true,’ Madame Quo retorted, ‘and I don’t believe you are a fool, Mrs Kennedy.’
A four-piece jazz orchestra had been setting up in a corner of the room, and the waiters had been clearing tables away in front of the bandstand. The musicians now struck up ‘Begin the Beguine’, a clarinet taking the lead.
‘They’re playing for their passage,’ Commodore Randall said. ‘Refugees, all four of them. Apparently Herr Hitler doesn’t approve of their kind of music.’
Diners abandoned their food to dance. The syrupy melody lines stopped conversation for a while. Couples glided to and fro under the glowering gaze of the great land-animals whose heads were mounted above them.
‘I wonder,’ Miss Ward said brightly, ‘if their bodies are on the other side.’
‘Whose bodies?’ Mrs Kennedy asked.
‘Those bison and moose and things. We should go and have a look.’
‘Your husband,’ Madame Quo went on, ‘has been singing the same song for years, Mrs Kennedy. Peace in our time, and all that. But it’s the wrong song now. The gospel of isolationism is dead. It died in 1917.’
Mrs Kennedy looked at Madame Quo with dislike. ‘You know I can’t comment on American policy,’ she said stiffly.
‘He’s not only out of step with the British government, but with your own State Department. Fawning on Hitler, egging on Neville Chamberlain and all those smart Nazi sympathisers at Cliveden.’
Mrs Kennedy’s lean cheeks were flushed. ‘I don’t intend to sit here and be scolded by you.’
‘You must scold your husband. He can’t go around loudly insisting that Hitler is going to win this war. Nothing could be more distasteful in an American ambassador. And he’s setting himself in direct opposition to your President.’
‘I suppose you know just what our President thinks,’ she snapped.
‘Everyone knows what your President thinks.’
‘Wanting to commit another whole generation of young men to the fire? To save a rotten old house that ought to be pulled down?’
‘I understand that history impels you Irish to consider Great Britain a hated enemy, Mrs Kennedy. But I assure you, you would find the Nazis a great deal worse. They’re rotten too, but in quite a different way.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Your husband is committing political suicide,’ Madame Quo said as Mrs Kennedy rose. ‘He’s going to be sent back to Washington in disgrace if he doesn’t change his tune.’
Stony-faced, Mrs Kennedy swept up her stole and stalked out of the dining room, ignoring the others at the table. Being lectured by that little woman was too much to bear.
She walked along the promenade deck, trying to cool the heat out of her face. There were too many things to bear. Unhappiness and worry weighed on her intolerably.
What to do with Rosemary. Joe’s diplomatic career heading for the rocks, along with the whole damned country. The looming war. The dreadful prospect of the boys enlisting.
Was Madame Quo right? There were others who said the same things. After everything Joe had done for Roosevelt! They had courted Roosevelt for two decades, raising millions for his campaigns, preaching the Roosevelt doctrine, even sending planeloads of live crabs and lobsters to the White House. But as was the way with politicians, Roosevelt would drop Joe in a heartbeat if it was expedient. And Madame Quo had been right in one thing, at least: it was becoming expedient to drop Joe.
She hurried back to her cabin to call her husband.
Cobh
Manhattan sailed into Cobh harbour with a long blast of her horn. The call echoed around the foggy little town, rebounding from the towering bulk of the cathedral, the rows of houses painted yellow and pink and blue, and the terminal buildings that clustered at the water’s edge.
The ship’s passengers crowded at the rails to gawp at the place, remote, pretty and somehow melancholy, perched at the edge of the Atlantic, the last landfall for over three thousand miles.
Unfortunately, the sturdy little tug which was nudging them into their berth was on the windward side of the Manhattan, and as its motors roared, its funnel expelled a cloud of dense black smoke which surged up the high sides of the ship and billowed across the deck, choking the passengers and covering them with soot.
Up on the bridge, Commodore Randall looked at the quaint vista of Cobh, arranged like a nebulous picture postcard around the bay. How many Irish men and women had passed through here on their way to New York, and a new life in a new world? And how many shipwrecked passengers had been brought back here, with nothing more than the drenched clothes on their backs, thanking God for a deliverance from the deep?