The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Read Online Free

bracelet.
    â€˜Wallisse! Talk to me. Don’t pretend any more. Pretence is so ungrateful! He gave up an Empire for you. An Empire! And you pretend to remember nothing. But I ’ave sworn to myself I shall not rest, I shall not return to my legal practice nor go again into the world until you admit to me that you do remember. For, somewhere in you, you do. So now tell me please: there are two words inscribed on the bracelet and you will say what they are or I am going to ’ave to punish you. I am going to punish you very badly.’
    The bracelet’s pressed against Wallis’s mouth. Who cares what words are inscribed on the fucking bracelet? It’s the thing itself that’s lovely, not the words. She lives in darkness most of the time, a ghost trapped in an old TV, but now the companion’s given her something beautiful and she’s damn well going to hang on to it.
    But the hag won’t leave her alone. There’s murder in her voice.
    â€˜I never thought you would be so obstinate. You are a mule ! I dare not tell anybody what a crime you are committing. I’m too ashamed.’
    Ashamed.
    Wallis knows what this word means. The shame of things. Being told by her mother: ‘Bessie, I can’t afford that school uniform, darlin’. But, see, I’m handy with the sewing machine. Make you one so good, nobody will tell the difference.’ Except she always knew. Knew it was different. There was no store label in it. The pleats didn’t fall perfectly right. The shame of those imperfect pleats.
    â€˜Two words!’ says the murdering hag. ‘Now tell me what they are!’
    Two words. What could they possibly be? Didn’t romantic people make a saga about three words? I love you. If you could claim that ‘I’ is a word. Because it doesn’t really feel like a word. More like a spool of film, whirring in darkness, snapping, breaking, spliced together again, whirring, flickering, showing you some scene or other, some far-off snow-flecked scene, only to break again, or else the projector breaks, just as you are beginning to recognise somebody or other, some castle in Germany, for instance, or that room in Baltimore where the school uniform was made, a drab room where Uncle Sol came and sometimes gave money to Alice Warfield, née Montague, sums of money that were never enough, never the same amount twice in a row, never something on which you could depend. The shame of that.
    Two words.
    Boarding House.
    That’s how they referred to it later, the place where she and her mother had to live after they left Preston Street. But ‘Boarding House’ was a lie, a shameful lie. It was an Apartment House. Sets of rooms, not expensive, never dusted, but like proper apartments, let to tenants. Not a Boarding House. A place where they could be, the two of them, separate from Grandma Anna, with her black dresses and her keys to all the closets and her ancestral furniture that creaked in the dark. And then Mother came up with this swell idea: cook meals for the other tenants. Turn them into paying guests. Live off that. It was a fine scheme. And she’d do it right. She was a Montague. She knew what people liked to eat: prime rib, soft-shell crabs, terrapin . . .
    So she’d buy these delicacies and boy, those people came along in dozens! Squab and crawfish. They guzzled it. Wallis went round, helping to serve them. ‘Minnehaha’ was a popular waitress. She was preparing for her dazzling table. But those guzzlers wouldn’t pay enough. They kept arguing about the cost of the meals. And then the tradespeople started sending round bills inked in red: Terms strictly thirty days. No further credit can be extended. And men began calling, threatening. ‘What’s goin’ on, Bessiewallis, dear?’ asked the tenants, the guzzlers. ‘Oh, nothing, Miss Brightwell, nothing Mister Carpenter. Just some ole friends of the