Read The Darkness of Wallis Simpson for Free Online Page B

liquor, told her he was sorry, made a fuss of her, like he loved her after all. But when she asked: ‘Where d’you go at night-time, Win?’, he said: ‘I’ll show you where I go.’ So he took her to a brothel, to a scented room where girls like children waited on soft couches, girls like flights of starlings, with their blue-black wings of hair and their twittering laughter.
    They were real. She hasn’t dreamed them, those laughing girls. Like she didn’t dream Hitler. Win gave her to the girls. He said: ‘Have a little fun, damsels. Teach her some stuff.’
    So she lay down with them, two or three of them in a scarlet room, with their carmine lips and their soft little hands which touched her where nobody had ever touched her. And it was nice. ‘So dark your hair, Wallie, so lovely black and heavy, like us! Now we touch you inside. Play a nice game. Put a small finger in. Play “trap the finger”. You see? Lovely game, Wallie. Lovely feeling . . .’
    Yeah. It was lovely. Nicer to be touched by those brothel girls than by any man. They may have been whores, but their breath was sweet. They whispered bad and beautiful things in her ear. She would have liked to stay with them till morning.
    But Win hauled her away. ‘Enough of that, for Christ’s sake. You’re not meant to like it , you perverted bitch. It’s for learning to satisfy me. So satisfy me, right? Open your damned legs and let me see what you can do now.’
    Messed on her love. Like he couldn’t help himself, like that was all he knew how to do. So a girl had to run away from that, in the end, never mind what the family thought or said. You couldn’t spend your life with an animal.
    She had to take a passage from China all the way back home seasick on a boat and yes, wait a minute, something happened on that voyage, something bad. She’d hoped to play deck quoits, flirt with the captain at dinner time, but she wasn’t able to eat any dinner, wasn’t able to stand, never mind play deck quoits. It wasn’t just seasickness: it was pain shrieking inside her. Pain in her womb like you could never have imagined. Pain a hundred times worse than any Win had inflicted. Oh, God. Just to think of it is bad. She had to beg for something, for morphine, in fact, to lessen that agony, and then in her drugged dreams, she tried to ask the ship’s doctor, what the hell is pain like this doing inside me? How did it get there? But he wouldn’t answer the question. He told her she’d forget it. She’d get well again and forget.
    So she lay in her little cabin, forgetting, afraid of the sea and afraid of the darkness, and when the pain came back, she thought her life was over, thought it was seeping away into the Pacific Ocean, and good riddance, for what had it been but a shameful, terrifying life and now she was going to close her eyes and forget it all.
    Except, as fast as someone tells you to forget, there’s someone else nagging you to remember. There’s always some hag, some fiend who snaps: ‘Sit up. Look at this. Watch this. And now get up. Walk to the door. You can do it. Come on. Don’t give up. Don’t give in.’
    Will there never come a moment when she’s allowed to die?
    Days seem to be passing. Or it could be weeks.
    For hours, Wallis holds the diamond and ruby bracelet against her lips.
    The quietness of everything is strangely beautiful. And the hag seems to be leaving her alone, thank God. After that Hitler storm, she went mercifully silent.
    Then, one morning, before it’s hardly light, Wallis wakes up and hears voices outside her window. They’re near. They sound like they’re in the damn garden. And there should not be the voices of strangers in the garden. It’s what the garden’s for – to keep strangers out. They sound like those people who used to gobble up Mother’s soft-shell crabs, those