The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Read online

  He stood very still, looking at the day’s brightness, but not moving. People swept by him, going in and out of the revolving hotel doors. Some of them stared at him, as if they understood how painful and profound was this hesitation of his. He thought, with affection, that they might be fellow Americans, but he wasn’t sure about this. Some might have been Germans.

  Frank was an average-sized man with a freckled face. He’d never been handsome, but at seventy-one, his sandy hair was still wiry, his hands strong, his eyes a watery but flirtatious blue. He had a son who’d followed him into the motor trade. He had a wife, Barbara, and a white-painted house in the small town of Sweetwater, Maryland, USA. He was not unhappy. He loved his dog, whose name was Jeff.

  But there was a thing that had always nagged at Frank Baines, an important event in his past which had kept on and on, through forty years, visiting his dreams. There had been an explanation for it, but Frank had never quite believed in this explanation, just as he’d never quite believed England was precisely as it appeared to be on his TV screen. He knew this was pig-headed of him, even weird, some might have said. But he just couldn’t lay it to rest in his heart.

  So now, at seventy-one, he’d decided – without mentioning it to a soul – that the time had come to find this rest. He got on the plane in an optimistic mood, not caring that Barbara was hurt he didn’t want her along. He told her there was a War Veterans Reunion in London he wished to attend on his own, in the hopes of meeting up with a few old pals from the US 9th Armoured Division.

  Frank had never been on a transatlantic airliner before. But he managed to enjoy the flight, with all the miniature things he was offered – toothpaste, whisky, nuts, socks – and the way the British flight crew pronounced the word ‘sir’. When the plane landed at Heathrow, in a pale and luminous dawn, he wondered whether, at his age, he was too old to hold a stranger in his arms.

  Frank walked out at last into Piccadilly, turned right and paced slowly along. The traffic, bunched up and fumy, barely moving but nevertheless travelling recklessly on the wrong side of the road, made him nervous. He suspected that he looked like a convalescent, like someone let out too soon from protective custody, and, in a way, this was how he felt. And he had no idea where he was headed. Part of him wanted not to be here.

  When Frank saw the Ritz Hotel across the road, he decided he would cross over towards it, because it was a place he remembered, a place that looked as if it hadn’t changed. But he saw immediately that crossing Piccadilly would be difficult. He stopped and considered what it involved, but couldn’t reach a definitive answer. He imagined that the traffic lights might slow the traffic but not be certain to halt it, that there would be some code of safe behaviour understood by Londoners, but not by him.

  He stood for a while at the crossing’s edge, letting a girdle of other pedestrians cluster round him, and when they moved to cross, he moved with them. Despite the shield these others formed, Frank kept turning his head, left and right, left and right, right and left, right and left, to make sure he wasn’t going to be run over. His heart was pounding all the while.

  He considered going into the Ritz – but for what? He’d eaten what felt like five meals in a row on the plane. At his hotel, he’d gulped down some cold foreign beer. He stood in the shade of the Ritz’s arches for a few minutes, gazing into the carpeted lobby, remembering some of the old music that was once played there; then he walked on. This walking on brought him to Green Park, where, though summer was past, a few deckchairs had been set out, amid the yellowing and falling leaves.

  He felt grateful to see grass and trees. He sat down in one of the deckchairs with a sigh so deep it almost caused him pain. Not far from where he was, a young couple were throwing a frisbee back and forth, back and forth between each other, and Frank marvelled that each time they caught it and held it and launched it again in a perfect arc. He wanted to applaud them. Precision was a thing he’d always admired. He’d been happy in the US Army for this very reason.

  Watching the frisbee, Frank felt himself gradually begin to relax and his heart slowed. With the sun warm on his face, he closed his eyes. And there she was again. As if she lived there, between his eyes and the world. His first and only love, Marie.

  Marie Smythe from the village of Swallowfield, Suffolk, England. Twenty-one-year-old orphaned girl with a dimpled smile. Bare legs, even in winter. Smoked the Chesterfields he gave her with a sly smile on her face. Lay with him in the attic room of the pub where she lived and worked. Let him adore her, with her heavy breasts and her chestnut hair. Promised to be his bride when the war ended – if it ever ended, if life could ever go back to being what it once was. Swore on her dead mother’s little crucifix she wore round her neck that she loved him, her Yankee boy, her big man, her wicked, wonderful Frank Baines. Said she’d follow him anywhere in the world . . .

  That was the word she used. Follow. Even now, even after his life had had the shape it did, he could still hear it, hear it like a bell tolling.

  He was twenty-nine and he’d found love. Holed up in the ice pit of Bastogne, with the US 9th Armoured Division in the winter of 1944, it had been the thought of Marie that kept him alive. No kidding. It was Marie Smythe who kept his blood circulating somehow, when his feet had turned to clods of iron, when his hands couldn’t grip the rifle butt. But for her, but for his memory of what had happened between them in that attic room and the promises they’d made, he would have lain down in the snow and died. Instead, he tried to write letters to her on scraps of frozen paper: Marie, we’re going to have a fine life. Wait till you see the tulip trees in Sweetwater! These letters didn’t describe the hunger of Bastogne, the dead of Bastogne, the impenetrable ground. They described the future. Build us a house with a porch and paint it white. Raise us a big family. Call our firstborn Jeff, after your poor father. . .

  Frank’s familiar reverie was interrupted by the arrival of a person in uniform, who told him he couldn’t sit in the deckchair unless he bought a ticket for it. Disorientated, Frank said he wasn’t going to stay in the deckchair, but the attendant insisted that he would nevertheless have to pay for the time he’d already spent in it.

  Frank looked up at a young face, pallid and wan. ‘Son,’ Frank heard himself say, ‘do you know anything about the war?’

  ‘What war?’ said the attendant.

  What war. Frank now felt a tirade rise in his throat, words about American lives laid down, but just before the tirade came out he thought, well, OK, there was Vietnam.

  He reached in his wallet for a five-pound note, handed the note to the attendant, thought to himself, that’s when things must have changed here, not right after the war, but then. After Vietnam, the whole world was different.

  ‘I can’t change this,’ said the attendant, after scrabbling in a leather bag. ‘Give me something smaller.’

  ‘I don’t have anything smaller,’ said Frank. ‘I just came from the airport.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said the attendant. ‘You’re my third bloody Yank today. Have the fucking chair free.’

  Frank took back his money. He felt confused and dizzy. All he longed to do now was sleep.

  In the spring of 1946, Frank returned to Sweetwater and, with the help of his widowed mother, Hazel, bought a plot of land. His knowledge and experience of US Army tanks helped him find a job repairing cars. He moved in with Hazel, not far from where his land lay waiting for the house of his dreams to be built on it.

  Then, he sent for Marie.

  The moment when Marie Smythe would walk down the gangway of the ship and into his arms seemed such a momentous one that he felt he had to rehearse it in his mind long before it arrived. So this is what he began to do. He saw it as a kind of film, which he described to his workmate, Sol.

  ‘I guess it’s near dawn, Sol,’ he said. ‘I’m in New York City and I’m at the waterfront early. And there’s some fog or mist in the air and it’s cold and I can see my breath.’

  ‘Fog and mist?’ sai
d Sol. ‘Why fog and mist?’

  ‘Dunno. But there they are. Then I pan out over the water. It’s like the world ends there, in the mist, you know? Like they used to believe the world had an edge.’

  ‘Nuts,’ said Sol. ‘You’re nuts, Frank.’

  ‘OK, but that’s how it feels. And then I hear it, that old ghostly siren. You know? That boom-boom of a big ocean liner, and so I know she’s there and coming closer. And then the scene fills up. There’s a crowd all round me, stamping in the cold, shouting, kids throwing stuff, waving flags. There’s a band playing.’

  ‘Would there be a band?’ interrupted Sol.

  ‘Who knows? There’s one in my mind. And I’m jigging up and down. I can’t keep still. Maybe it’s the cold or the excitement, or both. I’ve got the ring in my pocket. And I hold on to it like it’s the crown jewels.’

  ‘You didn’t buy the ring yet, did you?’ said Sol.

  ‘No, but I’m asking around. I think I can get a deal I can afford on a solitaire.’

  ‘Diamond?’

  ‘Sure, diamond. What else?’

  ‘She might be OK with an opal.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t. This is love, Sol. This is my future wife, Marie. Opals are definitely not coming into it.’

  Sol, who’d been married for fourteen years, was a sceptic. He was also undereducated and forgot that the word had a ‘c’ in it, so he said to Frank: ‘I’m a septic, Frank. I don’t believe things are ever the way you picture them.’

  But they were the way Frank had pictured them – more or less.

  By the time Marie embarked on the ship, he’d bought the diamond solitaire and he looked at it every night of the ten nights of her journey. He had his sandy hair cut and his suit cleaned and his best shoes shined. He helped Hazel prepare the chaste and tiny room where Marie would sleep, until they were man and wife. He placed a picture of himself in his army uniform by her narrow bed. Nostalgia for the 9th Armoured Division overcame him for a moment or two, then went gradually away.

  He drove to New York City in an ancient Chevy he’d repaired and made good as new. On a grey morning of freezing mist, he made his way through the unfamiliar streets to the waterfront. There, he waited. A US Navy band was playing. He heard the siren and saw the great booming ship slide towards him out of the milky light. He began to jig up and down, shouting: ‘Marie! Marie!’

  The passengers disembarked, smiling, waving. One by one, they were swept into the arms of the crowd and led away into the tall, beautiful city. The band played on and on, then suddenly stopped and the day fell silent. All the passengers were gone and Marie was not among them.

  It was dark, now, in Frank’s hotel room. Without meaning to, he’d slept the day away and now it was evening.

  He called Barbara and told her he’d arrived safely, but that London had gotten brash, crowded and confusing.

  ‘Well,’ said Barbara Baines, ‘times change, Frank. Nothing stands still.’

  He asked after Jeff. Barbara told him that Jeff had lain on the porch all day, waiting for his master to come home. Frank hung up soon and ordered a steak from Room Service.

  He turned on the TV and saw Mrs Thatcher, wearing her Pacific blue, addressing some awesome gathering, against a billowing blue backdrop. All the men on the podium behind her were smiling anguished smiles, as though at some adored and disdainful lover. Older women can be sexy, thought Frank. When I see Marie tomorrow, I may still feel that I want to touch her body.

  He listened to Mrs Thatcher’s speech for a while but didn’t take in much of what she said, just enjoyed the sound of her voice. And he remembered how, in Marie’s attic room above the pub, he would ask her to talk to him, say anything, tell a story, no matter what, just keep on talking in that soft, English voice of hers until he fell asleep. At Bastogne he heard her still, in the howling cold, in the star-filled nights. She called him ‘darling’. She whispered to him that he would survive, that the war would be won. ‘Keep holding on, Frank Baines,’ she told him. ‘Bastogne will be relieved.’

  She was right about Bastogne. There was an end to all their suffering. But why had she kept him alive? What for? He thought she’d wanted him as her husband and then, in the end, she just slipped away into darkness, as though she’d never ever been in his life.

  Back in Sweetwater, he’d told Sol: ‘That day in New York, it stayed dark, you know. The sky just never seemed to lighten, not even for an hour.’

  ‘That figures,’ observed Sol. ‘There are times like that.’

  But these times were incomprehensible. What happened next was worse, or at least as bad as waiting on the waterfront for Marie: her trunk was delivered at Hazel’s apartment.

  The address on the label – Hazel’s address – was written in Marie’s round handwriting, and Frank had the sudden notion that this girl had played an outrageous game with him and that she was – like Cleopatra, delivered to Caesar in a rolled-up carpet – inside the trunk.

  He put his arms round the trunk and called her name. Hazel lit a cigarette and told her son not to be macabre.

  He got out his army knife and picked at the locks until they gave. Inside the trunk were all the clothes he knew Marie Smythe to possess. Wrapped in tissue paper were nylon stockings he recognised as his own gift and a silky nightdress the colour of peach ice cream. He held this garment against his face and wept.

  His mother, who was seldom moved by anybody’s tears, said: ‘There’s something odd here, Frank. Why would she send her clothes and not follow them? I think she must have been detained on the ship.’

  ‘Detained why?’ he sobbed.

  ‘I don’t know, dear. Maybe she committed a felony.’

  ‘Marie? A felony? Like what?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. It’s all a mystery. Maybe she cheated at cards on board? Or . . .’

  Frank wiped his eyes on the peach nightdress. ‘Or what?’

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough and now she thinks you’ve abandoned her.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I told you. I waited for five hours.’

  And he had. This was why the day never seemed to lighten. He let time pass and pass. He pestered the people from the shipping line. He told them her name, demanded to see the purser. And this man arrived at last and told Frank no, nobody of that name was on the voyage. Nobody called Marie Smythe.

  But now the trunk had turned up. Marie had packed everything she owned. Surely these clothes had been laid in there by the future Mrs Frank Baines?

  Hazel looked sorrowful and said: ‘You know, Frank. Maybe she was sick and couldn’t be moved off the boat. Or maybe she died at sea.’

  He called Sol then and said: ‘I saw this in the war, Sol. The British don’t like to talk about death.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Sol. ‘They would of told you. Or you’d of gotten a cable.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’m not Next of Kin, yet.’

  So then, the thought of her dying and her body being cast into the ocean and her chestnut hair tangled among the fishes of the deep made him cold and shivery. He couldn’t sleep. He knelt by the trunk and unpacked Marie’s possessions, one by one. At the very bottom of the trunk was a framed photograph of her parents, which Frank held close to his body for a long time.

  Later, a letter came.

  It asked Frank to forgive her. It enquired politely whether he would be able to ship her possessions home to England, because these things were all she had. It gave no explanation, only said that she’d changed her mind at the last minute. a nd she was sorry, she knew promises had been made, important promises, but sometimes promises were impossible to keep and that was the way of the world. She sent him her love and hoped his future would go well.

  So then, not on bits of frozen paper, but on a large yellow pad, Frank poured out his fury. He told Marie she’d ruined his life. He said he wished now he’d died at Bastogne. He tore the peach nightdress to shreds, tied the nylon stockings in knots with which he wanted to strangle her.

  Sol kep
t saying, with his wisdom of fourteen years of marriage: ‘You’ll get over it, Frank. Everybody gets over everything in the end. There’s no such actual thing as a broken heart.’

  But – perhaps it was the war, perhaps it was Bastogne and staying alive for her sake, or perhaps it was just the way Frank turned out to be – the truth was that he’d never quite gotten over it. And in recent times, a man in his seventh decade now, this had begun to drive him crazy. He felt he’d wasted his life. Why couldn’t he forget something that happened forty years ago?

  He’d got to thinking lately that he’d never gotten over it because of the damn trunk. If the trunk had never arrived, perhaps he would have made better headway with his career, been able to give more of his heart to Barbara, more to his son. But that trunk had always and always bothered him. The tender care with which Marie had laid that nightdress in . . .

  He lay sleepless beside his wife in the dark and thought: just suppose Marie was on the ship after all? Just suppose, when the liner docked, she was standing at the rail, looking forward to seeing me, Frank Baines, her future husband, longing to disembark and rush into my arms. And then, when that mist lifted, when she saw me there, saw me jigging up and down in that stupid way that I was, she thought, no, I can’t do it, I can’t marry that moron, that sandy-coloured American who doesn’t pronounce my name right. I can’t let my destiny be joined with his.

  And so what did she do then? She hid on the ship. She stowed away. Did she? Or perhaps not? Perhaps she ran crying to the purser. Bribed him to say she wasn’t on the passenger list, if anyone should enquire. Bribed him with what? Bribed him with her body, the body that had been given to Frank in a lightless room in Swallowfield, with an owl calling outside in the dark? And then sailed right on back to England a few days later, with all the crew knowing who she was, the girl with chestnut hair, who’d sold herself to the purser for a lie . . .

  Once there in his mind, this new explanation wouldn’t leave Frank Baines a moment’s peace. He’d lived with the idea of himself as some kind of hero, a man who had risked his life for Europe and who was, in consequence, owed lifelong respect in that part of the world. But now he saw himself as Marie had seen him that day: an insignificant American, childish in his gestures, a person who was going to spend his life repairing stinking automobiles.