THE DARKNESS OF WALLIS SIMPSON

She knows she’s in Paris, city of dreams. Her companion in the shadowy room, who kisses her forehead, who strokes her hands, keeps telling her that she has a duty not to die, not now, not yet. ‘Wallisse . . .’ murmurs this person, who smells like a woman with peppermint breath, but whose cheeks are hard as a man’s. ‘Wallisse . . . I shall not let you die until you remember.’

Remember what? There are plenty of questions Wallis would like to ask, but she can’t get them out. What a bitch. Words compose themselves in her mind. They’re in the proper order, usually. Except she can hardly ever say them. Her throat has a disease. What comes out of her mouth is dribble. Dribble and some droll, incomprehensible language. Afrikaans?

The woman-man companion lifts her up in the wide bed, cradles her against her anatomy, which is bulky-thick, like a bale of packed cotton, and begins brushing her hair. ‘Beautiful . . .’ whispers the bulk as she brushes. And Wallis tries to say: ‘Oh yes, it was always very becoming. In fact, it was my best feature, dark and sleek as a Shanghai girl’s. It transfigured me. It sprang from blood. Not my blood. From the tumbler of raw-steak blood I was made to drink every day after school, to ward off TB, and my mother would say: “Drink it down, Bessiewallis. Make your tresses shine.”’

But her sentences turn to goo. The stench of lilies is on the pillow. And the room is so damn dark – with just these thin movements in it, these shadows she can’t make out – it’s mortifying, like she’s watching some old flickering TV picture, or even not watching, but trapped inside an old TV, a ghost made out of light, longing to join the world beyond the screen, the world of the TV watchers, pink as candy, warm and rounded, with their haunches nudging up close to each other on their chintzy divan. How comely these brightly coloured people seem! As if nothing cold would ever touch them. As if they would rise up in a line and dance a conga, hands-to-ass, hands-to-ass, swaying along, in and out of the furniture, singing sharp, singing flat, not caring a dime, untouched by tomorrow, heading pell-mell into the hall, waking the servants, opening the door and shimmying out under the summer moon.

Out where?

The companion has said in her strange, difficult-to-understand English: ‘Wallisse, for you, this state of forgetting is a mortal sin. A mortal sin! Do you want to die with this stain of sin on your soul?’

‘Stain of sin’. No, sure she doesn’t want to die with this on her. It sounds revolting. But just what is it a girl’s supposed to remember? She tries to say: ‘I remember Baltimore in spring. Is that it?’ But the companion never answers. And now she’s gone out the door, closing it, locking it, leaving Wallis alone, a prisoner. And the sound of that key turning, that’s the lonesomest sound in the world, the one that can bring the Nightmare on . . .

Wallis clutches the bed sheet. Once, she hid her too-large hands in white gloves; now, her hands are small, like the claws of a marmoset – another mystery. She calls out: ‘Don’t leave me alone!’ But she hears the sound she makes. Not proper words, just an oddball noise. Nobody’s going to answer an animal noise. They’ll assume wolves have come back to the Bois de Boulogne. The door remains tight shut.

And here comes the Nightmare. Always the same scene. Florida palms. A bright white glare on the edge of the veranda. And Wallis sits in a wickerwork chair, waiting. 6 Admiralty Row, Pensacola. Waiting for her husband to come home. 1916. Waiting with her arms folded, woollen dress neat, slip one inch and a half shorter than the dress, tortoiseshell barrette holding back the soft waves of her long lovely hair . . .

Waiting with such pride! Waiting to see his shadow moving ahead of him down Admiralty Row, moving towards her, she bandbox-smart as a US Navy wife should always be. When she met him, she cabled her mother in Baltimore: Last night, I danced with the world’s most fascinating aviator. Poor schoolmates, poor debutantes of Baltimore, poor Mother, poor American girls everywhere, who’d never known the embrace of Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. And now he was hers, her husband, and any moment she would see him: gold stripes on his shoulder boards, dark moustache, sunburned skin. He would smile as he caught sight of her, his bride, his Wallis, who was teaching herself to cook from Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book, who already knew how to season Campbell’s soup and make a gravy without lumps, and who was progressing to omelettes and fruit pie.

But then. The bright glare of the sun on the veranda is gone. The sun’s going down over the bay. The houses on the other side of Admiralty Row are already in deep shadow. The air is cooling. It’s wintertime. And Fannie Farmer’s perfect gravy can’t be made yet because the fascinating aviator hasn’t come home.

At Pensacola Naval Air Station there is a gong which sounds whenever a plane goes down. A gong. As though a motion picture were about to begin, except there were no motion pictures then. But the base goes silent, and the wives put their arms round each other and you can smell their fear even through talcum powder, and all you can do is hold on, all you young wives together, with your hearts beating. Hold on until you know. And the wind blows. It seems always to be blowing sand in your eyes and you can hear it in the high palms: death trying to flirt with the leaves.

She never reaches the bedroom because Win is at the front door. She can hear him jabbing at the lock with his key and she knows what this means.

When they checked in at the Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, on the first night of their marriage, Win ordered whiskey to be sent to the room, but the desk clerk said: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but West Virginia is a dry county.’ And Win cursed, he cursed like the devil. He said: ‘Imagine this happening to a man on his honeymoon!’ and took out of his suitcase a silver flask and sank into an armchair and drank, drank every drop in the flask, and Wallis tried to protest: ‘Win, you’re hurting a girl’s feelings kissin’ that ole flask when you could be kissin’ your bride . . .’ And he told her: ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever tell a man what he should or should not be doing.’

Win’s breath is fiery and scorches her face, but the rest of her is shivering.

Why didn’t she get the shawl from the closet? Because she ran to the door, to open it for Win, to say: ‘Oh, Win, I pictured you dead! I was listening out for the gong.’

His white uniform is stained yellow down the front. His eyes are huge and wild. ‘Listening out for the gong? Guess you want me dead then? Bet you darn well do.’

‘Oh, don’t say that . . .’

‘Might as well be dead as live with you. Frigid bitch.’

He shoulders her aside and goes to the kitchen and she follows and he opens the refrigerator and takes out a jug of milk and begins drinking from the jug. Then he sees the meat on the draining board and says: ‘What’s that hunk of excrement?’

‘Win,’ she says, ‘that’s our dinner. I’m going to make a gravy . . .’

‘Past tense,’ he says. ‘I’m not eating that.’ And he takes up the joint, dripping with its half-cold fat, and hurls it at her. She ducks, but it slams into her head, bruising her ear, spoiling her carefully arranged hair. And this makes her mad. Mad at him for not seeing what a good wife she’s trying to be – with her cooking, with her neat appearance, not to mention doing that for him when all it does is burn her, burn her inside – and so she flies at him and beats on his chest with her fists. He’s her husband and he never treats her like a wife and this makes her so mad, so mad and sad. But he’s a strong man. He grabs her arms. He twists them round, like he’s trying to snap them, her thin arms in the wool dress. She begins screaming, but it doesn’t move him. He pushes her forward, kicking her legs, making her walk.

His hand, which stinks of something bitter, is now over her mouth. Within the cage of his reeking hand, her screams die. How could marriage be this? She’d worn a gown of white panne velvet with a bodice embroidered with pearls and a petticoat of heirloom lace. A long court train had fallen from her shoulders. A coronet of orange blossoms had circled her lovely hair . . .

Win picks her up now, as they go into the bathroom. He dumps her in the cold white tub. There’s pain in her spine. She’s crying and pleading: ‘I’m your wife . . . I’m your wife . . .’ He holds her body down in the tub with one foot, his shoe heavy on her stomach. He unbuttons his fly. She screams louder, covers her face. His burning urine drenches her. She gags. She’s the wife of an animal. But how can this be, when, at the altar, he’d looked so much like a handsome man, when, as she moved down the aisle towards this smart and upright groom, she’d carried a bouquet of white orchids and lily of the valley, tied with white silk ribbons . . . ? She cries without ceasing. She thinks she’ll never stop crying as long as she lives . . .

He took away the towels. She can’t dry herself, can’t wrap her body in anything. She removes her dress and her underwear (which she washes every day in soap flakes, to make sure that a young bride is always clean and fragrant), runs hot water and climbs back into the tub and lies without moving, feeling warmth returning. But the water cools. She runs more. This cools in its turn. Wallis gets out and lies down on the bath mat, tries to wrap herself in the mat, which is worn and grey. She’s twenty-one years old. Far away in Europe, men are dying in a war that seems to have no end. She wishes that Winfield Spencer would fly there and crash his plane into the snow and that bits of his body would be scattered in pools of blood over the hard crust of northern France.

Her Nightmare’s like a war. It has no end. It’s followed her through all her years since 1916. As though this was what she deserved, as though society had decreed: Bessiewallis, née Warfield, daughter of lovely Alice Montague and poor sickly Teackle Warfield who died of a consumption before his daughter could say his peculiar name, this pretty Bessie with her violet eyes, this girl with a cow’s name is going to be cowed with shame. Men will spit on her. And worse. And at the end of it all, she’ll be quite alone.

Wallis longs to sleep. Though the bedclothes weigh her down, because she’s barely made of soft flesh any more, just sinew and bone, Wallis can sometimes drift off to sleep on some comforting tide of thought. And here comes one: she’s in Baltimore, in the yard of her grandmother’s house, 34 East Preston Street. She’s fourteen or fifteen. She wears a bright ribbon in her dark hair. (Her Uncle Sol calls her ‘Minnehaha’.) She’s helping Ruby, the coloured maid, to hang up sheets in a salt wind, in that wind from the sea which is so beneficial to the lungs, which should be breathed ninety-nine times a day to keep away the Disease that must not be named any more.

Obediently, she’s breathing. The wind moves in the big linden tree, with its dear little buds of leaves not open yet. Gulls swoop round, up there in the blue Baltimore sky. The linen sheets on the line keep blowing against Wallis’s body, like a touch from someone else, and this is so nice, it’s almost wonderful. You could write a poem about this feeling, if you could make the words say what you felt.

At lunch, she asks her grandmother: ‘Could I write a poem, Grandma?’

‘Sit up, Bessiewallis,’ her grandmother replies. Then, after some time and with a sniff, she declares: ‘Writing is very bad for the deportment. Luckily, not many women do it. In America, we leave poetry to the men.’

Grandmother Anna Emory Warfield holds herself so ramrod straight in her chair that not one inch of her spine touches the chair back. And she wants Bessiewallis to follow her example, to respect her Southern heritage, to remember she’s a lady, to try never to be dull, to strive to be witty, yet to watch others, learn from them, listen to them, draw them into conversation: ‘That way, you will be a good hostess one day, dear, and preside over a dazzling table.’

A dazzling table? Bessiewallis imagines a million twinkling and flickering candles; yellow flames licking the glassware, wax pooling and dripping and falling into the soup, the tablecloth catching fire . . .

‘Where will this dazzling table be?’ she enquires. And sees a rare smile cross the face of Anna Emory Warfield.

‘Where will it be? Why, I couldn’t tell, dear. Except it will surely be in the South. It would never do to marry a Yankee.’

Marriage. It’s the word on everybody’s mind. And time is flying, swooping like the gulls. That’s what the grown-ups keep implying. Not a moment to spare for poetry. No time for playing ‘catch’ with Ruby, in and out of the sheets on the drying line. No time for play of any kind. Her paper dolls, ‘Mrs Astor’ and ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’, with their paper wardrobe of cocktail gowns, are back in the dark and dust of her closet, together with all the other bits and pieces of her childhood. She thinks sadly of them sometimes, Mrs A and Mrs V, so lonely, without any soirées to attend. But still time keeps accelerating along, like the new motor cars on Preston Street. In three years, Wallis is going to be a debutante. She is going to wear a lace gown and dance at the Bachelors’ Cotillion. And out of the crowd of tail-coated young bachelors, with their white ties and their nervous smiles and their hair sleek with pomade, there she will find him, the One and Only.

Lunch is over and now, as Bessiewallis steps out into the Baltimore sun, going to Richmond Market with her grandmother, morning arrives in Paris, first as a grey presence in the room, a thing which has barely decided to stay, and then as a shaft of light, gold and soft at the window, where the heavy drapes are drawn back an inch or two. Wallis looks at this shaft. She’s slept and not dreamed. She feels a bit better. She can see the damned window perfectly clearly. She thinks she may be able to say a few words today, in sensible American.

The companion is there. Her skin’s pale brown, freckled in places, and stretched taut and hard over her skull. She lifts Wallis up in the bed. Pulls up her nightdress. Some aproned and uniformed girl Wallis can’t remember seeing before shoves a pan under her. ‘Fais pipi, ma Duchesse,’ says the companion. ‘Fais un petit pipi pour moi.’

Oh, Gawd. French.

As though speaking weren’t hard enough. Speaking American. As though this weren’t taxing already.

‘Speak English,’ commands Wallis. And yeah, her voice is OK today. The woman-man smiles in surprise.

‘Good,’ she says. (She is a ‘she’, is she? Or a man in a costume? A man with a big chest?) ‘I see my Duchesse is feeling herself again. Bravo. Very good. So now do your little tinkle, my dear, and then I ’ave some things to show you. Things to help you remember. Today, I think, is going to be the day when you understand again.’

Wallis stares at the companion. (‘Never stare, Bessiewallis,’ advises Grandma Anna. ‘Because it’s a low-down thing to do. If you wish to make some internal interrogation, just hold a face fleetingly with your eyes.’ But what the hell. She’s long dead, Anna Emory Warfield. Baltimore changed. From brown to grey. The linden tree was felled. Why not stare at everything that remains?) The companion’s hair is short and thick and grey. Her hands look tough.

The aproned girl is going round the room, tidying what already looks tidy enough. She, at least, thinks Wallis, has the decency not to stare at me while I’m trying to piss. The companion is shameless, though. She’s stroking my hand, kissing my hair, and all while I’m sitting on the fucking pan.

‘Go away,’ she says.

The woman-man looks so hurt for a moment, it’s like something stabbed her in the heart. But she doesn’t back off, just carries on with her stroking and kissing and now more French: ‘Oui, ma Duchesse, oui, oui. Mais tu sais que tu ne comprends rien. Je suis la seule qui est là pour toi. . .’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ says Wallis, trying to push the companion away.

But she’s too weak to push her away and now the man-woman is furious. ‘Don’t say that!’ she snaps. Then grabs Wallis’s hand and slaps it. A nasty little stinging slap, like you might give to a dog. ‘Or I’ll take the pan away and you can lie in a wet bed. Do you want to lie in a wet bed?’

Kissing her one minute, hitting her the next. A person out of a nightmare. There’s no talking to such a creature. Wallis can say words today, but why should she? Why should she waste her precious breath talking to this hag?

She turns her face away. Sees the girl in the apron staring at her with such a sad pitying look, it makes her weep. Fuck all these people. Piss in the damned pan and be done with them. Have them draw the curtains again. Go back to darkness.

She empties her bladder. Tells them she’s done. Between them, the girl and the companion lift her again and the companion, not the girl, presses a tissue between her legs to wipe her. Kisses her cheek as she does this, fuck her. Who is she to take such liberties?

Yet she remembers this, suddenly: the touch of a girl.

God, so long ago.

When?

Lying under stars. A coal brazier to warm them. Somehow exquisite, the burning brazier and the icy sky.

In China. With Katherine. Katherine who died. Her beautiful friend, Kitty.

Kissing each other, mouth on mouth, on a silken bed on the ground. Or was it something she dreamed? Was it something she wanted to do and never did? God knows.

From her hand?

She knows her brain’s gotten all twisted up. That’s what they mean by gaga. It’s like a fog came down. She can recall the Great Fog in London in 1934 or 1935: men walking in front of buses, waving red flags; people coughing and dying; dirt on the wainscot. She can remember staring at the fog out of the window of her pale-green drawing room at Bryanston Court, and thinking how far she’d come from Preston Street, Baltimore, and how here in London she’d at last preside over a ‘dazzling table’. She can remember buying candles in Harrods, glassware in Goodes. She can remember the butcher’s boy, arriving on his bicycle, with the choice cuts she’d ordered on the telephone. And she can remember her husband, her second husband, Ernest Simpson. The way he always looked too big and wide for his suits. The nice habit he had of draping his heavy arm round her thin shoulders, to warm her, to keep her safe. The smell of his pipe. His man’s laugh, throaty and loud. She can remember dancing with Ernest in some smart club or other. ‘Isn’t this just grand, what?’ A striped taffeta dress. Champagne in shallow glasses. Air thick with smoke. Tea for Two.

But was he still there that day when she was looking out at the fog? Because, after that day, she’s honestly got no memory of him any more. Did he die? Is there a grave in England she should visit? If so, somebody should darn well tell her. Ernest Simpson was a nice man.

Her breakfast tray’s taken away and Wallis lies there and stares at her room. The furniture looks familiar, though she couldn’t say from where. It just looks as if it could belong to her. Someone has arranged lilies in a tall vase. The silk drapes (Ernest always called them ‘curtains’) are a restful blue, the kind of colour she might have chosen. On the dressing table is a collection of perfume bottles – or what Ernest said should be called ‘scent bottles’, because perfume was a ‘common’ word. Ernest was helpful like this. He taught his American wife a lot about England and its little rigid ways. But these bottles look empty, as though the ‘scent’ in them went stale and was tipped down the john. Or else it was used up. Who knows?

Wallis turns her head and sees, on her night table, a large photograph in a silver frame. It’s a picture of a young man. Who’s put it there and why? Because for heaven’s sake, the poor boy in the picture appears perfectly miserable! And this makes her smile, and really it is quite amusing how woebegone he seems. He can’t be more than twenty-three. Youth should be a golden time. The boy in the photograph has some golden features, smooth skin, pale hair, ears snug to his head, but the anguish in his eyes! Heavens-to-betsy (as old Baltimore people used to say) what a world-weary look. It could make a girl depressed, when she’d got over laughing.

The companion comes in again. She always comes in, uninvited, without knocking, like she was once a butler.

‘Who’s this?’ Wallis asks her, pointing at the photograph.

The companion purses her lips, says: ‘Wallisse, you know that I refuse to answer such a stupid question. And I am getting very tired with your games.’

Games? Oh, if only there were games to play. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? English country house games like hide-and-seek and croquet and sardines. Beautiful, terrifying, American games like poker. Mad, disreputable games in the evening, with borrowed wigs and men’s clothes and a feeling of wanting to kiss people or bite their noses, or tell them you loved them. You could never get enough of games. They made life bearable. Now, there’s no one left to play.

‘You see this?’ asks the companion, opening a large leather box. ‘You remember what this is?’

‘Yes,’ says Wallis. Because she does, she remembers the smell of it, that leather smell. But she has no idea what’s inside.

‘So,’ says the companion, ‘I ’ave not let you look at these objects for a little while, because the last time I showed them you were very naughty. Very, very naughty, Wallisse. But I think today is a good day. N’est-ce pas? I think today you are going to be sensible and tell me exactly what they are.’

OK, so the hag’s gotten her intrigued for once.

‘It better be good,’ says Wallis.

‘It is good,’ says the companion, but where Wallis looks for a smile, there is none.

She opens the box. Removes a little flat cushion. She places the box on Wallis’s lap. The weight of it’s more painful than a meal tray.

Wallis peers into it. Laid out on pale chamois is a quantity of jewellery. In the morning light of the room she can see diamonds shining.

‘Voilà,’ says the companion. ‘Voilà, ma Duchesse.’

Wallis’s eyesight can’t cope with intricate things any more. She could see the acorns on the butter – probably because, if you know something’s there, you can see it better. But all these stones, these shapes blur into a snow-blind mass. Where are her spectacles?

‘Et bien?’ says the companion.

To please the woman-man, not wanting to get her wrist slapped, Wallis nods, as though to say she understands why she’s being shown all this, understands what’s expected of her. But she can’t see the darn stuff properly. What can she do, if she can’t get anything in focus?

She feels her wrist being lifted, this marmoset’s little limb, and then round the wrist is placed a heavy bracelet made up of . . . what? A glint of red. A sparkle of ice. Diamonds and rubies.

‘Now,’ says the companion. ‘This you remember. I know you do.’

Rubies bright as blood, but staunched and contained, the blood kept from spilling by the hard bandage of diamonds. There’s something beautiful about the arrangement of this, Wallis admits. She didn’t see it a moment ago, but oh boy, there is. This one piece, taken out of the box, released from being with the rest, is a fabulous thing.

The companion’s smiling approvingly. ‘Ah, I see it in your face,’ she says. ‘It’s come back to you, hasn’t it?’

With her other hand, Wallis touches the bracelet, runs her finger round it, touch helping vision. She sees it bright and clear: the rubies crammed together in square clusters, ten or more to each cluster. The square-cut diamonds separating them and yet locking them in . . .

She’s lost in it. She’s AWOL in the bracelet.

Who made it? Whose mind saw this lovely symmetry? Shame you couldn’t crunch it, munch it, grind your teeth on it till they ached, take its essence into you, get its mineral power into your lungs, into your liver, let it break up all the old sad flesh and clothe it with new.

She’d like to be left alone with these gems. Her teeth are brittle and not all her own, yet she’d still like to bite on this bracelet like a dog bites on a bone, like a baby bites on a teething ring. She wants to ask the interfering hag to leave, but words have gotten jumbled again, she can sense this. Nothing will come out right.

‘Very well,’ coos the hag. ‘Now tell me what is inscribed on the clasp of this bracelet.’

Another of her tests. Another of her ways to spoil any fleeting moment of pleasure.

Wallis refuses to let a syllable of anything in any language come from her mouth. She lies down with her head on the pillow, cradling the bracelet. The jewel box falls on to the floor.

‘Wallisse! Mon dieu!’

She’ll probably be slapped now, but she doesn’t care. She’s got the bracelet.

‘Wallisse! Talk to me. Don’t pretend any more. Pretence is so ungrateful! He gave up an Empire for you. An Empire! And you pretend to remember nothing. But I ’ave sworn to myself I shall not rest, I shall not return to my legal practice nor go again into the world until you admit to me that you do remember. For, somewhere in you, you do. So now tell me please: there are two words inscribed on the bracelet and you will say what they are or I am going to ’ave to punish you. I am going to punish you very badly.’

The bracelet’s pressed against Wallis’s mouth. Who cares what words are inscribed on the fucking bracelet? It’s the thing itself that’s lovely, not the words. She lives in darkness most of the time, a ghost trapped in an old TV, but now the companion’s given her something beautiful and she’s damn well going to hang on to it.

But the hag won’t leave her alone. There’s murder in her voice.

‘I never thought you would be so obstinate. You are a mule! I dare not tell anybody what a crime you are committing. I’m too ashamed.’

Ashamed.