Page 43 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)
‘It’s an obsession, and they never make sense. It’s a great pity Simpson decided on the divorce. As long as she was someone else’s wife, David’s hands were tied.’
Emma got a phone call early enough the next morning for her still to be in bed with her morning tray of tea and bread-and-butter and her post, her secretary Miss Ames sitting across the room and taking notes. When Emma heard Wally’s voice, she waved Miss Ames out of the room.
‘He rang me last night from the Fort,’ Wally said, without preamble. ‘He must have just got my letter. He said he will never let me go. He cried. He said if I tried to leave him he would cut his throat.’
‘How horrible! I’m sure he wouldn’t really—’
‘He would. Maybe not cut his throat, but Alec Hardinge told me he sleeps with a gun under his pillow. And there are always pills. He was quite hysterical – it took me ages to calm him down. Then this morning there was a letter from him, saying it all again, swearing if I left him his life would have no meaning and he’d kill himself.
He says if I’m not crowned beside him next May, he won’t be crowned at all.
I’m in agony, Emma. I feel like an animal in a trap. I wish I was dead!’
‘You don’t,’ Emma said encouragingly. ‘You’re going through a hard time, but you’ll come about. Aren’t Baltimore girls famous for their grit?’
There was a pause. Then, in a watery voice, ‘I don’t mind telling you I’m at a low ebb.
One thing,’ she added, ‘Goddard tells me there are so many divorce petitions piled up in London for the fall session, my case will never get called. He said I might have to wait a year for a hearing date. That might solve the problem.’
‘Because David wants to marry you before the Coronation?’
‘When he knows he can’t, he may let the whole marriage thing drop.’
The words were hopeful, but Emma heard the doubt underneath, and shared it.
The King’s principal characteristic was the sort of dogged stubbornness that got hold of a bone and would never let it go.
He would wear Wally down, as he had before, with a mixture of threats, endearments and jewels.
And with Ernest determined on a new life, she had nowhere else to turn.
So it proved. She heard nothing more from Wally for ten days, then bumped into her at Ciro’s, looking better, though still tense, and wearing a pair of sapphire and diamond ear clips in the shape of arrows.
She told Emma that Goddard had got her petition into the Ipswich Assizes, where there was much less competition.
It was to be heard on the 27th of October.
‘Which would mean a decree absolute at the end of April, just in time for the Coronation on the twelfth of May. Where is Ipswich, anyway?’
‘Suffolk. In the bit of England on the right-hand side that bulges out,’ Emma said.
‘Oh. It sounds rustic. I have to go and stay there, apparently. I have to be in residence for three weeks before the hearing. David’s got them looking for a house for me in the area. I hope it’s not too far from London – you’ll come and visit me there, won’t you?’
‘There are trains to Ipswich from Liverpool Street,’ Emma told her, skating over the invitation. ‘I believe it takes about an hour and a half.’
‘And I’m looking for a house in London,’ she went on. ‘Bryanston Court was all right for the Prince of Wales, but you can’t expect the King to visit me there. Oh, and I’m going to Balmoral on the twenty-third.’
‘I know,’ Kit said, when Emma told him that later.
‘Winnie Churchill told me – he was horrified. It’s an official palace, with long traditions of who ought to be asked and how they should conduct themselves.
Imagine our Wally barging into the kitchen and pushing the dour Scottish cooks aside to make club sandwiches!
And moving the furniture about, and giving orders.
Oh dear.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘They are a dreadful pair, but they do make life entertaining!’
There was a bigger scandal in store, which they found out about later.
Wally and the Rogerses went down by train, but to save Wallis from having to change trains, the King drove himself the sixty miles to Aberdeen to meet them and drive them back to Balmoral.
That was bad enough, but he had been supposed to visit Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on that day, and had called off, pleading illness, and made the Duke of York go in his place.
He thought that wearing motoring goggles would disguise him, but everyone recognised him, and his actions made it into the Aberdeen Evening Argus , which speculated sourly on what guest could possibly have been so important as to require the cancellation of an official engagement.
‘The Bertie Yorks are furious,’ Kit heard from Oliver, who had it from Eddie, who was staying with them at Birkhall.
‘Doing the hospital instead of the King made it look as though Bertie was complicit in the shockingly bad behaviour. HM asked Wally to act as hostess at a dinner at Balmoral the Yorks were invited to, and when Wally stepped forward to greet them, the Duchess ignored her and walked straight past. So now the Yorks will never forgive David and Wally, and they will never forgive the Yorks.’
Kit told Emma all this that evening, and she said, ‘You’re not laughing. You said they made life entertaining.’
‘I know, but suddenly I don’t find them so funny. It’s all getting rather … shoddy.’ He paused, then said, ‘I heard a joke at the club at lunchtime: Mrs Simpson got into a cab and said, “King’s Cross,” and the cabby said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”’
‘You’re not laughing at that, either.’
‘I didn’t say it was a good joke,’ said Kit.
The King rented a house in Cumberland Terrace for Wally – one of the fine Nash houses on the outer ring of Regent’s Park.
‘I’m having it redecorated,’ Wally told Emma at lunch at the Café Royal one day, ‘so it won’t be ready before I leave for Ipswich. David will have my things moved in while I’m away. I’m staying at Claridge’s for a few days.’
‘Where are you staying in Ipswich?’ Emma asked.
‘Some place nearby – Felixstowe, it’s called.
Goddard’s found a house there for me. By the sea.
’ She looked out at the dark day, where rain was sheeting down on Regent Street, and the few people hurrying by were sprouting umbrellas like mushrooms. ‘I’m stocking up on things to take with me.
One never knows if they’ll have one’s favourite brand of gin.
You will come and stay, won’t you? David is absolutely forbidden to visit me down there, and it will be a long three weeks. ’
‘You could do with the rest,’ Emma said.
‘But will I get it?’ she said, raising bleak eyes to Emma’s.
Those with friends in America were having American newspapers sent to them. They were full of Wally and the divorce.
King’s Moll to Reno in Wolsey’s Home Town
Baltimore Cutie Cuts Out British Belles
King to Wed Wally Before Christmas
Still the British press kept its silence, and the ordinary man in the street was in the dark, but everyone in London Society knew, and was rapidly dividing into two camps: those who believed the King should be allowed to marry his One True Love, and those who deplored the whole thing and believed nothing should be allowed to upset Queen Mary.
‘You wouldn’t think of stopping the divorce?’ Emma asked.
‘Everything’s gone too far now,’ Wally said. ‘Better to have it over and done with.’ She mused for a moment. ‘We weren’t unhappy, you know – Ernest and I. We jogged along perfectly well together. If David hadn’t come along …’
Emma was thinking of something Kit had told her that his solicitor Peter Bracey had said to him: that since Wally’s first divorce had taken place in America, on the grounds of desertion, it could be challenged as invalid in England, where adultery was the only accepted ground.
‘That would mean,’ Kit had said, quoting Bracey, ‘that her marriage to Simpson was bigamous. And bigamy is a crime. If anyone thinks to raise that , she could go to prison.’
Kit had also mentioned something Lord Halifax had said when he bumped into him in the lobby of the House: that the Archbishop of Canterbury was deeply distressed that the King did not go to church, and felt that he would have difficulty anointing him at the Coronation.
As for his marrying Mrs Simpson, he said no Anglican cleric would carry out the ceremony. He certainly would not.
But Emma kept the thoughts to herself. As Wally said, things had gone too far now.
Basil was reading a report that had come in on the wire from New York, headlined ‘MILLIONAIRES’ FLIGHT OVER NEW ENGLAND’.
The operating company of the German airship Hindenburg , the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei, had arranged a special trip on the 9th of October as an advertisement for their transatlantic service.
It was a ten-hour cruise for invited influential persons from New Jersey to Boston and back, with champagne and fine food and the inevitable speeches.
The airship was luxuriously appointed, and even featured a lightweight aluminium piano.
The public rooms included, Basil was amused to read, a smoking lounge, which he thought was rather risky for a vessel filled with combustible hydrogen.
Though, he supposed, given that people would smoke, it was probably better to confine it somehow.
The smoking lounge, he read, was pressurised to keep out any leaking gas, and was accessed by a single air-lock door behind the bar, so that the steward could check that the passengers coming out weren’t carrying a lit cigarette or pipe.
The Hindenburg , the largest thing ever to fly over the earth, was, of course, a valuable propaganda tool for the German government.
The Nazi swastika was prominently displayed on her keel, and she had been flown over the Olympic stadium in Berlin that summer, dropping leaflets praising Nazi achievements.