Fourth Estate £12.99 pp504
Laurie Graham’s last two novels, The Unfortunates and Mr Starlight, offered lightly fictionalised and enjoyable biographies of, respectively, Peggy Guggenheim and Liberace. In both cases, she lit on a subject whose life was so extraordinary that, as Richard Littlejohn might say, you couldn’t make it up, although, for the sake of literary tidiness, she did a bit of fictional rearranging. Gone with the Windsors is another real-life make-over. This time, many of the characters — courtiers, royal mistresses, weaselly politicians — appear under their real names rather than pseudonyms, and the events they live through — Edward VIII’s abdication, the second world war — are of the world-shaking kind, so that sometimes the novel reads like living history, rather than the true lies that are at the heart of fiction.
The story is told through the diary entries, running from 1932-46, of Maybell Brumby, a belle from Baltimore, whose devotion to manicures and swanky nightspots is reminiscent of another blonde, the high-maintenance diarist, Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee. Maybell, recently widowed — “it was always the risk in marrying an older man” — takes her late husband’s cash and her new spring wardrobe to London to catch up with a bunch of her buddies, who include the former Wally Warfield, once known as Minnehaha on account of her high cheekbones and dark braids. Wally is now married to a businessman, Ernest Simpson, and is, according to Maybell’s snooty older sister, Violet, “quite on the make”.
Violet is married to a Scottish nobleman who belongs to the dowdy aristocratic set surrounding the King and Queen, and neglects her children in order to serve on every London charity committee. So she is bound to disapprove of Wally, a divorcée with a scandalous past, including unmentionable adventures in China, who seems hellbent on destroying the cobwebby conventions of English society. Maybell is less censorious — she has always admired Wally for rising above her dismal circumstances as the daughter of a boarding-house keeper and for being the greatest fun. Wally, like Maybell, can shop till she drops and even though she is notorious for never picking up the tab, saps like Maybell can be wheedled into paying for the pleasure of Wally’s company.
Before long, Maybell is Wally’s best friend and, like her, persona non grata as far as the stuffy Violet is concerned. The ditzy Maybell may look and sound like Lorelei Lee — riotously misinformed about practically everything and with a kind of airheaded shrewdness that ensures her survival in treacherous times — but it is Wally, a bony brunette, who has taken to heart the unswerving philosophy of Loos’s heroine: “Kissing your hand may make you feel very good, but a diamond bracelet lasts for ever.”
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When Wally sets out to snaffle the Prince of Wales, it is not because she yearns to be the future Queen of England. Her master plan is to remain as the prince’s playmate for as long as she can hold on to him, and then be retired and rewarded with a pension and a rattling collection of diamond bracelets. Wally is a world-class schemer: ousting the current royal companion, Thelma Furness, after luring her into a state of chum- miness over a dinner at which Wally serves “an overture of caviars”; reading up on world events, so that HRH comes to rely on her advice; and installing a jazzy drinks trolley at his weekend retreat. But what she hadn’t bargained on, being somewhat distracted by fittings at Mainbocher and hair appointments, was that the heir to the throne was so unshakeably in love with her that he was never going to let her go; he would rather get rid of his country.
When George V dies unexpectedly of a cold, Wally’s long-term plans of jewel-encrusted retirement are trampled on in the immediate problems concerning love versus duty. For Wally’s wrinkly Peter Pan of a prince is on an eternal quest to find the mother love that he never received from his mother, the forbidding Queen Mary, and this, coupled with his penchant for tyrants, including Adolf Hitler, makes the bossy, interfering Mrs Simpson irresistible. It is a gorgeous irony that HRH, a weak and floundering man, gets what he wants — Wally — while the love of his life is forced into a tedious cul-de-sac of a life, with a man who bores her and won’t let her out of his sight. Maybell’s diary recounts the glitches in the royal romance in the same bemused tone as she records Europe’s jerky progress towards war. What she writes is a familiar story, but Graham’s sunny control makes the abdication crisis sound as fresh and tangy as Wally’s favourite dinner-party dessert, strawberry sherbet. Maybell Brumby is a wonderfully sassy creation: not exactly one of your heart-of-gold heroines, but, more entertainingly, one with a heart of gilt.
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