Famous Last Words (14 page)

two canine and myself.

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We stayed at the Hotel Bristol, an old haunt of mine and, as it turned out, the King’s as well. He knew the doorman’s name and the wine steward’s too—which rather threw me.

Not that he shouldn’t know such things. It was just that he was so very familiar, it made me wonder how much of his time had been spent “incognito” here and elsewhere. I was not yet used to Royal ways and had always thought, along with everyone else, that princes lived entirely apart in a world that had no border with my own. True, I might enter their world by invitation, but they never entered mine because they had no need. Unless they were pushed, of course—

as Dmitri had been.

In Vienna there was music of which the King approved.

and Wallis put away her gramophone. There was dancing

noon and night and cocktails every evening: long hours and rich meals. We dined, it seemed, on an endless diet of cream and cake. There was nothing we ate that did not arrive in a torte or some kind of pastry. The King. 1 think, was feeding his courage.

There were other signs, too. he was testing something—

growing in some new direction—feeding other appetites

than his own. He wanted to see what could come of the

image of himself and Wallis if he pushed it to its limits. He became completely careless of the Press. Photographers were even encouraged to cease their lurking in doorways and

wingback chairs and to come out into the open so their pictures might present a less furtive look lo the King and Wallis; and Wallis began to smile less shvly; and she glittered more and wore more jewelry. Indeed, she had more jewelry to wear.

There was something in those photographs worth remarking on—a kind of signal only seen and recognized later.

I saw it in myself, at first, more vibrantly than in the others.

I had never looked better, never looked happier, never looked more fit. 1 did not even guess why this should be. though I suppose 1 thought it was just the age. the times, the excitement of the moment. After all. 1 was younger then; 1 was

relatively famous; I was poised on the lip of great expectations: my future was secure: 1 knew who 1 was and 1 had

my health. We had all been out in the sun and now we were dancing in the limelight. Everyone in all those pictures taken then was smiling; everyone was radiant; everyone was infallible.

It was all a lie, of course. The fact was, we were

being used to shore up the King and his reluctant confidence—used as the symbols of the public approbation he

needed so desperately before he could broach the subject of Wallis and himself to his family. Given time and coverage, he could finally point to names and faces far more telling and prominent than mine and say: “But look! The people

approve!” As if the Duff-Coopers and the Prince and Princess of Hugelstein were the people… .So this was why we smiled.

We were all so willing to be there; thinking ours was the ultimate face of the age. And perhaps it was.

The King eventually left us there in Vienna and in our

own time we departed together, bound for Paris aboard the Orient Express, a large and very gav partv. But it was not till we had passed through Venice that Wallis took me aside and said: “when we arrive, I want you to stav with me a while at the Meurice. I have a most unpleasant thing to do—

and cannot possibly do it all alone… .”

The King had unpleasant things to do as well. for it was now he must put his case before his family. His “family” meant, pre-eminently, Queen Mary—and he found her having a

picnic tea in one of the drawing rooms at Marlborough House.

The fact she was having a picnic tea and wore a bibbed

apron over her dress was not entirely eccentric: Queen Mary was in the process of moving all her possessions and her staff of over sixty servants from Buckingham Palace down the Mall to the traditional residence of heirs presumptive.

where she had lived so happily twenty-five years before as the Princess of Wales. Some other home might well have

been assigned, but now that her still unmarried son was King, her second son, the heir, had established a family residence elsewhere and did not care to leave. So Marlborough House had been given over to the Queen.

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The heir—“Bertie”, the Duke of York—was a private man whose only wish was to be left alone with his wife and his children; standing on the edge of things but never at the centre. “David” was at the centre and had always been at the centre and, having survived into kingship, would surely continue to be at the centre now and for evermore—amen.

The Duke of York was in fact a paragon in this—and the rarest of princes because of it: there was not an iota of ambition in his veins and he shunned the Crown as anyone

else might push away a basket of snakes. The very thought of it repelled him. Kingship would kill him; his nervous spirit and his shyness would simply not bear it. Besides which, he stammered and could not say “King”.

The Queen, in her cotton apron and pale mauve hat, was

seated before a makeshift table eating a crustless sandwich of which a dozen more were piled on a plate.

“Have one,” she said. “They really are very nice.” The

Queen, though English born, still bore the faintest traces of an ancestral German accent that had endured unshaken though modified for many generations.

“No thank you. Mama. I’m really not hungry.”

“But David, you must. I cannot sit here and eat alone.”

The King set his hat and his gloves aside on the lid of a packing case full of swords and sat down and sighed. He picked up a sandwich and peeped inside and found it was not to his taste. Sliced tongue.

“Mrs Moore,” said the Queen, referring to her housekeeper, “had them made especially for you when I told her

you would be here. So eat.”

The King turned the sandwich over in his fingers several times and finally laid it back on the plate without his mother seeing.

The Queen was busy munching and had turned away to stare into the green recesses of the room in which they sat.

Packing cases, open and shut, some of them spilling their marble contents over the floor, gave the place the look and feel of a mausoleum—and the fact there were not yet curtains or drapes at the windows added a cold, hard light to the scene. The Queen began to pick at the crumbs that were

scattered over her apron, eating them one by one with a

reverent, distant look in her eye. “You can surely not fail to recall,” she said, “this house when you were a child.”

“Of course not. Mama.”

“We were here seven wears. And you were already sixteen and the Prince of Wales when we left.”

“That’s right.” The King was looking grim and his jaw

was set. His mother’s sole bad habit—irritating and sometimes even maddening—was her tendency to litanize. If a

cousin’s name was mentioned, out would come a string of genealogies. If a date was given, every week and month and year preceding it was struck with a tick mark—verbalized and embroidered with detail. She could name every child of every child of every child of Queen Victoria, and even Queen Victoria herself could not have done that.

“Do eat. Please do,” she said.

The King picked up and palmed another horrid sandwich,

placing it, once his mother’s gaze was averted, in his pocket next his handkerchief.

“Your grandpapa was here, heaven knows, a century before he was King. And your grandmotherdear. before and

after being the Queen, and before them both, Queen Adelaidethe-Grump.

…” Queen Mary smiled. “She was very

bad-tempered, you know. And she would have been your

great-great-great-Aunt. I never knew her, but certainly my mother did and she always said…”

“Mama?”

“Yes, David?”

“Please. No history today.”

The Queen picked over the sandwiches and held one near

her lips, prepared to bite. “I am only thinking,” she said.

“of where we are and what we do. It is almost a hundred years since Queen Victoria came to the throne and in all that time this house has been the house of a Princess of Wales or a Dowager Queen. Before and after the throne, we must all lie here in waiting… .” She trembled inadvertently and tried to eat the sandwich, but could not. Her lower lip retreated and she bit it—hard—as she always did to prevent

the onset of tears. Queen Mary never wept. It was a rule.

At last she placed the sandwich—whole—in her mouth

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and ate it as if her life depended on it. “Eat,” she said to her son. “You must.” And she handed him the plate, which he could only stare at and put in his lap because it seemed ungrateful to hand it back to her. And when he looked up, he saw that she was looking at him strangely, as from another time. It was perhaps the afternoon light that caused this effect and the gentle, silent rain that misted the windows.

And a veil of dust intruded between them, raised by his mother’s servants moving in a cortege behind a row of monstrous packing crates being carried through the great saloon

towards the double tiers of stairs beyond and his mother chewed her sandwich and watched and waited a very long

time before she spoke to him again and, when she did, her eyes were misted. The King was quite alarmed…until she spoke. “I got the end of Mrs Moore’s mustard pot that time,”

she said and dabbed at her eyes with a double damask napkin hugely embroidered with the letter G. “Just as 1 seem to have got the end of the mustard pot,” she went on, “with the news I hear of your recent trip abroad… .” And she bit decisively into a piece of ginger cake, with her eyes snapping blue like two brisk flags in a rising wind.

The King was overwhelmed with sorrow and anger. Anger

at Mrs Moore’s vindictive mustard pot and her ginger cake and her damned impertinent sliced-tongue sandwiches; sorrow at his mother’s words. And he opened his mouth to

speak, with an intake of breath that was an overture to violence, but his mother raised her hand and said; “please don’t

explain. 1 do not want to hear this woman’s name. No. Do not speak it.” And the King, who had come such a long,

long way to inform his mother of his plans for the future of her line, was forced to look awav into his lap. with his mouth still open. . -staring down at the spiteful sandwiches on their Ludwigsburg porcelain plate. And he tried with all his might to speak his mind, but his mother’s presence was just too great to overcome and he could not even raise his head.

There was something dreadfully wrong, all at once. with the back of his neck.

The Queen at last said; “come. there is something 1 wish

you to see.” And they both stood up and began to leave the room. The King looked back at his hat and gloves where

they sat like carved, forgotten things on top of their box of swords. The plate of contentious sandwiches sat beside them, carved as well, though out of malice, not of stone. But the King dared not go back to retrieve his things, since his mother’s stride was already leaving him behind and perhaps he thought he would turn into something carved of stone or malice himself if he waited there too long. So he turned and hurried after, both of them passing the rows and rows of royal portraits Queen Mary had made it her business to collect—all of them shrouded, all of them leaning back against the walls, unhung, and some with a single eye exposed to watch them as they passed—the Queen and her son—the

King and his mother—pattering heel and toe across the great uncarpeted saloon with its painted battle scenes raging on the ceilings overhead—all the great and glorious victories of the Duke of Marlborough for whom Sir Christopher Wren had built this house in 1710—and all the Queen’s servants and all the King’s movers nodded and bobbed as best they could beneath the weight of the giant boxes and trunks and wicker hampers flowing unceasingly through the doors and up the stairs and the King and the Queen took up their place in the procession—climbing all the way to the top with unbroken step and marching along the gallery as if in the lead of troops till they came to an open door through which the Queen propelled the King and closed the door behind them. Click.

There was instant silence.

“I don’t remember this,” said the King, as his eyes adapted to the light.

“You were never allowed in here,” said the Queen. “It

was always locked when children were about.”

Standing dead centre of a narrow, ill-lit room was a dressmaker’s dummy clothed in a long white shift. It was raised

on a dais two feet high, with a step running all the way around. Its other salient feature, besides the shift and the dais, was the fact that, unlike the rest of its kind, it possessed a head and the head, which was made of white kid leather, was crowned with human hair.

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“Is it you?” said the King.

“It is the Queen,” his mother said.

The thing, indeed, had the very shape of the Queen and

even its coiffure was so well made it gave the approximate shape of his mother’s hair; but its leather facelessness disturbed the King a good deal more than he Could say. Somehow,

it frightened him, standing there so still and utterly

bound to its place as it was. Its round metal base was nailed down tight to the floor of the dais, so nothing could topple it over and the King could see that it plainly had neither arms nor legs—which added, somehow sadly, to its poise since it stood so forthrightly there, as if such things as arms and legs were mere encumbrances. Nothing would be allowed to make it afraid, no matter how defenceless it seemed.

But of course it was only a thing and all these thoughts of “silence”, “stillness”, “poise” and “defencelessness” were nonsense.

The Queen had been watching her son to see what his

reaction might be to this apparition, and now she turned and faced her other self as if it were her twin. She reached out and touched the cotton shift, adjusting here and there an unbecoming fold until it fell just so. Its bows and pale rosettes all wanted putting up and fussing with, but she would come some other time and do that. For now, it was simply pleasant to see again an old respected friend.