Abdication: A Novel

by Juliet Nicolson

  Later that evening Evangeline and May waited with minimal enthusiasm for Myrtle’s reappearance. May was grateful she had often watched Rachel prepare her thick tomato soup and roast chicken for the Sabbath meal and now both dishes were sitting warming on the kitchen stove. Evangeline had mixed herself a strong and very dry cocktail in the manner in which she had often observed Wallis employ, coating the inner rim of the glass with vermouth before adding the ice-cold gin and finishing the glass with a slither of lemon and an olive. Half an hour later, Evangeline was halfway through her second drink and there was still no sign of Lady Myrtle. A glance into the dining room laid for two, followed by a check in Myrtle’s bedroom, revealed that she was definitely not in the house. May had run to the end of the garden to see if there was any sign of her but had returned alone. As May passed through the stone hall she saw an envelope sitting on the table marked in green ink. The single sheet of paper was addressed to Evangeline. The message was brief.

  “I will be otherwise engaged for dinner this evening. I will see you in the morning.”

  Evangeline and May had been puzzled but not concerned. Myrtle seemed like a woman capable of taking care of herself. It was getting late. Evangeline went upstairs to her own bedroom, while May set off along the little lane that led to Mrs. Cage’s house. On her way she passed the small cottage that was home to Vera Borchby. Vera’s lace-up muddy gardening boots were sitting on the porch. The lights were still on; music and what sounded like two very low male voices drifted through the open bedroom window. May hurried home to bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Wallis’s excitement about the forthcoming cruise on the Nahlin was proving infectious and for once Evangeline did not feel quite so left out.

  “Of course, we have had to remove all the books from the ship’s library, in order to make enough space for everyone to have their privacy. But I don’t think anyone will mind sleeping in a slightly musty room and no one will miss those old books when there is so much else to do, don’t you agree, Vangey!”

  Wallis had laughed, waving her hands in the air, drawing Evangeline’s attention to a charm bracelet from which dangled several different-coloured crosses. Noticing the direction of Evangeline’s gaze, Wallis explained.

  “David inscribes the date on one of these crosses when something important happens that he wants me to remember. Look at this last one! Can you see that it says ‘God Save the King for Wallis 16.vii.36’ in his own handwriting? That’s to remember the day he avoided being shot at in the Mall! Isn’t he a hoot?”

  Evangeline hoped without much conviction that the extra room on board the Nahlin had not been created to accommodate her. She loathed must. The yacht sounded wonderful though. She belonged to Lady Annie Henrietta Yule, the widow of a man who had made a colossal sum of money in India out of tea, jute and paper. Lady Yule had asked John Brown, the famous Clydebank shipyard, to build her the first privately owned steamship.

  There was no limit to the extravagance to which the king intended to go, in order that he and his guests should enjoy their summer holiday. The crew, the food, the drink, the opportunities for lazing, dancing, sleeping and loving were all to be of the highest standard.

  “David has even ordered a huge supply of golf balls to be packed on the ship so that it doesn’t matter how many he drives into the ocean!” Wallis chuckled.

  However, security rather than luxury was the uppermost consideration in the minds of the king’s advisors. The Nahlin was to be guarded by two destroyers, the Glow Worm and the Grafton and, by chance, May’s brother had been billeted to join Royal Navy officers on board. Sam had been impressing his superiors since the day he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and the responsibility for guarding this precious cargo, and for making sure that certain papers of state were delivered to the Nahlin on a daily basis, was only entrusted to the most promising and reliable of young recruits.

  Among the crew were several lads who had grown up on the Western Isles of Scotland, the connection with his maternal homeland making Sam happier than he had been since the day before hearing the news of his mother’s death. The crew was informed that the Nahlin had been rented for the month of August by the reclusive Duke of Lancaster, who no one knew anything about and no one could remember having actually met. But whoever he was the joint crews of the destroyers would ensure there would be no security mishaps for the mysterious duke.

  Evangeline had packed her black bathing suit with some misgivings. She had been troubled by her ignorance of cruise wardrobes especially after Wallis’s advice on what to pack had not been any help at all, even though she was in no doubt that Wallis had planned her own shipboard trousseau with her usual meticulous flair and precision.

  “Oh, just bring any old thing, Vangey!” Wallis had said airily. “I will be dressed most informally myself and David’s valet has only included one proper suit for the obligatory emergency royal funeral rig. Otherwise David plans to be as casual as he is at the Fort, and you know what that means?”

  Evangeline knew only too well. The well-worn shorts that had done double duty as bathing trunks during the unfortunate rescue mission at the Fort swimming pool had made many subsequent appearances. Evangeline herself had not ventured into the water since the mishap. No unkind remarks had been made to her face but she suspected her little accident had been discussed extremely behind her back.

  Evangeline had intermittently wondered if it might have been wiser to remain at Cuckmere for August, even though Philip had assured her he would just about manage the hosting of any country dinner parties on his own. Most of the time, however, he would remain in London but never too far from a telephone, just in case Joan woke up. His optimism was impressive. Joan had remained in hospital and had barely moved a muscle of her face since Myrtle’s abortive visit and she remained fearfully thin. The truth was Philip was so distressed by his wife’s unchanging condition that his visits had become too painful to endure except on the rarest of occasions.

  The Royal party arrived in Yugoslavia on 10 August 1936 for the final leg of their outward journey to the coast, having exchanged the Orient Express for the Yugoslav royal train. While the party made a brief diplomatic stop to take tea with Prince Paul, a couple of well-informed photographers were waiting at the railway station, hoping to bag a shot that would confirm the shared holiday plans of the king and Mrs. Simpson. They had been rewarded with a single frame that they intended to sell for a tidy sum to as many European newspapers as possible.

  The Nahlin was moored in the harbour at Sibenik on the Dalmatian Coast, with the pleasing simplicity of the vessel’s three-hundred-foot outline reflected in the clear mirror of the Adriatic waters. The ship that was to be home to the royal party for the next four weeks gleamed white against a backdrop of tree-covered mountains, and the first sight of her took away the collective breath of her distinguished passengers.

  “Oh my!” Evangeline exclaimed, overcome by a rare move to literary eloquence. “What happiness it will be to bask in the sunshine of eternal bliss!”

  She had a feeling this might have been a quote from William Shakespeare, because it sure sounded like one. She wished Julian could be there to hear her say it instead of indulging himself in the hedonistic playgrounds of Berlin. She comforted herself by thinking how tired he would become of the empty-headed Lottie, and at the same time how relieved he would be to escape May’s persistent proposals for bicycle rides.

  Finding themselves torn between the beauty of the ship and the unexpected sight of crowds of strangers gathered on the opposite side of the port, the king’s guests could not disguise their anxiety at what they had let themselves in for. The captain of the Nahlin estimated twenty thousand Yugoslavs—splendid in their national costume and alerted by the latest newspaper stories, complete with photographs—had come out to look. It was immediately evident that the Sibenik crowds were interested less in the figure of the king than in his female companion.

  After a few days spent in absolute privac
y cruising the sparkling waters, the holidaymakers docked at a small harbour off one of the Greek islands where it was confirmed that the pseudonymous cover of the Duke of Lancaster (in truth, one of the king’s own subsidiary titles) had been blown. With a look of doom mingled with disapproval, the king’s equerry, Sir John Aird, informed his employer that an everincreasing number of publications in America and Europe were covering the royal cruise and that interest in the king’s personal relationship with Mrs. Simpson was mounting by the day. As well as revealing the basic itinerary the newspapers had announced the names of “Britain’s king’s guests,” including “a divorced woman from Baltimore.”

  The couple around whom so much speculation fizzed were sharing one end of the yacht, while the guests were marshalled in the state rooms at the other. Evangeline comforted herself that although the former library was indeed rather musty, she supposed she should count her lucky stars that she was on board at all. All her early hopes that the romantic focus of the cruise might be expanded were soon dashed. The guest list comprised the King’s various equerries as well as several safely married couples, including the formidable Lady Diana Cooper and her parliamentary husband Duff. Sadly Mrs. Merryman had decided to stay put for the summer on the other side of the Atlantic, as her presence would have made the ignominy of being an unmatched woman more bearable. There were of course several singletons among the crew, but even Evangeline had to concede that there wasn’t much chance of a middle-aged dame from Baltimore finding a non-English-speaking deckhand from Greece to be a suitable beau, in order to teach Julian a lesson in what he might be missing.

  The guests settled into a routine of want-for-nothing indulgence. With staff at the ready to satisfy every whim, much of the time was spent doing nothing much at all. Lazing in the luxurious state rooms, stretching out on soft-cushioned and deep-mattressed chaise longues, eating fish that had been swimming in the warm waters beneath the boat only an hour earlier, puzzling over jigsaws, playing cards, reading, dozing, flirting and chatting of inconsequences all amounted to justifiable activity of a holiday nature. The king was certainly in a holiday mood. He had acquired a shrimping net that he would dangle in the water, while floating around the Nahlin in a small dingy. His cooperative subjects would lean over the side of the ship encouraging him.

  “There’s a big one, sir,” they would say, pointing helpfully, while the king whooped like a schoolboy each time he trapped so much as a jellyfish. Around his neck two crosses on a silver chain glinted in the Mediterranean sun, matching the answering glint of those on the bracelet around Wallis’s wrist.

  Whenever the guests wished to go on shore to explore the islands or to have dinner in a local restaurant, a pack of photographers waited to greet them; whenever the king disembarked for a morning of sightseeing, a jaunty holiday pipe in his mouth instead of the familiar cigarette, there would be loud shouts of “cheerio” in an exaggerated British accent. In Dubrovnik romantics reminded the royal couple how important it was to “long live love” by shouting “zivila ljubav” in their own language. One day the Nahlin slipped along the four-mile-long waterway that sliced through the isthmus joining the Peloponnesian peninsula to the Greek mainland. The towering sides of the Corinth Canal resembled the entrance to an Egyptian tomb, opening out not onto a long-abandoned burial place but instead onto the golden light of the Ionian Sea. The king remained on the bridge of the ship throughout the passage, mesmerised by the delicacy of the exercise, as the captain guided the Nahlin through the narrow cut. A pair of binoculars swung from his neck, and he was so engrossed in the manoeuvre that he appeared oblivious to the attention his half-naked state was attracting, delighting cheering onlookers with such informality. Evangeline noticed Lady Diana Cooper’s moue of disapproval as she watched the scene from the ship’s rail.

  When the other guests left the yacht to go on land, Evangeline took to staying behind in the shade of the yacht. During the first week she had been determined to keep up and join in. But she had found herself quite out of breath and also vertiginously queasy on the precariously narrow paths. These walkways had been created over centuries by hundreds of indigenous black and white goats who continued to crisscross the rocky islands without a stumble. But each step of a canvas-shoe would send hundreds of little pebbles cascading down the cliff face, each mini-avalanche eroding the breadth of the path still further. Most of the Nahlin guests learned to navigate their way with confidence but such physical agility was denied Evangeline and the beauty of the view, high above a light-dancing sea, was compromised by her fear of falling hundreds of feet below into the water.

  Evangeline’s habit of dawdling, whether to recover her breath or retie her laces meant that she often ended up a good fifty yards behind the person in front of her. From time to time the king would stop to tie his own lace and everyone would wait for him to complete the task. If there was a knot in the lace he would pause for longer, and during these interludes Evangeline would catch up with her companions, each one trying hard not to stare at the king’s bottom, which was stuck up in the air, quite unselfconsciously, as he bent over his shoe. Despite the benefits afforded by the king’s recalcitrant laces, after a couple of hours of wheezing and clutching in terror at tuffets of wild thyme to steady herself, Evangeline was always relieved to arrive at a crumbling temple, a lunchtime shelter from the heat and the glare. But these ancient buildings were hard-won goals and she soon decided that the quietness on the empty yacht offered an appealing alternative.

  Sometimes she pleaded seasickness. This excuse was a beauty as it succeeded in absolving her from joining a terror-laden swimming party. On other occasions she would announce a previously undeclared passion for jigsaw puzzles, sentencing herself to a frustrating morning staring at hundreds of bits of odd-shaped pale blue and white fragments of wood and the impossible challenge of reproducing an impressionist’s cloud-spattered sky.

  Evangeline had a further reason for wanting to be alone. She had begun to notice the increasingly tense atmosphere that existed between Wallis and the king. Wallis was often impatient and critical of her besotted suitor, who hovered anxiously and ever closer to her as if the earth beneath her feet would crumble at the faintest upset. He would go to every length to accommodate Wallis, agree with her or fetch things for her, giving an impression that the role of king and subject had been reversed. Evangeline tried to make sense of it. Wallis of course was not exactly a “subject,” and maybe that was the nub of it: respect. It was neither asked for nor given.

  Everyone who spent time with the king, even those whom he claimed as his closest friends, treated him with a deference they showed to no other living person—everyone except Wallis. The oddest thing about her critical manner was not the king’s unquestioning acceptance of such behaviour but the enjoyment he apparently derived from it. The more of a bully she became, the more he seemed to like it. There was something schoolmistressy about the way she spoke to him that reminded Evangeline of the way a mother treats a wayward child. Could it be that Queen Mary had never devoted the time to discipline her eldest son? Or perhaps the explanation lay with his father, George V, who had been by all accounts an excessive disciplinarian and had squeezed out the gentler motherly instincts of his shy and slightly frightened wife. Either way, their eldest son, now in his forties, appeared to have at last found a variation of the maternal bond he had craved for so long.

  Whatever the explanation for the strangeness of the relationship, Wallis seemed tenser by the day. Evangeline even wondered if some sort of breaking point was imminent. If so, the buildup was not enjoyable to witness. She wished for the dozenth time that Julian or even May were there to talk to. Lady Diana seemed aware that something was up but Evangeline did not dare introduce the subject and Lady Diana did not invite chattiness. Besides Lady Diana had recently been struck down with a bout of tonsillitis and was confined to her cabin.

  Turning these thoughts over in her mind while the others were safely on land and out of sight, Evangeline would so
metimes take off her summer dress and lie down on the shady deck in her patched-up bathing suit, with no threat of being watched. Occasionally she would remove her sweltering wig and pop it on the stool beside her, while at the same time ensuring her exposed and sensitive scalp remained well out of the sun’s glare.

  One member of the crew became endearingly attentive to Evangeline. Georgio spoke nothing but Greek but he would always spot Evangeline sitting on her own, bent over a half-completed jigsaw of a wooden Renoir seascape. Her concentration was instantly and willingly sidetracked whenever the muscular young Greek appeared beside her, indicating with loud smacking noises of his fingers to his lips, that he would be happy to bring Evangeline something refreshing to drink, or maybe one of the chef’s pastry and honey cakes.

  One afternoon when the rest of the party had gone ashore to look at a temple that predated the birth of Christ by five hundred years, Evangeline had chosen a favourite chair in the shade, near where the retractable sea ladder was stowed. As Georgio came up the ladder from the sea, she was about to call out in greeting when she saw he was not alone. Georgio did not notice Evangeline in the afternoon shadow because all his attention was focused on the figure that was following him up the steps from the water. A young woman appeared at the top of the ladder wearing a matching two-piece garment of pink gingham that had never featured in any of Evangeline’s fashion magazines. A brassiere encasing a pair of enviably firm breasts was separated from its matching pants by a flat, milk-chocolate torso. Georgio helped her onto the deck, his wet green trunks clinging to every contour of his formidable physique.

  Motioning with a finger to his lips for the girl to stay silent, Georgio was doing all he could to contain his laughter. As the dripping couple stood together on the firm surface of the boat the semi-naked woman gripped the salty wet material of her swimming pants and licking her lips with the tip of a raspberry-pink tongue, she squeezed. A fine horizontal jet of water shot into the air before falling in shimmering droplets onto the deck. The party trick was answered by an appreciative kiss blown through the air from Georgio’s moistened lips.