RACHEL AND ALEX ARRIVED IN BRIGHTON JUST after 6 p.m., by which time the registry office had closed and their wedding guests were enjoying a glass of champagne in the Bonne Auberge. A cheer went up as they walked in, hauling their luggage and a large, unwieldy parcel, and that set the mood for an evening full of laughter. All Rachel’s favourite people were in the room, and she darted from one to the next, chatting and hugging and quaffing champagne.
‘We’re going to reschedule the registry office for next spring,’ she told the guests. ‘I’ll send out fresh invites as soon as I have a date.’
The 1930s wedding cake was splendid, as was her bouquet of lilies of the valley, which Nicola had collected from the florist’s. She looked beautiful in her fifties silk dress, and Rachel noticed that Richard seemed to be spending a lot of time at her table.
‘Nicola’s single,’ she whispered discreetly, and he gave her a grin and a thumbs-up.
At the renamed ‘Not-the-Wedding-After-Party’ two days later, Rachel noticed Nicola and Richard sitting amongst the coats in her bedroom, talking earnestly. She went to rescue some quiche from the oven, to top up glasses and socialise, and when she next looked, they were still in the same spot, still talking.
‘I can’t believe you never introduced us before. He’s gorgeous!’ Nicola whispered when she came to the kitchen to refill their glasses.
Rachel was delighted. ‘I’m glad to see you two are getting on. He’s not your usual type.’
‘Why not?’ Nicola’s face fell.
‘Because he’s a nice guy.’
Nicola beamed and did a little dance, elbows pumping, hips wiggling.
On the evening of Monday 22 December, Rachel and Alex drove to West Sussex to visit Susie Hargreaves. Rachel had telephoned the day after they got back from Paris to say she had a Christmas present for her.
Susie sounded surprised and a bit embarrassed. ‘You have? I’m sorry, I didn’t think to . . . I haven’t bought any presents this year . . .’
‘Don’t worry. I didn’t pay for this. And it’s more for your grandmother than for you. I got it in Paris. Can Alex and I bring it down?’
There was a pause while Susie processed this. ‘My grandmother? It’s not . . . It couldn’t be the painting, could it?’
‘Indeed it is!’
There was a long pause, so long that Rachel called, ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ into the phone; then she realised that Susie was in tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rachel chuckled. ‘I must stop making you cry.’
As soon as she closed the shop, she drove to collect Alex from the flat then they set off towards Susie’s home, chatting along the way about Nicola and Richard, and some other unlikely pairings that had been established at the Saturday-night party. It had continued till the following morning, when Rachel had got up to find guests sprawled across sofas and chairs like a scene from a Toulouse-Lautrec bordello painting.
They pulled into Susie’s driveway at 7.30 p.m. and she came out to greet them wearing long brown leather boots and a green Barbour jacket. ‘Follow me.’ She waved, her car keys dangling. ‘I’m going to take you to meet Grandma.’
She climbed into her Land Rover and set off down the drive, taking a right turn at the end. Rachel followed for about two miles along country lanes before Susie took a left into a courtyard with a sign announcing Laurel Grove Care Home.
They got out of the car and Alex carried the painting as they followed Susie inside. She had to sign them in at reception, then they were buzzed through to a crimson-carpeted corridor with a number of rooms leading off. She stopped at one and tapped on the door, calling, ‘Grandma? It’s me.’
Rachel saw a frail, spindly woman in a chair by the window. Her shoulders were hunched and her chin rested on her breastbone as if her neck had collapsed in some degenerative process of age. Her hair was snow white and wispy like baby hair, and the hand she extended was curved in a claw shape.
‘This is my grandmother, Eleanor.’ Susie introduced them. Alex rested the painting against a wall to come forward and shake her hand.
As well as a bed, there was a bookcase in the room and several shelves of trinkets, a wardrobe, and a door that Rachel could see led to an en suite. Susie brought some extra chairs from the corridor outside, one more than they needed, and arranged them in a semicircle round Eleanor.
‘These kind people have brought something for you,’ Susie said, and Alex lifted the painting and placed it on the spare chair just two feet in front of Eleanor. Rachel had cleaned off the cobwebs and mildew, and polished the wooden frame. There was a tear in the canvas backing that would have to be mended, but otherwise it wasn’t in bad shape.
Eleanor clasped her hands beneath her chin and gazed at the painting in silence for quite some time, too emotional to speak.
‘Wasn’t she beautiful?’ she said at last, her voice croaky with age, her accent that of an aristocrat from a bygone era. ‘That’s my friend Mary.’ She shook her head slightly. ‘I never thought I’d see her again. Ralph would be so pleased.’
‘I think Alex and Rachel would like to hear the story of the painting,’ Susie prompted. ‘If you feel up to it.’
‘Oh yes, I’d love to. This brings back a time before the war, a time when we were all happy.’ As she spoke, she didn’t take her eyes off the painting, as if drinking in every detail: the curve of Mary’s hand on her lap, the pearl earrings, the vivacious eyes and warm smile.
Eleanor began by explaining what Rachel already knew: that in 1912 she had attended the same school in Baltimore as Wallis Warfield and her best friend Mary Kirk. ‘They were a riot!’ she explained. ‘Everyone gravitated towards them because of their irreverent humour. Mary was the more open character while Wallis was difficult to get close to. She was secretive about her home life, and it was only decades later that Mary told me she was ashamed that her father had died and her mother was not very well off. Isn’t it silly how we worry about such things as children?’
She told them that she had lost touch with the two girls after she left the school, but bumped into Mary at Petworth one day in the mid 1930s.
‘By that time it was well known in society circles that Wallis and the Prince of Wales were an item, and it was clear that Mary was in love with Wallis’s husband Ernest. I so hoped they would end up together.’ She paused, recollecting. ‘When Wallis heard of Mary and Ernest’s affair, they had a furious row and Mary came to stay with us for a while, to lie low. That’s when Ralph painted her.’ She gestured at the painting. ‘But he made the idiotic mistake of sending it to Wallis and Ernest’s address and Wallis kidnapped it. That was in 1936, and she held onto it for the next fifty years, until her death.’
‘Why did she want it?’ Rachel asked, glancing at the painting again.
‘Pure spite,’ Eleanor replied. ‘She couldn’t bear it that Mary was the prettier of the two, the even-tempered one and, eventually, the one who got Ernest. Wallis liked to be best at everything. She needed to win.’
Susie chipped in. ‘When Diana told me that she was visiting Villa Windsor, I asked her to keep an eye out for the painting. Of course, there was always a chance Wallis had destroyed it.’
‘I was sure she wouldn’t have,’ Eleanor insisted. ‘Mary was the closest friend Wallis ever had, and this picture captures her to a T. It’s got her personality in the paint.’
Susie took up the story again. ‘The Duchess was bedridden with dementia by the time Diana met her, so she wasn’t able to tell her about the painting’s whereabouts. Her affairs were being managed by a lawyer, who wouldn’t hear of anything being removed from the house. Then, after the Duchess died, her will left the bulk of her wealth to the Louis Pasteur Institute, so things became even more complicated.’ She reached over to hold her grandma’s hand. ‘When Mohamed Al-Fayed moved in to restore the house, I wrote to him about the painting but of course I couldn’t prove it belonged to us – it didn’t, in fact, because Ernest Simpson had paid for it. Al-Fayed’s secretary was very polite but suggested we bid for it at the auction of contents. I almost gave up at that point because I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of prices it might reach.’
‘I could never forget that picture.’ Eleanor had a distant look in her eyes, and Rachel wondered what memories it was conjuring for her. ‘Ralph died five years ago and it made me think about it even more. We have many of his other portraits in the house, but this was always his best.’
‘Did Wallis and Mary ever make up their argument?’ Rachel asked.
‘I doubt it.’ The old woman shook her head. ‘Mary was furious, simply furious. You see, Wallis wouldn’t let go of Ernest even once she was married to the Duke. She wrote him letters saying how much she missed him, how good life had been when they were together and how she wished things had worked out differently. She even told him that it was her dream they would end up together again one day. Ernest showed the letters to Mary, thinking honesty was the best policy, but they made her incandescent with rage. You can imagine!’
‘He should have told Wallis to stop writing,’ Alex said. ‘He should have put his foot down.’
Eleanor nodded. ‘I agree, but that’s not the kind of man he was.’
All of them had angled their seats to look at the portrait as they talked. ‘Were Mary and Ernest happy?’ Rachel asked.
‘I never saw a couple happier,’ the old woman breathed. ‘They had a baby called Ernest Henry. His father’s name.’
‘I know Ernest Simpson is dead, but is Mary still alive?’ Rachel asked.
‘Oh no, dear.’ Eleanor gave a little laugh. ‘I’m the last of that era. We were all born in the nineteenth century and now we’re at the end of the twentieth. It makes me feel ancient to think of it.’ She tapped Susie on the hand. ‘Do you think you could fetch something from my cupboard? The brown leather handbag on the top shelf.’
Susie rose to her feet and opened the cupboard. Rachel noticed that there weren’t many clothes inside; maybe ten dresses. She supposed you didn’t need many when you reached the age of a hundred.
Susie passed the bag to her grandmother. It was a stylish clutch bag with a tortoiseshell clasp, and Rachel tried to guess what era it was from. Possibly the 1930s. Her guess was soon confirmed.
‘Wallis gave that to Mary for her fortieth birthday back in 1936, two days before the huge argument when they fell out with each other. Of course, Mary didn’t want it after that, so she gave it to me, but I never used it. It seemed unlucky somehow. Now I just keep photographs inside.’
She opened the clasp, sorted through a handful of dog-eared black-and-white pictures and passed one to Rachel. There was Ernest Simpson, instantly recognisable with his slicked dark hair and moustache, alongside a smiling Mary, who was cradling a baby wearing a christening robe.
Rachel’s eye was caught by something else in the pile of photos: the edge of a Constance Spry business card with its oval illustration of old-fashioned roses. She pointed to it. ‘Did Susie tell you I found a Mainbocher dress at the house that appears to have been Wallis’s?’
Eleanor nodded. ‘That’s right. It was in a parcel from Mary’s dressmaker. She’d been copying it. I only found it years later and the original was far too small for me, but I wore the copy for quite some time. It had lovely colours: pink, purple and apricot.’
Rachel continued: ‘I ask because there was a florist’s card just like that in the pocket of Wallis’s dress. It read, “Now do you trust us?” I guess we’ll never know what it meant.’
Eleanor pulled the Constance Spry card from her piles of photographs and passed it over. In what looked like the same handwriting was the message See you in Berlin. Rachel looked at her questioningly.
‘Joachim von Ribbentrop,’ Eleanor explained. ‘He and Wallis were having an affair. Mary wasn’t sure if it was true, but I was. This card came with a bouquet he sent Wallis in 1936, the year before she and Edward met Hitler in Berlin. It proves they’d been planning the visit well before the abdication.’
Alex looked at Rachel as he made the connection. ‘A bracelet was found at the Duchess of Windsor’s house with a heart charm on it that had a J engraved on one side and the Roman numerals XVII on the other.’
‘That would be from him.’ Eleanor nodded. ‘He used to send her bouquets of seventeen roses, supposedly because that was the number of times they slept together. Ernest thought it was to do with a gambling debt, but she would hardly have told him the truth, would she?’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Ribbentrop pursued her relentlessly to get to Edward. The two of them were completely in his pocket. I’ve always thought some secret cabinet papers will be released, or some Nazi documents unearthed, to prove they actually helped the German war effort. Maybe not in my lifetime, but probably in yours.’
Alex glanced at Rachel. ‘That sounds like my next project. Perhaps I’ll do some digging. Gentle, non-obsessive digging.’