Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  He recoiled, bent over for a second, before straightening up.

  ‘Well this girl prefers a more civilized approach.’

  ‘Really? Where’s the pleasure in that?’

  Fleming adjusted his suit and shot his cuffs with a suave grin, his demeanour undented.

  ‘Another time, then.’

  At first, she was astonished at his reaction. It was as though she had turned down the offer of a cigarette, or a polite request for another cup of tea. As if his suggestion of forcible sex was entirely normal and her refusal had caused no offence. She guessed this was how men of his type operated. Maybe, to them, sex really was nothing personal. He turned and offered his arm and she took it.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you from your beauty sleep.’

  Then he laughed, as if the entire thing had been one enormous joke, and in that moment he was transformed again into the prank-playing schoolboy, straining for sophistication, and Clara couldn’t help smiling too. He smoothed his hair and lit up again as they walked, then as if struck by an afterthought he said, ‘As a matter of fact I have another proposition for you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like your propositions.’

  ‘Oh, this one’s rather brilliant actually. It occurred to me the moment I saw you sitting on that beach turning a pretty shade of brown. Ever been to a royal garden party?’

  ‘Once. My parents took me to one at Buckingham Palace. It rained, there were a lot of queues and piles of cucumber sandwiches. And I met Queen Mary.’

  She remembered the elderly Queen, as upholstered as a horsehair sofa, touring the guests, white-gloved hand extended, a servant beside her proffering an umbrella against the damp.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t mention her at this particular party. Wallis Simpson is not her greatest fan.’

  ‘Wallis Simpson? So this is the Duchess’s party?’

  ‘She’s taken to hosting little get-togethers, just local ladies. It dispels the boredom, I suppose. She’s having one of her dos tomorrow afternoon and I’m sure she’d adore to meet you. She can’t stand the English but she loves Germans and Germany. She spent some of her honeymoon there, after all. I’ll have you put on the guest list as staying at the German Embassy. It’d be awfully useful if you could get any clue as to what’s keeping them here.’

  ‘And how on earth would you get me on this list?’

  ‘One of the maids is in our pay. She’ll sort you out.’

  ‘It sounds the most unlikely plan.’

  Fleming sighed, as if her objections were as tiresome as a badly made Martini.

  ‘Look, Clara, if you’re half as intelligent as you appear, you’ll stop trying to assert your authority and agree with me. Go to this party and see if you can find out what’s keeping them from sailing.’

  ‘How will I let you know?’

  ‘There’s a dead letter box at the grave of Henry Fielding in the English Cemetery. Novelist chap. Came for a few months, hated the place, and promptly died here. It’s a stone tomb with an urn on it, looks like a soup tureen. Stick a message under the left pediment. It’s checked every couple of days. If it’s urgent, though, I noticed a clothesline outside the window of your pension. Hang a handkerchief on it.’

  ‘Must it be a handkerchief?’

  ‘Private lingo. H for help, if you see what I mean.’

  He tilted his head to one side. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t reconsider a nightcap?’

  This time she laughed and shook her head, and while he returned the smile, a melancholy swam in his eyes. Perhaps it was a knowledge that he would never find what he was searching for, neither the perfect Martini nor the perfectly compliant woman.

  ‘You didn’t tell me. Where do they live? The Duke and Duchess.’

  ‘I’ll write it down.’

  He pulled out a fountain pen and scrawled the address, then handed her both the scrap of paper and the pen itself.

  ‘As you won’t have a gun when you see Schellenberg, you should take this.’

  She held it up to the light. It was a heavy black and white enamelled fountain pen with a chic silver trim. It looked expensive but there was no maker’s mark.

  ‘Thank you. Though I’m not sure how this is going to help, unless he wants my autograph.’

  ‘It’s one of my little toys. I had it made up by some chaps in the department and it comes in very useful in emergencies. But be careful how you handle it. If you press the clip . . . here . . . it emits a large amount of tear gas. It takes a cyanide cartridge too, but I don’t use those except on really dangerous outings. Which I trust this will not be.’

  She looked down at the address.

  ‘So where is this place?’

  ‘It’s a curious spot. Place called Cascais, out beyond Estoril. The house itself belongs to Ricardo Espirito Santo Silva, a friend of the German Ambassador to Portugal, and it’s set on a rather dramatic landscape. A kind of rocky headland. The magician Aleister Crowley staged a suicide there a few years ago; pretended to throw himself off the cliff. Rather appropriate really. It’s called the Jaws of Hell.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Grandiose titles – in places as much as people – frequently fail to live up to expectations, and the spot known as the Boca do Inferno, or the Jaws of Hell, was no exception. Set on an isolated promontory jutting into the Atlantic, the local attraction was a steep gulley formed by an erosion of limestone in the cliff face where seawater trapped in a narrow cleft of rocks seethed and boiled as it searched for an escape. Sightseers climbing down a rocky ledge would peer over a railing to see the natural archway in the cavernous cliffs lashed by roaring water of deep cobalt blue. The sight was impressive, and in the swell of a westerly gale even spectacular, but infinitely less fearsome than the Reichenbach Falls Clara had seen on a recent visit to Switzerland, and far from being hellish, the ozone-rich air engendered a bracing vitality. Watching the water frustrated by its rocky trap into a fine arching spray, people came away awed by the energy of Nature. When Clara gazed down into the raging foam, however, it was a different kind of trap she was pondering.

  Lieutenant Fleming had been nonchalantly confident that he could secure her entrance to the Duchess’s tea party, but what would happen if the maid in question had not turned up for work that day, or she had not succeeded in adding Clara’s name to the guest list? And even if she got through the door, how likely was it that the Duchess would welcome a total stranger taking tea with her, let alone confide just what issue was preventing the royal couple making an urgent escape from the continent? If the royal couple distrusted her, no doubt there were plenty of both Portuguese and German officers on hand who could be summoned. It took some time, the breeze whipping her hair into her face, before she was able to summon the resolve to go through with Fleming’s plan. Eventually, she fortified herself with a deep breath of the bracing air, clambered back up the rocky steps and turned inland towards the last house along the isolated coast.

  The rambling, rose pink stucco villa, with gabled roof and colonnade, looked precisely what it was: the comfortable country refuge of a wealthy local family. In common with much of the architecture in Lisbon there was a gimcrack quality to its roughly painted walls, stippled with pebbledash, and the faded, fraying awning that shaded the terrace. Nothing about the place suggested that it was, at that moment, serving as the last sanctuary in Europe for an exiled British king and his American wife.

  Clara’s version of garden party attire was the sprigged rose-print dress that she had bought the day before and white leather T-bar shoes, all finished off with her glorious Elizabeth Arden lipstick. Smoothing her hair with a diamanté clip and replacing her new straw panama, she pushed open the high black gates to see three Cairn terriers chasing each other in joyous abandon across a parched lawn. The garden was bordered by umbrella pines and monkey puzzle trees and decorated at its centre by a circle of scrubby rose bushes and a stone fountain. In front of the house, in the shade of lemon trees, cane chairs were set out alongside tables dr
aped in white linen and a group of svelte ladies in tea dresses and sunglasses were already established, sipping punch. Fluent Portuguese and heavily accented English clashed in the air, surmounted by a deep Baltimore drawl which came floating imperiously across the rose bushes.

  ‘Oh, it’s a pathetic little job in a ghastly backwater. We feel like Napoleon being exiled to St Helena.’

  The speaker was standing on the terrace next to her husband, the pair of them dapper as matching china figurines: the ex-King of England and his wife, Wallis Simpson.

  The Duke was wearing a well-cut white linen summer suit and a red tie in a Windsor knot. His eyes were pouched with shadow and he had a cigarette on the go. Beside him the Duchess held herself very straight, as if a steel bar ran up her spine, with the cold, ivory composure of a chess piece. The same rigour could be observed in the parting of her hair, blue-black as a bird’s wing, and the severe fitting of her diaphanous blue spotted tea dress, cinched at the waist with a crimson leather belt, and falling in filmy pleats below her knee. The Duchess was not quite perfect – the angle of her jaw was too wide and her lips too thin – but she had a bold elegance that seemed to defy suggestions that she was not as beautiful as the clothes she wore. Something about her porcelain complexion alongside the Duke’s bleached linen figure brought back to Clara a memory of a tomb she had once seen in a church in Oxfordshire; a fourteenth-century knight and his wife carved in smooth alabaster and exquisitely detailed, down to the wisps of hair, the coils of chainmail, and the fur of the small dog crouched beneath the lady’s feet. A petrified pairing, frozen in stone. United in eternity.

  ‘Good afternoon! And you are?’

  Wallis detached herself and approached, extending a hand as thin as a bunch of twigs threaded with veins and garnished with an enormous engagement ring. A large flower was pinned to her lapel, made entirely from sapphires, with an emerald stalk and diamonds at its heart. Her smile was wide, but her eyes were as hard and as crystalline as the jewels she wore.

  ‘Fräulein Clara Vine,’ Clara replied, adding for good measure, ‘Your Royal Highness.’ If Wallis desired that title so dearly, who was Clara to deny her?

  ‘Ah yes. Have you come far?’

  ‘The German Embassy,’ replied Clara smoothly,

  A maid approached with a tray of Pimm’s and Clara selected a tumbler decorated with a sprig of mint. The maid had a blank, greasy face with an impassive expression and Clara wondered if this was the woman in British pay who had so obligingly tampered with the guest list.

  ‘We’ve met once before, in fact. At Carinhall, when you visited the Goerings.’

  The Windsors’ visit to Goering’s baronial home had been a highlight of the Berlin section of their honeymoon tour in 1937. Luftwaffe officers and Nazi Party elite had turned out in force for a candlelit dinner served by waiters in silken breeches and girls whose cleavage was barely restrained by ruffles of dirndled lace. The hall was hung with hunting trophies and the air thick with excitable gossip. While Clara had not actually been introduced to the royal couple, she felt sure the Duchess would not remember a detail like that and she was right. Wallis Simpson’s eyes lit up like a child reminded of Christmas.

  ‘Carinhall! I dream of Carinhall! The gymnasium! That massage machine! All that glorious art. It brings back such happy memories.’

  Excitedly she wheeled round to her husband.

  ‘David! Fräulein Vine here is a friend of the Goerings! Oh, do give them our love when you see them! If I could just go back to that time . . .’

  The Duke of Windsor came over, a bobbing tide of Cairn terriers at his feet. Close up his petulant mouth, pert nose and diminutive stature gave him the boyish air of a Peter Pan who has landed in an uncomfortably adult predicament but is unable to fly away.

  ‘Very good to meet you, Fräulein Vine.’

  Clara gambled on a curtsey. She didn’t want to emphasize her English origins, but she guessed that in this particular royal garden party, with its scrubby grass and assorted foreign strangers, any form of deference would be welcome.

  ‘Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘Awfully good English,’ he observed. His eyes were as yellow and bloodshot as oysters in Tabasco.

  ‘My father is English.’

  This revelation aroused almost no reaction in the Duke. Clara realized he was one of those men so self-absorbed that the details of other people’s lives registered no more than the brush of midges in the afternoon air.

  ‘Indeed. Can’t someone control these creatures?’

  The terriers were weaving in and out of his legs, their high yipping cries fracturing the air.

  ‘Pookie, Detto, Prisie!’ exclaimed Wallis, bending to caress them. ‘Do you love dogs, Fräulein Vine? We got these from a woman in Surrey. A terrifically nice lady, and you know what? She supplies David’s family with corgis, and she gives their cousins to von Ribbentrop. Don’t you think that’s the most splendid form of Anglo-German alliance? She should be in the diplomatic service.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful idea.’

  ‘She provided two chows for Goering and his secretary. If you know the Goerings you must have seen them.’

  ‘I think I must have,’ lied Clara. ‘Though I’m more of a cat person myself.’

  ‘Don’t know about cats. It’s the lions I remember,’ muttered the Duke.

  Hermann Goering’s predilection for having lion cubs running freely around his home always left a strong impression on visiting dignitaries.

  ‘Damned creatures gave me the fright of my life. He’s jolly lucky someone doesn’t shoot them.’

  ‘Goering may be frightfully keen on hunting, but I don’t think he’d forgive that in a hurry,’ said the Duchess, reaching to caress her husband’s cheek. It was a curiously intimate gesture in the midst of strangers, yet, Clara realized, for the Windsors there was no such thing as privacy. The most personal details of their lives had so long been played out for public consumption that any border between their private and public lives had already been utterly breached. Their lives had solidified into history and it was history that had left them beached here in unknown territory, on a distant shore.

  ‘I understand you’re shortly to leave for the Bahamas?’

  Wallis’s mouth wrinkled sourly, like someone with too much lime in her margarita.

  ‘They’ve made my husband governor. We’ll be three thousand miles away from the war. David wanted a far more active role but that family of his back on the island won’t consider it.’

  The island? Was that how she referred to Britain?

  ‘So what brings you to Lisbon, Fräulein Vine?’ enquired the Duke, with no perceptible interest in the answer.

  ‘Just a short engagement. I won’t even have time to catch any sun. I’ll be going back to Berlin in a few days.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ sighed Wallis. ‘I wish we were. We’re bored to sobs here. All we have are these endless dinners with local dignitaries, most of whom have only the barest comprehension of who we are, and the occasional tea party. This afternoon we have several wives of Portuguese worthies and a lady from the Red Cross and they have scarcely a dozen English words between them. Just How d’you do and Thank you. I try my best, I really do, but Portuguese is such a tricky language, don’t you think, and they won’t try Spanish. I can’t tell you how lovely it is to have a guest who shares one’s mother tongue. If it wasn’t for the golf course and the casino we’d go quite mad. David adores the casino – he’s there almost every night, aren’t you, darling?’

  The ex-King grunted assent and moved off. Once he was out of earshot Wallis’s bright façade faded and she wrapped her arms round her skinny frame, gloomily surveying the house behind her with its fringe of orange rose bushes. Even the roses looked different here – blown and gaudy, their petals garishly bright.

  ‘What do you think of this place? It’s a little scrubby, isn’t it? Not a patch on our villa, La Croë.’ A long sigh. ‘We left on my birthday. The staff were all in fl
oods. I so miss France. I wonder if we’ll ever see it again.’

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be staying here?’

  ‘Oh that’s what everyone keeps asking. I only wish I knew. It was my fault at first. Winston sent a ship to collect us but I said I was not going to budge an inch until someone had fetched my swimming costume for me.’

  This remark prompted Clara to inhale a little of her Pimm’s, prompting a coughing fit.

  ‘Your swimming costume? Where did you leave it?’

  ‘The south of France. It got abandoned at La Croë. We had to leave in a rush and it was not packed, but I said, if I’m going to be heading for the Bahamas I simply can’t be without it. It’s a beautiful Nile green and my absolute favourite. Even if one’s lying in the sun one wants to look one’s best, don’t you think? Any woman would understand that, surely.’

  ‘The south of France is rather a long way away, isn’t it? I mean, there’s no hope of actually getting it back.’

  ‘What defeatist talk! As it happens the very sweet American consul in Nice went to collect it and brought it down here.’

  ‘That’s quite an achievement.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Given the roads and the refugees and so on.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose.’ Wallis looked suddenly disconsolate, as if the return of the swimming costume had not been quite the joyous reunion she’d anticipated.

  ‘So now you’re ready to leave?’

  ‘If only it were that simple.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘But there are other problems. Firstly the British are messing us about disgracefully. They’ve refused to allow us to stop off in New York on the way to the Bahamas, which my husband is furious about. But what’s really preventing us from going is . . .’

  A call sounded from the terrace and she broke off.

  ‘Ah. They’re serving tea inside. Won’t you come in? I’m going to have to mingle with these ladies but perhaps you might like a little tour, Fräulein Vine. Though I warn you, there’s precious little to look at.’

  When she opened the doors to her new living quarters, Wallis Simpson might have been Howard Carter lifting the door to Tutankhamen’s tomb. The plethora of gilded furniture, porcelain, antique vases and bronze figures crowding the small drawing room suggested the opulent jumble of a Pharaoh’s antechamber, containing all the necessary treasure for the afterlife. The couple had clearly brought as much as they could carry in their headlong rush from the advancing Nazis, loading up several cars with oriental plates, Chinese screens, jade clocks and spindly-legged Louis XVI side tables. There were numerous photographs of Wallis herself, posing with one arm slung over a chair-back and gazing haughtily into the distance, as if the exercise of extreme dignity might counter the torrent of indignities that life had brought her. There were also pictures of the couple themselves and beside them, on the mantelpiece, an autographed photograph of Joachim von Ribbentrop – plainly if the Duke had heard the rumours of Wallis Simpson’s affair with the German Foreign Minister, then he had chosen to ignore them. Yet it was the image above, hanging in a sleek ebony frame, that stopped Clara in her tracks. It was a pencil sketch of a panther, coiled around its own spangled pelt, its body a picture of lithe precision and its eyes sparking cold fire. Clara recognized it at once. It was identical to the one she had seen in Cartier’s showroom in Paris.