Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  So this was the special client Jeanne Toussaint had talked of. The one who could not be mentioned.

  ‘That’s a design my husband made. For a piece,’ said Wallis, following her gaze.

  ‘It’s Cartier, isn’t it?’

  ‘Clever you! I like a woman who knows her jewellery. Is it a passion of yours?’

  ‘I was in Cartier’s last month, actually. Just by chance.’

  At once Wallis’s bland countenance was suffused with interest.

  ‘Were you now? Isn’t that showroom positively the most glorious place in the world? Jeanne Toussaint and I are firm friends. I think she’s an artistic genius, as great as any Picasso or Monet. She told me her life’s work is to take my dreams and turn them to stone.’ A little laugh. ‘I said I’d rather she turned them into platinum and gold and diamonds.’

  ‘I thought her designs were wonderful. Especially her latest.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Wallis’s eyes were alive with interest. ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was quite spectacular. She thinks it will prove her legacy. It’s the piece that means more to her than any other. She plans to display it in the front window.’

  Immediately Wallis’s entire frame was animated by curiosity. Gone was the brittle politesse and in its place a barely concealed shudder of excitement. The thought that Clara Vine had seen Cartier’s most precious piece, a legacy item that would tantalize collectors across Europe, was almost unbearable. Like anyone with an obsession, be it birdwatching or baccarat, Wallis wanted to stay ahead. Still, though, she contained herself. She was desperate to know, but she wouldn’t ask about it, not yet.

  ‘If you were in Cartier’s showroom I imagine you must collect yourself.’

  ‘I have a few pieces,’ said Clara, thinking exactly how few that was – a single silver locket, a row of pearls and a pair of diamond earrings in a scarlet box with the maker’s name in faded gold, nestling on a satin bed.

  ‘You’re teasing. I’d guess you’re a person of great discrimination.’

  Wallis was plainly mystified. Her eyes roved over Clara’s form, probing and assessing, trying to work out what it was that allowed her access to Cartier’s most precious piece. She touched Clara’s arm lightly.

  ‘I’ve an idea. As you’re a fellow aficionado and talking to these local ladies bores me rigid I’m going to show you my children.’

  Her children?

  She crossed the room and threw open a pair of double doors to reveal a dressing room. The shutters were closed against the sun, but in the corners glimmering sheaths of dresses in silk, satin and taffeta could be discerned, jostling for space on a temporary rail with Chanel jackets and Mainbocher frocks. Another rail held lingerie, boudoir jackets, negligees and ivory crêpe de Chine nightgowns. Satin gloves, clutch bags, capes and beaded boleros. Beneath them an army of handmade shoes, Vivier, Ferragamo and Anglisano, stood braced to attention, awaiting glittering occasions to come. Many of the accessories bore Wallis’s initials, or those of the royal pair entwined, as if the reality of their marriage required perpetual reinforcement. In a flash of insight, Clara realized that nowhere was Wallis’s spirit more evident than here, in her wardrobe. Elegance was her weapon and in a life of constant reinvention, she had made a subtle armour out of labels and styles. Everything about her, from the flower brooch in her lapel to the dress that matched the precise sapphire of her eyes, was a carefully calculated construction. It was only in her present circumstances that such elaborate planning had gone awry.

  At the far end of the room stood a tall cabinet and from it Wallis took a square Louis Vuitton travelling case, patterned in mulberry and old gold, inscribed with the title The Duchess Of Windsor. She laid it on a table, lit the desk lamp and opened the lid.

  ‘I call them my children because they’re all individuals to me. All of them are perfect, that’s what people with children say, isn’t it? They may have their flaws, but I know their pedigree and everything about them.’

  Before them, on a series of velvet-covered drawers, lay row upon row of jewels. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets and brooches. A spray of flowers, a fat rose of rubies, iridescent butterflies. Trembling drops of colour that seemed to shimmer and move as they lay. Substitutes for, perhaps even improvements on, the flesh and blood children she would never have.

  Wallis’s fingers roved over them, fondling a bracelet of circular-cut sapphires, interspersed with diagonal rows of diamonds.

  ‘I adore this. D’you know I have the sleeves of all my dresses shortened so the bracelets can be seen?’

  She skimmed a pair of earrings in a matching sapphire bombé design and picked up a diamond and green peridot frog whose glowing stones seemed to warm a reciprocal light in her eyes. Her face was bathed in tenderness as, like a real mother, she stroked its tiny form.

  ‘I love showing my little ones off but there’s no one in this godforsaken place who has the slightest appreciation of fine jewellery.’

  She held up a crystalline scorpion, its claws two rubies like drops of blood, and placed it against her cheek, pale and smooth as a hard-boiled egg.

  ‘Don’t you find, when you wear your jewels, that they tremble on your skin? Whenever I wear this one I feel it on my neck like a kiss.’

  She fondled a necklace whose diamonds refracted the ambient light in a glittering cascade.

  ‘You know, Hitler told me he has a personal collection of diamonds. I always wanted a look at them. They call them the Tears of the Wolf.’ She darted a quick, curious look at Clara, still trying to make her out. Assessing her level of access.

  ‘I suppose he hasn’t shown you?’

  ‘Not yet. But if I see him I’ll tell him you mentioned them.’

  ‘Oh, do! Diamonds are my favourite. They’re the strongest of stones. They’re supposed to have magical properties, warding off evil and so on. In fact I could do with some more of them. But then I adore all gems, except opals. Opals mean bad luck and I’ve had all the bad luck I can handle for now.’

  ‘This one’s magnificent.’

  Clara was studying a brooch in the shape of a flamingo, a spectacular thing made of platinum and gold, brilliant-cut diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, with sapphires for feathers and citrines for its yellow beak. Although she knew very little about gems, she could tell that the creation in front of her was a virtuoso example of the jeweller’s art. The stones caught the warm glow of the lamp and flashed it back like the light from a thousand stars.

  ‘The Duke designed that. My husband has such a good eye. He goes off to Cartier with little sketches he’s done and they reproduce them. He’s going to design me a whole menagerie – birds, leopards, cats, panthers. Though frogs are his favourite.’

  Her eye flickered towards Clara’s left hand.

  ‘How about you, Fräulein Vine. Is there a fiancé on the horizon?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Oh dear. I do recommend marriage. However doubtful one feels about going into it. And after all my experience, I should know.’

  The fact that she had married three times hovered unspoken between them.

  ‘It’s the pair of you together, for better or worse. A tower of strength in the face of their enemies. It actually says that in the wedding service, you know. You’d never think getting married would mean making enemies, would you, but I’ve gained a whole army of them. If the British Royal Family spent half as much time hating Mr Hitler as they do hating me, perhaps we wouldn’t all be in this fix.’

  Close up, the Duchess looked tired, her skin as soft as cigarette paper and one eyelid twitching. Although they were alone, she lowered her voice.

  ‘Now you’re English, but you choose to live in Germany . . .’

  ‘At the moment.’

  Almost beneath her breath she said, ‘I understand.’

  Clara tilted her head and waited. She sensed that the Duchess would not require much of an invitation to open up about her problems, even to a virtual stranger. Clara had rejected her Br
itish heritage by choosing to live abroad. That was enough. Wallis picked up a string of coloured gems, rubbing them absently like a pagan rosary.

  ‘I of all people know about divided loyalties. I do miss England sometimes, at least I miss Fort Belvedere and bridge and golf and the flat I used to have in Bryanston Court where all our set would drop in for cocktails. We had such a terrifically gay time, but David’s family were determined to make things difficult. It was them that started the war.’

  ‘The war? I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘The war with us. All my husband wants is for me to have the title HRH and to be received properly by his family. You would think he was asking for the moon, but the King has issued instructions to the Foreign Office that anyone using that term for me will be officially reprimanded. So petty! David says all he wants is an assurance that simple courtesies will be forthcoming. It needs to be the two of us together in the same position. Both HRH. People might say it’s a trifle, with the war on, but I don’t think it’s a trifle at all.’

  She was caressing another piece, a sumptuous yellow gold brooch sculpted into a luscious panther, but her thoughts were miles away. There was, Clara realized, something pantherish about Wallis herself; the tense, arrested muscles, the extreme rigour, as she paced the confines of this ramshackle villa like a lithe cat behind bars.

  ‘When we returned to England in September the family wouldn’t put us up. They wouldn’t even have him met. Everywhere we saw rigid, turned backs. It’s the Queen, you know. She bears a terrible grudge. It’s impossible to imagine so much anger inside such a small person.’

  Small. She picked out the word as if with sugar tongs. The adjective, delivered with biting Baltimore scorn, was made to encompass everything about England’s new queen, from her background, intellect and outlook to her apparent lack of style. Beside the tiny, curvy Queen Elizabeth the Duchess stood slim as a Sobranie cigarette.

  ‘The fact is, the Queen simply couldn’t bear to have my husband back in England. He offered his services in any capacity and he was given a job working with the British Military Mission at Vincennes while I had to join a French relief organization knitting socks. I did everything I could. David’s so angry, it smoulders away in him.’

  She picked out a ring, slid it onto her finger and held it out reflexively. She had large hands, somehow too big for her body, but she turned it this way and that almost defiantly, as if to say this was the hand that her husband had chosen. This hand above an empire.

  ‘Stanley Baldwin called me a whore, did you know?’

  There was a glint in her eye, a tear that trembled but refused to fall.

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Oh yes. As far as David’s family and the Court are concerned I might as well not exist. I feel like a bird in a cage. I’m ragged with nerves. You’ve no idea.’

  Clara laid a light hand on her arm.

  ‘It’ll be better in the Bahamas. All that sun.’

  ‘That’s if we make it. Our Spanish friends are saying we’ll never get there alive. Once we set foot on that boat we’ll be murdered en route.’

  ‘You don’t honestly believe your husband’s family would have you murdered? Now, when you’re not even living in England any more?’

  There was a wildness in Wallis’s eyes. The tension was maddening her. If she had been told that Queen Elizabeth supplied the knife herself she would have believed it.

  ‘I suppose I don’t. Not really. The Germans tell us one thing, the English tell us another. I don’t know what to believe. All I know is, I hate that country. I shall hate it to my grave.’

  Suddenly, the frenzy left her and her shoulders drooped.

  ‘Do you know what the worst thing is? Really the worst?’

  Clara hesitated. In a time of war, the worst could be so many things. The loss of relatives, the death of children. The Duke himself must be haunted above all by the prospect of his own country being conquered by a merciless Nazi regime.

  ‘It’s different for everyone, I suppose.’

  ‘My husband says the worst thing is having to leave all our possessions behind in Paris. We had no choice. They’re sitting in boxes in our villa in the Boulevard Suchet and I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. All our linen and china and antique glassware and silver. And our Meissen tableware. A friend brought our lovely George II silver salt cellars down to the south of France in his pockets, but it’s getting so hard to retrieve one’s valuables. For myself, I wouldn’t mind so much, but David asks why should we disappear to some flyblown island without them? If we’re to do any entertaining at all in the godforsaken Bahamas then we’ll need all our tableware. My husband was a king until very recently and there are standards to be kept, but the authorities here seem to have no conception of how important these things are when one entertains regularly. They have eventually agreed to allow our maid to be sent back to Paris to collect as much as she can, but it’s taking an age and we’ve not heard a thing. I’ve no idea why.’

  Clara thought of the river of refugees pushing through France and Spain, the routes choked for miles with abandoned trucks, carts and cars with mattresses tied to the roof. The roads blooming white with dust. How long would it take for one maid to make her way through two countries, with a car full of china?

  ‘You could be waiting for weeks. Months even. With respect, I would advise you to sail as soon as possible.’

  ‘You know what?’ Wallis’s face had regained its spritely humour. ‘I entirely agree. The fact is, I’m sick to death of all this. I’m desperate to leave. But my husband is adamant. Mostly I can persuade him about anything to do with the household, but in this matter he’s simply put his foot down. It’s just like he was over the abdication. He can be unbelievably stubborn when he wants. I’ve spent hours arguing, but he won’t step on that boat until our things arrive.’

  Could it be true? That the real reason that the Duke of Windsor would not leave Portugal, despite their perilous position and the urgency of the hour, despite the relentless march of an advancing Nazi army and the prospect of England itself under siege, was because he was awaiting a delivery of household goods? What would Ian Fleming make of that?

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Clara telephoned the German Embassy on Thursday morning as instructed from a café near her pension where she had gone to find breakfast. The café was barely more than a couple of tables squeezed onto a pavement in one of the twisting lanes that led down from the Castelo. It had peeling wallpaper inside and a fan wheezing asthmatically overhead, but it also had a call box at the back and the number Hanna Reitsch had given her connected her to a switchboard where a precise Prussian voice informed Clara that she should report to the Sturmbannführer’s office at precisely four o’clock that afternoon. The thought made her stomach churn and when she returned to her table she looked at the pastel de nata on her plate, its custard spiced with cinnamon and vanilla, thick and creamy with a glossy crust, and realized she could not possibly eat it. Apprehension had strangled her appetite and it was all she could do to choke down a glass of water as she wondered how to pass the hours until the confrontation.

  She wandered up to the fortifications of the castle and looked out at the jumbled roofs in ochre and rose pink like a patchwork of different textures stitched by a rough and inaccurate hand. Far below, the city glittered with an azure purity, and on the walls around her peacocks strutted, fanning jewelled tails of a hundred eyes. How ironic that this castle should be dedicated to the patron saint of England. What protection could Saint George possibly provide when, any day now, Goering unleashed his air attack on England? Clara imagined the lights of London extinguishing in the darkness, one by one, as the massed fleet of Luftwaffe came over, raining bombs. Afterwards the same houses with doors like mouths and windows like broken eyes, under a blanket of ash. The picture was so vivid that her stomach twisted and she shivered, despite the warmth of the sun.

  Leaving the Castelo behind she wandered down the dramat
ically sloping cobbled streets towards the Tagus River. The Alfama was the oldest district in Lisbon, the only area untouched by the famous earthquake, and still a mediaeval maze of alleys and tiny squares. Barefoot children and cats ran between huddled, whitewashed houses whose balconies were hung with birdcages and washing. A dog lay asleep on a step, a spill of scarlet geraniums dotting the wall behind him like the blood-spattered residue of a passing fight. Fisherwomen passed with baskets on their heads, as they must have for centuries. Clara followed the labyrinth of streets, ducking under small archways, until she came to a sun-warmed square where from the steps of the church a group of women in ecclesiastical black were watching their children play. Even as they talked, the mothers’ eyes dwelt fondly on their infants, at once alert and absent, and something about that protective gaze brought Clara’s own mother unexpectedly to mind.