The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Read online

  Then he saw me. ‘Who’s this?’ he said.

  And Pete said: ‘No one, just Annie.’

  ‘Tell her to get out,’ he said, ‘and take Lisa. We need some privacy here.’

  I know what happened next, but I dunno if I’ve got everything in the right order. I guess Chester screwed Pete so hard that afternoon that her brain stopped functioning. I guess she let him make any deal that came into his mind, provided he swore he’d never leave her again.

  Press guys came and went from Pete’s trailer. I held on to Lisa and we made a salad that was five colours of red and green. Towards evening, Chester came out, holding Ricky in his arms, the proud father, and all the photographers went flash flash and Chester held Ricky up to the TV cameras to show the world his feathers.

  Then they followed him and Ricky down to the cluster of live oaks at the north corner of the park. It was getting close to sunset, so they got some big lamps and shone them up into the trees. Pete was there, but hanging back out of sight. Lisa and I tried to get to her, but we were cut off by the crush of people and cameras so I said to Lisa: ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, I guess everybody just wants to see Ricky flying around under the oaks and then they’ll be satisfied and go home and things will be back to normal.’

  She said: ‘What if he won’t come down, Annie?’

  And I said: ‘Don’t worry, kid, Ricky came down in Kroger’s, remember, he came towards the light.’ And I guess we were both thinking about the way Ricky had landed in among the fruit when we saw him go.

  The crowd gave a gasp like they do at a NASA launch and there he was, flying higher and higher, and I could see insects in the light beams fluttering upwards, like they wanted to join him on his journey to the dusty trees.

  Well. That was in summer and it’s winter now and the bare branches of the redbuds are grey with frost.

  Lisa refuses to go to school, so she comes with me to Secco’s, where it’s warm, and the manager, Mr Borzoni, lets her help sort out the clothes by colour and fetch water for the steam presser. It’s lucky he’s Italian and has compassion. I bring him chocolate, out of gratitude.

  He knows the story. Everyone around here does. What no one knows, including me, is what was in Ricky’s little heart that evening when, instead of flying near the tree ceiling, he made for the open sky and disappeared from view. I think it must have been that he saw the shimmer of the lake. The light was almost gone, but even at dusk there’s some brilliance left on the water and Ricky flew towards that, and no one ever saw him again. They sent frogmen down into the depths to search for his body with its baby wings, but that lake is deep and they never could find it.

  So I guess what Pete said to herself was that if no one could bring him back to her, she’d just go and try to be wherever he was. I dunno. I’ve stopped trying to guess what was in her exhausted mind. Chester was gone too, back to the young girl’s bed with his bank account stuffed with media dollars. So perhaps she killed herself because of this and not because of Ricky. I’ll never know. All she said to me by way of warning was: ‘Annie, if anything happens to me, take care of Lisa and don’t let Chester take her away.’

  They dredged Pete up. She had her sewing machine roped to her waist. Some bitch on the trailer park said it was a waste of a good machine. But what got me was the thought of all that appliqué she’d done, all those hours and hours of working at one consoling thing and how this just hadn’t been enough.

  We had a little ceremony for her and some of the TV people came, but fewer than those who came to see Ricky the Flying Baby. There was no sign of any mountain man with a grey waterfall of hair.

  Lisa cries for Pete. I stroke her forehead and hold her close and call her my angel. My angel falls asleep with her arms sticking straight up in the air and gently I lay them down.

  The Cherry Orchard, with Rugs

  I was wearing a blossom-white suit that day. No tie. My number on the Eurostar train was seat 19, coach 04.

  It rained all through Kent, but when the train pulled clear of the tunnel, there was a cold February sun shining on the grey earth of northern France. I caught sight of a church steeple, which looked turquoise on the far horizon and, in my usual (some would say banal) way, I had a fashion thought: that particular turquoise was the perfect new colour for my kitchen walls. This cheered me more than I can tell you. I laid back my head and wished I were in First Class, with greater calm and comfort to enfold me as visions of my transformed culinary environment began to pleasure my mind.

  I’ve always adored transformations. I was born (thirty-four years ago) Darren John Sands and at work, in the carpet department of Peter Jones, people call me Darren or Daz. But I have other personae I can adopt without difficulty. One of these is a Cuban or Mexican sort of person, named Diego. I’m a good mimic and I speak a little Spanish. I have no difficulty pronouncing the word ‘cerveza’ correctly. My hair is naturally thick, dark and shiny, and sometimes, if I’m in a Diego mood, I risk gluing on to my baby-soft upper lip a pencil-thin moustache, which certain types of submissive men find devastating in its lethal little way. The only thing I dread, when I’m Diego, is meeting an actual Cuban and being accused of wounding and disrespectful racial impersonation. I have absolutely no desire to wound. I become Diego to amuse myself and to enable me to meet different types of people.

  When I go to Paris – which I do as often as I can afford to – I usually travel as Daniela. Daniela is the antithesis of Diego. Some people find this female persona too extreme for their tastes. I once had a lover called Bernard who hated Daniela so much, he tore a silver earring out of my ear and threw it down a drain in Wimpole Street. My ear was bleeding and I was in terrible pain. I said: ‘My God, Bernard, now I’m going to die in agony, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning!’ But Bernard, who never laughed at any joke of mine, just walked off and bagged the only cab with its light on in the whole colossal darkness of the Marylebone night. I was left alone, shivering and in shock, and with half my ear hanging down in shreds.

  But I didn’t abandon Daniela. I abandoned Bernard. And today, there I was, Paris-bound, as she. My make-up is always restrained: brown eyeliner, with just a smidgen of mink shadow; a lovely matt foundation on my flawless, studiously exfoliated skin and a pale lipstick, never gloss. My hair I gel into a kind of gamine Audrey Hepburn style and then just finish off the effect with some good jewellery: sometimes one, sometimes two earrings, depending on my mood. I like silver a lot. I buy the real thing from PJ’s, using my Staff Discount.

  I should explain that I never take Daniela to extremes. I don’t wear a padded bra or try to disguise my Adam’s apple with polo-necks. I’m not impersonating a woman in any comprehensive way. Not at all. The delight of being Daniela lies, precisely, in the ambiguity I strive to create. And then I watch the world look at her and wonder. I move through my universe with the perfume of people’s astonishment following me like a scented cloud wherever I go. And this scent is addictive. Because, as Daniela, I know that I’m totally beautiful. And how often, in a human life, does one experience the absolute beauty of one’s own being? I ask you. Not often at all.

  In Paris, then, city of bridges, city of love, I like to walk around as Daniela. Do you blame me? But the train was still quite far from its marvellous destination when I had my encounter with Ross.

  It was a chance thing. I’d wandered down to the buffet for a caffe latte. Ross was there, smoking. When he saw me, he inhaled an enormous gorgé of smoke and started to cough. The cough was horrendous. Everybody began staring. I asked the steward for an Evian water and took this over to Ross with my latte and poured it out for him, and he sipped it gratefully.

  He was a gingery kind of man, with freckles on his hands. I put his age at about forty-three. His eyes were blue and trusting, and his lashes long and pale. He wore a wedding ring on his left hand and I could imagine the kind of wife he had, whose laundry smelled of Comfort, who ate boiled sweets on car journeys, whose hair might even be permed.

  When he
’d recovered from his coughing fit, I said, in my soft Daniela voice: ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’ I touched his sleeve.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. But thanks for the water. Let me pay you back.’

  He counted out some English money and I took it. I didn’t want him to be in my debt in any way. I considered moving away and having my latte at another table, but I was enjoying the effect Daniela was having on Ross and thought I’d just see how far I might be able to take her. At my back, I could feel the stares of the other people in the buffet; their outrage, and their yearning.

  Ross was a schoolteacher. His subjects were drama and English. He was travelling to Paris, alone, to see a production of The Cherry Orchard a t some small theatre where the actors worked for nothing.

  ‘Why do they work for nothing?’ I asked.

  Ross explained that they did this for the amazing experience of being directed by somebody called Patrice Boniano, a shit-hot French director who liked to ‘break everything down into its simplest components, to – in Chekhov’s own words – “rid the theatrical experience of everything that’s petty and unreal”.’

  I ingested the dregs of my latte. I wanted to say to Ross that, when people utter sentences like the one he’d just pronounced, I feel they’re living in some parallel universe where the air is too murky to be breathable. But I didn’t say this. I said: ‘Oh. I’ve never seen The Cherry Orchard. Is it marvellously good?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ross. ‘I think it is. Chekhov described it, when he finished the play, as a “light comedy”, and it seems a very simple story, but there’s such feeling and passion underneath. It’s not really light comedy at all.’

  ‘I love ambiguity,’ I said. ‘It sounds so fascinating.’

  I caught, then, the tremble of a smile on Ross’s mouth and he looked away from me, out at the tranquil fields of Normandy, all ploughed and harrowed and ready for the spring.

  ‘What are the “simplest components”, then?’ I ventured.

  ‘Well,’ said Ross. ‘It’s a bit of a steal from something done by Peter Brook some years ago at the Bouffes du Nord. They’re using rugs.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, no scenery. Bare stage. Rugs on the walls and as furniture and probably as the views from the window, the views of the orchard itself.’

  ‘How is that going to work?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But there’s an intricacy to the design of beautiful carpets which mirrors the intricacy in the text. Also, they’re probably woven by slave labour in Afghanistan or Turkey, and this also feels right for what Chekhov is saying in this play about the idle aristocracy and their long years of owning serfs.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it sounds so interesting. In my very small way, I know a lot about rugs.’

  ‘You do?’ said Ross.

  ‘Yes. I work in the carpet department at Peter Jones.’

  Now, Ross laughed. He didn’t mean to laugh at me. I don’t think he did. This burst of laughter just came out in a kind of involuntary way. And the words ‘Peter Jones’ did sound somehow embarrassing when juxtaposed with the words ‘Peter Brook’. But, immediately, I pretended to be very hurt. Daniela is excellent at this. She can almost cry at will. I looked down into my empty latte cup. I wiped a fleck of foam from my lip with a French-polished nail. Though I didn’t look at Ross, I could tell that he was mortified and his laughter was replaced by a heavy silence.

  ‘Well,’ I said, after I’d let the silence go on for a while. ‘I’d better be getting back to my seat.’

  I looked up at Ross. His face was pink and his eyes deliciously bright.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to . . . I don’t suppose it would interest you to come with me to see The Cherry Orchard?’

  We drank Pernod in the crowded theatre bar. Ross was wearing a soft blue mohair jacket and a black shirt, buttoned all the way up. He looked nice. For the first time, Daniela thought that she would like to lie in his arms.

  The auditorium itself was very small and the rows of seats set too close together, so that we sat with our knees sticking up. Four knees, side by side. I tried to concentrate on The Cherry Orchard, but I had some problems. It was in French and my French is round about the B-minus grade. I think a lot of what Ross had called ‘the underlying complexity’ of the play was lost on me. I couldn’t help finding most of the characters annoying, and quite soon I was sympathising with the businessman, Lopakhin, who wants everybody to grow up and go away.

  And then there was the question of the rugs. At work, I’d been in charge of Oriental Layout and I can honestly say that the way Patrice Boniano arranged and then rearranged the rugs on the set of The Cherry Orchard was never, to me, as aesthetically pleasing as the way I’d arranged them in Peter Jones’s carpet department. And this distracted me. I thought, I’m no one and he’s a supposed genius, but I have an infinitely more subtle understanding of colour groupings.

  I was quite relieved when the play was over and we walked into a small but buzzy little restaurant and Ross ordered Chablis and oysters.

  Ross began to talk about Chekhov’s death in 1904.

  I said: ‘Isn’t that weird. Today, on the train, I was sitting in coach 04, seat 19,’ but Ross ignored this. He told me that when Chekhov came on stage after the first performance of The Cherry Orchard, he was so moved by the audience’s reaction that he was seized with a fit of coughing and this fit turned out to be the beginning of the end of his life.

  ‘How was that?’ I asked.

  ‘He was ill from that moment on,’ said Ross. ‘A few months later, when he was dying, the doctor said to him: “I’m going to put ice on your heart,” but the playwright said: “You don’t need to put ice on an empty heart.”’

  I ate an oyster. When I dabbed my mouth, I saw a darling little smudge of pink left on the napkin. I said to Ross: ‘What about you? Is your heart empty?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  I reached over and took his hand and I felt it burning.

  Back in my room, I asked Ross to undress me. He laid the blossom-white suit on a chair.

  When I was almost naked, Ross said: ‘I can’t do this.’ And he began to cry.

  I stroked his hair. I said: ‘Ross, if I understood it properly, one of the things that play’s about is longing. Am I right? And the way people don’t face up to what they know is true.’

  Ross nodded. He kept on crying. I put on a silk robe and sat quietly by the window, listening to the intimate sounds of the Paris night.

  After a while, Ross stood up and put on his overcoat. I remembered it was St Valentine’s Eve. I said to Ross: ‘Why don’t you kiss me before you go?’

  I never saw him again.

  When I went back to work and looked at the rugs, they kept reminding me of The Cherry Orchard, as if the play had been something marvellous and significant and overwhelming in my life. I prattled on about it until my work colleagues got completely fed up. One day, the manager of the carpet department took me aside and said: ‘Daz, for pete’s sake shut up about Chekhov. Just concentrate on the business in hand.’

  The Dead Are Only Sleeping

  When the telephone call came, Nell was cleaning out the parrot’s cage. The parrot itself had alighted on a windowsill and was pecking the glass.

  ‘It’s Laurel,’ said Laurel’s voice from long ago. ‘It’s your stepmother.’

  Nell said nothing, only waited and kept her eyes fixed on the parrot.

  ‘Nell?’ said Laurel. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nell.

  And then came the statement. Laurel made it quickly, in a tight whisper, as though saying it could damage her vocal cords: ‘I rang to tell you your father died.’

  The room where Nell stood, with the white telephone and the grey parrot, was high and light, with a shiny wood floor: a place where a person could feel calm and unconstrained.

  ‘When?’ asked Nell.

  ‘This morning,’ replied La
urel. ‘I wasn’t there. No one was there.’

  Now, Nell sat down on a cotton upholstered chair and lightly touched the fabric of its arms. Her thought was, from now on, the world may seem a kinder sort of place.

  Yes, but what if it wasn’t true? Laurel had said no one had been there to see it. What if another call came, cancelling out the first? What if a trainee nurse had gone in and mistaken sleep for death? And suppose now, as they manoeuvred her father on a trolley into the lift and down into the basement morgue, he was just lying there dreaming? Because even death would surely have been afraid of him and kept its distance until he was old and weak, wouldn’t it? So he must be fooling death and fooling the hospital staff. When the temperature dropped as they laid him on the slab, he was going to wake up.

  All Nell could do was wait. She finished clearing out the parrot’s cage and replenished the feeder with seed. She took the bird off the windowsill and stroked its head. It muttered to her. This-and-that. This-and-that. But it was the only sound. The phone didn’t ring. Laurel had asked politely: ‘Would you like to come home for the funeral?’

  Home? What a word to use, when Nell hadn’t been near that house for years, when her thirtieth birthday was only a few months away and the flat she shared with the parrot held everything she owned. She’d told Laurel she would think about it. But then, the idea that her father wasn’t really dead made her determined to be there, to see for herself. For only if she saw would she know that this was death and not a game of the same name.

  It was a Saturday morning. Earlier Nell had washed and polished the wood floors, and now the flat smelled scented and clean. In a moment she would call Laurel back (brassy Laurel with her solarium tan and her beaky nose designed to sniff out the currency value of every last item in the world) and say: ‘I’ll come this afternoon. I want to see him.’ But first, Nell walked into her kitchen and poured herself a glass of cold white wine. She took a deep drench of it and found the taste so sweetly satisfying that she smiled. Smiled and drank again. Outside the kitchen window, in the top of a chestnut sapling, some London bird was warbling in the gentle April sun.