“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.”
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