Famous Last Words (27 page)

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taken upon himself the task of playing host to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

As guests, the Duke and Duchess were hardly a pleasure

to entertain. To begin with, they could not go anywhere unnoticed and therefore had to remain within the confines of the villa.

The Villa itself was the essence of Iberian decadence: castellated pink stucco. It was surrounded by terraced gardens

and thick stone walls. The Duchess had never liked confinement and she hated the Villa Cascais. Inside its precincts,

every kindness—including Doctor Ricardo’s generous hospitality—had to be weighed against the possibility of fraudulence.

Even the simplest of gestures might contain the

seeds of treachery. Treason itself could no longer be defined.

Loyalties everywhere were being eroded and blurred.

France had fallen: Holland, Norway, Belgium, Denmark,

Luxembourg. The debacle at Dunkirk had left the British Army decimated, unarmed and powerless. Italy had “plunged the knife into the back of its neighbour” and was now at war with France and England. The British had turned against the P’rench, attempting to destroy their fleet at Oran in North Africa and the French had turned against themselves with the creation of Petain’s government at Vichy. Winston

Churchill had been made Prime Minister of England and,

so far as the Windsors were concerned, had turned against them. Once their friend and ally, he was siding now with their enemy the Queen, refusing the Duchess her rightful titles and threatening permanent exile.

At the Villa Cascais “The Lady Simpson” no longer knew

what her husband was up to. At night, he did not always follow her to bed, but lingered in the salon—sometimes alone; sometimes not. Sometimes she heard his voice, with its strange falsetto anger, rising against some unknown adversary on the telephone; probably the British Ambassador.

Maybe even Churchill himself. Or the king—Cod knew. She would see him from her window, leaning on the terrace,

deep in thought. The slimness of his shadow never failed to catch at her heart. The shape of his head, the set of his shoulders: he was just a bov—unless you could see his eyes.

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His eyes—somehow—had gone out. As if they had been

disconnected. The Duchess was—and she knew it—the centre of his life. Her wisdom, her advice, her presence were the food on which he fed: feasted whenever the tide of public opinion flowed against them. But now, his back was turned—

and what she saw was just his clothes—with no one inside.

A shell. Now, too, for whatever reason, there were secrets.

The Duke called them “matters of little or no importance”.

She knew better. She had so many secrets of her own.

She was more and more afraid. July had been like a sojourn in hell. There was a heat wave. For three weeks it didn’t rain, and then when it did it came down in sheets. After the rain, it was humid. Red dye oozed from the stucco and killed the roses. More and more gin, more and more brandy and

Madeira were consumed. The Duke’s mascara ran. The makeup tables were covered every morning with mosquitoes

drowned in cold cream, their corpses whitened by talcum powder. Drunken flies crawled up the sides of old martini glasses and fell to the tiles, where they spun on their backs in an ecstasy of euphoria. Lucky flies, the Duchess thought, as she watched them spinning long after midnight when she went in to take her pills. Lucky, lucky flies—with someone to squash you so quickly with mercy, roll you up in toilet paper, flush you down the drains. And she’d wait, with her wrists held out beneath the tepid stream from the cold water tap, staring at her face. The face she saw in her private mirror was a face no other human being had seen. It was her midnight face, and mostly in her mind. The true face—lifted

and lacquered—was the one she showed to others and the world. But this, she would tell herself, as she watched in her private mirror, is the face of Penelope—who waits.

As for her husband, she questioned his judgement. She

always had, of course. But she’d always been there in the past. The only time she’d ever left him alone in a crisis had been when she’d fled to the south of France in the fall of 1936. Within a month, he’d abdicated. Now he was in flight himself but she had no inkling where he was going. She

only knew it was her job to prevent his escape. So she waited, frightened and aloof from everyone. She played her gram

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ophone; drank her gin; wrote many letters—and put them all in a drawer. At first, her letters were addressed to her husband. “Where are you going…and why?” And then she discovered to her horror she’d begun to write to total strangers: “Dear Greta Garbo…Why don’t you write…?” “Dear Deanna Durbin…Please.” She took her pills. She looked in her mirror. And prayed.

There was virtually no one she could talk to about her

husband and it was during this time that she suffered the first of the strokes that would plague her in years to come.

Its outward effects were minor: a slight hesitation in the choice of words; a frozen nerve beneath her left eye. Inwardly, a gently harboured part of her mind was lost to her

forever, in which were contained all her memories of haven and of peaceful rest; of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, of the genteel voices of her aunts: “Come home.…” And the music of her first cotillion: “My! How many partners Bessie Wallis had…a dozen beaux at least.…” All gone.

The stroke was not even diagnosed as such. It was merely thought she had gone to earth.

The flowers in their box had now reached the stairwell.

carried in the hands of a richly dark-haired woman whose name was Estrade. Estrade was secretdria temporaria to the Duchess, a Spaniard injected into the household two weeks before the Windsors’ arrival, on a warm afternoon when

Doctor Ricardo’s back was conveniently turned. She was

about to climb to the Windsor apartments, when she saw

her new mistress at the end of the hallway, passing towards the terraces. It was the ice in the Lady Simpson’s glass that caught the secretdria’s attention.

“Duquesa…?”

“Yes?”

“These have arrived for your Highness.”

“Flowers?”

“Si, Duquesa.”

Neither the Duchess nor Estrade had moved. Each had a

view of the other standing at the nether end of a long. cool

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hallway. One held a box of flowers, the other a glass of gin and ice. One was endowed, in the order of things, with the power to command the other, but for a moment it was not clear which was which. This was what the Duchess feared in Estrade: the menace in the pause before response: the lethal possibilities contained in the dead, black gaze. Estrade had the look of certain dogs that have been trained to kill.

Now, there was an insolent break—a fracture in the flow of her obedience—before she turned and walked towards her

mistress. The Duchess took the bull by the horns.

“Well,” she said: “it’s good of you to have taken the risk, Estrade. Thank you. If there had been a bomb inside that box, I’m sure it would have gone off by now.”

She could see there was a note. The corner of its envelope angled up from among the rose leaves.

She took a breath. She wound her rings. She must make

a deliberate show of courage. Noblesse oblige—god damn

it.

“There seems to be a note,” she said. And snatched it out, like someone pulling a weed.

Nothing happened. The flowers did not explode. The box

did not burst into flames. Her hands were still intact. She laughed.

Estrade did not laugh. Perhaps to some, survival is no

laughing matter.

“Put them in something tall,” said the Duchess, fanning herself with the note, picking up her glass of gin. “They have such lovely stems, we might as well make as much of them as we can. Remove the roses; put them out of my sight.”

(The Duchess of Windsor could not abide a rose.)

Estrade departed. She walked very hard on her heels to

the stairs and the Duchess could hear her climbing all the way to the second floor. Perhaps, she thought, there will be a poison on the thorns.

She read the note carefully. Once. Twice. Three times.

The brutal simplicity of what it said was heightened by the fact the message had been phrased by someone whose

knowledge of English was scanty and formal. Dictionary or Cook’s Tour language, utterly stilted and utterly direct: “Death

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beware from British friends,” she read. “From one your interests in heart.” And that was all.

Cascais is west of Lisbon, facing south on the Costa de Roca.

The sand on the beaches has a reddish tinge: magenta. The rocks are dangerous. It is not the best place to land from the sea. Nonetheless, a small rubber craft made its way towards the shore on the night of July the 27th, determined to reach its destination against all odds. The wind had risen, a storm was brewing, the dinghy was overburdened and none of the seven occupants had any knowledge of the terrain they approached.

Also, the tide was against them.

Behind them, looming in the dusk, was the shape of a

military flying boat, its engines silenced, its light extinguished.

It bore no insignia. By daylight, seen from above,

it was the bleak steel colour of a winter sea. It was armed, but its guns were retracted. Resting as it was, in neutral waters and being a military aircraft and foreign, its very presence was a contravention of all the rules of war. But its journey had been sudden and made in great haste. Two days before, the need for such a journey had been so remote it had only been the subject of nightmares. Now, men barely competent to punt on the Isis were rowing ashore against the Atlantic ebb tide. Men whose previous adventures were confined to petty theft and visits to Paris were making their way towards a rendezvous with kidnap and murder.

Darkness fell. The storm broke. It rained.

The guest that night at the Villa Cascais was the Spanish Marques de Estella, Miguel de Rivera: Falangist hero of the Catalan Front and son of a former Spanish dictator. He was an old and trusted friend of the Duke’s: a hunting crony from happier bachelor days. He was small, dark and wiry—“wound up”, as the Duchess said. His laughter came in short, sharp bursts, like the laughter of a doll controlled by a ventriloquist.

But he was graceful and athletic, too. He boxed with

great skill and was also one of Europe’s finest equestrians.

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It was said that the true cause of de Estella’s bravery on the Catalan Front—which is where Franco’s troops broke the siege of Madrid in March 1939—was the firing of his stables by starving Loyalists who slaughtered his horses and ate them. For days, it was said, de Estella lost his reason and it was during this time he performed so many daring exploits he became a legendary figure. Many believed he could not be killed, for he was seen to walk through sheets of gunfire unscathed. The Duchess of Windsor disliked him intensely.

He spent all his energies, much to her chagrin, leading her husband down the garden path of memories from which she was excluded. Most of these memories had to do with “the kill”.

The Duke was prone to the “glorious past” and particularly prone to anything reminding him that once he had

been happy. Stories of the hunt brought back his sense of fresh air and freedom and also his sense of command. He and de Estella recalled their victims the way other people recall the victims of an accident. Groupings at the kill were vividly recalled. The shape of each scene—some of them twelve years past and more—was evoked with its silhouette imprinted, dated and filed; a precise parade of ten-point stags and bristled boars and countless birds laid out in bloodless rows.

When they spoke of all the paws and tails, fox

trophies held up over leaping dogs, the Duchess thought of the Spanish General who cried out; “long live death!” before he fell in battle, de Estella’s catalogue was filled with such images. “I stood here,” he would say to the Duke, “and you were over there to the left. Someone stood beside you. Who was that?” The Duke could not remember. He would struggle with the name and fail to catch it. Yet he could recall the number of their party, even how many of its members were mounted, how many beaters there were on foot and how

many dogs were involved. But the faces of his comrades

were too subtle to be conjured. So many had been smudged by disloyalty; blurred and obliterated by acts of unfriendliness and treason. They were like the faces in photographs

where you look and look and look, the Duchess thought;

and cannot think whose arm that is around your waist;

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whose hand that is you hold or whose lips those are that press their secrets in your ear.

She felt alone and threatened. There was something deeply sinister about this man. de Estella. Had he not been present at that reception in Madrid? Could it be that he knew of von Ribbentrop’s plans—or had overheard their discussion of Penelope? She spent the early part of the meal with her hand near her throat. She lapsed into silence and forgot to smile.

She had difficulty swallowing her trout. What unnerved her most was the hold de Estella had on her husband. This old friendship must have run very deep and she wondered what sort of obligations it entailed. If David had talked so often and so late at night on the telephone, perhaps he had been talking to de Estella. And if this was so, they might have devised some plan to bypass Churchill’s schemes—and this plan, in turn, might thwart whatever rescue von Ribbentrop had in mind. Oh, why had she been forbidden to speak to David about Penelope? If she could only caution him. If she could only warn him they must wait for von Ribbentrop.

. .But she knew she must not. If David had “secrets”,

he did not have them long. His mouth, it seemed, was not made to contain them.

Less and less food was eaten. More and more Madeira

drunk. The combination was deadly. The Duchess made

note of the fact their host. Doctor Ricardo, had fallen as silent as she. And was as watchful. And nervous.