ELEANOR AND RALPH WERE DELIGHTED TO WELCOME Mary to their home, and as they sat with drinks on a terrace in their pretty garden, looking out over the lawn, Mary told them the story of her and Wallis, Jackie and Ernest.
‘The truth is I’ve been in love with Ernest since we first met back in 1924,’ she confessed, ‘but it all got into a terrible muddle. We were both married to other people at the time, then Wallis came along and ensnared him.’ She sniffed, determined not to cry. ‘His first marriage broke up because of her. But once she had married him, she set her cap at the Prince of Wales. Then my marriage to Jackie broke up – and now it’s all a hopeless mess.’
Eleanor was sympathetic. ‘The first day I saw you and Ernest at Petworth, I assumed you were a couple. You’re so easy and natural together, so interested in what the other has to say. I am sure it’s all going to work out. I have an instinct about it.’
‘But if Wallis can’t marry the King, then I can’t marry Ernest. We are bound up in some infernal maze and I can’t see how we will ever untangle ourselves.’ She could not tell them about Ernest’s conversation with Winston Churchill, but they already knew that the King was not allowed to marry a divorcee.
‘Why can’t she just be his damn mistress?’ Ralph suggested. ‘English kings have always married some fecund young aristocrat to produce an heir and a spare, and taken the women they love as mistresses. It’s a system that’s worked since time immemorial.’
‘Wallis will want more security,’ Mary predicted. ‘Having oodles of money is important to her, and so is her social standing.’
Ralph lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes against the smoke. ‘Mistresses can have both of those. The King could settle an allowance on her in perpetuity. I can’t see what all the fuss is about.’
If only it were that simple, Mary thought. Wallis wanted the King and she also wanted the respectability of having a husband waiting at home – and what Wallis wanted she tended to get. Besides, Ernest had not asked Mary to marry him; he had never even told her he loved her. She knew he liked her, but would he want to remarry as soon as he was free of his current marriage?
‘You must let me paint you while you are here,’ Ralph suggested. ‘There’s an expression on your face right now that I would dearly love to capture.’
They agreed she would extend her stay till Ernest found her an apartment, and that work on the painting would begin the next morning.
Ernest telephoned from the office on Monday morning, and when Mary asked how his weekend at Fort Belvedere had gone he said, ‘Miserable. Wallis was louder and more demanding than ever, bossing the King around in the most demeaning way. When she noticed that the strap of her shoe had come undone she ordered him to get down on hands and knees to fasten it, in front of all the other guests. Personally, I suspect she unfastened it herself to facilitate her little show of power.’
‘Did she ask if you had been in touch with me?’ Mary ventured.
‘She did, and I’m afraid I had to tell her you were visiting the Hargreaveses. You are likely to hear from her.’
Mary laughed hoarsely. ‘Who knows? She might want to apologise for slapping me. I doubt it somehow.’
Ernest cleared his throat, then changed the subject to talk about some apartments he was viewing on her behalf.
Thoughts of Wallis were never far from Mary’s mind. Her initial distress was turning to fury when she thought about being slapped and unceremoniously evicted. You’ll regret it, she told Wallis in her head. No one else will stand by you the way I have. She felt guilty, too: of course she should not have gone to bed with her friend’s husband – but that friend had long since ceased being a wife to him.
When a letter arrived from Wallis the following day, it was full of vitriol.
You are a snake in the grass. I have always been loyal to you and yet you skulk around behind my back, behaving with cunning and deceit. I see now that I read your character wrong from the beginning, and that you were always jealous of me. Whatever I had, you wanted. You used me to gain access to the social circles in which I move, knowing that my friends would never accept you on your own merits because you are dull and your conversation tedious.
The letter finished: Be very clear about this: you will never truly have Ernest. His love for me will always be greater than whatever transient feelings he might currently entertain for you.
Mary replied the same day, venting her anger on the page:
Far from being jealous of you, I have always felt pity for you. Poor Wallis whose mother does not have much money, poor Wallis whose first marriage was such a disaster, poor Wallis with no family to support her . . . I gave selflessly and you used me for your own ends, right the way through our friendship. Jacques always said I should beware because you were not loyal, and I knew in my heart it was true. You are the most selfish person in the world, only interested in other people for what they can do for you. I will never feel pity for you again. Whatever happens next, you have brought it on yourself.
Back and forth the letters went, each of them raking up old history and trying to inflict the maximum hurt. Fury energised Mary. As soon as a new letter arrived, she rushed to the writing desk, bursting to reply. In one note she hurled the accusation that Wallis had been sleeping with von Ribbentrop as well as the Prince, and in her reply Wallis called her ‘ignorant and pathetic’.
After a week of this, Ernest rang and begged her to desist.
‘Wallis is suffering terribly from her stomach ulcers and I’m sure it’s been brought on by the stress of your correspondence. Whatever her next letter says, please will you ignore it? You be the civilised one.’
It stuck in Mary’s craw to let Wallis have the last word, but she was mollified when Ernest promised he would visit her at the Hargreaveses’ the following weekend. She was yearning to see him.
She wrote to Buckie instead:
I don’t know when Wallis turned into such a hard-nosed bitch. I look back through her life and wonder: was it in China, where she learned habits no lady should know? While here in London I have watched her bewitch a king she can barely stand the sight of, seduce a Nazi spy, and behave with callous disregard for the feelings of Ernest, who is a man of impeccable moral fibre. He still speaks up for her despite all she has heaped on his doorstep, for reasons I cannot fathom.
A reply arrived from Buckie saying she was delighted to hear that Mary had fallen out with her childhood friend. Wallis has always been entirely self-centred, she wrote. It used to break Mother’s heart to watch how she controlled you like a puppet, but you never could see it yourself. She continued: Over here the newspapers report on her intimacy with the King and only just stop short of calling her a whore, but there is nothing about the Nazi spy. Do tell more.
Mary clutched the letter to her chest. Despite the hospitality shown her by the Hargreaveses, and the sittings for her portrait that kept her busy each day, she was starting to feel very homesick for America and her true family. London was going to be a lonely and friendless place on her return.
When Ernest’s car pulled up in front of the Hargreaveses’ house, Mary rushed outside, flung her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth.
‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you,’ she breathed, inhaling the reassuring scent of him.
He pulled away, embarrassed by her show of affection in front of their hosts, who were standing on the steps. Mary knew that both were discreet and supportive of their situation. She slipped her arm through Ernest’s as she introduced him to Ralph. He greeted Eleanor with a handshake.
‘We’ve put Ernest in the room next to yours,’ Eleanor told Mary. ‘Why don’t you take him up and we’ll meet for cocktails in the drawing room when you are ready.’
Mary led him upstairs, chatting excitedly about the portrait Ralph was painting and the news from her sister back home and how generous her hosts were being. She was gabbling out of the sheer joy of seeing him.
Once they were in his room, Ernest put his arms round her and kissed her properly, making her giddy with desire.
‘I have news for you,’ he said. ‘As of today, you are the tenant of an apartment at Albion Gate in Hyde Park. It has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and looks out over the park. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
‘Isn’t that rather close to Bryanston Court?’ she asked, wary of bumping into Wallis in the butcher’s shop or the greengrocer’s.
‘Five minutes away. But you’ll find she is never there. I attended a dinner with her and the King yesterday and told them it was the last time I was prepared to perform the role of chaperone. It’s humiliating and I can’t bear it. They will have to think of some other solution.’
‘Gosh! How did they take that?’ Mary asked.
Ernest grimaced. ‘The King and I had rather a difficult talk in private. He pressed me again to divorce Wallis, to which I replied that I was not standing in her way. It’s her who does not want to divorce me. He said he would talk to her, so I suspect the situation will accelerate now. He is a most impetuous man.’ He shook his head, his expression disapproving.
‘Are they going away for the summer?’
‘Of course. They’ll be off to the South of France at the end of June and we can have some peace.’
That was reassuring, although privately Mary still found it infuriating that her future happiness depended on the woman she felt such hatred for. She had not one ounce of sympathy when Ernest described Wallis bent double in agony because of her ulcers, unable to drink alcohol or eat anything but milk puddings.
Good! she thought, although she murmured sympathetic noises.
‘I brought your dress,’ Ernest told her, handing over a brown paper parcel. ‘The dressmaker sent it. I have paid her for it as well.’
‘Thank you,’ Mary said. ‘That’s kind of you.’ She knew she would never wear it now. Any pleasure she might have taken in the King’s gift had been soured by the bitterness of her fight with Wallis.
They had cocktails, then dinner, and later in the evening Ernest asked Ralph if he might see the portrait of Mary.
‘Of course,’ Ralph agreed. ‘I’d be delighted.’
‘That’s not fair!’ Mary protested. She had not been allowed to view it herself, because Ralph said he did not like his subjects to influence him as he worked.
Mary sat chatting with Eleanor while Ernest followed Ralph to his studio across a yard behind the kitchen. They were gone some half an hour, and when they returned, Ernest had a soft look in his eyes.
‘Do you like it?’ Mary asked. ‘I hope I don’t look hideous.’
Ralph followed him into the room, beaming. ‘Ernest has offered to buy it, so I suppose he must think it’s not too bad.’
Ernest crossed the room and put his arm round Mary’s shoulder, kissing her on the cheek. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.