That Woman Part 2

After a champagne toast in the Grosvenor Hotel, 'a rambling soot-stained structure at Victoria Station', where Ernest senior was staying as ever without his wife the new Mr and Mrs Simpson, with Hughes at the wheel, set off for Paris and Spain in a yellow Lagonda touring car that Ernest had bought for the honeymoon. Ernest spoke fluent French and, with his vast knowledge of art and architecture, acted, according toheiaccordi Wallis, as 'a Baedeker, a Guide Michelin and an encyclopaedia all wrapped up in a retiring and modest manner'. For the moment, this was all she wanted from life and it was blissful. 'I felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood,' she wrote.

On their return, Maud, now in her fifties, set about helping to launch her new American sister-in-law. With her help, the Simpsons found a house to rent temporarily in the West End of London while they looked for a home of their own; 12 Upper Berkeley Street was available while its owner, Lady Chesham, was separated from her husband. It came with a small battery of servants and defective plumbing. Maud also gave luncheon parties according to Barbara Cartland, then a young society hostess and fledgling novelist, the best in London to introduce Wallis to her circle and teach her some of the niceties of British etiquette. Cartland, meeting Wallis when she first arrived, considered her not only 'badly dressed but aggressively American. She also told us rather vulgar stories and I was shocked to the core.' But Maud and Ernest were never close the twenty-year gap was only one difference among many. And since Wallis was determined that the only way she would make a mark in British society was by standing out she was never prepared to conform in the way Maud had in mind for her.

Maud's life revolved around fundraising for a number of good causes and launching her twenty-one-year-old daughter Elizabeth into society as a debutante. If Wallis could be relied upon to be amusing, she would be useful. The winter of 1928 9 was bitterly cold and foggy. Wallis, initially with few friends, was homesick and sometimes lonely, and considered London gloomy, grey and unfriendly. 'It evoked in me a bone-deep dislike. There was about the city a pervading indifference, a remoteness and withdrawal that seemed alien to the human spirit.' In her memoirs she explains her behaviour as something she had learned in the interests of her first husband: I had been shaped in the circle of naval officers and their wives, where a woman learned to manoeuvre furiously for her husband's promotion and where an American woman of my generation judged it important to be a little different or in any case interesting, and was prepared to pit her ideas spiritedly against those of the male ... English women, though formidably powerful in their own sphere, were still accepting the status of a second s.e.x.

But at least, in these first few months, she found Ernest's company pleasant. Weekdays she spent shopping in the morning, keen to visit the butcher, baker and fishmonger in person in order to poke and prod and ensure she was given the right cuts of meat and portions of equal sizes the latter was then considered an unusual request for hostesses who tended to serve a roast or stew and leave quant.i.ties, as well as presentation, to chance. But, for Wallis, attention to detail was always part of her desire to control her environment as far as she could. It was also necessary as a way of pa.s.sing the time after Ernest left home at 9 a.m. when, as she admitted, 'the day sometimes stretched vacantly before me' until he returned, which was never before seven in the evening. Sometimes she met people for lunch or went to the hairdresser and continued with her old habit of reading the newspapers to make sure she was au fait with the latest news. Revealingly, she explained how she would scour the Court Circular, which monitored royal activities, but what a superficial picture that gave her of the country she had come to live in and the people she was to live among. For Ernestous. For E, hoping to be as successful as his father, the business was his existence. But he would happily spend evenings quietly at home reading, or admiring his fine collection of first editions. At weekends he would plan careful visits to old churches and other buildings in London or else to country towns famed for their ancient castles and cathedrals. At first Wallis was intrigued by everything Ernest had to impart. But this quickly palled. Parties were what she lived for, and without those she became bored.

Their routine was interrupted in the spring of 1929 by a trip to the United States to visit Wallis's mother Alice, now bedridden with a cancerous tumour behind her eye which affected her spirit as much as her eyesight. She rallied sufficiently to meet her new son-in-law, but a few months later Wallis was summoned back across the Atlantic. This time Mary Raffray was there to greet her old friend when the s.h.i.+p docked inin New York. Alice was in a coma by the time her daughter arrived and died on 2 November 1929. There was no money to pa.s.s on, her savings having been all but wiped out in the Wall Street Crash that year. Wallis felt her mother's poverty as a deep, personal injustice, and part of the ambition which consumed her for the rest of her life was predicated on a determination to avenge this cruelty.

Back in London Wallis now threw all her energies into decorating the flat they had found in a smart new block a stone's throw from the rented house. George Street was nowhere near as fas.h.i.+onable as Belgravia, but Wallis had decided that it was better than Kensington, 'where all the aunts in England live' and it had a smart 'Amba.s.sador double-two-one-five' telephone number. By moving in to 5 Bryanston Court Wallis, although well within childbearing years, was acknowledging that she and Ernest were not intending to produce a family of their own, nor does there ever seem to have been any discussion of inviting Ernest's young daughter Audrey to stay. The apartment had a large and s.p.a.cious drawing room and an elegant dining room with a spectacular mirror-top table large enough to seat fourteen, but it was hardly child friendly. In addition to the master bedroom with a large 'pink plush' bed, and a pale pink chaise longue, there was a small guest bedroom, 'with an almost perfectly round bed of antique white, upholstered in oyster white satin, and [topped with] pink linen sheets and many pillows', as well as a dressing room c.u.m study for Ernest and two bathrooms. The staff of four the precious cook, Mrs Ralph, a parlourmaid, a housemaid and a personal maid called Mary Burke, who was to prove most loyal lived off site.

But planning the decor gave Wallis another activity. She described creating this home as 'giving expression to her feminine interests' and it is clear that the rooms for which she alone was responsible were ultra-feminine, pink and frilly. Where Syrie Maugham, wife of the novelist Somerset Maugham, whose dramatic white style was all the rage by 1928, helped advise, the look was more sophisticated. It was Maugham's idea to have high-backed dining chairs upholstered in white leather and to set tall vases on the table filled with flame-coloured flowers. The drawing room was to be pale chartreuse with cream and beige furnis.h.i.+ngs, which would show off Wallis's Chinese elephants and other precious pieces of chinoiserie. Once a week she and Ernest set aside a whole evening to go over the household accounts together. All Wallis's purchases, from frocks to fish, from partridges to peonies, were listed for Ernest to scrutinize one by one. Wallis recognized that life in England was extraordinarily cheap by American standards and in addition she now had a little trickle of capital from the unravelling of her uncle's will. They may have lived slightly beyond their means but Ernest, witbut Ernmeticulously, paid all the bills and the couple were given extra funding by old Mr Simpson, who lived mostly in London at this time. In return, the least Wallis could do was to submit dutifully to a regular Sunday-evening dinner with this 'tiny, dwarf-like figure with an unusually intelligent face, a goatee and piercing eyes that seemed to go right through one'. She came to despise him for not being more generous towards her and Ernest and she worried, having learned once how fickle old men could be when it came to wills, that he might leave all his capital to Midget.

Ernest had few friends of his own, but Bryanston Court was five minutes from the home of his closest companion, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, whom he had met during his time in the Brigade of Guards. Rickatson-Hatt had seen action in France and had been badly ga.s.sed, which left him permanently nervous. He remained in the army however until 1925 when he joined Reuters News Agency and was soon promoted to the role of editor in chief. He too was newly married to an American woman, Frances nee Sharpe, whom he had met while working for Reuters in New York, and they too were childless, enduring a deeply unhappy and fraught marriage. He had read cla.s.sics at Oxford and, like Ernest, was an enthusiastic bibliophile with a fine collection of Greek and Latin books. Rickatson-Hatt was easy to mock with his monocle, bowler hat and small pug dog, usually carried under his arm. Some evenings he and Ernest read aloud to each other in Latin, but both were far too constrained to discuss their marital problems with each other. For such men in the 1930s to have discussed personal matters of this nature is unimaginable, but each may have had his suspicions about the other having to put up with a disappointing marriage. The details of Rickatson-Hatt's eventually emerged before a divorce court judge in 1939, and it is fair to say that his staunch support and his determination to help his friend in the years ahead owed more than a little to the unfulfilled and deviant nature of his own marital arrangements.

As for Wallis, now she had somewhere to entertain she set about collecting an interesting array of guests, inevitably with a strong American nucleus. Those whom she invited for dinner were drawn almost entirely from her carefully nurtured contacts. Chief among these was Benjamin Thaw, newly appointed First Secretary of the US Emba.s.sy, married to Consuelo, one of the trio of glamorous Morgan sisters who had exotic Spanish looks and lots of money. Wallis had known Benjamin's brother, Bill, at Coronado where he had been a beau of Katherine Bigelow before she married Herman Rogers. She also knew of, though she had not met, Consuelo's twin sisters Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt, both celebrated society beauties. Thelma was currently the much gossiped-about lover of the Prince of Wales and Wallis knew that the pair sometimes met at the Thaws' home.

Among regulars at her table there was also Wallis's favourite cousin Corinne, now married to Lieutenant Commander George Murray a.s.signed as a.s.sistant naval attache at the Emba.s.sy, Major Martin 'Mike' Scanlon, 'a das.h.i.+ng bachelor who gave gay c.o.c.ktail and dinner parties' at his house, the former Ethel Noyes now Lady Lewis and her husband Sir Bill (Willmott), Vincent Ma.s.sey, the Oxford-educated and immensely wealthy Canadian diplomat and his pretty film-actress wife Alice and many others pa.s.sing through, as well as an occasional sprinkling of British friends for form's sake.

Wallis quickly established a reputation as a successful and unusual hostess. Her food, her conversation, her decor and her circle were all considered original and of note. Her parties were small but the attention to detail was second to none and the food and wines were lavisllys were h. She exaggerated her Americanness with a smattering of Southern recipes, food no one else prepared, and by her ability to mix c.o.c.ktails 'a trifling but widely appreciated knack'. With her c.o.c.ktails or KTs as she called them she served sausages, but not on skewers, followed perhaps by caviar with vodka, soup with sherry, and fish with white wine, as well as champagne and brandy. 'Wallis' parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave,' commented one guest.

In 1931 Mr and Mrs Kirk, Mary's parents, came to Europe and, while they were in London, Wallis proudly invited them to see her new home. She told Edith Kirk that she loved living in England, 'though there is one thing that bothers me a little. I don't know a single Englishwoman well enough to go to the bathroom with her.' Mrs Kirk thought the words sounded vulgar, implying that Wallis wanted to go to the powder room in order to confide some interesting remark or incident about a tall handsome man she might have been dancing with. They knew Wallis well enough to see that she was constantly on the lookout for excitement and interesting people to spice up her life. They could not fail to be impressed at seeing how the poor gir l from Baltimore with one broken marriage behind her had succeeded in swiftly making a place for herself in London society thanks to her second marriage to a dull but worthy s.h.i.+pbroker. It was after this visit that Wallis wrote to Mary encouraging her to come and stay, learning from her parents of further unhappiness in her schoolfriend's marriage.

5.

Wallis on the Sidelines.

'I suppose I'll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days'

Ever since her arrival in London, Wallis admitted to her aunt, 'I've had my mind made up' to meet the Prince of Wales. She accomplished this feat fairly effortlessly in 1931 through her friends.h.i.+p with Thelma Furness, 'the Prince's girl', and considered the achievement a relief. If she had further aspirations they were to be accorded more respect among her friends and to receive more glamorous invitations to fas.h.i.+onable parties as a result. Prince Edward, now thirty-seven years old, with his still boyish good looks and radiant charm, was adored by millions around the world who did not know him at all. Wallis herself knew much about his activities thanks to gossip and to the Court Circular newspaper announcements, but she knew little about the man himself other than what Thelma let slip.

Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park, the home of his maternal grandparents, the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Teck. He was the first child born to the future King George V and Queen Mary, although his parents were still Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York at the time of his birth. Through his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, he was related to most of the crowned heads in Europe. After he had been educated by tutors at home and then at Osborne Naval College, it was decided in 1912 that he would benefit from a more academic life, and Magdalen College, Oxford was selected for him, as were his putative friends there. But, as his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, observed: 'It cannot be said that Oghtxford widened his cultural horizons. ' Yet the young Prince was not without attributes, as was noted by Lord Esher, who had been consulted by Queen Mary about the education and upbringing of the Prince and took long walks with him at Balmoral: 'His memory is excellent and his vocabulary unusual and, above all things, he thinks his own thoughts.' But he found university life, and indeed much of his official life, 'very dull', and he never acquired a habit of reading or of disciplining those thoughts; moreover, his spelling was a disaster. Always chafing against restrictive authority, he left Oxford without graduating.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914, aged twenty, he was allowed to join the Grenadier Guards despite being a mere five feet seven inches tall instead of the regulation six foot, but was then kept as far away from danger as possible. As he grew into adulthood he was full of resentment against his parents and advisers over a range of issues. His father, by now King George V, was a shy disciplinarian unable to communicate with any of his children, all of whom were frightened of him, even as adults. He had a terrible temper and, when he was not venting his fury at them, was making fun of them. Even his most loyal staff, such as his a.s.sistant Private Secretary Alexander Hardinge, were moved to comment upon the mystery of why this essentially kind man 'was such a brute to his children'. His mother, perhaps kinder than history has portrayed her, was also motivated by duty above all and found it hard to display the affection she felt for all her children but especially for her sweet-faced firstborn. Neither parent believed that keeping up with modern trends was important, so many of the arguments they had with David, as Prince Edward was known to the family, were over trivialities such as trouser turn-ups, jazz, c.o.c.ktails and painted fingernails or the telephone, an innovation which Queen Mary never used.

The Prince's determination to get to the front line and be allowed to serve with his regiment whatever the dangers became a major source of friction. He bitterly reproached himself for leading such a comfortable life when his fellow officers were suffering and dying. 'I do hate being a prince and not allowed to fight!!' he told G.o.dfrey Thomas, a former diplomat who became his equerry and later his private secretary. In a courageous attempt to share the appalling risk and hards.h.i.+p faced by other soldiers, he appealed to Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, to allow him to go to the front, reminding him that as he had four brothers who could take his place it would not matter if he were killed. But Kitchener responded that the real fear was not that he might be killed but that he might be captured and held prisoner.

As Philip Ziegler has suggested: 'The ferocious battering to which he subjected his body, with a regime of endless walks and runs, a minimum of food and sleep, must have been in part a mortification of the flesh to a.s.suage this conviction of his inadequacy.' One of the specific tasks a.s.signed to G.o.dfrey Thomas when he first joined the Prince's staff was to try to get him to eat more and exercise less. Even dancing, when part of an official function and with a girl he detested, could be endured only if he looked upon it as strenuous exercise. This sometimes came as rather a shock for the girl involved. Although deliberate self-starvation was hardly new, by the 1880s eating disorders were slowly being recognized as a disease, mostly affecting women and girls, and the label 'anorexia nervosa' was introduced in 1873 by Queen Victoria's personal physician, Sir William Gull.4 Staving off p.u.b.erty is often cited as a factor in female anorexia, but trying to remain eternally childlike is t whildlikcommon to both s.e.xes. In the Prince's case, although the symptoms were recognized, no one in royal circles would have dared look into the causes. Thomas became a loyal friend who remained in the Prince's service until the abdication, 'never hesitating to point out or tell me of any failings he may think I am guilty of', according to the Prince. But nor was he ever strong enough to overrule his master.

Edward's letters and diary entries in the 1920s are so full of dismal self-disparagement that sometimes they appear close to childish whining at not being given what he wanted, at others they resemble a deeply worrying cri de coeur from a depressed adolescent. One day he wrote, 'I could not face ... any company. I wanted to be alone in my misery!! I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn't think it unfair on Papa.' But his desire to be of use was genuine and his brief taste of the war in France in 1915, though he had been kept away from sh.e.l.ls and behind the front lines, had left him desperately thirsting to do more than inspect troops, visit hospitals and play the largely morale-boosting role that he had been a.s.signed. He was shown the trenches and even allowed to spend a night in one, but was forbidden by his father to fight. One observer commented: 'his main desire appeared to be to get either killed or wounded'. His sense of frustration and shame at his own inadequacy are palpable, if exaggerated, and may have been aggravated by s.e.xual deficiencies. Much as he apparently enjoyed s.e.x, girlfriends openly referred to him as 'the little man'. But he may also have worried that he was sterile. Without tests, he is unlikely to have known whether this was the case but his heavy smoking and drinking were both habits now known to have a drastic effect on sperm count, and he would have had a strong suspicion if, at a time of ineffective contraception, none of his many dalliances with women resulted in a pregnancy. Many of his later ideas about pacifism as well as his deepest feelings of self-loathing can be traced to this time. The love of a good and sensible woman helped him through in 1918.

One evening while on leave in February that year, Edward was attending a party in Belgrave Square (hosted coincidentally by Maud Kerr-Smiley) when he was suddenly ushered into the cellar following an air-raid warning. There he met Mrs Dudley Ward, who had been out for the evening at a different party in the square but was invited in, with her escort for the evening, to take shelter when the siren went off. When the all-clear sounded, the Prince was introduced to Mrs Dudley Ward and the pair spent the rest of the evening together. The attraction was instant and a month later he was writing her very indiscreet letters addressed to 'my Angel!!' in which he expressed the hope that he had not said anything terrible, 'though how I long to angel!!'

Freda Dudley Ward was the pretty and pet.i.te twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a prosperous Nottingham businessman and his American wife. She had been married for the previous five years to a Liberal MP, William Dudley Ward, sixteen years her senior, with whom she had two daughters, Penelope and Angela. Freda was spirited and fun loving, popular in her own circle and always surrounded by a barrage of admirers. Her husband, known as Duddie, was vice chamberlain of the Royal Household and therefore often out late on public duties the ideal mari complaisant. For the next sixteen years, even though both had other minor dalliances, Freda became the Prince's ever-supportive confidante and lover. The affair was all consuming for the Prince, but relatively discreet, at least to the wider public. At first the couple would meet in a variety of London houses which Freda would buy, decorate and then sell at a profif al at a t. But shortly after the war, when the Dudley Wards moved to a magnificent Georgian mansion at Sunbury on Thames, the Prince rented a little Georgian cottage just across the road and came to visit his lover through a side gate into the garden and across the tennis court to the house itself. This, he decided, was more proper than entering through the front door a house belonging to the husband of his mistress. The locals in Sunbury all knew when the Prince's landau arrived for the weekend a good example of the hypocrisy he was to tell Baldwin later he refused to countenance and of the marital double standards which the Church and the country at large were struggling so hard to oppose.

Freda became something of an ideal, if unattainable, love for the heir to the throne. In pouring out his feelings to her he was discovering himself, a luxury his parents had not thought a necessary part of his education. 'How utterly sick of soldiering one is and anything to do with the Army,' he wrote to her shortly after the Armistice, 'but one can't help liking all the men and taking a huge interest in them ... And how one does sympathise with them and understand how hopelessly bored and fed up they are.' His pa.s.sionate letters to Freda, sometimes three a day, expose a deeply troubled, insecure young man, uncertain of his future who thought his father, the King, was 'hopelessly out of touch and ignorant', his 'studied hostility to the United States ... a national disaster'. In 1920, when he undertook a seven-month tour of New Zealand and Australia, he revealed more of his inner turmoil: Now I am going to write something that I know I ought not to really ... but mon amour I swear I'll never marry any other woman but you!!! Each day I long more and more to chuck in this job and be out of it and free for you, Sweetie. The more I think of it all, the more certain I am that really the day for kings and princes is past, monarchies are out of date, though I know it is a rotten thing for me to say and sounds Bolshevik.

It was a particularly jarring comment since the princ.i.p.al reason for sending Edward on such a world tour at this time was to show the world that the monarchies had survived in the wake of the overthrow of the Russian Tsar by the Bolshevik revolution.

Just before visiting Was.h.i.+ngton he told her: 'I'm like you, angel, want to die young & how marvellously divine if only WE could die together ... I'm just dippy to die with YOU even if we can't live together ...' On many occasions he told her that without her love and support he would prefer to die. 'It's only you who keeps [me] alive and going ... I do get so terribly fed up with it and despondent sometimes and begin to feel like "resigning"!!'

His letters with their invented baby language, using words like pleath and vewy for 'please' and 'very' and referring to himself in the third person as 'your poor hard worked little boy', are those of an adolescent who has fallen obsessively in love with a more mature woman and convinced himself no one else in the world understands him. To Freda he expressed all the impossibilities of his future life as he saw them and, trusting heavily in her discretion, complained constantly of his difficulties with his 'tyrannical' father. 'He's really been the absolute limit snubbing me and finding fault sarcastically at every possible occasion ... he maddens me, beloved one and I often feel like turning Bolshy as it's so hopeless trying to work for him.' But however much balm she offered him, and however much he pressed now he pre 'I just don't feel I can even exist let alone try to live much longer without you, my precious darling beloved little mummie!!' she would not marry him, knowing the effect this would have on the royal family and the nation itself.

This dependence on others, frequently a mother figure, is just one aspect of a personality defect brilliantly identified by the psychologist Simon Baron Cohen. In the case of Edward, Prince of Wales, it may not be possible to give it a name but his extremes of behaviour including a refusal to eat adequately, violent exercise and obsessive concern about weight or the thinness of his legs, verging on anorexia, arranging his myriad clothes in serried rows, his unusual speech, social insensitivity and nervous tics such as constantly fiddling with his cuffs are just some of the characteristics that come under the broad spectrum of autism or its sometimes less virulent cousin Asperger's Syndrome. Several of those who worked with him closely believed him in different ways to be 'mad', a word that could not be written about him while he was alive. Certainly Prime Minister Baldwin came to believe it to be the case. Alan 'Tommy' Lascelles, who had joined the Prince's staff in 1920 as a.s.sistant private secretary under G.o.dfrey Thomas, and was himself severely critical of the Prince, nonetheless advised Nigel Nicolson, editing his father Harold Nicolson's diaries in the 1960s, to remove the word from the text while the ex-King was still alive. 'One must not print it,' he wrote, 'certainly not of anybody with so frightening a mental ancestry as poor Edward P [Edward, Prince of Wales styled himself "EP"].' Lascelles himself commented after a long conversation with the Prince in 1927 that he had been struck by 'the curious absence of belief in ordinary general ideas', what he called his 'ethical impotence'.

I was always astonished by EP's total inability to comprehend such ideas ... words like 'decency' 'honesty' 'duty' 'dignity' and so on meant absolutely nothing to him. If one said to him 'But surely Sir, you can't do that,' he would reply in quite genuine bewilderment: 'But I don't know what you mean, Tommy. I know I can get away with it.'

Clive Wigram, George V's Private Secretary from 1931 to 1936, was also once heard emerging from a conversation with the Prince 'coming down the King's staircase at Buck. Pal. And exclaiming in his shrill staccato "He's mad he's mad. We shall have to lock him up. We shall have to lock him up."' Perhaps the most crucial witness is Lord Dawson of Penn, the royal family's doctor, who was similarly 'convinced that EP's moral development ... had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence and that would account for this limitation. An outward symptom of such arrestation, D of P would say, was the absence of hair on the face ... EP only had to shave about once a week.'

From the first, the Prince's entourage was always worried about his unreliable behaviour on foreign tours. Within a decade this had become more and more irresponsible as he would be up all hours at nightclubs drinking and womanizing, not taking his official duties seriously and exhibiting a cavalier att.i.tude to punctuality, much to the consternation of the local dignitaries. His refusal to eat adequately (while drinking and smoking more than adequately) often left him exhausted and without stamina to face the heavy schedule organized for him on tours, so that some of those travelling with him felt he was teetering dangerously on the edge of extreme depression.

For Lascelles the nadir came innesadir ca 1928, one year after his long talk with the Prince, when George V was, it seemed, close to death while his son was away on a trip to Kenya. The government sent a telegram saying that the King was extremely ill and urgently requesting that the Prince return. When Lascelles showed him the telegram he joked about 'silly old Baldwin' and accused the Prime Minister of using the wire as an electoral dodge. He was not going home. 'l said "Sir, the King is dying and if that doesn't matter to you it certainly matters to us." The Prince of Wales shrugged and gave me a look and went on with his plans for seducing the wife of a colonial official, Mrs Barnes. He was very happy to tell me what he'd done the next morning.' The Prince did return sooner than intended, but, shortly afterwards, Lascelles resigned in disgust at the Prince's att.i.tude; by way of explanation, he was to tell the above story many times. As Duff Hart-Davis, the editor of his diaries, remarked, perhaps Lascelles was the wrong person for the Prince of Wales. 'It could be said', Hart-Davis went on, 'that his moral outlook was too severe, his idea of duty too rigid, his code of conduct too unbending for him to be compatible with such a high-spirited employer. Yet it could equally be said that he was exactly the right person for the Prince and that someone of precisely his calibre, with his powerful intellect and high principles, was needed to shape the future King for his role.'

After his resignation from Edward's service, Lascelles took up another post abroad. But in 1935 he returned to royal service as a.s.sistant private secretary to the Prince's ailing father, George V, and thus was at the epicentre of the unfolding royal drama. In addition to his intimate knowledge of the protagonists, he was a cousin of Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood, who married Mary, the Princess Royal, sister of the Prince of Wales and the future George VI, and therefore was also an insider who saw events coloured by the considerable distaste of the rest of the royal family. What was becoming clear was that the Prince's household, now based in London at York House, a wing of St James's Palace, was increasingly alienated from his father's Court at nearby Buckingham Palace. While it may be true that many of the courtiers reflected the sn.o.bbisms of a previous age, isolation from sources of good advice had taken the place of legitimate independence for an heir to the throne. The Prince resented what he called the old order and as Hector Bolitho, an early biographer of Edward VIII, wrote, 'conventional society did not amuse him ... In time the dwindling ranks of society resented the originality of his choice of friends. He seldom went to stay in great country houses, where he might have met and known his contemporaries and ... he was almost stubborn in his habit of turning his back upon the conventions of polite society.'

Those who spoke with an American accent had a much easier chance of amusing the Prince. He liked almost everything that he characterized as new and modern and much of it was American. His foreign tours (including the one to Australia, where he narrowly missed meeting Wallis in Coronado en route) had done much to introduce him to the wider world or at least that part of it that was still called the Empire. His intensely English good looks blond hair, wistful blue eyes and generous mouth, often with cigarette dangling had ensured he was a pin-up figure for millions. As he said to Freda in some half-Americanese he had picked up on his travels, 'Princing' was much easier abroad. The ecstatic response he received wherever he went led to an easy belief that his views chimed with those of 'ordinary men and women' in a way that his father's did not. He did, however, have a genuine sympathy with those who faced unemployment and dest.i.tution so soon after offering thethaofferinir lives in the Great War. 'One can't help seeing the work people's point of view,' he told his mother, Queen Mary, 'and in a way it's only human nature to get as much as one can out of one's employer.' But there's scant evidence that he had any notion of what to do about the situation. It was sincere but vague benevolence, the original triumph of style over substance.

He loathed ceremony of all kind and in 1922, when his sister Mary married Viscount Lascelles, wrote to his mother that he did not mind not being able to attend as 'I have an inordinate dislike for weddings ... I always feel so sorry for the couple concerned.' The following year his closest sibling, Bertie, the Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the vivacious and highly suitable twenty-three-year-old daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, a marriage which brought his parents much pleasure. Elizabeth had once harboured romantic feelings herself for the Prince of Wales and had initially been extremely reluctant to accept Bertie's proposal of marriage. True she came from impeccable stock, but there was one skeleton in her ancient cupboard: her great-grandmother Anne, possessing 'a flirtatious nature', divorced her dull husband and eloped with Lord Charles Cavendish-Bentinck and had his child. She was never again received in society.

But the marriages of Edward's siblings scarcely relieved the pressure on him to marry immediately. However much he might wish it away, his awareness of his duty to marry and produce an heir to continue the dynasty was ever lurking. As he told his close friend and travelling companion Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1924, 'I suppose I'll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days tho' I'll put it off as long as I can cos it'll destroy me.'

In 1932, in an unusually frank conversation with his father, the King asked him if he had ever considered marrying 'a suitable well born English girl'. The Prince answered that the only woman he had ever wanted to marry had been Freda Dudley Ward. But she was not available. As long as he remained in love with Freda he persuaded himself that his commitment to her prevented marriage. Yet even though he balked at marriage he longed for an emotionally and physically fulfilling relations.h.i.+p. His liaison with Thelma Furness never really promised this. The pair met at a provincial cattle show while he was still involved with Freda. The Prince, undertaking the sort of mindless royal task which he hated, was awarding rosettes to prize-winning cows.

Thelma, like Freda, was half American and bored in her marriage to a much older man. Thelma Morgan was first married, aged seventeen, to James Vail Converse, but was divorced three years later and in 1926 settled for a second marriage to Marmaduke, 1st Viscount Furness, nearly twenty years older than her. They had a son, Tony, born in 1929, but then led separate lives indulging in frequent affairs. Thelma was exquisitely pretty with dark hair and eyes inherited from her mixed Irish-American and Chilean ancestry, and was allowed plenty of money by her elderly husband, who was known as Duke. His immense wealth derived from the Furness Withy s.h.i.+pping company, founded by his grandfather, of which he was chairman.

Both Thelma and Freda pandered to the Prince's needs to be mothered and indulged his childish whims, especially his craving for teddy bears. One of the biggest, a giant topiary teddy bear at Sunbury, given by the Prince to Freda, is still there today for all who pa.s.s the river bank to admire. However, Thelma was much more of a hedonist than Freda and enjoyed encouraging rather than curbing the Prince's natural tendencies towards selfishness and self-indulgence. Shetheulgence admitted that her conversations with the Prince were 'mostly about trivialities'. According to Henry 'Chips' Channon, the well-connected, American-born diarist, it was Thelma Furness (although unnamed by him at the time) who was 'the woman who first "modernised" him and Americanized him, making him over-democratic, casual and a little common. Hers is the true blame for this drama.' From now on observers were often struck by his inimitable blend of c.o.c.kney and American, which he mixed into his upper-cla.s.s drawl.

Thelma swiftly moved into the Prince's life and into his new country home Fort Belvedere memorably described by Lady Diana Cooper as a child's idea of a fort 'missing only fifty red soldiers ... between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy'. The eighteenth-century house, thirty miles outside London in the grounds of Windsor Great Park and not far from Sunningdale, was originally constructed as a folly, before being converted into a royal hunting lodge and gradually extended until it had seven bedrooms. In 1929 the building became vacant once again and was given to Prince Edward by his father 'for those d.a.m.n weekends, I suppose'. Thelma tinkered with various renovation schemes there and had one guest room done up in shocking pink, decorating the top of the bedposts with the Prince of Wales feathers an exhibition of vulgarity that apparently the Prince found vastly amusing. He installed central heating and up-to-date bathrooms and often arrived in a private plane all examples of what he had in mind by modernizing. The Fort became his favourite residence and retreat from reality. He remembered playing there as a child with his sister and brothers, some of his happiest moments. The Fort offered a chance to return to that lost world.

A year after they met, the Prince suggested that Thelma and her husband might like to join him and his party on a continuation of the African safari which he had been forced to leave hurriedly when his father was ill. Once his father seemed to have recovered he could see no reason not to return and was away from January until April 1930. In February Lord and Lady Furness met up with the Prince in Kenya. Thelma later wrote in purple prose how, after a day of lion hunting organized by the Governor, she and the Prince had a secret rendezvous: This was our Eden and we were alone in it. His arms about me were the only reality; his words of love my only bridge to life. Borne along on the mounting tide of his ardour I found myself swept from the accustomed mooring of caution. Each night I felt more completely possessed by our love, carried ever more swiftly into uncharted seas of feeling content to let the Prince chart the course heedless of where the voyage would end.

Wallis became a friend of Thelma through her connection with Benny and Consuelo Thaw. The women often met for lunch at the Ritz and in early January 1931 Consuelo invited the Simpsons to the Furness home at Melton Mowbray in Leicesters.h.i.+re in the heart of England's fox-hunting country for a Sat.u.r.day to Monday. The Prince of Wales was to be there, as was Thelma, the hostess, but without her husband, who was away. Convention demanded that one married couple should also be there to act as chaperones, but Consuelo herself could not make it. Would Wallis and Ernest help out?

Wallis was extremely nervous, but accepted. For her, this promised an important step up the social ladder. For Ernest, who revered the monarchy, it was close to his pinnacle of achievement. For both, it was amusing to see Maud Kerr-Smiley provoked into jealousy, especially as she insiill as shested on giving Wallis last-minute etiquette lessons. Wallis admitted that she spent an entire Friday on 'hair and nails etc' and on Sat.u.r.day 10 January she, Ernest and Benny Thaw went up to Melton Mowbray by train. Wallis had a cold and could not prevent herself snuffling and coughing. But her poker-playing skills came in useful once again as they played for stakes that even she considered 'frighteningly high'. According to the Prince's later account, they discussed central heating or the lack of it in British houses. Wallis was to claim that she did not remember the conversation, only the Prince's 'very loud-checked tweeds ... and utter naturalness'. But according to other versions of the occasion, she boldly told the Prince that she was disappointed in his predictable choice of topic of conversation: 'Every American woman is asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.' Thelma Furness insisted there had never been such a conversation and if so Wallis's brusque answer would have been 'not only bad taste but bad manners'. But by the time everyone was recalling in print their memories of this meeting, Wallis had shown herself to be a woman never afraid to adopt this sort of tone when speaking to the Prince in public. Others present maintain that she made little impression on the Prince that weekend, while Wallis herself wrote: 'the facts are as I shall now relate them ... we met late in the fall of 1930 ... I am sure I am right.' She dates the meeting according to the clothes she remembers wearing and is dismissive about the conversation. But in a letter dated 13 January 1931 it is clear that she wrote to Aunt Bessie about the weekend, saying 'what a treat it was to meet the Prince in such an informal way', though she later added, 'probably we will never hear or see any of them again'.

Wallis was certain about the date because she had just been to Paris in the autumn of 1930 and had indulged herself in what she called 'a little splurge' buying a dress from each of the three or four leading couturiers. 'The prospect of having a few chic clothes from the great couturiers was more than I could resist.' Why? Any woman will immediately understand. She knew, given the circles in which she was moving in this 'frowzy dressed town', that an invitation to meet the Prince would come her way very soon and she was going to be prepared for it, in control of how she looked insofar as she could be. She was not buying couture clothes to hang in her wardrobe for quiet dinners with Ernest.

Although some weeks pa.s.sed with no prospect of a second meeting because the Prince was travelling, Wallis was now busy arranging to have herself presented at Court that season. On 15 May Thelma again invited the Simpsons to a c.o.c.ktail party she was giving for the Prince's return from a tour of South America. Wallis was excited about this 'as I would like to be given the once-over without the cold'. Also invited was Felipe Espil, the diplomat who had spurned Wallis eight years earlier. But any chagrin she might have felt over seeing him again was more than mitigated by the Prince, who when introduced to the Simpsons that evening, whispered to Thelma that he thought he recognized Wallis. Thelma reminded him of the weekend at Melton Mowbray and, as Wallis rose from her curtsey, he told her how much he had enjoyed that encounter.

By the time Mary Raffray arrived in London later that month Wallis, not yet thirty-five, was moving, if not exactly in the highest echelons of London society, then in those circles which had access to the Prince. When they last met, Wallis had crossed the Atlantic to say goodbye to her dying mother and was feeling lonely and friendless in London. Mary considered that the transformation in her friend's life, just over two years.over twrs after making a new start in England, was extraordinary a transformation that, as Ernest understood, would have been inconceivable had she been Mrs Solomon.5 On the day of her arrival there was a lunch at the Thaws', so Wallis explained that she could not make it down to the docks to greet Mary after her long voyage but instructed her to take a train into London the minute she disembarked. From the station she was to go directly to the lunch before seeing Bryanston Court or changing her clothes. After lunch the women played bridge all afternoon not what Mary wanted: she complained that she could play bridge any day in New York then went to Ethel Lewis for a KT. When they returned from Ethel's that first night, Wallis and Mary changed into 'tea gown and pajamas' for dinner. 'Ernest of course always dresses and, except for such evenings at home, wears full dress designated here simply as "white tie" and we sat around and talked until 2 o'clock.'

The next day another American friend who had made a successful marriage to an Englishman, Minerva Dodge, called round early, inspected Mary's wardrobe and went with them for a lunch at the Ritz given by some Argentine diplomats for Lord and Lady Sackville, who were among Wallis's newest friends and owners of the historic Knole House in Kent. Lady Sackville was another American the former actress Anne Meredith Bigelow. After lunch there was shopping and in the evening Wallis gave a dinner for twelve, which included Ethel and Bill, Corinne and Lieutenant Commander Murray and the Rickatson-Hatts plus Minerva 'and her pompous husband, John'. The next day was lunch with Gilbert Miller, a theatrical producer married to the fabulously rich New Yorker Kitty Bache, followed by a few hands of bridge.

Mary wrote excitedly to her mother about plans for the coming weeks, which included more dinners, more shopping and a visit to Knole. This was a thrill for Wallis because they had been invited to have tea there with Lord and Lady Sackville, a thrill for Ernest because the partly fifteenth-century house was steeped in history. On 3 June there was the Derby, where they went in a jolly party with the US diplomat William Galbraith and his wife, and two days later 'Trooping of the Colours [sic]'.

Wallis thinks I have a slim chance of meeting the Prince. She said if I had gotten there a week sooner I would have met him twice but we have nothing booked so far where he'd be apt to be [although] his girl, Lady Furness, is lunching here with us on Monday with Gloria Vanderbilt and Lady Milford Haven. Wallis is to be presented on June 10th. I wish I could see it but I will see her dress for it anyway.

Wallis insists that the idea for her presentation at Court came first from Maud. 'I was reluctant ... because I would have to buy special clothes for the occasion and I didn't feel justified in such an extravagance, ' she claimed. Maud herself could not do the honours as she had just presented her own debutante daughter and, according to the rules, had to wait three years before a second presentation. But in any case she and Wallis were no longer on good terms. The rules demanded that divorcees could be presented only if they were the injured party, so Wallis had to send her Warrenton doc.u.mentation to the Lord Chamberlain and hope it would be accepted. Another friend was found to do the actual presentation Mildred Anderson, an American married to a London businessman and although Wallis borrowed a dress, train, feathers and fan from Connie and Thelma, she could not resist buying for herself some impressive jewellery: a large aqse : a laruamarine cross which dangled on a necklace ('imitations but effective') and white kid three-quarter-length gloves.

Ernest, in his full-dress uniform of the Coldstream Guards, was in his element as his wife waited in line in the magnificent Buckingham Palace ballroom in order to curtsey to the King and Queen on their red dais. Not a word was exchanged but Wallis had overheard the Prince of Wales mutter under his breath as she pa.s.sed that something ought to be done about the lights 'as they make all the women look ghastly'. After the formalities there was more partying at Thelma's house and when the Prince complimented Wallis on her gown she snapped back, 'But Sir, I thought you said we all looked ghastly' the sort of repartee for which she soon became well known. She had quickly learned how the Prince responded to such directness, considering it American. It came naturally to Wallis and was not entirely a studied response. Understanding Wallis means understanding that in Baltimore the Warfields were aristocracy. Not for the last time, the Prince found himself apologizing to this audacious woman, telling her that he had had no idea his voice carried so far. Far from being offended, the Prince was amused and drove the Simpsons home in his own car that night, causing quite a stir at Bryanston Court. 'She always had a challenging line for the Prince,' recalled Mary Kirk in her diary. In the early days she used to say to him: 'You are just a heartbreak to any woman because you can never marry her.' She understood her prey and knew that the tease would bring a response.

A month later old Mr Simpson invited Wallis and Mary to go with him and Midget to Paris. Wallis by now had had her fill of having to entertain Mary, 'the house pest' as she called her, so she accepted. Wallis in any case was en route to Cannes for a five-week holiday without Ernest but with Consuelo Thaw and Nada Milford Haven, an exotic Russian married to Lord Mountbatten's brother, and a renowned lesbian. It was a holiday she could ill afford and she had to borrow from the bank 'as poor old E. can't help me'. But she concluded that it would be worth it to get to know such nice people. Two days after their arrival Mary had a terrifying accident. She was knocked down on the street by a taxi and rushed to the American hospital in Neuilly where her condition was said to be critical. Wallis telephoned Jackie Raffray, who rang Buckie in a state of near hysteria. The injuries were to her kidneys and it was feared one might have to be removed. Wallis promised that if Mary was still in danger the next day she would stay with her at the hospital. If she was out of danger, she had a lunch engagement with a friend.

The next morning Buckie telephoned the apartment where Wallis was staying for news. 'A perfectly familiar voice said without so much as a preliminary "h.e.l.lo", "Mary's out of danger, Buckie."' Midget had summoned a leading French surgeon who concluded that no operation was necessary and that with proper hospital care and treatment Mary would recover. Wallis had spent the night at Mary's bedside but, once it was clear she was going to live, continued with her plans to travel to the South of France. Mary made a slow recovery and the pains in her side were often excruciating. But, as she told her sister, she forced herself to get up and take a few steps every day to get over the pins and needles. Her health was permanently impaired, but she returned to New York to see if her marriage could be similarly patched up.

Wallis cut short her holiday in Cannes, perhaps because Ernest, who could not afford a holiday himself, was restless without her and perhaps because she did not like sharing a room with Nada, who seems to have found her attractive.oul attrac Just as she was building a social circle leading upwards she was terrified of any scandal which might jeopardize this and was only too aware of the power of gossip. At all events she came back to a gloomy autumn in London beset with health and financial worries of her own. Ernest was so deeply concerned about their spending habits and the dark prospects for his business in the wake of the world recession and American stock-market collapse of 1929 that he decided they must give up the car and chauffeur, complaining that he was the one who always did the giving up.

In November Wallis had to go into hospital to have her tonsils removed. But a sparkle of promise came before Christmas when they again met the Prince at the Thaws' and persuaded him to dine with them at Bryanston Court in the new year.

6.

Wallis in Control.

'Keeping up with 2 men is making me move all the time'

Early in 1932, the Simpsons entertained the Prince of Wales for the first time to dinner at their flat in Bryanston Court. Many of Wallis's letters at this time reflect a typical concern about maids they were not good enough, they wanted too much money or they disliked working in a flat and a not so typical concern about not really being able to afford to give more than three big dinners a month. But this event put her staff on their mettle. For this, no expense was spared and her cook, Mrs Ralph, was beside herself with excitement. Wallis decided to serve a typical American dinner: black bean soup, grilled lobster, fried chicken Maryland and a cold raspberry souffle. Since the Prince stayed until 4 a.m. and asked for one of her recipes Wallis concluded: 'Everything, I am happy to say, went very well.' Almost immediately came the longed-for invitation in response: to spend a weekend with him at the Fort.

Wallis described the Princely existence at the Fort as 'amazingly informal' compared with the stately routine at Knole, her only point of comparison. There were c.o.c.ktails before dinner at which the Prince wore a kilt and the ladies Connie and Thelma their simplest evening dresses. They all retired to bed before midnight. Others described activities at the Fort rather differently. They were said to include 'orgies ... when Mrs Simpson did the "danse du ventre" and other un-English performances of an unsavoury nature'. In the morning the Simpsons found the Prince up and dressed before them; brandis.h.i.+ng a fearsome-looking billhook, he was engaged in cutting back the tangle of undergrowth outside the Fort. The guests were expected to help. Neither Ernest nor Wallis was known for their gardening skills, but while Ernest, typically obliging, promised to join in and went upstairs to get a sweater, Wallis had a private tour of the grounds with the Prince. She was a fast learner where men were concerned and could easily see the intense pleasure that living there, planting flowering rhododendrons where there had once been weeds, creating a haven out of a wilderness, gave their host. She also understood that he was lonely. 'Perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness ... For a long time,' Wallis wrote in her memoirs, 'I would carry in my mind the odd andsta incongruous picture of a slight figure in plus fours loping up the slope of the Terrace swinging the billhook and whistling.' And at all times he was followed by the dogs, two Cairn terriers Cora and Jaggs, which Wallis, hitherto not a dog lover, tried unsuccessfully to fuss over.

The thank-you letter they sent was in the form of doggerel which she and Ernest composed together. Ernest, she convinced herself, had had a wonderful time, which on this occasion was no doubt the case. That he was as much appreciated by their host as she was the two men were able to discuss history together until 'dates and circ.u.mstances were flying back and forth across the table like ping pong b.a.l.l.s' was less certain. Ernest, working harder than ever in the City, was starting to be exhausted by his wife's apparently insatiable need to go to and give parties. The s.h.i.+pping business had slumped dramatically after 1929, causing him serious concern as companies defaulted owing the family firm substantial sums. Maud, who also derived an income from SS&Y, insisted she was making economies, though 'no one seems able to say what', Wallis complained, deeply worried about how much longer they could hang on to their flat. She and Maud were now, in early 1932, barely on speaking terms.

In the midst of this difficult year the Simpsons' social life took what Wallis felt was 'a battering'. They entertained less just one dinner a month but nonetheless managed a short holiday to Tunis where Ernest's friend Georges Sebastian, a Romanian millionaire businessman with aristocratic connections, lived in a magnificent beachfront home that the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was to call the most beautiful house he had ever seen. When they pleaded poverty he paid for their travel there as well, a gesture they 'simply could not resist'. Aunt Bessie came to visit them in London in the summer, and in July the threesome set off on a tour of France and Austria. Later in the year there was another weekend plus a tea visit to the Fort, but Wallis, weighing just eight stone at this time, was still suffering recurring stomach trouble, which she believed was caused by an ulcer, so 'I am only allowed whiskey and plain water for the next six months,' she told Aunt Bessie.

But then, over the next year, the Simpsons started to be invited regularly to the Fort. This was partly Thelma's initiative as she feared she was losing her grip on the Prince's attentions and cast around to find amusing guests outside the normal circles to keep him happy, and partly the Prince's, who found he was indeed amused by Wallis with her sharp tongue and risque repartee. There was one memorable weekend in January 1933 when Ernest was away. It was so cold that she and Thelma along with the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York all went skating on the frozen lake, the Prince having presented the two women with skates. Wallis recalled later that in the course of that year 'we found ourselves becoming permanent fixtures at the Fort weekends. The a.s.sociation imperceptibly but swiftly pa.s.sed from an acquaintances.h.i.+p to a friends.h.i.+p.' But it was not so much 'we' as she who had become a permanent fixture a piece of recurrent misinformation in her otherwise revelatory memoirs.

Wallis told the Kirk family that she was making weekly visits to the Fort: A friend of mine, Thelma Furness, is the Prince of Wales' girl and I chaperone her when she goes out to Fort Belvedere to stay with him. She comes by for me once a week in her car and we drive out to the Fort together. The first time she came I asked what those long poles were that were strapped to the side of the car but she just lau C shherghed and said I would find out later. It was after dinner that I found out. The three of us came into the sitting room for coffee. On either side of the fireplace, where a grand fire was blazing, stood a comfortable chair and beside each chair stood something that looked to me like an artist's easel. When I went closer and looked I found that each of these held a piece of canvas on which was an unfinished piece of embroidery. When we had finished our coffee Thelma and the Prince settled themselves down to work and I, sitting between them, was asked to read from a book Thelma handed me.

Wallis never took up needlepoint, taught to the princes by their mother, Queen Mary, but she now came to know the Prince's brother Prince George, who was often at the Fort, as well as the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York. The Prince of Wales was especially close to the Yorks during his five-year liaison with Thelma Furness, whom they liked very much.

Wallis and Ernest's lives, inevitably, also started to diverge now. Ernest's business, if it were to survive at a time of such reduced economic activity, required him to make frequent trips abroad. And in March, Wallis made a longed-for trip to the US, paid for by her generous aunt, whom Wallis promised she loved 'better than anyone in the world and [I] will always be on hand when you need me'. She had not been to the United States since her mother died, had friends and family she was desperate to see and wanted a break from money worries. Just as she sailed she received a bon-voyage radiogram signed 'Edward P.' wis.h.i.+ng her a safe crossing and a speedy return to England. In her memoirs she wrote that she was sailing with Ernest and that the message was for them both. But, as her biographer Michael Bloch tactfully revealed, Wallis's memory was at fault here because she went alone. The message may have been the first intimation that she had more than piqued the Prince's interest and so may have foreshadowed the turmoil which was to follow. As such, the radiogram would have loomed large in her memory as a milestone. Nonetheless at this stage Wallis believed that it was evidence of nothing more than a mild interest, though perhaps something to make Thelma jealous, and that she had the situation well under control.

Wallis needed the trip for another reason too: to act as confirmation, as she approached her fortieth birthday, that she was still attractive to men. She viewed it as her swansong 'unless I can hang on to my figure' and thus take another trip in the next three years before hitting forty, an arbitrary date in many women's lives when they see their femininity come to an end with their childbearing years. Wallis, who had mastered the ability to flirt since Oldfields days, needed this more than most as she was without children to flaunt. She felt a deep emotional, not necessarily s.e.xual, need to show that she was still alluring and believed that she had only three more years in which to do it. As ever, she was on the lookout for interesting diplomats, and in Was.h.i.+ngton particularly enjoyed the attentions of John Cooper Wiley, subsequently a highly regarded US amba.s.sador.

She returned with her self-confidence restored and almost immediately the weekend visits to Sunningdale increased. It was her a.s.surance, poise and buoyancy that the Prince admired, as he could not see the underlying insecurity. After her return Wallis wrote to her aunt that 'Thelma is still Princess of Wales' an indication that the women had discussed the possibility that she soon might not be and then joked that a collection of funny b.u.t.ter moulds she had found, which stamped animal patterns on to b.u.t.ter, were a great success. 'Thelma is so mad for them and I have refused her,' revealing that Cveaof furivalry was already under way. On 19 June the Prince gave a birthday dinner for Wallis's thirty-seventh birthday at Quaglino's in London's Jermyn Street. Wallis was already thinking about clever ways to please him in response. A few days later, for his thirty-ninth birthday, she gave him a present which demonstrated how much time and ingenuity she was investing in this relations.h.i.+p. She had borrowed a royal spoon from Osborne, the butler at the Fort, in order to have his cipher engraved on a silver Bryant & May matchbox holder. She followed this up with a special 4 July American Independence Day dinner for him at Bryanston Court. But the s.h.i.+pping business had not picked up that much and since 'Pa S the most selfish old pig ' had stopped their allowance and was keeping them on a tight rein, the Simpsons found entertaining at this level a huge strain. Wallis now tried seriously to rent out their apartment, which was costing them a hefty 600 per annum, a bill they found hard to meet.

The night of 31 December saw the Simpsons celebrating with the Prince until 5 a.m. to see in the new year. And shortly afterwards, the situation changed dramatically when it was Thelma's turn to sail for the United States to see her family. In January 1934, Wallis and she had a farewell lunch at the Ritz, their regular meeting place. According to Wallis, Thelma said laughingly, 'I'm afraid the Prince is going to be lonely. Wallis, won't you look after him?' Thelma's version of events has Wallis initiating the conversation: 'Oh, Thelma the little man is going to be lonely.' Wallis confided to her aunt, 'I tried my best to cheer him up.'

Until now, Ernest was still tolerating everything that was happening, flattered that the heir to the throne called at his home sometimes as often as twice a week in the evenings for supper or a KT. Even if he objected, because the society gossip about his wife 'that I am the latest', as she put it was immediate once Thelma sailed, he did not relinquish his belief that one should at all times be deeply deferential to the future monarch. But, when these evenings went on until the small hours, and Ernest had brought work home he needed to do, 'he developed the art of tactfully excusing himself and retiring to his room with his papers'. Wallis was left to discuss plans for the Fort or the