The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Read Online Free Page B

surprise’. So she keeps waiting, looking at the sky, remembering how she taught Ernest to make a good martini, saying to him: ‘Nobody in England understands what to do between tea and dinner. So we’re going to show them.’
    â€˜That’s what it says.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Your two words, ducky. “Hold tight”. And then the date: “27 th March 1936”.’
    Hold tight.
    It’s what they used to say on London buses. Going down Piccadilly towards Knightsbridge on a 19 or a 22. Hold tight . Pleased with her purchases from Fortnum’s. A pound of smoked salmon. A jar of peaches in brandy. For a little supper with Ernest, just the two of them, in their new flat. Money at last. Chairs in their dining room upholstered in white leather. A silver cigar cutter from Asprey’s at Ernest’s elbow. His conversation so polite as he sipped the martini. His manners so British and perfect as he ate the smoked salmon. His eyes so gentle with appreciation.
    Hold tight.
    â€˜It’s what they used to say on the buses.’
    The man in the room explodes with laughter. ‘On the buses ! Sweetheart, he never went on a bus in his life! What a card you are.’
    â€˜â€œMove along inside”.’
    â€˜Oh, you make me die!’
    The man coughs and coughs, and then he’s gone. There and choking one minute, gone the next. Like her poor father, Teackle, vanished before he could be properly known, before he could be a husband or a father, leaving Alice Montague and her daughter to the mercy of Uncle Sol.
    And Wallis hides by the door of their apartment, the one where Mother used to serve up her turtle soup, her crowns of lamb, and watches as Sol puts his big, moist hands on Alice’s waist. ‘Won’t you hold me, Alice? I do so much for you. You never show me the least . . . Without me, you and Minnehaha . . . where would you be, baby?’
    Wallis knows this can’t be right, Sol’s rubbery mouth on Alice’s neck, his hands staining the silk dress she mends in the small hours of the Baltimore morning. How could this ever be right?
    â€˜Leave my mother alone. Go away, Uncle Sol ’
    He goes. He crawls away down the stairs, wearing his black coat with the astrakhan collar, and they lock the door on him. They say: ‘Never again. Never ever again.’
    But he never forgot.
    The hag would have been proud of such a man, who remembered and remembered, right until death, beyond death, into the bureaucracy of death, into the Will which states that all his money, his Warfield fortune, all five million dollars of it shall be used to set up a home for Indigent Gentlewomen.
    â€˜Indigent Gentlewomen’. Oh, you could laugh at that! You could imagine them, those indigent gentlewomen in their new ‘Home’, throwing away their gentility at the poker table, on the nightly drinking spree, in clouds of tobacco smoke, in secret orders from lingerie catalogues, in the way they ambush the janitor, the gardeners, the doctor who comes to tend to their indigestion and their bunions. You could make up stories about them, laugh till you wept, if only it weren’t so desperate a thing, to be a Warfield and to have nothing and for the Indigent Gentlewomen to have it all.
    Five million bucks.
    Just to think of that sum. To think of it back then when it could have bought the world. To think of it and have none of it. Not a dime.
    The companion’s back. They’re going through the ritual with the pan again except that this kind of business hurts like hell and stinks like the dead. Tears burn Wallis’s cheeks. If only food could melt away inside you and not have to come out again.
    â€˜ Oh mon dieu, chérie. Quelle odeur . . .’
    In future, she’ll refuse to eat anything solid. Getting rid of it again’s too much of an agony.
    The hag wipes her ass. No kissing this time, thank God.
    The girl rolls her