The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

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 her 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