Famous Last Words (13 page)

I took a deep breath and said; “all right. Go ahead.”

Allenby looked at me; and then away. But he did reach

out and take Diana’s hand—which gave me hope.

“You know you can come and visit us at Nauly anytime

you like,” he said. each word spoken separately like a completed sentence. “We’ve been friends so many, many years—

and I don’t like losing friends. Besides…” he took Diana’s other hand “I think my wife is in love with you. A little.

-” he made a desperate attempt for just the right words “—what I really want is just to know how it ends, you see.

I mean your story. This.” And he looked around the room at where we were and all the people there. “We have to get beyond this awful moment, Hugh. Beyond this awful time.

And we won’t—if people like you give in. And you have, you know. You have. If it wasn’t for people like you, this awful moment wouldn’t be here. Do you see?”

He was nearly breaking Diana’s hand in two with the force of the tension inside him and I became quite alarmed. He stood up, pushing down very hard on her hand and on the table—having to support himself without the benefit of his cane—and I thought he was going to fall over backwards.

I rose.

Diana and I supported Ned on either side and we could

feel him give away a little—easing very slightly in towards her shoulder. Diana motioned for the cane and I gave it to her. Ned didn’t even see this. He was shaking so much his eyes had all but closed.

Diana reached across and touched me on the cheek and

smiled at me—desperate—and said; “you know, dear, he

was right when he said I am in love with you a little.” And she drew me forward and kissed me somewhere south of the ear—but really only so she could whisper to me: “please; be patient; understand. You are far from being the only cause of this unhappiness… .”

Then—stepping back—she stood beside her husband and

gave her famous smile that is seen in all the Beaton photographs and said to Neddy; “ready to march, dear heart?”

And they left, without looking back.

And now I must tell what followed.

After they had gone, I sat for the next three-quarters of an hour at the enormous table, sipping what remained of the Pernod. On the other side of the room. the Blackshirts made a great show of their presence, laughing a good deal, making much of their African victory, flashing what seemed to be an inordinate display of strong white teeth, exuding an aura

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of masculinity that caused an imbalance in the atmosphere as if something quite invisible, but huge was taking up more and more space between the tables.

At one point one of them stood up—very tall—not more

than twenty-two years old and wearing boots and a wide

brown belt. I could hear him excusing himself and I knew this young, exuberant man would have to pass my table.

And I began to perspire. I wanted so desperately to follow him, but I could only think of what Allenby had said; “you are some kind of pilgrim looking for a faith…under rocks.”

And yet I turned in my chair and watched that young man going away. And I went away with him—in my mind. And

knelt before his strength. And his victory.

Once I had escaped from the Bar, I waited in my rooms, for nearly twenty hours. And in all that time the bands were marching through the streets and the songs kept rising through the floors and the rockets flew up into the sky obliterating all the ordinary stars with stars of green and yellow, blue and red. But I would not go out; I could not. I could not admit the bands were mine and the songs were mine and

the rockets flying up into the sky were celebrating my victory.

. .and my defeat.

I couldn’t eat. I didn’t want to think. I only wanted to be drunk, like Ned. I was ill.

I bathed. I lay on the bed beneath a shroud of netting. I bathed again. I covered myself from head to toe with Knize Ten. I bathed again. I thought; I will bathe myself to death if I can’t get rid of the smell. But of course, the smell was only in my mind. At last, the next night, after dark I had a perfunctory call from Ned. “You might want to come and

say your goodbye to the old man. The Palazzo d’Aquila…”

I was shaky still, but knew 1 must say yes. For Diana’s sake. if not my own.

So we all went out together, riding across the lagoon in a motor launch and slowlv down the far canal to the Via

d’Aquila, where footmen bearing torches met us at the steps and ushered us inside past rows of official mourners, officers.

ambassadors and princes of the Church.

The room Lord Wyndham lay in smelled of incense and

roses. The bed was raised on a dais and had a canopy of thick brocade and drawn-back netting. Along one wall, there was a fresco, chipped and faded, showing a pageant of worshippers and eagles. Two nuns. one of them a nursing sister,

sat on chairs by the windows, sipping water and lemon juice.

telling beads. A cardinal hovered by the bed.

A tall, blonde woman—fortv-eight, maybe fifty years old—

came down the length of the room to embrace Diana. This must be the old man’s mistress. Lady Wyndham had been

dead for years.

Allenby kissed the woman on both cheeks rather formally and brought her over to be introduced to me, while Diana went and knelt beside the bed and kissed the cardinal’s ring and held her father’s hand.

The gold-headed woman was the Baronessa Isabella Loverso.

She spoke impeccable English. She told me she had

read my books and had long ago met Ezra, when he lived

in Venice.

As she spoke, she stared into my face as if to tell me

something else, unspoken. As if she wished to literally impress herself upon my mind. But then she turned away and

walked with Allenby across the room to introduce him to the cardinal.

Diana spoke in her father’s ear.

I could hardly bear to watch. (But I always do.) I saw him move his hands to find Diana and watched him touch her

face and then reach out to find the other woman.

“Presto; Presto’” someone whispered.

The room filled up with the sound of rustling clothes, like wings, as everyone fell to their knees. Falling down myself, I realized I was kneeling more in awe of history than of death. For the old man dying on the bed had knelt himself, as a child, to kiss the hand of Wellington. There we all were in the midst of the twentieth centurv. but now his daughter and his mistress kissed his hands, through which time flew to Waterloo and Bonaparte. Somewhere a clock was striking.

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The reigns of Victoria, Edward, George rose up and fell away in seconds.

Then there was a sigh. And death.

We waited there all night. And in the morning the Baronessa Loverso, standing with me on the steps beside the

water, said; “I have read what you have written in the London Daily Mail. You are right, you know, when you say that

we need a new kind of leader—not the leaders we have. I have friends with whom I think you should speak. Would

you mind—would you object, if one day, once this mourning is over, I wrote to you and arranged a meeting?”

No. I would not object at all. I found the woman charming.

Isabella Loverso stood at the edge of another age, retaining its dignity and serenity in spite of all the harassment of the modern world. I was impressed.

“You are one of us, I think,” she said—and smiled. “Though of course you don’t know what I mean by that. But I am very glad we met.”

I kissed her hand and we parted.

In the motorlaunch, I said to Allenby; “what can you tell me of her?”

Allenby pursed his lips.

“She comes from a very important family,” he said. “Though not of rank. She’s a niece of Admiral Ciano.”

“That’s where she gets the handsome features, then?;” I said.

“Yes. And the dreadful politics.”

1 was about to ask for details but Allenby gave me a look that told me the conversation was over. I should have known better than to think that Ned and I could ever talk of politics again.

About a week later, Allenby and Diana left for England—

taking with them all Diana wanted in memoriam: the pillow her father’s head had lain against when he died.

I telephoned the Palazzo d’Aquila but was told the Baronessa Loverso was in Paris. She had gone away quite suddenly

“on business”—but with no address.

“You are one of us, I think,” she had said. “Though of course you don’t know what I mean by that.”

FR1;But I thought I could guess. It must have to do with where she got the handsome features. And the politics.

Quinn had now made his way around the walls from China, 1924 and had arrived with Mauberley at the moment in

which he was preparing to join the King and Mrs Simpson aboard the Ndhh’n in the summer of 1936.

He sat on his cot and wished it was as warm in this room as it was above his head in Dubrovnik. He turned his collar up and wondered why there hadn’t been a call for chow.

Freyberg, no doubt. The last thing on his list was always the Mess, one reason being that Captain Freyberg lived on candy bars and Coke and never really gave much thought to proper food.

Way off down the hall, Quinn could hear two people

talking. Rudecki, more than likely, nattering with the picket at the top of the stairs. Just two ordinary voices, barely audible.

Just two ordinary men way off down the hall polishing

the butts of their Browning Automatics and shifting the weight of the hand grenades that wouldn’t be there on their belts if it wasn’t for the writing on these walls.

The Nahlin: August, 1936

It was unnerving at first to have the King so close. I never knew where to look, and was always staring him straight in the eye. He was wary of this and avoided it at all costs and I thought for certain I had made some dreadful gaff in protocol.

In the end, of course, I came to my senses and realised that very few conversations with anyone are held “eye-to—

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eye” unless one is trying to intimidate the listener—or perhaps if one is making love. People’s eyes so rarely meet in

the normal course of events, it can be quite alarming when it happens and I think the King must have thought I was somewhat peculiar at first. I was known as that man who stares, Wallis told me—and then we all had a good laugh about it. It was, I explained, a writer’s prerequisite to stare—

and they accepted this.

The King had a charming smile and his colouring was

vivid and exquisite under the sun, which he revelled in—

though his lips, I noted, tended to pale if he stayed too long in the heat. He was otherwise tanned and golden and he

wore the briefest kahki shorts I have ever seen on a grownup man and an open shirt with a brace of crucifixes round

his neck on silver chains. He literally shone from head to toe, so you could pick him out a mile away in any crowd and this shining was so pronounced and unique that I ultimately found myself believing in the magic “inner lights”

of which one hears superior beings are possessed.

But in spite of the shining and in spite of the smile and in spite of the glorious times we had and the marvellous reception given the King and Wallis everywhere we went, the last few days of the Nahlin’s cruise were tense and ambiguous.

The King withdrew from his guests and even scowled

when we passed him on the deck. He was not bad-tempered, merely melancholy—and our final meals together were eaten in silence, though Wallis played a good deal of music on her gramophone. Nothing, however, helped—not even “Dardenella”, which had been our anthem throughout the trip—

and one night Wallis made the fatal mistake of absent-mindedly putting on a recording of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers singing: “A Fine Romance”.

A fine romance, my friend this is;

A fine romance, with no kisses….

At this point, the King got up and left the table.

The cause of his melancholia was plain. As soon as he

disembarked from the Nahlin, he would be parted many

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weeks from Wallis. And he was not going home to the best of situations. He was going, instead, to confront his first real crisis as King and a test of wills between himself and his family that would set the pattern for the rest of his reign.

He would have to tell his mother, his brothers and his sister he was determined to marry a woman they each had refused to accept.

All the King wanted was to make Wallis Simpson happy—

and a marriage, in time, was not completely out of the question.

But the King and Wallis wanted more. Their intention

was now quite clear she should be his consort. For the last three weeks of the cruise they spoke of it openly. People began to defer to Wallis even to the point of bobbing when she passed. This in turn led her to assume an air of hauteur which a person might otherwise have smiled at, were it not that it now took on an edge of ugly grandeur when she dealt with those “beneath” her. Going into public places soon became an embarrassment, since Wallis always raised her hand to be kissed and held people off by the length of her arm as if she expected them to curtsey. She even did this to the mistress of the King of the Hellenes—a woman, incidentally, whose real name was Jones.

Then, too, there was a heat wave and the war in Spain—

which lent an air of delicate unease to the whole of Southern Europe. This was like a hot wind with sand in it—a sirocco full of tiny shards of glass. German battleships sat offshore from Barcelona—harmless enough, but blond and out of

place. There was the sound of aeroplanes all day. It was time for all of us to head back north and for the King to go about his business.

Nonetheless, it proved an impossible wrench to simply

pack one’s bags and entrain for the rains of London. Having been so long on display in the sun, our bodies demanded a measured withdrawal into the shade, in the manner of

addicts who pare down their intake of alcohol by one glass a day. Consequently, stepping onto the quayside, the King begged Wallis to go with him to Vienna—which of course she did; but not without the companionship of her dogs—