The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  I smiled. “Hasn’t she got a perfectly good mother?”

  “Sure, she does. But girls that age.” He shook his head, and that was all, because we had reached the goldfish pond and the duchess and the duke, laughing warmly with a short, perspiring man who had materialized from nowhere. The duchess’s head turned in my direction. She wore a dress of pale blue silk and an expression of brief, unguarded discontent, and a shock ran down my limbs because I thought perhaps someone had made a terrible mistake—God knew what, maybe that invitation hadn’t been meant for me after all. But the duchess’s frown smoothed away as I reached her. Oh, the duchess. It’s a funny thing, when you encounter a face like that, a face you’ve seen frozen in a hundred two-dimensional photographs, and here it is before you, looking at you, alive. Those pungent blue eyes, that coronet of dark hair. That skin stretched over her cheeks and jaw, now endowed with breadth and depth and texture. Around her neck, a staggering circle of diamonds and rubies set off the blue of her eyes and her dress. How patriotic of her. She took my hand between two of hers and shook it firmly.

  “My dear Mrs. Randolph! And Sir Harry. I see you’ve met our new recruit.”

  “Recruit?” he demanded.

  “The Red Cross. Mrs. Randolph’s volunteered her services.”

  “The Red Cross? What the devil for? You don’t strike me as a Red Cross kind of gal.”

  “Just doing my bit,” I said.

  “But you’re American. You’ve got no part in this damned war.”

  “Now, Sir Harry,” said the duchess, “the Red Cross has nothing to do with taking sides. We are a humanitarian organization.”

  Well, Oakes rolled his eyes at this—as well he might—and stumped a few paces to the right, where he greeted the duke with about as much ceremony as he’d greeted the duke’s wife. Stuck his hand out and grunted something. The duchess and I exchanged weary little smiles, almost intimate. A fellow like that can bind two females instantly. A pair of diamond and ruby earrings clung to her earlobes, matching the necklace. I thought she glanced down to assess the imitation pearls around my collar, but maybe that was my imagination.

  “I’m so terribly sorry to be late,” I said. “I didn’t realize about the entrance.”

  “Not at all. I haven’t anyone left to greet, thank goodness, so we can get to know each other a bit.” She slipped her arm around mine. She smelled of face powder and perfume, and her arm was like her hand, bony and purposeful. “Don’t you look charming in that dress.”

  I might have stuttered, so great was my amazement. “Why—well—this old thing?”

  “Of course, you’ve got the kind of figure that suits any dress, you lucky duck. Now, stick with me. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  “Meet me? I can’t imagine whom.”

  She laughed. “David! David!”

  Her husband stood a few feet away, dressed in a pale suit, speaking to the other man and to Oakes, who had turned toward them both. The duke’s head snapped in her direction. For an instant, his eyes bugged in a terrified way. The lanterns poured gold on the duke’s waving hair, his shocked, twitching, haggard face. Next to him, Oakes and the other fellow more or less disappeared—not physically, of course, but rendered invisible by the halo of glamour. “Yes, dear?” the duke asked, pitched anxiously toward his wife, not registering my presence in the slightest degree.

  “David, it’s Mrs. Randolph at last.”

  “Mrs. Randolph?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Randolph. You remember, don’t you?” She grasped my elbow. “Mrs. Randolph, David. The girl I’ve been speaking about.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes. Of course.” He held out his hand to me, and although he’d turned in my direction and fixed his gaze politely on my face, I thought his eyes were unfocused, that he wasn’t really looking at me. Not past me, mind you, the way some people do, searching out someone of greater interest, but the opposite direction. Inward, toward himself. “Duke of Windsor,” he said, pronouncing the word duke like an American, dook.

  I made a slight curtsy. “Your Royal Highness. Leonora Randolph. I’m honored to—”

  “Charmed, of course.” He dropped my hand—he had a grip that wasn’t so much limp as motionless, without life—and turned to the duchess. “Have you seen Thorpe about?”

  “Not since he arrived.”

  “Oh, damn.” The duke cast his nervous eyes about the palms and the shadows. “Neither have I.”

  “Is something the matter?” she asked, but the duke was already bolting off. I suppose I stared after him, at least until his bright figure disappeared into the tangle of darker ones. I remember a feeling of disbelief—had I, or had I not, just met the former king of England, and did it matter if he hadn’t actually perceived my existence?—and then the tug of the duchess’s hand on my elbow.

  “Mrs. Randolph, do you know Mr. Christie?” she said.

  “I’m afraid not.” I held out my hand to the other man, who was plain and balding, thick-necked, green-eyed. His temples gleamed with perspiration. He was shorter even than Oakes, and next to Sir Harry’s bull shoulders, looked as slight as a lamb. “Leonora Randolph,” I said.

  The man took my hand and smiled. “Harold Christie. Pleasure.”

  His palm was damp. I extracted my fingers and said the pleasure was all mine. “I’ve already heard so many interesting things about you, Mr. Christie.”

  “Ah.” He cast a glance to the duchess—nervous or modest, I couldn’t tell. “I hope—I hope—good things.”

  “Aren’t you practically a one-man Bahamas development office? So they tell me.”

  “Oh, it’s quite true,” said the duchess. “Mr. Christie’s done so much to improve the colony.”

  Back and forth glanced Mr. Christie. “That’s too kind. I love the Bahamas, that’s all. Only doing what I can for them.”

  “How awfully good of you,” I said.

  “Turns a nice penny, too, from time to time,” said Oakes. “Isn’t that right, Christie? Turned a few of those pennies on my account.”

  “From which your account profited considerably, I believe.”

  “Don’t stop you borrowing a fortune from me, either. Eh, Christie? That Lyford Cay scheme of yours?”

  “You’ll be begging me for a plot of your own there, when it’s finished.”

  Oakes turned to me. “Wasteland. Wasteland all the way on the other end of the island, miles from town. If I could pull my money out of that one, I would. I must’ve been drunk when you asked me, Christie.”

  Christie smiled. “Now, old fellow, I’m sure the ladies don’t wish to listen to our business talk.”

  “On the contrary—”

  “Tell me, what brings you here to our little paradise, Mrs. Randolph? Our oasis from this mad world? I certainly hope you mean to make a lengthy visit.”

  “Careful,” said Oakes. “He’ll ply you with booze and get you investing in his damned schemes.”

  As coincidence would have it, a waiter approached us right that second, bearing a tray on which a few champagne coupes glistened in the light of the lanterns. I reached out and snatched one by the stem. “How opulent. I haven’t seen champagne since I left New York. Poor old France and all.”

  “We contrived to pack along a few bottles, when we left Paris in such a hurry,” said the duchess, plucking a stem, smiling softly, so I couldn’t help imagining a crew of stevedores unloading crate after crate at Prince George’s wharf, while a flush-faced supervisor begged them to take care.

  I raised my glass. “We’re ever so grateful you found the time.”

  Naturally, the champagne was sublime. I knew precious little about wine, but I knew that the Windsors ate and drank and wore only the best, and I imagined, if they smuggled champagne out of France as the Germans closed in, the champagne would be the finest vintage fizz that credit could buy.

  “To victory,” said Mr. Christie. “May it arrive swiftly.”

  I remember thinking, as I clicked my glass against that of Harold
Christie, that he didn’t seem like much of a warrior.

  By the time the duke reappeared, I’d almost forgotten he existed to begin with. You know how it is during a party, how the minutes turn liquid and run into each other, how the words and faces form a separate universe in which you rotate endlessly on your axis, North Pole and South Pole tilted just so. Afterward, you never can remember the exact chronology, who said what, where and when it all occurred. And how.

  Up he popped, anyway, just as the duchess was introducing me to two of her guests, a straw-haired mother and her teenage daughter. He jumped midsentence in front of the duchess’s attention, the way a tennis player lunges for a ball, slicing neatly between us. A thick piece of hair had fallen from the shield atop his head. He pushed it back and said, “Darling, I can’t seem to find him!”

  “Who?”

  “Thorpe, darling. Thorpe.”

  “Yes? Where is he?”

  “That’s the trouble. I’ve looked all over.”

  “Then I suppose we’ll just have to start things off without him,” said the duchess. “David, darling, will you please get everyone’s attention?”

  David—I beg your pardon, the Duke of Windsor—cast about for something or other, his long-abandoned cocktail glass perhaps, because he wound up snatching my champagne coupe and striking it forcefully with the manicured nail of his index finger. When that produced no discernible sound, he shoved it back to me and clapped his hands. “Good evening!” he called. “Good evening, all!”

  At the sound of his voice, the din of voices went absolutely silent. The strangest thing, that instant silence, as if everybody had been waiting for this signal, even the birds, as if nothing else in the world held the slightest interest. Several dozen faces turned toward us, none of them quite sober. The duke smiled, and what a dazzling smile it was. Red-lipped and toothsome. He’d practiced it all his life.

  “Good evening, my dear friends. We’re so—ah, my wife and I, we’re delighted to have so many of you gathered here tonight in our humble abode”—here he paused expertly for a ripple of chuckles—“in service of, really, an absolutely tremendous cause. I am just absolutely speechless with pride at all the great work my wife has done as president of the Red Cross chapter here in the Bahamas, which we couldn’t possibly accomplish without your generous support. But my wife, I believe, has more to tell you about all that. Darling? Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor.”

  Nobody chuckled, nobody gave the least sign of knowing that the Duchess of Windsor was not, in fact, royal: by express decree of those who were. Certainly not Wallis herself. She painted on a thin, beautiful smile and stepped to her husband’s side. For the first time, I noticed that she wore a jeweled brooch pinned to her breast, the same brooch as in the photograph in Life magazine, and what do you know? It was a flamingo. She waved her ring-crusted hand. “Hello, everybody!”

  Everybody murmured Hello!

  “As David said. Thank you all for gathering here with us tonight. In a few minutes I’ll be coming round, cap outstretched, along with—I hope, anyway—someone who seems to have gone . . . oh, there he is!” Her face transformed, so that I realized she hadn’t really been smiling before, and now she was. She looked over my right shoulder, where a cluster of palms bordered the rock garden. “Mr. Thorpe! Where have you been hiding? Mr. Benedict Thorpe, ladies and gentlemen, a dear friend of mine and David’s, a scientist of international repute and a true patriot of our British Empire.”

  She began to clap, and the crowd, shifting and straining to catch a glimpse of this true British patriot, burst into applause. Though I kept my gaze trained on the duchess—what a show she was, after all—I clapped along. I mean, it would have been rude otherwise, wouldn’t it? A scientist of international repute. I confess, I wasn’t that interested in science, at the time, but I could appreciate the affinity in others. Science was the future, after all. Everybody said so.

  “Mr. Thorpe—hello, everybody!—Mr. Thorpe’s agreed to help me collect donations for the Red Cross tonight, a cause close to both our hearts, isn’t that right, Thorpe? In fact, it’s Mr. Thorpe’s own hat we’re going to pass around, so don’t be niggardly!” She paused for laughter. She still hadn’t taken her eyes from that patch of garden from which this Thorpe had emerged. I felt a stir of curiosity—or maybe even premonition, who knows—and turned my head at last to catch a glimpse. A palmetto spread its fronds between us, blocking my view. Before me, the duchess waved her hand. “Step up, Thorpus. Don’t be shy!”

  The crowd stirred, making way. I turned and stepped back with everyone else. A pair of shoulders swept past. In the slight draft of his passing, I smelled not the tang of cigarettes or cocktails or perspiration—those were endemic—but a soap of some kind, or else cologne, hair oil, whatever it was, and I believe I made a gasp of recognition. There was applause, delighted voices. The fellow stepped to the duchess’s side and swept off his hat—he wore a towering silk topper for the occasion—to reveal that hair, short, glistening, ruddy-blond, and I covered my mouth with my hand. His spectacles were just slightly crooked.

  He beamed across the crowd, left to right, and to my great relief his gaze passed right over me, though I stood in front, next to the duke. My cheeks ached, and I realized I was smiling back, even though he wasn’t looking in my direction. Thorpe, I thought. He had a name. Thorpe.

  “Right ho, chaps,” he said. “Ladies. Let’s make this quick and painless, shall we? Empty your pockets, so I don’t have to go round the room again with my pistol.”

  Before the collection party passed by, I slipped between guests and up the path toward the governor’s residence. I don’t believe I started out with any conscious intent. A breath of air, that’s what I murmured as I sidled my way through the crowd, and this was true enough. Certainly I wanted air, and once free of the smokiness and perspiration of the party, I found air in abundance. I also saw a pair of French doors standing open to the evening air, allowing a glimpse of a hallway, and not a footman in sight.

  Now, it wasn’t as if I meant any harm. I had just sipped champagne with the duchess, I even felt a stir of liking for her, a warmth I hadn’t expected. When somebody pays you compliments, pays you the favor of her attention and interest, you can’t help but think she must be a person of great taste and discernment. I meant no disrespect toward either of them, duke or duchess; or their privacy. There was only curiosity, and the desire to escape, and a certain surge of audacity that visits me from time to time, and also the possibility—duchesses could be fickle, after all—that I might never again have the opportunity to enter this building and see its rooms for myself. Which, in retrospect, is just the sort of logic that lands a girl in trouble, in love affairs as in houses that don’t belong to her.

  Thus the inevitable. Instead of soothing my lungs and returning to the party or else to my own little room at the Prince George, snug and sound, I continued down that hall, the entire width of Government House, until I arrived at the door on the opposite side. I made no hesitation whatsoever. Hesitation’s fatal, my father always told me, when he could be bothered to speak to me at all; deliberate all you like upon a course of action, but once you’ve made your decision, don’t for God’s sake waver. I laid my hand on the doorknob and opened it to find some sort of library. The duke’s own study, perhaps. There was a desk and a fireplace, hissing the last remains of a good solid fire. The furniture was up-to-date, the upholstery fresh. I felt the duchess’s taste hanging in the air, coating every surface, every detail, every Union Jack pillow, every club chair. Even in her absence, she possessed a magnificent presence.

  Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.

  I made a progress along the walls, examining each picture as one might examine the contents of an art gallery or a museum. I daresay I imagined I might discover some clue to the essential mystery of them—the Windsors, I mean—this exquisitely dressed pair of sybaritic bigots who had the power to fascinate millions, even those who weren’t the slightest b
it interested in fashion or luxury or jewelry or parties. This painting: Had the duchess chosen it for its form and its meaning or because the colors married so perfectly with the upholstery on her new sofa? I dragged my hand along the back of the sofa and made my way to the desk, orderly, untroubled by paperwork, adorned by photographs of Wallis. I had this idea—I remember it clearly—that if I opened any of the drawers in this desk, I would find them empty. I actually saw myself opening those drawers, as in a dream; I saw their emptiness. This fine, polished, beautifully proportioned desk, made of empty drawers. I curled my fingers around a brass handle. I don’t believe I meant to pull it. Even if I had, the voice would have stopped me.

  “My dear Mrs. Randolph. Are you looking for something?”

  I spun to the door—not the one leading to the main hallway, but the door on the opposite side of the room, toward the back of the house, where the duchess stood in her beautiful blue gown with the jeweled flamingo on her breast. She was smiling.

  “I—I seem to have taken a wrong turn,” I said.

  She moved forward. “It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? I had it redecorated. I had the whole place redecorated. It was a dump when we arrived.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Shabby and leaky and everything. Uninhabitable, really.”

  “You’ve done wonders. It looks just terrific.”

  The duchess paused at the corner of the desk, the opposite diagonal, and rested her fingers on the edge. “It’s not what he’s used to, of course. I did my best, but he ought to live in a palace, he ought to be doing something bigger. That’s what he’s used to. What he was raised for. Instead . . .”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had the feeling this was a test of some kind, and my answer would determine the course of my future association with the Windsors, or whether we had any association at all. Would determine the course of my existence altogether. The initial shock had passed, thank God. My face had begun to cool. I flexed my fingers, I drew in a long, steady breath and exhaled it slowly.

  “You’re both doing such a terrific job,” I said. “Your talents are wasted in a place like this.”