The duchess, p.9
The Duchess, page 9
Red and gold glowed at her side. A footman, proffering a tray crammed with glasses of champagne. She took a steadying sip; the world came into focus again.
‘Which one are you riding tomorrow, Mummy? At the T of the C?’ An attractive blonde had come up to the queen.
‘Burmese, of course.’ Lilibet turned to Wallis. ‘Have you met my daughter Anne?’
Anne wore a hideous nylon blouse. It seemed she had the family talent both for dressing badly and for raising awkwardness to an art form. After a curt greeting she walked off, tossing her ash-blonde mane.
Charles appeared. ‘How are you, Aunt Wallis?’ The Prince of Wales’s smile was warm. ‘I’m so very sorry about Uncle David. I wish …’ His eyes flicked uneasily towards his mother. ‘I wish I had known him better.’
Chapter Eleven
Bryanston Court, London W1
The flat was finished and ready to move into. She loved everything about it; it was everything Upper Berkeley Street was not. Bright and modern, clean and new, with efficient heating and water systems. And a satisfactorily grand-sounding Ambassador double-two-one-five telephone number.
On the first possible morning she took Ernest to see it and covered his eyes as he entered. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, taking her hands away.
‘Amazing,’ he said, looking round.
‘Amazing good or amazing bad?’ She genuinely hoped he liked it. While she had been in charge of the project, he had written all the cheques. Their finances remained dire, so he had clearly done something. Taken out a loan perhaps. She had not asked, but nor had he offered. Or uttered a word of complaint.
He smiled at her. ‘Just … amazing.’
‘Good.’ It had been hard work, tracking down exactly the perfect pale green for the drawing-room walls, the right beige for the carpet, the correct cream for the damask curtains. She had found the long Italian sideboard and the William and Mary cabinet in local antique shops. Ernest glanced at them; yes, they had been expensive, but she had offset them with sofas and chairs that were cheap but didn’t look it.
She saw him swallow at the sight of the flowers, costly tall white blooms in tall glass vases. He seemed most appreciative of the bookcases which filled one entire wall and held his collection of volumes.
‘Come see the dining room,’ she invited. He followed her and she saw his eyes widen at the mirror-topped table, the white leather chairs and the toile de Jouy wallpaper. Sconces had been fitted to the walls and glass candlesticks held long pink candles. Reflected in the table, they formed a prettily coloured wax forest. They lifted her heart. ‘Think of how pretty our dinners will look!’
Ernest nodded in agreement. ‘My business contacts are going to love it.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘We’ve been through this. You’re having those in hotels from now on.’
His round brown eyes became apologetic. ‘Sorry. I forgot. But …’ The basset hound forehead creased. ‘Who will we entertain here?’
She smiled at him. ‘Leave that to me. I’m working on it.’
Next was the bedroom with its aquamarine walls, pink curtains and coverlet and bright silver bedside telephone. A wave of awkwardness passed between them as he turned to her, a silent question in his eyes.
In silent answer, she opened the door into the adjoining room, where polished mahogany cupboards and drawers gave a smart, masculine air. It was predominantly a dressing room, but contained a single bed. Ernest gave her a resigned smile. ‘Much more my sort of thing.’
She led him through the guest room, with its circular bed upholstered in oyster satin.
‘It’s quite MGM,’ Ernest said, of the film studio.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she smiled, leading him into the bathroom with its mirrored pillars, sky-blue tub, white walls and white fluffy rugs, as close to the one in the Whigham mansion as she had been able to manage.
‘Well?’ she smiled.
‘You want an honest answer?’
She folded her arms and gave him a mock-frown. ‘Possibly.’
‘Looks like a cocktail bar in Detroit,’ said Ernest, grinning.
‘Funny you should say that!’ She led him back into the sitting room and opened a cupboard. Inside was an ice bucket, a cocktail shaker, spirits and mixers, glasses and swizzlers. ‘We’re going to have cocktails.’
‘Cocktails?’
‘Remember them?’ She looked at him wryly. ‘Admittedly it’s been a while. The bar in Paris?’
‘Of course.’ He looked back at the makeshift bar. ‘But … you mean we’re having them now?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s only half past ten.’
‘I mean I’ll holding a cocktail party every night.’
‘Every night?’
‘Between six and eight.’ She hastened to explain her idea to him. ‘You see, I’m not sure that formally inviting people would work yet. I don’t know many, and I don’t have any clout. But I thought that if people knew they could drop in here on the way to other things. Have a cocktail, a hot savoury …’ She stopped, seeing she had left Ernest behind.
‘What people?’ he asked.
‘All kinds of people. Aristocrats, showgirls, diplomats, bankers. That’s the secret of a great party. Mix it up.’ She did not add that, as a Navy wife, she had been noted for lively gatherings. It had been one aspect of marriage to Win that had worked.
Ernest had sat down on the edge of the bathtub. He looked pale. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him. ‘It won’t be until after the pageant. I haven’t asked anyone yet and, besides, I’ve got my crawfish to sew.’
Cecil had sketched the design for her: tight-fitting and brightly metallic to show off her slender figure. As all the other participants were either elderly, rotund or both, their outfits were more exercises in concealment. At the many dress rehearsals there was more good humour than Wallis had expected, ancient aristocrats laughing at their appearance.
Only Cecil was not seeing the funny side. He had started to worry about reputational damage and was behaving like a spoilt child. ‘I’m going to be a laughing stock,’ he fretted after a rehearsal in which two large tadpoles had collided and fallen over.
‘Can’t you bring in a few Bright Young Things?’ Wallis suggested hopefully. ‘The Jungmans, for instance? The Morgans?’ Cecil had promised to introduce her to both, and here was an ideal opportunity.
‘They wouldn’t be seen dead doing this,’ was the unflattering response.
Later, Wallis saw him talking to Maud. Her voice, simultaneously horrified and offended, came floating across the stage. ‘I’m sure we can find someone under a million, as you so flatteringly put it, Cecil. Let me ask around.’
Angela came to the next rehearsal. She was an exquisite blonde twenty-something with bobbed hair and a straight fringe. Like a beautiful Joan of Arc, Wallis thought. She was also thoughtful and kind, helping some of the more infirm participants through the gloomy, confusing passages of the theatre without tripping over the ropes. Cecil had cast her as an eel, and in her silver glittering costume she was often seen steering a staggering scallop, or an unsteady goldfish.
One day, Angela brought her mother. Tiny, vividly pretty and beautifully dressed, she caught Wallis’s eye immediately. Here was a woman she would like to be friends with. She seized the opportunity. If she was in her crawfish costume, too bad.
Angela’s mother was reading on a chair in the theatre foyer. Sitting down next to her, Wallis began singing her daughter’s praises. The woman’s lovely eyes brightened with gratitude. ‘How kind of you. Angela was delighted to help. My name is Freda, by the way.’
Wallis introduced herself. Freda looked at her with happy curiosity. ‘You’re Maud’s sister-in-law? How wonderful for you. She’s a very old friend of mine.’
Wallis tried to look as if it was wonderful while concealing her amazement that dull Maud had a friend like this. ‘How do you know her?’
Freda’s laugh was soft and attractive. ‘A friend and I were walking through Berkeley Square. The air-raid warning sounded – this was during the war – and we ran for shelter to the first place we saw, which was the portico of a large house. It turned out to be Maud’s, and although I didn’t know her she was terribly kind and let us stay until the raid ended. We’ve been friends ever since.’
Wallis felt something like a landslide inside her brain; a swooping joining-up of dots. She realised who Freda was, the star of the astonishing lunch anecdote, the woman who became the Prince of Wales’s mistress after meeting at Maud’s.
Freda now smiled, rose, said it had been lovely to talk but now she must find Angela.
Wallis hurriedly mentioned the planned cocktail parties. ‘Do drop in if you can,’ she added.
‘How lovely,’ said Freda. Wallis watched her disappear daintily into the auditorium.
Moments later an oyster rushed out of it and up to where Wallis was sitting. Maud’s puce face glowered from a hole in the middle of the shell. ‘Just a word of warning, Wallis dear. No one in London just asks people to drop in.’
Wallis smiled sweetly back at her. ‘Well, I’m from the United States of America. And I’m doing things my way.’
The day before the pageant performance, she woke with a sore throat. As the day developed, so did her illness and by the following morning it had ripened to full-blown influenza. Despite aching in every limb, alternately burning hot and shuddering with cold, she insisted on getting up and getting dressed.
‘Go back to bed,’ Ernest instructed, pausing in the bedroom doorway. He had his hat and coat on, ready to go to the office. ‘The pageant’ll have to happen without you.’
‘It can’t. I have to go. Everything depends on it.’
‘The Lying-In Hospital has been going since the 1780s. It will manage without you dressing up as a crawfish.’
She couldn’t bring herself to say that that was not quite what she meant. After today she would not see Cecil again. She had mentioned her cocktails but he had been non-committal and once the show was over she would be back to square one. Plus a few geriatric bridge parties if she was lucky. ‘I have to go,’ she muttered, attempting to struggle up before collapsing back down with a groan.
Things became a blur after that. She was in a dark, hot passage where strange sea creatures paraded past. They looked at her and laughed eerie echoing laughs. Her head hurt and it was hard to breathe. She had no sense of time passing but gradually the darkness ebbed and the weight on her chest lifted. She woke up one day to find the room had stopped whirling and the pain in her head was gone.
Ernest was vastly relieved. He gave her shoulder a loving, sympathetic squeeze. ‘I’m so glad you’re better.’
She stared tearfully back at him, feeling anything but glad herself. Recovery meant facing failure. She remembered the pageant and the parties she had planned in its wake. But no one had called while she was ill, either in person or by telephone. What was the point? No one cared.
She stayed in bed for some days after that; what was there to get up for? She lay propped against her pillow, the silver telephone beside her silent, the newspapers and magazines Ernest brought to cheer her up unopened, their gossip and social pages unread. Instead, she watched the sky through her bedroom window go through its diurnal motions. The bright light of morning, the flatter light of afternoon, the rich tones of early evening. Evenings were the worst, when her dashed hopes of being a hostess particularly came back to haunt her. To think she had imagined that Cecil would come with the likes of the Magnificent Morgans!
The evenings dragged by, the flat so silent she could almost hear the distant snap of the fire in the sitting room and Ernest turning the pages of his volumes of the classics. She pictured the cabinet with the ice bucket and the cocktail shaker, the spirits and mixers, the glasses and swizzlers. She had chosen it all so carefully. But it would never be used.
One evening the silence was broken by the distant ring of the front door bell. It was followed by the sound of footsteps in the passage and the sight of Ernest in the bedroom doorway, looking unusually flustered. ‘You’d better rise and shine, Wallis. There’s a Cecil just arrived. Says he’s come for cocktails. He’s brought some women with him. Thelma and Gloria, I think they’re called.’
Chapter Twelve
No one had ever got dressed so fast. Wallis was hurrying down the corridor just as the guests had got their coats off. She felt as if she were stepping into a part she had long been rehearsing to play. As Lily came past, arms full of furs, she said, ‘The sausages please, Lily. Oh, and the ice.’
Lily, also playing her role beautifully, nodded as if this were routine and not the first time it had ever happened. She knew what to do; Wallis had briefed her some time ago.
In the drawing room, Ernest was clearly asking Cecil the usual questions.
‘I went to Cambridge, Arnie.’
‘It’s Ernest.’
‘But I have to say it was slightly wasted on me. I never went to lectures. However, I was good at acting. I was hailed as “one of our greatest living actresses” at the University Amateur Dramatic Club.’
Seeing Ernest’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline, Wallis chuckled to herself. She felt towards Cecil a passionate gratitude. He had done as he promised. She could have kissed his brown-and-white co-respondent shoes.
‘I failed all my exams and left without a degree,’ Cecil blithely continued. ‘My father arranged that I enter the family firm but it was soon clear to all that the cement business wasn’t for me.’
Wallis hurried across the carpet. ‘Cecil! How wonderful to see you!’
He greeted her rapturously, kissing her on both cheeks.
‘How was the pageant? I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to come.’
‘Well it wasn’t quite the same without you, dear. A couple of the tadpoles cried off too. We had to pad out the fish with literary characters. Mrs Throgmorton came as an Abyssinian maid playing on her dulcimer and singing of Mount Abora.’
‘“Kubla Khan,”’ said Ernest, immediately. ‘Coleridge.’ He took a breath, and quoted. ‘“Could I recall within me her symphony and song …”’
‘Mrs Throgmorton’s symphony and song were, alas, rudely interrupted by the curtain falling down on her and knocking off her wig,’ Cecil said. ‘But everyone agreed it was a most artistic achievement.’
Wallis turned to the two dark-haired women standing with Cecil, one voluptuous and smiling and one slight and appraising. ‘Welcome,’ she said, excitedly.
‘Wallis, Arnie,’ said Cecil, ‘may I introduce the Magnificent Morgans? The Big Apple’s most terrific twins? Otherwise known as Lady Thelma Furness and Mrs Gloria Vanderbilt!’
She felt a swoop of tremendous excitement. These guests, in her drawing room!
She allowed herself a discreet glance at their noses. Were they like begonias? In fact, they were small and tip-tilted. Their lips were richly coated in lipstick and their faces heavily powdered. They had emphatic eye make-up and their dresses, exposing the voluptuous one’s breasts and curves, a little looser on the other, were black. Shaking hands, Wallis thought that Thelma was the friendly one. Gloria seemed more watchful.
Lily entered with sausages and handed them around just as instructed, with tiny plates and napkins. Cecil was in raptures. ‘Perfection! And I say that as a connoisseur of sausages!’
‘And all the flowers, I can see you adore flowers!’ chimed in Thelma. ‘I always say a room without flowers is like the sky without the sun!’
Wallis avoided Ernest’s eye. She sensed he was wondering if people were going to exclaim like this all night. He flinched as Thelma shuffled up to him and began to stroke his arm suggestively with red fingernails. ‘And we have something else in common, Wallis!’ She giggled at Wallis.
‘You mean we’re both from the States?’ Ernest, Wallis saw, was looking terrified.
‘No, we’re both married to men in the shipping business! All the nice girls love a sailor, is that not so?’
‘Yes, and we all know which sailor in your case,’ put in Gloria waspishly. ‘It’s not dear Marmaduke, either. Her husband,’ she added, apparently for Wallis and Ernest’s benefit.
‘Lord Furness is an only child, thankfully,’ supplied Thelma. ‘Imagine what his mother would have called the others!’
Cecil was looking about him. ‘What’s a girl got to do to get a drink round here?’
Wallis darted for the cocktail shaker and hastily handed the glasses round.
‘Do you miss the States, Wallis?’ Thelma asked. ‘I sure do,’ she went on, without waiting for the answer. ‘Remember when we first arrived there, Gloria? We were barely seventeen and innocent as new-born babes but then we just happened to meet nice Mr Cholly Knickerbocker who put us in his social column in the New York American!’
‘And then you just happened to meet the heir to AT&T, who you just happened to marry before you just happened to divorce him to marry someone who just happened to be richer …’
Thelma snatched up a cushion and threw it at her sister. ‘Do shut up, Gloria.’
The impact of the cushion had caused Gloria’s cocktail to slop in her glass and spill on to the pale carpet. Wallis tried not to mind the stain that was spreading there. Or that Cecil had smeared sausage grease on the sofa.
‘Coco and Bendor are back on again,’ Cecil observed with pretend weariness. Wallis’s ears pricked up. There was only one Coco she had heard of: Mademoiselle Chanel, whose clothes she so admired. She now learnt that her lover was the Duke of Westminster, the richest peer in England.
‘He’s crazy about her,’ said Gloria, enviously. ‘Sends her boxes of vegetables to Paris from his country estates. With emeralds hidden in the bottom!’
‘Lucky her,’ pouted Thelma. ‘Duke used to send me baskets of plover’s eggs from Holland. But there were never any emeralds in those.’
‘And of course he’s put her initials on the lampposts!’ Cecil shook his head in wonder. ‘Double Cs! In gold!’
Wallis tried to picture a London lamppost. She had never really noticed them. ‘Why would he do that?’
