The Shadow Queen (34 page)

The first was that Mrs. Dudley Ward was inches shorter than Edward even in high heels.

The second was that she was as exotically dark-haired as Marian Coke and Portia Cadogan, the previous two women in his life.

The third was that Edward was dancing with Mrs. Dudley Ward not out of politeness, as he had danced with Maud Kerr-Smiley, but because he had been instantly, immediately, overpoweringly smitten by her.

She gritted her teeth, praying that when the dance ended he would return Mrs. Dudley Ward to her escort and would then speedily return to her side and stay there for the rest of the evening.

The record came to an end.

Another record was put on the gramophone, this time a foxtrot.

Without having released his hold of her for a second, Edward again began dancing with Mrs. Dudley Ward and, seemingly incapable of taking his eyes from hers, he did so for the next dance—and the next.

People began shooting amused glances in Pamela’s direction. When the sniggers began, Pamela knew there was only one way for her to avoid total humiliation.

With her head held high she left the room and then, a black velvet cocoon coat around her shoulders, left the house, uncaring that the sirens were still wailing.

If Prince Edward had stayed the night with her at Tarquin’s town house he would, she was quite sure, have afterward been bound to her for as long as she had wanted him to be.

Because of a German Zeppelin, that was not now going to happen, and her rage was incandescent.

“Piccadilly,” she said tautly to the cabdriver she waved down, not wanting to even think about the perfectly set table for two in her stepfather’s town house and the silk-sheeted bed in its vast bedroom.

All she craved, as the all-clear sounded, was her own home and privacy in which to give vent to her fury at the way fate, in the petite shape of Mrs. Dudley Ward, had cheated her of her dream of becoming Edward’s mistress.

Chapter Twenty

W
allis’s dreams had long lain in ashes. San Diego was idyllic, but her marriage had become a hell on earth. Though Win now held the prestigious position of commanding officer of North Island naval base, it wasn’t a position he had wanted.

What he had wanted—what he still wanted—was an overseas combat assignment. His frustration at not being given one increased his heavy drinking, his dangerously erratic mood swings, and the frequency of his violent attacks on her.

His only saving grace was that he now never drank while on duty and that his superiors viewed his achievements at North Island with satisfaction. He was training not only pilots but mechanics and, as the war ground on, had added Marines and military personnel and raw recruits from Los Angeles to the training program.

That he habitually worked a twelve- to fourteen-hour day was a mercy for which Wallis was deeply grateful, for the instant he was off duty, his drinking and his rants would begin. His chief rant was that he was still in America when the brother closest to him, Dumaresque, was engaging in aerial dogfights over France and covering himself in glory. Hard on the heels of that rant would be his explosive fury that though she was adept at ensuring he was never sexually frustrated by her inability to engage in full normal intercourse, it meant there was no way he could father the sons he craved.

Wallis used every device she could think of in order to avoid triggering his temper. Now that Win was a commanding officer, their home was spacious, and she would retreat into another part of it and bury herself in a book or with a piece of sewing. If one of his black moods was on him, her efforts not to antagonize him never succeeded for very long. On one never-to-be-forgotten day he had indulged in his habit of tying her to the bed and then, while she was completely helpless to try to stop him, had taken every one of her family photographs and ripped them to pieces in front of her.

That his behavior was beyond anything that could be considered normal and that he was a deeply troubled man was knowledge she had done her best to hide and keep to herself. It was something the Mrs. Summers incident had made well nigh impossible, and when someone had had the nerve to mention it to her, she had laughed it off, saying that Mrs. Summers’s remark that she had found her beaten “black and blue” was a figment of the elder woman’s imagination, that she had not been found sobbing, and that her being found as she had been was simply a bedroom bit of private fun between herself and Win. As to why she was found alone in the house—it was, she had said, because Win had briefly left it in order to buy a bottle of wine.

Whether her version of her humiliating experience was believed she had no way of knowing, but no one ever mentioned it to her again or alluded to it in her presence. Privately, she tried to get what pleasure she could out of being wife to a man holding prestigious rank, knowing if she ever publicly admitted to his abusive behavior he would lose his position as the air station’s commanding officer and that there would then be no compensations in her married life at all.

His behavior precluded her from making close friendships. What she did have was lots of people she was friendly with and, as the wife of the commanding officer, the kind of hectic social life that suited her outgoing, extrovert nature.

Whenever high Navy brass visited the station, which was regularly, there were always cocktail parties and dinners in their honor, and she loved being the hostess and, as her mother had done at her pay-to-attend dinners, ensuring that everyone had a good time. At such events Win had to at least make a show of being a considerate husband, but it was never more than a show, and whenever he had the opportunity he would make a snide remark to her that, though no one else present understood it, was a veiled and cruel insult.

As well as gaining pleasure from her innate hostessing skills, she also gained pleasure from the home they now lived in. Their house in San Diego stood on the corner of a quiet intersection, and the windows of the thirty-four-foot living room looked out over splendid views of Balboa Park. With a vaulted, sixteen-foot ceiling, it was a room filled with light, and Wallis decorated it as she had their home at Pensacola: with white walls, pale oak furniture, and gay chintz curtains and cushions.

Everything, if it hadn’t been for the secret at the heart of their marriage and Win’s attitude toward her because of it, would have been perfect. In early 1918 Wallis finally plucked up the nerve to make an appointment with a Los Angeles gynecologist, doing so with black humor under the name of her childhood bête noire, Violet Dix.

Once in the gynecologist’s examination room, she knew why she hadn’t braved such a visit sooner. Being seated in a chair with her legs in stirrups while the doctor slid what looked to be a pair of stainless steel salad tongs into her vagina and then opened them was an experience she vowed then and there she would never repeat.

Even worse, it was all to no avail.

“If your problem were simply that of a hymen that needed minor surgery in order to break it, it would be a common problem easily resolved,” he said to her when she had put the items of clothing she’d had to remove back on. “You are, however, suffering from an abnormality I have had no previous experience with and with which I would be very reluctant to interfere. I strongly suspect, Mrs. Dix, that you have no womb and that no amount of extensive surgery would enable you to ever bear a child.”

Frozen-faced Wallis thanked him, paid him, and left his consulting room.

She had never been very maternal or interested in children and, other than for Win’s sake, didn’t particularly want to bear a child. What she did want to do was to function as other women did in the bedroom and to put an end to Win’s sneers that she wasn’t a proper woman.

By the time she reached the train station, she was too deep in thought to be aware of how crowded and busy it was. Was the fact that she was unmaternal because of her lack of a uterus and a womb? Shouldn’t she have guessed long ago that there was something basically wrong with her internal organs when, at Oldfields, she was the only girl who didn’t have what was referred to discreetly as “monthlies”? The school nurse had told her it was nothing to worry about; that lots of girls, if they were athletic as she, captain of the Oldfields hockey team, was, didn’t menstruate and, as she was spared all the considerable inconvenience of “monthlies,” she was to think herself lucky.

She had thought herself lucky and, until now, had never given her very active, period-free life another thought.

She boarded a train for San Diego, thinking about it now very deeply.

Did whatever was different about her account for her flat-chested, angular figure? Certainly there was nothing remotely rounded or femininely voluptuous about her, and that there wasn’t had never troubled her. She had liked looking different and had always played up to it. At one time, when she was about seventeen, she had even taken to wearing men’s shirts and bow ties.

She had never felt unfeminine, though.

She had never overly preferred the company of girls to boys; rather the reverse. Even since she had been old enough to be interested in boys, she had always been very popular with them—and had wanted to be so.

The knowledge brought with it vast relief. Despite her markedly masculine appearance, she most certainly wasn’t a man. Where sexual desire was concerned, she was very much a woman. Importantly as well, her visible genitalia were completely normal. She wasn’t a freak. She was simply a woman possibly without a uterus and womb and with a hymen no one, not even a gynecologist, wished to tamper with.

Well, if that was the case, so be it. She could live with it. Even without penetration she could still give sexual satisfaction and, if Win had been a more tender and considerate lover, knew she would be capable of receiving it as well.

She would, though, never be able to give Win the son he so deeply craved.

As the train continued to steam toward San Diego, she felt an emotion for Win she had never felt before.

She felt pity.

It wasn’t his fault he had drawn such a short straw when he had married her. That he should give vent to his frustration in violent rages was almost understandable—and from now on she was going to do her best to understand it. In many respects, they had such a lot going for them. Win was a man’s man, popular with those beneath his command. He was certain he was in line for further promotion—which meant she would have even more prestige socially. Their lifestyle gave endless opportunities for the kind of entertaining and hostessing that she so enjoyed and that she excelled at.

The two of them simply had to make the best of things. As the train finally steamed into San Diego’s tiny station she determined that she, at least, was going to do so. Somehow, some way, even though drink had made Win portly instead of slim-hipped and even though his once well-defined jawline was now as jowly as that of a man several years his senior, she was going to rekindle her feelings for him. For what she had unwittingly cheated him out of, she owed him that at least.

Full of inner resolve, she took the bus that led out to the air station. Win never got home till late in the evening, and so she would have time to make an especially nice dinner for the two of them. She would leaf through her cookery bible,
Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
, and find something she was certain he would enjoy.

As she got off the bus and walked the short distance to their pleasingly large house, its yard a riot of oleander and roses, she felt almost lighthearted. She now knew the worst and had decided how she was going to live with it. All that was needed to make it work was just a tiny bit of reciprocation from Win.

Though it was still only late afternoon, she knew the instant she closed the front door behind her that the house wasn’t empty and that Win was home.

There was no noise, though. No clinking of a bottle against the edge of a glass. No sound of him moving about.

With tension mounting, she shed her jacket and gloves and walked swiftly through the sitting room, calling out, “Win! Win, darling! Where are you?”

She found him in the dining room. He was seated at the table, his face ashen, a telegram in his hands.

Slowly, with a look of stupefaction on his face, he raised his head to hers.

“Dumaresque,” he said starkly. “He’s dead. Shot down in a dogfight with a Fokker triplane.”

Deeply shocked, she put a hand on the table’s shiny surface to steady herself.

Dumaresque had been the only person in his family Win had truly cared about, and his death was going to hit him hard. Even worse for him would be the manner of Dumaresque’s death. For Dumaresque to have died in action while he, Win, had been thousands of miles away, safely training pilots in navigational skills, would in his eyes be such a slur on his manhood she doubted if he would ever get over it.

Even as the thought came to her, he crushed the telegram fiercely in a white-knuckled fist.

“Win, darling …” She rounded the table in order to put an arm around him, to offer him some kind of comfort.