The Golden Hour Read online

  Dedication

  To women and men everywhere who live with depression.

  You are loved. You are needed. The night will pass.

  Epigraph

  In August 1940, the Duke of Windsor is appointed governor of the Bahamas by his brother, George VI, on the recommendation of Winston Churchill.

  While the former king feels the appointment is beneath his station, he accepts, in the expectation that loyal service in this colonial outpost will lead to more prestigious assignments in the future.

  But despite an exemplary public record of governorship for the duration of the Second World War, and the energetic support of the Duchess of Windsor as the governor’s wife, the duke is never again asked to serve his country in an official capacity.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I Lulu

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Part II Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Part III Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Part IV Lulu

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  War Office, London

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Lulu

  Lulu

  Lulu

  Part V Lulu

  Part VI Ursula

  Lulu

  Elfriede

  Epilogue: Lulu

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Beatriz Williams

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Lulu

  December 1943

  (London)

  In the foyer of the Basil Hotel in Cadogan Gardens, atop the tea-colored wallpaper, a sign advises guests that blackout hours will be observed strictly. Another sign reminds us that enemy ears are listening. The wallpaper’s crowded with tiny orange flowers that seem to have started out life as pink, and they put me in mind of a story I once read about a woman who stares at the wallpaper in her room until she goes batty. Although that wallpaper was yellow, as I recall, so I may have some time to go.

  I consult my watch. Three twenty-two.

  Outside the windows, the air’s darkening fast. Some combination of coal smoke and December fog and the early hour at which the sun goes down at this latitude, as if the wallpaper and the signboards and the piles of rubble across the street aren’t enough to make you melancholy. I check the watch again—three twenty-three, impossible—and my gaze happens to catch that of the desk clerk. He’s examining me over the top of a rickety pair of reading glasses, because he hasn’t liked the look of me from the beginning. Why should he? A woman shows up at your London hotel in the middle of December, the middle of wartime, tanned skin, American accent, unmistakable scent of the foreign about her. She pays for her room in advance and carries only a small suitcase. Now she’s awaiting some no-good rendezvous, right in the middle of your dank, shabby, respectable foyer, and you ought to telephone the authorities, just to be on the safe side. In fact, you probably have telephoned the authorities.

  The clerk’s gaze flicks to the window, and then to the clock above the mantel behind me. He steps away from the reception desk and goes to pull down the blackout shades, to close the heavy chintz curtains. His limbs are frail and stiff; his suit was tailored in maybe the previous century. When he moves, his white hair flies away from his skull, and I catch a whiff of cologne that reminds me of a barbershop. I consider whether I should rise and help him. I consider whether he’d kill me for it.

  Well. Not kill me exactly, not the literal act of murder. It seems the killing of people has got inside my head somehow. War will do that. War will turn killing into a commonplace act, a thing men do to each other every day, every instant, for no particular reason except not to be killed yourself, so that you start to expect it everywhere, murder hangs darkly over you and around you like an atmosphere. The valley of the shadow of death, that’s war. Killing for no particular reason. At least in regular life, when somebody kills somebody else, he generally has a damned good reason, at least so far as the killer’s concerned. It’s personal, it’s singular. As I observe the feathery movement of the clerk’s hair in the draft, I wonder how much reason a fellow like that needed to kill someone. We all have our breaking points, you know.

  A bell jingles. The front door opens. A blast of chill air whooshes inside, along with a pale woman in a worn coat and a brown fedora, almost like a man’s. She brushes the damp from her sleeves and looks around, spies the clerk, who’s just crossing the foyer on his way back to the desk.

  “I beg your pardon, my good man,” she begins, in a brisk, quiet English voice, and the light from the lamp catches her hair, caught up in a blond knot just beneath the brim of her hat. She’s not wearing cosmetics, except maybe a touch of lipstick, and you might say she doesn’t need any. There’s something Nordic about her, something that doesn’t need ornament. Height and blondness, all those things my own Italian mother couldn’t give me, though she gave me plenty else. There’s also something familiar about her. I’ve seen that mouth before, haven’t I? Those straight, thick eyebrows soaring above a pair of blue eyes.

  But no. Surely not. Surely I’m only imagining this, surely I’m only seeing a resemblance because I want to see one. After all, it’s impossible, isn’t it? Margaret Thorpe won’t receive my letter until this evening, when she arrives home from whatever government building she inhabits during working hours. So this woman can’t be her, cannot possibly be my husband’s sister, however much the sight of those eyebrows sets my heart stuttering. Anyway, her head’s now turned toward the clerk, and from this angle she looks nothing like Thorpe, not at all. Unless—

  The bell jingles again, dragging my attention back to the entryway. Another draft follows, and a man shambles past the door in a damp overcoat of navy blue, a hat glittering with mist. His face is pockmarked, the only notable thing about him. He casts a slow, bland expression around the room, and it seems to me that he takes in every detail, every flock on the wallpaper and spot on the upholstery, until he arrives, quite by accident, on me.

  The woman’s still addressing the clerk. No notice of us at all. I climb to my feet. “Mr. B—?”

  He steps forward and holds out his hand. “You must be Mrs. Thorpe,” he says warmly, and he takes my fingers between his two palms, as if we are father and daughter, meeting for tea after a short absence.

  Instead of remaining inside the Basil Hotel foyer (in which the enemy ears might or might not be listening, but the desk clerk certainly is) we head out into the gloom. I tend to step briskly as a matter of habit, but Mr. B— (I’m afraid I can’t reveal his real name) shuffles along at an awkward gait, and it’s a chore to keep my limbs in check. I tuck my hands inside my pockets and drum my fingers against my thighs. I feel as if he should speak first. He’s the professional, after all.

  “Well, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says at last. “I must congratulate you on your resolve. To have made your way to London in wartime, to have approached my office with such an extraordinary request—why, it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve seen in some time.”

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? Of course not. If there’s one thing we admire in this country, it’s dash. Dash and pluck, Mrs. Thorpe, which you appear to possess in abundance. How long had you two been married?”

  “Since July.”

&nb
sp; “This past July?”

  “Yes. The seventh.”

  “Ah. Just before he was captured, then. How dreadful.”

  “It was months before I had any word at all. At first, I thought he’d been called out on another of his—whatever you call them—”

  “Operations?”

  “Yes, operations. But when he didn’t return . . .”

  We pause to cross the street. I’ve allowed him to choose the route; I mean he’s the one who lives here, after all, the one who understands not just the map of London but the habits of the place. A couple of bicycles approach, one after the other, and while we wait for them to pass, Mr. B— speaks again.

  “Mind you, it was quite against the rules.”

  “What? What’s against the rules?”

  Mr. B— stares not at my face, but along a line that passes right above my head, down the street to the approaching bicycles. “Marrying,” he says blandly.

  The bicycles pass. We cross the street to enter a foggy square of red brick and white trim. Several of the houses are missing, simply not there, like teeth pulled from a jaw. Mr. B— leads me to the gardens in the middle, where we choose a wooden bench and sit about a foot apart, so that our arms and legs aren’t in any danger of touching, God forbid. The button at the wrist of my left-hand glove has come undone. I attempt to refasten it, but my fingers are too stiff.

  “Of course, I quite understand your distress, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, in the voice you might use to console a child. “It’s for that reason that we tend to discourage men such as Thorpe from forming any sort of personal attachment. To say nothing of marriage.”

  “We’re all human, Mr. B—.”

  “Still, it’s unwise. And then to allow you any hint of his purpose there in the Bahamas—”

  “Oh, believe me, he never said a word about that. I was the one who put two and two together. I was on the inside, you see. A friend of the Windsors.”

  “Were you really? Remarkable. Although I suppose . . .” He reaches into the pocket of his coat, brushing my arm with his elbow as he manipulates his fingers inside. He draws out a familiar white envelope. I recognize it because I carried this envelope myself, in a pocket next to my skin, for the entirety of the thirty-nine hours it took to cross the Atlantic, from Nassau to London, in a series of giant, rattling airplanes, before I stamped the upper right corner and posted it from a red metal postbox yesterday evening. And it’s funny, isn’t it, how a letter you mailed with your own two hands no longer belongs to you, once it begins that fateful drop through the slot. I glimpse my own handwriting, the stamp I placed there myself, and it’s like being reunited with an estranged child who has grown into adulthood.

  “You suppose?”

  Mr. B— taps the edge of the envelope against his knee. “I suppose it depends on what one means by friendship.”

  “In wartime, friendship can mean anything, can’t it?”

  “True enough. This note of yours. Quite astonished me this morning, when my secretary delivered it to my desk.”

  “But you must have known Thorpe was captured.”

  “Naturally. I take the most anxious interest in my agents, Mrs. Thorpe, and your—ah, your husband—he was one of—well. Well. That is to say, Mr. Thorpe in particular. We took the news very hard. Very hard indeed. Colditz, my God. Poor chap. Awful show.”

  He takes out a cigarette case, opens the lid, and tilts it toward me. I select one, and he selects another. As he lights the match, he covers the flame with his cupped hand. We sit back against the bench and smoke quietly. The wind on my cheek is cold, and the air tastes of soot, and the sky’s blackening by the instant. At first I don’t quite understand what’s missing, until I realize it’s the absence of light. Not a pinprick escapes the windows around us, not a ray of comfort. It’s as if we’re the only two people alive in London.

  “There used to be a railing,” says Mr. B—.

  “What’s that?”

  “Around the square gardens. A railing, to keep residents in and everybody else out, you see. They took it away and melted it down for iron.”

  “I suppose it’s more democratic this way.”

  “I suppose so. Here we are, after all, the two of us. Sitting on this bench, quite without permission.”

  “And that’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it? Democracy.”

  He straightens his back against the bench. “Well, then. Leonora Thorpe. Plucky young American from across the ocean. What are we to do with you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why are you here? You’ll forgive me, but London isn’t the most peaceful of cities, at the moment. I imagine, wherever you come from—”

  “Nassau.”

  “Yes, Nassau. But you weren’t born there, were you?”

  “No. I was raised in New York. I arrived in the Bahamas a couple of years ago, to cover the governor and his wife for a magazine.”

  “A magazine?”

  “Metropolitan magazine. Nothing serious, just society news. The American appetite for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is just insatiable.”

  Mr. B— sucks on his cigarette. “I must confess, it puzzles me. You Americans went to such trouble to rid yourselves of our quaint little monarchy.”

  “Oh, we like to gossip about them, all right. Just not to let them rule over us and all that.”

  “I imagine you were well paid?”

  “Well enough.”

  “A plum assignment, Mrs. Thorpe, spending the war in a tropical paradise. Plenty of food, plenty of money. Why didn’t you stay there?”

  “Why? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “But what’s to be gained by coming to London? Look around you. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and it’s already dark. Decent food in short supply. The weather—as you see—is simply dreadful, to say nothing of air raids and the threat of invasion. You ought to have stayed in the tropics, nice and safe, to wait for news.”

  I crush out my cigarette on the arm of the bench.

  “But that’s the thing, Mr. B—. I don’t mean to sit around and wait. That’s why I’ve come to London.”

  I say this carelessly—come to London—as if it were as easy as that. As easy as boarding an ocean liner and waddling from meal to meal, deck chair to deck chair, until you step off a week later, and poof! you’re in England. And maybe it was that easy, in another time. These days, it’s not so simple. That ocean teems with objects that hope to kill you. And if you want to reach London in a hurry, well, the challenge grows by geometric leaps and bounds, because there’s only one way to cross the Atlantic in a hurry, and it doesn’t come cheap, believe me.

  And then you contrive to meet this challenge. Clever you. You pay the necessary price, because you must, there’s no other choice. You find yourself strapped inside the comfortless fuselage of a B-24 Liberator as it prepares to separate you from the nice safe sun-soaked ground of the Bahamas and bear you, by leaps and bounds, to darkest England, a place you know only by hearsay. The engines gather power, the noise fills your ears like all the world’s bumblebees pollinating a single rose. The metal around you bickers and clatters, the world tilts, the air freezes, and there you are, eyes shut, stomach flipping, ears roaring, mouth watering, chest rattling, lungs panting, nerves screaming, heart aching, wishing you had goddamn well fallen in love with someone else. Someone you could live without.

  But you can’t. So now you’re here in London. London at last, on a garden bench in the middle of a darkened city, next to the only man in the world who can help you. Except the fellow’s shaking his head, the fellow’s got no faith in you at all.

  “Come to London,” he says. “How on earth did you manage it?”

  “I managed it because I had to. I’d do anything to free my husband.”

  “Free your husband? Is that the idea?”

  “I damned well won’t run around Nassau going to parties while my husband rots away in the middle of Nazi Germany.”

  Mr. B— extends his
arm and flicks ash onto the gravel. His shoes are beautifully polished, his trousers creased. Standards must be kept. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, “I don’t know quite how to express this.”

  “How about straight out? That’s how we Americans prefer it.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. Once one of our men falls into enemy hands, why, he’s on his own. Thorpe knew this. We can’t possibly risk more agents on hairy schemes that—you’ll forgive me—offer almost no chance of success. We’re stretched enough as it is. We’re scarcely hanging on.”

  “But I’m not asking you to risk anyone else. I’d go myself.”

  “I’m afraid it’s impossible. Thorpe’s been trained. He knows it’s his duty to escape, not ours to spring him out, and I’ve no doubt he’s doing his utmost.”

  “That’s not enough for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorpe,” Mr. B— says. “I don’t mean to be unkind. Naturally you’re suffering. It’s the most beastly news. One hopes for the best, of course. But one soldiers on. That’s all there is, just to soldier on.”

  “That’s all terrific, if you’re a soldier. If you’re allowed to do something useful instead of twiddling your thumbs.”

  “There are many ways in which women are able to serve the war effort, Mrs. Thorpe. And I can offer you my steadfast assurance that we’re doing our best, in my department and in Britain as a whole, all the services, every man Jack, to defeat Germany and bring your husband safely home.”

  Across the street, a pair of women hurry down the sidewalk, buttoned up in wool coats and economical hats. The clatter of shoes echoes from the bricks, and it occurs to me how silent a city can be, when gas is rationed and private automobiles are banned. You can hear an omnibus rattle and grind from a couple of streets away, and you realize how alone you are, how desolate war is.