by Rose Tremain
‘Tell me, my dearest,’ says the companion gently. ‘Je t’écoute.’
The drama of it. The suspense. Like on those TV quiz shows where you could win sixty-four thousand dollars by naming the capital city of Paraguay.
‘OK,’ says Wallis calmly. ‘I remember. Him.’
‘Oh oui, oh oui, ma bien aimée, ma Wallisse adorable. Just say his name to me. Just whisper his name.’
‘Hitler.’
Silence in the room again. No wind in the Bois. No ambulances travelling past. Not even the sound of rain. And it goes on and on. Nothing moves outside the window and here, on the bed, the companion sits absolutely still, rigid, a hunk of stone.
Then comes a horrible sound. The man-woman’s crying. Her body heaves. This heaving’s unearthly, like some demon crawled into her under the tweed. Oh, stop, Wallis wants to say. God almighty. But she can’t breathe now, because the companion’s fallen across her body and she’s clutching her like a lover, her damp cheek pressed against hers, her lips against her mouth.
‘Forget this,’ she sobs. ‘Never mention his name to anyone ever again. You never met Hitler, Wallisse. Forget this. Oh ma chérie, if you only knew what this does to me. Tell me you never went to that place . . .’
‘I went,’ says Wallis. ‘There were vultures flying around the mountain. Hitler admired my cocktail gown . . .’
‘No, no! Oh, my poor heart! Tell me you never met that man. You only dreamed it.’
‘No,’ says Wallis. ‘I met him. I told you, he kissed my hand. I’ve remembered it all.’
The hag moves off Wallis’s body, but breaks down afresh in a storm of weeping. Jesus Christ, what inconsistency! It defies belief. This terrifying ‘Maître’ has spent weeks – or months – slapping and beating her and punishing her because she couldn’t come up with his name, and now she’s said it, she’s said the name ‘Hitler’ out loud, and what happens? The woman has a fit. She’s told to forget it again! Boy, oh boy. This is enough to turn a girl gaga. It surely is.
Wallis is alone again with night. Alone with the Nightmare that’s always hovering there, behind the locked door. She can hear rain beating on the windows.
So OK, she got it wrong: it couldn’t have been Hitler she was supposed to remember. But how are you meant to understand what to remember and what to try to forget? And where’s the truth about your life – in the forgetting or in the remembering? Hell knows.
Wallis’s thin hand scrabbles under the pillow to get the bracelet. Holding that against her cheek, against her lips, is so comforting, it’s like the caress of a person you love. Actually, it’s better than the caress of a person you love. Because love’s so fragile. Well, it was for her. It was a mirage. It was just the shine in a puddle of oil.
She thought she loved Win Spencer, but he took that love of hers and messed on it. Not once, but over and over. Till she ran away and left him, told her mother no, I can’t be the wife of someone like that. But oh, the look on Mother’s face. ‘For gracious sake, Bessiewallis, don’t say the word “divorce” to me! There has never ever been a divorce in the Montague family, never ever been a divorce in the Warfield family. So don’t you go bringing shame on us with that talk. My, my! What would your grandma say? Now you go right on back to that husband of yours and stay by him. Those vows you made, they’re for life, unless one of you decides to die.’
He’d been posted to China, to old Canton. When she arrived, he was off the liquor, told her he was sorry, made a fuss of her, like he loved her after all. But when she asked: ‘Where d’you go at night-time, Win?’, he said: ‘I’ll show you where I go.’ So he took her to a brothel, to a scented room where girls like children waited on soft couches, girls like flights of starlings, with their blue-black wings of hair and their twittering laughter.
They were real. She hasn’t dreamed them, those laughing girls. Like she didn’t dream Hitler. Win gave her to the girls. He said: ‘Have a little fun, damsels. Teach her some stuff.’
So she lay down with them, two or three of them in a scarlet room, with their carmine lips and their soft little hands which touched her where nobody had ever touched her. And it was nice. ‘So dark your hair, Wallie, so lovely black and heavy, like us! Now we touch you inside. Play a nice game. Put a small finger in. Play “trap the finger”. You see? Lovely game, Wallie. Lovely feeling . . .’
Yeah. It was lovely. Nicer to be touched by those brothel girls than by any man. They may have been whores, but their breath was sweet. They whispered bad and beautiful things in her ear. She would have liked to stay with them till morning.
But Win hauled her away. ‘Enough of that, for Christ’s sake. You’re not meant to like it, you perverted bitch. It’s for learning to satisfy me. So satisfy me, right? Open your damned legs and let me see what you can do now.’
Messed on her love. Like he couldn’t help himself, like that was all he knew how to do. So a girl had to run away from that, in the end, never mind what the family thought or said. You couldn’t spend your life with an animal.
She had to take a passage from China all the way back home seasick on a boat and yes, wait a minute, something happened on that voyage, something bad. She’d hoped to play deck quoits, flirt with the captain at dinner time, but she wasn’t able to eat any dinner, wasn’t able to stand, never mind play deck quoits. It wasn’t just seasickness: it was pain shrieking inside her. Pain in her womb like you could never have imagined. Pain a hundred times worse than any Win had inflicted. Oh, God. Just to think of it is bad. She had to beg for something, for morphine, in fact, to lessen that agony, and then in her drugged dreams, she tried to ask the ship’s doctor, what the hell is pain like this doing inside me? How did it get there? But he wouldn’t answer the question. He told her she’d forget it. She’d get well again and forget.
So she lay in her little cabin, forgetting, afraid of the sea and afraid of the darkness, and when the pain came back, she thought her life was over, thought it was seeping away into the Pacific Ocean, and good riddance, for what had it been but a shameful, terrifying life and now she was going to close her eyes and forget it all.
Except, as fast as someone tells you to forget, there’s someone else nagging you to remember. There’s always some hag, some fiend who snaps: ‘Sit up. Look at this. Watch this. And now get up. Walk to the door. You can do it. Come on. Don’t give up. Don’t give in.’
Will there never come a moment when she’s allowed to die?
Days seem to be passing. Or it could be weeks.
For hours, Wallis holds the diamond and ruby bracelet against her lips.
The quietness of everything is strangely beautiful. And the hag seems to be leaving her alone, thank God. After that Hitler storm, she went mercifully silent.
Then, one morning, before it’s hardly light, Wallis wakes up and hears voices outside her window. They’re near. They sound like they’re in the damn garden. And there should not be the voices of strangers in the garden. It’s what the garden’s for – to keep strangers out. They sound like those people who used to gobble up Mother’s soft-shell crabs, those tenants who gorged themselves sick and then bickered about the cost.
Wallis lies still as Minnehaha used to lie, when the tenants argued on the landing of the Baltimore Apartment House. One voice is getting louder than the others. Like some Yankee tycoon in a temper, and she’s known a few of those! Just from the noise he’s making, you can imagine how he might look: cashmere overcoat smeared with threads of rain; big bull neck kept ruddy and warm by some expensive scarf; black hairs in his ears; soft lips that no longer feel a thing, worn out from French-kissing.
He’s yelling at the Maître. The others join in. The poor old Maître’s telling them all to go away, but they won’t go away, of course they damn well won’t. They’re exactly like the tenants, or like those terrible tradespeople who never gave up with their bills and summonses: they’ve come to get something.
Wallis pushes back the bed sheets, the heavy satin quilt, tries to get he
r legs to move. ‘When you alight from a car, Wallis, keep you knees together. Make sure your skirt is pulled well down. The world should never get a glimpse of your thigh.’ So she tries to make this a dainty manoeuvre. But when she alighted from cars, there was never this pain in her stomach, this wrenching of her gut, this agony that makes a girl want to scream.
She sits on the bed, legs dangling, not reaching the floor. The damn bed’s too high. She’s sweating from the gut pain. The kind of pain that makes you curse or long for a morphine drip in your arm. But she’s not giving up. She wants to see these people, who’ve gotten the nerve to approach her door. Who the hell are they? And what have they come for?
Wallis remembers there’s a stick somewhere, a cane to lean on, like Uncle Sol used to do when he was old. But someone’s hidden the damn stick. They thought she’d never move again, never get her wizened old ass out of the bed any more. Well, they’re wrong. She’s out now. She’s on her pins for a moment, then she falls, kneeling, to the floor. Takes a big breath, swears at the pain, and then off she goes, on her hands and knees, crawling towards the window. What a girl! She may be gaga, but she can remember how to crawl.
Her long white hair hangs down. Her feet are cold, but who cares? She’s always stood up to people. Always. Even her mother admired her for that. And now she’s going to open the window and stand up to these strangers.
On she goes. Just like a child, except the limbs of a child are soft and bendy as a willow wand and hers are like dead sticks. She’s almost at the window when she hears a new rumpus starting up outside and the Yankee yells out: ‘She’s dead! Isn’t she? You can stop faking things, Maître Blum. We’ve all figured it out: Wallis Simpson is dead!’
Dead?
Oh, God. This had never occurred to her. She’d thought death was still to come. But perhaps this is what death is, this room in Paris? But then why don’t people tell the truth about death? If it’s going to be exactly like being in Paris, why didn’t somebody darn well say so?
Wallis has gotten to the window now. She raises one hand and tugs at the heavy blue drapes, and a stab of light bursts into the room, blinding and cruel. She can remember cruel light. The little man once said: ‘Mama, something must be done about the light. It makes all the women look ugly.’ But where was that cruel light, the one he complained about? Surely, surely, it was somewhere grand, somewhere she shouldn’t have been, and weren’t the King and Queen there – the old King, whatever his name was, and that upright, frightening old Queen – before the war, before Cookie was Queen-of-the-May, before London was lost . . . ?
Oh, God knows. Her thoughts are all twisted up again. The light twisted them. She must concentrate now, pull apart the curtains and get a damn good look at these strangers who believe she’s dead. See if they’re telling the truth or not.
But how will she know? If they say, ‘Sure, you’ve been dead a while, Wally,’ how will she be certain they’re not lying? Because lies are always a part of things. Part of each and every thing. She understood that long ago. Wherever you walk, lies tread the same road. And yet he said . . . he . . . the little man . . . he said once he wanted to live his life without lying. He pleaded with her: ‘Wallis, I can’t lie to the world any more.’ But what did she reply? Perhaps she took him by the arm or put her hand in his and told him, told him like a mother would tell an innocent boy: ‘Wherever you walk, lies tread the same road.’ Perhaps it was then that she first uttered these words of wisdom?
It’s gone quiet outside. The hag’s talking her weird French talk.
Wallis puts her cheek close to the window and peers down.
God, it looks cold there. Cold and white with snow. All the strangers are huddled under umbrellas, listening to the Maître. They seem good and obedient for a while, in the Maître’s power, just like everybody else, but then, without warning, one of them, another loud American, shouts out: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Maître Blum! Wallis Simpson had the most breathtaking story since the Resurrection! And you’ve let her forget it!’
What?
Did she hear right?
Oh, boy. First it’s death they’re describing; now they’re yelling something about resurrection. What kind of crazy stuff is getting spoken on this snowy morning?
Wallis decides she’d better ask them. She reaches up and tries to open her window, but windows in France are so damned tall and heavy, you can never get them to move. So she taps on the glass, with her nails, which are still long and painted red as rubies. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. And suddenly they turn. All the people turn, moving their umbrellas, and look up. She sees their faces, pink-cheeked in the snow. They stare at her. With their mouths hanging open. They look like they’re seeing a ghost. And then they begin to move towards her. ‘Wallis!’ they call. ‘Wallis! Wallis . . . !’
And oh, she can remember this: people calling her name. People reaching out their hands to her, trying to touch her. ‘Wallis! Wallis!’ It was so swell for a while for a girl from Baltimore. Better than being a deb at the Bachelors’ Cotillion. Better than being a bride with orange blossom in her hair. Better than presiding over a dazzling table. It was what she’d always wanted. Always. To be loved; for people to say her name with love.
But it never lasted. Did it? God knows why not. First they loved her, like Win had loved her, and reached for her with their hands, and then, for no reason she can recall, they began to insult her, started calling her a bitch, an American bitch, threw rotten eggs at her car. Their love had been so beautiful and then, one day, it turned to hate . . .
Wallis lets fall the curtains and curls up on the carpet, knees tucked into her bony chest. She sees that she’s wearing a white silk nightgown with a trim of Brussels lace. She’s always been careful about her clothes. She just hopes there’s no unsightly stain on the derrière.
The calling of her name goes on and on. ‘Wallis! Wallis!’ It’s like some familiar music, long ago faded and gone.
Wallis. Wallis. Wallis!
She likes it. She hopes they’ll go on calling for ever.
And now, suddenly, there’s a flicker of memory, like a candle being lit in her mind: the one who loved her name so much was the pale little man. It was he who used to say it, over and over, like the saying of it was a kind of prayer or mantra or consoling nursery rhyme. ‘Wallis, my Wallis . . . Wallis, my Wallis . . .’
He said it sweetly, caressingly. He said it like no one else had ever said it. And he never got mad at her. Never called her an American bitch. He got mad at the world, but never at her. Perhaps he was the only one, out of everybody in the whole damn universe (including Ernest who just disappeared into the London smog) who loved her? Because it was he, too, wasn’t it, who gave her jewels? He told her some of them should have been Cookie’s but fuck that, he said, they were hers now and nobody was ever going to take them away.
And not only jewels. Yeah, it’s coming back now. It was he who used to buy her caviar – as much as she liked, whenever she wanted it. And boy, how she’d loved that! She just craved it like she’d never craved any other food. She knew it was expensive, she knew that ninety-nine per cent of people in the world had never tasted it, but too bad. She was one of the one per cent. Lucky her. Lucky Bessiewallis Warfield from Baltimore.
Lying very still on the floor, with the crowd still calling outside, Wallis thinks, with a smile, that she could use a spoonful of caviar now, its texture so soft and strange. It would be the one thing she could eat. And, still smiling, she decides that really she wouldn’t mind if the little man came into the room and helped her back into the bed, so that she could be comfortable as she ate it. He had such gentle hands. With these hands, more gentle than a woman’s, he used to spoon caviar into her mouth. Spoon it into her mouth! What an adorable, dippy little rite! Who else ever did a thing like that? And his blue eyes used to smile into hers. Smile with such love and adoration. And then he’d ask, gently: ‘Is that lovely, darling? Is that delicious for my darling?’
Darling.
My darling.
She said these words, too. Didn’t she? Said them to him. Said them often, and with tenderness. Sure she did.
So OK, this must be it, the thing she had to dredge up from the darkness. When the Maître comes pestering her next time, this is what she’ll tell her: ‘I’ve remembered him,’ she’ll say. ‘He was too pale to have a name. I always called him darling.’
And then the whole darn thing will be put to rest.
How It Stacks Up
She says to him: ‘On your birthday, McCreedy, what d’you want to do?’
She always calls him McCreedy. You’d have thought by now, after being his wife for so long, she’d have started to call him John, but she never does. He calls her Hilda; she calls him McCreedy, like he was a stranger, like he was a footballer she’d seen on the telly.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What’ll we do, then?’
‘Forty-six,’ she says. ‘You’d better think of something.’
‘Go out . . .?’ he says.
‘Out where?’
The pub, he thinks, but doesn’t say. With the fellas from work. Get the Guinness down. Tell some old Dublin jokes. Laugh till you can’t laugh any more.
‘What’d the kids like?’ he says.
She lights a ciggie. Her twentieth or thirtieth that Sunday, he’s stopped counting. Smoke pours out of her mouth, thick and blue. ‘Never mind the kids, McCreedy,’ she says. ‘It’s your fuckin’ birthday.’
‘Go back to Ireland,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’d like. Go back there for good.’
She stubs out the ciggie. She’s always changing her mind about everything, minute to minute. ‘When you’ve got a sensible answer,’ she says, ‘let me know what it is.’
And she leaves him, click-clack on her worn-out heels, pats her hair, opens the kitchen door and lets it slam behind her.
McCreedy stares at the ashtray. Time she was dead, he thinks. Time the smoking killed her.