The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [132]
In his letter to Jack, Joe Jr. didn’t mention that he was doubly grounded, by the miserable weather and by the equally miserable ambiance of south England. The pubs closed at nine, when Joe Jr.’s hunting season was only beginning. The only diversion was dinner at the Imperial Hotel, breaking bread with a dispirited collection of evacuees from London, the room devoid of any of the smart young things who had enlivened Joe Jr.’s time in prewar London.
Joe Jr. wasn’t about to write a fan letter to little Jack, congratulating him on his heroism. Nor would he even admit that he might have a grudging respect for a brother who had held up the family name so well and so high. “I understand that anyone who was sunk got thirty days’ survivor leave,” he wrote, as if Jack stood to receive a vacation for his ineptness. “How about it? Pappy was rather indignant that they just didn’t send you back right away.” That was the nastiest cut of all. The truth was, as Joe Jr. knew from his father’s letters, that Joe believed Jack had given all that a man should be asked to give and had vowed to try to get Jack out of the war theater for good.
Joe Jr. managed a flight to London so he could see his sister Kathleen. She was serving with the Red Cross at the Hans Crescent Club in an old hotel in the center of London. The young Kennedys picked up with one another as if all the time between had been desultory nonsense. They headed out to the 400 Club, where before the war Joe Jr. had attended many a glorious soiree. As they descended into the nightclub, Joe Jr. saw that the kind of young gentlemen who had frequented the place in the old days were still there. But now they wore not evening clothes but officer uniforms. The champagne was the same, if far more expensive, but whereas in 1939 pleasure had been an amiable pastime, now it was pursued with no regard for tomorrows that might never come.
The next evening William Randolph Hearst Jr., a foreign correspondent, invited Joe Jr. and Kathleen to have dinner with him at the Savoy. Hearst had also invited an exquisite brunette, Patricia Wilson, whose husband was a major serving in Libya. Joe Jr. did not let those minor impediments stand in the way as he turned on his inestimable charm. He learned that Patricia was an Australian. She had come to London to make her debut. There the seventeen-year-old debutante married the earl of Jersey, a relationship that lasted six years and brought her a child and endless embarrassment over the activities of her pure rake of a husband. Shortly after their divorce, she had married Robin Filmer Wilson, with whom she had two more children. Now she was doing her bit by working part-time in a factory.
This woman with the cascading, carefree laughter was in some respects not unlike Jack’s Inga. Patricia was at that age when beauty is exquisitely refined by life. Like Inga, she was married and she was daring, at least daring in the glimpses she gave to Joe Jr., daring in the way she invited him and his friends to her cottage for the weekend in Woking, not far from London.
Joe accepted Patricia’s invitation and began an affair that on each weekend sojourn, each sweet homey interlude far from the muck and cold of duty, became more passionate and intense.
Joe Jr. had cursed the mud and rain of St. Eval, but that had been a sweet oasis compared to Dunkeswell, where his unit was now stationed permanently during the wettest season in memory. It would have been miserable enough if the squadron