The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Stupid,’ said Albert under his breath. ‘Absolutely stupid.’

  A wasp arrived and began crawling over the cake. He stared venomously at it. As a child, he’d almost died from a wasp sting. The natural world waged a senseless war with man which exasperated Albert. How he hated this kind of Sunday outing! He wished he were in his office in the rue St Hippolyte, immersed in the Estate Accounts of one of his solidly wealthy burgher clients, or, better still, about to read out – in all the glory of its repetitive and complicated language – the Will of an aristocrat to the dead man’s confused and betrayed wife.

  Albert loved this work. Love was not too strong a word to attach to the feelings he had for it. Berthe sometimes teased him that he loved only the fees he earned, those rounded ten per cents which followed one another in a steady and almost unbroken stream. ‘Non, ma chérie,’ he always told her, ‘it’s the lawyer’s work itself, that sorting out and tallying up of things, which I adore.’ Albert went so far as to admit that he often felt himself to be boiling up with contentment in his chosen profession. ‘Boiling up’ was how he liked to put it. Because it made him hot and scarlet, and he could feel his feet burning and he could imagine his liver, beet-red and glistening.

  But now, sitting in the park on this October Sunday in the year 1877, Albert felt cold. He picked up one of the voluminous table napkins provided for the picnic by Berthe and wound it round his neck. Marianne giggled. ‘I don’t know what you look like!’ she said.

  ‘If you don’t know what I look like, then why did you say anything, Marianne?’ said Albert. ‘If you had found some witty comparison between me and, say, some little-known species of marsupial, then you might have given us a moment’s amusement, but as it is you’ve just wasted your breath.’

  Berthe, against whose familiar rump Albert was reclining, turned her head and looked sharply at him. Why, came her unspoken question, was he being so pompous and disagreeable, especially to Marianne, upon whom, everybody knew, he doted in a way that was sometimes almost troubling?

  Why indeed? Why? Albert didn’t know. He stared at Marianne, at her pretty face under her smart Sunday bonnet, at the bodice of her striped taffeta dress and waited for the pleasurable and familiar feeling of mild lust to arrive in his groin. But what arrived instead was a feeling of boredom so crushing, so absolute, that Albert had the sensation of falling over. He was glad that he wasn’t standing up, for then, surely, he would have fallen over. It was as if the sky had literally darkened, or as if the universe were collapsing in on itself.

  Albert looked away from Marianne. He saw that he was still holding his teacup. He examined his own thumb on the rim of the saucer. He thought how plump, pink and ridiculous this thumb appeared. He set the cup down and now realised that everybody had turned away from him: Marianne and Berthe and his six-year-old daughter, Delphine, and Claude and Joséphine. All of them had turned their backs on him. The child was whispering something to herself, one of her little songs, but the grown-ups remained silent and unmoving, and Albert wondered whether they knew what was happening to him, knew that his universe was faltering and that, lying as he was near the rim of the pond, they were simply waiting for the moment when he would roll backwards and fall into the water and drown under the flat green leaves of the water lilies.

  Albert rubbed his eyes. Then, one by one, he examined the things that lay within his vision: the tea caddy, the teapot on its stand, some bottles of water, the half-eaten cake, the wasp, a plate of biscuits, the fallen leaves, the knives and forks, the white cloth, the edge of the rug, the grass beyond, the shadows of clouds on the gravel walkway. He expected to find consolation in one or other of these things, especially in the tea caddy, whose square shape and ivory handle he had always found aesthetically pleasing. But now, on reflection, Albert decided that a tea caddy was a ridiculous object; in itself and through-and-through an unnecessary thing, balefully ugly and superfluous to human need. He wanted to rage at the mind that had invented it.

  At this moment, Delphine picked up her skipping rope and asked her grandmother if she could go and do some skipping on the gravel walkway. ‘Yes,’ said Joséphine, ‘but go right over there, so that you don’t kick up dust into our faces.’

  Albert looked away from the tea caddy, over to where Delphine now stood in the sunshine, laying out the rope in front of her feet, then experimentally jumping over it, to remind herself what skipping involved. Though he was pleased to discover that these little gestures still touched his heart, Albert soon realised that what they touched his heart with was sorrow: sorrow for Delphine’s loneliness in a grown-up world, sorrow for her future as the wife of some unfaithful husband, sorrow for her mortality. Though he loved her, he wished at that moment, as Delphine began to skip, that he had never brought her into the world.

  He couldn’t lie there any more, shivering with cold, leaning against Berthe. Though his legs felt weak, he stood up, brushing crumbs from his jacket, and walked towards his daughter. ‘Watch me, Papa!’ she called out, so he did as she asked, watching the concentration on her face, and then watching her feet, shod in brown boots, jumping up and down in the dust.

  He slept badly that night, for the first time in his life irritated by the smallness of the double bed, by the solidity and heat and nearness of Berthe. That afternoon, he’d been cold; now he was far too hot. He wanted to be in a narrow space of his own, in absolute darkness, with the sheet pulled taut and cold and clean across his chest. When Berthe began snoring, he wanted to bundle her out on to the floor. ‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked himself.

  Albert turned his back towards Berthe and lay staring at the darkness. He began counting money in his mind, which is what he often did to encourage sleep: adding up the total of all the ten per cents, actual and probable, that he would earn before the year’s end. The figure he arrived at was large and encouraging, but almost immediately the thought came to him that money, these days, simply remained money. In his youth, or even until quite recently, it had always been alchemised into purchases and acquisitions. But his house and office were now stuffed with these purchases and acquisitions. Albert couldn’t think of one other single thing that he wanted to buy. In fact, he decided, there were a number of things that he would like to throw away, starting with the ivory-handled tea caddy.

  The logic of this was depressing. For if there was really nothing more that he wanted to buy or acquire by any means, what was the point of continuing to work as a lawyer for the next twenty or twenty-five years? A consoling (but strangely weary-sounding) voice in Albert’s head reminded him that he enjoyed his work very much – for its own sake, for the satisfaction of turning chaos into order, muddle into transparency, expectation into fulfilment. What he earned was far from being the only important thing. But the next realisation to torment Albert, as the birds began their dawn revels outside his window, was that the vocation of a lawyer specialising in Estates and Wills amounted to nothing much more than the job of a femme de chambre, commanded to tidy out the piles of forgotten junk people kept in their attics. All he did, in the end, was move things around. (And then take away some sizeable pieces for himself.)

  He became aware, at this moment, of Berthe waking up. Hearing her stir and sigh and reach out one of her plump arms for a sip of water from her bedside cup, Albert remembered how these intimate noises used to move him, and how it had often seemed like a miracle to him that this sweet-natured and beautiful Berthe was his wife. But now, he saw, as he lay pretending to sleep, that he was indifferent to her. He was tired of the smell of her hair. He didn’t really care whether she lived or died.

  Albert dragged himself to his office, but cancelled all his appointments with clients. The thought of talking to rich people made him feel ashamed. As the afternoon came on, he decided that he couldn’t endure this town any more. It was surely the familiarity of everything in it that had brought on the unbearable sadness of his mind.

  He booked himself a wagon-lit on the overnight train to Paris a
nd, once installed on the hard little bed, hearing the wheels of the train grinding on the shining rails, he felt his spirits lift a little. ‘What I’m experiencing,’ he told himself as he lay there, ‘is just the onset of middle-aged pessimism. I’m forty-three and my stomach is too large for every single pair of my trousers. I’m feeling the anguish of one who’s become too fat for the world he’s in.’

  It was thus, as Albert drifted off to sleep, that he dreamed of how, for a few days, he would change his world. He would visit Jeanne, his favourite dancer at the Moulin Rouge. He and Jeanne would drink champagne and dance to gypsy violins and make love in a noisy and indecent way. Jeanne, who had nothing, no possessions, no apartment of her own, nothing at all except her beauty and her clothes and her meagre salary from the Moulin Rouge, would console him. She would make life seem beautiful again. Because forty-three was not old; it could be the prime of his life. Perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would have made enough money to move to Paris and set up a practice there. And in Paris, he decided, there would be no more picnicking and family outings. They killed a man, these things. They destroyed his curiosity and his desire.

  When Albert woke, as a pale sun began to shine through the train window, he became immediately aware of an odd, tickling sensation on his mouth, as though Jeanne might have been stroking it with a feather.

  He reached up to his lips and found, to his disgust, an insect crawling there. He swatted it away: a large wasp, heavy and stupid in its autumn torpor. It fell on to the red blanket which covered Albert and as he looked around for something with which to kill it, a burning pain in his mouth assailed him. The damned wasp had stung him!

  Albert leaned up on his elbow. As the pain intensified, he thought how he had been lying exactly like this at the picnic in the park, but with his head resting against Berthe, and now, alone in the wagon-lit, he began to cry out to Berthe, saying her name, gasping it out as the venom from the wasp sting – the same venom that had almost killed him as a child – entered his blood and began its lethal work. His throat constricted. His lungs began to burn and ache. He doubled over in his agony, trying to reach out for his cup of water, but knowing, as his hand scrabbled to find the cup, that water wasn’t going to save him.

  And Albert thought that this, this death by suffocation, by asphyxiation, was exactly the death he had always feared, the worst death, and he cursed it and cursed despicable Nature which had caused it.

  In torment, he hammered on the window of the wagon-lit. He tried to call out to the fields and woods and hedgerows speeding by. He tried to tell these green and indifferent things that he was too young to die. He tried to say that it was barely the autumn of his life and that on the beautiful surface of his existence, hardly any leaves had fallen.

  Nativity Story

  I had a child once. A boy called Daniel. He was just learning to crawl and make noises that sounded like words when my wife left me and took Daniel with her and I never saw either of them again. My wife packed up all the baby paraphernalia and every single one of Daniel’s toys and all his little clothes, so there was no evidence left that he’d ever been part of my life.

  I went searching in drawers and under furniture, looking for something left behind, but there was nothing left behind. When I was drunk – which I often was – I thought, well maybe I just dreamed this little Daniel? Because I’m prone to spells of weirdness. People stare at me and say: ‘Mordy, what’s going on, then?’ And sometimes I can’t go to work. Sometimes, when I wake up, the world looks so abnormally bad that I have to cower in my room.

  I’m a chef. Well, a cook. Chef’s too poncy a word for what I do. But I’m good with eggs and I know what proper chips should be like.

  I never stay in one place for long. It’s like I’m afraid I’ll look up from the fryer one day and see my ex-wife and my son eating food that I’ve made and be filled with a sadness I won’t be able to bear. So I keep moving on. On and on.

  And more and more I keep away from towns, choose places way out in the countryside: motels, guest houses and B-and-Bs. If you work in these places, especially out of season, you can often get a room in them, the smallest, cheapest room they’ve got, but the room’s part of the deal and then at least you can sleep OK and go to work clean and smelling of shower gel. And I’ve got no possessions. Not as such. A few clothes, a little tobacco tin, a torch. Oh, and an oyster shell. I did a stint at an oyster bar round about the time when Daniel was born and one oyster I opened had such a fantastic pearly shine inside it that I took it home and scrubbed it and stored it away, wrapped in a rag. I thought I’d give it to Daniel when he was older. I imagined myself showing him the shiny shell and saying something pitiful like: ‘There aren’t that many beautiful things left in the world, mate, but this is one of them.’

  When last winter began, I found a job in a big old rundown hotel that was empty most of the week but on Saturdays and Sundays hosted ‘Dance-and-Dream’ weekends for elderly people. A ‘Dance-and-Dream’ weekend was one in which you played bingo or roulette all day and dreamed about the fortune you could win, and then in the evenings danced to a three-piece band who played rumbas and tangos and old embarrassing songs. The average age of the Dance-and-Dreamers was seventy-nine.

  In the kitchen, we made steak pies and sherry trifle. The steak had to be soft and tender, and the trifle extra sweet. Late at night, just as the kitchen was closing, orders would come down for hot chocolate and malted milk.

  During the week, I occupied quite a nice room with two beds in it and coffee-making facilities and a shower of my own. But the Dance-and-Dream weekends caught on so well that the bookings increased fivefold and the hotel manager had to take me aside and say: ‘Mordy, you don’t mind roughing it, do you, just for the two nights of the D-and-D? We’ll make it up to you in tips.’

  I was taken down to an enormous room in the hotel basement, which smelled damp and weird, like some breathing creature had once lived there, chomping on the green moss of the snooker table. There were big leather sofas round the walls, where the snooker players once sprawled around and smoked, and the manager said I could sleep on one of these and wash myself in the rusty little toilet the players used. It was cold down there and the floor was damp in places, but I said it would do. Since Daniel left, I can’t bring myself to care that much about where I am or on what surface my body has to lie.

  On the Saturday of this particular D-and-D weekend, the weather had been misty and mild, but on the Sunday, during bingo and while we were simmering the steak and opening cans of peaches for the trifle, you could feel the outside temperature suddenly drop.

  I opened the pantry door and looked out on to the pitch-dark yard. An amazing frost had crept up on everything in sight, hard and glittery as sugar. I called over the other chef, whose name was Rinaldo, and we stood together breathing the frozen air and looking up at the stars, which seemed incredibly near and low, like they were crowding out of the cold universe to get some warmth from us. ‘Phew, lucky our Dancy Dreamers not goin’ any place in their cars!’ said Rinaldo. ‘Very lucky tonight.’

  I got to bed on my leather sofa about one o’clock. It was really cold in the basement and my blankets were itchy and my pillow made a crunching noise every time I moved my head, like it was filled with barley husks.

  I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I got out my oyster shell, to see if it had kept its shine, and this staring at my shell seemed to calm me. I was just on the brink of sleep when I heard voices on the basement stairs.

  The overhead light snapped on and I saw the manager at the door in his dressing gown and with him was a young couple. The girl was whimpering and being comforted by the bloke, who was pale and thin with a nerdy kind of beard. The manager was carrying an armful of blankets and pillows. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is the best I can do for you. At weekends we’re absolutely chock-a-block full.’ Then he said: ‘Oh, Mordy, sorry. I’d forgotten you were down here. These poor people’s car went off the road. They’re no
t hurt, but they’re dreadfully cold and tired. Can you help them get comfortable?’

  I put my shell away. The woman stared at me in confusion. She thought she’d be shown into a proper room with a shower and a double bed with clean white sheets, and now she found herself in an old snooker den with a man who smelled of cooking oil. And I wasn’t even wearing proper clothes, only a string vest and a pair of boxer shorts.

  I tried to reassure the couple that I wasn’t drunk or weird – just a chef who had no family. I showed them the rusty toilet and helped the guy pull two sofas together and lay out the blankets and the scratchy pillows while the girl went to wash away her tears of cold and fright. The guy’s name was Joe and he had a quiet voice. In this soft little voice of his, he told me he worked as a kitchen fitter.

  The girl wouldn’t speak to me or look at me. She just kept her coat wrapped round her and got under the blankets and turned her face away. Joe whispered to me: ‘Nothing personal, mate. She’s just a bit traumatised by what happened with the car. She’ll be OK in the morning. And I’m sorry we’ve interrupted your night.’

  We put out the light and tried to go to sleep. I could hear Joe talking softly to the girl and I couldn’t help thinking about the days when I’d had a wife to talk to in the middle of a freezing night. I could remember the smell of her hair and the way she breathed so silently you couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.

  I don’t know what time it was when I woke up.

  The light was on. The guy Joe was bending over the girl, who was lying on her back and gasping. There was a weird smell in the air and parts of the floor were wet.