That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba Page B

later. ‘Through the years I think men found her witty, and that special ability of giving them her full attention, quite an art! I think men were more generous and complimentary than women.’ Angula adds: ‘Lt Alberto Da Zara, an excellent horseman with a keen and practised eye for charming women, fell under her spell.’ Decades later when he returned to China aboard his flagship Montecucolli as Admiral Da Zara there was a splendid photo in his quarters of Wallis in Court dress inscribed ‘To you’. Wallis herself admits that he bequeathed to her some poetry that he had written.
    The inscription is worth pausing over, indicating as it does how adept Wallis was at making a man feel he was the only one in the world. There was therefore no need for further identification; he was the only one. In another photograph from a private family collection of Wallis with Lieutenant Da Zara she is not, as others might be, looking at the camera but is focusing entirely on her man. However, as Diana Angulo, whose family knew many Italian old-school diplomats in China, explains: ‘in that league Italians tended to marry into the old aristocratic families’.
    There had been other men friends during the Lotus Year including one described as a ‘dashing British Military Officer’, and she also met at this time, probably through Da Zara, the glamorous and wealthy young Italian aristocrat Count Galeazzo Ciano, playboy son of a First World War hero. Ciano was already a Fema alreadascist sympathizer having taken part in the 1922 march on Rome. Diana Angulo recalls: ‘From Italian friends I often heard that Ciano was very taken by her.’ But the Count was twenty-one at the time, seven years younger than Wallis, a newly qualified law graduate embarking on a diplomatic career which took him to Rio de Janeiro, the Holy See and Peking in the space of one year, 1925. Later, Count Ciano became Mussolini’s son-in-law with a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness and promiscuity and was executed by an anti-Fascist firing squad in 1944. In 1930, newly married to the nineteen-year-old Edda Mussolini, he came to serve as Italian consul in Shanghai. A casual acquaintance with Wallis five years earlier in China was thus embellished to create a story that they had had an affair which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and botched abortion.
    But none of her friendships blossomed into likely marriage and, as she was about to turn thirty, she knew it was time to face reality – what she calls the unfinished business of her marriage to Win – and either get a divorce and find another man to marry, or look for a job, a prospect she did not relish.
    Wallis writes of a Peking summer and winter and spring, of an inner voice suddenly speaking to her quite severely telling her that she was deluding herself if she stayed any longer. In fact she had returned to Shanghai in the spring of 1925, possibly because she recognized that she was becoming too close to Herman, in many ways her ideal man. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, he would take her walking along the broad parapet of the great wall around the city. She had had many hours to brood about what she should do and, with renewed confidence that she could still attract men, decided it was time to find a ship that would carry her across the Pacific, to take her home to America and to the future that she now had to face.

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    Wallis on the Lookout
     
    ‘I can’t go on wandering for the rest of my life’
     
     
     
    W allis sailed from Japan to Seattle in early September 1925, but while en route across the Pacific fell ill with ‘an obscure internal ailment’. She recalled that the ship’s doctor ‘struggled valiantly with a very puzzling case’ and then had her transferred to hospital as soon as the ship docked in Seattle. There followed an operation, which she described as not long but ‘one more thing I had to go through alone in a strange city’. If ever a woman sounded in need of a