Already the image of Thorpe has started to crowd into my head, obliterating everything else, the certain knowledge of Thorpe’s milky, beautiful back crisscrossed by welts. Something leaps on my stomach and starts to purr. I reach out to clasp Tuxedo, but he has other ideas, probably to do with getting fed, and leaps back off. I throw aside the covers and hurry down the hall to the remembered bathroom, which seems to have been installed in the house before Thorpe himself. The water’s icy, and the smell of rust reminds me of blood. Through the walls comes the distant noise of voices, the clatter of plates. I wash swiftly, dress swiftly, throw on my coat for good measure, and head downstairs in the direction of these signs of humanity.
The funny thing about Margaret, she’s not all that interested in Nassau, in the Windsors, the glamour. Last night, on the train, I explained how we met, Thorpe and I, and how I worked for Metropolitan and went to parties for a living, and her face took on this distant expression, and her mouth curved with something that, if it wasn’t quite disapproval, was certainly disdain. Fine, then. Margaret Thorpe doesn’t give a damn about parties and duchesses. I might have guessed.
The only thing that moves her is Thorpe. When I told her how he was attacked on the docks one night, her eyes turned glossy and she reached for her cigarettes, just as she’s doing now, sitting at the kitchen table at Dunnock Lodge with a plate of eggs—real ones—and a cup of tea before her. At the giant, ancient range, a woman fusses about, skinny and silvery. It’s a moment before I realize she’s the same woman who drove the Morris last night. For one thing, she’s speaking. Scolding Margaret about not giving more warning.
“Annie, there’s a war on,” she says. “I can’t just— Oh, there you are, Lulu. I was beginning to think you’d sleep all morning.”
Annie whirls from the stovetop to face me, wiping her hands on her apron. Her round eyes convey awe, in much the same way the Red Cross ladies regard the Duchess of Windsor, I guess.
“Mrs. Thorpe. Would you—may I offer you breakfast?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any coffee?”
A panicked expression overtakes Annie’s face. I step forward and pull back a chair from the table, where a place is already set for me, plate and cup and saucer (somewhat the worse for chips) and cutlery. “Never mind. Tea’s just fine, thank you.”
“We’ve got eggs,” she says proudly. “Toast.”
I’m about to say Just toast, but then I recall I ought to be eating better, ought to be filling myself with good, wholesome food. I lay my napkin on my lap and smile at her. “Thank you, Annie. Sunny-side up, if you don’t mind.”
Across the table, Margaret lifts the cigarettes and her eyebrows. I shake my head. She shrugs and continues to smoke, continues to nudge her eggs around the plate. “We used to have our breakfast right here, Benedict and I, when we were little,” she says. “Didn’t we, Annie? You made us boiled eggs and toast soldiers. There was so much butter, then. He used to sit right there, where you’re sitting. I remember the sun coming through the window to shine on that hair of his.”
“Lit up the whole kitchen, it did. When it was sunny, of course.”
“Which wasn’t often.” Margaret stubs out her cigarette and lights another. Her mouth is pale, she isn’t wearing lipstick. There’s a stirring in the region of her lap, and she lowers her hand to stroke some object I presume is Tuxedo. Settles back an inch or two and stares at Annie. “He was the sweetest boy, you know. After Mummy died, Granny and her sister moved in to take care of us. Of course, the war was still on, and they’re the sort of thrifty Scots who light the fires only when the temperature gets below freezing. If we complained about the cold, they would tell us to put on a jumper and run around the halls. I don’t think I even knew what it was to be warm until Johann started inviting us down to Germany during the summers.” She pauses to drag on her cigarette. “But Benedict, you know, he never would complain, not the least noise.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Margaret flicks the ash from her cigarette into a nearby ashtray. “I remember he was such an awfully big baby, but then he got so skinny after Mummy died. Whenever he got sick, I thought he was finished. But they’re stronger than they look, you know. Babies.”
“Are they? Or just him?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? He’s the only baby I’ve ever properly encountered. Annie? More tea, if you don’t mind.”
Annie carries over a fresh pot, which she pours first for me and then for Margaret. As she lifts the spout and turns away, she mutters, “More tea and less cigarettes, if you ask me.”
“But nobody did ask you, Annie,” says Margaret, so crisp.
I look for the sugar and can’t find any. Instead, there’s a pot of honey. I pour in the milk, stir in the honey. “Maybe he had to be strong. Maybe it’s just bred into him, from the beginning. Maybe it’s a good thing the house was so cold.”
“We’d like to think so, wouldn’t we? We’d like to think he can endure it. The alternative’s too awful to contemplate.”
Annie brings me a pair of eggs, cooked together so that the yolks are like a pair of yellow eyes regarding me from a white face. Also brown toast with butter.
“Why does Mrs. Thorpe get two eggs, Annie?” Margaret asks. “And all that butter on her toast, it’s obscene.”
For an instant, Annie meets my gaze. “No reason,” she says softly, and returns to the range. Margaret glances at the clock on the opposite wall and drums her fingers against the saucer. A pair of black ears pops up from her lap. An inquisitive feline face, interested in the egg that remains on Margaret’s plate.
“Do hurry,” she says. “I’d like to take a walk before it starts to rain. Oh, damn. Never mind. It’s already started. How I hate the weather here.”
“I don’t see how you can live in London and complain about the weather anywhere else.”
“Because it can’t make up its mind, that’s why. First one thing and then another.”
Annie, washing dishes at the sink, turns her head over her shoulder. “Mackintoshes are in the boot room, Miss Margaret.”
Margaret heaves a sigh, stubs out her cigarette, gathers the cat, and rises from the table. I stare out the window and listen to the sound of her footsteps on the floorboards. A drizzle’s begun to patter, sure enough. When the footsteps disappear, I turn to Annie.
“Don’t say a word to her, do you hear me?”
She shuts off the faucet and faces me. “You can’t hide it much longer, mind.”
“Oh? And what do you know about it?”
“Because Mrs. Thorpe used to look the same way when she was breeding, that’s why.” She clasps her hands together. “It’s true, then? A wee babe? Dear little Benedict’s sweet child?”
“Why, didn’t you know for certain?”
“Oh, aye, you can never be sure, Mrs. Thorpe, not until the lady says so herself.”
I smacked my forehead. “It’s a secret. Remember that.”
“What’s a secret?”
Margaret stands in the doorway, arms full of raincoats, face all stricken. Her hair’s coming loose from the knot at her neck. She looks from me to Annie and back again, and her gaze slides downward, to my breasts, lower still. The raincoats slide to the floor. Tuxedo, galloping past her legs, makes a heroic last-second leap.
“Bloody hell. When did that happen?”
“July,” I say. “The night Oakes was murdered.”
Lulu
July 1943
(The Bahamas)
Every morning, the Liberators took off from Oakes Field and flew in formation over the ocean, like a flock of ungainly birds. It was all part of their training, and it made a terrible noise. I used to sit at my desk and grit my teeth against the immense, subterranean racket as each airplane lumbered down the runway and out to sea, four Rolls Royce engines churning in unison to drown out the ancient clackety-clack of my Remington typewriter.
Sometimes I counted them as they roared above the rooftop. Mor
e often I leaned forward and concentrated ferociously on the words before me, because mistakes were made when you weren’t paying attention, and you couldn’t afford mistakes in a gossip column, believe me. One misplaced letter or, God forbid, number might cause the guilty to go free or the innocent tossed in the slammer, metaphorically speaking. Or worse, might bring the wrath of Wallis upon your head. So I concentrated on the typing and blocked out not just the noise of the Liberators but the thought of them. Their existence altogether. It was better that way, right?
Every so often, I rose and went to check on the man sleeping in my bed. A racket like that, surely it would wake him. But poor Thorpe was so exhausted, he didn’t even flinch. So I went back to work while the sun climbed carefully above the palmettos of Hog Island. I was due for the morning shift at the duchess’s canteen at eight o’clock sharp, and the “Lady of Nassau” column was due in the post at high noon, and something had to give. My hours of rest, apparently.
I finished the column with just enough time to spare. In the bedroom, Thorpe still lay in his torpor. I shrugged off my dressing gown, sank back down on the damp sheets and curled myself around him once more. He was here, that was all. Had come to life in my bedroom in the middle of the night, still wet from a bath—I smelled the soap on him—and from the squall that had drenched him on the way across the harbor. He’d stopped on Hog Island only long enough to drop off his kit and clean up, he said, and then he had come to me, to Lulu, his Lulu, at last, my God, had spent himself in less than a minute and dropped senseless on my pillow. Just like that. Where he’d slept the night before, I had no idea. Where he’d slept the previous twelve nights, I had even less idea. He was here, that was all. His heart still thudded away, thank God. A snore rasped in his nose. He was alive. I gathered him in my arms and listened to the sounds of his sleep, which—unlike the noise of the airplanes outside—belonged to me, and only to me.
That was all.
I was just drifting off again when he woke. For an instant, his body went rigid, and then he recognized the room, the bed, the whore at his back. I felt his relief like a downpour. He turned in my arms and apologized.
“For what?”
“For last night.”
“Last night? That was nothing. Makes a change from the everyday.” I ran my hand over his hair, which was short and bristling, God knew why. The smell of his soap, how I’d missed it. This humid little intimacy of tangling in bed together at dawn.
“Everyday, eh?” he said.
“Everyday. It’s how most people live, you know, one day the same as the other. Sleeping in the same bed with the same woman, night after night. Some find it a little dull, I guess.”
How that wide, red mouth grinned at me. I still remember that smile, the shape and size of it. He rolled me on my back, kissed me on the lips and throat and breasts. “I believe we can do better than that, my love,” he said. And you know how it is. The sunshine, the smell of the sea through your window, your lover returned to you after an absence. A lover’s body you know as your own, each bone, each sinew, each twitch of muscle, each hair, each flavor, each word before he says it, each thought. When the end approached, I threw back my head and came like the Southern Pacific, and he arched his back and collided head on, an awful crash. Together we shuddered and steamed. The quiet, pale room. The damp sheets, the fan that whirred above us.
Eventually the shuddering slowed to a tremble, a stillness. We lay stomach to stomach while the light gathered above our heads. Still I trusted him. He lifted himself on his elbows and pulled out slowly. Shimmied off the rubber and said he’d be right back, don’t go anywhere. When he returned, I stood at the French door to the patio, staring out to sea, smoking a cigarette. He put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head.
“Why, what’s the matter?” I said.
He took some time, while the surf tumbled in under the sunrise.
“I’ve been recalled back to London,” he said.
Now, I don’t know why everything caught up with me at that particular moment. I hadn’t shed a single tear, not one, throughout the length of Thorpe’s most recent absence. I was used to them, after all. Sometimes he went away for a week, sometimes a couple of weeks. Sometimes he would return for a day or two, sometimes for a week or two, and once—dear, blissful February—he stuck around for almost an entire month. And I never knew which it was. He never gave me the slightest clue. He turned up and disappeared without prior notice. Well, he couldn’t exactly emblazon his intentions in the sky, could he? So I’d learned to take him as I found him, each episode of his company a surprise, each kiss, each clandestine bender at Shangri-La, each stolen night at my bungalow, careful always to make sure we never gave ourselves away at a party, greeted each other coolly, flirted with others, left separately, raced to Cable Beach where Thorpe waited for me under one of the enormous, mature sea grape trees that brushed the patio. He had resumed his cigarettes, maybe because of the additional strain of hiding a mistress from the world, and I always saw the curl of smoke first, then his hair and his skin in the moonlight. Sometimes, when the party had proved especially unbearable, the tension between us too excruciating, we got no farther than the trunk of that tree for quite some time, and I still remember the scratch of sea grape bark on my spine with a certain sadistic pleasure.
Then he would vanish, and I tried not to think of him at all. I plunged myself into the socio-charitable whirl of Nassau. When Freddie and Nancy de Marigny returned from their honeymoon, such as it was—she’d had a terrible case of typhoid when they got to Mexico, followed by trench mouth, innumerable dental surgeries, just awful—I gave them a dinner party at my bungalow that went off quite well, I thought, under the circumstances. On Christmas Eve, we opened the duchess’s canteen at Fred Sigrist’s old Bahamian Club with a grand party chock-full of handsome young servicemen, and I’d been working shifts there most mornings since. So you see how terribly busy I was, how unable to spare even a moment to indulge in self-pity. The appearance of these tears shocked me. What was it about Thorpe? I never cried anywhere except with him.
I spun to face him. “What did you say?”
His face was heavy with remorse. “I’ve been called back to London.”
“And you agreed?”
“Don’t, Lulu,” he said. “You know I haven’t got any say in this.”
“I know!” I shoved away the tears with the back of my hand. “Don’t you think I know? But you don’t know what it’s like, to be left behind. Not a word. Just helpless. You might be in Timbuktu or dead, and I’d never know. Nobody knows about us, except Veryl. Your family’s never heard of me, have they? Have they?”
He answered with a frown. I threw up my hands.
“You see? Where do I go if you never come back? Whom do I turn to? I’m nobody to you, as far as anyone else is concerned.”
Thorpe released me and sat on the edge of the bed. He stared at me from what I called his thinking face, which was really no expression at all, just this blankness, topped by a furrowed brow. He’d worn it often during the past year, usually right after making love. I suppose there’s something about fornication that gets you thinking. His eyes, catching the yellow sunlight, were nearly green.
I stepped to the chest of drawers and stubbed out my cigarette.
“When the war’s over,” he began.
“When the war’s over you’ll be dead, Thorpe, and I’ll be alone, or worse, I’ll be pregnant with some baby who has no father to speak of, no family to speak of.” I sat down and gathered the pillow in my lap. “And with my luck, he’ll have your goddamned hair!”
Thorpe rose from the bed and pulled his trousers from the floor. “Now, hang on a moment, darling. I thought you liked my hair.”
I threw the pillow. He dodged it and reached for his shirt.
“Where the devil do you think you’re going?” I yelled.
“Out, of course. Veryl should be swinging through the door any second.”
“Ve
ryl already knows about us, you bastard.”
“Keep your voice down. The neighbors will hear.”
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what the neighbors hear!”
He leaned over the bed and kissed my forehead. “I’ll come back, my beauty.”
“You always say that.”
“And I always do. Eventually.”
An instant later, I was staring at the door. Which was not at all how I’d imagined this scene would end.
Years later, in her autobiography, the former Mrs. Wallis Simpson calculated—among other things—some thirty thousand eggs personally fried by her bony, capable hands in the kitchen of the United Services Canteen of Nassau, but I dispute those numbers. For one thing, she wasn’t exactly there every day. For another, the woman can’t count up much else except pieces of eight.
Still, she did her share. Duty called. She took Sigrist’s shabby old club and refurbished those rooms into a canteen de luxe. And I can attest she cooked up eggs and bacon for hundreds of these starstruck young men, dazzled them all with her famous charm, organized supper dances and concerts and what have you, anything you could imagine to keep up morale and keep servicemen writing home in rapture about how the Duchess of Windsor herself served them eggs by the plateful, any which way you wanted them.
And when we opened the place last Christmas! Oh, that was a party, all right. I’d had some last-minute appointment with the duchess, I don’t remember what, and wound up driving to the joint in the Windsors’ own limousine with the Union Jack flags. If only the folks in Bakersfield could’ve seen me. The canteen was already jumping, buzzing with Red Cross ladies in a spirit of tremendous female cooperation, laced with Christmas cheer. Standing in a disorderly queue outside, held back by a tolerant police officer of the white-glove variety, milled our first customers in their best dress uniforms. The duke and duchess stopped to wave—slow, decorous waving like they were screwing in a pair of light bulbs. Pop, flash went the cameras. Your Highness, Your Highness went the newspapermen, while Miss Drewes and I slipped right up the front steps and into the duchess’s canteen de luxe. Someone tossed me an apron and a gin fizz. We took about a million orders, and afterward Miss Drewes and I handed out presents from beneath the tree, since the duke and duchess had left shortly after their official performance.
The Golden Hour Page 31
