“while I’m here. Perhaps you could spare a moment for a private matter? If it’s convenient, of course.”
The Duchess of Windsor met my gaze over the back of the sofa. “Of course. Miss Drewes, would you mind showing Mrs. Gudewill to her car?”
Miss Drewes rose. “Not at all.”
Now, let me make something clear, before I explain what happened next. You could fault the duchess for any number of defects—we all have our defects, remember—but you couldn’t claim she shirked her duties as the wife of the governor of the Bahamas.
“They think I’m nothing but a clotheshorse,” she told me, as we cruised to Cat Island aboard the Gemini, a few weeks after our first productive little chat in the library of Government House. “They think I’m some kind of lazy, frivolous socialite. Dinner parties and ocean cruises. And nothing could be further from the truth, Lulu.”
I remember gazing at her against her tableau of pillows on the sofa—we sat inside the deckhouse, because of the draft—and recalling a certain dinner party the night before, at the home of Fred Sigrist and his wife. The Oakeses were there, and Harold Christie and his brother Frank, and yours truly, and a warm breeze off the ocean, and plenty of wine and brandy, palm trees and sea grapes and tranquility, such that you would hardly have known there was a war on at all, over on the other side of the world, where they existed under gloom of German bombers and English weather. Of course, there was no need to ask Wallis who they were. She meant David’s family, her nemesis, those wicked, cold-blooded, implacable snobs, hypocrites all, determined always to cast her—Wallis—in the worst possible light, when nothing could be further from the truth, Lulu. Behind her, the ocean shimmered under the sun.
“Nothing at all,” I said.
“I simply couldn’t believe my eyes when we began to tour about. The poverty! It’s heartbreaking, worse than anything I saw in China. And no one was doing a thing to help. I remember visiting a woman in her hut on one of the Out Islands—I don’t remember which one, it doesn’t matter—dirt floor, surrounded by children in rags, their bellies all swollen, another baby on the way, and she wasn’t any more concerned about the coming event than a . . . a cat might be concerned about an impending litter.” Wallis shook her head. “And that’s when I conceived the idea of a maternity clinic. To help, you know. To help these poor creatures take care of their young.”
“And to think the newspapers report nothing but the number of steamer trunks in your retinue.”
“Oh, it’s no surprise, really. That’s what they want the rest of the world to think of me. Those newspapers, they all have their instructions, believe me.” She turned to look out one of the portholes. What a profile she had. That strong jaw, that sharp, large nose. “It doesn’t matter. As long as I’ve made a difference, that’s what matters. I don’t care if nobody hears about it, not a single soul. My own conscience is clear.”
“I’m sure you’ve done a lot of good.”
“You’ll see. You have to roll up your sleeves, you know, you have to weigh those babies yourself, change those napkins, feed them their bottles. You have to show these natives how to do it all properly.”
I opened my mouth to ask how Wallis herself had learned to do it all properly, not having children of her own, but at the last instant I swallowed the question and glanced down to my stenographer’s notebook and scribbled something, I don’t remember what.
“It’s all so primitive,” she went on. “And in this modern age. They nurse the babies themselves, like animals. No notion of proper infant nutrition. The first thing I did, I rang up Johnson and Johnson and made them donate cans of milk. Thousands and thousands of cans we’ve distributed among the Out Islanders. It’s done so much good. Of course, if the United States gets dragged into this damned war, they’ll have to stop.”
“You mean the milk? Johnson and Johnson?”
“All of it. Milk, diaper cloths, everything.” Her eyes narrowed, and I remember thinking she must be concentrating deeply on something, maybe the possible new sources of supplies, some alternative means of getting milk and diapers to the native mothers of the Bahamas. I sat and watched her, pen poised.
After some time, she turned to me and pointed her finger at the leather bag containing my Kodak