The Shadow Queen (35 page)

Brutally he pushed her away. “Don’t ‘Win darling’ me!” he snarled, stumbling to his feet. “Dumaresque is dead and so are hundreds of thousands of others! And where am I? I’m a useless object sunning myself in California!”

With her heart thumping painfully in her chest, Wallis said briskly, “Of course you’re not useless, Win. Organizing air stations the way you do is helping win the war on a scale much larger than would be the case if you had been sent overseas as a pilot. The job you do is vitally important and you are very good at it—”

“I’m a fucking failure!” Sobs caught in his throat as he barged past her to the door leading into their sitting room. “I should have been out in France with Dumaresque. I should be out there now, hunting in the skies for the bastard who brought him down in flames!”

In mounting alarm she hurried after him, but he was already at the cocktail cabinet, one hand around the neck of a bottle of gin.

He swung around to face her. “Get out!” he screamed, tears streaming down his face. “Get out!
Get out! GET OUT!
”

She didn’t need telling for a fifth time.

Scooping up the jacket and gloves she had just shed, she beat a hasty retreat, running in her haste to be out of the house. With the front door closed safely behind her, she paused, panting for breath. What was she to do now? Trawling through Fannie Farmer’s cookbook for something extra delicious for dinner was completely out of the question. What she had to do was to steer clear of Win until he had drunk himself into an unconscious stupor. Only then would it be relatively safe for her to return.

In Pensacola, the movie theater had been a retreat for her countless times in the past, and the movies was where she now headed. There, in the dark, she would work out how she was going to deal with what she knew was going to prove to be yet another destructive blow to her marriage.

The movie was an English film that had been released just before the outbreak of the war. It was historical, all about Henry VIII and his six wives. Wallis had too much on her mind to pay it much attention, but one thing she did notice was that the actress taking the part of Catherine Howard reminded her very strongly of Pamela.

A
fterward Wallis was to always remember the day Win received the news of Dumaresque’s death as the day when, instead of their marriage being given a second chance as, when returning from Los Angeles, she had intended it would be, it became the day their marriage finally reached the point of no return.

He became inseparable from his flask of gin, often disappearing to the beach at night to drink for hours on end in lonely, bitter isolation. To make things even worse, there were other Spencer family tragedies. His mother was killed in an automobile accident. His sister Ethel committed suicide. Even to Wallis, who always struggled to be pragmatic, it seemed as if the Spencer family had been born under a particularly dark star.

Where the darkness of her own life was concerned, the one sliver of hope she clung to was that when victory finally came and the war was at an end, Win would no longer be burdened by the shame he felt in not having seen front-line active service.

By the end of the summer it seemed as if the war were about to come to a victorious conclusion. The Germans were being pushed back to the old Hindenburg Line, the position they had held before the spring offensive. The battlefields began to be littered with abandoned German weapons, and the numbers of German prisoners taken soared into the thousands.

September brought with it fresh, sweeping victories. All along the Western Front, from the Scheldt River in the north to Sedan in the south, the Germans were finally in retreat.

In October, American troops under the command of General Pershing crashed through the German line on the River Meuse, hammering the final nail into Germany’s coffin. From then on, there was no doubt about the outcome.

On the eleventh of November Wallis woke to the news that an armistice had been signed and that the war in Europe had ended. The jubilation at the air station was manic. People ran from their homes screaming and yelling and whooping with joy and relief. Whistles blew. Bells rang. Guns were triumphantly fired.

In San Diego there was dancing in the streets. The next day Win led his men in a confetti-blitzed parade through the city. A sixty-piece U.S. Navy band marched behind them, and bringing up the rear were flag-waving Boy Scouts, the California Women’s Army Corps, and a whole host of city dignitaries.

For Wallis it provided a rare moment: a moment when she could justifiably be proud of Win. Despite his off-duty drinking binges and the rumors on the base as to his treatment of her, he had, through a mixture of sheer energy and talent, created the North Island naval air station virtually from scratch, just as he had the air station at Squantum.

It was a big achievement and she knew that if he could only curb his drinking and his temper, there was no telling what heights he might reach within the Navy. Knowing exactly how her Montague and Warfield relations would react if she told them she wished to divorce Win, she determined yet again to soldier on with her difficult marriage. Quite simply, it seemed to her she had no other choice.

Chapter Twenty-One

W
ith the war now at an end, everyone she knew, apart from herself and Win, was looking forward with fierce optimism to the future. Optimism was not a quality Win had ever possessed, and the end of the war brought with it, for him, a feeling of utter worthlessness. Being in command of a naval air training station when a war was in progress had been one thing. There had been an adrenaline-filled sense of urgency about it. There was no sense of urgency at all in being in command of a naval air training station when the war to end all wars had been fought and won.

“What is the damned point of it?” he said savagely time and again to Wallis. “All I’m now doing is pushing a pen all day long—and there’s no promotion in the pipeline. It’s men who’ve seen active service who are getting the promotions.”

With every passing day his sense of failure and disappointment increased. At home he retreated behind a wall of silence so complete that there were times when Wallis would have been grateful for the cutting remarks he had once been so free with. Now he rarely spoke to her at all.

She compensated for the hostile silence she lived with at home by spending as much time as possible outside it. There were congenial people on the air station with whom, in the plush surroundings of San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado, she played bridge, bezique, and backgammon. She went to the cinema once or twice a week with Fidelia Rainey and then came a lifesaving event. Henry Mustin was posted to San Diego in order to assume command of the air detachment of the Pacific Fleet. A month later, Corinne joined him.

“So give me all the gossip, Skinny,” she said as they sat in a quiet corner of the del Coronado, sipping chilled martinis. “What’s griping Win? Henry says he’s like a bear with a sore head—and doin’ himself no favors because of it.”

Wallis had given a lot of thought as to how much she was going to tell Corinne. Because Corinne was not only family but also the nearest thing to a best friend she had, her instinct was to tell her everything. If she did, though, Corinne would tell Henry—and the outcome of that would not be good for Win’s career.

She said, choosing her words carefully, “He’s not happy, Corinne. I never could convince him that being in command of Squantum and then North Island was far more important to the winning of the war than serving as a pilot at the front. When Dumaresque was killed in action, he felt guilt, shame, every negative feeling you can imagine.”

Corinne took a sip of her martini and then said, “Negativity isn’t a quality the Navy looks for when promoting men. I hate to say this honey, but Win is his own worst enemy. Especially where booze is concerned.”

Wallis flinched. For Corinne to speak so bluntly about Win’s drinking problems meant those problems were also known to Henry and, if they were known to Henry, it meant they were also known to the Navy brass who held the power to promote—or not to promote—Win.

“Win never drinks on duty, Corinne.”

Corinne quirked an eyebrow. “If all Henry’s heard is true, the amount Win drinks off duty means he doesn’t have to drink on duty. His off-duty drinking is enough to keep him tanked up all the time.”

It was too true for Wallis to deny. She bit her lip, hoping rumors as to other aspects of Win’s behavior hadn’t also reached Henry Mustin’s ears.

Corinne swirled an olive on a cocktail stick around in the remainder of her drink. “Both Henry and I feel partly responsible for your marriage to Win, Skinny. You met him in our home, and both of us knew Win was a man with a very short fuse. I guess we just couldn’t imagine him giving rein to his temper where a woman was concerned. Something it seems we were wrong about.”

Wallis opened her mouth to vehemently deny that Win had ever been abusive to her, but it was a lie too far and the words wouldn’t come.

Corinne put her drink down and took hold of Wallis’s hand, gripping it tightly. “No one else is goin’ to give you this advice, but then I’m not anyone else. Nothing is ever goin’ to get any better between you and Win. He’s a man with a whole pile of problems—all of them of his own making. Leave him. Get a divorce and start afresh. If you don’t, he’ll crush your spirit, Skinny. And you can trust in one thing—though the rest of the family will react to the word
divorce
as if the world has come to an end, Henry and I won’t. We know too much about Win. You’ll have us rooting for you even if you don’t have anyone else.”

G
rateful as she was for Corinne’s support, Wallis still continued trying to make her marriage work. For her to become a divorcée would break her mother’s heart. Not only that, it would signify failure on a very public scale, and, ever afterward, her reputation would, she knew, be viewed as being tarnished. It was Corinne’s attitude toward Win that brought matters to a head.

After months of treating Wallis as though she didn’t exist, he slammed into the house late one afternoon, incoherent with rage. “You’ve told her!” he screamed, sweeping their collection of cut-glass crystal from its display shelf onto the floor in an avalanche of glittering, shimmering shards. “Mustin’s never going to put a good word in for me now!”

“I haven’t told Corinne anything, Win! I swear to God I haven’t!” Desperately she tried to get out of the room, but whichever way she darted he was right in front of her. Broken glass crackled beneath the soles of her shoes as he made a lunge, seizing hold of her wrists.

She knew what was going to happen next. He was going to drag her into the bedroom and hog-tie her to the bed as he had done countless times before. Then he would leave her there for hours while he went off on a drunken bender.

As always, she struggled like a wildcat, but he was a big man.

“Bitch!” he shouted at her as he lashed first one of her wrists to the headboard, and then the other, following the expletive with a string of other, far viler ones.

Wallis had heard them all before, but as Win stormed out of the bedroom and then out of the house, she vowed she wasn’t going to go through the rest of her life listening to them. She was going to follow Corinne’s advice. She was going to divorce Win and start her life afresh.

I
n late spring of 1919, when Win was away on a week’s training exercise, she took the train to Washington to speak with her mother.

“Honey, you just can’t do a thing like that.” Alice stared at her as if unsure as to whether she had heard right.

“Yes, I can, Mama. This last time when he tied me to the bed, he didn’t come back for thirty-six hours! I nearly died of thirst, and I’ve never been so hungry in my life.”

Alice began twisting her hands together. “Some men aren’t easy to live with, darling, and I guess Win is a shade worse than most. You can’t divorce him, though. No Montague has ever been divorced. It’s just something completely unheard of.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Mama. Win doesn’t love me anymore—and because of the way he treats me, I don’t love him anymore either.”

“In marriages between well-bred people, love doesn’t always have a lot to do with things.”

“Maybe it doesn’t, but those aren’t the rules you’ve lived by, Mama. You always married for love and were fortunate enough to always stay in love. I haven’t been. There’s another reason, too, why I think divorcing Win is the right thing for me to do.”

The blood left Alice’s face. “Dear Lord, Wallis! You’re not in love with another man, are you?”

“No, Mama.” She paused, wondering how, without causing her mother unnecessary distress, she could best explain that she could never have children. In the end she decided that vagueness was the best policy. “Because I’ve never fallen pregnant, I went to see a gynecologist, Mama. He says I’m not quite as other women are internally and that I’ll never be able to have a baby. For that reason alone, I think Win should be free to marry again. That way he’ll stand every chance of having the son he so wants and that I can’t give him.”