The Golden Hour Read online

  “How kind.”

  “Really, though. The Red Cross. It’s such a smashing success. All those women, working so hard. Only you could raise all that money, organize everything so perfectly—”

  The duchess laughed and turned her head. “Would you care for a drink, Mrs. Randolph? David keeps a few bottles handy in here. He’s forbidden to start drinking before seven, but once the clock strikes, why . . .”

  “No, thank you.”

  But she was already moving away, already opening the door to a cabinet of gleaming wood, the kind of cabinet you thought must hold important papers and that kind of thing, but actually contained about a dozen various bottles of liquor, several glasses, a siphon, a bucket.

  “There’s no ice, I’m afraid,” she said, “but you don’t mind that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Brandy? I like a glass of brandy in the evenings.”

  “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” She turned to me. “You certainly look as if you could use a drink.”

  “I like to keep my wits about me.”

  “I see.” She closed the cabinet door. She stood about fifteen or twenty feet away, about as elegant as a woman could possibly look, but then she had the kind of figure that sets off clothes to their best advantage. Long and angular, lean to the point of nonexistence; not exactly attractive by itself, but irresistible as a foil to what covered those bones, that flesh. Like all Southern ladies, she moved gracefully, shaping the air as she went. Her thin, tight, scarlet smile contained electricity. “Now, don’t be afraid,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Most people are. But I don’t bite.”

  “If you did, I’d bite back.”

  The duchess laughed. “You brave thing. That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it.”

  She gestured to the window seat. “Can we sit a moment? I have a question for you, Mrs. Randolph. A proposition.”

  I hesitated only long enough to catch my breath. “Of course.”

  We sat. The window faced north, toward the twinkling of lights that rimmed the shore and the sudden blackness of the ocean. The stars were invisible. I smelled the duchess’s perfume, her cigarettes. Around us lay that beautiful, masculine room of wood and photographs and, beyond that, the faint music from the party in the garden. I folded my hands in my lap and said again how lovely the place looked.

  “Naturally the papers had nothing but bad things to say,” she told me. “How extravagant I was. How out of touch with the common man. Never mind that the house—Government House, don’t forget, the very seat and symbol of government, of the British Empire—was riddled with mildew and falling apart. Anyway, we paid for a great deal of the redecoration out of our own pockets. A great deal.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Of course you hadn’t. They’re all against me. I’m sure you read about our little tour this fall, how many pieces of luggage went along with us.”

  “I can’t remember the number,” I said modestly.

  “A hundred and forty-six, they said, which wasn’t remotely true, it was no more than seventy-three, and anyway it wasn’t just ours. It belonged to our entourage as well. Our private secretary, Miss Drewes, and Major Phillips—that’s David’s aide-de-camp—and so on. But each and every story they print has to conform to this—this idea they have about me. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that is. And it’s all very frustrating. One can’t answer back. One can try, of course, but that only makes one sound petulant.”

  “The duchess doth protest too much.”

  “Exactly. I see you understand the business, Mrs. Randolph.”

  “What business?”

  “Journalism.” Her smile took on a feline quality. “You’re a journalist yourself, aren’t you?”

  I sort of choked. “Journalist?”

  “Yes. Metropolitan magazine, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. That is, no. That is, the magazine sent me out here to gather a little background information—”

  “Now, Mrs. Randolph—”

  “—I’ve never written a word for them. Not a word.” I paused. “How did you know about that?”

  “Oh, I hear things. It’s my business to hear things. Not for myself, you understand, but for David’s sake. All these stories in the press, these terrible things they print, it upsets him so much. I try to protect him, of course, but it’s impossible. He will read them all.”

  I started to rise, and then remembered you weren’t supposed to stand except with permission, and then remembered I was American, after all, not subject to such rules. I rose. I nearly said Mrs. Simpson and caught myself just in time. “Ma’am,” I said instead, “I can’t imagine why you’re telling me all this.”

  “Oh, I understand, believe me,” she said. “You’ve got a job to do. A girl’s got to make her way in the world. I also suspect there was no Mr. Randolph. Am I correct?”

  There was a noise through the window, a spray of brilliant laughter. The duchess gave no sign of hearing it, not a flinch.

  “Oh, the husband’s real enough,” I said. “At least, he was real. But even a dead husband gives a girl on her own a bit more respectability.”

  “Of course. A girl like you, for example, a girl with no one to stand up for her. I understand completely. You haven’t got a fortune. Just an allowance of some kind, I presume?” She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes intelligently. “Or not even that?”

  “I’m afraid that’s none of—”

  “Mrs. Randolph.” She rose to meet me. “What if you were to become a journalist?”

  “Become a journalist?”

  “A column of your very own, weekly or monthly, whatever suits. Syndicated in all the papers, or exclusive to Metropolitan, as you like.”

  “What kind of column?”

  “Why, reporting from Nassau, from the middle of society, all our busy little doings here. Intriguing tidbits. The kind of details that only an intimate friend of the Windsors might know. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America?”

  The exact shade of her eyes was so particular, so remarkable, a plush, vivid lavender, they had a name for it: Wallis blue. Her wedding dress, I’m told, matched that shade exactly. And I don’t blame her. Those eyes, they held you in thrall, especially when she wanted them to. When she channeled the full force of her charm through them and into you. On that July day, the duchess was as much a mystery to me as to everyone else who wasn’t married to her, and maybe even—maybe especially—to the fellow who was. I perhaps thought her morals a little wanting, her ethics a little thin, her mind a little shallow, her clothing a little fabulous and perhaps the most interesting thing about her. As for me, I was a pedigree twenty-five-year-old feline, blessed with a sleek, dark pelt and composure in spades, polished to a sheen by decent schooling and a little over a year of college, followed by a swift, brutal tutorial in the outside world to harden the skin beneath. I thought I was plenty of match for a woman like that, the Duchess of Windsor, the former Mrs. Ernest Simpson, the former Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer, yes, that woman, striking, thin-lipped, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed, who nearly toppled the British Crown by the force of her ambition.

  But here’s the thing. You cannot possibly know somebody you’ve never met. You can observe her in a thousand photographs, a hundred newsreels, and not understand a thing about her. That person on the magazine cover is a character in a play, a character in a book, a character of her own creation and your imagination, and this immaculate namesake bears no more than a passing resemblance to the original. Remember that, please. You don’t know her. You know only the fascinating fiction she’s presented to you. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America, she had said.

  “I bet it would,” I answered.

  Until that instant, I hadn’t noticed the tension in her face. That tautness, I thought it was her natural state. Now
everything loosened, her eyes and cheekbones and mouth, that fragile skin, like the softening of frosting on a cake. She looked almost human. I thought this couldn’t be happening, I couldn’t be standing here. She couldn’t be offering me this prize. There must be some trick. But her eyes were so blue.

  “Then we understand each other?” she said.

  “I believe so.”

  “Good.”

  She held out her hand to me, and I clasped it. The coldness shocked me, but what did I expect? I always seemed to simmer a degree or two warmer than other women. I opened my mouth to ask her particulars, how all these lovely plans might be set into motion, but she spoke first.

  “Let’s return to our guests, shall we? There are so many people I’d like you to meet.”

  Elfriede

  September 1900

  (Switzerland)

  “If something were to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”

  “No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”

  His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.

  “You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.

  Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”

  “I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most—most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”

  A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.

  Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”

  Elfriede makes an O with her mouth and turns away to face the peaks of the neighboring mountains. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.

  “You speak from experience?”

  “You shouldn’t ask such questions.”

  Wilfred makes a noise—not his Scotch noise, another one. He has a wardrobe of noises for every occasion. Each nuance of thought. Over the course of the past few weeks, Elfriede has learned and cataloged them all. This one’s meant to convey amusement, tempered with just a lash of longing.

  “Anything but that,” Elfriede says. “You can ask me anything but that.”

  In fact, Gerhard was almost touchingly eager to please her, after the disastrous deflowering. He had dreamed of nothing but consummation with Elfriede during those months of their betrothal, and when at last he lifted his damp, triumphant head from the pillow next to hers, he’d evidently expected to see his own expression of spent rapture mirrored in that of his bride. The tears astonished him. Well, they horrified him! Filled him with profound remorse.

  The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.

  No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.

  Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.

  Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.

  Still, she can’t discuss these things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)

  “Fair play, I suppose,” says Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”

  “All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”

  Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”

  “Travel where?”

  “Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”

  Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”

  “Heaven,” says Elfriede.

  Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is
more like heaven, if you ask me.”

  A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.

  “I don’t understand . . .” she begins softly.

  “Understand what?”

  “Why you should move me like this, when he loved me so much. So terribly.”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it? This.”

  She leans her head on his shoulder. “What are we to do?”

  “Nothing.” He touches her hair. Then he says it again, in English. Nothing.

  Nothing, she repeats.

  “No-thing. Th-th-th. Put your tongue beneath your upper teeth.”

  “No-thing,” Elfriede says again, paying particular attention to this English th, her Waterloo these past few weeks. In order to pass the anxious time while Wilfred lay in bed with his relapse—a friendly orderly passed the notes between them—she began to teach herself English with the books from the sanatorium’s extensive library. She hoped to astound him when he recovered. Good morning, she said to him, when they met at last on the wall of the infirmary garden, the exact spot where they had spoken their first words to each other. (This by design, of course, in a note passed that morning from the orderly’s pocket.) I hope you are vell. She remembers how he turned—she’d come up to him from the meadow behind—and how the sight of his face, pale but radiant, made her dizzy. How his smile, growing slowly across his face to expose his teeth, illuminated the universe. Well, he said. W-w-w. Well.

  W-w-well, she repeated.

  I am well, thank you. Are you well, my love?

  I am wery vell.

  Now it’s a joke between them, how wery vell they both are during these slow, beautiful hours together. How wery vell the sun shines upon them, how wery vell the air smells, the ground feels, the skin glows. How wery vell she’s progressing in her English lessons.