The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain Page B

for a few days, he would change his world. He would visit Jeanne, his favourite dancer at the Moulin Rouge. He and Jeanne would drink champagne and dance to gypsy violins and make love in a noisy and indecent way. Jeanne, who had nothing, no possessions, no apartment of her own, nothing at all except her beauty and her clothes and her meagre salary from the Moulin Rouge, would console him. She would make life seem beautiful again. Because forty-three was not old; it could be the prime of his life. Perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would have made enough money to move to Paris and set up a practice there. And in Paris, he decided, there would be no more picnicking and family outings. They killed a man, these things. They destroyed his curiosity and his desire.
    When Albert woke, as a pale sun began to shine through the train window, he became immediately aware of an odd, tickling sensation on his mouth, as though Jeanne might have been stroking it with a feather.
    He reached up to his lips and found, to his disgust, an insect crawling there. He swatted it away: a large wasp, heavy and stupid in its autumn torpor. It fell on to the red blanket which covered Albert and as he looked around for something with which to kill it, a burning pain in his mouth assailed him. The damned wasp had stung him!
    Albert leaned up on his elbow. As the pain intensified, he thought how he had been lying exactly like this at the picnic in the park, but with his head resting against Berthe, and now, alone in the wagon-lit, he began to cry out to Berthe, saying her name, gasping it out as the venom from the wasp sting – the same venom that had almost killed him as a child – entered his blood and began its lethal work. His throat constricted. His lungs began to burn and ache. He doubled over in his agony, trying to reach out for his cup of water, but knowing, as his hand scrabbled to find the cup, that water wasn’t going to save him.
    And Albert thought that this, this death by suffocation, by asphyxiation, was exactly the death he had always feared, the worst death, and he cursed it and cursed despicable Nature which had caused it.
    In torment, he hammered on the window of the wagon-lit. He tried to call out to the fields and woods and hedgerows speeding by. He tried to tell these green and indifferent things that he was too young to die. He tried to say that it was barely the autumn of his life and that on the beautiful surface of his existence, hardly any leaves had fallen.

Nativity Story

I had a child once. A boy called Daniel. He was just learning to crawl and make noises that sounded like words when my wife left me and took Daniel with her and I never saw either of them again. My wife packed up all the baby paraphernalia and every single one of Daniel’s toys and all his little clothes, so there was no evidence left that he’d ever been part of my life.
    I went searching in drawers and under furniture, looking for something left behind, but there was nothing left behind. When I was drunk – which I often was – I thought, well maybe I just dreamed this little Daniel? Because I’m prone to spells of weirdness. People stare at me and say: ‘Mordy, what’s going on, then?’ And sometimes I can’t go to work. Sometimes, when I wake up, the world looks so abnormally bad that I have to cower in my room.
    I’m a chef. Well, a cook. Chef’s too poncy a word for what I do. But I’m good with eggs and I know what proper chips should be like.
    I never stay in one place for long. It’s like I’m afraid I’ll look up from the fryer one day and see my ex-wife and my son eating food that I’ve made and be filled with a sadness I won’t be able to bear. So I keep moving on. On and on.
    And more and more I keep away from towns, choose places way out in the countryside: motels, guest houses and B-and-Bs. If you work in these places, especially out of season, you can often get