The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain

beet-red and glistening.
    But now, sitting in the park on this October Sunday in the year 1877, Albert felt cold. He picked up one of the voluminous table napkins provided for the picnic by Berthe and wound it round his neck. Marianne giggled. ‘I don’t know what you look like!’ she said.
    â€˜If you don’t know what I look like, then why did you say anything, Marianne?’ said Albert. ‘If you had found some witty comparison between me and, say, some little-known species of marsupial, then you might have given us a moment’s amusement, but as it is you’ve just wasted your breath.’
    Berthe, against whose familiar rump Albert was reclining, turned her head and looked sharply at him. Why, came her unspoken question, was he being so pompous and disagreeable, especially to Marianne, upon whom, everybody knew, he doted in a way that was sometimes almost troubling?
    Why indeed? Why ? Albert didn’t know. He stared at Marianne, at her pretty face under her smart Sunday bonnet, at the bodice of her striped taffeta dress and waited for the pleasurable and familiar feeling of mild lust to arrive in his groin. But what arrived instead was a feeling of boredom so crushing, so absolute, that Albert had the sensation of falling over. He was glad that he wasn’t standing up, for then, surely, he would have fallen over. It was as if the sky had literally darkened, or as if the universe were collapsing in on itself.
    Albert looked away from Marianne. He saw that he was still holding his teacup. He examined his own thumb on the rim of the saucer. He thought how plump, pink and ridiculous this thumb appeared. He set the cup down and now realised that everybody had turned away from him: Marianne and Berthe and his six-year-old daughter, Delphine, and Claude and Joséphine. All of them had turned their backs on him. The child was whispering something to herself, one of her little songs, but the grown-ups remained silent and unmoving, and Albert wondered whether they knew what was happening to him, knew that his universe was faltering and that, lying as he was near the rim of the pond, they were simply waiting for the moment when he would roll backwards and fall into the water and drown under the flat green leaves of the water lilies.
    Albert rubbed his eyes. Then, one by one, he examined the things that lay within his vision: the tea caddy, the teapot on its stand, some bottles of water, the half-eaten cake, the wasp, a plate of biscuits, the fallen leaves, the knives and forks, the white cloth, the edge of the rug, the grass beyond, the shadows of clouds on the gravel walkway. He expected to find consolation in one or other of these things, especially in the tea caddy, whose square shape and ivory handle he had always found aesthetically pleasing. But now, on reflection, Albert decided that a tea caddy was a ridiculous object; in itself and through-and-through an unnecessary thing, balefully ugly and superfluous to human need. He wanted to rage at the mind that had invented it.
    At this moment, Delphine picked up her skipping rope and asked her grandmother if she could go and do some skipping on the gravel walkway. ‘Yes,’ said Joséphine, ‘but go right over there, so that you don’t kick up dust into our faces.’
    Albert looked away from the tea caddy, over to where Delphine now stood in the sunshine, laying out the rope in front of her feet, then experimentally jumping over it, to remind herself what skipping involved. Though he was pleased to discover that these little gestures still touched his heart, Albert soon realised that what they touched his heart with was sorrow: sorrow for Delphine’s loneliness in a grown-up world, sorrow for her future as the wife of some unfaithful husband, sorrow for her mortality. Though he loved her, he wished at that moment, as Delphine began to skip, that he had never brought her into the world.
    He couldn’t lie there any