The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Read online

  Hold tight.

  ‘It’s what they used to say on the buses.’

  The man in the room explodes with laughter. ‘On the buses! Sweetheart, he never went on a bus in his life! What a card you are.’

  ‘“Move along inside”.’

  ‘Oh, you make me die!’

  The man coughs and coughs, and then he’s gone. There and choking one minute, gone the next. Like her poor father, Teackle, vanished before he could be properly known, before he could be a husband or a father, leaving Alice Montague and her daughter to the mercy of Uncle Sol.

  And Wallis hides by the door of their apartment, the one where Mother used to serve up her turtle soup, her crowns of lamb, and watches as Sol puts his big, moist hands on Alice’s waist. ‘Won’t you hold me, Alice? I do so much for you. You never show me the least . . . Without me, you and Minnehaha . . . where would you be, baby?’

  Wallis knows this can’t be right, Sol’s rubbery mouth on Alice’s neck, his hands staining the silk dress she mends in the small hours of the Baltimore morning. How could this ever be right?

  ‘Leave my mother alone. Go away, Uncle Sol ’

  He goes. He crawls away down the stairs, wearing his black coat with the astrakhan collar, and they lock the door on him. They say: ‘Never again. Never ever again.’

  But he never forgot.

  The hag would have been proud of such a man, who remembered and remembered, right until death, beyond death, into the bureaucracy of death, into the Will which states that all his money, his Warfield fortune, all five million dollars of it shall be used to set up a home for Indigent Gentlewomen.

  ‘Indigent Gentlewomen’. Oh, you could laugh at that! You could imagine them, those indigent gentlewomen in their new ‘Home’, throwing away their gentility at the poker table, on the nightly drinking spree, in clouds of tobacco smoke, in secret orders from lingerie catalogues, in the way they ambush the janitor, the gardeners, the doctor who comes to tend to their indigestion and their bunions. You could make up stories about them, laugh till you wept, if only it weren’t so desperate a thing, to be a Warfield and to have nothing and for the Indigent Gentlewomen to have it all.

  Five million bucks.

  Just to think of that sum. To think of it back then when it could have bought the world. To think of it and have none of it. Not a dime.

  The companion’s back. They’re going through the ritual with the pan again except that this kind of business hurts like hell and stinks like the dead. Tears burn Wallis’s cheeks. If only food could melt away inside you and not have to come out again.

  ‘Oh mon dieu, chérie. Quelle odeur. . .’

  In future, she’ll refuse to eat anything solid. Getting rid of it again’s too much of an agony.

  The hag wipes her ass. No kissing this time, thank God.

  The girl rolls her over very gently, with cool soft hands, and places a clean sheet under her. Soon, everything will smell of roses, of lilies, of candy, of peppermint sorbet, of forget-me-nots.

  In her hand is a silver mug. ‘Drink,’ says the hag. A strange and bitter taste. Cold as ice and yet hot in the gut.

  And it takes away pain. This and the bracelet. These are the only things she needs to remain alive; the things which fortify her blood. She knows best. It’s her blood. Surely someone should pay attention? But oh no, the mug’s taken away, the drink is finished and gone and now the companion, the man-woman, is setting her another test. Every day, there’s one of these – or more. Every day, she fails them and her hand gets slapped. Or her cheek. Sometimes, the hag slaps her cheek! As though she were a kid again, stealing the good-luck charms out of Mother’s ugly wedding cake, when she married for the second time; crying with rage when her favourite paper ball gown of her darling paper Mrs Vanderbilt was chucked on to the fire.

  ‘Look at this picture, Wallisse. Here are your glasses. Put them on and look closely and tell me who this is.’

  So tired. Tired of tests and puzzles. Tired of being slapped.

  She can barely focus her eyes, even through the spectacles. But she tries to see who’s in the photograph. And OK, it’s swimming into her field of vision now, like a developing picture: a big, ridiculous hat; a fluffy veil; a smug smile; eyes too small; breasts too big. She knows who this is. Of course she darn well does! She’d know her anywhere. It’s a photograph of her Enemy.

  ‘Cookie,’ she announces.

  ‘Non,’ says the hag. ‘Non, non.’

  It’s unfair to be contradicted. This is one test she couldn’t fail. A girl can always recognise her Enemy, even when she’s gaga, even when she’s half blind, even when so many things have gotten lost in the London smogs.

  ‘Cookie,’ she says again.

  ‘Wallisse. Look again. Not this “cookie”. Who?’

  It’s Cookie all right. With her ‘sweet-as-peachy-pie’ smile, her fat little hands, her pearls and her dimples. There was never any mistaking Cookie. Because the one you hate and who hates you never dies or fades from your mind.

  Except . . . Why was Cookie the Enemy?

  Well, you can temporarily mislay the reason for a quarrel. This happens all the time. Or else, there wasn’t any reason, like there was no reason for Win to shove her into the bathtub and degrade her and humiliate her. You can’t pretend there’s a reason for every last thing that happens in the world.

  ‘Allez,’ says the woman-man, with a sigh. ‘I show you another picture.’

  It’s Cookie again, older, fatter, with more and more dents and dimples in her wide smiling face. Cookie with an arrow sticking out of her hat. A straw arrow! At least, she used to make them laugh. She’d appear in the newspapers sometimes. God knows why. But there Cookie would be, wearing some flouncy, tasteless tent of a gown, some stork’s nest on her head, and they would howl with mirth. And that’s when they thought up the nickname for her: ‘Cookie’, like a fat cook who doesn’t know how to dress. They thought it up at breakfast time. Oh and it was just wonderful to be laughing so much, hurting and weeping with laughter. ‘Cookie’! What a peach of a name. ‘Cookie’!

  The dogs – those sweet little dogs who skittered about on the polished floors – would sometimes begin barking, they laughed so hard. Laughing at Cookie was one of their favourite, favourite things. But wait. Whose favourite things? Not hers and Ernest’s. Ernest had disappeared in the fog somewhere. Somebody else. A person with whom she once breakfasted. A dull little man, who hated sitting still.

  ‘Well?’ says the companion.

  Wallis turns to her. That set mouth, that hard bone of her cheek. The bracelet’s safe under her pillow, safe for now, but if the hag takes it away, what misery. So she tries with all her might to compose a proper sentence. She jabs a nail at the picture. Stabs at Cookie’s wide and smiling face. ‘This . . .’ she says, feeling saliva begin to trickle at the corner of her mouth, ‘is Cookie. That is what we called her.’

  The picture’s snatched away. The hag screams at her: ‘Why do you think I’m keeping you alive? Why ’ave I – with my years and years of advocacy, of linguistic finesse – why ’ave I decided to devote my time to you? Why am I standing guardian at your gate? Because I refuse to let you die until you acknowledge your place in history!’

  History? History? The old thing pronounced it perfectly, with the ‘h’ at the beginning. But what can she mean? What place in ‘history’ could a twice-married Baltimore debutante ever achieve?

  Wallis wipes the saliva from the edge of her lips. ‘I don’t understand one single word,’ she says.

  ‘Mon dieu! I ’ave told you so many times, Wallisse. I am so tired of repeating it: you must become an honest witness to the past. I shall feed you through a tube in your nose. An iron heart will beat for yours. But you will remember! I ’ave sworn it. I ’ave sworn on my own life. The Duchess is going to bring everything back into the light!’

  Oh, boy. She’s a hell-hound, a fury. What’s made her so mad? Did her mother die a terrible death at fifty-nine? Did this mother, r
ight before dying, tell her she looked plain, that the brown dress she was wearing was all wrong, that her skin needed a facial stimulant? Some things you never forget.

  The fury goes marching out, taking the picture of Cookie. Slam of the door, echo of the lock. Shame. Because looking at photographs of Cookie always cheered a girl up. Those bits of Cookie-pie which met in the middle: breast and stomach nudging one another like gourmandising friends. Those hawsers of pearls going round and round the turkey-wattled neck. That chiffon, all colours of pastel rainbows, which floated around the stumpy silhouette. And always that serene smile which seemed to say ‘I’m Cookie-the-Beautiful’, as though no one had ever told her she looked a fright, that people got stitches in their sides from laughing at her clothes, that, as an Enemy, she was a joke.

  Yet, somehow, damn her, she was the Enemy with power. God knows how she’d got it, but she had. The little dull man, when he’d finished laughing at Cookie, would sometimes hurl the newspaper away and curse her. He could curse like a London barrow boy. Curse like Win Spencer. That fucking cow! That fat cunt! He would be trembling and have to light a cigarette, and his hands would shake as he lit it. He’d be near to weeping, say that it was all unfair, unfair, so bloody unfair! And then she, Wallis, would try to calm him down, tell him that temper tantrums did no good, stroke his pale head.

  Who was he?

  How long did he stay?

  The dogs liked him. Those cute, dribbling pugs who used to sleep on her bed, lie on her feet under the dining-room table, they loved him too. But that sniffle-snuffle of their breathing used to worry him. He’d look up from his embroidery and stare at the pugs, like they were breaking his heart.

  ‘It’s the way they are,’ she’d say.

  ‘I know,’ he’d say. ‘I know.’ And go back to his stitching. His knees would be covered in bits and ends of coloured wool. What a sad sight he was, doing his gros point. Hour on hour. A man embroidering his life away.

  One day he announced: ‘I’m going to do the Fort.’

  And he meant, embroider a tapestry of it, to cover a cushion or a footstool. But the Fort was complicated. It was three-dimensional, unlike his flower needlework. He knew it was going to cause him difficulties.

  It had been his house once, Fort Belvedere, with towers and turrets covered in ivy and battlements running round it, where rusty old canon still stood, pointing at nothing. He’d loved it. It was the place he’d loved most in the world. He’d owned other houses (hadn’t he?), but this was the only one he loved. God knows why. All Wallis can remember of it is an elegant hall, with black and white flagstones on the floor, or marble even, everything black and white, except some tall chairs that were yellow, the colour of buttercups. Why did he love it so? Because of those startling colours? Or because he knew some hag, some fat cook, some miser like Uncle Sol would one day snatch it away from him? Alice Montague said, when her second husband died: ‘Everything is taken away, Bessiewallis. Each and every beloved thing.’

  Perhaps the little man had a good understanding of those words?

  Anyway, he wanted to get the Fort back by doing this embroidery picture of it, but before he could start on the embroidery, he had to paint the Fort on to the canvas. He tried to copy it from an old photograph. But he wasn’t happy with his painting. He crumpled it up and threw it in the fire, just like the paper ball gown of Mrs V had been thrown into the fire. He said his painting looked like a child had done it. He marched out of the house, informing her he was going to slash stinging nettles. He was almost weeping.

  Slash stinging nettles? The things men dream up to do.

  Now, Ernest had been happy with life on the whole. He’d never slashed a nettle, not as far as anyone knew. He’d often say: ‘Isn’t this jolly? Isn’t this a treat, what, Wallis?’ Some men can be happy with their existence and Ernest was one of these. But the little man was never happy with anything, that’s what Wallis remembers. And, for a while, it seemed to fall to her to try to make him happy. God knows why her. But the words of Anna Emory Warfield came back to her: ‘Always do your best, Bessiewallis, to make people feel comfortable and content and not bored in your presence.’ So she supposes someone knew she was schooled in trying to please. Whoever it was gave her the little man as a challenge.

  But boy, he was hard work! Some of things she had to do. It’s coming back to her now. Jesus Christ, he was so bored one time, he made her come with him to visit Hitler. In some high-up mountain resort. Cold as death. Not even any skiing. Birds of prey wheeling around in the sky above.

  And that Hitler creature, with his slicked-down hair and his ranting voice, he was wearisome. No, he was. Wallis had been told everybody loved him, that he could save the world bla bla bla – but why in the world did the world need ‘saving’ when everyone in London seemed to be able to afford a cook and a chauffeur and a parlourmaid, when the likes of Uncle Sol were dead and forgotten, when Londoners were cheery, even during the fogs, when Ernest’s shipping business was on the up-and-up, when you could buy spring violets for tuppence a bunch in Sloane Square? That’s what no one ever explained to her properly: why such a lovely world needed a saviour. And it never did get explained – ever. Or else she’s forgotten the explanation, along with everything else. Didn’t they say it was something to do with Communists? Communists? Surely they were too far away to matter? They were in Russia, weren’t they? They stood in lines in the snow, far far away.

  At Bryanston Court, one of the women round her dinner table said she was in love with this ‘Führer’, as Hitler called himself. So Wallis imagined someone tall and athletic, like Douglas Fairbanks. But honest-to-goodness, Herr Hitler turned out to be small and egotistical and rude. And yes, didn’t he have the nerve to shut a door in her face? She can recall that: she and the little pale man were going in to drinks with him and there were other people there, men in uniform, and she, Wallis, was all dressed up in a taffeta gown and a fur stole, and hoping to God there might be a martini some time soon. And then bang! The door slams right in front of her nose. Could you imagine such a thing?

  But Hitler did what he liked. And what he liked was bringing death.

  She was far away somewhere by the time it happened, but there was darkness and death in London, that’s what they told her, later on. This is coming back: being in sunshine miles away from where it was, but knowing that in places she’d loved there was horror beyond what she could ever imagine. And knowing Hitler had caused it. He was the architect of this horror. He slammed the door on her and on that beautiful past, and then things were never the same.

  She never saw London again. Did she? It had been her home, her adopted home, and then it disappeared from sight. And everything in it disappeared from sight. The sooty parks. The trolley buses. The Ritz Hotel. The roof garden at Derry and Toms. The crowds outside the Empire, Leicester Square. The milk carts. The baskets of violets for tuppence a bunch. The pale-green drawing room at Bryanston Court. Ernest.

  So this is it. This must be it: the important thing the hag wants her to remember. She wants her to remember Hitler. How she let him kiss her hand. How, after he’d kissed it, he didn’t save the world but took it all away. A girl should never forget a thing like this. The hag’s right. It is immoral. She should be ashamed of herself.

  So now she’s got to call the hag, or the ‘Maître’ as she calls herself, tell her OK – whoever you are – I did it: I remembered. I remembered the horror. And maybe I was to blame in some way, for what happened to the world when Hitler got hold of it. Was I? Is that why you slap my wrist, my cheek? Not only because I forgot, but because I was polite to Hitler in that mountain resort. Because, before he slammed the door on me, I sat with him on some precipice and admired the view? The little man was there, smiling, approving, as I praised the German scenery, and it was then that the Führer kissed my hand. And still we both smiled, the little man and me. Smiling with our sky-blue eyes. I guess he knew no better at the time and I knew no better and neither one of us imagined that aft
er he’d kissed my hand, Hitler could make London disappear into darkness.

  There’s a bell hanging from a cord near Wallis’s bed. When she presses the bell, someone usually appears. There’s always a gap, between pressing the bell and the person arriving, as though they had to walk right across the damned Bois to get here. In days gone by, in Bryanston Court, servants used to arrive promptly, but here, in this ghostly room, she waits and waits, and sometimes the waiting goes on so long she can’t remember why she rang the bell in the first place and she has to send the person away.

  After a while, the man-woman arrives. She smells of rain. She hauls Wallis up in the bed, from where she’s slithered down, then grabs a brush and begins that same, repetitious brushing of her hair she seems to want to do so often. It might be nice, except her hair’s white now. White and brittle. Wallis has seen it on the pillow, like some old hermit had lain himself down beside her. Why bother to brush that?

  ‘Stop,’ she says.

  ‘Non, non. I make you tidy, Wallisse.’

  On she goes, the silver-handled brush heavy as iron. Wallis reaches up and clutches the hag’s arm, which is always clothed in some moorland tweed.

  ‘Stop,’ she says again. ‘I remembered.’

  Now there’s silence in the room. Not a tree moving outside, nor any far-away whisper of cars on the cobbled roads.

  The companion puts away the brush, sits on the bed, takes Wallis’s hand. ‘Mon dieu,’ she whispers. ‘Dieu soit loué. Tell me, ma chérie. Tell me all of it.’

  Wallis has to get the words right now. And not drool. Not come out with Afrikaans. She swallows. Preparing to speak.