Famous Last Words (40 page)

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This caused a great deal of laughter to go up into the air to join the letters. “Men!”

And then, as the letters continued to emerge and to follow one another, forming other words—or what seemed to be

other words—the crowd began to chant.

“M!” they all sang.

“E!”

“N!” they all sang.

“E!”

“M!” they all cried—and clapped their hands like children at a birthday party. “M! E! N! E! M!…MENEM!”

Every eye was on the sky. Little Nell sat down hard upon the grass and his hands began to shake. And the sweat came down in a torrent over his eyes so he could barely see and his feet were twisted under him in agony.

“What does it mean?” said one old man. “Menem?”

“Wait,” said another. “I don’t think it’s finished yet.”

“No,” said Little Nell unheard. “It hasn’t.”

And the aeroplane went on spelling out its ciphered message above them. M.E.N.E.M.E… .it wrote. MENEME. It wasn’t even English.

“Maybe,” said the old man; “if that N was really meant

to be another M, he’s saying to us: Me! Me! Me!”

“No,” said Little Nell, who wasn’t even watching any

more, “He isn’t saying me—me—me.”

And then—something fell from the plane. A strange, elliptical shape, like a tear drop: made of aluminium.

“Oh…” said someone. “Oh. It’s a bomb!”

Major Bunny Gerrard, waving his famous revolver in the

air, had leapt onto a table in front of the Parisian Cafe. It had been his intention to threaten the plane and to try to kill the pilot if it flew within his range. But now, with this object falling through the air that might have been a bomb, Major Gerrard had the chance to take his aim and fire before it hit the ground. And if it had been a bomb, he might have made it explode in the air and saved five hundred lives. But it was not a bomb.

It was the plane’s spare tank of fuel.

And now there was brightness spilling down the sky, a

great orange chute of flames that broke, micMall, and scat

tered everywhere. Gasoline. It could be smelled.

Everyone fell to the earth as if a muezzin had suddenly called them all to their knees. Men, women, children all fell down. But it was not in prayer. It was to hide.

And MarsdenFawcett, kneeling with the Duke and Duchess, tried to say for all the others; “f-f-f-…”

Fire. —

And then it caught.

The word itself leapt everywhere over the heads of the

crowd like a flame. Fire. Fire.

Everyone rose and ran. First they went one way. Then

they went another. Then another. And then it struck them all at once. They were trapped. There would be no running anywhere. On every side they were blocked by marquees;

by the Mansion; by the ambulance at the top of the drive and by the press of motorcars that filled every gap between the trees. Five hundred people and more were entirely

hemmed in and there was not a hope of getting out.

Major Gerrard blew three blasts on his whistle.

This brought all the Cameron Highlanders up from their

stations on the hillside; running like scarlet dogs to the sound of their names. Some even climbed across the tops of motorcars, with their rifles raised and their bayonets flashing in the sun.

Everyone fell down again.

Out of the aeroplane, now fell bright green paper. A bright green snowdrift, rolling over, falling down as the people fell. And the aeroplane went on with its writing…

M.E.N.E.M.E.N.E.T.E.K… .

People began to rise and to stumble across the backs of others who could not get up. Suddenly the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, white like statues, were revealed in the very centre of the lawn. The Duchess was holding up the hem

of her Schiaparelli skirt. The Duke had his mouth open, staring at the fallen circle of people. By now, the marquees were going up one by one in candystripe volcanoes causing an enormous, roaring updraught which lifted the remnants of the canvas and the bright green papers into the air like burning flags.

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More and more people were rising from the ground. Fire

was flooding out around them over the stones and shells and through the grass. There was a second convulsive movement, again en masse, towards the canvas enclosures that

only moments before had offered shelter from the sun. Now, there was nothing but a wall of flame and a corps of struggling human torches flailing against the holocaust, drowning

for lack of air in waves of fire and smoke.

And the bright green papers made a blizzard and the Duchess of Windsor, holding out her skirts, appeared to be gathering them. DEATH TO FASCISTS EVERYWHERE! the bright

green papers screamed. But neither the Duchess—nor anyone—could hear them.

Now the people wheeled towards the barricade of cars

and the siren on top of the ambulance was wailing. A woman had pushed her children in through the glass and was lying across the front seat, cranking the siren’s handle just as if she were winding a gramophone. And all the time she lay there, she was shouting at her children; “Shut up! Shut up!

Shut up!” But her children were dead—because she had

smothered them.

The crowd became a mob. It had no other choice. Men

beat at women with their walking sticks. Women beat at

men with their parasols. Children were beaten aside with ice-cream chairs, while others were thrown through the air like parcels—riches thrown from a sinking ship.

In the Cinema Marquee, seventy-five or a hundred people had been watching the Battle of Britain and the Fall of Prance. Now, in a nightmare calmly narrated by a disembodied Movietone Voice, they were caught themselves in

the hordes of struggling refugees who clogged the roads on the screen while the dive bombers strafed them in the ditches down between the rows of chairs. Real flames caught at their hair and their clothing. Real screams mingled with the screams of falling bombs and the rising flames over London echoed the rising flames that leapt towards the sky above the lawns at Nassau. Suddenly the screen was filled with the image of a Spitfire squadron rushing towards the camera. Just as it took off, the whole marquee exploded.

The Duchess of Windsor saw a woman standing before

her in flames like a figure in a mirror who kept repeating; “I am dead. I am dead,” as her arms flew up to cover her face as if in shame; and the words were perfectly enunciated, spoken without a trace of anguish or agony: simply J am dead. The Duchess of Windsor fell to her knees and crawled away across the burning grass. All around her there was chaos, heat and terror. And a great, wild wind that was made by the fire itself. And far, far away—or so it seemed—she could see her husband, lost in a daze, beginning to walk towards the fiery awnings, holding out his hands to the flames as if they were salvation.

The sight of him drew her at once to her feet, and the

Duchess went running, galvanized by his image, limping

and not knowing why. She had lost one shoe. But even so, she was totally unaware the ‘earth’ beneath her feet was flesh and she just kept running, single-minded, over the field of bodies towards her husband. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” she was crying, either aloud or in her mind. “Don’t!” But all she could hear was the rush of the winds through the tunnels of the fire.

Moving like a figure of glass in a furnace the Duchess

turned and turned and turned, only vaguely aware of the thrashing arms and sticks all around her: walking sticks, swagger sticks, stakes pulled out of the ground, pointed parasols, chair legs, table legs, anything with which to jab and batter—and it was in this way she discovered why it was her shoe was missing. It was in her hand and she was using its heel to strike at whoever got in her way.

When she finally got as far as the Duke she had no idea where they were; there seemed to be only herself and him in a wilderness of violence. The Duchess put her arms around his shoulders and drew him close. The naval uniform was smouldering but it was not on fire. For a moment the Duchess didn’t even try to move, but stood while the movement of the others flowed around them like a river. Then—very

slowly—she began to push the Duke of Windsor gently backwards, both of them moving against the stream.

It was the longest walk the Duchess had ever made. Thirty

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yards towards the drive…on and on and on. And her partner, catatonic in her arms, without a whimper but alive. And for days—for weeks—the Duchess of Windsor’s legs and

thighs would ache with the effort of it and in her dreams she would go on pushing her husband across the dance-floor on the lawns—hearing over and over the crazy song about a paper moon, a cardboard sea and a melody played in a

fiery arcade.

As for Little Nell, being so tiny he had tried to crawl away and hide in the Kissing Concession under the counter. But Lana Turner had to be saved and so he offered to lift her up as best he could, with his palms beneath her breasts; but she fell to the ground and was carried off by three tall men in blue velvet coats with silver trim. And buckled shoes. And Little Nell was left behind, alone and unable to move. One of the men—a giant—had stepped on his neck and crushed it.

The last thing Little Nell saw before he died was the writing high in the sky above him: rnene mene tekel upharsin;

the final scrawl, the ultimate graffiti…thou art weighed in the balance—and found wanting.

God’s shoes were size twelve.

All that remained, when the fire had died, were the ruined shapes of the great marquees, looming in the moonlit smoke like sunken ships with all their ropes cast off upon the blackened sea of grass. Soldiers and firemen, doctors and nurses, policemen and mesmerized survivors wandered over the scene identifying, trying to identify, the victims. Fiftyfive dead in all: including both Major Gerrard and Lieutenant MarsdenFawcett. Gerrard’s automatic was welded to his

hand. As for MarsdenFawcett, he was found, like a child, with his fingers in his mouth—as if in desperation he was trying to pluck out “fire”.

Aunt Bessie Merryman lost all her hair and had to wear a wig for the rest of her life. And she joined less and less in her niece’s company. “Fire,” she said, “is the one true terror and the only thing in hell I can’t endure.” The Duchess of Windsor let her go. Fire, she had surmised, was what awaited them all, though not in hell. And only those who could endure it would be allowed to remain in her retinue.

Far in the depths of the Mansion, the lights began to go out and it seemed there was a kind of will towards darkness.

Soon after midnight one of the nurses, all in white, bent down to see if Little Nell was dead and, finding that he was, she closed his eyes and reached inside his jacket, seeking for some identification. None was there—but she found a long brown envelope and opened it, thinking it might tell his name. Folded neatly inside there was a bright green leaflet of the kind that had fallen from the plane that afternoon and a piece of plain white paper. On the white was

written, by hand, the simple message: For Your Information—Friday, July the Fourth, 1941 at 15:00 hrs. And on the

green, a simpler message in bold, black type—already known: DEATH TO FASCISTS EVERYWHERE.

The fire had claimed its fifty-five victims and three days later the sea yielded up the fifty-sixth: the body of Lorenzo de Broca, the young Italian poet whose words had so embarrassed Hugh Selwyn Mauberley one day when they had

met on the steps of the Grand Elysium Hotel at

UnterBalkonberg in 1939.

Perhaps it had been de Broca’s intention all along to die in his plane—or perhaps it was the result of his naivete and panache. One thing will never be known, which is whether he carried the extra tank of gasoline to get him home to Florida, whence he had flown, or for the purposes of fire to which it was put—either by accident or design. At any rate, de Broca had not made it very far out to sea before he crashed.

The aeroplane the Duchess of Windsor had watched being

loaded aboard the Excalibur in the Azores had joined the other skeletons of war machines and ships beneath the waves;

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while the whimsical currents had deposited its drowned

young pilot—who called himself Icarus—on the coral close to a colony of birds whose wings he would have envied, but whose beaks and claws had no respect for mythology—except insofar as they fed on it.

Fire, Quinn read again, is the one true terror and the only thing in hell I can’t endure.

He turned around very quickly after that and walked out into the room where the gramophone sat on its desk and the half-moon piece of shiny black Schubert sat propped up

beside the pile of other records. Piano Sonata in B flat ma…he read. This was his memento mori: his reminder of Freyberg’s will that everyone should die the worst of deaths he could devise.

Well.

They had.

Quinn stuffed his pack of Philip Morris into the pocket of his Eisenhower, buttoned his greatcoat and grabbed the blanket from his cot and threw it around his shoulders.

Out in the corridor there was a smell like formaldehyde which Quinn discovered was coming from the room he now

called Mauberley’s Crypt. Freyberg was standing, blocking the view, in the doorway.

Quinn had hoped not to see Captain Freyberg in this particular moment. His equilibrium was frail. He didn’t want

the burning world on the walls to be joined to the caustic world out here in the corridor of the Grand Elysium Hotel.

He had the dreadful feeling that, if Freyberg read the story of the Spitfire Bazaar, he might rejoice in the body count.

But perhaps he was being unfair. Perhaps it was just the

9 usAsi^a^K? “(;?

juxtaposition of the sight of Freyberg’s back and the overpowering smell of acid.

“Where are you going?” said Freyberg.

“Out,” said Quinn.

“Out?” said Freyberg. “There’s a god damn blizzard.”

“Yes sir.”

Freyberg smiled as he gazed at Lieutenant Quinn’s attire.

“All dolled up, I see.”

“That’s right,” said Quinn, and he pulled the blanket further around his shoulders. “May I go now, sir?”