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Authors: Juliet Nicolson

Tags: #Literary, #General, #Historical, #Fiction

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BOOK: Abdication: A Novel
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I know you will keep it to yourself when I tell you that I have been suffering one of my worst glooms recently. Philip says that another war is a distinct possibility and I do not think I could manage to go through it all again, especially with Rupert leaving Oxford this coming summer and being the right age for being called up. I am praying it will not happen. But if you write and say yes to coming to see us, you will be giving Philip and me the very best of belated Christmas presents
.

This comes, as always, with a kiss from us both
.

Your loving godmother
,

Joan

 

Joan’s family and the Nettlefolds had known each other for as long as Evangeline could remember. Her mother and Joan had met
in England one summer while Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, two reigns ago. Mrs. Nettlefold had been visiting London on a sightseeing visit to Europe, or what she later referred to as “an eye-opener” (named after her favourite cocktail). In the summer of 1894 she had met the eighteen-year-old debutante Lady Joan Bradley (as one of three daughters of an earl the title had been hers from birth). They had been seated on adjacent gold chairs at a fashion show at the Maison Lucile in Mayfair, a new salon to which society flocked in the wake of the patronage of the elegantly bustled Lillie Langtry, the Prince of Wales’s favourite. That day when they had each bought a daringly diaphanous tea gown, and had marvelled at Lucile’s crêpe de Chine and rose silk underwear, a friendship had begun to develop between the young society woman and the socially ambitious American tourist. A year or two later, after Evangeline’s mother had found herself a rich suitor willing to play the several roles of banker, husband and father, she gave birth to Frank and then to Evangeline. The two godmothers selected to take care of Evangeline’s spiritual well-being were Madame Lucile, who gave Evangeline her love of fashion, and Joan, who instilled in her a hesitant affection for England. Charming as the country was, Evangeline always felt that the weather and an occasional propensity for unfriendliness let the place down.

The Blunt and Nettlefold families had remained in touch by letter and through occasional visits across the Atlantic, although the fortunes of the two godmothers had not prospered during the war. Madame Lucile, the one-time queen of the fashion world, found herself reduced to bankruptcy, her wafty Edwardian tea gowns no longer fashionable, and she died alone and poverty-stricken in a one-room flat in South London. Misfortune had struck Evangeline’s other godmother far earlier. At the beginning of the war, at the late age of thirty-eight, Joan married a successful politician, and soon afterwards became the mother of first a son, Rupert, in 1915, and then a daughter, Bettina, the following year.

But only a month before the Armistice was signed in 1918, a monstrous stray shell had torn with annihilating force into the body of Joan’s beloved younger sister Grace, a nurse stationed right up at the front line at Ypres, and despite a desperate search by her medical colleagues, no remains were found. This loss had permanently fractured Joan’s emotional equilibrium. Nearly twenty years later, and at sixty years old, Joan continued to suffer bouts of deep depression. Sometimes her husband, Sir Philip Blunt, was at his wits’ end trying to bring his wife back to the state of capable sunniness that had first prompted him to fall in love with her.

Evangeline also knew what it was to question the point of getting out of bed in the morning, and whether it would be worth the bother of dressing, washing, brushing her hair or speaking to a living soul. But through the dulling agents of food and shopping Evangeline taught herself to force the immediacy of the pain to recede and to diffuse her propensity to despair by making it a habit to think of the welfare of others. Pursuing responsibilities made Evangeline feel needed and worthwhile.

But should she go to Joan? England in the winter was hardly an enticing prospect. Her last trip had been five years ago during one of her mother’s visits to Royal Ascot and had proved most unenjoyable, what with the lack of male company and the incessant drizzle. Despite Joan’s generous invitation, Evangeline was doubtful if there really was anything worth going to England for.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

 

A
day or two later, slipped within the final late post of the Christmas season, another letter bearing an English stamp arrived for Evangeline. Helping herself to a handful of the sugar-covered almonds from the glass bowl on the hall table, she examined the envelope carefully before inserting into one corner the silver, flower-engraved knife that she used for opening letters. The flourishing loop that finished off the first letter of each word took her back to those Baltimore boarding-school days at Oldfields where the teachers often quoted the school motto to them: “Gentleness and courtesy are expected of girls at all times.”

As ever, the circled, underlined and hyphenated code word was reliably in place in the top left-hand corner of the envelope, the word she and Wallis had used in all correspondence with each other since their teenage years. At school, the custom had been for best friends to merge part of their own first names into one, and the middle part of Evangeline and the last part of Wallis had formed Gel-Lis. The two of them had always laughed when saying the made-up word out loud because although it sounded like “jealous,” that particular emotion played no part in their friendship. The other girls thought they made an incongruous pair as the stooped, cumbersome figure of Evangeline towered over her shorter, skinnier friend. Wallis had another soulmate,
the pretty Mary Kirk, with whom she was almost as close, and Evangeline, while grateful for her primary position in Wallis’s life, wondered if Wallis chose the company of herself over Mary solely for the shiny glamour bestowed on her by Evangeline’s contrasting dowdiness.

During school holidays, Wallis and Evangeline would go shopping in downtown Baltimore. The girls were just turning sixteen and the new department store, Hochschild’s, was a favourite place to meet. Evangeline would arrive early and spend stolen time in the store’s tempting hat department, swaddling her poor bald head in the latest velvet and silk models, her appearance in the mirror briefly confusable with a sophisticated young woman of fashion like Mary Kirk instead of the plain-faced egghead that usually stared back at her. It was in the coffee shop at Hochschild’s that Wallis confided to Evangeline that she had “done it.” The boy in question was the son of a friend of her parents, although much more beyond that Wallis was not prepared to divulge. It was clear from Wallis’s satisfied expression that Evangeline had reacted to her shared confidence with awe. In fact, Evangeline had found the information almost impossible to comprehend. When had it happened? How had it begun? How long did it go on for? Were they wearing clothes all the way through? Who unhooked the hooks? Was there any sound involved? Words? Shrieks? Many other mysteries demanded answers but Evangeline had not the courage to ask them. Evangeline was further perplexed when, having settled their check with the waitress and returned to the street, she noticed that Wallis had no trouble at all swinging herself onto her bicycle and pedalling off at speed. A hard bicycle seat that tapered to a point? Surely after such an “interference” it must now
hurt
? Nonetheless, Evangeline left the department store that day feeling as if life had lurched forward a notch or two. If Evangeline herself remained innocent of the interlocking physical jigsaw that two human bodies were evidently capable of, she could at least glow in the reflected smugness of her newly worldly friend.

 

Two decades ago Wallis had returned to Baltimore from China, where she had been living for two years with her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer, a naval pilot known by everyone as Win. Evangeline had been looking forward to their reunion in Wallis’s old family home but had spoken little during the meeting as Wallis described the drama of the Orient and the horror of dealing with her husband’s alcoholic temper. After more than two hours of chat Wallis gave Evangeline a silver Chinese paperknife, engraved with flowers and sheathed in its own silver holder.

“I bought it in a bazaar in Peking,” Wallis told her. “I thought you might like it.”

Evangeline was moved by such thoughtfulness.
Friendship was everything
, she thought contentedly, as she put the knife in her bag and Wallis announced she had an even more special present to show her in the bedroom.

“What do you think of this?” Wallis asked, her usual macaw-like voice suddenly unnaturally soft. In her hand was a flesh-coloured metal cylinder about four inches long and a generous inch in diameter. “We could have some fun with this, Vangey. I learned how in China. I could show you if you like.”

Evangeline could smell Wallis’s spice-scented breath as her provocative expression was accompanied by the slow unbuttoning of Wallis’s beautiful silk blouse. Before Evangeline could move out of the way, Wallis had reached for the pussycat bow at the neck of Evangeline’s dress and loosened it with one short tug.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Evangeline cried, sending Wallis stumbling backwards with a forceful shove, the stifling intimacy of the bedroom suddenly intolerable as she made a rush for the front door.

That horrible misunderstanding had reverberated in Evangeline’s thoughts during all the intervening years, and at first Evangeline had
vowed privately to have nothing more to do with her old schoolfriend. She had learned through the Baltimore grapevine that Wallis and Win had been divorced and that Wallis had gone on to marry an English shipping executive named Ernest Simpson was already known to her. Evangeline and Wallis had not met since the unfortunate incident in Wallis’s bedroom and no reference had ever been made to the occasion in their infrequent letters.

Maybe that was all about to change, Evangeline wondered as she removed several folded pages from the envelope. The letterhead was unknown to her. Had Wallis and her new husband made friends with some sort of military family? What sort of people lived in a fort? There was no accounting for the English and their old-fashioned ways. Despite the incident in the bedroom Evangeline could not help looking forward to Wallis’s letters. They were always so amusing. Wallis had made Evangeline laugh at her aversion to Britain’s lumpy pillows and her unease with the complex etiquette at table. Why for example did the British fall upon their food as soon as it was placed in front of them, as if they had not eaten for months, instead of an hour or so earlier?

“Do start, oh
do
,” a hostess would apparently call down the table even though the butler had not yet completed his rounds and half the guests still had nothing to start on.

Wallis had also written of her relief at finding a new husband, half English to boot, with whom she got on so well. Their relocation to Ernest’s mother’s home country and the fun they had been having over choosing antique furniture for their small flat had confirmed for Evangeline that this second marriage had been a good decision.

Wallis had also described the filth of the capital city and how the sulphurous-smelling pea soupers, the greenish fog that Londoners called the “London particular,” restricted the visibility in the city streets making it impossible to tell the house numbers without peering right
up against the door. She told of how the smoggy dirt from coal fires that belched night and day from the city’s chimneys was intensified by the diesel fumes from the increasing number of cars on the road. What is more, Wallis could not abide the dust and grime that had found its way
inside
the houses.

Dirt and chaos did not suit Wallis. The photographs of herself that she sometimes enclosed always confirmed that everything about Wallis was clean and tidy; she was as assured as a flamingo on one leg. The attractive waviness of her youthful hairstyle had long since disappeared. Instead she had become streamlined in every detail from the fine symmetry of the parting of her hair right down the middle, to the precise manner in which she posed for the camera in her chic and cinched dresses. Even the pencilled-in shape of the upended smile of her eyebrows that brought some relief to the otherwise empty expanse of her broad forehead had apparently been subjected to the same strict dietary regime. Some of the girls at school had nicknamed her “Skellis.” Evangeline tried not to dwell on the name they might have called
her
when she was out of the room, but skeletal she was certainly not.

BOOK: Abdication: A Novel
5.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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