Roosevelt said nothing, but it was clear he was in agreement.
29: The Billiard Table
NASSAU IN JANUARY is always cool and dry—the long and glorious summer days with their delicious, lazy heat and sudden downpours have disappeared. And this January, the incessant flood of the most petty regulations from Whitehall confused the natives and annoyed the English. This morning the native head gardener asked David about Supplementary Regulation Concerning the Washing of Farm and Gardening Implements For Cultivating Peat. It was pure gibberish, written, no doubt, by a civil servant who had never set foot outside the British Isles.
From the next room, David’s wife asked, “Darling, can you zip up, please?”
Wallis’ slim body and mannish face appeared in the mirror. No one could ever be guilty of calling her beautiful, but many strong men had fallen under her spell, and the former King of England was not a strong man. And as Wallis was the always willing to admit—to herself at least—David did not come from the strong branch of the Windsor family tree. Far from it; he was weakest of her many conquests. The joke—too extensive to be mere gossip—was that she had an unequalled ability to make a man equipped with a toothpick to feel like he had a cigar.
She whispered, “there’s nothing underneath, so don’t dally too long tonight, darling.”
These small indiscretions were all that was needed to keep him interested—he was, and he would always be, a dunderhead. She would remind him twice during the dinner, but her main message would be to the ladies after the ladies had left the men to their brandy and cigars. These ladies would all offer disapproving clucking ranging from the mild to the severe at such a meretricious trick. Of course, they all immediately adopted the practice themselves to try to rekindle a little carnal fire with their boring husbands. Much more important to Wallis would be the faithful retelling to their husbands. Among the small colony of British in the Bahamas, Wallis would always have an ample supply of English supplicants to entertain herself, and when she tired of them and their congenital lack of stamina, there were the occasional “informals” with a native helper that seemed so spontaneous, but which Wallis actually planned to the last detail—she did so love the animism of being dominated by a massive black frame of raw muscle and power sweating over her, his sweat making the grabbing of his massive arms and shoulders all the more challenging and exciting.
Wallis was buoyant as she had recently started a discreet correspondence, first by mail and then by the occasional long-distant telephone with the very polite, very proper, well-educated, and sophisticated Lord Halifax. She admired Halifax and saw him as a potential ally. She sensed Halifax could lead the charge to have her pathologically weak husband regain a position of influence. True, the terms of the Abdication had been exceedingly severe but this was after all simply a piece of paper, and new pieces of paper could always be created when the time was right. And Halifax knew that both Wallis and David were very well liked in Germany.
The previous August, Wallis had redecorated the boat house and had it painted a light cream with sky-blue trim. The boat house was far from the main house, and had the added attraction of a private winding track to the main road, and the track was very well hidden by the greenery—a man could quite easily slip down to the boat house unseen.
Actually, Wallis had been caught once and it always made her tingle when she remembered it. She had an extension added to the boat house with its glorious view of the harbor. Wallis had installed four soft, dark tan club chairs, the type David loved and that one sinks into rather than sits on. She also installed a billiard table in the far end of the room, away from the windows. It was on this table, with her legs wrapped around a stout leg, that she had been caught in flagrante delicto.
With her typical thoroughness and planning, Wallis had bespoke dark brown cushions made that just happened to be a little thicker than the height of the walls of the billiard table. The cushions were surprisingly firm and covered in a smooth silk. In the cupboard beneath the small bar there were four extra cushion covers, in case any of the cushions in service suffered any spontaneous but potentially embarrassing stains. One of these cushions was in use the day of the surprise discovery.
Dickie and Edwina had been David and Wallis’s best friends before all the troubles started with David’s mother. It was from this prim and proper archetypical upper-class English lady—and an heiress, at that—that Wallis had been educated in the glories of dark flesh.
“You have never experienced such a feeling. It’s overwhelming—they are so big everywhere, especially down there,” Edwina had stated matter-of-factly.
“Well, Edwina, I am a Southern belle and to think about having a huge, sweating Negro on top of me. And inside me. Well, I just cannot consider it.”
“Pfff, don’t be such a prude. I’ve been to Harlem a dozen times and I told you about the adventures I have had on billiard tables. You need to be open minded. After all, it’s not as if you have to be seen in public with these Negro men. It’s all just light-hearted fun. And remember, as you’re a white woman, you’re prized among these men so you get treated like royalty. Come to think of it, you are royalty.”
They both giggled as Wallis was clearly warming to the idea.
Edwina had been correct. On the first few encounters with the local boys, Wallis had been thrilled to actually be nervous, as she had been in the early days working as a whore in Shanghai. The nervousness made her feel young again.
Wallis had arranged for one of the native boys who had painted the boat house earlier to return, “just to do a little touch-up work” she had explained on the telephone to the harried and rude British captain who was in charge of work details for government properties on the island.
The young man arrived wearing sandals, an old straw hat, and overalls that had once been a deep blue, but now the color had been reduced to a very pale blue with all the washing and bleaching. The bleaching had removed all the hardness of the original material so now the overalls were soft as baby flannel.
Wallis knew the seduction protocol by heart. And what excited her as much as the penetration by this strong young man was the seduction. Of course, she knew it was not really seduction, as she had complete mastery over the young man, but she loved to make all her conquests—black or white—beg.
Wallis was wearing sunglasses with a large dark brown frame, flat canvas espadrilles, and her favorite summer sun flower dress—mid-calf length white cotton with blue and yellow sun flowers; she had nothing underneath, as was her custom with the dress. She opened the door and explained to the young man that she wanted an area on the veranda painted above the main picture window. She sat in one of the white painted wicker chairs drinking a rum punch that she had made herself. Languidly the young man painted. She noted with a quiet delight that his arms were extremely well developed, as were his back and shoulders—his muscles were clearly visible, so different from the flabby white men on the Colony. She estimated his weight at 17 stone, or over twice her demure eight stone—“he will be able to throw me around like a rag doll;” she dampened at the thought.