Famous Last Words (36 page)

And then the door gave way—flew open—and someone

shouted at him: There; And the tapestry exploded.

The Duke of Windsor next saw a man—it was Major Gerrard—waving a gun in the air; and Major Gerrard saw the Duke of Windsor and what appeared to be a dozen others

surrounding him. The major, assuming one of the dozen

must be the assassin, shouted one word; “run!” at the Duke and opened fire.

The Duke of Windsor threw his arms in the air, shouting; “Where? Where? Where do I run?” And he saw some other

men come through the door and up the steps and past the tapestry—so he reached out towards them thinking they

must have come to save him, and he ran…

To their reflection. And his own. Straight through the

mirror that only moments before had borne the image of

splendour.

And the air was shattered by a thousand brilliant flames and all he could hear was the so,und of running water and the stones began to stream with blood.

Then darkness. Silence. And Wallis. With her arms out.

“Wake up.”

Where?

“Wake up.”

Where?

He woke.

Excah’bur heaved.

For a moment, the Duke thought maybe they were sinking.

But then he saw his mother watching him, sitting in her silver frame beside the bed. And she was so serene and calm, there was no possibility the ship would sink. None whatsoever.

Wallis said; “you were having your dream again.”

“Yes.”

Is it over?

Far off down in the valley, something howled. A dog perhaps.

There could be no wolves in Europe anymore. But at

home, Quinn thought; it would be a wolf that howled. Or

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a pack of wolves. One pack would sing and another pack

would answer in the distance. Quinn had heard them all

through his childhood summers in Vermont, singing down

the whole of the Appalachian chain: and he used to try to calculate how long it would take their message to reach from Canada to West Virginia. I am here, they would sing. Are you there? And their songs had raised the hackles on his neck and even the tiny hairs on the backs of his hands. But this dog under Balkonberg was singing alone. No other dog replied.

Quinn went across the room and drew the shutters closed.

But the dog could still be heard.

Quinn lit his candles and set his lamp on the packing

crate beside his cot and the writing danced across the walls and Quinn’s own shadow spread out over the words and he thought there must have been times when Mauberley lived on Montrechat and brandy, and surely he must have been

so drunk he could hardly see and the words must have

poured from his brain unedited. They had just come out, the way that howl was coming now from the dog down the

mountain.

Quinn rolled off his gloves and lit a cigarette and poured himself a glass of wine. He looked at his watch—it was three a.m.

The poor old dog would die, he thought, and he tried very hard not to hear. If only someone down in the town would let it in. There were soldiers billeted there and some of the civilians had returned. The dog was making such a dreadful sound. Dear God, what a racket it made.

Quinn wondered if Freyberg heard it. Or was he sound

asleep across the hall? And, if sound asleep, would his dreams incorporate the dog? If they did, Quinn thought; the dog would have more cause to be afraid than it had down there in i - valley.

Dreams.’

They were all so violent; bloody; fouled with the mess the war had made of everyone’s mind. Nobody dreamt of being alive any more. One dream only he could remember had

begun with being alive: a dream in which he lay with his

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face pressed close against the naked breasts of a girl who was not much older than a child. But she was dead and the beauty of her breasts was thwarted just as they had begun to bud: and as the dream expanded, Quinn had discovered he was lying fully clothed on a bed of corpses whose arms were wound around his back to hold him fast.

And on the wall the dreamer lay bandaged and terrified, huddled under his blankets: lost at sea.

‘You were having your dream again.’

Yes.’

Is it over?

No.

The splendour faded here: faded as surely as the voices of the valley’s dogs had dwindled down to one.

Quinn turned and looked at the flickering walls and shook his head. How right it was and wonderful that Mauberley should have his king confront himself in a dream. The kings in Shakespeare did the same. They always met themselves in dreams—as ghosts.

He listened for the dog.

It was silent now—and must be dead.

Quinn sat on his cot and drank the last of his wine. And then it struck him very hard: the dog was silent now. And his only thought had been; it must be dead. And he wondered where that part of him had gone that once presumed

when a dog fell silent, it could only be because some door had opened and the dog had gone inside to sleep.

Quinn then got up and closed all the doors around him

and slept without blowing out the lamp.

In the morning, when he woke, he drove himself from the bed at once and began to read, at first not even recognizing the words, but only using them to kill whatever dreams he’d had.

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Italy: August 1940

All through August, I waited to hear from Isabella but nothing was forthcoming. Of course I was mystified—and it made me very unhappy to think she had felt she could not trust me enough to have told me where she was going. On the

other hand, she had disappeared before and the messages had been the same: her servants did not know where she

was; or they knew, but their instructions had been to say she was incommunicado. I did what I had always done. I

telephoned. I cabled. I wrote. I debated making the journey to Venice. I made arrangements to go. I got on the train. I got off. I cancelled the arrangements. I waited.

All this time, I was at Rapallo with Ezra and Dorothy. Ezra was putting Dorothy through hell, but she was stoic and silent and laid out her tea cups and gave a very good performance of the wife who trusts her husband. “Isn’t it wonderful Ezra and Olga Rudge get on so well together: so much

to talk about: so many interests in common. And the thing I like most is the fact Olga Rudge lives so close by and if I really need Ezra, all I have to do is get the boy to run up the hill and bring him back.” She would then—as she offered rose hip tea, or camomile—assure me that Olga Rudge was her own best friend and that was “nice, too, don’t you think?

The three of us together…”

I spent much time alone with Dorothy that August and

September.

It was during this time we received the stunning news of Trotsky’s death in Mexico. Plastered all over the front pages of the papers—laid out amongst the cups of camomile tea—

there were pictures of the great man lying bloodied on a table.

I was both fascinated and horrified. Trotsky may have

been the enemy, but still there was something scandalous about a front page photograph of someone—anyone—dying.

But this was the age into which we were moving. There were photographs of death on every hand; though most of the

deaths were anonymous and somehow failed to reach you

with quite the jolt of Trotsky lying on his table. He looked so helpless, lying there, the whole world party to his agony

and the agony of his wife, who was shown beside him. She hovered—solicitous—begging, it seemed, our forgiveness that her husband bled so profusely. And, though she tried, she could not hide the bloodied head from the freezing lights of the flashbulbs.

And the reportage was not much better. In Italy, of course, we were shown the death of Trotsky with a sense of triumph.

As if iJ Duce himself had brought about the Bolshevist’s death. Not that Tio Benito had appointed the assassin—

heaven forbid! It was only that, without his great wisdom, the house of International Communism might never have

been effectively divided against itself. “While we gain all our victories through unity,” he said, “the Communists are breaking up their revolution from within.” The assassin had been a “trusted friend”; the murder weapon—an alpine

climber’s pick—had been driven straight down through the cranium.

The news went on for days and we were made to believe

that Trotsky had survived far longer than in fact he did. But this was only to keep the triumph alive. In truth he had only lasted for twenty-four hours. Nonetheless for one whole day he had been articulate, aware and desperate to dictate a manifesto which never saw the light of day. Whoever it was who was meant to be taking down his dying words, somehow managed to burn the notebook they were written in—by

“mistake”. His wife remained beside him right to the very end—even in the operating theatre (where photographers

were also allowed) and then—at last—he suffered a final convulsion and death.

And when Ezra finally came down the hill, he said it was a fitting death; “an alpine axe for one who climbed too high”—a phrase that pleased him so much he wrote it down.

And Dorothy did a thing I had never thought she would.

She scissored one of the photographs out of the papers and put it in a book beside her bed. This was a picture of Madam Trotsky, staring straight at the camera lens, cradling her husband’s bleeding head. “Faith is for women,” Dorothy

said. “Men don’t understand.”

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In mid-September, still not having heard from Isabella, I played the only card I had left and took the train to Stresa on the shores of Lago Maggiore. I had never been to the Loverso summer home and only knew of it as the setting for the murder of Isabella’s husband and children in 1924. It was not a place to which she had ever returned, so far as I knew, but I thought that might be all the more reason for her to go there now to hide. For she must be ‘in hiding’—

there could be no other explanation for so long an absence and so long a silence. And I was certain it was Mussolini she was hiding from, and always had been: since it was

Mussolini who had killed her husband. So I went to the one last place where I thought I might track her down—but all I found was an empty villa with a padlocked gate and a

broken eagle mounted on a chipped stone ball surmounting one of the pillars, while on the other pillar there was a great stone wreath that encircled another ball—though the wreath was intact and even the smallest of its flowers had not been worn away by weather.

“Has the Baronessa been seen?” I asked the caretaker.

No.

“Is she expected? Has there been any news of her whereabouts?”

No.

“Might I see the grounds?”

No.

But I did walk around to the open-work fences that separated the gardens from the lake and I stood—with my legs

shin-deep in the water—and I looked in through the bars and could see the courtyard where the murder had taken

place. And I was rather thrown by what I saw. Because it was so ordinary. Here was the shrine of Isabella’s regret and the source of all her passion: and all it was was a plain stone yard with a trellis overhead, supporting an unpruned vine that was running wild and covered with a myriad of rotting, forgotten grapes. And not a sign of any ghosts or of any defiance in the way it caught the light. It was just a plain

and shabby terrace, shadowed and damp, with one broken window and a boarded-up door. And I knew then—how?—

Isabella was not in hiding, but had escaped. From all of us.

But I could not think why.

In October, I was summoned to Rome. In fact, a Mercedes came for me.

My summons had come from none other than Isabella’s

cousin, the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazo Ciano: though it was not so grand a summons as it might have

sounded. I was not to be alone in Ciano’s presence—but was only one of five hundred foreign guests who were being

treated to a Grand Reception at the Palazzo Venezia, on behalf of “maintaining good public relations with all our resident aliens in this, the mother city of the civilized world”.

Our journey through the dark October night was lit by

storms and the rain came down like pellets flung against the glass. Thunder, lightning and a great wild wind pursued us all the way from Viareggio, and 1 thought of Shelley’s storm in which he had been drowned. And I wondered, too, if the driver meant to kill another poet—namely myself—he took such chances on the road and he seemed to be riding instead of driving the Mercedes. And, being a German, 1 thought perhaps he was a male Valkyrie and when I asked him why he had to drive so fast, he replied that his orders had been to get me to Rome without a moment’s delay.

He was the most bad-tempered driver I had had in years

and finally I got him to admit he hated Italy and would rather be anywhere but here. He was from Bad Godesberg

and he missed the Rhine and he used a phrase to describe the world beyond that place where he was born that I have never been able to forget. He said all other places in the world were “ein cmderland, Night mein”. And, after that, I forgave him his whirlwind driving and I settled back to sleep. “Another country not my own” is where 1 had been living ever since I left America.

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The following morning, I presented my credentials at the Palazzo Venezia—Mussolini’s monumental glorification of bad taste which housed his own offices and also the offices of several of his ministries—and I was finally admitted only after no less than three separate secretaries (each one of higher rank than the one before) had cross-checked my passport against a typewritten guest list. I was then propelled

in the general direction of the sound of distant social chatter emanating from somewhere above me. Miles of corridor

opened up before me, and thousands of mile-wide steps.

The reception was already in full swing. Going in, I was presented with three red roses—symbolic of the tripartite Axis—and could see that each of the hundreds of guest had likewise been adorned. I attempted to melt into the crowd, but failed. There were faces I recognized everywhere in the melee—and one of the first of these was Julia Franklin. She could, it seemed, be found anywhere, in any company, waiting to sink her pen into the enemy. I hoisted my roses in