Abdication: A Novel

by Juliet Nicolson

  “So, Miss …?”

  “Thom-Thomas,” she supplied, stumbling a little over her own name before adding, “Sir, I mean, Your Royal. King. Sorry, Your Majesty, I mean.” She tapered off.

  But he appeared troubled neither by her confusion nor by her wobbly attempt at a curtsey and turned to watch Mrs. Simpson open the brown paper parcel.

  “What have we here, my dear Evangeline?” Mrs. Simpson exclaimed in her jangly voice as she removed the flat slipcase from the wrapping paper. “Oh my! I do declare it is something to get the foot tapping!” And then, “But Evangeline, darling! How clever you are! A foxtrot from Handy’s Memphis Blues Band,’ she exclaimed, reading the words of the record sleeve. “Oh my! David, do you see?”

  Mrs. Simpson held the bright yellow disc out to show him. Printed along the bottom of the record were the words “Manufactured for Hochschild, Kohn and Co.”

  “Oh, Evangeline! Hochschild’s! Our favourite store, the lipstick store, the place of refuge from our mothers! Were we all of sixteen, even fifteen years old I wonder?”

  Her eyes shone at the recollection. But Miss Nettlefold was not quite finished with her surprise.

  “And Wallis, there is a rather divine coincidence that I think will surprise you.” Miss Nettlefold pointed to one word denoting the record label, which was imprinted on the top of the disc. Belvedere. Just the same as Fort Belvedere, the house in which they all stood.

  “Well! I do declare this is quite the best gift I ever did see! What about it, David? Do you see what a clever, imaginative, generous friend I have brought to stay with us? We will quite forget all our worries when we start dancing to Handy’s Band. It will be quite like the good old times before you became …”

  But she stopped herself mid-sentence and ran over to the gramophone, the record in her hand.

  “Come here, Evangeline darling! Let’s listen to it at once. And let’s have a martini! Whoever said it was too early for a martini? It’s never too early for a cocktail, is it, Vangey?” Her hands were as expressive as her smile, opening up and outwards as she spoke.

  The king appeared startled by this girlish gush of reminiscence and, spotting May dawdling uncertainly in the corner near the door, went over to speak to her. May had been trying to edge out of the room, with its soft lamplight and its glossy furniture, without anyone noticing.

  “I believe Miss Nettlefold mentioned that you learned to drive in the West Indies?” the king began. “A most glorious place! I know it myself: travelled all through that area by ship just after the war! Such friendly people aren’t they? Which one exactly is your island?”

  “Barbados, sir,” she murmured, but his attention had returned to the figure of Mrs. Simpson, who was gliding round the room to the sound of the music. As she passed by, the king’s hand brushed her cashmere elbow. He was quite unable to take his eyes off her.

  “Just imagine, darling. May is from Barbados. One day, soon, darling,” he said, raising his voice to compete with the bluesy crooning coming from the gramophone, “I promise WE will go and find some sunshine.”

  On hearing the emphasis the king put on the personal pronoun, Mrs. Simpson put her purple-polished finger to her lips in a sign to him to say no more. Her face was abnormally pale, and apart from the mole on one cheek her skin was as smooth as the inside of a seashell. Whirling away from the king’s touch, Mrs. Simpson turned her back on them and May could see her wide jawbone jutting out from either side of her head like the back view of a cobra. The king pulled a cigarette from a compact leather case that was tucked into the silver sporran hanging from his waist and lit the end from the burning ember of the one he was about to extinguish. The intimacy of the little procedure unnerved May further and she was wondering how much more of this unexpected encounter she could manage.

  “I am most impressed to hear of your skill behind the wheel,” he continued in his semi-transatlantic accent. May could feel herself breathing hard. “I love cars myself,” said the king. “Matter of fact I’m thinking of ordering one of those new American station wagons. My own driver Ladbroke is a little sceptical. Perhaps you would care to have a turn in the machine when you next bring Miss Nettlefold to see us? You might be able to persuade Ladbroke that one must keep up with the times?”

  But May found herself unable to supply anything more than a blush in return to this friendly line of enquiry. And suddenly it was all over. Mr. Osborne had returned and was lingering by the door. With a barely discernible inclination of his head, he indicated to May that it was time to leave.

  Past the yellow chairs, across the marble floor, and there at last was the February wind restoring some coolness to May’s flushed cheeks. It was as if she had been released from a conservatory where rare plants were lovingly tended, unable to survive without careful nurturing. Outside felt like the real world. Inside resembled a hothouse of make-believe. She reached the car, inhaling the familiar leather smell of the seats. This strange house, about which she had already been warned in advance not to ask questions, had well and truly shaken her.

  “Fancy that,” May murmured out loud, settling herself back in her seat. It occurred to her that Mrs. Simpson must be a very good friend indeed of the king to be so in charge in the king’s own house.

  “Well, I must get back to my proper place where I belong, darling,” she continued out loud.

  “Darling” mattered to May. Her father never uttered the word when speaking to her and she was glad of that. The term of endearment was reserved for rare usage by her mother alone, and its power to soothe always took her by happy surprise. May could not imagine ever using the word herself. It did not seem to fit anyone she knew. For a moment she wished desperately that her mother could be there with her now.

  Pulling the door shut, and adjusting a small cushion that Mr. Hooch, the Cuckmere Park odd-job man, had suggested would give May extra height, she put the engine carefully into reverse. She was still feeling jumpy after the recent scene in the drawing room and as the car began to crunch over the gravel, her shoe became caught in a small tear in the fitted carpet on the floor below the steering wheel. As May tried to release her foot, she inadvertently pressed down hard on the accelerator pedal. The car jolted backwards, hitting an object that May was certain had not been in the driveway earlier.

  A prickling on her arms was coming from underneath her skin. The sensation, May’s infuriating response to anything that made her nervous, travelled up towards her shoulders, then her neck and right into her cheeks as she fought the instinct to look round. Take it slowly, May told herself. There is no need to panic. Had Miss Nettlefold been carrying her handbag with her as she entered the house? May felt certain she had. And then a dreadful thought occurred to her. Still facing forward and sitting up very straight May was able to see the reflection of the back seat in the driving mirror. It was empty.

  Just then Miss Nettlefold appeared at the front door of the house. For a second or two she stood quite still, a large and in some ways absurd figure in her black fur hat, her voluminous coat and shoulders rounded and hunched forward, as if she was trying to reduce her height. Shielding her eyes with her hand against the surprisingly strong glare of a setting wintry sun, Miss Nettlefold searched the driveway.

  “Wiggle!” May heard her call in a deep American voice, and then again, a little louder with an extended emphasis on the first syllable. “Weeeg-le!”

  Miss Nettlefold turned in the direction of the parked car, a woman happy in her ownership of a temporarily missing dog, as she scanned the gravel for the wag of a tail. But her glance fell quickly on a small, still shape just visible beneath a back wheel of the Rolls-Royce.

  In an instant the Fort driveway filled up with several black-suited servants, alerted by Miss Nettlefold’s agonised cry. Towered over by the straight-backed Mr. Osborne, they hovered crow-like over the large figure that lay on the gravel, unsure how to lift the comatose Miss Nettlefold inside. In her thick-haired fur coat Miss Nettlefold resembled a bear that had lum
bered out of the evergreen rhododendron bushes surrounding the driveway and collapsed in confusion.

  Mr. Osborne approached May and suggested that it might be best if she leave now, adding, after a theatrical clearing of his throat, “And remove the instrument of death before Miss Nettlefold regains consciousness.”

  A yard or two away, his outline just identifiable beneath a plaid rug, lay the motionless body of Wiggle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The following morning, May stood cap in hand in Sir Philip Blunt’s study at Cuckmere Park in Sussex as he faced her, employer to employee, from behind his large mahogany desk. She had returned to the house late the previous evening, and had gone straight to her bedroom without speaking to anyone. She feared the worst. She had tried to prepare herself for the inevitable consequences of her fatal carelessness, and had been unable to stop herself reliving the minutes following the second of impact. She could not absorb the shocking knowledge that she was responsible for the death of a living thing.

  Sir Philip put a match to his cigar, igniting it with big billowy puffs. May watched one end of the brown cylinder darken with saliva while the other end glowed with menace. For a moment a large puff of smoke obscured his face.

  “I am happy to come straight to the point and tell you that Miss Nettlefold has concluded that yesterday’s incident was not your fault.”

  May tried to swallow but her throat felt blocked.

  “In fact, it is to you whom Miss Nettlefold now wishes to apologise,” he explained, looking a little bemused. He had received a telephone call from Miss Nettlefold at Sunningdale just an hour ago. She had begun speaking in a state of understandable anguish, even anger, declaring that Wiggle had been “the love of her life,” and the only living soul she could trust. But she had calmed down and in the end registered her distress at the distress that must have been suffered by Miss Thomas. The dog had been unwell for a few days—an allergy to offal, apparently—and that weakness must have prevented Wiggle from dodging the approaching wheels of the car.

  At that moment May wished she still had enough hair to cover her face, which she was sure betrayed a vestige of the guilt she still felt. Sir Philip had not finished.

  “There is one other small matter that I wish to raise. I understand you met certain people when you delivered Miss Nettlefold to the address at Sunningdale yesterday?”

  May nodded.

  “Well, far be it for me to question the wisdom of introducing you to those particular individuals. What is important is that I already know you well enough, May, to say that I feel you to be a dependable person. And an intelligent one too.”

  She was not quite sure where this was all leading.

  “So I want your confirmation that you will never discuss with anyone that meeting yesterday. And when I say ‘anyone’ that includes not only the staff in the house here but your own family when you return home. Have I made myself clear?”

  May nodded vigorously.

  Sir Philip smiled. “Good. I knew you would understand.”

  May left Sir Philip’s study, relieved on two levels. First, she was happy to escape a smell that reminded her of smouldering socks, the result of the accumulated decades, if not centuries, of cigar smoke that had impregnated the ancient stone walls of the Sussex manor house. But mostly she was astonished to have held on to her job and to have been exonerated so completely from the consequences of yesterday’s accident. Considering how things might have turned out, May felt herself to be most fortunate, although she hated to think how much she must have upset Miss Nettlefold. May was startled by the forgiving nature of the woman who, the previous afternoon, had settled herself into the back of the car. As for the caution that she should be discreet about yesterday’s encounter in the yellow drawing room of Fort Belvedere, she felt no anxiety. Keeping secrets had been a way of life for May for as long as she could remember.

  Up until the moment when Miss Nettlefold had slid the glass partition aside May had maintained the respectful silence that was expected of a chauffeur. As a courtesy, she had formally introduced herself to her passenger at the beginning of the journey but Miss Nettlefold had been so preoccupied with her bags and parcels and small snuffly dog that she had paid little attention to the driver. However, in her driving mirror May could see the surreptitious stares Miss Nettlefold began to give her from the backseat and had expected to hear the whoosh of the screen that separated the passengers from the driver being pushed back even sooner. The little window had not closed properly from the first day May had begun driving the car and although she had considered getting it fixed she had changed her mind. The almost imperceptible gap through which private conversations reached her was too much of an unexpected bonus to relinquish.

  “I do declare you are a girl!” Miss Nettlefold had finally concluded aloud, in a rich and lilting accent that was unequivocally American. “Tell me I’m right,” she said, already chuckling deeply at the accuracy of her deduction. “My, oh my, you certainly have some pluck in choosing this profession at such a young age! And what with you being so pretty in such a male line of work!” she continued. “Tell me, how did this all come about?”

  After a little hesitation, May described briefly how she and her older brother Sam had left their home at the sugar plantation in Barbados and had sailed to Liverpool on the sugar consignment boat two months ago. She told her passenger how, with the encouragement of her mother’s London cousins, she had looked in the newspaper and applied for this chauffeuring job.

  Miss Nettlefold professed herself to be “quite fascinated” by everything May told her and had kept up her chatter for the last twenty miles of the journey. Both women were amazed to discover they had disembarked from their respective ships at the Liverpool dockyards on exactly the same day. Miss Nettlefold felt certain that the coincidence was a fortuitous sign of a future amicable relationship between them. Indeed, her passenger appeared so effusive that May began to feel a little uncomfortable. But she listened politely as Miss Nettlefold explained how she was on her way to meet an old school friend from Baltimore, Maryland, whom she had not seen for years. If she was honest, she was apprehensive at seeing her again after such a long interval.

  “Of course, we stayed in touch by letter, you understand, May? Oh forgive me? Do you mind if I call you May, Miss Thomas? I wanted to ask, rather than presume, especially as we Americans can sometimes run away with our manners over here in England. I guess we can be too informal for some folks.”

  “I don’t mind being ‘May’ in the least,” May replied. “In fact Sir Philip asked to call me by my first name only last week, so you are in good English company.”

  “Oh, you have no idea how pleased I am to hear that,” Miss Nettlefold sighed. “It’s so good to meet up with someone who understands what it is like to be a bit on the outside of the insiders, if you get my meaning? My word,” she continued, “there are so many things one is not allowed to talk about over here, and it takes a Yank a bit of time to figure it all out.”

  May sensed a further confidence teetering on the edge of Miss Nettlefold’s fashionably red-painted lips.

  “I expect you’ve heard whispers about … well … you know … the goings on at the top?” Miss Nettlefold went on. Her remark was more a statement than an enquiry.

  May gave what she hoped was a noncommittal movement of her head.

  “Most people think it will all blow over just as it did with his earlier married girlfriends, but they don’t know Wallis like I do. Death of a king, crowning of a king, whatever happens, when Wallis wants something, boy, does she hang around until she gets it and blow the consequences!”

  May’s silent concentration on the road quieted Miss Nettlefold but only for a moment.

  “Oh, there I go, opening my big mouth again! Forgive me, May.”

  But May had pulled the car over and was examining the written directions that lay on the front seat beside her and a few moments later the car was making its way across the gravel and Miss Nettle
fold was wishing out loud that the journey had not been over so soon. Chauffeur and passenger assured one another that after this agreeable beginning, they would look forward to meeting again before long.

  The day after the accident, May had left Sir Philip’s study and gone to her room in Mrs. Cage’s house, eager to clarify her thoughts by writing in the blue cotton-bound diary given to her by her mother, Edith, just before May had stepped on board the ship. Sir Philip had not mentioned a diary in his list of forbidden confidantes.

  “Don’t forget to write everything down, darling,” her mother had said. “Nothing has really happened until you write it down.”

  May did not write every day. Sometimes there was not much to say. Sometimes she was nervous that if she put down the truth someone might read it. There was also another drawback to confiding everything to paper. The shortest of entries could trigger the memory of experiences best forgotten. Her mother was right. Once something was committed to writing it became a reality, whereas if she failed to record an incident, or sometimes skipped a whole day, she could pretend it had never happened at all. But with her brother Sam already away at the beginning of his training in the voluntary naval service, and in the absence of anyone else she was allowed to talk to, or trusted enough, she took the diary down from the shelf beside her bed, hoping that the exercise would simplify her confused state of mind.

  “I am keeping this diary for you, Mamma,” she began, “although it feels good to be able to write it for me too, without feeling I have to be careful what I confide. Did you know that Dad has been reading my diary for years? I never mentioned it in case he took it out on me. Although the last few weeks have been unpredictable nothing has happened to make me regret boarding the ship to England, except of course for missing you.”