Famous Last Words (15 page)

All down the sides of the’room the Queen’s royal gowns

and robes were hung on racks, a hundred pieces of clothing and more and each one bearing a number pinned discreetly to its sleeve. On a lectern near the door, beneath a naked pink electric bulb, there was a large, much used and very old ledger bound in leather. Every occasion on which each gown and robe had been worn was entered there and all the corresponding hats and shoes and jewels described and

numbered, too.

Queen Mary looked around the room and smiled with

deep and genuine pleasure. “You should know,” she said, “that I came up here the day your grandfather died—and curtsied to my sawdust sister here.”

The King was now watching his mother’s face and he saw

how deeply moved she was by the thought of that historic

day so long ago when the old world passed. And the evening light in which that scene had taken place must have been the very same as this that flooded now between the corridors of robes from the windows at the western end of the room.

“As 1 waited here,” Queen Mary said, “for the call to take my place, do you know that Grandmotherdear had just let Alice Keppel in to say farewell to your Granpapa?” Mrs

Keppel had been the last and most enduring of Edward VIl’s mistresses—and Queen Alexandra had had the heart and

the decency to bring her in to say goodbye. She had even left the King and his mistress alone for their final words.

“There is nothing we cannot do or bear,” Queen Mary said to her son. King Edward VIII. “If we are the lords of the realm, we must.”

The King looked away.

“Mrs Keppel is still alive,” Queen Mary said, “with all her happiness and memories intact. And Grandmotherdear

passed on the Queen to me… .Do you see? Do look,” she said. And she ran the palm of her hand across the leather shoulders of the figure on the dais. “The Queen has had a most extraordinary life. And she will, I am sure, be here when I am dead for many years.”

The King was speechless now—deprived of every word

he might have used to tell his tale. And if Wallis Simpson’s name had not crossed even his lips, it would certainly never cross his mother’s.

There was a burst of sunlight, then, and the King and his mother turned towards the windows. “Look,” she said. “We can see the tops of all the trees in St James.” And she went along between the robes and opened the doors and stepped out onto the balcony. “No more rain,” she said. “It has all gone by and the sky is as clear as a bell. Do come and see.”

She held out her hand to her son and the King went out and joined her, overlooking the gardens. The balcony was very small and only large enough for three or four to stand there comfortably.

In the yard below, where the gravel and sand abutted the grass, an enormous congregation of birds was gathering.

Pigeons and rooks and sparrows from the Park. And there

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was Mrs Moore with the Ludvvigsburg plale in her hand and all the remains of the uneaten sandwiches and she was breaking them up into tiny. tiny pieces and mingling these with

the crusts the cook had earlier cut away and also, perhaps, with a crumb or two of ginger cake and scattering all of this with a wide and generous gesture of benevolence over the grass so that all the birds—every one of them—might eat.

And the Queen, on seeing this, looked over at her son and said; “is there nothing in your pocket that you think you might throw down?”

She was smiling. Damn. She had known all along he had

palmed that sandwich and put it there beside his handkerchief—so it shamed him having to reach inside and take it

out.

“You should break it up, as Mrs Moore has done,” said

the Queen, “so as many will receive some parts of it as possible. Do.”

So the King threw down his sandwich—morsel by morsel—onto the grass and the pigeons, rooks and sparrows

made a very happy racket, scrabbling around to find it all and his mother said; “there. It is all they ask. )ust listen to them sing!” And she turned and went inside and left the King alone on the balcony. Moments later he went inside himself and, closing the doors behind him, he stood ostensibly alone in the wardrobe room. His mother was gone but

the ledger remained with its pages and pages of legends neatly inscribed, and all the numbered gowns and robes

made a rustling sound as he passed—and the Queen was

still in her place, nailed down forever. Her eyeless gaze was like a pressure on his back as he went through the door and left her there in the dark. But this was more than he could bear, so he turned again and opened the door again so the light from the gallery fell on the hem of her long pale gown and the oval of her white kid face could just be seen. It was easy enough, he thought as he watched, to understand the power of the mystery that had drawn his mother to her knees before this image all those years ago. He would kneel himself, if he was not her King. But he was her King and he must not kneel.

The moment Wallis and I appeared in Paris there were photographs; American reporters; invitations from the French,

the Spanish and the forty-eight Russian Pretenders. We became a curious “item”: scandal bait—without a hook.

This, however, was only in the evenings. By day there

was genuine scandal afoot—but all of it was private. It began the very day we arrived.

The unpleasant thing that Wallis could not do alone was to meet in secret with her husband. This meeting occurred downstairs in her suite where, fascinated, I hung in the background with the other dogs and watched while Ernest Simpson crossed the carpet to be greeted by his wife’s extended arm and noticeably ringless fingers.

Simpson, impeccably dressed in pin-stripe blue, had come to effect, if it were possible, “a reconciliation of mutual intent” (as his lawyer had obviously told him to put it).

“Why?” said Wallis. “What for?”

Ernest Simpson mumbled something that incorporated the

phrase “past happiness”. It was all I could hear.

There was something vaguely Oriental about the way the

scene unfolded: Ernest Simpson standing in the centre of the carpet, almost at attention, bobbing from time to time, and Wallis seated on a silk divan, with her feet precisely touching at the ankles and her back as straight as a ramrod—

while I hovered, (the Shanghai ambassador) in the background, holding a tiny dog in the crook of either arm an’d

watching, of necessity, through slitted eyes because the light was pouring through the windows, cutting across the room between the suitor and his wife.

The suitor pled for himself. He pled for his wife. He even pled for the King—for the “honour of the King and all he stands for”. Still she would not be moved.

It went on and on, until at last they broke for lunch like actors being released from rehearsing a scene they did not know how to play.

I retired to my own suite. Paris was slowly being ruined.

I read the latest pronouncements of Aldous Huxley in the

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newly-published “Eyeless in Gaza”—none of which pleased me once I had read that “chastity is the most unnatural of sexual perversions”. Damn it all! Is nothing sacred? I slammed the book into the wastebasket. Rubbish. From an upstart!

All through the rest of the afternoon, Ernest and Wallis did their best to extricate themselves from history alive and sane and physically unwounded. The tension in the rooms became so great that one of the dogs threw up, while the other lifted its leg against a Louis Quinze table (luckily an imitation).

In the end, Ernest Simpson informed his wife she was not the only infidel abroad that summer and hinted he was

falling in love with her best friend, a woman called Raffray (which I thought made her sound like an Irish tout).

Wallis made a face and eased one foot from its shoe. I was certain she would laugh. But she controlled herself.

“Have you slept with her?” she said.

Simpson said; “of course not”—positive proof that he had.

“Well—what are we to do?” said Wallis, allowing me to

light her cigarette.

Ernest said; “I implore you to return to my bed and board.”

Now, Wallis let go and roared with laughter. “Bed and

board? It sounds like a rooming house!”

At this point, Ernest Simpson grew very red in the face and shouted at his wife; “damn it, woman, I would sue you in a second if I could!”

“Why don’t you, then?” (Knowing full well he didn’t have the nerve.)

“For the simple reason the law does not allow me to name the King as corespondent.”

Wallis paled, I think. At any rate, the back of her neck was livid.

“Oh.” (The first small sound she had made; the first admission history might have aces up its sleeve.)

Just when I thought he might win if he kept up his attack, Ernest Simpson suddenly sagged. He gave up.

“Very well, Wallis.” he said. “Tell me what you want?”

I waited for her to say; “the Crown.” But all she said was; “a divorce.”

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“When?” said Simpson.

“Just as soon as it can be arranged.”

Simpson hesitated just one second and then, for the first and only time in their whole encounter, he smiled. “And do you want it arranged with or without publicity?” he said.

It won me to him completely.

But I must admit her answer was very winning, too.

“Without knives,” she said.

And so—they, too, were parted.

Nauly. September, 1936

It was a perfect English afternoon, resplendent with flowers and insects, seedcake and cucumber sandwiches. After their tea, Charles Augustus Lindbergh asked the Honourable Edward Allenby to walk with him across the lawns at Nauly,

in Kent. “There’s something 1 want to say,” said Lindbergh.

“Alone.”

It was as if they had wandered into a verse of Victorian poetry, illustrated by Tenniel. Civilized by seven generations of Massies, the Jacobean manor house and its estates had fallen to Edward Allenby only because his eldest brother, the present Earl of Massie, preferred to live in town and, out of season, in the South of France.

There were arbours overgrown with roses, a yew walk, a

knot garden filled with herbs and a rouTid pond down the slope that was hung beneath a willowed shade. Over to one side, visible but increasingly distant as they walked. Lady Diana and Mrs Lindbergh and a dozen others sat on a terrace continuing their tea while children played with a dog on the grass and a gardener wheeled the deadheads from some roses past their prime toward a compost heap. Budleia bloomed—

all blue—beside the paths and a bees’ grove of lavender drooped in a raised stone bed.

Allenby was just past fifty, rounding, but still very handsome.

He was currently Parliamentary Under-Secretarv of

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State for Foreign Affairs and the member for justin-Beeches.

Lindbergh—only recently returned from the German

Olympics where he’d been an honoured guest of Reichmarshal Goring—was thirty-four wears of age and spare of

mind as he was of form: thin as a walking photograph; weatherbeaten as a prairie bone. Allenbv. on the other hand. was

compacted like a well-wrapped English parcel—everything spruce and neat. with all the awkward corners nicely turned and folded under. When Lindbergh walked, he led with his shoulders, and standing still was apparently impossible.

Some part of him was always in motion—his wrists, his

hands, his elbows. Allenbv in England (where it was not quite so damp as Venice), still had a noticeable limp but could discard his cane. The cause of the limp would be best described as the Somme.

Lindbergh and Allenbv had known one another for several years—though never so intimately as Allenbv and 1. Lindbergh.

being shy, would not let people in. But they were

genuine friends, not mere acquaintances.

They had met in the worst of conditions, in America where Allenbv had gone as part of a diplomatic mission back in 1932, the year the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped and murdered, an event from which Lindbergh never recovered.

In a sense, it had driven a part of him “mad”. He became like Orestes—driven by furies. Some say the Furies are flies—

or a swarm of bees—and they torment their victims both with buzzing and with endless bites. For Lindbergh these Furies were his fellow countrymen, in particular the Press, whom he hated with an all consuming rage that has been

described as “demented”.

Allenbv thought of this dementia as a great and debilitating tragedy: “that one so revered by his countrymen, who

had done his countrymen such credit and brought them so much honour, should turn so vehemently against them.”

Vehement was something of an understatement. Lindbergh

once described America as having the bloodiest form of

government on earth, because it indulged and encouraged people’s lust for violence by tolerating freedom of the press.

He called this form of government “degenerate democracy”.

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But he and Allenby were standing now on an English

lawn, bathed in sunlight. They were not on that American lawn, in the awful darkness with the ladder propped against the window, crying; I am gone forever: dead. Still, it did not seem to matter. When Allenby looked at Lindbergh from the corner of his eye. he beheld the same demi-mordant man

he had known all along—with thinning hair and a thinning mouth and an ever-thinning sense of tolerance. It could well be, of course, that Bruno Hauptmann’s execution in the

spring of 1936 had brought the horror back in ways that only Lindbergh would ever know. Merely to kill the killer of his child did not kill the killing. It extended it.

Lindbergh, his wife and son }on had come to live in England, in the Harold Nicolsons’ old farm house, which more

or less made them neighbours of the Allenbys. The distance between them was only eight miles. Lindbergh was given

to “wandering over” in his motorcar and even, on occasion, walking. In spite of a happy marriage he always seemed

lonely. Always seemed as if there were something he was about to ask—but never did.