The Peoples King by Susan Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

Lady Furness, who was Edward's lover at the time. Shortly afterwards the Prince left for a tour of South America, but on his return in 1931, the Simpsons saw the Prince twice, at the home of Lady Furness. In January 1932 the Prince invited them to stay for the weekend at his home, Fort Belvedere, an eighteenth-century folly that was half-castle, half-house, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. By the middle of 1933, the Simpsons were regular visitors at the Fort.
    In early 1934, Thelma Furness asked Wallis to 'look after' the Prince for a while, as she wanted to go to the USA with her twin sister Gloria Vanderbilt. While Lady Furness was away (and caught up in a passionate affair with the wealthy playboy Aly Khan), Edward would call at the Simpsons' flat early in the evening, and Wallis welcomed him with cocktails. Frequently, he stayed on for dinner. 19 Everything was in exquisite taste at Bryanston Court, wrote Edward later, 'and the food, in my judgement, unrivalled in London'. There he met young British and American men of affairs, foreign diplomats and 'intelligent women'. The talk, he said, was 'witty and crackling with the new ideas that were bubbling up furiously in the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the New Deal, and Chiang Kai-shek.' 2 " When Thelma returned to Britain, she realized with a shock that she had been replaced. From now on, Wallis was Edward's chief companion, with Ernest usually in attendance too. This was the best-known threesome in London, wrote an American journalist, adding dryly that, 'They went everywhere together, and Mr Simpson's deadpan demeanour on these outings inspired the inevitable sad gags about the Importance of Being Ernest.' 21
    A woman who worked as a housemaid at Bryanston Court remembered that just before Princess Marina's wedding in the autumn of 1934, the Prince called for cocktails with Wallis and Ernest before leaving to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace. He left at about 8 p.m. and returned later and dined with Mr and Mrs Simpson. He left alone at about 9 p.m. and went to the Palace and his car returned to take Mr and Mrs Simpson to the Palace. When the Prince arrived that evening for dinner he was in full Court dress. He wore a sash across his breast and he was wearing a gold garter around his knee."
    But increasingly, the Prince and Wallis were alone together. He called upon her during the daytime, recalled the housemaid. 'Sometimes he remained for half an hour, and on other occasions he remained for an hour; they would be alone in the drawing room.' On one occasion 'he dined alone with Mrs Simpson and they both left the flat together in the Prince's car at about 10.00 p.m.' When Ernest returned from a ten-day trip abroad, 'Mrs Simpson had already gone to Fort Belvedere for the weekend ... I was with her and Miss Burke her maid went with her.' Wallis always addressed the Prince as 'Sir', she added, but on one occasion when the Prince was dining at Bryanston Court, 'I heard Mrs Simpson address the Prince as David.' 23
    One day, wrote Edward in his memoirs, Wallis 'began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps comprehend. My impression is that for a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.' 24 For Wallis, it was not until a cruise with Edward through the Mediter­ranean in the summer of 1934 on the Rosaura, that she knew that she and Edward were in love:
    Often the Prince and I found ourselves sitting alone on deck, enjoying the soft evening air, and that unspoken but shared feeling of closeness generated by the immensity of the sea and the sky. Perhaps it was during these evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love. Perhaps it was one evening strolling on the beach at Fomenter in Majorca.
    'How can a woman ever really know?' wondered Wallis in her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons. 'How can she ever really tell?' But she realized that a line had been crossed, and there