The Golden Hour
The Golden Hour
Beatriz Williams
From the New York Times bestselling author: a dazzling WWII epic spanning London, New York and the Bahamas and the most infamous couple of the age, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor The Bahamas, 1941. Newly-widowed Lulu Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine whose readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. But beneath the glitter of Wallis and Edward’s marriage lies an ugly – and even treasonous – reality. In the middle of it all stands Benedict Thorpe: a handsome scientist of tremendous charm and murky national loyalties. When Nassau’s wealthiest man is murdered in one of the most notorious cases of the century, Lulu embarks on a journey to discover the truth behind the crime. The stories of two unforgettable women thread together in this extraordinary epic of sacrifice, human love and human courage, set against a shocking true crime… and the rise and fall of a legendary royal couple.
Beatriz Williams
Copyright (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Beatriz Williams
Cover design by Ellie Game @HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Cover photographs © Lee Avison/Arcangel Images (woman and foreground), Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (trees, hedges and background)
Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008380274
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008380281
Version: 2019-08-06
Dedication (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
To women and men everywhere who live with depression.
You are loved. You are needed. The night will pass.
Contents
Cover (#ue6b990d6-4581-5312-85b5-048a873e801d)
Title Page (#u77846f30-c56c-502c-b3e4-b166a344cd8e)
Copyright
Dedication
In August 1940 … (#u6b66bb1b-0179-5877-9fcb-03d1020a7f2f)
PART I
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Lulu: June 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: July 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: September 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
PART II
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Elfriede: October 1900 (Germany)
Lulu: December 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: November 1900 (Germany)
Lulu: December 1941 (The Bahamas)
PART III
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Elfriede: June 1905 (Florida)
Lulu: June 1942 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: July 1905 (Florida)
Lulu: June 1942 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1905 (Berlin)
PART IV
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: June 1916 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1916 (Scotland)
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
PART V
Lulu: November 1943 (The Bahamas)
PART VI
Ursula: January 1944 (Germany)
Lulu: March 1944 (Switzerland)
Elfriede: March 1944 (Switzerland)
Epilogue. Lulu: June 1951 (RMS Queen Mary, At Sea)
Historical Note
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
About the Publisher
In August 1940, the Duke of Windsor is appointed governor of the Bahamas by his brother, George VI, on the recommendation of Winston Churchill.
While the former king feels the appointment is beneath his station, he accepts, in the expectation that loyal service in this colonial outpost will lead to more prestigious assignments in the future.
But despite an exemplary public record of governorship for the duration of the Second World War, and the energetic support of the Duchess of Windsor as the governor’s wife, the duke is never again asked to serve his country in an official capacity.
PART I (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
LULU (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
DECEMBER 1943 (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
(London) (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
IN THE FOYER of the Basil Hotel in Cadogan Gardens, atop the tea-colored wallpaper, a sign advises guests that blackout hours will be observed strictly. Another sign reminds us that enemy ears are listening. The wallpaper’s crowded with tiny orange flowers that seem to have started out life as pink, and they put me in mind of a story I once read about a woman who stares at the wallpaper in her room until she goes batty. Although that wallpaper was yellow, as I recall, so I may have some time to go.
I consult my watch. Three twenty-two.
Outside the windows, the air’s darkening fast. Some combination of coal smoke and December fog and the early hour at which the sun goes down at this latitude, as if the wallpaper and the signboards and the piles of rubble across the street aren’t enough to make you melancholy. I check the watch again—three twenty-three, impossible—and my gaze happens to catch that of the desk clerk. He’s examining me over the top of a rickety pair of reading glasses, because he hasn’t liked the look of me from the beginning. Why should he? A woman shows up at your London hotel in the middle of December, the middle of wartime, tanned skin, American accent, unmistakable scent of the foreign about her. She pays for her room in advance and carries only a small suitcase. Now she’s awaiting some no-good rendezvous, right in the middle of your dank, shabby, respectable foyer, and you ought to telephone the authorities, just to be on the safe side. In fact, you probably have telephoned the authorities.
The clerk’s gaze flicks to the window, and then to the clock above the mantel behind me. He steps away from the reception desk and goes to pull down the blackout shades, to close the heavy chintz curtains. His limbs are frail and stiff; his suit was tailored in maybe the previous century. When he moves, his white hair flies away from his skull, and I catch a whiff of cologne that reminds me of a barbershop. I consider whether I should rise and help him. I consider whether he’d kill me for it.
Well. Not kill me exactly, not the literal act of murder. It seems the killing of people has got inside my head somehow. War will do that. War will turn killing into a commonplace act, a thing men do to each other every day, every instant, for no particular reason except not to be killed yourself, so that you start to expect it everywhere, murder hangs darkly over you and around you like an atmosphere. The valley of the shadow of death, that’s war. Killing for no particular reason. At least in regular life, when somebody kills somebody else, he generally has a damned good reason, at least so far as the killer’s concerned. It’s personal, it’s singular. As I observe the feathery movement of the clerk’s hair in the draft, I wonder how much reason a fellow like that needed to kill someone. We all have our breaking points, you know.
A bell jingles. The front door opens. A blast of chill air whooshes inside, along with a pale woman in a worn coat and a brown fedora, almost like a man’s. She brushes the damp from her sleeves and looks around, spies the clerk, who’s just crossing the foyer on his way back to the desk.
“I beg your pardon, my good man,” she begins, in a brisk, quiet English voice, and the light from the lamp catches her hair, caught up in a blond knot just beneath the brim of her hat. She’s not wearing cosmetics, except maybe a touch of lipstick, and you might say she doesn’t need any. There’s something Nordic about her, something that doesn’t need ornament. Height and blondness, all those things my own Italian mother couldn’t give me, though she gave me plenty else. There’s also something familiar about her. I’ve seen that mouth before, haven’t I? Those straight, thick eyebrows soaring above a pair of blue eyes.
But no. Surely not. Surely I’m only imagining this, surely I’m only seeing a resemblance because I want to see one. After all, it’s impossible, isn’t it? Margaret Thorpe won’t receive my letter until this evening, when she arrives home from whatever government building she inhabits during working hours. So this woman can’t be her, cannot possibly be my husband’s sister, however much the sight of those eyebrows sets my heart stuttering. Anyway, her head’s now turned toward the clerk, and from this angle she looks nothing like Thorpe, not at all. Unless—
The bell jingles again, dragging my attention back to the entryway. Another draft follows, and a man shambles past the door in a damp overcoat of navy blue, a hat glittering with mist. His face is pockmarked, the only notable thing about him. He casts a slow, bland expression around the room, and it seems to me that he takes in every detail, every flock on the wallpaper and spot on the upholstery, until he arrives, quite by accident, on me.
The woman’s still addressing the clerk. No notice of us at all. I climb to my feet. “Mr. B—?”
He steps forward and holds out his hand. “You must be Mrs. Thorpe,” he says warmly, and he takes my fingers between his two palms, as if we are father and daughter, meeting for tea after a short absence.
INSTEAD OF REMAINING INSIDE THE Basil Hotel foyer (in which the enemy ears might or might not be listening, but the desk clerk certainly is) we head out into the gloom. I tend to step briskly as a matter of habit, but Mr. B— (I’m afraid I can’t reveal his real name) shuffles along at an awkward gait, and it’s a chore to keep my limbs in check. I tuck my hands inside my pockets and drum my fingers against my thighs. I feel as if he should speak first. He’s the professional, after all.
“Well, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says at last. “I must congratulate you on your resolve. To have made your way to London in wartime, to have approached my office with such an extraordinary request—why, it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve seen in some time.”
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Of course not. If there’s one thing we admire in this country, it’s dash. Dash and pluck, Mrs. Thorpe, which you appear to possess in abundance. How long had you two been married?”
“Since July.”
“This past July?”
“Yes. The seventh.”
“Ah. Just before he was captured, then. How dreadful.”
“It was months before I had any word at all. At first, I thought he’d been called out on another of his—whatever you call them—”
“Operations?”
“Yes, operations. But when he didn’t return …”
We pause to cross the street. I’ve allowed him to choose the route; I mean he’s the one who lives here, after all, the one who understands not just the map of London but the habits of the place. A couple of bicycles approach, one after the other, and while we wait for them to pass, Mr. B— speaks again.
“Mind you, it was quite against the rules.”
“What? What’s against the rules?”
Mr. B— stares not at my face, but along a line that passes right above my head, down the street to the approaching bicycles. “Marrying,” he says blandly.
The bicycles pass. We cross the street to enter a foggy square of red brick and white trim. Several of the houses are missing, simply not there, like teeth pulled from a jaw. Mr. B— leads me to the gardens in the middle, where we choose a wooden bench and sit about a foot apart, so that our arms and legs aren’t in any danger of touching, God forbid. The button at the wrist of my left-hand glove has come undone. I attempt to refasten it, but my fingers are too stiff.
“Of course, I quite understand your distress, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, in the voice you might use to console a child. “It’s for that reason that we tend to discourage men such as Thorpe from forming any sort of personal attachment. To say nothing of marriage.”
“We’re all human, Mr. B—.”
“Still, it’s unwise. And then to allow you any hint of his purpose there in the Bahamas—”
“Oh, believe me, he never said a word about that. I was the one who put two and two together. I was on the inside, you see. A friend of the Windsors.”
“Were you really? Remarkable. Although I suppose …” He reaches into the pocket of his coat, brushing my arm with his elbow as he manipulates his fingers inside. He draws out a familiar white envelope. I recognize it because I carried this envelope myself, in a pocket next to my skin, for the entirety of the thirty-nine hours it took to cross the Atlantic, from Nassau to London, in a series of giant, rattling airplanes, before I stamped the upper right corner and posted it from a red metal postbox yesterday evening. And it’s funny, isn’t it, how a letter you mailed with your own two hands no longer belongs to you, once it begins that fateful drop through the slot. I glimpse my own handwriting, the stamp I placed there myself, and it’s like being reunited with an estranged child who has grown into adulthood.
“You suppose?”
Mr. B— taps the edge of the envelope against his knee. “I suppose it depends on what one means by friendship.”
“In wartime, friendship can mean anything, can’t it?”
“True enough. This note of yours. Quite astonished me this morning, when my secretary delivered it to my desk.”
“But you must have known Thorpe was captured.”
“Naturally. I take the most anxious interest in my agents, Mrs. Thorpe, and your—ah, your husband—he was one of—well. Well. That is to say, Mr. Thorpe in particular. We took the news very hard. Very hard indeed. Colditz, my God. Poor chap. Awful show.”
He takes out a cigarette case, opens the lid, and tilts it toward me. I select one, and he selects another. As he lights the match, he covers the flame with his cupped hand. We sit back against the bench and smoke quietly. The wind on my cheek is cold, and the air tastes of soot, and the sky’s blackening by the instant. At first I don’t quite understand what’s missing, until I realize it’s the absence of light. Not a pinprick escapes the windows around us, not a ray of comfort. It’s as if we’re the only two people alive in London.
“There used to be a railing,” says Mr. B—.
“What’s that?”
“Around the square gardens. A railing, to keep residents in and everybody else out, you see. They took it away and melted it down for iron.”
“I suppose it’s more democratic this way.”
“I suppose so. Here we are, after all, the two of us. Sitting on this bench, quite without permission.”
“And that’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it? Democracy.”
He straightens his back against the bench. “Well, then. Leonora Thorpe. Plucky young American from across the ocean. What are we to do with you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why are you here? You’ll forgive me, but London isn’t the most peaceful of cities, at the moment. I imagine, wherever you come from—”
“Nassau.”
“Yes, Nassau. But you weren’t born there, were you?”
“No. I was raised in New York. I arrived in the Bahamas a couple of years ago, to cover the governor and his wife for a magazine.”
“A magazine?”
“Metropolitan magazine. Nothing serious, just society news. The American appetite for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is just insatiable.”
Mr. B— sucks on his cigarette. “I must confess, it puzzles me. You Americans went to such trouble to rid yourselves of our quaint little monarchy.”
“Oh, we like to gossip about them, all right. Just not to let them rule over us and all that.”
“I imagine you were well paid?”
“Well enough.”
“A plum assignment, Mrs. Thorpe, spending the war in a tropical paradise. Plenty of food, plenty of money. Why didn’t you stay there?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious?”
“But what’s to be gained by coming to London? Look around you. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and it’s already dark. Decent food in short supply. The weather—as you see—is simply dreadful, to say nothing of air raids and the threat of invasion. You ought to have stayed in the tropics, nice and safe, to wait for news.”
I crush out my cigarette on the arm of the bench.
“But that’s the thing, Mr. B—. I don’t mean to sit around and wait. That’s why I’ve come to London.”
I say this carelessly—come to London—as if it were as easy as that. As easy as boarding an ocean liner and waddling from meal to meal, deck chair to deck chair, until you step off a week later, and poof! you’re in England. And maybe it was that easy, in another time. These days, it’s not so simple. That ocean teems with objects that hope to kill you. And if you want to reach London in a hurry, well, the challenge grows by geometric leaps and bounds, because there’s only one way to cross the Atlantic in a hurry, and it doesn’t come cheap, believe me.
And then you contrive to meet this challenge. Clever you. You pay the necessary price, because you must, there’s no other choice. You find yourself strapped inside the comfortless fuselage of a B-24 Liberator as it prepares to separate you from the nice safe sun-soaked ground of the Bahamas and bear you, by leaps and bounds, to darkest England, a place you know only by hearsay. The engines gather power, the noise fills your ears like all the world’s bumblebees pollinating a single rose. The metal around you bickers and clatters, the world tilts, the air freezes, and there you are, eyes shut, stomach flipping, ears roaring, mouth watering, chest rattling, lungs panting, nerves screaming, heart aching, wishing you had goddamn well fallen in love with someone else. Someone you could live without.
But you can’t. So now you’re here in London. London at last, on a garden bench in the middle of a darkened city, next to the only man in the world who can help you. Except the fellow’s shaking his head, the fellow’s got no faith in you at all.
“Come to London,” he says. “How on earth did you manage it?”
“I managed it because I had to. I’d do anything to free my husband.”
“Free your husband? Is that the idea?”
“I damned well won’t run around Nassau going to parties while my husband rots away in the middle of Nazi Germany.”
Mr. B— extends his arm and flicks ash onto the gravel. His shoes are beautifully polished, his trousers creased. Standards must be kept. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, “I don’t know quite how to express this.”
“How about straight out? That’s how we Americans prefer it.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. Once one of our men falls into enemy hands, why, he’s on his own. Thorpe knew this. We can’t possibly risk more agents on hairy schemes that—you’ll forgive me—offer almost no chance of success. We’re stretched enough as it is. We’re scarcely hanging on.”
“But I’m not asking you to risk anyone else. I’d go myself.”
“I’m afraid it’s impossible. Thorpe’s been trained. He knows it’s his duty to escape, not ours to spring him out, and I’ve no doubt he’s doing his utmost.”
“That’s not enough for me.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorpe,” Mr. B— says. “I don’t mean to be unkind. Naturally you’re suffering. It’s the most beastly news. One hopes for the best, of course. But one soldiers on. That’s all there is, just to soldier on.”
“That’s all terrific, if you’re a soldier. If you’re allowed to do something useful instead of twiddling your thumbs.”
“There are many ways in which women are able to serve the war effort, Mrs. Thorpe. And I can offer you my steadfast assurance that we’re doing our best, in my department and in Britain as a whole, all the services, every man Jack, to defeat Germany and bring your husband safely home.”
Across the street, a pair of women hurry down the sidewalk, buttoned up in wool coats and economical hats. The clatter of shoes echoes from the bricks, and it occurs to me how silent a city can be, when gas is rationed and private automobiles are banned. You can hear an omnibus rattle and grind from a couple of streets away, and you realize how alone you are, how desolate war is.
The women turn the corner. A man begins a slow, arthritic progress from the opposite direction, bent beneath the weight of his coat and hat. He’s smoking a cigarette. I figure the fellow’s probably deaf, but I speak softly anyway. Soft and firm.
“I understand your position, of course. I guess it’s about what I expected. I understand, I really do. But now I need you to understand me, Mr. B—.”
He turns his face toward me and lifts his eyebrows. At last, his voice goes a little cold, the way a man speaks to another man, his equal. “Oh? Understand what, Mrs. Thorpe? Let us be perfectly clear with each other.”
“All right, Mr. B—. Listen carefully. In the course of my service in Nassau, in my capacity as a journalist, as an intimate associate of the governor and his wife, I became privy to certain information. Do you catch my drift?”
There is this silence. I think, Well, he knows this already, doesn’t he? I wrote as much in my note. At the time, I thought I conveyed my meaning in circumspect sentences, that my note was a clever, sophisticated little epistle, but now it seems to me that my note was probably a masterpiece of amateurism, that Mr. B— probably laughed when he read it. Probably he’s suppressing his laughter right now. His silence is the silence of a man controlling his amusement.
He examines the end of his cigarette. “What kind of information?”
“You know. The kind of information that might prove embarrassing— embarrassing to say the least—were it to be made known to the general public.”
He drops his cigarette to the gravel and crushes it with his shoe. “Embarrassing to whom?”
“To the British government. To the king and queen.”
Mr. B— reaches into his jacket pocket and removes another cigarette from the case. He lights it with the same care as before, the same series of noises, the scratch and the flare, the covering of the flame. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says softly, “I’m afraid I have a little confession to make.”
“Oh?”
“I may have stretched the truth just a bit, when I told you I was astonished by the contents of your letter.”
We still sit side by side, except we’ve turned a few degrees inward to address each other. Mr. B—’s elbow rests on the top slat of the bench. Because he’s looking at my face now, almost tenderly, I make a tremendous effort to keep my expression as still as possible. My fingers, however, have developed some kind of tremor. Imagine that.
“How so?” I ask.
“I received a memorandum a day or two ago. From a certain member of the Cabinet, in response to a cable sent him from Government House in Nassau. So we had some warning, you see, of your imminent arrival. We had some notion of what to expect.”
“I see.”
“Still, your note was—well, it was marvelous. I don’t wish to take anything away from that. My own men couldn’t have done better.”
“I’m flattered.”
He leans forward, so I can smell his cigarette breath, the faint echo of whatever it was he ate for lunch. “Mrs. Thorpe, I simply can’t allow that information to go any further. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand. That’s why I’m offering to—”
He drops the cigarette in the gravel and crushes it with his heel. “No, my dear. I don’t think you really do understand.”
And I’m ashamed to say it’s only now I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Not until this instant does it occur to me to ask why, if Mr. B— received my note in the morning—my note hinting delicately of treason at the highest level, treason within the royal family itself—he waited until the fall of night to meet me, to draw me outside, to walk with me into a darkened square before a thousand windows closed for the blackout.
Why, indeed.
I rise from the bench. “Very well. If you’re not going to cooperate, I have no choice—”
With remarkable swiftness, he rises too, draws a small pistol from his pocket, and lodges the end of it in the middle of my coat, just above the knotted belt.
“Mrs. Thorpe. I’m afraid I must insist you give me whatever evidence you’ve obtained in this matter.”
“I don’t have it. Not right here.”
“Where, then?”
“In my hotel room.”
He considers. The pistol remains at my stomach, moving slightly at each beat of my heart. Though my gaze remains on his, I gather the details at the edge of my vision: the trees, bare of leaves; the shrubs, the plantings, all of them shadows against the night, against the murky buildings surrounding us. I observe the distant noise of another omnibus, a faint, drunken cheer from a pub nearby. Possibly, if I screamed, someone might hear me. But I would be dead by the time this noise reached a pair of human ears.
“It’s well hidden,” I continue. “I could save you a lot of trouble.”
Mr. B— nudges the pistol against my stomach. “Very well. Move slowly, please.”
As I begin my turn, I jerk my knee upward, bang smack into the center of his groin. A shot cracks out. I grab the pistol, burning my hand, and slam it into his head, right behind his left ear. He slumps to the ground, and let me tell you, I take off running, hoping to God I don’t have a bullet in me somewhere, hoping to God I knocked him out as well as down.
As I dart across the street, there’s a shout. I don’t stop to discover where it came from, or whom. The sidewalk’s empty, the street’s dark. The sky’s begun to drizzle. I pass a red postbox, the house with the grand piano in the window I noticed this morning, except you can’t see that piano right now, I can’t see anything, the whole world is dark and wet, each stoop concealing its own shadows. I cross another street, another, not stopping to check for traffic—there isn’t any, not with wartime restrictions on brave, threadbare London—until the familiar white signboard resolves out of the mist, BASIL HOTEL in quaint letters.
I pull back, undecided, but my momentum carries me forward into another human chest, female chest.
Oomph! she says, and snatches me by the arms. I lift my hands to push away. I spy a coat, a neck, a fringe of blond hair gathered into a bun.
The woman in the foyer.
“Miss Thorpe?” I gasp.
Her eyes are paler than her brother’s, but I recognize the shape, and the straight, thick eyebrows, though his are a darker gold. The same milky skin, the same freckles. She has pointed cheekbones, a wide, red mouth, a slim jaw. I’m able to drink in all these details because the world seems to have gone still, the clock seems to have stopped, and even the molecules of air, the motes of dust, have stuck in place. Only my blood moves, against the scorched skin of my right hand.
“You must be Leonora,” she says.
“Yes.”
She snatches my elbow and pulls me down the sidewalk. “Come along, quick. My flat’s just around the corner.”
And it occurs to me, as I career along in her wake, that this is just how her brother appeared in my life. Out of the blue in some foreign land, like a genie from a lamp, just when you needed a wish granted.
LULU (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
JUNE 1941 (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
(The Bahamas) (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
ON THE MAGAZINE COVER, the woman sits on a rattan sofa and the man sits on the floor at her feet, gazing not at the camera but upward, adoringly, at her. She smiles back in approval. She has a book in her lap, open to the frontispiece or maybe the table of contents—she doesn’t look as if she actually means to read it—and in her hair, a ribbon topped with a bow. (A bow, I tell you.) A pair of plump Union Jack sofa pillows flanks either side of her. A real domestic scene, a happy couple in a tasteful home. THE WINDSOR TEAM, reads the caption, in small, discreet letters at the bottom. At the top, much larger, white type inside a block of solid red: L I F E.
I’d been staring at this image, on and off, for most of the journey from New York, having paid a dime for the magazine itself at the newsstand in the Eastern Air Lines terminal building at LaGuardia Field. (It was the latest issue, now there’s coincidence for you.) I’d held it on my lap as what you might call a talisman, throughout each leg of the journey, each takeoff and landing, Richmond followed by Savannah followed by some swamp called Orlando followed by Miami at last, smacking down to earth at half past five in the afternoon, taxi to a shabby hotel, taxi back to the airfield this morning, and I still didn’t feel as if I’d quite gotten to the bottom of that photograph. Oh, sometimes I flipped the magazine open and read the article inside—the usual basket of eggs, served sunny-side up—but mostly I studied the picture on the cover. So carefully arranged, each detail in place. Those Union Jack pillows, for example. (We just couldn’t be any more patriotic, could we? Oh, my, no. We are as thoroughly British as afternoon tea.) That hair ribbon, the bow. (We are as charmingly, harmlessly feminine as the housewife next door.) The enormous jeweled brooch pinned to her striped jacket, just above the right breast— and what was it, anyway? The design, I mean. I squinted and peered and adjusted the angle of light, but I couldn’t make any sense of the shape. No matter. It was more brooch than I could afford, that was all, more jewels than I could ever bear on my own right breast. (We are not the housewife next door after all, are we? We are richer, better, royal. Even if we aren’t quite royal. Not according to the Royals. Still, more royal than you, Mrs. American Housewife.)
The airplane lurched. I peered through the window at the never-ending horizon, turquoise sea topped by a turquoise sky, and my stomach—never at home aboard moving objects—lurched too. According to my wristwatch, we were due at Nassau in twenty minutes, and the twenty-one seats of this modern all-metal Pan American airliner were crammed full of American tourists in Sunday best and businessmen in pressed suits, none of whose stomachs seemed troubled by the voyage. Just my dumb luck, my dumb stomach. Or was it my ears? Apparently motion sickness had something to do with your inner ear, the pressure of fluid inside versus the pressure of air without, and when the perception of movement on your insides didn’t agree with the perception of movement from your eyeballs, well, that’s where your stomach got into difficulty. I supposed that explanation made sense. All the world’s troubles seemed to come from friction of one kind or another. One thing rubbing up against another, and neither one backing down.
So I crossed my arms atop the magazine and gazed out into the distance—that was supposed to help—and chewed on the stick of Wrigley’s thoughtfully provided by the stewardess. By now, the vibration of the engines had taken up habitation inside my skull. This? This is nothing, sister, said the fellow sitting next to me on the Richmond– Savannah hop yesterday, local businessman type. You shoulda heard the racket on the old Ford tri-motor. Boy, that was some kind of noise, all right. Why, the girls sometimes had to use a megaphone, it was so loud. Now, this hunka junk, they put some insulation in her skin. You know what insulation is? Makes a whole lot of difference, believe you me. Here he rapped against the fuselage with his knuckles. Course, there ain’t no amount of insulation in the world can drown out the sound of a couple of Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp engines full throttle, no ma’am. That’s eight hundred horsepower apiece. Yep, she’s a classy bird, all right, the DC-three. You ever flown the sleeper model? Coast to coast in fifteen hours. That’s something, ain’t it? And so on. By the time we reached Savannah, I would gladly have taken the old Ford tri-motor and a pair of earplugs.
On the other hand, it could have been worse. When the talkative fellow from Richmond disembarked in Savannah, he was replaced by another fellow entirely, a meaty, sweating, silent specimen in a fine suit, reeking of booze and cigarettes, possessed of a sticky gaze. You know the type. By the time we were airborne, he had arranged himself luxuriously on the seat, insinuated his thigh against mine, and laid his hand several times on my knee, and as I slapped away his paw yet again, I would have given any amount of money to have Mr. Flapping Gums in his checked suit safely back by my side. And then. Then. The damned fellow turned up again this morning in an even more disreputable condition to board the daily Pan American flight to Nassau, fine suit now rumpled and stained, eyes now bloodshot and roving all over the place.
Thank God he hadn’t seemed to notice me. He sat in the second row, and by the stricken expression of the stewardess, hurrying back down the aisle this second with the Thermos of precious coffee, he hadn’t mended his ways during the night. I caught her eye and communicated sympathy into her, woman to woman, as best I could. She returned a small nod and continued down the aisle. The chewing gum was turning stale and hard. The wrapper had gone missing somewhere. I tore off a corner of page fourteen of Life magazine, folded the scrap, and slipped the wad discreetly inside.
In the seat next to mine, a gentleman looked up from his newspaper. He was tall and lean, almost thin, a loose skeleton of a fellow, and he’d made his way aboard with a small leather suitcase, climbing the stairs nimbly, the last in line. I hadn’t paid him much attention, except to note the interesting color of his hair, a gold fringe beneath the brim of his hat. He wore spectacles, and in contrast to my earlier companions, he’d hardly acknowledged me at all, except to duck his head and murmur a polite Good morning and an apology for intruding on my privacy. Though his legs were long, like a spider’s, he had folded them carefully to avoid touching mine, and when he’d opened his newspaper, he folded the sides back so they didn’t extend past the armrest between us. He’d refused the chewing gum, I remembered, though the tropical air bumped the airplane all over the sky. Other than that, he read his newspaper so quietly, turned and folded the pages with such a minimum of fuss, I confess I’d nearly forgotten he was there.
As the stewardess swept by, he bent the top of said newspaper in order to observe the fellow up front, unblinking, the way a bird-watcher might observe the course of nature from the security of his blind. I felt a stir of interest, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the quiet of him. Under cover of looking back for the stewardess, I contrived to glimpse his profile, which was younger than I thought, lightly freckled. All this, as I said, I captured in the course of a glance, but I have a good memory for faces.
After a minute or so, the gentleman folded his newspaper, murmured an apology, and rose from his seat. He set his newspaper on the seat and walked not to the front of the airplane, which he’d observed with such attention, but down the aisle to the rear, where the stewardess had gone. The airplane bumped along, the propellers droned. I looked back at the magazine on my lap—the windsor team, what did that mean, what exactly were they trying to convey, those two—and then out the window again. A series of pale golden islands passed beneath the wing, rendering the sea an even more alluring shade of turquoise, causing me almost to forget the slush in my stomach and the fuzz in my head, until the gentleman landed heavily back in the seat beside me.
Except it wasn’t the same gentleman. I knew that instantly. He was too massive, and he reeked of booze. A thigh came alongside mine, a paw settled on my knee.
“Kindly remove your hand,” I said, not kindly at all.
He leaned toward my ear and muttered something I won’t repeat.
I reached for the hand, but he was quicker and grabbed my fingers. I curled my other hand, my right hand, into a fist. I still don’t know what I meant to do with that fist, whether I really would have hit him with it. Probably I would have. The air inside our metal tube was hot, even at ten thousand feet, because of the white June sun and the warm June atmosphere and the windows that trapped it all inside, and the man’s hand was wet. I felt that bile in my throat, that heave, that grayness of vision that means you’re about to vomit, and I remember thinking I must avoid vomiting on the magazine at all costs, I couldn’t possibly upchuck my morning coffee on the pristine Windsor Team.
At that instant, the first gentleman returned. He laid a hand on the boozer’s shoulder and said, in a clear, soft English voice, “I believe you’ve made a mistake, sir.”
Without releasing my hand, the fellow turned and stretched his neck to take in the sight of the Englishman. “And I say it’s none of your business, sir.”
His voice, while slurred, wasn’t what you’d call rough. Vowels and consonants all in proper order, a conscious ironic emphasis on the word sir. He spoke like an educated man, thoroughly sauced but well brought up. You never could tell, could you?
“I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid it is my business,” said the Englishman. “For one thing, you’re sitting on my newspaper.”
Again, he spoke softly. I don’t think the other passengers even knew what was going on, had even the slightest inkling—if they noticed at all—that these two weren’t exchanging a few friendly words about the weather or the Brooklyn Dodgers or Hitler’s moustache or something. The Englishman didn’t look my way at all. The boozer seemed to have forgotten me as well. His grip loosened. I yanked away my fingers and dug into my pocketbook for a handkerchief. The boozer reached slowly under his rump and drew out the crushed newspaper. The Miami Herald, read the masthead, sort of.
“There you are,” he said. “Now beat it.”
Those last words seemed out of place, coming from a voice like that, like he’d heard the phrase at the movies and had been waiting for the chance to sound like a real gangster. His empty hand rested on his knee and twitched, twitched. The fingers were clean, the square nails trimmed, the skin pink, except for an ugly, cracked, weeping sore on one of his knuckles.
The Englishman pushed back his glasses and leaned a fraction closer.
“I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I’ve made myself clear. I’d be very grateful if you’d return to your own seat, sir, and allow me to resume the use of mine.”
“You heard me,” said the boozer. “Scram.”
He spoke more loudly now, close to shouting, and his voice rang above the noise of the engine. People glanced our way, over their newspapers and magazines, and glanced back just as quickly. Nobody wanted trouble, not with a drunk. You couldn’t tell what a drunk might do, and here we flew, two miles above the ocean in a metal tube. I myself had begun to perspire. The sweat trickled from my armpits into the sleeves of my best blouse of pale blue crepe, my linen jacket. The boozer was getting angrier, despite the soothing, conciliatory nature of the Englishman’s voice, or maybe because of it. The force of his anger felt like a match in the act of striking, smelled like a striking match, the tang of saltpeter in your nose and the back of your throat. My fingers curled into the seams of my pocketbook.
“I’m afraid not,” said the Englishman.
The boozer looked like he was going to reply. He gathered himself, straightened his back, turned his head. His cheeks were mottled. The Englishman didn’t move, didn’t flinch. The boozer opened his mouth and caught his breath twice, a pair of small gasps. Then he closed his eyes and slumped forward, asleep. The Englishman removed his hand from the boozer’s shoulder and bent to sling the slack arm over his own shoulders.
“I’ll just escort this gentleman to his seat, shall I?” he said to me. “I’m awfully sorry for the trouble.”
No one spoke. No one moved. The stewardess stood in the aisle, braced on somebody’s headrest, hand cupped over mouth, while the Englishman hoisted the unconscious man to his feet and bore him— dragged him, really—toward the empty seat in the second row. The airplane found a downdraft and dropped, recovered, rattled about, dropped again. The Englishman lurched and caught himself on the back of the single seat to the left, third row. He apologized to the seat’s owner and staggered on. The stewardess then dashed forward and helped him lower the boozer into his seat like a sack of wet barley. Together they buckled him in, while the elderly woman to his right looked on distastefully. (I craned my neck to watch the show, believe me.)
Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew quite what we had just witnessed. The engines screamed on, the airplane rattled like a can of nails. Across the aisle, a man in a suit of pale tropical wool turned back to his magazine. In the row ahead of me, the woman leaned to her husband and whispered something. I checked my watch. Only four minutes had passed, imagine that.
BY THE TIME THE ENGLISHMAN returned to his seat, the roar of the engines had deepened into a growl, and the airplane had begun to stagger downward into Nassau. A cloud wisped by the window and was gone. I feigned interest in the magazine, while my attention poured through the corner of my left eye in the direction of my neighbor, who picked his hat from the floor—it had fallen, apparently, during the scuffle or whatever it was—and placed it back in the bin. It turned out, his hair wasn’t thoroughly gold; there was a trace of red in the color, what they call a strawberry blond. I turned a page. He swung into place and reached for the newspaper, which I had retrieved and slid into the cloth pocket on the seat before him. It seemed like the least I could do, and besides, I can’t abide a messy floor.
“Thank you,” he said. “I do hope you weren’t troubled.”
“Not at all.”
He didn’t reply. I had a hundred questions to ask—foremost, was the boozer still alive—but I just turned the pages of the magazine in rapid succession until I ran out of paper altogether and closed the book on my lap, front cover facing up, THE WINDSOR TEAM locked in eternal amity with their Union Jack sofa pillows. The loudspeaker crackled and buzzed, something about landing shortly and the weather in Nassau being ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, God save us.
I cleared my throat and asked the Englishman what brought him to Nassau, business or pleasure.
“I live here, in fact,” he said. “For the time being.”
“Oh! So you were visiting Florida?”
“Yes. My brother lives in a town called Cocoa, up the coast a bit. Lovely place by the ocean.” He nodded to the magazine. “Doing your research, are you?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”
“Ah.”
The airplane shook. I looked out the window and saw land, shrubby and verdant, and a long, pale beach meeting the surf, and a car flashing brilliantly along a road made of gray thread. “What a pair of romantics,” I heard myself say.
“Romantics? Do you really think so?”
I turned my head back and saw a serious profile, a pair of eyes squinted in thought behind the wire-rimmed spectacles. He hadn’t touched the newspaper. His lanky arms were folded across his chest, his right leg crossed over his left, immaculate, civilized. He didn’t look as if he’d lifted a pair of boots, let alone two hundred pounds of slack human weight.
“Don’t you? But it’s the love story of the century, hadn’t you heard?” I said. “The king who gave up his throne for the woman he loves.”
“A thoroughly modern thing to do. Not romantic at all.”
“How so?”
The airplane shuddered and thumped, bounced hard and settled. I looked out the window again and saw we had landed. The landscape outside teemed with color and vegetation and shimmering heat. I saw a cluster of palms, a low, rectangular building.
By the time we rolled to a stop, I had forgotten the question left dangling between us. The sound of his voice surprised me, but then everything about him had surprised me.
“A romantic would have sacrificed love for duty,” said the Englishman, “not the other way around.”
The airplane gave a final lurch and went still. He rose from his seat, removed his suitcase and his hat from the bin, removed my suitcase and gave it to me, and put his hat on his head. I said thank you. He told me to think nothing of it and wished me a good day, a pleasant stay in Nassau, and walked off the airplane. The sunshine flashed from the lenses of his spectacles.
As I passed the fellow from Savannah, he was still slumped in his seat, held in place by the safety belt, and I couldn’t honestly tell if he was dead or alive. The stewardess kept casting these anxious glances at his chest. I told her thank you for a memorable flight.
“Wasn’t it though,” she said. “Have a pleasant stay in Nassau.”
IN THE TERMINAL BUILDING, AS I waited my turn at the passport desk, I looked around for the blond man, but I didn’t see him. He might have gone anywhere. He might have come from anywhere. A fellow like that, he was like a djinn, like an enchanted creature from a fairy tale. Except this wasn’t a fairy tale, this was reality. He was made of common clay. He came from a woman and man, who fell in love, or had not. Who had married, or had not. Had spent a lifetime of nights together, or just one.
As I trudged out the terminal building to the street outside, I remember thinking a vast history lay behind this man, which I would never know.
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
JULY 1900 (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
THE ENGLISHMAN ARRIVES at the clinic about an hour after lunchtime, while Elfriede sits in the main courtyard with Herr Doktor Hermann, discussing something she dreamed the night before. When she looks back on this moment, from a distance of years and—eventually— decades, she will remember nothing about the dream or the discussion, but she will hear the exact noise of the cartwheels and the iron hoofbeats on the paving stones of the drive as if the interior of her head were a phonograph disc, and these sounds imprinted it forever. She’ll remember the voices rising from the other side of the courtyard wall, and the smell of the pink, half-wild roses climbing that wall, and the way the sun burst free from the shade to warm the back of her neck and soak the courtyard in light.
Except that the sun doesn’t really come out at that moment. Memory, it turns out, is unreliable. All on its own, your memory gathers up helpful details that match your recollection of an event, whether or not those details actually existed at the time. But does it matter? For Elfriede, the sun comes out when the Englishman arrives. That’s how she remembers it. Sunshine, and the smell of roses.
ANYWAY, ONE OF THEM IS talking, Elfriede or Dr. Hermann, it doesn’t matter which one, and they both fall silent at the clatter of hoofbeats and cartwheels. “A new arrival?” Elfriede asks, after a moment.
“Yes, a lung patient,” answers the doctor. “Pneumonia.”
“How awful.”
“He’ll be kept in the infirmary wing, of course. There is no danger of transmission.”
“I meant, how awful for him.”
Dr. Hermann nods and makes a note in his little book. He makes notes continually during these sessions—conversations, he calls them, as if purely social—and Elfriede feels sometimes like a laboratory experiment, an unknown specimen of plant or animal, something abnormal. “How do you feel about this?” he asks, still writing, and for a moment Elfriede isn’t sure what he means, the note taking or the new patient. When she hesitates, he prompts her.
“I don’t mind at all,” she says. “I hope he recovers quickly. Why should I mind?”
“Indeed. Why should you mind?”
“I don’t know. But you seem to think I should.”
“What makes you say that?”
Another thing about Dr. Hermann, he never answers a question except with another question. He wants Elfriede to do all the talking, Elfriede to reveal herself. It’s the very latest treatment for nervous disorders such as hers, and really, as compared to some of the others, it’s not bad. Dr. Hermann is a large, soft-edged, round-shouldered man who folds his long limbs into normal-size chairs without the smallest irritation that they weren’t designed to accommodate him. There’s something malleable about him. Even his brown hair has a pliant quality. In later years, Elfriede will realize she never noticed the color of his eyes, nor can she recall his face. Just the soft, even shape of his voice, asking her questions.
She makes her answer as clear as possible, so he can’t find another question in it. “When I said How awful, you told me there was no danger of infection. So you must have thought I was afraid of that.”
Dr. Hermann adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “Have you ever felt afraid of sickness, Elfriede?”
“No.” She stands up. “I’m going to take a walk now.”
ADMISSION TO THE CLINIC IS voluntary, and Elfriede is free to come and go as she likes, no restriction on movement, no requirement to stay. She could leave at any time, in fact.
Practically speaking, of course, that’s nearly impossible. The clinic sits on the top of a mountain, surrounded by wilderness and reached by a single, steep road in poor repair. Until the middle of the last century, it was a monastery of the Franciscan order, and the last of the monks sold the grounds and the ancient buildings to Dr. Hermann for next to nothing, on the condition that the crumbling walls remain a sanctuary for healing and peace. Patients seek out its geographic isolation and clean, healthful air for a variety of reasons—lung trouble, nervous disorders, broken hearts, discreet pregnancies, discreet abortions—but the general point is to separate oneself from civilization. You can’t leave without mountaineering skills or help from the outside, and Elfriede has neither. Also, she has no money—none she can produce from a pocket, anyway. So, when she rises from her bench and leaves the courtyard, walks along the covered passage to the old chapel, passes the chapel, and exits the building altogether to emerge on the fragrant, sunlit hillside, she doesn’t imagine she could hail the driver of the Englishman’s carriage and convince him to carry her back along the twenty miles of steep, rutted roadway, or that she could simply walk them on her own. Where would she go, anyway? Who would want her?
She just goes outside to be alone. That’s all she wants. To be left alone.
AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, THE quarters in this former Franciscan monastery are austere, to say the least. Elfriede’s bedroom is literally a monk’s cell, or rather two of them knocked together, and contains a single bed with a horsehair mattress, a stool, a plain wardrobe in which she hangs her three dresses, a dresser, and a desk and chair. There are no bookshelves. Elfriede’s free to borrow from the library, one volume at a time, but she wasn’t allowed to bring any books from home, nor is she allowed to receive any while she’s here. She’s encouraged to write, however. Each week, a fresh supply of notebooks arrives on her desk. Herr Doktor Hermann wants her to record her thoughts, her memories, and especially her dreams, and to bring these notebooks to their daily conversations so he can review the contents. When her notebooks aren’t sufficiently full, he doesn’t express any obvious displeasure to Elfriede. Of course, that would be unprofessional! Still she feels his displeasure like a disturbance in the air, turning his flared nostrils all pink, so she writes her devoirs daily, sometimes for hours, in order to satisfy his hunger for her subconscious mind. She also keeps another notebook under the horsehair mattress. This is the notebook that contains her real thoughts.
In the evenings, or during the day when the weather’s inclement, Elfriede has another way of finding solitude. She makes her way to the music room, which nobody ever enters except her, and plays on the piano from sheet music obtained from the library. Sometimes she’ll go on for hours, in chronological order of course, Bach to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Chopin, one must be methodical about such things. Then it’s midnight, and as the notes fade a silence fills the chamber like a thousand ears listening, an audience of spirits, and Elfriede can almost—but not quite—feel that her husband and son are among them.
TWO WEEKS LATER, ELFRIEDE ENCOUNTERS the Englishman for the first time. An orderly pushes him in a wheeled chair along one of the paved paths in the infirmary garden, and she observes them both from the hillside above. She’s just returned from a long, solitary hike, and the mountain air fills her lungs and her limbs, and the sunlight burns her face in a primitive way. She sits among the wildflowers and wraps her arms around her legs. Below her, about the size and importance of squirrels, the orderly and the Englishman come to a stop at the top of the rectangular path, inside a patch of sun. The orderly adjusts the blanket on the Englishman’s lap and they exchange a few words, although the breeze carries their voices away from Elfriede’s ears. After a last pat to the blanket, the orderly consults a pocket watch and heads back to the infirmary building, leaving the Englishman in the sunshine.
For some time, he sits without moving. The chair’s positioned at such an angle that she can’t see his face properly, and anyway Elfriede’s a bit nearsighted, so he might be asleep or he might just be too weak to move. Still, he must be past the crisis, or they wouldn’t have left him outside like this, would they?
Judging from the proportion of man to chair, he seems to be on the tall side, if slender. Of course, Elfriede’s husband is a giant, two meters tall and almost as broad, so most men look slender in comparison. Also, this fellow’s been sick, and he’s wearing those loose blue infirmary pajamas. His hair’s been shaved, and the remaining stubble is ginger, which catches a little sun and glints. Elfriede creeps closer. The brief, vibrant season of alpine wildflowers has arrived, and the meadow’s packed with their reds and oranges and violets, their sticky sage scent, clinging to Elfriede’s dress as she slides through the grass. She just wants to see his face, that’s all. Wants to know what an Englishman looks like. In her entire sheltered life, living in the country, small villages, Berlin once to shop for her trousseau, Frankfurt and Zurich glimpsed through the window of a train, she’s never met one.
Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.
Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”
“Oh! I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”
He says those words—up the duff—in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.
“You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”
“Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”
“Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”
She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”
“As old as that?”
“And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.
“Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come sit by me? I’ll promise not to cough on you.”
“I don’t know if it’s allowed.”
“Bugger that.” (In English again.) “I’ll take the blame, I promise. I’ll say I had a coughing fit, and you came to my aid in your selfless way.”
She laughs rustily and rises to her feet. In the course of her creeping, she’s come to within ten or twelve meters of the low stone wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, and it seems so silly and artificial to be holding a conversation in this manner, calling back and forth across the gulf, that Elfriede goes willingly to the brick wall and perches atop it, a meter or so from Herr Thorpe’s left shoulder, crossing her legs at the ankle.
“That’s better,” he says. “Easier on my lungs, anyway. You smell like wildflowers.”
“I’ve been sitting on them. You speak German very well.”
“So do you.”
She laughs again—so out of practice at laughing, but she can’t seem to help herself. “But it’s my native tongue, and you—you’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”
“Indeed I am. I learned my German in school, from a fearsome and very fluent master. Used to beat me with a cane whenever I slipped accidentally into the informal address.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s supposed to build character.” He opens his eyes and squints into the sun. He looks nothing like her husband, not just because he’s smaller and his head is shaved and his bones stick out from his skin, not just because he’s in a wheelchair while her husband is as huge and hale and hearty as a woodsman. Herr Thorpe is terribly plain, wide-faced and thick-lipped, freckled and ginger-haired, and the electricity of his smile can’t disguise his current state of febrile emaciation. She holds her breath in disbelief at the sharpness of his protruding bones, at the length of his pale eyelashes. He’s positively lanky inside his blue pajamas, and then there’s this enormous pumpkin head stuck on top of him.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Pneumonia can be so dangerous.”
“Oh, I’m all right.”
“You wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t quite sick.”
“I couldn’t have come here at all if I’d been really sick. It’s a damned long journey from Vienna, you know. No, I came through the crisis all right, but the doctors were worried about my lungs, so they sent me here for recuperation. And my parents agreed because—well.”
“Because why?”
“A personal matter.”
“Some girl?” Elfriede asks boldly.
“Yes,” he says. “Some girl, I’m afraid. But it all seems rather long ago now. What about you?”
“A personal matter.”
“Let me guess. Coerced to marry some doddering old bastard against your will, and you’ve gone mad to escape him?”
“Nothing like that,” she says.
“Crossed in love?”
“No.”
“Some terrible grief, perhaps?”
“Nothing too terrible.”
The man drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “Have you been here long?”
“Long enough.”
“Ah. Then perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity on a small matter. You see, late in the evenings, when I’m meant to be sleeping, I sometimes hear the most extraordinary music floating into my chamber. Piano. Goes on for hours. I can’t decide whether it’s coming from outside the window or down the corridor. At first I thought I was dreaming. Do you hear it at all?”
“I—well, I …” She stops herself on the brink of a lie. “I’m afraid it’s me.”
“You? Ah. Ah.”
“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize anyone could hear me. I’ll stop—”
“No! No. Don’t stop on my account.”
“If I’m keeping you awake—”
“I don’t mind at all, I assure you. It’s enchanting. Last night, the Chopin … I had the strangest feeling …”
“What?”
“Nothing. Enchanted, that’s all. Absolutely enchanted. And it was you, all along? All the more enchanting, then.”
From another man, this compliment might have sounded unctuous. But Mr. Thorpe speaks the word enchanting with such easy intimacy, Elfriede laughs instead, and laughter feels so good in her chest, in her head. She looks down at her feet, crossed at the ankles, and only then does she realize she’s blushing. She asks hastily, “What were you doing in Vienna?”
“What does anybody do in Vienna? Art, culture, philosophy. Opera and cafés and whatever amusement comes one’s way. I suppose I was attempting what they used to call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”
“What’s so inevitable?”
“Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”
“What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”
“Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”
“How—how—”
“Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get married, grow a beard, and start a brood of rascals of my own, and the whole cycle will start over again.” He looks as if he might say something else, but starts to cough instead. The sound is wet and wretched, cracking off the walls of the garden and the stone infirmary building across the grass.
“Are you all right?” Elfriede asks anxiously. “Shall I call the orderly?”
He waves the idea away. The fit dies down, and he leans his head back against the chair. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s gotten much better, believe it or not.”
“You must have been at death’s door, then.”
“Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”
“Dissipation? Really? You don’t seem like the dissipated sort.”
“Well, my mother’s idea of dissipation is a glass of sherry in the evening. Her side of the family is all Scotch Presbyterians. Strict,” he adds, apparently realizing Elfriede isn’t well acquainted with the tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism. “Damned strict.”
“So you were escaping.”
“Something like that. I finished university a year ago and thought—well, one’s only got this single chance to sin, before that inevitable time of life when one’s sins puncture the happiness of somebody else.”
“It’s not inevitable,” Elfriede says. “You don’t have to do it.”
“Do what? Go home and take up the law and become a respectable chap?”
“No. You should go back to Vienna instead. Go back to Vienna and the cafés and that girl of yours—”
“Frau von Kleist,” he says solemnly, “you’re making me weary with all your talk of rebellion. I’m a sick man, remember?”
“Of course.”
“I require a long period of rest and recuperation, not a program of debauchery.”
“How long—” She clears her throat and continues. “How long are you supposed to stay here?”
“As long as it takes. A month or two, perhaps. Just in time for autumn. And you, Frau von Kleist? How long do you expect to stay?”
She shrugs. “As long as it takes.”
“A month or two, perhaps? I’m afraid I don’t know much about nervous disorders.”
“More time than that, I think.”
There is a queer, heavy silence, the kind for which the clinic is famous. The deep peace of the mountains settles over Elfriede, a sense of motionless isolation that sometimes unnerves her, or increases her melancholy, because it seems as if she’s the only human being in the world, and she wants passionately to belong to somebody, anybody, almost anybody. Elfriede smells the wildflowers, the faint odor of something cooking in the refectory kitchen—it’s nearly lunchtime—and something else as well, a peculiar, indecipherable scent she will come to recognize as that of Herr Thorpe himself, a scent that will forever remind her of mountains, even in the middle of a teeming, dirty city.
Herr Thorpe murmurs, “There’s the orderly.”
Elfriede glances to the infirmary door, and the white-uniformed man presently emerging from it. A shimmer of panic crosses her chest, the way you feel when the nurse arrives to draw your blood from your veins. She climbs to her feet atop the wall.
“I must be going, Herr Thorpe—”
“Wilfred.”
“Wilfred.” She hesitates. “My name is Elfriede.”
He presents her with that wide grin, one eye squinted. “Why, it’s practically the same as mine! What are the chances, do you think?”
“Very slim, I think.”
Wilfred puts his hand to his heart. “Shattered. Will I see you again?”
She leaps back to the meadow side, which is about a half meter higher than the garden, rising upward along a soft, rounded hill. “I don’t see why we should. We occupy entirely different wings of the clinic.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“A mistake!” she says, over her shoulder, as she starts to climb the hill.
Wilfred’s voice carries after her. “There are no mistakes, Elfriede the Fair! Only fate!”
Elfriede climbs quickly, and the word fate is so thin and distant, it’s almost out of earshot. Nevertheless, she hears it. In fact, it echoes inside her head, over and over, in time to the heavy smack of her heart as she approaches the summit of the hill. She tells herself it’s only the effort of the climb, the thin air, the anticipation of the view from the top.
LULU (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
EVERY TOWN HAS its watering hole, where everybody gathers to share a few drinks and some human news, and in Nassau that particular place was the bar of the Prince George Hotel. You couldn’t miss it. If, newly disgorged from some steamship onto the hot, smoky docks of Nassau Harbor, you staggered with your suitcase across Bay Street to shelter from the sun, you found yourself bang under the awning of the Prince George. And since the Prince George, as a matter of tradition, offered the arriving tourist his first glass of rum punch gratis, why, you can see how the bar developed a loyal following. I should know, believe me, even though I’d arrived by air instead of by sea. That punch went down so well, I made straight for the reception desk and booked a room. Three weeks later, I had almost forgotten I’d lived anywhere else. Every evening at six sharp, I made my way downstairs and took up a stool three seats down from the left, and the bartender—we’ll call him Jack—whipped up a cocktail while I lit a cigarette from a case full of Parliaments, a brand relatively rare in New York City but nigh ubiquitous in this British Crown colony. So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.
Jack was the kind of bartender who sized you up first and decided for himself what kind of drink you needed. On this particular evening, with the place just loosely occupied and the afternoon sun still filling the windows, he took a bit of time and asked, “Be a double for you, Mrs. Randolph? Look like you been dropping bombs all over Germany today.”
“Nothing as exciting as that.” I rested my left hand on the thick, sleek varnish and stared at the gold band on my fourth finger. “Just a day with the ladies at the Red Cross.”
Jack made a low, slow whistle. “Since when?”
“Since this morning, when the nice fellow in charge of the magazine was so dear as to send me one of his telegrams to go with my breakfast.”
“The good kind of telegram?”
“See for yourself.” I set the cigarette in the ashtray, pulled the yellow envelope from my pocketbook, and removed the wisp of paper, which I spread out flat on the counter before me. How I hated the color yellow.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY STOP TODAY NOW THREE WEEKS SINCE YOUR DEPARTURE NASSAU STOP TOTAL EXPENSES TO MAGAZINE $803.22 STOP TOTAL EXCLUSIVE WINDSOR SCOOPS ZERO STOP RETURN TO NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY STOP NOT ONE MORE PENNY EXPENSES WILL BE PAID BY THIS MAGAZINE=
=S. B. LIGHTFOOT
Jack peered over and whistled. Above our heads, a ceiling fan purred and purred, lifting the ends of my hair. Jack shook his head and returned to his bottles.
“So you see,” I continued, replacing telegram in envelope and envelope in pocketbook, “my time in Nassau may be winding to an end.”
“Don’t you like it here, Mrs. Randolph?”
“Very much. But I can’t stick around if the magazine’s cutting off my expenses.”
“You could write them a story, like this fellow suggests.”
I inclined my head to the pocketbook. “This fellow? You mean Lightfoot? That’s a nice way of putting it. Orders, is more like it.”
“So? Write the fellow a story.”
“It ain’t that easy, sonny,” I said. “There’s only one thing to write about in this town, this blazing, backward, godforsaken burg, and it turns out you can’t just waltz right into Government House and ask to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, s’il vous plaît, and make it snappy.”
“I guess not, at that.”
“No, sir. You’ve got to weave your way into society, it seems. For starters, you have to join the local Red Cross, of which said duchess is president, and make nice with the ladies.”
“That bad, was it?”
“It was awful.”
Jack set the drink in front of me. A martini, it turned out. “Compliments of an admirer.”
“A what?” I sputtered into the glass.
“An admirer, like I said. And that’s all I’m saying.” Jack zipped his lips.
I set down the glass and lifted the cigarette. Jack observed me with interest, thick eyebrows cocked. When I’d taken the first long drag, and another sip from the martini, I crossed my legs and began a survey of the room around me. As you might expect, there was plenty of room to survey, plenty of height and arch, plenty of solid rectangular pillars done in handsome raised wood paneling, plenty of large, masculine chairs and ashtrays on little tables. Not so many customers. Everybody still out enjoying the sunshine, no doubt, and aside from the elderly gent near the window, buried in his newspaper, and the two fellows in linen suits having an earnest discussion in an alcove, the joint was empty. I turned back to Jack.
“Not the old man with the newspaper, I hope?”
“He’s mighty rich, Mrs. Randolph. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Are you calling me a beggar, Jack?”
Jack’s face assumed an aspect of innocence. Above his head, the glasses glittered in their rows, highballs and lowballs, champagne coupes and brandy snifters, not a speck of dust, not a hair’s width out of order. “Just an old saying, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Something my mama used to tell me, that’s all.”
“I have my faults, I’m the first to admit. But I’ve never begged for a dime in my life, and I don’t intend to start now.” I tilted my head toward the window. “Certainly not with some old moneybags trying his luck in a hotel lounge.”
“You have your standards, is that what you’re getting at?”
“I have my standards.”
“Oh, then I should take back this little glass here?”
I slapped away his hand. “Don’t you dare. The poor fellow’s perfectly free to buy me all the drinks he wants. So long as he understands he’s not getting his money’s worth.”
“Aw, he’s not so bad. Just look at the poor sucker. Got most of his hair. Nice clean suit. Shoes all shiny. Can’t see his teeth, but I bet he’s got a few left.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“You’re a real tough dame, you know that? A lot of pretty girls might take pity on a nice guy like that, money to burn. A one-way ticket to Easy Street.”
“I’m not a lot of girls, am I? Besides,” I said, reaching for the ashtray, “I happen to know firsthand where that kind of arrangement ends up, and it’s not Easy Street, believe me.”
The ashtray, if you’re asking, was a heavy old thing made of silver and embossed in the middle with what seemed to be a tavern scene. A border wound around the edges in a series of scrolls, dipping now and then to make space for a resting cigarette. I knocked a crumb of ash inside and measured the weight of Jack’s curiosity on the top of my head. Not that I blamed him. You said a provocative thing like that, you expected someone to wonder what you meant by it, to clear his throat and ask you for a detail or two.
Jack’s black waistcoat shifted in the background, his crisp white sleeves. He put away the bottle of gin on the shelf behind him and said, over his shoulder, “Just as well, I guess, he ain’t the fellow who bought your martini.”
“But you said—”
“You said.” Jack turned back to me and grinned. “I was just following along, you see?”
“I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have amused you.”
“Now, don’t be sore with me, Mrs. Randolph. I’m sworn to secrecy, that’s all.”
“You’re teasing me, aren’t you? I’ll bet this admirer of yours doesn’t even exist. You just poured me a free drink for your own entertainment.”
“Oh, he exists, all right. Paid me up front and everything. Nice tip.”
“Is he here right now?”
“In this room?” Jack’s gaze slid to the door, traveled along the walls, the panel and polish, the glittering windows, and returned to me. “’Fraid I can’t say. Kind of a shy fella, your beau. But don’t you fret. I got the feeling he’ll make himself known to you, when he’s good and ready.”
Before me, the martini formed a tranquil circle in its glass, a cool pool. Not a single flaw disturbed its surface. I pondered the chemical properties of liquids, the infinitesimal bonds of electricity that secured them together in such perfect order, the beautiful molecules held flat in my glass by gravity. The great mystery eluded me, as ever.
“How long have you tended bar, Jack?” I asked.
“How long have I tended bar? Or tended this bar here?”
“Tended bar at all, I guess.”
“Well, now.” He shut one eye and judged the ceiling. “Landed here in Nassau in twenty-one when I was just a wee lad, helping my dad with the old schooner—Lord, what a sweet ship she was—”
“Rum-running, you mean.”
“Just engaging in a little maritime commerce, Mrs. Randolph, serving the needs of you poor suckers dying of thirst back home. Used to load and unload them crates of liquor all the livelong day. Oh, but we lived like kings in Nassau back then. Those were good years.” He shook his head and wiped some invisible smudge of something-or-other from the counter. “Then they brought back the liquor trade stateside.”
“Hallelujah.”
“For you folks back home, maybe. Come to find out, my dad spent all the money from those years, every damn penny, Mrs. Randolph. Left me here in Nassau, broke as a stick. Lucky I knew a fellow who tended bar in those days. Took me under his wing, taught me the trade. Now here I am.” Jack spread his arms. “Got my domain. Nothing happens here without my say-so, Mrs. Randolph, and don’t you forget that. You got a problem with any fellow here, you come to me.”
He was a large man, Jack, maybe more wide than tall, but still. I found myself wanting to wrap my arms around that comfortable girth and kiss his rib cage. At the thought of this act, the image it evoked in my imagination, I directed a tiny smile at the remnants of my drink and asked, “Why do you like me so much, Jack?”
“Because you’re an honest dame, Mrs. Randolph. Honest and kindhearted.”
“This fellow of yours. Is he good enough for me?”
“Nobody’s good enough for you, Mrs. Randolph, not in my book.” He leaned forward an inch or two. “Between you and me, there’s been a lot of fellows asking. Pretty lady, drinking alone, kind of sad and don’t-touch-me. But this fellow is the first fellow I said could buy you a drink.”
“A fine endorsement.”
“Now it’s up to you, Mrs. Randolph. You’re a real good judge, I’ll bet. You just watch yourself around here, that’s all.”
“I thought you said he met your approval.”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking about him.” Jack pulled back and set the glass back on its shelf. “Talking about everything else, everything and everyone else on this island, but especially that duchess and her husband, them two sleek blue jays in a nest, looking out for nobody but themselves. You watch yourself.”
“Watch myself? What for? When I can’t seem to buy myself even a peep inside that nest. I spent all morning at their damned headquarters, the Red Cross, stuffing packages and sitting through the dullest committee meeting in the world, going out of my mind, just to wrangle myself an invitation to the party at Government House on Saturday, and then the duchess finally turns up, and do you know what she says?”
Jack makes a slice along his throat. “Off with your head?”
“Worse. Enchanted to meet you, Mrs. Randolph.”
“That’s all? Sounds all right to me.”
“You don’t know how it is with these people. She locks eyes with you, see, like you’re the only person in the room, the only person in the world, pixie dust glitters in the air around you, and she takes your hand and says, Enchanted to meet you, and you think to yourself, She likes me! She’s enchanted, she said it herself! We’re going to be the best of friends! Then she drops your hand and turns to the next woman and locks eyes with her, and you feel like a sucker. No, you are a sucker. Sucked in by the oldest trick in the book.” There was a stir to my right, somebody approaching the bar. I glanced out the side of my eye and recognized, or thought I recognized, a certain man sliding into position a few stools down, tall, polished, Spanish or French or something, air of importance. Jack, on the other hand, made not the slightest sign of having noticed him. I leaned my elbow on the counter and said, “Maybe I ought to just read the stars and give up.”
“Give up?” said Jack. “Now what kind of talk is that?”
“The smart kind, brother. The realist kind.”
He glanced at last to the newcomer. “Excuse me one minute, Mrs. Randolph.”
The drink was finished. I stubbed out the cigarette. Jack had taken the newcomer’s order and turned to the row of bottles behind him. I stood up, a little more unsteady than I ought to have been after a single martini, and fished a shilling from my pocketbook.
“I beg your pardon,” said the gentleman to my right. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“Of course you couldn’t.”
“You are not leaving, surely?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“But you haven’t eaten yet.”
“Maybe I’m having dinner elsewhere.”
“Now, Mrs. Randolph,” the man said slowly, “we both know that isn’t true.”
Up until this point, I’d been speaking into air. I wasn’t in the habit of addressing bold men, it was a stubbornness of mine. But you can’t ignore a fellow who calls you by name, can you? I turned my head. As I said, I had taken notice of him before. He was one of the regulars at the Prince George, and besides, you couldn’t help but notice him. He was tall and lustrous and strapping, dressed in a pressed suit and white shirt and green necktie, and even though his nose was large and his jaw a little soft, you had to admit he was handsome, especially when he looked at you dead on from that pair of wicked, intelligent eyes. Also, he had an elastic way of moving, like an athlete.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
He held out a large hand. “Alfred de Marigny.”
“I’ve heard that name before, I believe.”
“I’m afraid I have something of a reputation.” There was a note of apology in his voice.
“I’ll say. If you believe all the stories.”
“Do you believe the stories?”
“Naturally. I’ll bet they’re a hundred times more interesting than the truth. Thanks for the drink, by the by.”
He lifted his eyebrows and signaled to Jack. “You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say I wanted another.”
“Didn’t you? But please, Mrs. Randolph, sit down. We cannot have you standing like that. We cannot have you leaving like this.”
“Why not?” I asked. But I sat down.
He sat too, facing me, elbow propped on the bar. “What is this you are saying, about giving up? Give up on what?”
I reached into my pocketbook for the cigarette case. You know, something for my hands to do, something to occupy my attention while the most notorious playboy in Nassau settled himself on a nearby stool and fixed his attention on me. I tried to assemble a few facts in my memory. He was recently divorced from some wealthy Manhattanite who had left her previous husband for him. He was a yachtsman, a good one. A foreigner with a title of some kind, which nobody knew how he acquired, or whether it really belonged to him. In short, he was a—what was the word I had overheard? A mountebank. Fine ten-dollar word, mountebank. I plucked a cigarette and said, “Did I say that?”
“You did. I’m certain of it. Allow me.” He removed a matchbook from his pocket and lit me up in a series of deft movements: selecting the match, striking flame, holding it just to the end of the cigarette, so that the blue core touched the paper in a tiny explosion.
“Thank you.” I opened the case again and offered him the contents. He chose one and thanked me in turn. As we completed these little rituals, Jack returned with a pair of drinks: another martini for me, a whiskey for de Marigny.
When we had both tasted the waters, he said, “I hope I have not offended. I only wish to know if I might be of some assistance.”
“Out of the kindness of your heart?”
He pressed his hand against his chest. “I am a gentleman, Mrs. Randolph. I ask nothing in return.”
“Sure you don’t. Not that I hold it against you, mind you. It’s what makes the world go round.”
“What makes the world go round?”
“Favors.” I reached for the ashtray. “To answer your question, I’m a journalist. I’ve been sent here by an American magazine to give our readers an inside view of Nassau society in these interesting times.”
“By Nassau society, do you perhaps mean the duke and his wife?”
“Well. That is what’s interesting about it, after all.”
“I see.” He turned his face a few inches to the left, as if to regard the tables and chairs, which had begun to populate, mostly men in pale, pressed linen suits, like de Marigny, only shorter and pudgier, your commonplace middle-aged merchant, Bahamicus mercantilis vulgarii. A couple of conspicuous American tourists. “I’m afraid there isn’t much I can do for you in this regard, Mrs. Randolph. I am not a favorite of His Royal Highness.”
“Goodness me. Why ever not? I thought it was part of His Highness’s duty to make himself agreeable to his allies.”
“Allies?”
“I couldn’t help noticing your accent, Monsieur de Marigny.”
“Mrs. Randolph, I am a British subject by birth. I was born in Mauritius, which is a British colony, somewhat to the right of Africa.”
“I see,” I said. “How awfully exotic. Then it’s Mister de Marigny?”
He made a small smile. “My friends call me Freddie.”
“Well then, Freddie. How did a nice chap like you end up on the wrong side of the Duke of Windsor?”
“Do you ask me as a journalist, Mrs. Randolph, or as a friend?”
“Both. I’m a desperate woman, you know. Any little old tidbit might save my career.”
“Then I don’t mind telling you that the duke is a terrible bigot, a vain, weak, effeminate man, entirely ruled by his wife and his own greed.”
He still wore the smile, but his voice was serious, and not at all hushed as you might expect, saying a thing like that in a place like this. I tapped my cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, taking care to keep my fingers steady despite the buzz along my nerves. “Golly. Say what you really think, Freddie.”
“I beg your pardon. Mine is an outspoken nature.”
“Oh, I don’t mind a bit, believe me. Is he a traitor?”
“No,” de Marigny said, “but he is the fool of the Nazis. I knew him a little before the war, you know, when I lived in London. It’s no secret he admired Hitler very much in those days. His wife, I think, is of the same mind. You will remember, I think, their visit to Germany, shortly after they married?”
“I remember, all right. That was some show. Parades and factory tours and what have you. Wearing their best clothes and their best smiles.”
“He is an idiot.” De Marigny sucked on his cigarette. His gaze, which had been trained amicably on me, lost a little focus, lost a little amity, and slipped to some point past my left ear. “I had a friend in those days, a good chap, handsome fellow, clever, a Jew. He traveled back to Berlin to persuade his family to leave. This was in 1936, I believe, after they passed these terrible laws. That was the last I ever saw of him.”
“Do you believe what some of the newspapers are saying? About the camps and so on? Or is it all just propaganda, like spearing the Belgian babies?”
He tossed down a considerable measure of whiskey and stared at the cubes of ice left behind. The air was warm, the way the air is always warm in Nassau, and you could almost hear the melting of the ice under the draft of the ceiling fan. His hand, holding the glass, was quite long, and the fingers looked as if they could crush rocks. I waited for him to speak. Most people will, if you give them enough time. Nobody likes a silence.
“I have a story for you,” he said at last. “I think it illustrates rather nicely the character of the man.”
“That’s what I’m here for, after all.”
“Some few years ago, when I first came to the Bahamas, I found a pleasant little ridge on the island of Eleuthera on which to build a house of my own. I had made some money, you see, in the London commodities markets, and I wanted what every fellow does. A castle of his own.”
“Naturally.”
He waved away a little smoke. “It’s a pretty island, Eleuthera. Long and narrow and undulating, like a ribbon”—he made a gesture with his hand, illustrating this ribbon—“so you are never far from these beaches of beautiful coral sand. It lies to the east, about two days’ sail from here. Eleuthera. This means ‘freedom’ in Greek, did you know that?”
“I did not. They don’t teach much Greek at girls’ schools, I’m afraid.”
“No? I suppose not. In any case, I bought two hundred acres on a ridge, sloping right down to the beach, and assured myself of a source of plentiful fresh water on the property. Then I built a nice bungalow.”
“So what happened? The duke decided he wanted it for himself?”
A large party burst into the room, six or seven of them, voices booming off the ceiling, reeking of sunshine and perspiration. De Marigny glanced across the furniture and observed them for a second or two, no more. Then he returned to me and said, smiling again, “Not quite. You see, in the village below this ridge, the Negroes have no fresh water of their own. The women boil seawater and collect rain in buckets, or else they walk for miles and then pay a penny a dipper. So I thought, since I was building this house in any case, I should also build a system to pipe water down to the village from my well, to these villagers who had nothing but dry rocks and barren soil. And I designed this system, and had the permit approved by the Executive Council, and all that was needed was the signature of the governor himself.”
“Oh, dear,” I said.
While he was speaking, Jack came silently in our direction and replaced the empty whiskey glass with a fresh one. De Marigny nodded his thanks and sipped. Though the sides of the glass were still dry, he held it gingerly. “Then this woman arrives,” he said. “A woman named Rosita Forbes, a writer. An Englishwoman, the sporty sort, do you know what I mean?”
“I have an idea. Thinks she’s Gertrude Bell and Good Queen Bess all rolled into one.”
He laughed. “Yes, like that. So she buys her own land, not far away from mine, and builds herself a big, splendid house, and what do you think? She has no well, no source of her own. The silly woman did not think to ask these practical questions before she purchased her little empire.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I suggested she build gutters and a water tank. We have plenty of tropical downpours in these islands, after all. But no. She has other ideas. And then I wait and wait for the governor’s signature, and there is no signature, so I sail back to Nassau and make an appointment at Government House and explain the situation, how the villagers are waiting for their fresh water, and do you know what he says, this fellow who ruled as king of England and her dominions for almost a year? Emperor of India, et cetera?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He says he wants the water in those pipes—my water, mind you, from my property—diverted to Mrs. Forbes instead. He says the natives are used to collecting their water in buckets, they have never had running water, it won’t make a difference to them, while Mrs. Forbes, this munificent woman, she and her estate will provide work and money to the population, which is a gift of far greater value to them.”
My fingers rotated the end of the cigarette in the ashtray, round and round. De Marigny had a contradictory mouth, a thin top lip over a full, sensuous bottom lip, from which the smile had disappeared. He drank again, not deeply, and when he put the glass down he stared at me. The voices hammered around us. By some imperceptible means, our two stools had drawn closer together, almost in intimacy.
“And what did you say to that?” I asked.
“I refused, of course. Then I said some rather uncomplimentary things, which I shall not repeat, and which he pretended not to notice. He left the room. His—what’s the word—his aide-de-camp was horrified. I felt a little sorry for him, in the end.”
“The aide-de-camp?”
“No, the duke. He spends the first three and a half decades of his life being told he is like a god on earth. And he believes it! And now it’s a very different story. An attractive woman walks into his office and pays him the great compliment of begging for a boon, so he grants it—like a king, like an emperor—never imagining he cannot do this thing she asks. But what’s this? His subject won’t obey him. His subject crosses his thick colonial boots and tells the little emperor he’s nothing more than the governor of a pimple on the arse of the British Empire.”
“You said that?”
“Something like that, anyway.” He ground out his own cigarette. “Listen to me. When I was living in London, before the war, I met him twice. Once at Ascot. The second time at a hunting party in Scotland. He arrives in his own airplane, you see, flies in late to join us on his own bloody airplane, the Gypsy Moth—what an ass—and proceeds to tell us over dinner what a fine chap this Hitler fellow is, has all the right ideas, Germany and England should be the best of friends, stand firm together against international Jewry—pah. Half of us were disgusted. The other half could not applaud him enough.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Yes, interesting. That is what you wanted, after all, Mrs. Randolph. Anyway, you see what I mean. If you wish to become intimate friends with the royal couple, to learn all their secrets so you may write about them in your magazine, you had better not mention my name.”
“Understood.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “Forgive me. I have a dinner engagement. I am already late.”
“We can’t have that.” I held out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Instead of grasping my palm, de Marigny pressed the fingers briefly to his lips. As he released me, he raised his eyebrows. “But perhaps you can join us? We are just a few dull sailors from the yacht club.”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”
He smiled. “Yes, you would.”
“Maybe I would. But not this time. You’ve given me a little too much food for thought already.”
De Marigny reached into his pocket to retrieve a fold of bills. He plucked at them almost without looking and laid a five-pound note on the counter, next to his empty whiskey glass, which amounted—if I knew my shillings—to a four hundred percent tip for Jack.
“Of course, you can do with this information what you wish,” de Marigny said, rising from his stool, “but if I were you, I would not print these things I have told you, not yet, or you will never write another word in Nassau.”
“Then what would you recommend?”
“Why, it’s very simple.” He picked up his hat from the counter and settled it on his head. His eyes had regained their luster, his smile its charm, and I believe every head in the room swiveled to take him in, on cue. He didn’t seem to notice. “If you want to know all the best ladies in Nassau society, Mrs. Randolph,” he said, “you must join the Red Cross, of course. The headquarters is just around the corner, on George Street.”
I ORDERED A PORK CHOP for dinner and ate it at the bar, washed down by a glass of red wine. Afterward, I stepped outside and paused to light a cigarette. The sun was setting over the ridge, and the sky had that unearthly wash of color that stops your breath. Above my head, a pair of seagulls shrieked at each other. I stared north, toward the harbor and the slivery green paradise of Hog Island on the other side.
Having spent the last two years of my life in what you might call a prison, in a series of cheap boardinghouses in cheap American towns, I couldn’t quite accustom myself to this landscape of heat and color and clarity, this excess of blue that was the Bahamas. When I’d stepped outside the metal skin of the airplane to the earth of Oakes Field, three weeks ago, I thought I’d traveled into another universe. I thought I’d stepped into another Earth entirely, a paradise lit by an eternal sun, a release from everything old, everything dreary. Then I touched land and discovered that freedom was not so straightforward, that you could move to a different universe but you couldn’t escape the prison of your own skin.
Still, I hadn’t entirely lost that sense of unreality, especially when I found the line of that horizon and searched in vain for any cloud. The British Colonial Hotel sprawled ahead on West Bay Street, white and crisp like a castle made of wedding cake. A breeze came off the ocean, smelling of brine. The sand, oh. How I’d miss the fluid, delicate sand, slithering between my toes. I dragged on my cigarette and stared again at Hog Island, now gilded by the rising moon. The lighthouse twinkled from the western tip. Some Swedish fellow owned the island, an inventor, built the vacuum cleaner and the electric icebox, God bless him. Came here to the Bahamas because of the taxes—the absence of taxes, I should say, and why not? A fellow who invents the vacuum cleaner, he’s done his share for humanity. Let him wallow in profits and buy a goddamn island in paradise and call it Shangri-La. Let him buy the largest private yacht in the world and swan around the seven seas. Wenner-Gren, that was his name. Axel Wenner-Gren. There was a Mrs. Wenner-Gren too. No doubt Mrs. Wenner-Gren was invited to all the duchess’s parties. And she hadn’t even had to invent a solid-state electric icebox! Just to marry the man who had. I tossed my cigarette into the sand and turned to walk back to the Prince George Hotel.
As I reached the base of George Street, I hesitated. Instead of continuing to the hotel, I turned left, walked up the street, past the Red Cross headquarters to stand at the bottom of the steps that led to Government House. Darkness had drained away the pinkness of it, the confectionary quality. A constellation of lights shone through the various windows. I could just make out the guards at the main entrance, standing at brutal attention, and the perfume of the night blossoms, wafting from the gardens behind their wall.
BACK IN MY ROOM AT the Prince George, I changed into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, drank a glass of water, and took some aspirin. Fetched my suitcase from the wardrobe and opened it. There was a knock on the door, not entirely unexpected. I had asked for a final bill from the front desk, as I intended to check out tomorrow morning.
But it was not the bill at all. It was an envelope, addressed in an elegant, calligraphic hand to Mrs. Leonora Randolph. Inside lay an invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a cocktail party this Saturday at seven P.M. in the gardens of Government House, to benefit the Central Bahamas Chapter of the International Red Cross Society.
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
AUGUST 1900 (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
TWO WEEKS AFTER the encounter in the infirmary garden, Herr Doktor Hermann offers Elfriede an unusual question in the middle of their afternoon discussion.
“Would you say, Elfriede,” he intones, making a bridge with his hands, “would you say that you love your husband?”
ELFRIEDE’S HUSBAND. DOES SHE LOVE him? They were married four years ago. She’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday only a month before the wedding, in a small party attended by her parents and siblings and prospective sisters-in-law (her husband is an orphan) and Gerhard himself—of course—aged thirty-three, the giant Baron von Kleist who was doing her such a preposterous honor as to marry her. Of course, her beauty was to blame for that. Why else should a baron of such ancient lineage, of considerable fortune and figure, stoop to marry the daughter of a mere burgher? They had met skating on the village pond, a democratic location. Elfriede was an especially graceful skater, and Gerhard was not, and whether by accident or intent he had crashed into her, just gently enough that she wasn’t hurt, but so decisively that he had no choice but to apologize profusely for the accident and buy her a cider. “Why, he’s in love with you,” her mother whispered eagerly the next day, after the baron paid an afternoon call to assure himself of Elfriede’s recovery, and Elfriede—well, Elfriede was too overwhelmed, too flattered, too mesmerized to understand whether she returned that love or not. Gerhard von Kleist was not exactly handsome, but he was tall and magnificently built, he was well-dressed and well-read, he had a disarmingly earnest way about him, and above all he was Gerhard von Kleist! He was a nobleman, the hereditary master of Schloss Kleist; he was a great man, he was an officer in the army, he hunted often with the Kaiser himself. By April they were engaged; by June the banns were called, and on the first of July they were married in the beautiful church in the village, disapproving sisters-in-law to one side and ecstatic parents to the other, amid much good-natured congregational whispering about the baron’s haste to make the flaxen-haired Elfriede his lawful bride.
Before they left for the church, in the carriage bedecked with flowers, Elfriede’s mother pressed a lace handkerchief into her hand, as tradition required. Elfriede was to mop up her bridal tears with this linen square, and afterward to fold it and tuck it away in her drawer on her wedding night. There it’s supposed to lie, until one day, when Elfriede dies, the Cloth of Tears will shroud her cold, dead features. Tradition. As it turned out, Elfriede didn’t cry at all during the ceremony that united her to Gerhard, nor in the carriage to Schloss Kleist while Gerhard held her hand snugly beneath her massive wedding dress, nor during the wedding banquet in the schloss’s baroque great hall, two hundred years old, bearing an exquisite resemblance to the wedding cake itself. (Her mother exclaimed over the dryness of the Cloth of Tears, when she extracted it unused from Elfriede’s bodice as she prepared her daughter for bed.) And she did not cry when Gerhard himself entered the nuptial chamber, smelling pungently of soap, dressed in pajamas and a silk dressing gown. Elfriede had drunk several glasses of champagne, and her new husband appeared to her in a haze as he approached the monumental bed on which his bride sat. He knelt—such a big, powerful man, thirty-three years old, kneeling before her!—and covered her hands with kisses. Elfriede stared down at his wheaten head, worshiping her, and felt a sincere, loving warmth move her heart. A sincere connection to Gerhard, who had shared this day with her, who had stood by her side, the two of them united against all those curious guests and well-wishers. “I will be gentle, my dearest girl,” he promised, removing her nightgown with trembling fingers, kissing her mouth and her breasts and everything else, and Elfriede, dazed and tender, lay back on the embroidered bedspread while he climbed on top of her, and still she didn’t cry. He untied the belt of his dressing gown and shrugged it off, but he didn’t remove his pajamas. Perhaps he didn’t want to frighten her. In any case, he reached inside his pajama trousers and drew out his organ, primed for business, and Elfriede, being somewhat drunk for the first time in her life, couldn’t help glancing at this thing that had consumed her curiosity since adolescence, this object designed by nature to plant seeds inside her womb. At the reality of her husband’s erection, however, the tears sprang at last to her eyes. “Oh no!” she said, but it was too late. Gerhard’s face had already clouded over with rapture, he was already fitting this startling, stiff machine—nothing like the harmless anatomy of the classical statues, God have mercy, of the Renaissance paintings—between her legs. As he shoved his way in, saying her name and invoking his love for her while he split her apart, she gripped the pillows and wept, but the Cloth of Tears was already tucked away in her bureau, unreachable and useless.
HERR DOKTOR HERMANN’S QUESTION IS strange not because of its intimacy—certainly they have touched on intimate subjects before—but because of its specificity. How do you feel about your husband? he should have asked instead. By inserting the word love inside the query, he’s compromised the honesty of her answer.
Elfriede stares at the bridge made by his long, latticed fingers, and his face just above, which seems a little flushed, though today’s weather is far from warm. “Why do you ask?” she says.
“Because it is important for me to know, as your doctor. As your doctor, I must know these vital details, Elfriede, so we may progress in your treatment.”
Dr. Hermann’s fingernails are small and shallow, almost as if the tips of the digits had been chopped off at some uniform length, or else cut short at his creation. Elfriede thinks of her son’s tiny fingernails, like fragments of seashells, and how she used to gaze on them in awe and also fear, unable to understand how such delicate ornamentation could have come from her. From Gerhard and his bear paws.
“Of course I love my husband,” she says.
Dr. Hermann considers. “You say ‘of course,’ Elfriede. Why do you say ‘of course’? Is it necessary for a wife to love her husband?”
“A wife would be a beast if she didn’t love a man such as my husband. She would be unworthy of life.”
Herr Doktor’s hands spring apart. He turns to his notebook, lifts the pen lying in the crease, and writes something down. When he looks up again, his cheeks are even more flushed than before, and the tip of his nose.
“Are you a beast, Elfriede?” he asks. “Are you unworthy of life?”
Elfriede rises from her chair. Because the weather’s blustery, they’re indoors, inside Dr. Hermann’s private office, equipped with comfortable armchairs and a sofa. On the wall opposite Elfriede hangs a painting of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, where the large, baroque houses remind her of Schloss Kleist.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I’m going to get a little air.”
ACTUALLY, THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a little air in a place like this, a monastery arranged on the slope of a mountain so as to be far from mankind and nearer to God. You walked outside and encountered huge mouthfuls of it, you had to gulp to keep pace, to save yourself from drowning, and sometimes there was so much air you turned your back on the wind and made your way along with your shoulders hunched against this onslaught.
Today’s such a day, a day that doesn’t know it’s supposed to be August instead of October. You can actually see the wind as it hurtles between the peaks, dragging along thick shreds of clouds, and you feel it as an ocean current. Cold and forceful it strikes you, sharp and wet at the same time, turning your cheeks and your fingers numb, any skin you dare to lay bare. Elfriede, wearing a thick, belted cardigan but no coat, no jacket of any kind, relishes the hardship. She trudges along the path that leads downward toward the trees, a trail she knows well, every rock, every kink of landscape. The heads of the wildflowers huddle low to shield themselves, like Elfriede herself. The surrounding peaks are invisible inside this mass of howling clouds. No, forget the surrounding peaks, even her own mountain is lost to sight, the slope disappears before her, and she walks on faith alone, curling her fingers inside her sleeves to keep them warm.
Then the first trees flash between the streams of mist. Grow larger, more certain, more plentiful. Elfriede quickens her stride. She reaches the stubby pines at the vanguard, and a hundred or so yards later she’s enveloped by them, like stepping into a cathedral. The wind dies to a breeze. She finds a fallen log and sits in relief. Leans her head back against a thin, hardy trunk. She loves the smell of wood and rot and moss. She closes her eyes and dreams of her baby, whose features are blurred, but whose heart she feels clamoring inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
Though the trees muffle the howling of the gale, the forest is not silent. The branches rustle, the wind whines between the pine needles. Certain of her own solitude, Elfriede doesn’t hear the sound of footsteps as they approach, only the voice that greets her, an instant after she senses the vibration of another human being.
“Frau von Kleist?” a man inquires, in a slight, courteous English accent.
TWO WEEKS HAVE PASSED SINCE Elfriede encountered the Englishman in the infirmary garden. To be precise, sixteen days and a few hours, but who’s counting? Her eyes fly open, she startles upward from the log. She beholds him, a pumpkin-headed skeleton belted into a thick Norfolk jacket, wool trousers, leather gaiters. A hunting cap covers his wide skull, his stubbly ginger hair. There should be a pipe sticking from his mouth, a shotgun nestled in the crook of his elbow to complete the picture, but mercifully no.
“You shouldn’t be out in such weather,” she exclaims.
“Probably not. Yet here I am. You might say the mountains called me. Do you mind awfully if I sit down? Still a bit short-winded, I’m afraid.”
“No, of course not.”
He doesn’t move, just stands there smiling inquisitively, and Elfriede realizes that he won’t sit until she does. A gentleman. So she drops back onto her log. Mr. Thorpe finds a boulder. Beneath the collar of his jacket, he wears a scarf of bulky wool. Elfriede drops her gaze to the ground before her, which is cushioned in old brown pine needles.
“You shouldn’t be out,” she says again.
“Do you know, that’s exactly what the orderly told me.”
“You should have listened to the orderly.”
“Oh, I’m used to this sort of weather. I spent my summers in Scotland, with my mother and her sisters. Frightful, most of the time. Of course, when it was fine, there was no lovelier place in the world. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Smoke?”
He was already drawing a silver case from his jacket pocket. “You’re about to tell me I shouldn’t be smoking, either.”
“But it’s true. You’ve had pneumonia.”
“You’re quite right, of course. I do all sorts of things I shouldn’t do.” He lifts a match, preparing to strike, then lowers it. “I say, you don’t mind, do you? If you object to the smell, I mean.”
“N-no.” Elfriede thinks she should probably have said yes, because tobacco smoke is possibly the last substance on earth that should fill the passages of Mr. Thorpe’s ravaged lungs at the moment, short of poisoned gas. But his pleasure, his anticipation is so obvious, she doesn’t have the heart to deny him. A pattern that will shape all the days they spend together.
“Ah, but you do mind, don’t you? How kind you are. If only I were good enough to return the favor.” He strikes the match and lights the cigarette, and when he’s taken a long draft, eyes shut in pleasure, and exhaled slowly, taking care to release the smoke in the opposite direction from Elfriede, he opens his eyes again and says, “I can’t begin to express my gratitude. First fag in nine weeks. Tell me how to make it up to you.”
“You can stop. You can take care of yourself, so you don’t relapse.”
Mr. Thorpe squints at a point a meter or so to her left. He has the kind of face that suits squinting. Crinkles his expression in a genial way. “I’ve been giving that some thought, actually.”
“I hope so.”
“I mean, my recovery has been altogether too rapid, if you know what I mean. Blessed as I am with my mother’s formidable constitution. Just the other day, they were talking about discharging me.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Well.” He turns back to her, turns the full force of himself upon her blushing cheeks. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think there can be any question. Of course you must get better.”
“But leave? Aye, there’s the rub.”
“Don’t you want to leave? To return to Vienna and your amusing life there?”
He sits there smoking, and his refusal to answer is answer enough. Just like her husband, who fell in love with her at a stroke—fell in love, at any rate, with her flaxen hair and celestial eyes, her round and childlike face, her expression of dreamy otherworldliness. Imagined she represented some kind of ideal, and was horrified to discover the reality.
“I’m not what you think,” she says.
“How do you know what I think?”
“Besides, I’m married. I’m married and I have a baby, a son, three years old.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you. Haven’t you already told me these facts? Believe me, I know them well. Except the age of your son, bless him. Three years old! He must be a sturdy little man by now.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “They won’t let me see him. I have been living here for two—two years—”
“Oh, my dear girl.”
Mr. Thorpe crushes out his half-finished cigarette on the boulder. Elfriede hides her face and doesn’t see him rise to his feet and cross the carpet of pine needles between them. When he stops at the log and sits beside her, she feels the warmth of his body underneath the wool.
“Don’t they send photographs?” he says. “Your people?”
“Herr Doktor forbids it. He says it will bring about a nervous relapse.”
“Herr Doktor?”
“Herr Doktor Hermann. My analyst. He’s well versed in the latest—the latest methods for disorders—like mine.” Elfriede struggles to keep her composure, to speak rationally through the web of fingers covering her face.
“You’ll forgive me, but Herr Doktor’s methods strike me as a trifle barbaric.”
Elfriede’s so astonished, she lifts her face away from her hands and meets Mr. Thorpe’s plain, large gaze directly. His freckles. His eyes, a startling blue. “But he’s a doctor!” she gasps.
“What does that mean? He’s got a paper of some kind, a degree in some scientific subject, which will probably prove entirely obsolete in a decade or so. Any fool would call that barbaric, to keep a mother away from her child. Not even a photograph!”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Know about what? Your breakdown, as you call it?”
“I’m unnatural,” she says. “An unnatural mother.”
“Well, what the devil does that mean? You seem natural enough to me.”
“I’m not, believe me.”
By way of reply, Mr. Thorpe fixes her with an expression so compassionate, she has to look away. But looking away is not enough. The compassion remains in the air, on her skin, seeping into her flesh, inescapable. She stares at his shoulder and her heart crashes. Fear, or attraction? Are they perhaps the same thing?
“I went mad after he was born,” she says. “An extreme form of nervous melancholy. It’s a particular malady and one of Herr Doktor Hermann’s special fields of interest.”
“This Hermann fellow—have I met him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s in the psychiatric section.”
“The loony bin, you mean?”
Elfriede refuses to laugh. Instead she examines the collar of his jacket. The woolen scarf tucked inside, protecting his neck and chest from the damp, cold air. She whispers, “You should be disgusted. You should be appalled.”
“I’m just waiting to hear the rest of the story.”
“There is no rest of the story.”
“Rubbish. Of course there is. Lots of new mothers have a spell of the blue devils after their babies are born. My cousin spent a rough few weeks, as I remember. By God, I don’t blame them. I should imagine the whole affair’s rather a shock to the system, and then you’ve got this child to take care of, this mysterious little being keeping you up all hours and so on.”
“Not like this. I couldn’t—I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t—it was like a shroud settled on me. I thought I was going mad. I should have been joyful, I should have been grateful. I had a rich, loving husband. I had a beautiful baby. Everything for me was perfect. But I felt miserable and terrified. I felt shadowed by doom. I can’t even describe how black it all was. I looked at his face, his little squashed face, and he was a stranger. I thought, I don’t love you, I don’t even know you, who are you?”
“Poor Elfriede … my poor girl … and nobody understood …”
Now Elfriede raises her head to Mr. Thorpe’s kindly, bony face. She defies his kindness. She defies this compassion of his. She defies his freckles and his pale, gingery eyebrows.
“I tried to kill myself.” (She flings the words at his long eyelashes.) “I thought I should kill myself, because I was no use to my baby at all. I was a terrible mother. I was poisoning him with my own bitter milk. I thought I should kill myself before I killed my own baby.”
Mr. Thorpe doesn’t reply. Not in words, anyway. He lifts his arms and puts them around her. Her defiance crumbles. She leans into his ribs, into his shrunken chest, and shudders out a barrage of tears into the left-hand pocket of the Norfolk jacket, the one covering his heart. A shooting jacket, designed to withstand far more serious attacks than this one, thank goodness. His thumbs move against her back. He doesn’t speak. She smells wet wool, and the particular scent she caught two weeks earlier, in the infirmary garden, soap and the salt of human skin. Mr. Thorpe’s skin. Eventually she turns her face to the side and speaks again.
“I spent a month in hospital, and then they sent me home. Everybody pretended nothing had happened, that I had caught a bad cold or something. Except they wouldn’t leave me alone with the baby. My milk had dried up. Everybody was so polite and cold.” She pauses, considers, forges on brazenly. “And my husband—Gerhard—I wouldn’t—I was afraid of having any more babies—”
“Dear me. Poor Gerhard. So they sent you here to recover your senses.”
“Yes.”
“When are you supposed to go back home?”
“When I’m cured,” she says. “When Herr Doktor Hermann decides I’m well enough.”
“Ah, this Hermann again. You know, I’m loath to point fingers at another man, but it seems to me that he’s had two years to cure you. Two years, and you’re clearly in your proper senses, no danger to anybody. Only a lingering sense of guilt, which a loving family ought to be able to conquer.”
“Maybe it’s better if I don’t go back. Maybe my son—my little Johann—I’m a stranger to him—”
“Is that what this Hermann chap’s been telling you?”
“No. He doesn’t tell me things. He only asks questions, for the most part.”
Mr. Thorpe makes a noise that Elfriede will one day recognize as coming from the Scotch side of him. She remains in his arms, laid comfortably against his chest, shielded from his sharp, skinny bones by the woolen jacket. She doesn’t want to move. Has no ability, even, to stir from this place of refuge. His jacket, her Cloth of Tears.
“Anyway, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she says.
“Who doesn’t? Your son?”
“My husband.”
“Did he say that? Did he say he doesn’t love you?”
“No, but I saw it in his face, after I came back from the hospital. I was alien to him. He thought he’d married an angel, and as it turned out …”
“Speaking from the male perspective,” Mr. Thorpe says slowly, “of which I naturally consider myself something of an expert. Perhaps it was something else?”
“No. No. A woman can tell. A woman can tell when a man doesn’t love her.”
“Well—and I’m only speculating, mind you—a man whose wife—how do I put this? A man whose beautiful wife no longer allows him the singular privilege for which he married her—”
Elfriede starts to draw away. But Mr. Thorpe makes a little squeeze of his arms, not to keep her there, not so firm as that, but to let her know she’s welcome to stay, if she likes. So she pauses, no longer pressed against his chest, but close.
“It’s possible, you see, that he thought you didn’t love him. And a chap who believes he’s lost the love of a woman—forgive me—a woman such as you—well, I daresay it might ruin him.” Mr. Thorpe pauses. “That’s only conjecture, mind you. I haven’t met the lucky Herr von Kleist.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Another slight squeeze. Elfriede capitulates. The lure of comfort is too much for her. Warm human contact. Warm human arms, warm human chest. Things for which she’s starved. A famine of touch.
“Thank you for your music,” Wilfred says. “I was afraid you’d stop.”
“I wasn’t sure whether I should. I didn’t want to keep you awake.”
“Keep me awake? Kept me alive, I think.”
“Oh!”
“So why did you? Keep playing, I mean.”
“Because I … well, I …” She shouldn’t say the words, but she must. She might conceal her true thoughts from the doctor, but she can’t conceal them from Wilfred. Oh, his actual heart, thudding under her ear! She whispers, “Because I thought you might be listening.”
“Damn it all,” he says softly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just hellish fate, that’s all.”
Elfriede says, “Tell me about this girl of yours.”
“Girl? Girl? I’m afraid I don’t know any other girls.”
“You told me there was a girl.”
There is a sigh from inside that ravaged chest, far more sigh than Elfriede might have imagined possible. It ends in a cough. Not a bad one. Not the cough of two weeks ago.
“Right. Her. Well, you know, she’s quite the opposite of you. Older and rather cosmopolitan. Divorcée of a well-known composer, I won’t say whom. Just the sort of woman to render a callow youth—an ugly, awkward fellow such as myself—dizzy with ecstasy.”
“And did she?”
“Yes.”
“Pardon me,” says Elfriede, smiling a little, “but you don’t sound ecstatic.”
“That’s because …”
“Because?”
“Because I shall have to go back to her shortly, I suppose. And the prospect is not what it once was. Don’t ask why.”
“Why?”
That noise again. “Let’s just sit here a moment longer, shall we? I daresay we’re not doing anybody any harm, just sitting here.”
“No.”
“I’m a man of honor.”
“Yes.”
“Unlike, I suspect, that blackguard Hermann.”
“Let’s not talk,” she says.
“An ugly, awkward chap like me. Emaciated with fever. Head like a pumpkin—why are you laughing?”
“That’s exactly what I thought, when I first saw you. Your head like a pumpkin.”
“Ah, well. At least a fellow knows where he stands.”
Elfriede stares at the trees opposite. The dark woods beyond. The wind whining quietly between the pine needles. “I love your pumpkin head.”
“But you hardly know my head.”
“You hardly know mine. Does it matter?”
Wilfred moves a little, turning his back to the tree as she had, settling them both more comfortably.
“No,” he says.
LULU (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
ON SATURDAY EVENING, I walked to Government House in my best summer dress of blueberry organza and a pair of tall peep-toe shoes that would have fared much better in a taxi, if I could have spared the dough. It wasn’t the distance; it was the stairs. Government House, as I said, sat at the top of George Street, aboard its very own hill, in order to ensure (or so it seemed to me, at the time) that the ordinary pedestrian arrived flushed and breathless for his appointment with the governor.
Still. As I passed Columbus on his pedestal and climbed the steps toward the familiar neoclassical facade of pink stucco—heavens, what a perfect representation of the Bahamian ideal—I had to admit to a certain human curiosity. Like everybody else, I knew Government House from the outside, as a passerby, an acquaintance. I hadn’t the least idea what lay inside. Now its portico expanded before me, all pink and white, Roman columns and tropical shutters, windows aglow, music and voices, a thing of welcome, alive. I paused at the top of the steps to pat my hair, to adjust my necklace of imitation pearls, to gather my composure while the noise of an engine clamored in my ears, and an enormous automobile roared beneath the pediment and slammed to a halt exactly at the front door. As I watched, too rapt to move, a stumpy man in a plain, poorly cut suit popped from the back seat and patted his pockets.
Now, in the many years since I inhabited the Bahamas, I’ve come to understand that memory is a capricious friend, and never more unreliable than when we trust it absolutely. But I’ll swear on any Bible you like that I identified Sir Harry Oakes right there on the portico of Government House that evening with photographic precision. I remember the sense of awe I felt as I said to myself, Why, that’s Harry Oakes. Maybe it was the car, or the confident electricity that inevitably surrounds the richest man in the British Empire. He had struck gold in Canada or someplace, after years and years of prospecting, one of the biggest strikes ever made, and now he lived here in the Bahamas, because of taxes. I guess he figured he had already paid his dues, like that Swedish fellow.
The car roared off. I slowed my steps to hang back, conscious that I had no companion, no escort, no friend of any kind. I was alone, as usual, and when you’re alone you must time your entrance carefully, you must carry yourself a certain way, you must manage every detail so nobody suspects your weakness. A fellow in a uniform stood just outside the door, exchanging words with Oakes, who continued to pat his pockets in that absentminded way, while I crossed the drive at a measured pace, presenting my hips just so. As I reached the portico, I heard an oath. It was delivered, needless to say, in a plain, rough, American kind of voice, and I froze, a few yards away. I’d heard he was a flinty fellow, Sir Harry Oakes, that he had a hot temper and small patience—no wonder he’d married late in life, when he was already rich—and here’s what I’d learned about men of temperament: stay the hell away, if you can help it.
But Oakes spun around and spotted me. In the course of patting his pockets, he’d discovered the same card I carried in my hand. He brandished it now. “In the gardens!” he bellowed. “The goddamn west entrance!”
“The west entrance?”
“Follow me.”
He stumped off—there’s no other way to describe it, as if he wore an invisible pair of iron boots—and I scrambled after him, because when the richest man in the British Empire tells you to follow him, you take your chances and follow, temperament be damned.
“Leonora Randolph,” I ventured, when I reached his shoulder.
He stopped and spun again. He couldn’t seem to turn like an ordinary man, but then he wasn’t ordinary, was he? He stuck out his hand. “Oakes,” he said, because of course there needed no further introduction.
I took the hand and shook it briskly. “I figured.”
Well, he laughed at that. We resumed walking, at a more amicable pace, and Oakes said, “Where do you come from, Miss Randolph?”
“Mrs. Randolph. I’m from New York City, mostly. I came down to Nassau a few weeks ago for a change of pace.”
“Change of pace, eh? I guess you’ve got your money’s worth.”
“I’ll say.”
“Your husband come with you?”
“My husband’s dead, Sir Harry.”
“I see.”—stomp, stomp—“Awfully sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a louse.”
“A louse, eh? The lazy kind, or the drinking kind?”
“Take your pick.”
“Did he beat you?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say beat.”
Oakes grunted. “Good riddance to the bastard, then. Why Nassau?”
“Why not Nassau?”
“The heat, for one thing. It’s goddamn July. My wife and kids left for Bar Harbor two months ago.”
“I don’t mind the heat at all, Sir Harry. Heaven knows it’s better than the cold.”
We had turned the corner of the mansion by now, and proceeded down a path that led, presumably, to the gardens at the rear. The music and chatter grew louder through the quicksand of warmth, the scent of blossom, the splay of palm fronds. Oakes raised his voice to bark, “Cold? Cold? A New York City winter’s nothing to the goddamn Yukon, believe me!”
“Well, I’ll take the tropics over either of them, any day. Even in July.”
“And I say you’re nuts. Nobody’s here! Just the locals and the riffraff. Like me!” He rapped his thigh with his invitation card and laughed.
“And Their Royal Highnesses.”
“They wouldn’t be here either, if they could help it. Here we are.”
We had reached an iron gate, where a sturdy, immaculate fellow wore his white uniform and white gloves bravely. He greeted Oakes by name. Oakes snatched my invitation card right from my fingers and thrust both of them, his and mine, toward this gatekeeper. “There you go, Marshall. This is Mrs. Randolph, just off the boat from New York.”
“The airliner, actually,” I said.
“The airliner. That new Pan American service from Miami, I’ll bet.”
“That’s the one.”
“Not afraid of flying, either. Good girl. Mrs. Randolph, this gentleman is George Marshall, butler at Government House. He’s the fellow who runs just about everything. Isn’t that right, Marshall?”
Marshall glanced down at my invitation card, glanced back up at me. I felt a cool inspection pass across my skin and my dress of blueberry organza, not unpleasant. “Good evening, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Welcome to Government House.”
“Good evening, Mr. Marshall. Delighted, I’m sure.”
“How’s the rum punch in there?” said Oakes.
“I mixed it myself an hour ago, sir.”
“Good, good. The duke?”
“Their Royal Highnesses are still receiving by the goldfish pond, I believe.”
Oakes took my elbow. “Come along, Mrs. Randolph. Might as well go in with reinforcements, I always say.”
Together we walked through the gate, toward the crackle of human noise. By the sound of things, the party was already in full swing. Against the twilight, the flares of perhaps a dozen or more lanterns flickered opulently, illuminating the garden in patches of gold, illuminating spiky palmettos and white jasmine and pink bougainvillea, illuminating people and more people, drinking and smoking and laughing. I turned my head to Oakes. “I thought you said nobody was here, except locals and riffraff.”
“Those are the locals, Mrs. Randolph. Conchie Joes, we call ’em. Merchants on Bay Street and their plump little wives. You’ll get to know their faces, believe me. The pond’s this way.”
I allowed him to lead me down the path, toward a cluster of lanterns that had attracted—like mosquitoes, I thought—several people dressed in bright colors, next to a rock-lined pool. Oakes was grumbling to himself. I asked him if something was wrong.
“Receiving lines,” he said. “Can’t stand ’em.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t notice if you just slipped past.”
“Their Royal Highnesses,” he muttered. “Nothing royal about her. You know that, don’t you?”
I turned my head toward the man before me, the richest man in the British Empire. A dazzling fact, if you paused to consider it, but of course you couldn’t pause in the middle of a cocktail party and consider the pounds, shillings, and pence that belonged to the fellow walking at your elbow. You just gazed in pity at his thinning hair, his frown in profile, and said gently, “I do. I also know it’s wiser just to go along with things.”
He didn’t reply. I liked his face, his kind eyes and his even, sturdy, jowly features. Possibly I only imagined the ruggedness that clung to his skin, the hint of rock and earth, because I knew this about him. Or perhaps, when you spend half your life prospecting in the wilderness, no amount of Bahamas sunshine can burn away the scent of frontier.
As we drew closer, the cluster of people moved away, revealing a pair of familiar, ravishing figures, exactly the same height, one dark-haired and one fair. A half-dozen lanterns hung from the nearby palms. The light created a nimbus around them. What a show, I thought. What a goddamned brilliant show they put on. You almost wanted to applaud.
Oakes turned to me and said, “You know, you oughta meet my daughter Nancy. You’d like her.”
“Would I?”
“She could use someone like you, a few years older. Take her under your wing.”
I smiled. “Hasn’t she got a perfectly good mother?”
“Sure, she does. But girls that age.” He shook his head, and that was all, because we had reached the goldfish pond and the duchess and the duke, laughing warmly with a short, perspiring man who had materialized from nowhere. The duchess’s head turned in my direction. She wore a dress of pale blue silk and an expression of brief, unguarded discontent, and a shock ran down my limbs because I thought perhaps someone had made a terrible mistake—God knew what, maybe that invitation hadn’t been meant for me after all. But the duchess’s frown smoothed away as I reached her. Oh, the duchess. It’s a funny thing, when you encounter a face like that, a face you’ve seen frozen in a hundred two-dimensional photographs, and here it is before you, looking at you, alive. Those pungent blue eyes, that coronet of dark hair. That skin stretched over her cheeks and jaw, now endowed with breadth and depth and texture. Around her neck, a staggering circle of diamonds and rubies set off the blue of her eyes and her dress. How patriotic of her. She took my hand between two of hers and shook it firmly.
“My dear Mrs. Randolph! And Sir Harry. I see you’ve met our new recruit.”
“Recruit?” he demanded.
“The Red Cross. Mrs. Randolph’s volunteered her services.”
“The Red Cross? What the devil for? You don’t strike me as a Red Cross kind of gal.”
“Just doing my bit,” I said.
“But you’re American. You’ve got no part in this damned war.”
“Now, Sir Harry,” said the duchess, “the Red Cross has nothing to do with taking sides. We are a humanitarian organization.”
Well, Oakes rolled his eyes at this—as well he might—and stumped a few paces to the right, where he greeted the duke with about as much ceremony as he’d greeted the duke’s wife. Stuck his hand out and grunted something. The duchess and I exchanged weary little smiles, almost intimate. A fellow like that can bind two females instantly. A pair of diamond and ruby earrings clung to her earlobes, matching the necklace. I thought she glanced down to assess the imitation pearls around my collar, but maybe that was my imagination.
“I’m so terribly sorry to be late,” I said. “I didn’t realize about the entrance.”
“Not at all. I haven’t anyone left to greet, thank goodness, so we can get to know each other a bit.” She slipped her arm around mine. She smelled of face powder and perfume, and her arm was like her hand, bony and purposeful. “Don’t you look charming in that dress.”
I might have stuttered, so great was my amazement. “Why—well—this old thing?”
“Of course, you’ve got the kind of figure that suits any dress, you lucky duck. Now, stick with me. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
“Meet me? I can’t imagine whom.”
She laughed. “David! David!”
Her husband stood a few feet away, dressed in a pale suit, speaking to the other man and to Oakes, who had turned toward them both. The duke’s head snapped in her direction. For an instant, his eyes bugged in a terrified way. The lanterns poured gold on the duke’s waving hair, his shocked, twitching, haggard face. Next to him, Oakes and the other fellow more or less disappeared—not physically, of course, but rendered invisible by the halo of glamour. “Yes, dear?” the duke asked, pitched anxiously toward his wife, not registering my presence in the slightest degree.
“David, it’s Mrs. Randolph at last.”
“Mrs. Randolph?”
“Yes, Mrs. Randolph. You remember, don’t you?” She grasped my elbow. “Mrs. Randolph, David. The girl I’ve been speaking about.”
“Oh! Oh, yes. Of course.” He held out his hand to me, and although he’d turned in my direction and fixed his gaze politely on my face, I thought his eyes were unfocused, that he wasn’t really looking at me. Not past me, mind you, the way some people do, searching out someone of greater interest, but the opposite direction. Inward, toward himself. “Duke of Windsor,” he said, pronouncing the word duke like an American, dook.
I made a slight curtsy. “Your Royal Highness. Leonora Randolph. I’m honored to—”
“Charmed, of course.” He dropped my hand—he had a grip that wasn’t so much limp as motionless, without life—and turned to the duchess. “Have you seen Thorpe about?”
“Not since he arrived.”
“Oh, damn.” The duke cast his nervous eyes about the palms and the shadows. “Neither have I.”
“Is something the matter?” she asked, but the duke was already bolting off. I suppose I stared after him, at least until his bright figure disappeared into the tangle of darker ones. I remember a feeling of disbelief—had I, or had I not, just met the former king of England, and did it matter if he hadn’t actually perceived my existence?—and then the tug of the duchess’s hand on my elbow.
“Mrs. Randolph, do you know Mr. Christie?” she said.
“I’m afraid not.” I held out my hand to the other man, who was plain and balding, thick-necked, green-eyed. His temples gleamed with perspiration. He was shorter even than Oakes, and next to Sir Harry’s bull shoulders, looked as slight as a lamb. “Leonora Randolph,” I said.
The man took my hand and smiled. “Harold Christie. Pleasure.”
His palm was damp. I extracted my fingers and said the pleasure was all mine. “I’ve already heard so many interesting things about you, Mr. Christie.”
“Ah.” He cast a glance to the duchess—nervous or modest, I couldn’t tell. “I hope—I hope—good things.”
“Aren’t you practically a one-man Bahamas development office? So they tell me.”
“Oh, it’s quite true,” said the duchess. “Mr. Christie’s done so much to improve the colony.”
Back and forth glanced Mr. Christie. “That’s too kind. I love the Bahamas, that’s all. Only doing what I can for them.”
“How awfully good of you,” I said.
“Turns a nice penny, too, from time to time,” said Oakes. “Isn’t that right, Christie? Turned a few of those pennies on my account.”
“From which your account profited considerably, I believe.”
“Don’t stop you borrowing a fortune from me, either. Eh, Christie? That Lyford Cay scheme of yours?”
“You’ll be begging me for a plot of your own there, when it’s finished.”
Oakes turned to me. “Wasteland. Wasteland all the way on the other end of the island, miles from town. If I could pull my money out of that one, I would. I must’ve been drunk when you asked me, Christie.”
Christie smiled. “Now, old fellow, I’m sure the ladies don’t wish to listen to our business talk.”
“On the contrary—”
“Tell me, what brings you here to our little paradise, Mrs. Randolph? Our oasis from this mad world? I certainly hope you mean to make a lengthy visit.”
“Careful,” said Oakes. “He’ll ply you with booze and get you investing in his damned schemes.”
As coincidence would have it, a waiter approached us right that second, bearing a tray on which a few champagne coupes glistened in the light of the lanterns. I reached out and snatched one by the stem. “How opulent. I haven’t seen champagne since I left New York. Poor old France and all.”
“We contrived to pack along a few bottles, when we left Paris in such a hurry,” said the duchess, plucking a stem, smiling softly, so I couldn’t help imagining a crew of stevedores unloading crate after crate at Prince George’s wharf, while a flush-faced supervisor begged them to take care.
I raised my glass. “We’re ever so grateful you found the time.”
Naturally, the champagne was sublime. I knew precious little about wine, but I knew that the Windsors ate and drank and wore only the best, and I imagined, if they smuggled champagne out of France as the Germans closed in, the champagne would be the finest vintage fizz that credit could buy.
“To victory,” said Mr. Christie. “May it arrive swiftly.”
I remember thinking, as I clicked my glass against that of Harold Christie, that he didn’t seem like much of a warrior.
BY THE TIME THE DUKE reappeared, I’d almost forgotten he existed to begin with. You know how it is during a party, how the minutes turn liquid and run into each other, how the words and faces form a separate universe in which you rotate endlessly on your axis, North Pole and South Pole tilted just so. Afterward, you never can remember the exact chronology, who said what, where and when it all occurred. And how.
Up he popped, anyway, just as the duchess was introducing me to two of her guests, a straw-haired mother and her teenage daughter. He jumped midsentence in front of the duchess’s attention, the way a tennis player lunges for a ball, slicing neatly between us. A thick piece of hair had fallen from the shield atop his head. He pushed it back and said, “Darling, I can’t seem to find him!”
“Who?”
“Thorpe, darling. Thorpe.”
“Yes? Where is he?”
“That’s the trouble. I’ve looked all over.”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to start things off without him,” said the duchess. “David, darling, will you please get everyone’s attention?”
David—I beg your pardon, the Duke of Windsor—cast about for something or other, his long-abandoned cocktail glass perhaps, because he wound up snatching my champagne coupe and striking it forcefully with the manicured nail of his index finger. When that produced no discernible sound, he shoved it back to me and clapped his hands. “Good evening!” he called. “Good evening, all!”
At the sound of his voice, the din of voices went absolutely silent. The strangest thing, that instant silence, as if everybody had been waiting for this signal, even the birds, as if nothing else in the world held the slightest interest. Several dozen faces turned toward us, none of them quite sober. The duke smiled, and what a dazzling smile it was. Red-lipped and toothsome. He’d practiced it all his life.
“Good evening, my dear friends. We’re so—ah, my wife and I, we’re delighted to have so many of you gathered here tonight in our humble abode”—here he paused expertly for a ripple of chuckles—“in service of, really, an absolutely tremendous cause. I am just absolutely speechless with pride at all the great work my wife has done as president of the Red Cross chapter here in the Bahamas, which we couldn’t possibly accomplish without your generous support. But my wife, I believe, has more to tell you about all that. Darling? Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor.”
Nobody chuckled, nobody gave the least sign of knowing that the Duchess of Windsor was not, in fact, royal: by express decree of those who were. Certainly not Wallis herself. She painted on a thin, beautiful smile and stepped to her husband’s side. For the first time, I noticed that she wore a jeweled brooch pinned to her breast, the same brooch as in the photograph in Life magazine, and what do you know? It was a flamingo. She waved her ring-crusted hand. “Hello, everybody!”
Everybody murmured Hello!
“As David said. Thank you all for gathering here with us tonight. In a few minutes I’ll be coming round, cap outstretched, along with—I hope, anyway—someone who seems to have gone … oh, there he is!” Her face transformed, so that I realized she hadn’t really been smiling before, and now she was. She looked over my right shoulder, where a cluster of palms bordered the rock garden. “Mr. Thorpe! Where have you been hiding? Mr. Benedict Thorpe, ladies and gentlemen, a dear friend of mine and David’s, a scientist of international repute and a true patriot of our British Empire.”
She began to clap, and the crowd, shifting and straining to catch a glimpse of this true British patriot, burst into applause. Though I kept my gaze trained on the duchess—what a show she was, after all—I clapped along. I mean, it would have been rude otherwise, wouldn’t it? A scientist of international repute. I confess, I wasn’t that interested in science, at the time, but I could appreciate the affinity in others. Science was the future, after all. Everybody said so.
“Mr. Thorpe—hello, everybody!—Mr. Thorpe’s agreed to help me collect donations for the Red Cross tonight, a cause close to both our hearts, isn’t that right, Thorpe? In fact, it’s Mr. Thorpe’s own hat we’re going to pass around, so don’t be niggardly!” She paused for laughter. She still hadn’t taken her eyes from that patch of garden from which this Thorpe had emerged. I felt a stir of curiosity—or maybe even premonition, who knows—and turned my head at last to catch a glimpse. A palmetto spread its fronds between us, blocking my view. Before me, the duchess waved her hand. “Step up, Thorpus. Don’t be shy!”
The crowd stirred, making way. I turned and stepped back with everyone else. A pair of shoulders swept past. In the slight draft of his passing, I smelled not the tang of cigarettes or cocktails or perspiration—those were endemic—but a soap of some kind, or else cologne, hair oil, whatever it was, and I believe I made a gasp of recognition. There was applause, delighted voices. The fellow stepped to the duchess’s side and swept off his hat—he wore a towering silk topper for the occasion—to reveal that hair, short, glistening, ruddy-blond, and I covered my mouth with my hand. His spectacles were just slightly crooked.
He beamed across the crowd, left to right, and to my great relief his gaze passed right over me, though I stood in front, next to the duke. My cheeks ached, and I realized I was smiling back, even though he wasn’t looking in my direction. Thorpe, I thought. He had a name. Thorpe.
“Right ho, chaps,” he said. “Ladies. Let’s make this quick and painless, shall we? Empty your pockets, so I don’t have to go round the room again with my pistol.”
BEFORE THE COLLECTION PARTY PASSED by, I slipped between guests and up the path toward the governor’s residence. I don’t believe I started out with any conscious intent. A breath of air, that’s what I murmured as I sidled my way through the crowd, and this was true enough. Certainly I wanted air, and once free of the smokiness and perspiration of the party, I found air in abundance. I also saw a pair of French doors standing open to the evening air, allowing a glimpse of a hallway, and not a footman in sight.
Now, it wasn’t as if I meant any harm. I had just sipped champagne with the duchess, I even felt a stir of liking for her, a warmth I hadn’t expected. When somebody pays you compliments, pays you the favor of her attention and interest, you can’t help but think she must be a person of great taste and discernment. I meant no disrespect toward either of them, duke or duchess; or their privacy. There was only curiosity, and the desire to escape, and a certain surge of audacity that visits me from time to time, and also the possibility—duchesses could be fickle, after all—that I might never again have the opportunity to enter this building and see its rooms for myself. Which, in retrospect, is just the sort of logic that lands a girl in trouble, in love affairs as in houses that don’t belong to her.
Thus the inevitable. Instead of soothing my lungs and returning to the party or else to my own little room at the Prince George, snug and sound, I continued down that hall, the entire width of Government House, until I arrived at the door on the opposite side. I made no hesitation whatsoever. Hesitation’s fatal, my father always told me, when he could be bothered to speak to me at all; deliberate all you like upon a course of action, but once you’ve made your decision, don’t for God’s sake waver. I laid my hand on the doorknob and opened it to find some sort of library. The duke’s own study, perhaps. There was a desk and a fireplace, hissing the last remains of a good solid fire. The furniture was up-to-date, the upholstery fresh. I felt the duchess’s taste hanging in the air, coating every surface, every detail, every Union Jack pillow, every club chair. Even in her absence, she possessed a magnificent presence.
Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.
I made a progress along the walls, examining each picture as one might examine the contents of an art gallery or a museum. I daresay I imagined I might discover some clue to the essential mystery of them—the Windsors, I mean—this exquisitely dressed pair of sybaritic bigots who had the power to fascinate millions, even those who weren’t the slightest bit interested in fashion or luxury or jewelry or parties. This painting: Had the duchess chosen it for its form and its meaning or because the colors married so perfectly with the upholstery on her new sofa? I dragged my hand along the back of the sofa and made my way to the desk, orderly, untroubled by paperwork, adorned by photographs of Wallis. I had this idea—I remember it clearly—that if I opened any of the drawers in this desk, I would find them empty. I actually saw myself opening those drawers, as in a dream; I saw their emptiness. This fine, polished, beautifully proportioned desk, made of empty drawers. I curled my fingers around a brass handle. I don’t believe I meant to pull it. Even if I had, the voice would have stopped me.
“My dear Mrs. Randolph. Are you looking for something?”
I spun to the door—not the one leading to the main hallway, but the door on the opposite side of the room, toward the back of the house, where the duchess stood in her beautiful blue gown with the jeweled flamingo on her breast. She was smiling.
“I—I seem to have taken a wrong turn,” I said.
She moved forward. “It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? I had it redecorated. I had the whole place redecorated. It was a dump when we arrived.”
“So I heard.”
“Shabby and leaky and everything. Uninhabitable, really.”
“You’ve done wonders. It looks just terrific.”
The duchess paused at the corner of the desk, the opposite diagonal, and rested her fingers on the edge. “It’s not what he’s used to, of course. I did my best, but he ought to live in a palace, he ought to be doing something bigger. That’s what he’s used to. What he was raised for. Instead …”
I didn’t know what to say. I had the feeling this was a test of some kind, and my answer would determine the course of my future association with the Windsors, or whether we had any association at all. Would determine the course of my existence altogether. The initial shock had passed, thank God. My face had begun to cool. I flexed my fingers, I drew in a long, steady breath and exhaled it slowly.
“You’re both doing such a terrific job,” I said. “Your talents are wasted in a place like this.”
“How kind.”
“Really, though. The Red Cross. It’s such a smashing success. All those women, working so hard. Only you could raise all that money, organize everything so perfectly—”
The duchess laughed and turned her head. “Would you care for a drink, Mrs. Randolph? David keeps a few bottles handy in here. He’s forbidden to start drinking before seven, but once the clock strikes, why …”
“No, thank you.”
But she was already moving away, already opening the door to a cabinet of gleaming wood, the kind of cabinet you thought must hold important papers and that kind of thing, but actually contained about a dozen various bottles of liquor, several glasses, a siphon, a bucket.
“There’s no ice, I’m afraid,” she said, “but you don’t mind that, do you?”
“No.”
“Brandy? I like a glass of brandy in the evenings.”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” She turned to me. “You certainly look as if you could use a drink.”
“I like to keep my wits about me.”
“I see.” She closed the cabinet door. She stood about fifteen or twenty feet away, about as elegant as a woman could possibly look, but then she had the kind of figure that sets off clothes to their best advantage. Long and angular, lean to the point of nonexistence; not exactly attractive by itself, but irresistible as a foil to what covered those bones, that flesh. Like all Southern ladies, she moved gracefully, shaping the air as she went. Her thin, tight, scarlet smile contained electricity. “Now, don’t be afraid,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Most people are. But I don’t bite.”
“If you did, I’d bite back.”
The duchess laughed. “You brave thing. That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say.”
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it.”
She gestured to the window seat. “Can we sit a moment? I have a question for you, Mrs. Randolph. A proposition.”
I hesitated only long enough to catch my breath. “Of course.”
We sat. The window faced north, toward the twinkling of lights that rimmed the shore and the sudden blackness of the ocean. The stars were invisible. I smelled the duchess’s perfume, her cigarettes. Around us lay that beautiful, masculine room of wood and photographs and, beyond that, the faint music from the party in the garden. I folded my hands in my lap and said again how lovely the place looked.
“Naturally the papers had nothing but bad things to say,” she told me. “How extravagant I was. How out of touch with the common man. Never mind that the house—Government House, don’t forget, the very seat and symbol of government, of the British Empire—was riddled with mildew and falling apart. Anyway, we paid for a great deal of the redecoration out of our own pockets. A great deal.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Of course you hadn’t. They’re all against me. I’m sure you read about our little tour this fall, how many pieces of luggage went along with us.”
“I can’t remember the number,” I said modestly.
“A hundred and forty-six, they said, which wasn’t remotely true, it was no more than seventy-three, and anyway it wasn’t just ours. It belonged to our entourage as well. Our private secretary, Miss Drewes, and Major Phillips—that’s David’s aide-de-camp—and so on. But each and every story they print has to conform to this—this idea they have about me. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that is. And it’s all very frustrating. One can’t answer back. One can try, of course, but that only makes one sound petulant.”
“The duchess doth protest too much.”
“Exactly. I see you understand the business, Mrs. Randolph.”
“What business?”
“Journalism.” Her smile took on a feline quality. “You’re a journalist yourself, aren’t you?”
I sort of choked. “Journalist?”
“Yes. Metropolitan magazine, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. That is, no. That is, the magazine sent me out here to gather a little background information—”
“Now, Mrs. Randolph—”
“—I’ve never written a word for them. Not a word.” I paused. “How did you know about that?”
“Oh, I hear things. It’s my business to hear things. Not for myself, you understand, but for David’s sake. All these stories in the press, these terrible things they print, it upsets him so much. I try to protect him, of course, but it’s impossible. He will read them all.”
I started to rise, and then remembered you weren’t supposed to stand except with permission, and then remembered I was American, after all, not subject to such rules. I rose. I nearly said Mrs. Simpson and caught myself just in time. “Ma’am,” I said instead, “I can’t imagine why you’re telling me all this.”
“Oh, I understand, believe me,” she said. “You’ve got a job to do. A girl’s got to make her way in the world. I also suspect there was no Mr. Randolph. Am I correct?”
There was a noise through the window, a spray of brilliant laughter. The duchess gave no sign of hearing it, not a flinch.
“Oh, the husband’s real enough,” I said. “At least, he was real. But even a dead husband gives a girl on her own a bit more respectability.”
“Of course. A girl like you, for example, a girl with no one to stand up for her. I understand completely. You haven’t got a fortune. Just an allowance of some kind, I presume?” She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes intelligently. “Or not even that?”
“I’m afraid that’s none of—”
“Mrs. Randolph.” She rose to meet me. “What if you were to become a journalist?”
“Become a journalist?”
“A column of your very own, weekly or monthly, whatever suits. Syndicated in all the papers, or exclusive to Metropolitan, as you like.”
“What kind of column?”
“Why, reporting from Nassau, from the middle of society, all our busy little doings here. Intriguing tidbits. The kind of details that only an intimate friend of the Windsors might know. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America?”
The exact shade of her eyes was so particular, so remarkable, a plush, vivid lavender, they had a name for it: Wallis blue. Her wedding dress, I’m told, matched that shade exactly. And I don’t blame her. Those eyes, they held you in thrall, especially when she wanted them to. When she channeled the full force of her charm through them and into you. On that July day, the duchess was as much a mystery to me as to everyone else who wasn’t married to her, and maybe even—maybe especially—to the fellow who was. I perhaps thought her morals a little wanting, her ethics a little thin, her mind a little shallow, her clothing a little fabulous and perhaps the most interesting thing about her. As for me, I was a pedigree twenty-five-year-old feline, blessed with a sleek, dark pelt and composure in spades, polished to a sheen by decent schooling and a little over a year of college, followed by a swift, brutal tutorial in the outside world to harden the skin beneath. I thought I was plenty of match for a woman like that, the Duchess of Windsor, the former Mrs. Ernest Simpson, the former Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer, yes, that woman, striking, thin-lipped, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed, who nearly toppled the British Crown by the force of her ambition.
But here’s the thing. You cannot possibly know somebody you’ve never met. You can observe her in a thousand photographs, a hundred newsreels, and not understand a thing about her. That person on the magazine cover is a character in a play, a character in a book, a character of her own creation and your imagination, and this immaculate namesake bears no more than a passing resemblance to the original. Remember that, please. You don’t know her. You know only the fascinating fiction she’s presented to you. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America, she had said.
“I bet it would,” I answered.
Until that instant, I hadn’t noticed the tension in her face. That tautness, I thought it was her natural state. Now everything loosened, her eyes and cheekbones and mouth, that fragile skin, like the softening of frosting on a cake. She looked almost human. I thought this couldn’t be happening, I couldn’t be standing here. She couldn’t be offering me this prize. There must be some trick. But her eyes were so blue.
“Then we understand each other?” she said.
“I believe so.”
“Good.”
She held out her hand to me, and I clasped it. The coldness shocked me, but what did I expect? I always seemed to simmer a degree or two warmer than other women. I opened my mouth to ask her particulars, how all these lovely plans might be set into motion, but she spoke first.
“Let’s return to our guests, shall we? There are so many people I’d like you to meet.”
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
SEPTEMBER 1900 (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
IF SOMETHING WERE to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”
“No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”
His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.
“You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.
Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”
“I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most—most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”
A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.
Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”
Elfriede makes an O with her mouth and turns away to face the peaks of the neighboring mountains. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.
“You speak from experience?”
“You shouldn’t ask such questions.”
Wilfred makes a noise—not his Scotch noise, another one. He has a wardrobe of noises for every occasion. Each nuance of thought. Over the course of the past few weeks, Elfriede has learned and cataloged them all. This one’s meant to convey amusement, tempered with just a lash of longing.
“Anything but that,” Elfriede says. “You can ask me anything but that.”
IN FACT, GERHARD WAS ALMOST touchingly eager to please her, after the disastrous deflowering. He had dreamed of nothing but consummation with Elfriede during those months of their betrothal, and when at last he lifted his damp, triumphant head from the pillow next to hers, he’d evidently expected to see his own expression of spent rapture mirrored in that of his bride. The tears astonished him. Well, they horrified him! Filled him with profound remorse.
The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.
No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.
Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.
Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.
STILL, SHE CAN’T DISCUSS THESE things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)
“FAIR PLAY, I SUPPOSE,” SAYS Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”
“All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”
Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”
“Travel where?”
“Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”
Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”
“Have you been there?”
“I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”
“Heaven,” says Elfriede.
Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”
“Why not?”
“This is more like heaven, if you ask me.”
A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.
“I don’t understand …” she begins softly.
“Understand what?”
“Why you should move me like this, when he loved me so much. So terribly.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? This.”
She leans her head on his shoulder. “What are we to do?”
“Nothing.” He touches her hair. Then he says it again, in English. Nothing.
Nothing, she repeats.
“No-thing. Th-th-th. Put your tongue beneath your upper teeth.”
“No-thing,” Elfriede says again, paying particular attention to this English th, her Waterloo these past few weeks. In order to pass the anxious time while Wilfred lay in bed with his relapse—a friendly orderly passed the notes between them—she began to teach herself English with the books from the sanatorium’s extensive library. She hoped to astound him when he recovered. Good morning, she said to him, when they met at last on the wall of the infirmary garden, the exact spot where they had spoken their first words to each other. (This by design, of course, in a note passed that morning from the orderly’s pocket.) I hope you are vell. She remembers how he turned—she’d come up to him from the meadow behind—and how the sight of his face, pale but radiant, made her dizzy. How his smile, growing slowly across his face to expose his teeth, illuminated the universe. Well, he said. W-w-w. Well.
W-w-well, she repeated.
I am well, thank you. Are you well, my love?
I am wery vell.
Now it’s a joke between them, how wery vell they both are during these slow, beautiful hours together. How wery vell the sun shines upon them, how wery vell the air smells, the ground feels, the skin glows. How wery vell she’s progressing in her English lessons.
Nothing, Elfriede says again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We are doing nothing. How is zat?
“I’m being discharged,” Wilfred says in German.
BUT ISN’T THIS WHY THEY’VE fallen in love, so suddenly and so utterly? Because of course Wilfred must go home when he’s better, because of course Elfriede and Wilfred must part. It’s so easy and so safe to fall in love when the universe is against you. Now, they haven’t quite said those words to each other—I love you, we’ve fallen in love—but Elfriede has no doubt they echo inside Wilfred’s head, in the same way they echo in hers.
I am wery vell, she said aloud, on the wall of the infirmary garden. Translation: I love you.
Come, let’s go for a walk, Wilfred replied, taking her hand. Translation: I can’t bear to exist without you.
And they walked, and they existed with each other, and in the touch of Wilfred’s hand Elfriede imagined the rest of him. When they sat to rest, Elfriede stared at their clasped palms in the grass, Wilfred’s large, white bones curled around hers, and a premonition of grief came upon her. But what will I do when you’ve gone? she whispered.
I have an idea, Wilfred said. Let’s not speak of that day until it comes.
NOW IT’S COME.
“What?” Elfriede says.
“After all, I’ve regained my health.”
“But they don’t ever make you leave, the doctors. You can stay as long as you like.”
“Only if you’ve got the dosh, my dear.”
“But I could—we could—I have plenty of money—”
“You mean your husband has plenty of money.”
Elfriede bows her head to this truth. Across the meadow, about thirty yards away, the grass stirs. A rodent of some kind, or a rabbit. Making preparation for winter, though the sun is still warm, no hint of evil yet cools the air.
“We have until Thursday,” Wilfred says. “Four more days.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing. I go about my life, pretending my heart’s not beating away somewhere else, beating inside your chest—”
“Oh, don’t. Don’t.”
He doesn’t. So they sit, as they always do, as they’ve done for the past few weeks, since Wilfred was first allowed out of the infirmary garden with strict instructions not to exert himself, not to expose his lungs to any hint of inclement weather. Lucky for them, the weather has been fine, an unprecedented succession of warm, dry, perfect days. Or maybe it’s not luck, after all. Maybe some more conscious force has arranged their affairs in this manner. Either way, the result’s the same. They sit side by side in the meadow grass, watching the sun make its eternal arc across the heavens. Sometimes he touches her, as he does now. His fingertips on the backs of her knuckles.
“I once met this fellow in the south of France, this painter. Do you know what he called this time of day? The hour before sunset?”
“No.”
“The golden hour.” Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, which now burns just above the jagged peaks that form their horizon. “He said that’s when everything looks the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold. He said it made him want to paint the whole world. And then it’s gone, just like that. The sun disappears. The night arrives.”
“The golden hour.” Elfriede stares at Wilfred’s hair, which has indeed transformed into a gold so pure as to make the alchemists weep, like the sun itself. She wants to touch it, to bury her face in it, to lick the gold from each strand before it’s gone. Before Wilfred’s gone, and the night arrives.
“What about you, Elfriede?” he asks. “That’s the important thing. What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Except I can’t stay here any longer if you’re gone.”
“Can’t you?”
“No, it’s impossible. It will hurt too much.”
“Not so much as it hurts me to leave.”
“No, more. Because you’ll have Vienna, you’ll have new sights and scenes, nothing to remind you of me. Whereas here, these buildings, this mountain, this meadow—everything is you now. And it will be empty.”
“Is that so intolerable?”
“You know it is.”
“Hmm.” The fingertips make another waltz on her knuckles. A Blue Danube of longing. “I thought you needed approval from this doctor to leave. Are you certain you want to cross him?”
“He can’t stop me. I’ll find a way out, like you.”
Find a way out. Once she says the words, once she releases them into the air, they become possible. The horror of the outside world loses all consequence compared to the horror of existing inside the sanatorium without Wilfred. Against that, she has no other fear: not the mountain roads or the trains or the stares of strangers, not the husband she has disappointed, not the baby who doesn’t know her, not Herr Doktor Hermann and all his degrees and authority. She can leave. She is the wife of a baron, after all. She can arrange for a carriage, she can simply walk out the door if she wants. Who will dare to stop her?
Elfriede straightens her back. Her eyes are dry now, her blood’s warm. “Yes. I can’t stay here without you. I’ll leave.”
“Good,” says Wilfred. “That’s settled. But where will you go, my heart?”
She curls her fingers inside her palm, so that her entire hand disappears in the grass beneath Wilfred’s hand. Sometimes, sitting in this patch of meadow under the sun, smelling the warm, dead flowers, she forgets that anything else exists except the two of them, disappearing into the grass and each other.
Where will she go? She belongs to only one other place. Only one other heart beats inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
“Back to my son, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go back to my son and miss your freckles. All twenty-six of them.”
BUT NO SUCH AGONIZING DECISION needs to be made, after all. When Elfriede returns to the sanatorium—by a different path from Wilfred’s, of course—Herr Doktor Hermann waits for her in her room. He takes her hands.
“There is terrible news, Elfriede,” he tells her. “I’m afraid your husband is very sick. The family has summoned you home to his side.”
LULU (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
BY THE TIME the evening wound to its end, I’d lost track of all the names, all the faces. They passed in a blur while the duchess guided me around the garden, under the lanterns, introducing me like a prize filly, and I pranced and pawed and whinnied on cue, made almost dizzy by this extraordinary ascent of fortune. In the months to come, I didn’t remember the exact moment in which I first met Mrs. Gudewill and her daughters, or Fred Sigrist, or the other men and women who were to figure so prominently in this Bahamian chapter of my life. I didn’t remember the precise drip of information that fed its way through my ears and into my brain, to be picked through and examined later. I do remember that I stood once more in the duke’s study, speaking to Axel Wenner-Gren—yes, him, the Swedish industrialist, owner of Hog Island, the sort of fellow attracted to tax havens like the Bahamas like ants to picnics—when Thorpe reappeared. By now, most of the guests had left, and only a few of us remained to drink bourbon whiskey from the Windsor cabinet and listen to the duke’s collection of popular American songs on the phonograph. Mr. Wenner-Gren wanted to know more about my husband.
“How long were you married?” he asked.
“Only a year.”
“Then you were newlyweds. What a terrible thing, this war.”
“What’s the war got to do with it?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed he was killed in battle.”
I tried to speak and realized the muscles of my throat were paralyzed, that my pulse struck like a hammer in my neck. The familiar panic. You never knew when it might seize you, when it might sock your gut at any sudden noise, any bang of a window, any innocent question. When it struck, you had to remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, to disguise your terror as something else, like grief. When the panic receded, when the muscles softened enough to enable you to speak at all, you spoke haltingly, as if mastering your anguish, so that no one would suspect you were lying.
“No,” I said. “He was killed in an accident. A terrible accident.”
Now, though he was all of sixty years old, this Wenner-Gren was still an attractive man, a man of silver hair and elegant movements and perceptive blue eyes of the X-ray variety, if you know what I mean. He smoked his cigarette and stared at me, not at all moved by my widowhood, while I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest and ask him if the rumors were true, that he was really a Nazi, that he was friends with Goering and that his real mission here in Nassau was to persuade the duke to cast his fortunes with a triumphant Germany. After all, wasn’t that exactly the kind of worldwide exclusive the Metropolitan had sent me to the Bahamas to discover? Wasn’t Axel Wenner-Gren exactly the kind of man with whom I’d been desperate to sidle myself into profitable intimacy?
He leaned his face toward mine. “This must be terribly lonely for you.”
“Oh, I keep myself busy. Not as busy as you do, of course, with your yacht and your lovely estate.”
“Ah. What do you know about my estate?”
“Isn’t it right there on Hog Island? I can just about see it from my bedroom window.”
“Can you, now?”
“And your yacht, of course. There’s no mistaking her.” I paused to sip my drink. “Where are you headed next? I hear you’re much enamored of Mexico these days. You’ve started a bank there, haven’t you? The Banco Continental.”
His eyebrows rose. He turned his face politely away to blow out a stream of smoke, and while he did so, breaking gaze for just that instant, his eyes flicked downward to appraise the sharp, deep neckline of my dress. “You seem to hear a great many things, Mrs. Randolph.”
“Oh, one keeps one’s ears open. And Nassau is terrible for gossip. It’s the favorite pastime. Everybody seems to be knee-deep in each other’s dirty business.”
“So my wife tells me. And what else have you heard about me?”
“Oh, this and that.” I shrugged. “I can’t remember most of it. But tell me more about Mexico. I’ve always wanted to go.”
He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette, examined the diminished end, and said softly, “Perhaps you might join us on our next voyage. We intend to make an archaeological expedition to South America, and then travel up to Mexico in time for Christmas.”
“How kind of you. When do you cast off?”
Wenner-Gren opened his mouth, but it wasn’t his voice that answered me.
“Any day now, isn’t that right? I’d go myself, if I wasn’t already occupied.”
The words came from somewhere near my right shoulder, causing us both to startle and turn to the doorway, where Mr. Thorpe stood in his white dinner jacket, long and wide-shouldered and lean as a wooden cross. His head was bare and the spectacles perched at the very end of his nose. He pushed them up and smiled.
“My dear Thorpe,” said Wenner-Gren. “I thought you had disappeared, as usual.”
“Merely counting my profits in the back office.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve finished raiding all the pockets already,” I said.
“Every shilling accounted for.” Thorpe held out his elbow. “Might I have a private word with you, Mrs. Randolph?”
I suppose I gaped. He hadn’t shown the slightest sign of recognition earlier, and though I’d caught glimpse after glimpse of him during the course of the party, we had never come face to face, as if some contract had been drawn up between us, some agreement not to acknowledge each other. I thought he had probably forgotten me, forgotten the episode on the airplane, or at least my face in the middle of it. And now he held out his elbow to me.
“Thorpe, old chap,” said Wenner-Gren, in the funny way that men of all nations will ape certain expressions of the English upper classes. “I didn’t know you were a friend of Mrs. Randolph’s.”
“We met on an airplane,” said Thorpe, pronouncing the word in three syllables, air-o-plane, “and formed an instant connection. Didn’t we, Mrs. Randolph?”
His face was grave, his fair skin pink beneath the freckles. I considered his eyes, which were blue and slightly hooded behind his spectacles, giving you an impression of great depth. I glanced back at Wenner-Gren’s face and discovered a cool, pale stare like a reptile’s.
I set down my half-finished bourbon on the edge of the Duke of Windsor’s desk. “That’s a wonderful question, Mr. Thorpe. I guess we might as well find out.”
WE DIDN’T SAY A WORD until we reached the center of the main hallway, right between the staircase and the front entrance, where the panic hit my stomach once more. I snatched my hand from Thorpe’s elbow. “Thanks very much for rescuing me in there. I won’t trouble you further.”
“Now, wait just a moment, Mrs.—”
But I was already pushing open the door, already hurrying across the portico. He caught up with me a few steps later and touched my elbow. I stopped and whirled to face him.
“Did I say I wanted company, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Look here. You can’t just fly off alone like that.”
“You can’t possibly think I’d go off with you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? I don’t even know you. For all I know, you’re a homicidal maniac. Or worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse than that?”
I lifted my chin and fixed him with a certain stare of mine. He gave my displeasure his full attention, while some bird trilled out a mighty evening song from the portico above. It takes a certain amount of strength, you know, to gaze without blinking into the eyes of a man you hardly know, a man as tall and dazzling as Thorpe, and to this day I don’t quite understand how I held firm, or why. From the windows of Government House floated the mist of some jiggly, dancing tune I didn’t recognize, the shadow of somebody’s braying laugh. The dark air lay against Thorpe’s skin. His eyes were narrowed and gray, the way the night drains color from everything. At last he sighed, glanced heavenward, and made a half turn toward the Government House entrance. “Taylor!” he called out.
For the first time, I noticed the footman there, or rather the doorman, straight-shouldered and tidy in his white uniform against the pink facade, lit by the windows behind him. “Yes, sir?” he said, staring straight ahead.
“You’ve seen me leave the premises in the company of Mrs. Randolph, correct?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“If something untoward occurs, you’re prepared to swear to that effect in a court of law?”
“Without hesitation, sir.”
Thorpe turned back to me. “You see? Nothing to fear. Intentions entirely honorable.”
I resumed walking toward the stairs. The air had cooled no more than a few degrees with the coming of night, but at least the brutal sun had sunk away. The atmosphere was hazy, the stars blurred in the sky above the nearby ocean. I didn’t need to look over my shoulder; I knew Thorpe had joined me. “That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said. “For all I know, you’re in collusion.”
“You’re a damned suspicious woman, Mrs. Randolph.”
“Women need to be suspicious, Thorpe, suspicious of everyone and everything. A woman on her own, especially. It’s a matter of survival.”
“Not all men are beasts, you know.”
“Enough of them are. Even one’s enough. Once you encounter your first wolf, why, you start to notice them everywhere.”
“I see,” he said. “Are we speaking of Mr. Randolph, perhaps?”
We were tripping down the endless flight of stairs, had already passed the statue of Columbus. Below us, the street was dark and quiet. I stopped midstep and waited for Thorpe to halt, to turn, two stairs below, so that his face sat at last on the same level as mine.
“There was a girl back at college,” I said. “Went off with a boy after a party, just like a little lamb. It didn’t end well.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have the smallest idea. You’ve never been anybody’s prey.”
“Not true.”
I lifted my eyebrows and stared at his large, earnest face, his eyes behind the spectacles. I thought he was going to say more, tell me some story, even if it wasn’t real. But the lips didn’t move. Just those two words, Not true, a pair of words that covered a vast territory.
“All right,” I said. “But I’ll bet you were evenly matched, weren’t you? A big cat like you. You could fight back.”
“Fair point. But I might say the same of you.”
“Me?”
“You might not be so big, of course. But you seem to me like the sort of woman who fights back.”
The streetlamps cast a soft yellow heat on his face. He stood with one foot braced on the step above; his hand rested on his thigh. I was conscious of my daring neckline, my exposed skin, my scarcity of sleeves, my breath trapped in my lungs, my thundering heart. The goose bumps prickling my arms, which could not possibly have sprung from the tropical air.
“That man on the airplane,” I said. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing at all.”
“No, that was something, all right. Something I wouldn’t mind learning how to do, should another wolf come bounding into my life, for example.”
Thorpe rubbed his fist on his knee and looked to the side, at an upward angle, as if considering the sky above the ocean. His nose was robust, almost Roman, and yet there was something vulnerable about his profile or else the way he presented it to me. “By college,” he said, “do you mean you were at university?”
“Yes.”
“And this girl. She was a friend of yours?”
I stared at his cheekbone. “We were inseparable.”
“I see.” He turned back to me. “I found myself at the bar at the Prince George a week or two ago. Happened to catch a glimpse of a girl sitting all by herself. She was drinking a Scotch whiskey, I believe, no ice, reading a book, and her hair kept falling over her forehead, and she kept pushing it back. Eventually she looked up and glanced my way—I imagine she must have sensed me watching—and I recognized her at once. The girl from the airplane.”
I held out my hand. “Leonora Randolph. But you can call me Lulu.”
“Lulu. I’m Benedict.”
“Benedict?”
“I was named after my father. His middle name.”
“I can’t call you Benedict.”
He shrugged. “Then call me whatever you want.”
HE WALKED ME DOWN GEORGE Street to the hotel. We didn’t touch, nor did we speak until we turned the corner of Bay Street and stopped. Thorpe stuck his hands in his pockets and looked toward the harbor. “Still the Prince George?” he said.
“Still the Prince George.”
“Sounds rather temporary.”
“I might be looking for something a little more permanent.”
He turned his head. “Really?”
“Seems I’m about to enter paid employment. If all goes well.”
“Congratulations. Splendid news.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I might have made a few inquiries regarding your intentions here,” he said.
I snapped my fingers. “Jack! That old so-and-so. I might’ve known.”
“I’m afraid I can’t reveal my sources.”
“There’s no need. I can practically smell him on you. Say …”
Thorpe lifted an eyebrow and stared at me patiently. Behind him, the street was empty, except for the British Colonial rising brilliantly against the sky. The air smelled stickily of night blossom, of the nearby ocean, of the lingering afternoon ether of automobile exhaust. There’s a particular odor to a Nassau evening, a perfume I’ve never encountered since. I wrapped my hands around my pocketbook and said, “I’ll bet that was you, wasn’t it? That drink the other night.”
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”
“Jack said you were a shy kind of fellow.”
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Beatriz Williams
From the New York Times bestselling author: a dazzling WWII epic spanning London, New York and the Bahamas and the most infamous couple of the age, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor The Bahamas, 1941. Newly-widowed Lulu Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine whose readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. But beneath the glitter of Wallis and Edward’s marriage lies an ugly – and even treasonous – reality. In the middle of it all stands Benedict Thorpe: a handsome scientist of tremendous charm and murky national loyalties. When Nassau’s wealthiest man is murdered in one of the most notorious cases of the century, Lulu embarks on a journey to discover the truth behind the crime. The stories of two unforgettable women thread together in this extraordinary epic of sacrifice, human love and human courage, set against a shocking true crime… and the rise and fall of a legendary royal couple.
Beatriz Williams
Copyright (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Beatriz Williams
Cover design by Ellie Game @HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Cover photographs © Lee Avison/Arcangel Images (woman and foreground), Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (trees, hedges and background)
Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008380274
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008380281
Version: 2019-08-06
Dedication (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
To women and men everywhere who live with depression.
You are loved. You are needed. The night will pass.
Contents
Cover (#ue6b990d6-4581-5312-85b5-048a873e801d)
Title Page (#u77846f30-c56c-502c-b3e4-b166a344cd8e)
Copyright
Dedication
In August 1940 … (#u6b66bb1b-0179-5877-9fcb-03d1020a7f2f)
PART I
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Lulu: June 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: July 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: September 1900 (Switzerland)
Lulu: July 1941 (The Bahamas)
PART II
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Elfriede: October 1900 (Germany)
Lulu: December 1941 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: November 1900 (Germany)
Lulu: December 1941 (The Bahamas)
PART III
Lulu: December 1943 (London)
Elfriede: June 1905 (Florida)
Lulu: June 1942 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: July 1905 (Florida)
Lulu: June 1942 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1905 (Berlin)
PART IV
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: June 1916 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Elfriede: August 1916 (Scotland)
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
Lulu: July 1943 (The Bahamas)
Lulu: December 1943 (Scotland)
PART V
Lulu: November 1943 (The Bahamas)
PART VI
Ursula: January 1944 (Germany)
Lulu: March 1944 (Switzerland)
Elfriede: March 1944 (Switzerland)
Epilogue. Lulu: June 1951 (RMS Queen Mary, At Sea)
Historical Note
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
About the Publisher
In August 1940, the Duke of Windsor is appointed governor of the Bahamas by his brother, George VI, on the recommendation of Winston Churchill.
While the former king feels the appointment is beneath his station, he accepts, in the expectation that loyal service in this colonial outpost will lead to more prestigious assignments in the future.
But despite an exemplary public record of governorship for the duration of the Second World War, and the energetic support of the Duchess of Windsor as the governor’s wife, the duke is never again asked to serve his country in an official capacity.
PART I (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
LULU (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
DECEMBER 1943 (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
(London) (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
IN THE FOYER of the Basil Hotel in Cadogan Gardens, atop the tea-colored wallpaper, a sign advises guests that blackout hours will be observed strictly. Another sign reminds us that enemy ears are listening. The wallpaper’s crowded with tiny orange flowers that seem to have started out life as pink, and they put me in mind of a story I once read about a woman who stares at the wallpaper in her room until she goes batty. Although that wallpaper was yellow, as I recall, so I may have some time to go.
I consult my watch. Three twenty-two.
Outside the windows, the air’s darkening fast. Some combination of coal smoke and December fog and the early hour at which the sun goes down at this latitude, as if the wallpaper and the signboards and the piles of rubble across the street aren’t enough to make you melancholy. I check the watch again—three twenty-three, impossible—and my gaze happens to catch that of the desk clerk. He’s examining me over the top of a rickety pair of reading glasses, because he hasn’t liked the look of me from the beginning. Why should he? A woman shows up at your London hotel in the middle of December, the middle of wartime, tanned skin, American accent, unmistakable scent of the foreign about her. She pays for her room in advance and carries only a small suitcase. Now she’s awaiting some no-good rendezvous, right in the middle of your dank, shabby, respectable foyer, and you ought to telephone the authorities, just to be on the safe side. In fact, you probably have telephoned the authorities.
The clerk’s gaze flicks to the window, and then to the clock above the mantel behind me. He steps away from the reception desk and goes to pull down the blackout shades, to close the heavy chintz curtains. His limbs are frail and stiff; his suit was tailored in maybe the previous century. When he moves, his white hair flies away from his skull, and I catch a whiff of cologne that reminds me of a barbershop. I consider whether I should rise and help him. I consider whether he’d kill me for it.
Well. Not kill me exactly, not the literal act of murder. It seems the killing of people has got inside my head somehow. War will do that. War will turn killing into a commonplace act, a thing men do to each other every day, every instant, for no particular reason except not to be killed yourself, so that you start to expect it everywhere, murder hangs darkly over you and around you like an atmosphere. The valley of the shadow of death, that’s war. Killing for no particular reason. At least in regular life, when somebody kills somebody else, he generally has a damned good reason, at least so far as the killer’s concerned. It’s personal, it’s singular. As I observe the feathery movement of the clerk’s hair in the draft, I wonder how much reason a fellow like that needed to kill someone. We all have our breaking points, you know.
A bell jingles. The front door opens. A blast of chill air whooshes inside, along with a pale woman in a worn coat and a brown fedora, almost like a man’s. She brushes the damp from her sleeves and looks around, spies the clerk, who’s just crossing the foyer on his way back to the desk.
“I beg your pardon, my good man,” she begins, in a brisk, quiet English voice, and the light from the lamp catches her hair, caught up in a blond knot just beneath the brim of her hat. She’s not wearing cosmetics, except maybe a touch of lipstick, and you might say she doesn’t need any. There’s something Nordic about her, something that doesn’t need ornament. Height and blondness, all those things my own Italian mother couldn’t give me, though she gave me plenty else. There’s also something familiar about her. I’ve seen that mouth before, haven’t I? Those straight, thick eyebrows soaring above a pair of blue eyes.
But no. Surely not. Surely I’m only imagining this, surely I’m only seeing a resemblance because I want to see one. After all, it’s impossible, isn’t it? Margaret Thorpe won’t receive my letter until this evening, when she arrives home from whatever government building she inhabits during working hours. So this woman can’t be her, cannot possibly be my husband’s sister, however much the sight of those eyebrows sets my heart stuttering. Anyway, her head’s now turned toward the clerk, and from this angle she looks nothing like Thorpe, not at all. Unless—
The bell jingles again, dragging my attention back to the entryway. Another draft follows, and a man shambles past the door in a damp overcoat of navy blue, a hat glittering with mist. His face is pockmarked, the only notable thing about him. He casts a slow, bland expression around the room, and it seems to me that he takes in every detail, every flock on the wallpaper and spot on the upholstery, until he arrives, quite by accident, on me.
The woman’s still addressing the clerk. No notice of us at all. I climb to my feet. “Mr. B—?”
He steps forward and holds out his hand. “You must be Mrs. Thorpe,” he says warmly, and he takes my fingers between his two palms, as if we are father and daughter, meeting for tea after a short absence.
INSTEAD OF REMAINING INSIDE THE Basil Hotel foyer (in which the enemy ears might or might not be listening, but the desk clerk certainly is) we head out into the gloom. I tend to step briskly as a matter of habit, but Mr. B— (I’m afraid I can’t reveal his real name) shuffles along at an awkward gait, and it’s a chore to keep my limbs in check. I tuck my hands inside my pockets and drum my fingers against my thighs. I feel as if he should speak first. He’s the professional, after all.
“Well, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says at last. “I must congratulate you on your resolve. To have made your way to London in wartime, to have approached my office with such an extraordinary request—why, it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve seen in some time.”
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Of course not. If there’s one thing we admire in this country, it’s dash. Dash and pluck, Mrs. Thorpe, which you appear to possess in abundance. How long had you two been married?”
“Since July.”
“This past July?”
“Yes. The seventh.”
“Ah. Just before he was captured, then. How dreadful.”
“It was months before I had any word at all. At first, I thought he’d been called out on another of his—whatever you call them—”
“Operations?”
“Yes, operations. But when he didn’t return …”
We pause to cross the street. I’ve allowed him to choose the route; I mean he’s the one who lives here, after all, the one who understands not just the map of London but the habits of the place. A couple of bicycles approach, one after the other, and while we wait for them to pass, Mr. B— speaks again.
“Mind you, it was quite against the rules.”
“What? What’s against the rules?”
Mr. B— stares not at my face, but along a line that passes right above my head, down the street to the approaching bicycles. “Marrying,” he says blandly.
The bicycles pass. We cross the street to enter a foggy square of red brick and white trim. Several of the houses are missing, simply not there, like teeth pulled from a jaw. Mr. B— leads me to the gardens in the middle, where we choose a wooden bench and sit about a foot apart, so that our arms and legs aren’t in any danger of touching, God forbid. The button at the wrist of my left-hand glove has come undone. I attempt to refasten it, but my fingers are too stiff.
“Of course, I quite understand your distress, Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, in the voice you might use to console a child. “It’s for that reason that we tend to discourage men such as Thorpe from forming any sort of personal attachment. To say nothing of marriage.”
“We’re all human, Mr. B—.”
“Still, it’s unwise. And then to allow you any hint of his purpose there in the Bahamas—”
“Oh, believe me, he never said a word about that. I was the one who put two and two together. I was on the inside, you see. A friend of the Windsors.”
“Were you really? Remarkable. Although I suppose …” He reaches into the pocket of his coat, brushing my arm with his elbow as he manipulates his fingers inside. He draws out a familiar white envelope. I recognize it because I carried this envelope myself, in a pocket next to my skin, for the entirety of the thirty-nine hours it took to cross the Atlantic, from Nassau to London, in a series of giant, rattling airplanes, before I stamped the upper right corner and posted it from a red metal postbox yesterday evening. And it’s funny, isn’t it, how a letter you mailed with your own two hands no longer belongs to you, once it begins that fateful drop through the slot. I glimpse my own handwriting, the stamp I placed there myself, and it’s like being reunited with an estranged child who has grown into adulthood.
“You suppose?”
Mr. B— taps the edge of the envelope against his knee. “I suppose it depends on what one means by friendship.”
“In wartime, friendship can mean anything, can’t it?”
“True enough. This note of yours. Quite astonished me this morning, when my secretary delivered it to my desk.”
“But you must have known Thorpe was captured.”
“Naturally. I take the most anxious interest in my agents, Mrs. Thorpe, and your—ah, your husband—he was one of—well. Well. That is to say, Mr. Thorpe in particular. We took the news very hard. Very hard indeed. Colditz, my God. Poor chap. Awful show.”
He takes out a cigarette case, opens the lid, and tilts it toward me. I select one, and he selects another. As he lights the match, he covers the flame with his cupped hand. We sit back against the bench and smoke quietly. The wind on my cheek is cold, and the air tastes of soot, and the sky’s blackening by the instant. At first I don’t quite understand what’s missing, until I realize it’s the absence of light. Not a pinprick escapes the windows around us, not a ray of comfort. It’s as if we’re the only two people alive in London.
“There used to be a railing,” says Mr. B—.
“What’s that?”
“Around the square gardens. A railing, to keep residents in and everybody else out, you see. They took it away and melted it down for iron.”
“I suppose it’s more democratic this way.”
“I suppose so. Here we are, after all, the two of us. Sitting on this bench, quite without permission.”
“And that’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it? Democracy.”
He straightens his back against the bench. “Well, then. Leonora Thorpe. Plucky young American from across the ocean. What are we to do with you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why are you here? You’ll forgive me, but London isn’t the most peaceful of cities, at the moment. I imagine, wherever you come from—”
“Nassau.”
“Yes, Nassau. But you weren’t born there, were you?”
“No. I was raised in New York. I arrived in the Bahamas a couple of years ago, to cover the governor and his wife for a magazine.”
“A magazine?”
“Metropolitan magazine. Nothing serious, just society news. The American appetite for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is just insatiable.”
Mr. B— sucks on his cigarette. “I must confess, it puzzles me. You Americans went to such trouble to rid yourselves of our quaint little monarchy.”
“Oh, we like to gossip about them, all right. Just not to let them rule over us and all that.”
“I imagine you were well paid?”
“Well enough.”
“A plum assignment, Mrs. Thorpe, spending the war in a tropical paradise. Plenty of food, plenty of money. Why didn’t you stay there?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious?”
“But what’s to be gained by coming to London? Look around you. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and it’s already dark. Decent food in short supply. The weather—as you see—is simply dreadful, to say nothing of air raids and the threat of invasion. You ought to have stayed in the tropics, nice and safe, to wait for news.”
I crush out my cigarette on the arm of the bench.
“But that’s the thing, Mr. B—. I don’t mean to sit around and wait. That’s why I’ve come to London.”
I say this carelessly—come to London—as if it were as easy as that. As easy as boarding an ocean liner and waddling from meal to meal, deck chair to deck chair, until you step off a week later, and poof! you’re in England. And maybe it was that easy, in another time. These days, it’s not so simple. That ocean teems with objects that hope to kill you. And if you want to reach London in a hurry, well, the challenge grows by geometric leaps and bounds, because there’s only one way to cross the Atlantic in a hurry, and it doesn’t come cheap, believe me.
And then you contrive to meet this challenge. Clever you. You pay the necessary price, because you must, there’s no other choice. You find yourself strapped inside the comfortless fuselage of a B-24 Liberator as it prepares to separate you from the nice safe sun-soaked ground of the Bahamas and bear you, by leaps and bounds, to darkest England, a place you know only by hearsay. The engines gather power, the noise fills your ears like all the world’s bumblebees pollinating a single rose. The metal around you bickers and clatters, the world tilts, the air freezes, and there you are, eyes shut, stomach flipping, ears roaring, mouth watering, chest rattling, lungs panting, nerves screaming, heart aching, wishing you had goddamn well fallen in love with someone else. Someone you could live without.
But you can’t. So now you’re here in London. London at last, on a garden bench in the middle of a darkened city, next to the only man in the world who can help you. Except the fellow’s shaking his head, the fellow’s got no faith in you at all.
“Come to London,” he says. “How on earth did you manage it?”
“I managed it because I had to. I’d do anything to free my husband.”
“Free your husband? Is that the idea?”
“I damned well won’t run around Nassau going to parties while my husband rots away in the middle of Nazi Germany.”
Mr. B— extends his arm and flicks ash onto the gravel. His shoes are beautifully polished, his trousers creased. Standards must be kept. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, “I don’t know quite how to express this.”
“How about straight out? That’s how we Americans prefer it.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. Once one of our men falls into enemy hands, why, he’s on his own. Thorpe knew this. We can’t possibly risk more agents on hairy schemes that—you’ll forgive me—offer almost no chance of success. We’re stretched enough as it is. We’re scarcely hanging on.”
“But I’m not asking you to risk anyone else. I’d go myself.”
“I’m afraid it’s impossible. Thorpe’s been trained. He knows it’s his duty to escape, not ours to spring him out, and I’ve no doubt he’s doing his utmost.”
“That’s not enough for me.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorpe,” Mr. B— says. “I don’t mean to be unkind. Naturally you’re suffering. It’s the most beastly news. One hopes for the best, of course. But one soldiers on. That’s all there is, just to soldier on.”
“That’s all terrific, if you’re a soldier. If you’re allowed to do something useful instead of twiddling your thumbs.”
“There are many ways in which women are able to serve the war effort, Mrs. Thorpe. And I can offer you my steadfast assurance that we’re doing our best, in my department and in Britain as a whole, all the services, every man Jack, to defeat Germany and bring your husband safely home.”
Across the street, a pair of women hurry down the sidewalk, buttoned up in wool coats and economical hats. The clatter of shoes echoes from the bricks, and it occurs to me how silent a city can be, when gas is rationed and private automobiles are banned. You can hear an omnibus rattle and grind from a couple of streets away, and you realize how alone you are, how desolate war is.
The women turn the corner. A man begins a slow, arthritic progress from the opposite direction, bent beneath the weight of his coat and hat. He’s smoking a cigarette. I figure the fellow’s probably deaf, but I speak softly anyway. Soft and firm.
“I understand your position, of course. I guess it’s about what I expected. I understand, I really do. But now I need you to understand me, Mr. B—.”
He turns his face toward me and lifts his eyebrows. At last, his voice goes a little cold, the way a man speaks to another man, his equal. “Oh? Understand what, Mrs. Thorpe? Let us be perfectly clear with each other.”
“All right, Mr. B—. Listen carefully. In the course of my service in Nassau, in my capacity as a journalist, as an intimate associate of the governor and his wife, I became privy to certain information. Do you catch my drift?”
There is this silence. I think, Well, he knows this already, doesn’t he? I wrote as much in my note. At the time, I thought I conveyed my meaning in circumspect sentences, that my note was a clever, sophisticated little epistle, but now it seems to me that my note was probably a masterpiece of amateurism, that Mr. B— probably laughed when he read it. Probably he’s suppressing his laughter right now. His silence is the silence of a man controlling his amusement.
He examines the end of his cigarette. “What kind of information?”
“You know. The kind of information that might prove embarrassing— embarrassing to say the least—were it to be made known to the general public.”
He drops his cigarette to the gravel and crushes it with his shoe. “Embarrassing to whom?”
“To the British government. To the king and queen.”
Mr. B— reaches into his jacket pocket and removes another cigarette from the case. He lights it with the same care as before, the same series of noises, the scratch and the flare, the covering of the flame. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says softly, “I’m afraid I have a little confession to make.”
“Oh?”
“I may have stretched the truth just a bit, when I told you I was astonished by the contents of your letter.”
We still sit side by side, except we’ve turned a few degrees inward to address each other. Mr. B—’s elbow rests on the top slat of the bench. Because he’s looking at my face now, almost tenderly, I make a tremendous effort to keep my expression as still as possible. My fingers, however, have developed some kind of tremor. Imagine that.
“How so?” I ask.
“I received a memorandum a day or two ago. From a certain member of the Cabinet, in response to a cable sent him from Government House in Nassau. So we had some warning, you see, of your imminent arrival. We had some notion of what to expect.”
“I see.”
“Still, your note was—well, it was marvelous. I don’t wish to take anything away from that. My own men couldn’t have done better.”
“I’m flattered.”
He leans forward, so I can smell his cigarette breath, the faint echo of whatever it was he ate for lunch. “Mrs. Thorpe, I simply can’t allow that information to go any further. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand. That’s why I’m offering to—”
He drops the cigarette in the gravel and crushes it with his heel. “No, my dear. I don’t think you really do understand.”
And I’m ashamed to say it’s only now I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Not until this instant does it occur to me to ask why, if Mr. B— received my note in the morning—my note hinting delicately of treason at the highest level, treason within the royal family itself—he waited until the fall of night to meet me, to draw me outside, to walk with me into a darkened square before a thousand windows closed for the blackout.
Why, indeed.
I rise from the bench. “Very well. If you’re not going to cooperate, I have no choice—”
With remarkable swiftness, he rises too, draws a small pistol from his pocket, and lodges the end of it in the middle of my coat, just above the knotted belt.
“Mrs. Thorpe. I’m afraid I must insist you give me whatever evidence you’ve obtained in this matter.”
“I don’t have it. Not right here.”
“Where, then?”
“In my hotel room.”
He considers. The pistol remains at my stomach, moving slightly at each beat of my heart. Though my gaze remains on his, I gather the details at the edge of my vision: the trees, bare of leaves; the shrubs, the plantings, all of them shadows against the night, against the murky buildings surrounding us. I observe the distant noise of another omnibus, a faint, drunken cheer from a pub nearby. Possibly, if I screamed, someone might hear me. But I would be dead by the time this noise reached a pair of human ears.
“It’s well hidden,” I continue. “I could save you a lot of trouble.”
Mr. B— nudges the pistol against my stomach. “Very well. Move slowly, please.”
As I begin my turn, I jerk my knee upward, bang smack into the center of his groin. A shot cracks out. I grab the pistol, burning my hand, and slam it into his head, right behind his left ear. He slumps to the ground, and let me tell you, I take off running, hoping to God I don’t have a bullet in me somewhere, hoping to God I knocked him out as well as down.
As I dart across the street, there’s a shout. I don’t stop to discover where it came from, or whom. The sidewalk’s empty, the street’s dark. The sky’s begun to drizzle. I pass a red postbox, the house with the grand piano in the window I noticed this morning, except you can’t see that piano right now, I can’t see anything, the whole world is dark and wet, each stoop concealing its own shadows. I cross another street, another, not stopping to check for traffic—there isn’t any, not with wartime restrictions on brave, threadbare London—until the familiar white signboard resolves out of the mist, BASIL HOTEL in quaint letters.
I pull back, undecided, but my momentum carries me forward into another human chest, female chest.
Oomph! she says, and snatches me by the arms. I lift my hands to push away. I spy a coat, a neck, a fringe of blond hair gathered into a bun.
The woman in the foyer.
“Miss Thorpe?” I gasp.
Her eyes are paler than her brother’s, but I recognize the shape, and the straight, thick eyebrows, though his are a darker gold. The same milky skin, the same freckles. She has pointed cheekbones, a wide, red mouth, a slim jaw. I’m able to drink in all these details because the world seems to have gone still, the clock seems to have stopped, and even the molecules of air, the motes of dust, have stuck in place. Only my blood moves, against the scorched skin of my right hand.
“You must be Leonora,” she says.
“Yes.”
She snatches my elbow and pulls me down the sidewalk. “Come along, quick. My flat’s just around the corner.”
And it occurs to me, as I career along in her wake, that this is just how her brother appeared in my life. Out of the blue in some foreign land, like a genie from a lamp, just when you needed a wish granted.
LULU (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
JUNE 1941 (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
(The Bahamas) (#u2f9b29cf-49c8-5644-8969-483b2ca3b6f4)
ON THE MAGAZINE COVER, the woman sits on a rattan sofa and the man sits on the floor at her feet, gazing not at the camera but upward, adoringly, at her. She smiles back in approval. She has a book in her lap, open to the frontispiece or maybe the table of contents—she doesn’t look as if she actually means to read it—and in her hair, a ribbon topped with a bow. (A bow, I tell you.) A pair of plump Union Jack sofa pillows flanks either side of her. A real domestic scene, a happy couple in a tasteful home. THE WINDSOR TEAM, reads the caption, in small, discreet letters at the bottom. At the top, much larger, white type inside a block of solid red: L I F E.
I’d been staring at this image, on and off, for most of the journey from New York, having paid a dime for the magazine itself at the newsstand in the Eastern Air Lines terminal building at LaGuardia Field. (It was the latest issue, now there’s coincidence for you.) I’d held it on my lap as what you might call a talisman, throughout each leg of the journey, each takeoff and landing, Richmond followed by Savannah followed by some swamp called Orlando followed by Miami at last, smacking down to earth at half past five in the afternoon, taxi to a shabby hotel, taxi back to the airfield this morning, and I still didn’t feel as if I’d quite gotten to the bottom of that photograph. Oh, sometimes I flipped the magazine open and read the article inside—the usual basket of eggs, served sunny-side up—but mostly I studied the picture on the cover. So carefully arranged, each detail in place. Those Union Jack pillows, for example. (We just couldn’t be any more patriotic, could we? Oh, my, no. We are as thoroughly British as afternoon tea.) That hair ribbon, the bow. (We are as charmingly, harmlessly feminine as the housewife next door.) The enormous jeweled brooch pinned to her striped jacket, just above the right breast— and what was it, anyway? The design, I mean. I squinted and peered and adjusted the angle of light, but I couldn’t make any sense of the shape. No matter. It was more brooch than I could afford, that was all, more jewels than I could ever bear on my own right breast. (We are not the housewife next door after all, are we? We are richer, better, royal. Even if we aren’t quite royal. Not according to the Royals. Still, more royal than you, Mrs. American Housewife.)
The airplane lurched. I peered through the window at the never-ending horizon, turquoise sea topped by a turquoise sky, and my stomach—never at home aboard moving objects—lurched too. According to my wristwatch, we were due at Nassau in twenty minutes, and the twenty-one seats of this modern all-metal Pan American airliner were crammed full of American tourists in Sunday best and businessmen in pressed suits, none of whose stomachs seemed troubled by the voyage. Just my dumb luck, my dumb stomach. Or was it my ears? Apparently motion sickness had something to do with your inner ear, the pressure of fluid inside versus the pressure of air without, and when the perception of movement on your insides didn’t agree with the perception of movement from your eyeballs, well, that’s where your stomach got into difficulty. I supposed that explanation made sense. All the world’s troubles seemed to come from friction of one kind or another. One thing rubbing up against another, and neither one backing down.
So I crossed my arms atop the magazine and gazed out into the distance—that was supposed to help—and chewed on the stick of Wrigley’s thoughtfully provided by the stewardess. By now, the vibration of the engines had taken up habitation inside my skull. This? This is nothing, sister, said the fellow sitting next to me on the Richmond– Savannah hop yesterday, local businessman type. You shoulda heard the racket on the old Ford tri-motor. Boy, that was some kind of noise, all right. Why, the girls sometimes had to use a megaphone, it was so loud. Now, this hunka junk, they put some insulation in her skin. You know what insulation is? Makes a whole lot of difference, believe you me. Here he rapped against the fuselage with his knuckles. Course, there ain’t no amount of insulation in the world can drown out the sound of a couple of Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp engines full throttle, no ma’am. That’s eight hundred horsepower apiece. Yep, she’s a classy bird, all right, the DC-three. You ever flown the sleeper model? Coast to coast in fifteen hours. That’s something, ain’t it? And so on. By the time we reached Savannah, I would gladly have taken the old Ford tri-motor and a pair of earplugs.
On the other hand, it could have been worse. When the talkative fellow from Richmond disembarked in Savannah, he was replaced by another fellow entirely, a meaty, sweating, silent specimen in a fine suit, reeking of booze and cigarettes, possessed of a sticky gaze. You know the type. By the time we were airborne, he had arranged himself luxuriously on the seat, insinuated his thigh against mine, and laid his hand several times on my knee, and as I slapped away his paw yet again, I would have given any amount of money to have Mr. Flapping Gums in his checked suit safely back by my side. And then. Then. The damned fellow turned up again this morning in an even more disreputable condition to board the daily Pan American flight to Nassau, fine suit now rumpled and stained, eyes now bloodshot and roving all over the place.
Thank God he hadn’t seemed to notice me. He sat in the second row, and by the stricken expression of the stewardess, hurrying back down the aisle this second with the Thermos of precious coffee, he hadn’t mended his ways during the night. I caught her eye and communicated sympathy into her, woman to woman, as best I could. She returned a small nod and continued down the aisle. The chewing gum was turning stale and hard. The wrapper had gone missing somewhere. I tore off a corner of page fourteen of Life magazine, folded the scrap, and slipped the wad discreetly inside.
In the seat next to mine, a gentleman looked up from his newspaper. He was tall and lean, almost thin, a loose skeleton of a fellow, and he’d made his way aboard with a small leather suitcase, climbing the stairs nimbly, the last in line. I hadn’t paid him much attention, except to note the interesting color of his hair, a gold fringe beneath the brim of his hat. He wore spectacles, and in contrast to my earlier companions, he’d hardly acknowledged me at all, except to duck his head and murmur a polite Good morning and an apology for intruding on my privacy. Though his legs were long, like a spider’s, he had folded them carefully to avoid touching mine, and when he’d opened his newspaper, he folded the sides back so they didn’t extend past the armrest between us. He’d refused the chewing gum, I remembered, though the tropical air bumped the airplane all over the sky. Other than that, he read his newspaper so quietly, turned and folded the pages with such a minimum of fuss, I confess I’d nearly forgotten he was there.
As the stewardess swept by, he bent the top of said newspaper in order to observe the fellow up front, unblinking, the way a bird-watcher might observe the course of nature from the security of his blind. I felt a stir of interest, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the quiet of him. Under cover of looking back for the stewardess, I contrived to glimpse his profile, which was younger than I thought, lightly freckled. All this, as I said, I captured in the course of a glance, but I have a good memory for faces.
After a minute or so, the gentleman folded his newspaper, murmured an apology, and rose from his seat. He set his newspaper on the seat and walked not to the front of the airplane, which he’d observed with such attention, but down the aisle to the rear, where the stewardess had gone. The airplane bumped along, the propellers droned. I looked back at the magazine on my lap—the windsor team, what did that mean, what exactly were they trying to convey, those two—and then out the window again. A series of pale golden islands passed beneath the wing, rendering the sea an even more alluring shade of turquoise, causing me almost to forget the slush in my stomach and the fuzz in my head, until the gentleman landed heavily back in the seat beside me.
Except it wasn’t the same gentleman. I knew that instantly. He was too massive, and he reeked of booze. A thigh came alongside mine, a paw settled on my knee.
“Kindly remove your hand,” I said, not kindly at all.
He leaned toward my ear and muttered something I won’t repeat.
I reached for the hand, but he was quicker and grabbed my fingers. I curled my other hand, my right hand, into a fist. I still don’t know what I meant to do with that fist, whether I really would have hit him with it. Probably I would have. The air inside our metal tube was hot, even at ten thousand feet, because of the white June sun and the warm June atmosphere and the windows that trapped it all inside, and the man’s hand was wet. I felt that bile in my throat, that heave, that grayness of vision that means you’re about to vomit, and I remember thinking I must avoid vomiting on the magazine at all costs, I couldn’t possibly upchuck my morning coffee on the pristine Windsor Team.
At that instant, the first gentleman returned. He laid a hand on the boozer’s shoulder and said, in a clear, soft English voice, “I believe you’ve made a mistake, sir.”
Without releasing my hand, the fellow turned and stretched his neck to take in the sight of the Englishman. “And I say it’s none of your business, sir.”
His voice, while slurred, wasn’t what you’d call rough. Vowels and consonants all in proper order, a conscious ironic emphasis on the word sir. He spoke like an educated man, thoroughly sauced but well brought up. You never could tell, could you?
“I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid it is my business,” said the Englishman. “For one thing, you’re sitting on my newspaper.”
Again, he spoke softly. I don’t think the other passengers even knew what was going on, had even the slightest inkling—if they noticed at all—that these two weren’t exchanging a few friendly words about the weather or the Brooklyn Dodgers or Hitler’s moustache or something. The Englishman didn’t look my way at all. The boozer seemed to have forgotten me as well. His grip loosened. I yanked away my fingers and dug into my pocketbook for a handkerchief. The boozer reached slowly under his rump and drew out the crushed newspaper. The Miami Herald, read the masthead, sort of.
“There you are,” he said. “Now beat it.”
Those last words seemed out of place, coming from a voice like that, like he’d heard the phrase at the movies and had been waiting for the chance to sound like a real gangster. His empty hand rested on his knee and twitched, twitched. The fingers were clean, the square nails trimmed, the skin pink, except for an ugly, cracked, weeping sore on one of his knuckles.
The Englishman pushed back his glasses and leaned a fraction closer.
“I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I’ve made myself clear. I’d be very grateful if you’d return to your own seat, sir, and allow me to resume the use of mine.”
“You heard me,” said the boozer. “Scram.”
He spoke more loudly now, close to shouting, and his voice rang above the noise of the engine. People glanced our way, over their newspapers and magazines, and glanced back just as quickly. Nobody wanted trouble, not with a drunk. You couldn’t tell what a drunk might do, and here we flew, two miles above the ocean in a metal tube. I myself had begun to perspire. The sweat trickled from my armpits into the sleeves of my best blouse of pale blue crepe, my linen jacket. The boozer was getting angrier, despite the soothing, conciliatory nature of the Englishman’s voice, or maybe because of it. The force of his anger felt like a match in the act of striking, smelled like a striking match, the tang of saltpeter in your nose and the back of your throat. My fingers curled into the seams of my pocketbook.
“I’m afraid not,” said the Englishman.
The boozer looked like he was going to reply. He gathered himself, straightened his back, turned his head. His cheeks were mottled. The Englishman didn’t move, didn’t flinch. The boozer opened his mouth and caught his breath twice, a pair of small gasps. Then he closed his eyes and slumped forward, asleep. The Englishman removed his hand from the boozer’s shoulder and bent to sling the slack arm over his own shoulders.
“I’ll just escort this gentleman to his seat, shall I?” he said to me. “I’m awfully sorry for the trouble.”
No one spoke. No one moved. The stewardess stood in the aisle, braced on somebody’s headrest, hand cupped over mouth, while the Englishman hoisted the unconscious man to his feet and bore him— dragged him, really—toward the empty seat in the second row. The airplane found a downdraft and dropped, recovered, rattled about, dropped again. The Englishman lurched and caught himself on the back of the single seat to the left, third row. He apologized to the seat’s owner and staggered on. The stewardess then dashed forward and helped him lower the boozer into his seat like a sack of wet barley. Together they buckled him in, while the elderly woman to his right looked on distastefully. (I craned my neck to watch the show, believe me.)
Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew quite what we had just witnessed. The engines screamed on, the airplane rattled like a can of nails. Across the aisle, a man in a suit of pale tropical wool turned back to his magazine. In the row ahead of me, the woman leaned to her husband and whispered something. I checked my watch. Only four minutes had passed, imagine that.
BY THE TIME THE ENGLISHMAN returned to his seat, the roar of the engines had deepened into a growl, and the airplane had begun to stagger downward into Nassau. A cloud wisped by the window and was gone. I feigned interest in the magazine, while my attention poured through the corner of my left eye in the direction of my neighbor, who picked his hat from the floor—it had fallen, apparently, during the scuffle or whatever it was—and placed it back in the bin. It turned out, his hair wasn’t thoroughly gold; there was a trace of red in the color, what they call a strawberry blond. I turned a page. He swung into place and reached for the newspaper, which I had retrieved and slid into the cloth pocket on the seat before him. It seemed like the least I could do, and besides, I can’t abide a messy floor.
“Thank you,” he said. “I do hope you weren’t troubled.”
“Not at all.”
He didn’t reply. I had a hundred questions to ask—foremost, was the boozer still alive—but I just turned the pages of the magazine in rapid succession until I ran out of paper altogether and closed the book on my lap, front cover facing up, THE WINDSOR TEAM locked in eternal amity with their Union Jack sofa pillows. The loudspeaker crackled and buzzed, something about landing shortly and the weather in Nassau being ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, God save us.
I cleared my throat and asked the Englishman what brought him to Nassau, business or pleasure.
“I live here, in fact,” he said. “For the time being.”
“Oh! So you were visiting Florida?”
“Yes. My brother lives in a town called Cocoa, up the coast a bit. Lovely place by the ocean.” He nodded to the magazine. “Doing your research, are you?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”
“Ah.”
The airplane shook. I looked out the window and saw land, shrubby and verdant, and a long, pale beach meeting the surf, and a car flashing brilliantly along a road made of gray thread. “What a pair of romantics,” I heard myself say.
“Romantics? Do you really think so?”
I turned my head back and saw a serious profile, a pair of eyes squinted in thought behind the wire-rimmed spectacles. He hadn’t touched the newspaper. His lanky arms were folded across his chest, his right leg crossed over his left, immaculate, civilized. He didn’t look as if he’d lifted a pair of boots, let alone two hundred pounds of slack human weight.
“Don’t you? But it’s the love story of the century, hadn’t you heard?” I said. “The king who gave up his throne for the woman he loves.”
“A thoroughly modern thing to do. Not romantic at all.”
“How so?”
The airplane shuddered and thumped, bounced hard and settled. I looked out the window again and saw we had landed. The landscape outside teemed with color and vegetation and shimmering heat. I saw a cluster of palms, a low, rectangular building.
By the time we rolled to a stop, I had forgotten the question left dangling between us. The sound of his voice surprised me, but then everything about him had surprised me.
“A romantic would have sacrificed love for duty,” said the Englishman, “not the other way around.”
The airplane gave a final lurch and went still. He rose from his seat, removed his suitcase and his hat from the bin, removed my suitcase and gave it to me, and put his hat on his head. I said thank you. He told me to think nothing of it and wished me a good day, a pleasant stay in Nassau, and walked off the airplane. The sunshine flashed from the lenses of his spectacles.
As I passed the fellow from Savannah, he was still slumped in his seat, held in place by the safety belt, and I couldn’t honestly tell if he was dead or alive. The stewardess kept casting these anxious glances at his chest. I told her thank you for a memorable flight.
“Wasn’t it though,” she said. “Have a pleasant stay in Nassau.”
IN THE TERMINAL BUILDING, AS I waited my turn at the passport desk, I looked around for the blond man, but I didn’t see him. He might have gone anywhere. He might have come from anywhere. A fellow like that, he was like a djinn, like an enchanted creature from a fairy tale. Except this wasn’t a fairy tale, this was reality. He was made of common clay. He came from a woman and man, who fell in love, or had not. Who had married, or had not. Had spent a lifetime of nights together, or just one.
As I trudged out the terminal building to the street outside, I remember thinking a vast history lay behind this man, which I would never know.
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
JULY 1900 (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_863b5755-b920-50c2-8edc-9f74380fa0c4)
THE ENGLISHMAN ARRIVES at the clinic about an hour after lunchtime, while Elfriede sits in the main courtyard with Herr Doktor Hermann, discussing something she dreamed the night before. When she looks back on this moment, from a distance of years and—eventually— decades, she will remember nothing about the dream or the discussion, but she will hear the exact noise of the cartwheels and the iron hoofbeats on the paving stones of the drive as if the interior of her head were a phonograph disc, and these sounds imprinted it forever. She’ll remember the voices rising from the other side of the courtyard wall, and the smell of the pink, half-wild roses climbing that wall, and the way the sun burst free from the shade to warm the back of her neck and soak the courtyard in light.
Except that the sun doesn’t really come out at that moment. Memory, it turns out, is unreliable. All on its own, your memory gathers up helpful details that match your recollection of an event, whether or not those details actually existed at the time. But does it matter? For Elfriede, the sun comes out when the Englishman arrives. That’s how she remembers it. Sunshine, and the smell of roses.
ANYWAY, ONE OF THEM IS talking, Elfriede or Dr. Hermann, it doesn’t matter which one, and they both fall silent at the clatter of hoofbeats and cartwheels. “A new arrival?” Elfriede asks, after a moment.
“Yes, a lung patient,” answers the doctor. “Pneumonia.”
“How awful.”
“He’ll be kept in the infirmary wing, of course. There is no danger of transmission.”
“I meant, how awful for him.”
Dr. Hermann nods and makes a note in his little book. He makes notes continually during these sessions—conversations, he calls them, as if purely social—and Elfriede feels sometimes like a laboratory experiment, an unknown specimen of plant or animal, something abnormal. “How do you feel about this?” he asks, still writing, and for a moment Elfriede isn’t sure what he means, the note taking or the new patient. When she hesitates, he prompts her.
“I don’t mind at all,” she says. “I hope he recovers quickly. Why should I mind?”
“Indeed. Why should you mind?”
“I don’t know. But you seem to think I should.”
“What makes you say that?”
Another thing about Dr. Hermann, he never answers a question except with another question. He wants Elfriede to do all the talking, Elfriede to reveal herself. It’s the very latest treatment for nervous disorders such as hers, and really, as compared to some of the others, it’s not bad. Dr. Hermann is a large, soft-edged, round-shouldered man who folds his long limbs into normal-size chairs without the smallest irritation that they weren’t designed to accommodate him. There’s something malleable about him. Even his brown hair has a pliant quality. In later years, Elfriede will realize she never noticed the color of his eyes, nor can she recall his face. Just the soft, even shape of his voice, asking her questions.
She makes her answer as clear as possible, so he can’t find another question in it. “When I said How awful, you told me there was no danger of infection. So you must have thought I was afraid of that.”
Dr. Hermann adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “Have you ever felt afraid of sickness, Elfriede?”
“No.” She stands up. “I’m going to take a walk now.”
ADMISSION TO THE CLINIC IS voluntary, and Elfriede is free to come and go as she likes, no restriction on movement, no requirement to stay. She could leave at any time, in fact.
Practically speaking, of course, that’s nearly impossible. The clinic sits on the top of a mountain, surrounded by wilderness and reached by a single, steep road in poor repair. Until the middle of the last century, it was a monastery of the Franciscan order, and the last of the monks sold the grounds and the ancient buildings to Dr. Hermann for next to nothing, on the condition that the crumbling walls remain a sanctuary for healing and peace. Patients seek out its geographic isolation and clean, healthful air for a variety of reasons—lung trouble, nervous disorders, broken hearts, discreet pregnancies, discreet abortions—but the general point is to separate oneself from civilization. You can’t leave without mountaineering skills or help from the outside, and Elfriede has neither. Also, she has no money—none she can produce from a pocket, anyway. So, when she rises from her bench and leaves the courtyard, walks along the covered passage to the old chapel, passes the chapel, and exits the building altogether to emerge on the fragrant, sunlit hillside, she doesn’t imagine she could hail the driver of the Englishman’s carriage and convince him to carry her back along the twenty miles of steep, rutted roadway, or that she could simply walk them on her own. Where would she go, anyway? Who would want her?
She just goes outside to be alone. That’s all she wants. To be left alone.
AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, THE quarters in this former Franciscan monastery are austere, to say the least. Elfriede’s bedroom is literally a monk’s cell, or rather two of them knocked together, and contains a single bed with a horsehair mattress, a stool, a plain wardrobe in which she hangs her three dresses, a dresser, and a desk and chair. There are no bookshelves. Elfriede’s free to borrow from the library, one volume at a time, but she wasn’t allowed to bring any books from home, nor is she allowed to receive any while she’s here. She’s encouraged to write, however. Each week, a fresh supply of notebooks arrives on her desk. Herr Doktor Hermann wants her to record her thoughts, her memories, and especially her dreams, and to bring these notebooks to their daily conversations so he can review the contents. When her notebooks aren’t sufficiently full, he doesn’t express any obvious displeasure to Elfriede. Of course, that would be unprofessional! Still she feels his displeasure like a disturbance in the air, turning his flared nostrils all pink, so she writes her devoirs daily, sometimes for hours, in order to satisfy his hunger for her subconscious mind. She also keeps another notebook under the horsehair mattress. This is the notebook that contains her real thoughts.
In the evenings, or during the day when the weather’s inclement, Elfriede has another way of finding solitude. She makes her way to the music room, which nobody ever enters except her, and plays on the piano from sheet music obtained from the library. Sometimes she’ll go on for hours, in chronological order of course, Bach to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Chopin, one must be methodical about such things. Then it’s midnight, and as the notes fade a silence fills the chamber like a thousand ears listening, an audience of spirits, and Elfriede can almost—but not quite—feel that her husband and son are among them.
TWO WEEKS LATER, ELFRIEDE ENCOUNTERS the Englishman for the first time. An orderly pushes him in a wheeled chair along one of the paved paths in the infirmary garden, and she observes them both from the hillside above. She’s just returned from a long, solitary hike, and the mountain air fills her lungs and her limbs, and the sunlight burns her face in a primitive way. She sits among the wildflowers and wraps her arms around her legs. Below her, about the size and importance of squirrels, the orderly and the Englishman come to a stop at the top of the rectangular path, inside a patch of sun. The orderly adjusts the blanket on the Englishman’s lap and they exchange a few words, although the breeze carries their voices away from Elfriede’s ears. After a last pat to the blanket, the orderly consults a pocket watch and heads back to the infirmary building, leaving the Englishman in the sunshine.
For some time, he sits without moving. The chair’s positioned at such an angle that she can’t see his face properly, and anyway Elfriede’s a bit nearsighted, so he might be asleep or he might just be too weak to move. Still, he must be past the crisis, or they wouldn’t have left him outside like this, would they?
Judging from the proportion of man to chair, he seems to be on the tall side, if slender. Of course, Elfriede’s husband is a giant, two meters tall and almost as broad, so most men look slender in comparison. Also, this fellow’s been sick, and he’s wearing those loose blue infirmary pajamas. His hair’s been shaved, and the remaining stubble is ginger, which catches a little sun and glints. Elfriede creeps closer. The brief, vibrant season of alpine wildflowers has arrived, and the meadow’s packed with their reds and oranges and violets, their sticky sage scent, clinging to Elfriede’s dress as she slides through the grass. She just wants to see his face, that’s all. Wants to know what an Englishman looks like. In her entire sheltered life, living in the country, small villages, Berlin once to shop for her trousseau, Frankfurt and Zurich glimpsed through the window of a train, she’s never met one.
Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.
Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”
“Oh! I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”
He says those words—up the duff—in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.
“You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”
“Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”
“Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”
She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”
“As old as that?”
“And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.
“Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come sit by me? I’ll promise not to cough on you.”
“I don’t know if it’s allowed.”
“Bugger that.” (In English again.) “I’ll take the blame, I promise. I’ll say I had a coughing fit, and you came to my aid in your selfless way.”
She laughs rustily and rises to her feet. In the course of her creeping, she’s come to within ten or twelve meters of the low stone wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, and it seems so silly and artificial to be holding a conversation in this manner, calling back and forth across the gulf, that Elfriede goes willingly to the brick wall and perches atop it, a meter or so from Herr Thorpe’s left shoulder, crossing her legs at the ankle.
“That’s better,” he says. “Easier on my lungs, anyway. You smell like wildflowers.”
“I’ve been sitting on them. You speak German very well.”
“So do you.”
She laughs again—so out of practice at laughing, but she can’t seem to help herself. “But it’s my native tongue, and you—you’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”
“Indeed I am. I learned my German in school, from a fearsome and very fluent master. Used to beat me with a cane whenever I slipped accidentally into the informal address.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s supposed to build character.” He opens his eyes and squints into the sun. He looks nothing like her husband, not just because he’s smaller and his head is shaved and his bones stick out from his skin, not just because he’s in a wheelchair while her husband is as huge and hale and hearty as a woodsman. Herr Thorpe is terribly plain, wide-faced and thick-lipped, freckled and ginger-haired, and the electricity of his smile can’t disguise his current state of febrile emaciation. She holds her breath in disbelief at the sharpness of his protruding bones, at the length of his pale eyelashes. He’s positively lanky inside his blue pajamas, and then there’s this enormous pumpkin head stuck on top of him.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Pneumonia can be so dangerous.”
“Oh, I’m all right.”
“You wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t quite sick.”
“I couldn’t have come here at all if I’d been really sick. It’s a damned long journey from Vienna, you know. No, I came through the crisis all right, but the doctors were worried about my lungs, so they sent me here for recuperation. And my parents agreed because—well.”
“Because why?”
“A personal matter.”
“Some girl?” Elfriede asks boldly.
“Yes,” he says. “Some girl, I’m afraid. But it all seems rather long ago now. What about you?”
“A personal matter.”
“Let me guess. Coerced to marry some doddering old bastard against your will, and you’ve gone mad to escape him?”
“Nothing like that,” she says.
“Crossed in love?”
“No.”
“Some terrible grief, perhaps?”
“Nothing too terrible.”
The man drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “Have you been here long?”
“Long enough.”
“Ah. Then perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity on a small matter. You see, late in the evenings, when I’m meant to be sleeping, I sometimes hear the most extraordinary music floating into my chamber. Piano. Goes on for hours. I can’t decide whether it’s coming from outside the window or down the corridor. At first I thought I was dreaming. Do you hear it at all?”
“I—well, I …” She stops herself on the brink of a lie. “I’m afraid it’s me.”
“You? Ah. Ah.”
“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize anyone could hear me. I’ll stop—”
“No! No. Don’t stop on my account.”
“If I’m keeping you awake—”
“I don’t mind at all, I assure you. It’s enchanting. Last night, the Chopin … I had the strangest feeling …”
“What?”
“Nothing. Enchanted, that’s all. Absolutely enchanted. And it was you, all along? All the more enchanting, then.”
From another man, this compliment might have sounded unctuous. But Mr. Thorpe speaks the word enchanting with such easy intimacy, Elfriede laughs instead, and laughter feels so good in her chest, in her head. She looks down at her feet, crossed at the ankles, and only then does she realize she’s blushing. She asks hastily, “What were you doing in Vienna?”
“What does anybody do in Vienna? Art, culture, philosophy. Opera and cafés and whatever amusement comes one’s way. I suppose I was attempting what they used to call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”
“What’s so inevitable?”
“Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”
“What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”
“Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”
“How—how—”
“Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get married, grow a beard, and start a brood of rascals of my own, and the whole cycle will start over again.” He looks as if he might say something else, but starts to cough instead. The sound is wet and wretched, cracking off the walls of the garden and the stone infirmary building across the grass.
“Are you all right?” Elfriede asks anxiously. “Shall I call the orderly?”
He waves the idea away. The fit dies down, and he leans his head back against the chair. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s gotten much better, believe it or not.”
“You must have been at death’s door, then.”
“Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”
“Dissipation? Really? You don’t seem like the dissipated sort.”
“Well, my mother’s idea of dissipation is a glass of sherry in the evening. Her side of the family is all Scotch Presbyterians. Strict,” he adds, apparently realizing Elfriede isn’t well acquainted with the tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism. “Damned strict.”
“So you were escaping.”
“Something like that. I finished university a year ago and thought—well, one’s only got this single chance to sin, before that inevitable time of life when one’s sins puncture the happiness of somebody else.”
“It’s not inevitable,” Elfriede says. “You don’t have to do it.”
“Do what? Go home and take up the law and become a respectable chap?”
“No. You should go back to Vienna instead. Go back to Vienna and the cafés and that girl of yours—”
“Frau von Kleist,” he says solemnly, “you’re making me weary with all your talk of rebellion. I’m a sick man, remember?”
“Of course.”
“I require a long period of rest and recuperation, not a program of debauchery.”
“How long—” She clears her throat and continues. “How long are you supposed to stay here?”
“As long as it takes. A month or two, perhaps. Just in time for autumn. And you, Frau von Kleist? How long do you expect to stay?”
She shrugs. “As long as it takes.”
“A month or two, perhaps? I’m afraid I don’t know much about nervous disorders.”
“More time than that, I think.”
There is a queer, heavy silence, the kind for which the clinic is famous. The deep peace of the mountains settles over Elfriede, a sense of motionless isolation that sometimes unnerves her, or increases her melancholy, because it seems as if she’s the only human being in the world, and she wants passionately to belong to somebody, anybody, almost anybody. Elfriede smells the wildflowers, the faint odor of something cooking in the refectory kitchen—it’s nearly lunchtime—and something else as well, a peculiar, indecipherable scent she will come to recognize as that of Herr Thorpe himself, a scent that will forever remind her of mountains, even in the middle of a teeming, dirty city.
Herr Thorpe murmurs, “There’s the orderly.”
Elfriede glances to the infirmary door, and the white-uniformed man presently emerging from it. A shimmer of panic crosses her chest, the way you feel when the nurse arrives to draw your blood from your veins. She climbs to her feet atop the wall.
“I must be going, Herr Thorpe—”
“Wilfred.”
“Wilfred.” She hesitates. “My name is Elfriede.”
He presents her with that wide grin, one eye squinted. “Why, it’s practically the same as mine! What are the chances, do you think?”
“Very slim, I think.”
Wilfred puts his hand to his heart. “Shattered. Will I see you again?”
She leaps back to the meadow side, which is about a half meter higher than the garden, rising upward along a soft, rounded hill. “I don’t see why we should. We occupy entirely different wings of the clinic.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“A mistake!” she says, over her shoulder, as she starts to climb the hill.
Wilfred’s voice carries after her. “There are no mistakes, Elfriede the Fair! Only fate!”
Elfriede climbs quickly, and the word fate is so thin and distant, it’s almost out of earshot. Nevertheless, she hears it. In fact, it echoes inside her head, over and over, in time to the heavy smack of her heart as she approaches the summit of the hill. She tells herself it’s only the effort of the climb, the thin air, the anticipation of the view from the top.
LULU (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_02831f02-135a-5bc6-b2fd-adcfc6a9b336)
EVERY TOWN HAS its watering hole, where everybody gathers to share a few drinks and some human news, and in Nassau that particular place was the bar of the Prince George Hotel. You couldn’t miss it. If, newly disgorged from some steamship onto the hot, smoky docks of Nassau Harbor, you staggered with your suitcase across Bay Street to shelter from the sun, you found yourself bang under the awning of the Prince George. And since the Prince George, as a matter of tradition, offered the arriving tourist his first glass of rum punch gratis, why, you can see how the bar developed a loyal following. I should know, believe me, even though I’d arrived by air instead of by sea. That punch went down so well, I made straight for the reception desk and booked a room. Three weeks later, I had almost forgotten I’d lived anywhere else. Every evening at six sharp, I made my way downstairs and took up a stool three seats down from the left, and the bartender—we’ll call him Jack—whipped up a cocktail while I lit a cigarette from a case full of Parliaments, a brand relatively rare in New York City but nigh ubiquitous in this British Crown colony. So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.
Jack was the kind of bartender who sized you up first and decided for himself what kind of drink you needed. On this particular evening, with the place just loosely occupied and the afternoon sun still filling the windows, he took a bit of time and asked, “Be a double for you, Mrs. Randolph? Look like you been dropping bombs all over Germany today.”
“Nothing as exciting as that.” I rested my left hand on the thick, sleek varnish and stared at the gold band on my fourth finger. “Just a day with the ladies at the Red Cross.”
Jack made a low, slow whistle. “Since when?”
“Since this morning, when the nice fellow in charge of the magazine was so dear as to send me one of his telegrams to go with my breakfast.”
“The good kind of telegram?”
“See for yourself.” I set the cigarette in the ashtray, pulled the yellow envelope from my pocketbook, and removed the wisp of paper, which I spread out flat on the counter before me. How I hated the color yellow.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY STOP TODAY NOW THREE WEEKS SINCE YOUR DEPARTURE NASSAU STOP TOTAL EXPENSES TO MAGAZINE $803.22 STOP TOTAL EXCLUSIVE WINDSOR SCOOPS ZERO STOP RETURN TO NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY STOP NOT ONE MORE PENNY EXPENSES WILL BE PAID BY THIS MAGAZINE=
=S. B. LIGHTFOOT
Jack peered over and whistled. Above our heads, a ceiling fan purred and purred, lifting the ends of my hair. Jack shook his head and returned to his bottles.
“So you see,” I continued, replacing telegram in envelope and envelope in pocketbook, “my time in Nassau may be winding to an end.”
“Don’t you like it here, Mrs. Randolph?”
“Very much. But I can’t stick around if the magazine’s cutting off my expenses.”
“You could write them a story, like this fellow suggests.”
I inclined my head to the pocketbook. “This fellow? You mean Lightfoot? That’s a nice way of putting it. Orders, is more like it.”
“So? Write the fellow a story.”
“It ain’t that easy, sonny,” I said. “There’s only one thing to write about in this town, this blazing, backward, godforsaken burg, and it turns out you can’t just waltz right into Government House and ask to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, s’il vous plaît, and make it snappy.”
“I guess not, at that.”
“No, sir. You’ve got to weave your way into society, it seems. For starters, you have to join the local Red Cross, of which said duchess is president, and make nice with the ladies.”
“That bad, was it?”
“It was awful.”
Jack set the drink in front of me. A martini, it turned out. “Compliments of an admirer.”
“A what?” I sputtered into the glass.
“An admirer, like I said. And that’s all I’m saying.” Jack zipped his lips.
I set down the glass and lifted the cigarette. Jack observed me with interest, thick eyebrows cocked. When I’d taken the first long drag, and another sip from the martini, I crossed my legs and began a survey of the room around me. As you might expect, there was plenty of room to survey, plenty of height and arch, plenty of solid rectangular pillars done in handsome raised wood paneling, plenty of large, masculine chairs and ashtrays on little tables. Not so many customers. Everybody still out enjoying the sunshine, no doubt, and aside from the elderly gent near the window, buried in his newspaper, and the two fellows in linen suits having an earnest discussion in an alcove, the joint was empty. I turned back to Jack.
“Not the old man with the newspaper, I hope?”
“He’s mighty rich, Mrs. Randolph. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Are you calling me a beggar, Jack?”
Jack’s face assumed an aspect of innocence. Above his head, the glasses glittered in their rows, highballs and lowballs, champagne coupes and brandy snifters, not a speck of dust, not a hair’s width out of order. “Just an old saying, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Something my mama used to tell me, that’s all.”
“I have my faults, I’m the first to admit. But I’ve never begged for a dime in my life, and I don’t intend to start now.” I tilted my head toward the window. “Certainly not with some old moneybags trying his luck in a hotel lounge.”
“You have your standards, is that what you’re getting at?”
“I have my standards.”
“Oh, then I should take back this little glass here?”
I slapped away his hand. “Don’t you dare. The poor fellow’s perfectly free to buy me all the drinks he wants. So long as he understands he’s not getting his money’s worth.”
“Aw, he’s not so bad. Just look at the poor sucker. Got most of his hair. Nice clean suit. Shoes all shiny. Can’t see his teeth, but I bet he’s got a few left.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“You’re a real tough dame, you know that? A lot of pretty girls might take pity on a nice guy like that, money to burn. A one-way ticket to Easy Street.”
“I’m not a lot of girls, am I? Besides,” I said, reaching for the ashtray, “I happen to know firsthand where that kind of arrangement ends up, and it’s not Easy Street, believe me.”
The ashtray, if you’re asking, was a heavy old thing made of silver and embossed in the middle with what seemed to be a tavern scene. A border wound around the edges in a series of scrolls, dipping now and then to make space for a resting cigarette. I knocked a crumb of ash inside and measured the weight of Jack’s curiosity on the top of my head. Not that I blamed him. You said a provocative thing like that, you expected someone to wonder what you meant by it, to clear his throat and ask you for a detail or two.
Jack’s black waistcoat shifted in the background, his crisp white sleeves. He put away the bottle of gin on the shelf behind him and said, over his shoulder, “Just as well, I guess, he ain’t the fellow who bought your martini.”
“But you said—”
“You said.” Jack turned back to me and grinned. “I was just following along, you see?”
“I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have amused you.”
“Now, don’t be sore with me, Mrs. Randolph. I’m sworn to secrecy, that’s all.”
“You’re teasing me, aren’t you? I’ll bet this admirer of yours doesn’t even exist. You just poured me a free drink for your own entertainment.”
“Oh, he exists, all right. Paid me up front and everything. Nice tip.”
“Is he here right now?”
“In this room?” Jack’s gaze slid to the door, traveled along the walls, the panel and polish, the glittering windows, and returned to me. “’Fraid I can’t say. Kind of a shy fella, your beau. But don’t you fret. I got the feeling he’ll make himself known to you, when he’s good and ready.”
Before me, the martini formed a tranquil circle in its glass, a cool pool. Not a single flaw disturbed its surface. I pondered the chemical properties of liquids, the infinitesimal bonds of electricity that secured them together in such perfect order, the beautiful molecules held flat in my glass by gravity. The great mystery eluded me, as ever.
“How long have you tended bar, Jack?” I asked.
“How long have I tended bar? Or tended this bar here?”
“Tended bar at all, I guess.”
“Well, now.” He shut one eye and judged the ceiling. “Landed here in Nassau in twenty-one when I was just a wee lad, helping my dad with the old schooner—Lord, what a sweet ship she was—”
“Rum-running, you mean.”
“Just engaging in a little maritime commerce, Mrs. Randolph, serving the needs of you poor suckers dying of thirst back home. Used to load and unload them crates of liquor all the livelong day. Oh, but we lived like kings in Nassau back then. Those were good years.” He shook his head and wiped some invisible smudge of something-or-other from the counter. “Then they brought back the liquor trade stateside.”
“Hallelujah.”
“For you folks back home, maybe. Come to find out, my dad spent all the money from those years, every damn penny, Mrs. Randolph. Left me here in Nassau, broke as a stick. Lucky I knew a fellow who tended bar in those days. Took me under his wing, taught me the trade. Now here I am.” Jack spread his arms. “Got my domain. Nothing happens here without my say-so, Mrs. Randolph, and don’t you forget that. You got a problem with any fellow here, you come to me.”
He was a large man, Jack, maybe more wide than tall, but still. I found myself wanting to wrap my arms around that comfortable girth and kiss his rib cage. At the thought of this act, the image it evoked in my imagination, I directed a tiny smile at the remnants of my drink and asked, “Why do you like me so much, Jack?”
“Because you’re an honest dame, Mrs. Randolph. Honest and kindhearted.”
“This fellow of yours. Is he good enough for me?”
“Nobody’s good enough for you, Mrs. Randolph, not in my book.” He leaned forward an inch or two. “Between you and me, there’s been a lot of fellows asking. Pretty lady, drinking alone, kind of sad and don’t-touch-me. But this fellow is the first fellow I said could buy you a drink.”
“A fine endorsement.”
“Now it’s up to you, Mrs. Randolph. You’re a real good judge, I’ll bet. You just watch yourself around here, that’s all.”
“I thought you said he met your approval.”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking about him.” Jack pulled back and set the glass back on its shelf. “Talking about everything else, everything and everyone else on this island, but especially that duchess and her husband, them two sleek blue jays in a nest, looking out for nobody but themselves. You watch yourself.”
“Watch myself? What for? When I can’t seem to buy myself even a peep inside that nest. I spent all morning at their damned headquarters, the Red Cross, stuffing packages and sitting through the dullest committee meeting in the world, going out of my mind, just to wrangle myself an invitation to the party at Government House on Saturday, and then the duchess finally turns up, and do you know what she says?”
Jack makes a slice along his throat. “Off with your head?”
“Worse. Enchanted to meet you, Mrs. Randolph.”
“That’s all? Sounds all right to me.”
“You don’t know how it is with these people. She locks eyes with you, see, like you’re the only person in the room, the only person in the world, pixie dust glitters in the air around you, and she takes your hand and says, Enchanted to meet you, and you think to yourself, She likes me! She’s enchanted, she said it herself! We’re going to be the best of friends! Then she drops your hand and turns to the next woman and locks eyes with her, and you feel like a sucker. No, you are a sucker. Sucked in by the oldest trick in the book.” There was a stir to my right, somebody approaching the bar. I glanced out the side of my eye and recognized, or thought I recognized, a certain man sliding into position a few stools down, tall, polished, Spanish or French or something, air of importance. Jack, on the other hand, made not the slightest sign of having noticed him. I leaned my elbow on the counter and said, “Maybe I ought to just read the stars and give up.”
“Give up?” said Jack. “Now what kind of talk is that?”
“The smart kind, brother. The realist kind.”
He glanced at last to the newcomer. “Excuse me one minute, Mrs. Randolph.”
The drink was finished. I stubbed out the cigarette. Jack had taken the newcomer’s order and turned to the row of bottles behind him. I stood up, a little more unsteady than I ought to have been after a single martini, and fished a shilling from my pocketbook.
“I beg your pardon,” said the gentleman to my right. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“Of course you couldn’t.”
“You are not leaving, surely?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“But you haven’t eaten yet.”
“Maybe I’m having dinner elsewhere.”
“Now, Mrs. Randolph,” the man said slowly, “we both know that isn’t true.”
Up until this point, I’d been speaking into air. I wasn’t in the habit of addressing bold men, it was a stubbornness of mine. But you can’t ignore a fellow who calls you by name, can you? I turned my head. As I said, I had taken notice of him before. He was one of the regulars at the Prince George, and besides, you couldn’t help but notice him. He was tall and lustrous and strapping, dressed in a pressed suit and white shirt and green necktie, and even though his nose was large and his jaw a little soft, you had to admit he was handsome, especially when he looked at you dead on from that pair of wicked, intelligent eyes. Also, he had an elastic way of moving, like an athlete.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
He held out a large hand. “Alfred de Marigny.”
“I’ve heard that name before, I believe.”
“I’m afraid I have something of a reputation.” There was a note of apology in his voice.
“I’ll say. If you believe all the stories.”
“Do you believe the stories?”
“Naturally. I’ll bet they’re a hundred times more interesting than the truth. Thanks for the drink, by the by.”
He lifted his eyebrows and signaled to Jack. “You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say I wanted another.”
“Didn’t you? But please, Mrs. Randolph, sit down. We cannot have you standing like that. We cannot have you leaving like this.”
“Why not?” I asked. But I sat down.
He sat too, facing me, elbow propped on the bar. “What is this you are saying, about giving up? Give up on what?”
I reached into my pocketbook for the cigarette case. You know, something for my hands to do, something to occupy my attention while the most notorious playboy in Nassau settled himself on a nearby stool and fixed his attention on me. I tried to assemble a few facts in my memory. He was recently divorced from some wealthy Manhattanite who had left her previous husband for him. He was a yachtsman, a good one. A foreigner with a title of some kind, which nobody knew how he acquired, or whether it really belonged to him. In short, he was a—what was the word I had overheard? A mountebank. Fine ten-dollar word, mountebank. I plucked a cigarette and said, “Did I say that?”
“You did. I’m certain of it. Allow me.” He removed a matchbook from his pocket and lit me up in a series of deft movements: selecting the match, striking flame, holding it just to the end of the cigarette, so that the blue core touched the paper in a tiny explosion.
“Thank you.” I opened the case again and offered him the contents. He chose one and thanked me in turn. As we completed these little rituals, Jack returned with a pair of drinks: another martini for me, a whiskey for de Marigny.
When we had both tasted the waters, he said, “I hope I have not offended. I only wish to know if I might be of some assistance.”
“Out of the kindness of your heart?”
He pressed his hand against his chest. “I am a gentleman, Mrs. Randolph. I ask nothing in return.”
“Sure you don’t. Not that I hold it against you, mind you. It’s what makes the world go round.”
“What makes the world go round?”
“Favors.” I reached for the ashtray. “To answer your question, I’m a journalist. I’ve been sent here by an American magazine to give our readers an inside view of Nassau society in these interesting times.”
“By Nassau society, do you perhaps mean the duke and his wife?”
“Well. That is what’s interesting about it, after all.”
“I see.” He turned his face a few inches to the left, as if to regard the tables and chairs, which had begun to populate, mostly men in pale, pressed linen suits, like de Marigny, only shorter and pudgier, your commonplace middle-aged merchant, Bahamicus mercantilis vulgarii. A couple of conspicuous American tourists. “I’m afraid there isn’t much I can do for you in this regard, Mrs. Randolph. I am not a favorite of His Royal Highness.”
“Goodness me. Why ever not? I thought it was part of His Highness’s duty to make himself agreeable to his allies.”
“Allies?”
“I couldn’t help noticing your accent, Monsieur de Marigny.”
“Mrs. Randolph, I am a British subject by birth. I was born in Mauritius, which is a British colony, somewhat to the right of Africa.”
“I see,” I said. “How awfully exotic. Then it’s Mister de Marigny?”
He made a small smile. “My friends call me Freddie.”
“Well then, Freddie. How did a nice chap like you end up on the wrong side of the Duke of Windsor?”
“Do you ask me as a journalist, Mrs. Randolph, or as a friend?”
“Both. I’m a desperate woman, you know. Any little old tidbit might save my career.”
“Then I don’t mind telling you that the duke is a terrible bigot, a vain, weak, effeminate man, entirely ruled by his wife and his own greed.”
He still wore the smile, but his voice was serious, and not at all hushed as you might expect, saying a thing like that in a place like this. I tapped my cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, taking care to keep my fingers steady despite the buzz along my nerves. “Golly. Say what you really think, Freddie.”
“I beg your pardon. Mine is an outspoken nature.”
“Oh, I don’t mind a bit, believe me. Is he a traitor?”
“No,” de Marigny said, “but he is the fool of the Nazis. I knew him a little before the war, you know, when I lived in London. It’s no secret he admired Hitler very much in those days. His wife, I think, is of the same mind. You will remember, I think, their visit to Germany, shortly after they married?”
“I remember, all right. That was some show. Parades and factory tours and what have you. Wearing their best clothes and their best smiles.”
“He is an idiot.” De Marigny sucked on his cigarette. His gaze, which had been trained amicably on me, lost a little focus, lost a little amity, and slipped to some point past my left ear. “I had a friend in those days, a good chap, handsome fellow, clever, a Jew. He traveled back to Berlin to persuade his family to leave. This was in 1936, I believe, after they passed these terrible laws. That was the last I ever saw of him.”
“Do you believe what some of the newspapers are saying? About the camps and so on? Or is it all just propaganda, like spearing the Belgian babies?”
He tossed down a considerable measure of whiskey and stared at the cubes of ice left behind. The air was warm, the way the air is always warm in Nassau, and you could almost hear the melting of the ice under the draft of the ceiling fan. His hand, holding the glass, was quite long, and the fingers looked as if they could crush rocks. I waited for him to speak. Most people will, if you give them enough time. Nobody likes a silence.
“I have a story for you,” he said at last. “I think it illustrates rather nicely the character of the man.”
“That’s what I’m here for, after all.”
“Some few years ago, when I first came to the Bahamas, I found a pleasant little ridge on the island of Eleuthera on which to build a house of my own. I had made some money, you see, in the London commodities markets, and I wanted what every fellow does. A castle of his own.”
“Naturally.”
He waved away a little smoke. “It’s a pretty island, Eleuthera. Long and narrow and undulating, like a ribbon”—he made a gesture with his hand, illustrating this ribbon—“so you are never far from these beaches of beautiful coral sand. It lies to the east, about two days’ sail from here. Eleuthera. This means ‘freedom’ in Greek, did you know that?”
“I did not. They don’t teach much Greek at girls’ schools, I’m afraid.”
“No? I suppose not. In any case, I bought two hundred acres on a ridge, sloping right down to the beach, and assured myself of a source of plentiful fresh water on the property. Then I built a nice bungalow.”
“So what happened? The duke decided he wanted it for himself?”
A large party burst into the room, six or seven of them, voices booming off the ceiling, reeking of sunshine and perspiration. De Marigny glanced across the furniture and observed them for a second or two, no more. Then he returned to me and said, smiling again, “Not quite. You see, in the village below this ridge, the Negroes have no fresh water of their own. The women boil seawater and collect rain in buckets, or else they walk for miles and then pay a penny a dipper. So I thought, since I was building this house in any case, I should also build a system to pipe water down to the village from my well, to these villagers who had nothing but dry rocks and barren soil. And I designed this system, and had the permit approved by the Executive Council, and all that was needed was the signature of the governor himself.”
“Oh, dear,” I said.
While he was speaking, Jack came silently in our direction and replaced the empty whiskey glass with a fresh one. De Marigny nodded his thanks and sipped. Though the sides of the glass were still dry, he held it gingerly. “Then this woman arrives,” he said. “A woman named Rosita Forbes, a writer. An Englishwoman, the sporty sort, do you know what I mean?”
“I have an idea. Thinks she’s Gertrude Bell and Good Queen Bess all rolled into one.”
He laughed. “Yes, like that. So she buys her own land, not far away from mine, and builds herself a big, splendid house, and what do you think? She has no well, no source of her own. The silly woman did not think to ask these practical questions before she purchased her little empire.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I suggested she build gutters and a water tank. We have plenty of tropical downpours in these islands, after all. But no. She has other ideas. And then I wait and wait for the governor’s signature, and there is no signature, so I sail back to Nassau and make an appointment at Government House and explain the situation, how the villagers are waiting for their fresh water, and do you know what he says, this fellow who ruled as king of England and her dominions for almost a year? Emperor of India, et cetera?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He says he wants the water in those pipes—my water, mind you, from my property—diverted to Mrs. Forbes instead. He says the natives are used to collecting their water in buckets, they have never had running water, it won’t make a difference to them, while Mrs. Forbes, this munificent woman, she and her estate will provide work and money to the population, which is a gift of far greater value to them.”
My fingers rotated the end of the cigarette in the ashtray, round and round. De Marigny had a contradictory mouth, a thin top lip over a full, sensuous bottom lip, from which the smile had disappeared. He drank again, not deeply, and when he put the glass down he stared at me. The voices hammered around us. By some imperceptible means, our two stools had drawn closer together, almost in intimacy.
“And what did you say to that?” I asked.
“I refused, of course. Then I said some rather uncomplimentary things, which I shall not repeat, and which he pretended not to notice. He left the room. His—what’s the word—his aide-de-camp was horrified. I felt a little sorry for him, in the end.”
“The aide-de-camp?”
“No, the duke. He spends the first three and a half decades of his life being told he is like a god on earth. And he believes it! And now it’s a very different story. An attractive woman walks into his office and pays him the great compliment of begging for a boon, so he grants it—like a king, like an emperor—never imagining he cannot do this thing she asks. But what’s this? His subject won’t obey him. His subject crosses his thick colonial boots and tells the little emperor he’s nothing more than the governor of a pimple on the arse of the British Empire.”
“You said that?”
“Something like that, anyway.” He ground out his own cigarette. “Listen to me. When I was living in London, before the war, I met him twice. Once at Ascot. The second time at a hunting party in Scotland. He arrives in his own airplane, you see, flies in late to join us on his own bloody airplane, the Gypsy Moth—what an ass—and proceeds to tell us over dinner what a fine chap this Hitler fellow is, has all the right ideas, Germany and England should be the best of friends, stand firm together against international Jewry—pah. Half of us were disgusted. The other half could not applaud him enough.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Yes, interesting. That is what you wanted, after all, Mrs. Randolph. Anyway, you see what I mean. If you wish to become intimate friends with the royal couple, to learn all their secrets so you may write about them in your magazine, you had better not mention my name.”
“Understood.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “Forgive me. I have a dinner engagement. I am already late.”
“We can’t have that.” I held out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Instead of grasping my palm, de Marigny pressed the fingers briefly to his lips. As he released me, he raised his eyebrows. “But perhaps you can join us? We are just a few dull sailors from the yacht club.”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”
He smiled. “Yes, you would.”
“Maybe I would. But not this time. You’ve given me a little too much food for thought already.”
De Marigny reached into his pocket to retrieve a fold of bills. He plucked at them almost without looking and laid a five-pound note on the counter, next to his empty whiskey glass, which amounted—if I knew my shillings—to a four hundred percent tip for Jack.
“Of course, you can do with this information what you wish,” de Marigny said, rising from his stool, “but if I were you, I would not print these things I have told you, not yet, or you will never write another word in Nassau.”
“Then what would you recommend?”
“Why, it’s very simple.” He picked up his hat from the counter and settled it on his head. His eyes had regained their luster, his smile its charm, and I believe every head in the room swiveled to take him in, on cue. He didn’t seem to notice. “If you want to know all the best ladies in Nassau society, Mrs. Randolph,” he said, “you must join the Red Cross, of course. The headquarters is just around the corner, on George Street.”
I ORDERED A PORK CHOP for dinner and ate it at the bar, washed down by a glass of red wine. Afterward, I stepped outside and paused to light a cigarette. The sun was setting over the ridge, and the sky had that unearthly wash of color that stops your breath. Above my head, a pair of seagulls shrieked at each other. I stared north, toward the harbor and the slivery green paradise of Hog Island on the other side.
Having spent the last two years of my life in what you might call a prison, in a series of cheap boardinghouses in cheap American towns, I couldn’t quite accustom myself to this landscape of heat and color and clarity, this excess of blue that was the Bahamas. When I’d stepped outside the metal skin of the airplane to the earth of Oakes Field, three weeks ago, I thought I’d traveled into another universe. I thought I’d stepped into another Earth entirely, a paradise lit by an eternal sun, a release from everything old, everything dreary. Then I touched land and discovered that freedom was not so straightforward, that you could move to a different universe but you couldn’t escape the prison of your own skin.
Still, I hadn’t entirely lost that sense of unreality, especially when I found the line of that horizon and searched in vain for any cloud. The British Colonial Hotel sprawled ahead on West Bay Street, white and crisp like a castle made of wedding cake. A breeze came off the ocean, smelling of brine. The sand, oh. How I’d miss the fluid, delicate sand, slithering between my toes. I dragged on my cigarette and stared again at Hog Island, now gilded by the rising moon. The lighthouse twinkled from the western tip. Some Swedish fellow owned the island, an inventor, built the vacuum cleaner and the electric icebox, God bless him. Came here to the Bahamas because of the taxes—the absence of taxes, I should say, and why not? A fellow who invents the vacuum cleaner, he’s done his share for humanity. Let him wallow in profits and buy a goddamn island in paradise and call it Shangri-La. Let him buy the largest private yacht in the world and swan around the seven seas. Wenner-Gren, that was his name. Axel Wenner-Gren. There was a Mrs. Wenner-Gren too. No doubt Mrs. Wenner-Gren was invited to all the duchess’s parties. And she hadn’t even had to invent a solid-state electric icebox! Just to marry the man who had. I tossed my cigarette into the sand and turned to walk back to the Prince George Hotel.
As I reached the base of George Street, I hesitated. Instead of continuing to the hotel, I turned left, walked up the street, past the Red Cross headquarters to stand at the bottom of the steps that led to Government House. Darkness had drained away the pinkness of it, the confectionary quality. A constellation of lights shone through the various windows. I could just make out the guards at the main entrance, standing at brutal attention, and the perfume of the night blossoms, wafting from the gardens behind their wall.
BACK IN MY ROOM AT the Prince George, I changed into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, drank a glass of water, and took some aspirin. Fetched my suitcase from the wardrobe and opened it. There was a knock on the door, not entirely unexpected. I had asked for a final bill from the front desk, as I intended to check out tomorrow morning.
But it was not the bill at all. It was an envelope, addressed in an elegant, calligraphic hand to Mrs. Leonora Randolph. Inside lay an invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a cocktail party this Saturday at seven P.M. in the gardens of Government House, to benefit the Central Bahamas Chapter of the International Red Cross Society.
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
AUGUST 1900 (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_95809a16-0dfb-5b40-8309-5c5ae98d786c)
TWO WEEKS AFTER the encounter in the infirmary garden, Herr Doktor Hermann offers Elfriede an unusual question in the middle of their afternoon discussion.
“Would you say, Elfriede,” he intones, making a bridge with his hands, “would you say that you love your husband?”
ELFRIEDE’S HUSBAND. DOES SHE LOVE him? They were married four years ago. She’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday only a month before the wedding, in a small party attended by her parents and siblings and prospective sisters-in-law (her husband is an orphan) and Gerhard himself—of course—aged thirty-three, the giant Baron von Kleist who was doing her such a preposterous honor as to marry her. Of course, her beauty was to blame for that. Why else should a baron of such ancient lineage, of considerable fortune and figure, stoop to marry the daughter of a mere burgher? They had met skating on the village pond, a democratic location. Elfriede was an especially graceful skater, and Gerhard was not, and whether by accident or intent he had crashed into her, just gently enough that she wasn’t hurt, but so decisively that he had no choice but to apologize profusely for the accident and buy her a cider. “Why, he’s in love with you,” her mother whispered eagerly the next day, after the baron paid an afternoon call to assure himself of Elfriede’s recovery, and Elfriede—well, Elfriede was too overwhelmed, too flattered, too mesmerized to understand whether she returned that love or not. Gerhard von Kleist was not exactly handsome, but he was tall and magnificently built, he was well-dressed and well-read, he had a disarmingly earnest way about him, and above all he was Gerhard von Kleist! He was a nobleman, the hereditary master of Schloss Kleist; he was a great man, he was an officer in the army, he hunted often with the Kaiser himself. By April they were engaged; by June the banns were called, and on the first of July they were married in the beautiful church in the village, disapproving sisters-in-law to one side and ecstatic parents to the other, amid much good-natured congregational whispering about the baron’s haste to make the flaxen-haired Elfriede his lawful bride.
Before they left for the church, in the carriage bedecked with flowers, Elfriede’s mother pressed a lace handkerchief into her hand, as tradition required. Elfriede was to mop up her bridal tears with this linen square, and afterward to fold it and tuck it away in her drawer on her wedding night. There it’s supposed to lie, until one day, when Elfriede dies, the Cloth of Tears will shroud her cold, dead features. Tradition. As it turned out, Elfriede didn’t cry at all during the ceremony that united her to Gerhard, nor in the carriage to Schloss Kleist while Gerhard held her hand snugly beneath her massive wedding dress, nor during the wedding banquet in the schloss’s baroque great hall, two hundred years old, bearing an exquisite resemblance to the wedding cake itself. (Her mother exclaimed over the dryness of the Cloth of Tears, when she extracted it unused from Elfriede’s bodice as she prepared her daughter for bed.) And she did not cry when Gerhard himself entered the nuptial chamber, smelling pungently of soap, dressed in pajamas and a silk dressing gown. Elfriede had drunk several glasses of champagne, and her new husband appeared to her in a haze as he approached the monumental bed on which his bride sat. He knelt—such a big, powerful man, thirty-three years old, kneeling before her!—and covered her hands with kisses. Elfriede stared down at his wheaten head, worshiping her, and felt a sincere, loving warmth move her heart. A sincere connection to Gerhard, who had shared this day with her, who had stood by her side, the two of them united against all those curious guests and well-wishers. “I will be gentle, my dearest girl,” he promised, removing her nightgown with trembling fingers, kissing her mouth and her breasts and everything else, and Elfriede, dazed and tender, lay back on the embroidered bedspread while he climbed on top of her, and still she didn’t cry. He untied the belt of his dressing gown and shrugged it off, but he didn’t remove his pajamas. Perhaps he didn’t want to frighten her. In any case, he reached inside his pajama trousers and drew out his organ, primed for business, and Elfriede, being somewhat drunk for the first time in her life, couldn’t help glancing at this thing that had consumed her curiosity since adolescence, this object designed by nature to plant seeds inside her womb. At the reality of her husband’s erection, however, the tears sprang at last to her eyes. “Oh no!” she said, but it was too late. Gerhard’s face had already clouded over with rapture, he was already fitting this startling, stiff machine—nothing like the harmless anatomy of the classical statues, God have mercy, of the Renaissance paintings—between her legs. As he shoved his way in, saying her name and invoking his love for her while he split her apart, she gripped the pillows and wept, but the Cloth of Tears was already tucked away in her bureau, unreachable and useless.
HERR DOKTOR HERMANN’S QUESTION IS strange not because of its intimacy—certainly they have touched on intimate subjects before—but because of its specificity. How do you feel about your husband? he should have asked instead. By inserting the word love inside the query, he’s compromised the honesty of her answer.
Elfriede stares at the bridge made by his long, latticed fingers, and his face just above, which seems a little flushed, though today’s weather is far from warm. “Why do you ask?” she says.
“Because it is important for me to know, as your doctor. As your doctor, I must know these vital details, Elfriede, so we may progress in your treatment.”
Dr. Hermann’s fingernails are small and shallow, almost as if the tips of the digits had been chopped off at some uniform length, or else cut short at his creation. Elfriede thinks of her son’s tiny fingernails, like fragments of seashells, and how she used to gaze on them in awe and also fear, unable to understand how such delicate ornamentation could have come from her. From Gerhard and his bear paws.
“Of course I love my husband,” she says.
Dr. Hermann considers. “You say ‘of course,’ Elfriede. Why do you say ‘of course’? Is it necessary for a wife to love her husband?”
“A wife would be a beast if she didn’t love a man such as my husband. She would be unworthy of life.”
Herr Doktor’s hands spring apart. He turns to his notebook, lifts the pen lying in the crease, and writes something down. When he looks up again, his cheeks are even more flushed than before, and the tip of his nose.
“Are you a beast, Elfriede?” he asks. “Are you unworthy of life?”
Elfriede rises from her chair. Because the weather’s blustery, they’re indoors, inside Dr. Hermann’s private office, equipped with comfortable armchairs and a sofa. On the wall opposite Elfriede hangs a painting of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, where the large, baroque houses remind her of Schloss Kleist.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I’m going to get a little air.”
ACTUALLY, THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a little air in a place like this, a monastery arranged on the slope of a mountain so as to be far from mankind and nearer to God. You walked outside and encountered huge mouthfuls of it, you had to gulp to keep pace, to save yourself from drowning, and sometimes there was so much air you turned your back on the wind and made your way along with your shoulders hunched against this onslaught.
Today’s such a day, a day that doesn’t know it’s supposed to be August instead of October. You can actually see the wind as it hurtles between the peaks, dragging along thick shreds of clouds, and you feel it as an ocean current. Cold and forceful it strikes you, sharp and wet at the same time, turning your cheeks and your fingers numb, any skin you dare to lay bare. Elfriede, wearing a thick, belted cardigan but no coat, no jacket of any kind, relishes the hardship. She trudges along the path that leads downward toward the trees, a trail she knows well, every rock, every kink of landscape. The heads of the wildflowers huddle low to shield themselves, like Elfriede herself. The surrounding peaks are invisible inside this mass of howling clouds. No, forget the surrounding peaks, even her own mountain is lost to sight, the slope disappears before her, and she walks on faith alone, curling her fingers inside her sleeves to keep them warm.
Then the first trees flash between the streams of mist. Grow larger, more certain, more plentiful. Elfriede quickens her stride. She reaches the stubby pines at the vanguard, and a hundred or so yards later she’s enveloped by them, like stepping into a cathedral. The wind dies to a breeze. She finds a fallen log and sits in relief. Leans her head back against a thin, hardy trunk. She loves the smell of wood and rot and moss. She closes her eyes and dreams of her baby, whose features are blurred, but whose heart she feels clamoring inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
Though the trees muffle the howling of the gale, the forest is not silent. The branches rustle, the wind whines between the pine needles. Certain of her own solitude, Elfriede doesn’t hear the sound of footsteps as they approach, only the voice that greets her, an instant after she senses the vibration of another human being.
“Frau von Kleist?” a man inquires, in a slight, courteous English accent.
TWO WEEKS HAVE PASSED SINCE Elfriede encountered the Englishman in the infirmary garden. To be precise, sixteen days and a few hours, but who’s counting? Her eyes fly open, she startles upward from the log. She beholds him, a pumpkin-headed skeleton belted into a thick Norfolk jacket, wool trousers, leather gaiters. A hunting cap covers his wide skull, his stubbly ginger hair. There should be a pipe sticking from his mouth, a shotgun nestled in the crook of his elbow to complete the picture, but mercifully no.
“You shouldn’t be out in such weather,” she exclaims.
“Probably not. Yet here I am. You might say the mountains called me. Do you mind awfully if I sit down? Still a bit short-winded, I’m afraid.”
“No, of course not.”
He doesn’t move, just stands there smiling inquisitively, and Elfriede realizes that he won’t sit until she does. A gentleman. So she drops back onto her log. Mr. Thorpe finds a boulder. Beneath the collar of his jacket, he wears a scarf of bulky wool. Elfriede drops her gaze to the ground before her, which is cushioned in old brown pine needles.
“You shouldn’t be out,” she says again.
“Do you know, that’s exactly what the orderly told me.”
“You should have listened to the orderly.”
“Oh, I’m used to this sort of weather. I spent my summers in Scotland, with my mother and her sisters. Frightful, most of the time. Of course, when it was fine, there was no lovelier place in the world. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Smoke?”
He was already drawing a silver case from his jacket pocket. “You’re about to tell me I shouldn’t be smoking, either.”
“But it’s true. You’ve had pneumonia.”
“You’re quite right, of course. I do all sorts of things I shouldn’t do.” He lifts a match, preparing to strike, then lowers it. “I say, you don’t mind, do you? If you object to the smell, I mean.”
“N-no.” Elfriede thinks she should probably have said yes, because tobacco smoke is possibly the last substance on earth that should fill the passages of Mr. Thorpe’s ravaged lungs at the moment, short of poisoned gas. But his pleasure, his anticipation is so obvious, she doesn’t have the heart to deny him. A pattern that will shape all the days they spend together.
“Ah, but you do mind, don’t you? How kind you are. If only I were good enough to return the favor.” He strikes the match and lights the cigarette, and when he’s taken a long draft, eyes shut in pleasure, and exhaled slowly, taking care to release the smoke in the opposite direction from Elfriede, he opens his eyes again and says, “I can’t begin to express my gratitude. First fag in nine weeks. Tell me how to make it up to you.”
“You can stop. You can take care of yourself, so you don’t relapse.”
Mr. Thorpe squints at a point a meter or so to her left. He has the kind of face that suits squinting. Crinkles his expression in a genial way. “I’ve been giving that some thought, actually.”
“I hope so.”
“I mean, my recovery has been altogether too rapid, if you know what I mean. Blessed as I am with my mother’s formidable constitution. Just the other day, they were talking about discharging me.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Well.” He turns back to her, turns the full force of himself upon her blushing cheeks. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think there can be any question. Of course you must get better.”
“But leave? Aye, there’s the rub.”
“Don’t you want to leave? To return to Vienna and your amusing life there?”
He sits there smoking, and his refusal to answer is answer enough. Just like her husband, who fell in love with her at a stroke—fell in love, at any rate, with her flaxen hair and celestial eyes, her round and childlike face, her expression of dreamy otherworldliness. Imagined she represented some kind of ideal, and was horrified to discover the reality.
“I’m not what you think,” she says.
“How do you know what I think?”
“Besides, I’m married. I’m married and I have a baby, a son, three years old.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you. Haven’t you already told me these facts? Believe me, I know them well. Except the age of your son, bless him. Three years old! He must be a sturdy little man by now.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “They won’t let me see him. I have been living here for two—two years—”
“Oh, my dear girl.”
Mr. Thorpe crushes out his half-finished cigarette on the boulder. Elfriede hides her face and doesn’t see him rise to his feet and cross the carpet of pine needles between them. When he stops at the log and sits beside her, she feels the warmth of his body underneath the wool.
“Don’t they send photographs?” he says. “Your people?”
“Herr Doktor forbids it. He says it will bring about a nervous relapse.”
“Herr Doktor?”
“Herr Doktor Hermann. My analyst. He’s well versed in the latest—the latest methods for disorders—like mine.” Elfriede struggles to keep her composure, to speak rationally through the web of fingers covering her face.
“You’ll forgive me, but Herr Doktor’s methods strike me as a trifle barbaric.”
Elfriede’s so astonished, she lifts her face away from her hands and meets Mr. Thorpe’s plain, large gaze directly. His freckles. His eyes, a startling blue. “But he’s a doctor!” she gasps.
“What does that mean? He’s got a paper of some kind, a degree in some scientific subject, which will probably prove entirely obsolete in a decade or so. Any fool would call that barbaric, to keep a mother away from her child. Not even a photograph!”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Know about what? Your breakdown, as you call it?”
“I’m unnatural,” she says. “An unnatural mother.”
“Well, what the devil does that mean? You seem natural enough to me.”
“I’m not, believe me.”
By way of reply, Mr. Thorpe fixes her with an expression so compassionate, she has to look away. But looking away is not enough. The compassion remains in the air, on her skin, seeping into her flesh, inescapable. She stares at his shoulder and her heart crashes. Fear, or attraction? Are they perhaps the same thing?
“I went mad after he was born,” she says. “An extreme form of nervous melancholy. It’s a particular malady and one of Herr Doktor Hermann’s special fields of interest.”
“This Hermann fellow—have I met him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s in the psychiatric section.”
“The loony bin, you mean?”
Elfriede refuses to laugh. Instead she examines the collar of his jacket. The woolen scarf tucked inside, protecting his neck and chest from the damp, cold air. She whispers, “You should be disgusted. You should be appalled.”
“I’m just waiting to hear the rest of the story.”
“There is no rest of the story.”
“Rubbish. Of course there is. Lots of new mothers have a spell of the blue devils after their babies are born. My cousin spent a rough few weeks, as I remember. By God, I don’t blame them. I should imagine the whole affair’s rather a shock to the system, and then you’ve got this child to take care of, this mysterious little being keeping you up all hours and so on.”
“Not like this. I couldn’t—I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t—it was like a shroud settled on me. I thought I was going mad. I should have been joyful, I should have been grateful. I had a rich, loving husband. I had a beautiful baby. Everything for me was perfect. But I felt miserable and terrified. I felt shadowed by doom. I can’t even describe how black it all was. I looked at his face, his little squashed face, and he was a stranger. I thought, I don’t love you, I don’t even know you, who are you?”
“Poor Elfriede … my poor girl … and nobody understood …”
Now Elfriede raises her head to Mr. Thorpe’s kindly, bony face. She defies his kindness. She defies this compassion of his. She defies his freckles and his pale, gingery eyebrows.
“I tried to kill myself.” (She flings the words at his long eyelashes.) “I thought I should kill myself, because I was no use to my baby at all. I was a terrible mother. I was poisoning him with my own bitter milk. I thought I should kill myself before I killed my own baby.”
Mr. Thorpe doesn’t reply. Not in words, anyway. He lifts his arms and puts them around her. Her defiance crumbles. She leans into his ribs, into his shrunken chest, and shudders out a barrage of tears into the left-hand pocket of the Norfolk jacket, the one covering his heart. A shooting jacket, designed to withstand far more serious attacks than this one, thank goodness. His thumbs move against her back. He doesn’t speak. She smells wet wool, and the particular scent she caught two weeks earlier, in the infirmary garden, soap and the salt of human skin. Mr. Thorpe’s skin. Eventually she turns her face to the side and speaks again.
“I spent a month in hospital, and then they sent me home. Everybody pretended nothing had happened, that I had caught a bad cold or something. Except they wouldn’t leave me alone with the baby. My milk had dried up. Everybody was so polite and cold.” She pauses, considers, forges on brazenly. “And my husband—Gerhard—I wouldn’t—I was afraid of having any more babies—”
“Dear me. Poor Gerhard. So they sent you here to recover your senses.”
“Yes.”
“When are you supposed to go back home?”
“When I’m cured,” she says. “When Herr Doktor Hermann decides I’m well enough.”
“Ah, this Hermann again. You know, I’m loath to point fingers at another man, but it seems to me that he’s had two years to cure you. Two years, and you’re clearly in your proper senses, no danger to anybody. Only a lingering sense of guilt, which a loving family ought to be able to conquer.”
“Maybe it’s better if I don’t go back. Maybe my son—my little Johann—I’m a stranger to him—”
“Is that what this Hermann chap’s been telling you?”
“No. He doesn’t tell me things. He only asks questions, for the most part.”
Mr. Thorpe makes a noise that Elfriede will one day recognize as coming from the Scotch side of him. She remains in his arms, laid comfortably against his chest, shielded from his sharp, skinny bones by the woolen jacket. She doesn’t want to move. Has no ability, even, to stir from this place of refuge. His jacket, her Cloth of Tears.
“Anyway, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she says.
“Who doesn’t? Your son?”
“My husband.”
“Did he say that? Did he say he doesn’t love you?”
“No, but I saw it in his face, after I came back from the hospital. I was alien to him. He thought he’d married an angel, and as it turned out …”
“Speaking from the male perspective,” Mr. Thorpe says slowly, “of which I naturally consider myself something of an expert. Perhaps it was something else?”
“No. No. A woman can tell. A woman can tell when a man doesn’t love her.”
“Well—and I’m only speculating, mind you—a man whose wife—how do I put this? A man whose beautiful wife no longer allows him the singular privilege for which he married her—”
Elfriede starts to draw away. But Mr. Thorpe makes a little squeeze of his arms, not to keep her there, not so firm as that, but to let her know she’s welcome to stay, if she likes. So she pauses, no longer pressed against his chest, but close.
“It’s possible, you see, that he thought you didn’t love him. And a chap who believes he’s lost the love of a woman—forgive me—a woman such as you—well, I daresay it might ruin him.” Mr. Thorpe pauses. “That’s only conjecture, mind you. I haven’t met the lucky Herr von Kleist.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Another slight squeeze. Elfriede capitulates. The lure of comfort is too much for her. Warm human contact. Warm human arms, warm human chest. Things for which she’s starved. A famine of touch.
“Thank you for your music,” Wilfred says. “I was afraid you’d stop.”
“I wasn’t sure whether I should. I didn’t want to keep you awake.”
“Keep me awake? Kept me alive, I think.”
“Oh!”
“So why did you? Keep playing, I mean.”
“Because I … well, I …” She shouldn’t say the words, but she must. She might conceal her true thoughts from the doctor, but she can’t conceal them from Wilfred. Oh, his actual heart, thudding under her ear! She whispers, “Because I thought you might be listening.”
“Damn it all,” he says softly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just hellish fate, that’s all.”
Elfriede says, “Tell me about this girl of yours.”
“Girl? Girl? I’m afraid I don’t know any other girls.”
“You told me there was a girl.”
There is a sigh from inside that ravaged chest, far more sigh than Elfriede might have imagined possible. It ends in a cough. Not a bad one. Not the cough of two weeks ago.
“Right. Her. Well, you know, she’s quite the opposite of you. Older and rather cosmopolitan. Divorcée of a well-known composer, I won’t say whom. Just the sort of woman to render a callow youth—an ugly, awkward fellow such as myself—dizzy with ecstasy.”
“And did she?”
“Yes.”
“Pardon me,” says Elfriede, smiling a little, “but you don’t sound ecstatic.”
“That’s because …”
“Because?”
“Because I shall have to go back to her shortly, I suppose. And the prospect is not what it once was. Don’t ask why.”
“Why?”
That noise again. “Let’s just sit here a moment longer, shall we? I daresay we’re not doing anybody any harm, just sitting here.”
“No.”
“I’m a man of honor.”
“Yes.”
“Unlike, I suspect, that blackguard Hermann.”
“Let’s not talk,” she says.
“An ugly, awkward chap like me. Emaciated with fever. Head like a pumpkin—why are you laughing?”
“That’s exactly what I thought, when I first saw you. Your head like a pumpkin.”
“Ah, well. At least a fellow knows where he stands.”
Elfriede stares at the trees opposite. The dark woods beyond. The wind whining quietly between the pine needles. “I love your pumpkin head.”
“But you hardly know my head.”
“You hardly know mine. Does it matter?”
Wilfred moves a little, turning his back to the tree as she had, settling them both more comfortably.
“No,” he says.
LULU (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_1601cc42-16f4-59d6-aa3c-555657d330ed)
ON SATURDAY EVENING, I walked to Government House in my best summer dress of blueberry organza and a pair of tall peep-toe shoes that would have fared much better in a taxi, if I could have spared the dough. It wasn’t the distance; it was the stairs. Government House, as I said, sat at the top of George Street, aboard its very own hill, in order to ensure (or so it seemed to me, at the time) that the ordinary pedestrian arrived flushed and breathless for his appointment with the governor.
Still. As I passed Columbus on his pedestal and climbed the steps toward the familiar neoclassical facade of pink stucco—heavens, what a perfect representation of the Bahamian ideal—I had to admit to a certain human curiosity. Like everybody else, I knew Government House from the outside, as a passerby, an acquaintance. I hadn’t the least idea what lay inside. Now its portico expanded before me, all pink and white, Roman columns and tropical shutters, windows aglow, music and voices, a thing of welcome, alive. I paused at the top of the steps to pat my hair, to adjust my necklace of imitation pearls, to gather my composure while the noise of an engine clamored in my ears, and an enormous automobile roared beneath the pediment and slammed to a halt exactly at the front door. As I watched, too rapt to move, a stumpy man in a plain, poorly cut suit popped from the back seat and patted his pockets.
Now, in the many years since I inhabited the Bahamas, I’ve come to understand that memory is a capricious friend, and never more unreliable than when we trust it absolutely. But I’ll swear on any Bible you like that I identified Sir Harry Oakes right there on the portico of Government House that evening with photographic precision. I remember the sense of awe I felt as I said to myself, Why, that’s Harry Oakes. Maybe it was the car, or the confident electricity that inevitably surrounds the richest man in the British Empire. He had struck gold in Canada or someplace, after years and years of prospecting, one of the biggest strikes ever made, and now he lived here in the Bahamas, because of taxes. I guess he figured he had already paid his dues, like that Swedish fellow.
The car roared off. I slowed my steps to hang back, conscious that I had no companion, no escort, no friend of any kind. I was alone, as usual, and when you’re alone you must time your entrance carefully, you must carry yourself a certain way, you must manage every detail so nobody suspects your weakness. A fellow in a uniform stood just outside the door, exchanging words with Oakes, who continued to pat his pockets in that absentminded way, while I crossed the drive at a measured pace, presenting my hips just so. As I reached the portico, I heard an oath. It was delivered, needless to say, in a plain, rough, American kind of voice, and I froze, a few yards away. I’d heard he was a flinty fellow, Sir Harry Oakes, that he had a hot temper and small patience—no wonder he’d married late in life, when he was already rich—and here’s what I’d learned about men of temperament: stay the hell away, if you can help it.
But Oakes spun around and spotted me. In the course of patting his pockets, he’d discovered the same card I carried in my hand. He brandished it now. “In the gardens!” he bellowed. “The goddamn west entrance!”
“The west entrance?”
“Follow me.”
He stumped off—there’s no other way to describe it, as if he wore an invisible pair of iron boots—and I scrambled after him, because when the richest man in the British Empire tells you to follow him, you take your chances and follow, temperament be damned.
“Leonora Randolph,” I ventured, when I reached his shoulder.
He stopped and spun again. He couldn’t seem to turn like an ordinary man, but then he wasn’t ordinary, was he? He stuck out his hand. “Oakes,” he said, because of course there needed no further introduction.
I took the hand and shook it briskly. “I figured.”
Well, he laughed at that. We resumed walking, at a more amicable pace, and Oakes said, “Where do you come from, Miss Randolph?”
“Mrs. Randolph. I’m from New York City, mostly. I came down to Nassau a few weeks ago for a change of pace.”
“Change of pace, eh? I guess you’ve got your money’s worth.”
“I’ll say.”
“Your husband come with you?”
“My husband’s dead, Sir Harry.”
“I see.”—stomp, stomp—“Awfully sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a louse.”
“A louse, eh? The lazy kind, or the drinking kind?”
“Take your pick.”
“Did he beat you?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say beat.”
Oakes grunted. “Good riddance to the bastard, then. Why Nassau?”
“Why not Nassau?”
“The heat, for one thing. It’s goddamn July. My wife and kids left for Bar Harbor two months ago.”
“I don’t mind the heat at all, Sir Harry. Heaven knows it’s better than the cold.”
We had turned the corner of the mansion by now, and proceeded down a path that led, presumably, to the gardens at the rear. The music and chatter grew louder through the quicksand of warmth, the scent of blossom, the splay of palm fronds. Oakes raised his voice to bark, “Cold? Cold? A New York City winter’s nothing to the goddamn Yukon, believe me!”
“Well, I’ll take the tropics over either of them, any day. Even in July.”
“And I say you’re nuts. Nobody’s here! Just the locals and the riffraff. Like me!” He rapped his thigh with his invitation card and laughed.
“And Their Royal Highnesses.”
“They wouldn’t be here either, if they could help it. Here we are.”
We had reached an iron gate, where a sturdy, immaculate fellow wore his white uniform and white gloves bravely. He greeted Oakes by name. Oakes snatched my invitation card right from my fingers and thrust both of them, his and mine, toward this gatekeeper. “There you go, Marshall. This is Mrs. Randolph, just off the boat from New York.”
“The airliner, actually,” I said.
“The airliner. That new Pan American service from Miami, I’ll bet.”
“That’s the one.”
“Not afraid of flying, either. Good girl. Mrs. Randolph, this gentleman is George Marshall, butler at Government House. He’s the fellow who runs just about everything. Isn’t that right, Marshall?”
Marshall glanced down at my invitation card, glanced back up at me. I felt a cool inspection pass across my skin and my dress of blueberry organza, not unpleasant. “Good evening, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Welcome to Government House.”
“Good evening, Mr. Marshall. Delighted, I’m sure.”
“How’s the rum punch in there?” said Oakes.
“I mixed it myself an hour ago, sir.”
“Good, good. The duke?”
“Their Royal Highnesses are still receiving by the goldfish pond, I believe.”
Oakes took my elbow. “Come along, Mrs. Randolph. Might as well go in with reinforcements, I always say.”
Together we walked through the gate, toward the crackle of human noise. By the sound of things, the party was already in full swing. Against the twilight, the flares of perhaps a dozen or more lanterns flickered opulently, illuminating the garden in patches of gold, illuminating spiky palmettos and white jasmine and pink bougainvillea, illuminating people and more people, drinking and smoking and laughing. I turned my head to Oakes. “I thought you said nobody was here, except locals and riffraff.”
“Those are the locals, Mrs. Randolph. Conchie Joes, we call ’em. Merchants on Bay Street and their plump little wives. You’ll get to know their faces, believe me. The pond’s this way.”
I allowed him to lead me down the path, toward a cluster of lanterns that had attracted—like mosquitoes, I thought—several people dressed in bright colors, next to a rock-lined pool. Oakes was grumbling to himself. I asked him if something was wrong.
“Receiving lines,” he said. “Can’t stand ’em.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t notice if you just slipped past.”
“Their Royal Highnesses,” he muttered. “Nothing royal about her. You know that, don’t you?”
I turned my head toward the man before me, the richest man in the British Empire. A dazzling fact, if you paused to consider it, but of course you couldn’t pause in the middle of a cocktail party and consider the pounds, shillings, and pence that belonged to the fellow walking at your elbow. You just gazed in pity at his thinning hair, his frown in profile, and said gently, “I do. I also know it’s wiser just to go along with things.”
He didn’t reply. I liked his face, his kind eyes and his even, sturdy, jowly features. Possibly I only imagined the ruggedness that clung to his skin, the hint of rock and earth, because I knew this about him. Or perhaps, when you spend half your life prospecting in the wilderness, no amount of Bahamas sunshine can burn away the scent of frontier.
As we drew closer, the cluster of people moved away, revealing a pair of familiar, ravishing figures, exactly the same height, one dark-haired and one fair. A half-dozen lanterns hung from the nearby palms. The light created a nimbus around them. What a show, I thought. What a goddamned brilliant show they put on. You almost wanted to applaud.
Oakes turned to me and said, “You know, you oughta meet my daughter Nancy. You’d like her.”
“Would I?”
“She could use someone like you, a few years older. Take her under your wing.”
I smiled. “Hasn’t she got a perfectly good mother?”
“Sure, she does. But girls that age.” He shook his head, and that was all, because we had reached the goldfish pond and the duchess and the duke, laughing warmly with a short, perspiring man who had materialized from nowhere. The duchess’s head turned in my direction. She wore a dress of pale blue silk and an expression of brief, unguarded discontent, and a shock ran down my limbs because I thought perhaps someone had made a terrible mistake—God knew what, maybe that invitation hadn’t been meant for me after all. But the duchess’s frown smoothed away as I reached her. Oh, the duchess. It’s a funny thing, when you encounter a face like that, a face you’ve seen frozen in a hundred two-dimensional photographs, and here it is before you, looking at you, alive. Those pungent blue eyes, that coronet of dark hair. That skin stretched over her cheeks and jaw, now endowed with breadth and depth and texture. Around her neck, a staggering circle of diamonds and rubies set off the blue of her eyes and her dress. How patriotic of her. She took my hand between two of hers and shook it firmly.
“My dear Mrs. Randolph! And Sir Harry. I see you’ve met our new recruit.”
“Recruit?” he demanded.
“The Red Cross. Mrs. Randolph’s volunteered her services.”
“The Red Cross? What the devil for? You don’t strike me as a Red Cross kind of gal.”
“Just doing my bit,” I said.
“But you’re American. You’ve got no part in this damned war.”
“Now, Sir Harry,” said the duchess, “the Red Cross has nothing to do with taking sides. We are a humanitarian organization.”
Well, Oakes rolled his eyes at this—as well he might—and stumped a few paces to the right, where he greeted the duke with about as much ceremony as he’d greeted the duke’s wife. Stuck his hand out and grunted something. The duchess and I exchanged weary little smiles, almost intimate. A fellow like that can bind two females instantly. A pair of diamond and ruby earrings clung to her earlobes, matching the necklace. I thought she glanced down to assess the imitation pearls around my collar, but maybe that was my imagination.
“I’m so terribly sorry to be late,” I said. “I didn’t realize about the entrance.”
“Not at all. I haven’t anyone left to greet, thank goodness, so we can get to know each other a bit.” She slipped her arm around mine. She smelled of face powder and perfume, and her arm was like her hand, bony and purposeful. “Don’t you look charming in that dress.”
I might have stuttered, so great was my amazement. “Why—well—this old thing?”
“Of course, you’ve got the kind of figure that suits any dress, you lucky duck. Now, stick with me. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
“Meet me? I can’t imagine whom.”
She laughed. “David! David!”
Her husband stood a few feet away, dressed in a pale suit, speaking to the other man and to Oakes, who had turned toward them both. The duke’s head snapped in her direction. For an instant, his eyes bugged in a terrified way. The lanterns poured gold on the duke’s waving hair, his shocked, twitching, haggard face. Next to him, Oakes and the other fellow more or less disappeared—not physically, of course, but rendered invisible by the halo of glamour. “Yes, dear?” the duke asked, pitched anxiously toward his wife, not registering my presence in the slightest degree.
“David, it’s Mrs. Randolph at last.”
“Mrs. Randolph?”
“Yes, Mrs. Randolph. You remember, don’t you?” She grasped my elbow. “Mrs. Randolph, David. The girl I’ve been speaking about.”
“Oh! Oh, yes. Of course.” He held out his hand to me, and although he’d turned in my direction and fixed his gaze politely on my face, I thought his eyes were unfocused, that he wasn’t really looking at me. Not past me, mind you, the way some people do, searching out someone of greater interest, but the opposite direction. Inward, toward himself. “Duke of Windsor,” he said, pronouncing the word duke like an American, dook.
I made a slight curtsy. “Your Royal Highness. Leonora Randolph. I’m honored to—”
“Charmed, of course.” He dropped my hand—he had a grip that wasn’t so much limp as motionless, without life—and turned to the duchess. “Have you seen Thorpe about?”
“Not since he arrived.”
“Oh, damn.” The duke cast his nervous eyes about the palms and the shadows. “Neither have I.”
“Is something the matter?” she asked, but the duke was already bolting off. I suppose I stared after him, at least until his bright figure disappeared into the tangle of darker ones. I remember a feeling of disbelief—had I, or had I not, just met the former king of England, and did it matter if he hadn’t actually perceived my existence?—and then the tug of the duchess’s hand on my elbow.
“Mrs. Randolph, do you know Mr. Christie?” she said.
“I’m afraid not.” I held out my hand to the other man, who was plain and balding, thick-necked, green-eyed. His temples gleamed with perspiration. He was shorter even than Oakes, and next to Sir Harry’s bull shoulders, looked as slight as a lamb. “Leonora Randolph,” I said.
The man took my hand and smiled. “Harold Christie. Pleasure.”
His palm was damp. I extracted my fingers and said the pleasure was all mine. “I’ve already heard so many interesting things about you, Mr. Christie.”
“Ah.” He cast a glance to the duchess—nervous or modest, I couldn’t tell. “I hope—I hope—good things.”
“Aren’t you practically a one-man Bahamas development office? So they tell me.”
“Oh, it’s quite true,” said the duchess. “Mr. Christie’s done so much to improve the colony.”
Back and forth glanced Mr. Christie. “That’s too kind. I love the Bahamas, that’s all. Only doing what I can for them.”
“How awfully good of you,” I said.
“Turns a nice penny, too, from time to time,” said Oakes. “Isn’t that right, Christie? Turned a few of those pennies on my account.”
“From which your account profited considerably, I believe.”
“Don’t stop you borrowing a fortune from me, either. Eh, Christie? That Lyford Cay scheme of yours?”
“You’ll be begging me for a plot of your own there, when it’s finished.”
Oakes turned to me. “Wasteland. Wasteland all the way on the other end of the island, miles from town. If I could pull my money out of that one, I would. I must’ve been drunk when you asked me, Christie.”
Christie smiled. “Now, old fellow, I’m sure the ladies don’t wish to listen to our business talk.”
“On the contrary—”
“Tell me, what brings you here to our little paradise, Mrs. Randolph? Our oasis from this mad world? I certainly hope you mean to make a lengthy visit.”
“Careful,” said Oakes. “He’ll ply you with booze and get you investing in his damned schemes.”
As coincidence would have it, a waiter approached us right that second, bearing a tray on which a few champagne coupes glistened in the light of the lanterns. I reached out and snatched one by the stem. “How opulent. I haven’t seen champagne since I left New York. Poor old France and all.”
“We contrived to pack along a few bottles, when we left Paris in such a hurry,” said the duchess, plucking a stem, smiling softly, so I couldn’t help imagining a crew of stevedores unloading crate after crate at Prince George’s wharf, while a flush-faced supervisor begged them to take care.
I raised my glass. “We’re ever so grateful you found the time.”
Naturally, the champagne was sublime. I knew precious little about wine, but I knew that the Windsors ate and drank and wore only the best, and I imagined, if they smuggled champagne out of France as the Germans closed in, the champagne would be the finest vintage fizz that credit could buy.
“To victory,” said Mr. Christie. “May it arrive swiftly.”
I remember thinking, as I clicked my glass against that of Harold Christie, that he didn’t seem like much of a warrior.
BY THE TIME THE DUKE reappeared, I’d almost forgotten he existed to begin with. You know how it is during a party, how the minutes turn liquid and run into each other, how the words and faces form a separate universe in which you rotate endlessly on your axis, North Pole and South Pole tilted just so. Afterward, you never can remember the exact chronology, who said what, where and when it all occurred. And how.
Up he popped, anyway, just as the duchess was introducing me to two of her guests, a straw-haired mother and her teenage daughter. He jumped midsentence in front of the duchess’s attention, the way a tennis player lunges for a ball, slicing neatly between us. A thick piece of hair had fallen from the shield atop his head. He pushed it back and said, “Darling, I can’t seem to find him!”
“Who?”
“Thorpe, darling. Thorpe.”
“Yes? Where is he?”
“That’s the trouble. I’ve looked all over.”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to start things off without him,” said the duchess. “David, darling, will you please get everyone’s attention?”
David—I beg your pardon, the Duke of Windsor—cast about for something or other, his long-abandoned cocktail glass perhaps, because he wound up snatching my champagne coupe and striking it forcefully with the manicured nail of his index finger. When that produced no discernible sound, he shoved it back to me and clapped his hands. “Good evening!” he called. “Good evening, all!”
At the sound of his voice, the din of voices went absolutely silent. The strangest thing, that instant silence, as if everybody had been waiting for this signal, even the birds, as if nothing else in the world held the slightest interest. Several dozen faces turned toward us, none of them quite sober. The duke smiled, and what a dazzling smile it was. Red-lipped and toothsome. He’d practiced it all his life.
“Good evening, my dear friends. We’re so—ah, my wife and I, we’re delighted to have so many of you gathered here tonight in our humble abode”—here he paused expertly for a ripple of chuckles—“in service of, really, an absolutely tremendous cause. I am just absolutely speechless with pride at all the great work my wife has done as president of the Red Cross chapter here in the Bahamas, which we couldn’t possibly accomplish without your generous support. But my wife, I believe, has more to tell you about all that. Darling? Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor.”
Nobody chuckled, nobody gave the least sign of knowing that the Duchess of Windsor was not, in fact, royal: by express decree of those who were. Certainly not Wallis herself. She painted on a thin, beautiful smile and stepped to her husband’s side. For the first time, I noticed that she wore a jeweled brooch pinned to her breast, the same brooch as in the photograph in Life magazine, and what do you know? It was a flamingo. She waved her ring-crusted hand. “Hello, everybody!”
Everybody murmured Hello!
“As David said. Thank you all for gathering here with us tonight. In a few minutes I’ll be coming round, cap outstretched, along with—I hope, anyway—someone who seems to have gone … oh, there he is!” Her face transformed, so that I realized she hadn’t really been smiling before, and now she was. She looked over my right shoulder, where a cluster of palms bordered the rock garden. “Mr. Thorpe! Where have you been hiding? Mr. Benedict Thorpe, ladies and gentlemen, a dear friend of mine and David’s, a scientist of international repute and a true patriot of our British Empire.”
She began to clap, and the crowd, shifting and straining to catch a glimpse of this true British patriot, burst into applause. Though I kept my gaze trained on the duchess—what a show she was, after all—I clapped along. I mean, it would have been rude otherwise, wouldn’t it? A scientist of international repute. I confess, I wasn’t that interested in science, at the time, but I could appreciate the affinity in others. Science was the future, after all. Everybody said so.
“Mr. Thorpe—hello, everybody!—Mr. Thorpe’s agreed to help me collect donations for the Red Cross tonight, a cause close to both our hearts, isn’t that right, Thorpe? In fact, it’s Mr. Thorpe’s own hat we’re going to pass around, so don’t be niggardly!” She paused for laughter. She still hadn’t taken her eyes from that patch of garden from which this Thorpe had emerged. I felt a stir of curiosity—or maybe even premonition, who knows—and turned my head at last to catch a glimpse. A palmetto spread its fronds between us, blocking my view. Before me, the duchess waved her hand. “Step up, Thorpus. Don’t be shy!”
The crowd stirred, making way. I turned and stepped back with everyone else. A pair of shoulders swept past. In the slight draft of his passing, I smelled not the tang of cigarettes or cocktails or perspiration—those were endemic—but a soap of some kind, or else cologne, hair oil, whatever it was, and I believe I made a gasp of recognition. There was applause, delighted voices. The fellow stepped to the duchess’s side and swept off his hat—he wore a towering silk topper for the occasion—to reveal that hair, short, glistening, ruddy-blond, and I covered my mouth with my hand. His spectacles were just slightly crooked.
He beamed across the crowd, left to right, and to my great relief his gaze passed right over me, though I stood in front, next to the duke. My cheeks ached, and I realized I was smiling back, even though he wasn’t looking in my direction. Thorpe, I thought. He had a name. Thorpe.
“Right ho, chaps,” he said. “Ladies. Let’s make this quick and painless, shall we? Empty your pockets, so I don’t have to go round the room again with my pistol.”
BEFORE THE COLLECTION PARTY PASSED by, I slipped between guests and up the path toward the governor’s residence. I don’t believe I started out with any conscious intent. A breath of air, that’s what I murmured as I sidled my way through the crowd, and this was true enough. Certainly I wanted air, and once free of the smokiness and perspiration of the party, I found air in abundance. I also saw a pair of French doors standing open to the evening air, allowing a glimpse of a hallway, and not a footman in sight.
Now, it wasn’t as if I meant any harm. I had just sipped champagne with the duchess, I even felt a stir of liking for her, a warmth I hadn’t expected. When somebody pays you compliments, pays you the favor of her attention and interest, you can’t help but think she must be a person of great taste and discernment. I meant no disrespect toward either of them, duke or duchess; or their privacy. There was only curiosity, and the desire to escape, and a certain surge of audacity that visits me from time to time, and also the possibility—duchesses could be fickle, after all—that I might never again have the opportunity to enter this building and see its rooms for myself. Which, in retrospect, is just the sort of logic that lands a girl in trouble, in love affairs as in houses that don’t belong to her.
Thus the inevitable. Instead of soothing my lungs and returning to the party or else to my own little room at the Prince George, snug and sound, I continued down that hall, the entire width of Government House, until I arrived at the door on the opposite side. I made no hesitation whatsoever. Hesitation’s fatal, my father always told me, when he could be bothered to speak to me at all; deliberate all you like upon a course of action, but once you’ve made your decision, don’t for God’s sake waver. I laid my hand on the doorknob and opened it to find some sort of library. The duke’s own study, perhaps. There was a desk and a fireplace, hissing the last remains of a good solid fire. The furniture was up-to-date, the upholstery fresh. I felt the duchess’s taste hanging in the air, coating every surface, every detail, every Union Jack pillow, every club chair. Even in her absence, she possessed a magnificent presence.
Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.
I made a progress along the walls, examining each picture as one might examine the contents of an art gallery or a museum. I daresay I imagined I might discover some clue to the essential mystery of them—the Windsors, I mean—this exquisitely dressed pair of sybaritic bigots who had the power to fascinate millions, even those who weren’t the slightest bit interested in fashion or luxury or jewelry or parties. This painting: Had the duchess chosen it for its form and its meaning or because the colors married so perfectly with the upholstery on her new sofa? I dragged my hand along the back of the sofa and made my way to the desk, orderly, untroubled by paperwork, adorned by photographs of Wallis. I had this idea—I remember it clearly—that if I opened any of the drawers in this desk, I would find them empty. I actually saw myself opening those drawers, as in a dream; I saw their emptiness. This fine, polished, beautifully proportioned desk, made of empty drawers. I curled my fingers around a brass handle. I don’t believe I meant to pull it. Even if I had, the voice would have stopped me.
“My dear Mrs. Randolph. Are you looking for something?”
I spun to the door—not the one leading to the main hallway, but the door on the opposite side of the room, toward the back of the house, where the duchess stood in her beautiful blue gown with the jeweled flamingo on her breast. She was smiling.
“I—I seem to have taken a wrong turn,” I said.
She moved forward. “It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? I had it redecorated. I had the whole place redecorated. It was a dump when we arrived.”
“So I heard.”
“Shabby and leaky and everything. Uninhabitable, really.”
“You’ve done wonders. It looks just terrific.”
The duchess paused at the corner of the desk, the opposite diagonal, and rested her fingers on the edge. “It’s not what he’s used to, of course. I did my best, but he ought to live in a palace, he ought to be doing something bigger. That’s what he’s used to. What he was raised for. Instead …”
I didn’t know what to say. I had the feeling this was a test of some kind, and my answer would determine the course of my future association with the Windsors, or whether we had any association at all. Would determine the course of my existence altogether. The initial shock had passed, thank God. My face had begun to cool. I flexed my fingers, I drew in a long, steady breath and exhaled it slowly.
“You’re both doing such a terrific job,” I said. “Your talents are wasted in a place like this.”
“How kind.”
“Really, though. The Red Cross. It’s such a smashing success. All those women, working so hard. Only you could raise all that money, organize everything so perfectly—”
The duchess laughed and turned her head. “Would you care for a drink, Mrs. Randolph? David keeps a few bottles handy in here. He’s forbidden to start drinking before seven, but once the clock strikes, why …”
“No, thank you.”
But she was already moving away, already opening the door to a cabinet of gleaming wood, the kind of cabinet you thought must hold important papers and that kind of thing, but actually contained about a dozen various bottles of liquor, several glasses, a siphon, a bucket.
“There’s no ice, I’m afraid,” she said, “but you don’t mind that, do you?”
“No.”
“Brandy? I like a glass of brandy in the evenings.”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” She turned to me. “You certainly look as if you could use a drink.”
“I like to keep my wits about me.”
“I see.” She closed the cabinet door. She stood about fifteen or twenty feet away, about as elegant as a woman could possibly look, but then she had the kind of figure that sets off clothes to their best advantage. Long and angular, lean to the point of nonexistence; not exactly attractive by itself, but irresistible as a foil to what covered those bones, that flesh. Like all Southern ladies, she moved gracefully, shaping the air as she went. Her thin, tight, scarlet smile contained electricity. “Now, don’t be afraid,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Most people are. But I don’t bite.”
“If you did, I’d bite back.”
The duchess laughed. “You brave thing. That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say.”
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it.”
She gestured to the window seat. “Can we sit a moment? I have a question for you, Mrs. Randolph. A proposition.”
I hesitated only long enough to catch my breath. “Of course.”
We sat. The window faced north, toward the twinkling of lights that rimmed the shore and the sudden blackness of the ocean. The stars were invisible. I smelled the duchess’s perfume, her cigarettes. Around us lay that beautiful, masculine room of wood and photographs and, beyond that, the faint music from the party in the garden. I folded my hands in my lap and said again how lovely the place looked.
“Naturally the papers had nothing but bad things to say,” she told me. “How extravagant I was. How out of touch with the common man. Never mind that the house—Government House, don’t forget, the very seat and symbol of government, of the British Empire—was riddled with mildew and falling apart. Anyway, we paid for a great deal of the redecoration out of our own pockets. A great deal.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Of course you hadn’t. They’re all against me. I’m sure you read about our little tour this fall, how many pieces of luggage went along with us.”
“I can’t remember the number,” I said modestly.
“A hundred and forty-six, they said, which wasn’t remotely true, it was no more than seventy-three, and anyway it wasn’t just ours. It belonged to our entourage as well. Our private secretary, Miss Drewes, and Major Phillips—that’s David’s aide-de-camp—and so on. But each and every story they print has to conform to this—this idea they have about me. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that is. And it’s all very frustrating. One can’t answer back. One can try, of course, but that only makes one sound petulant.”
“The duchess doth protest too much.”
“Exactly. I see you understand the business, Mrs. Randolph.”
“What business?”
“Journalism.” Her smile took on a feline quality. “You’re a journalist yourself, aren’t you?”
I sort of choked. “Journalist?”
“Yes. Metropolitan magazine, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. That is, no. That is, the magazine sent me out here to gather a little background information—”
“Now, Mrs. Randolph—”
“—I’ve never written a word for them. Not a word.” I paused. “How did you know about that?”
“Oh, I hear things. It’s my business to hear things. Not for myself, you understand, but for David’s sake. All these stories in the press, these terrible things they print, it upsets him so much. I try to protect him, of course, but it’s impossible. He will read them all.”
I started to rise, and then remembered you weren’t supposed to stand except with permission, and then remembered I was American, after all, not subject to such rules. I rose. I nearly said Mrs. Simpson and caught myself just in time. “Ma’am,” I said instead, “I can’t imagine why you’re telling me all this.”
“Oh, I understand, believe me,” she said. “You’ve got a job to do. A girl’s got to make her way in the world. I also suspect there was no Mr. Randolph. Am I correct?”
There was a noise through the window, a spray of brilliant laughter. The duchess gave no sign of hearing it, not a flinch.
“Oh, the husband’s real enough,” I said. “At least, he was real. But even a dead husband gives a girl on her own a bit more respectability.”
“Of course. A girl like you, for example, a girl with no one to stand up for her. I understand completely. You haven’t got a fortune. Just an allowance of some kind, I presume?” She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes intelligently. “Or not even that?”
“I’m afraid that’s none of—”
“Mrs. Randolph.” She rose to meet me. “What if you were to become a journalist?”
“Become a journalist?”
“A column of your very own, weekly or monthly, whatever suits. Syndicated in all the papers, or exclusive to Metropolitan, as you like.”
“What kind of column?”
“Why, reporting from Nassau, from the middle of society, all our busy little doings here. Intriguing tidbits. The kind of details that only an intimate friend of the Windsors might know. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America?”
The exact shade of her eyes was so particular, so remarkable, a plush, vivid lavender, they had a name for it: Wallis blue. Her wedding dress, I’m told, matched that shade exactly. And I don’t blame her. Those eyes, they held you in thrall, especially when she wanted them to. When she channeled the full force of her charm through them and into you. On that July day, the duchess was as much a mystery to me as to everyone else who wasn’t married to her, and maybe even—maybe especially—to the fellow who was. I perhaps thought her morals a little wanting, her ethics a little thin, her mind a little shallow, her clothing a little fabulous and perhaps the most interesting thing about her. As for me, I was a pedigree twenty-five-year-old feline, blessed with a sleek, dark pelt and composure in spades, polished to a sheen by decent schooling and a little over a year of college, followed by a swift, brutal tutorial in the outside world to harden the skin beneath. I thought I was plenty of match for a woman like that, the Duchess of Windsor, the former Mrs. Ernest Simpson, the former Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer, yes, that woman, striking, thin-lipped, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed, who nearly toppled the British Crown by the force of her ambition.
But here’s the thing. You cannot possibly know somebody you’ve never met. You can observe her in a thousand photographs, a hundred newsreels, and not understand a thing about her. That person on the magazine cover is a character in a play, a character in a book, a character of her own creation and your imagination, and this immaculate namesake bears no more than a passing resemblance to the original. Remember that, please. You don’t know her. You know only the fascinating fiction she’s presented to you. Surely that would be of interest to readers in America, she had said.
“I bet it would,” I answered.
Until that instant, I hadn’t noticed the tension in her face. That tautness, I thought it was her natural state. Now everything loosened, her eyes and cheekbones and mouth, that fragile skin, like the softening of frosting on a cake. She looked almost human. I thought this couldn’t be happening, I couldn’t be standing here. She couldn’t be offering me this prize. There must be some trick. But her eyes were so blue.
“Then we understand each other?” she said.
“I believe so.”
“Good.”
She held out her hand to me, and I clasped it. The coldness shocked me, but what did I expect? I always seemed to simmer a degree or two warmer than other women. I opened my mouth to ask her particulars, how all these lovely plans might be set into motion, but she spoke first.
“Let’s return to our guests, shall we? There are so many people I’d like you to meet.”
ELFRIEDE (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
SEPTEMBER 1900 (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
(Switzerland) (#ulink_e1729a4f-ca8e-506b-af8c-f8519296bd07)
IF SOMETHING WERE to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”
“No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”
His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.
“You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.
Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”
“I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most—most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”
A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.
Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”
Elfriede makes an O with her mouth and turns away to face the peaks of the neighboring mountains. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.
“You speak from experience?”
“You shouldn’t ask such questions.”
Wilfred makes a noise—not his Scotch noise, another one. He has a wardrobe of noises for every occasion. Each nuance of thought. Over the course of the past few weeks, Elfriede has learned and cataloged them all. This one’s meant to convey amusement, tempered with just a lash of longing.
“Anything but that,” Elfriede says. “You can ask me anything but that.”
IN FACT, GERHARD WAS ALMOST touchingly eager to please her, after the disastrous deflowering. He had dreamed of nothing but consummation with Elfriede during those months of their betrothal, and when at last he lifted his damp, triumphant head from the pillow next to hers, he’d evidently expected to see his own expression of spent rapture mirrored in that of his bride. The tears astonished him. Well, they horrified him! Filled him with profound remorse.
The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.
No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.
Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.
Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.
STILL, SHE CAN’T DISCUSS THESE things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)
“FAIR PLAY, I SUPPOSE,” SAYS Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”
“All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”
Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”
“Travel where?”
“Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”
Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”
“Have you been there?”
“I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”
“Heaven,” says Elfriede.
Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”
“Why not?”
“This is more like heaven, if you ask me.”
A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.
“I don’t understand …” she begins softly.
“Understand what?”
“Why you should move me like this, when he loved me so much. So terribly.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? This.”
She leans her head on his shoulder. “What are we to do?”
“Nothing.” He touches her hair. Then he says it again, in English. Nothing.
Nothing, she repeats.
“No-thing. Th-th-th. Put your tongue beneath your upper teeth.”
“No-thing,” Elfriede says again, paying particular attention to this English th, her Waterloo these past few weeks. In order to pass the anxious time while Wilfred lay in bed with his relapse—a friendly orderly passed the notes between them—she began to teach herself English with the books from the sanatorium’s extensive library. She hoped to astound him when he recovered. Good morning, she said to him, when they met at last on the wall of the infirmary garden, the exact spot where they had spoken their first words to each other. (This by design, of course, in a note passed that morning from the orderly’s pocket.) I hope you are vell. She remembers how he turned—she’d come up to him from the meadow behind—and how the sight of his face, pale but radiant, made her dizzy. How his smile, growing slowly across his face to expose his teeth, illuminated the universe. Well, he said. W-w-w. Well.
W-w-well, she repeated.
I am well, thank you. Are you well, my love?
I am wery vell.
Now it’s a joke between them, how wery vell they both are during these slow, beautiful hours together. How wery vell the sun shines upon them, how wery vell the air smells, the ground feels, the skin glows. How wery vell she’s progressing in her English lessons.
Nothing, Elfriede says again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We are doing nothing. How is zat?
“I’m being discharged,” Wilfred says in German.
BUT ISN’T THIS WHY THEY’VE fallen in love, so suddenly and so utterly? Because of course Wilfred must go home when he’s better, because of course Elfriede and Wilfred must part. It’s so easy and so safe to fall in love when the universe is against you. Now, they haven’t quite said those words to each other—I love you, we’ve fallen in love—but Elfriede has no doubt they echo inside Wilfred’s head, in the same way they echo in hers.
I am wery vell, she said aloud, on the wall of the infirmary garden. Translation: I love you.
Come, let’s go for a walk, Wilfred replied, taking her hand. Translation: I can’t bear to exist without you.
And they walked, and they existed with each other, and in the touch of Wilfred’s hand Elfriede imagined the rest of him. When they sat to rest, Elfriede stared at their clasped palms in the grass, Wilfred’s large, white bones curled around hers, and a premonition of grief came upon her. But what will I do when you’ve gone? she whispered.
I have an idea, Wilfred said. Let’s not speak of that day until it comes.
NOW IT’S COME.
“What?” Elfriede says.
“After all, I’ve regained my health.”
“But they don’t ever make you leave, the doctors. You can stay as long as you like.”
“Only if you’ve got the dosh, my dear.”
“But I could—we could—I have plenty of money—”
“You mean your husband has plenty of money.”
Elfriede bows her head to this truth. Across the meadow, about thirty yards away, the grass stirs. A rodent of some kind, or a rabbit. Making preparation for winter, though the sun is still warm, no hint of evil yet cools the air.
“We have until Thursday,” Wilfred says. “Four more days.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing. I go about my life, pretending my heart’s not beating away somewhere else, beating inside your chest—”
“Oh, don’t. Don’t.”
He doesn’t. So they sit, as they always do, as they’ve done for the past few weeks, since Wilfred was first allowed out of the infirmary garden with strict instructions not to exert himself, not to expose his lungs to any hint of inclement weather. Lucky for them, the weather has been fine, an unprecedented succession of warm, dry, perfect days. Or maybe it’s not luck, after all. Maybe some more conscious force has arranged their affairs in this manner. Either way, the result’s the same. They sit side by side in the meadow grass, watching the sun make its eternal arc across the heavens. Sometimes he touches her, as he does now. His fingertips on the backs of her knuckles.
“I once met this fellow in the south of France, this painter. Do you know what he called this time of day? The hour before sunset?”
“No.”
“The golden hour.” Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, which now burns just above the jagged peaks that form their horizon. “He said that’s when everything looks the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold. He said it made him want to paint the whole world. And then it’s gone, just like that. The sun disappears. The night arrives.”
“The golden hour.” Elfriede stares at Wilfred’s hair, which has indeed transformed into a gold so pure as to make the alchemists weep, like the sun itself. She wants to touch it, to bury her face in it, to lick the gold from each strand before it’s gone. Before Wilfred’s gone, and the night arrives.
“What about you, Elfriede?” he asks. “That’s the important thing. What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Except I can’t stay here any longer if you’re gone.”
“Can’t you?”
“No, it’s impossible. It will hurt too much.”
“Not so much as it hurts me to leave.”
“No, more. Because you’ll have Vienna, you’ll have new sights and scenes, nothing to remind you of me. Whereas here, these buildings, this mountain, this meadow—everything is you now. And it will be empty.”
“Is that so intolerable?”
“You know it is.”
“Hmm.” The fingertips make another waltz on her knuckles. A Blue Danube of longing. “I thought you needed approval from this doctor to leave. Are you certain you want to cross him?”
“He can’t stop me. I’ll find a way out, like you.”
Find a way out. Once she says the words, once she releases them into the air, they become possible. The horror of the outside world loses all consequence compared to the horror of existing inside the sanatorium without Wilfred. Against that, she has no other fear: not the mountain roads or the trains or the stares of strangers, not the husband she has disappointed, not the baby who doesn’t know her, not Herr Doktor Hermann and all his degrees and authority. She can leave. She is the wife of a baron, after all. She can arrange for a carriage, she can simply walk out the door if she wants. Who will dare to stop her?
Elfriede straightens her back. Her eyes are dry now, her blood’s warm. “Yes. I can’t stay here without you. I’ll leave.”
“Good,” says Wilfred. “That’s settled. But where will you go, my heart?”
She curls her fingers inside her palm, so that her entire hand disappears in the grass beneath Wilfred’s hand. Sometimes, sitting in this patch of meadow under the sun, smelling the warm, dead flowers, she forgets that anything else exists except the two of them, disappearing into the grass and each other.
Where will she go? She belongs to only one other place. Only one other heart beats inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
“Back to my son, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go back to my son and miss your freckles. All twenty-six of them.”
BUT NO SUCH AGONIZING DECISION needs to be made, after all. When Elfriede returns to the sanatorium—by a different path from Wilfred’s, of course—Herr Doktor Hermann waits for her in her room. He takes her hands.
“There is terrible news, Elfriede,” he tells her. “I’m afraid your husband is very sick. The family has summoned you home to his side.”
LULU (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
JULY 1941 (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
(The Bahamas) (#ulink_28b025b3-baff-5d0c-8f5d-5a46b61dd2f5)
BY THE TIME the evening wound to its end, I’d lost track of all the names, all the faces. They passed in a blur while the duchess guided me around the garden, under the lanterns, introducing me like a prize filly, and I pranced and pawed and whinnied on cue, made almost dizzy by this extraordinary ascent of fortune. In the months to come, I didn’t remember the exact moment in which I first met Mrs. Gudewill and her daughters, or Fred Sigrist, or the other men and women who were to figure so prominently in this Bahamian chapter of my life. I didn’t remember the precise drip of information that fed its way through my ears and into my brain, to be picked through and examined later. I do remember that I stood once more in the duke’s study, speaking to Axel Wenner-Gren—yes, him, the Swedish industrialist, owner of Hog Island, the sort of fellow attracted to tax havens like the Bahamas like ants to picnics—when Thorpe reappeared. By now, most of the guests had left, and only a few of us remained to drink bourbon whiskey from the Windsor cabinet and listen to the duke’s collection of popular American songs on the phonograph. Mr. Wenner-Gren wanted to know more about my husband.
“How long were you married?” he asked.
“Only a year.”
“Then you were newlyweds. What a terrible thing, this war.”
“What’s the war got to do with it?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed he was killed in battle.”
I tried to speak and realized the muscles of my throat were paralyzed, that my pulse struck like a hammer in my neck. The familiar panic. You never knew when it might seize you, when it might sock your gut at any sudden noise, any bang of a window, any innocent question. When it struck, you had to remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, to disguise your terror as something else, like grief. When the panic receded, when the muscles softened enough to enable you to speak at all, you spoke haltingly, as if mastering your anguish, so that no one would suspect you were lying.
“No,” I said. “He was killed in an accident. A terrible accident.”
Now, though he was all of sixty years old, this Wenner-Gren was still an attractive man, a man of silver hair and elegant movements and perceptive blue eyes of the X-ray variety, if you know what I mean. He smoked his cigarette and stared at me, not at all moved by my widowhood, while I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest and ask him if the rumors were true, that he was really a Nazi, that he was friends with Goering and that his real mission here in Nassau was to persuade the duke to cast his fortunes with a triumphant Germany. After all, wasn’t that exactly the kind of worldwide exclusive the Metropolitan had sent me to the Bahamas to discover? Wasn’t Axel Wenner-Gren exactly the kind of man with whom I’d been desperate to sidle myself into profitable intimacy?
He leaned his face toward mine. “This must be terribly lonely for you.”
“Oh, I keep myself busy. Not as busy as you do, of course, with your yacht and your lovely estate.”
“Ah. What do you know about my estate?”
“Isn’t it right there on Hog Island? I can just about see it from my bedroom window.”
“Can you, now?”
“And your yacht, of course. There’s no mistaking her.” I paused to sip my drink. “Where are you headed next? I hear you’re much enamored of Mexico these days. You’ve started a bank there, haven’t you? The Banco Continental.”
His eyebrows rose. He turned his face politely away to blow out a stream of smoke, and while he did so, breaking gaze for just that instant, his eyes flicked downward to appraise the sharp, deep neckline of my dress. “You seem to hear a great many things, Mrs. Randolph.”
“Oh, one keeps one’s ears open. And Nassau is terrible for gossip. It’s the favorite pastime. Everybody seems to be knee-deep in each other’s dirty business.”
“So my wife tells me. And what else have you heard about me?”
“Oh, this and that.” I shrugged. “I can’t remember most of it. But tell me more about Mexico. I’ve always wanted to go.”
He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette, examined the diminished end, and said softly, “Perhaps you might join us on our next voyage. We intend to make an archaeological expedition to South America, and then travel up to Mexico in time for Christmas.”
“How kind of you. When do you cast off?”
Wenner-Gren opened his mouth, but it wasn’t his voice that answered me.
“Any day now, isn’t that right? I’d go myself, if I wasn’t already occupied.”
The words came from somewhere near my right shoulder, causing us both to startle and turn to the doorway, where Mr. Thorpe stood in his white dinner jacket, long and wide-shouldered and lean as a wooden cross. His head was bare and the spectacles perched at the very end of his nose. He pushed them up and smiled.
“My dear Thorpe,” said Wenner-Gren. “I thought you had disappeared, as usual.”
“Merely counting my profits in the back office.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve finished raiding all the pockets already,” I said.
“Every shilling accounted for.” Thorpe held out his elbow. “Might I have a private word with you, Mrs. Randolph?”
I suppose I gaped. He hadn’t shown the slightest sign of recognition earlier, and though I’d caught glimpse after glimpse of him during the course of the party, we had never come face to face, as if some contract had been drawn up between us, some agreement not to acknowledge each other. I thought he had probably forgotten me, forgotten the episode on the airplane, or at least my face in the middle of it. And now he held out his elbow to me.
“Thorpe, old chap,” said Wenner-Gren, in the funny way that men of all nations will ape certain expressions of the English upper classes. “I didn’t know you were a friend of Mrs. Randolph’s.”
“We met on an airplane,” said Thorpe, pronouncing the word in three syllables, air-o-plane, “and formed an instant connection. Didn’t we, Mrs. Randolph?”
His face was grave, his fair skin pink beneath the freckles. I considered his eyes, which were blue and slightly hooded behind his spectacles, giving you an impression of great depth. I glanced back at Wenner-Gren’s face and discovered a cool, pale stare like a reptile’s.
I set down my half-finished bourbon on the edge of the Duke of Windsor’s desk. “That’s a wonderful question, Mr. Thorpe. I guess we might as well find out.”
WE DIDN’T SAY A WORD until we reached the center of the main hallway, right between the staircase and the front entrance, where the panic hit my stomach once more. I snatched my hand from Thorpe’s elbow. “Thanks very much for rescuing me in there. I won’t trouble you further.”
“Now, wait just a moment, Mrs.—”
But I was already pushing open the door, already hurrying across the portico. He caught up with me a few steps later and touched my elbow. I stopped and whirled to face him.
“Did I say I wanted company, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Look here. You can’t just fly off alone like that.”
“You can’t possibly think I’d go off with you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? I don’t even know you. For all I know, you’re a homicidal maniac. Or worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse than that?”
I lifted my chin and fixed him with a certain stare of mine. He gave my displeasure his full attention, while some bird trilled out a mighty evening song from the portico above. It takes a certain amount of strength, you know, to gaze without blinking into the eyes of a man you hardly know, a man as tall and dazzling as Thorpe, and to this day I don’t quite understand how I held firm, or why. From the windows of Government House floated the mist of some jiggly, dancing tune I didn’t recognize, the shadow of somebody’s braying laugh. The dark air lay against Thorpe’s skin. His eyes were narrowed and gray, the way the night drains color from everything. At last he sighed, glanced heavenward, and made a half turn toward the Government House entrance. “Taylor!” he called out.
For the first time, I noticed the footman there, or rather the doorman, straight-shouldered and tidy in his white uniform against the pink facade, lit by the windows behind him. “Yes, sir?” he said, staring straight ahead.
“You’ve seen me leave the premises in the company of Mrs. Randolph, correct?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“If something untoward occurs, you’re prepared to swear to that effect in a court of law?”
“Without hesitation, sir.”
Thorpe turned back to me. “You see? Nothing to fear. Intentions entirely honorable.”
I resumed walking toward the stairs. The air had cooled no more than a few degrees with the coming of night, but at least the brutal sun had sunk away. The atmosphere was hazy, the stars blurred in the sky above the nearby ocean. I didn’t need to look over my shoulder; I knew Thorpe had joined me. “That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said. “For all I know, you’re in collusion.”
“You’re a damned suspicious woman, Mrs. Randolph.”
“Women need to be suspicious, Thorpe, suspicious of everyone and everything. A woman on her own, especially. It’s a matter of survival.”
“Not all men are beasts, you know.”
“Enough of them are. Even one’s enough. Once you encounter your first wolf, why, you start to notice them everywhere.”
“I see,” he said. “Are we speaking of Mr. Randolph, perhaps?”
We were tripping down the endless flight of stairs, had already passed the statue of Columbus. Below us, the street was dark and quiet. I stopped midstep and waited for Thorpe to halt, to turn, two stairs below, so that his face sat at last on the same level as mine.
“There was a girl back at college,” I said. “Went off with a boy after a party, just like a little lamb. It didn’t end well.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have the smallest idea. You’ve never been anybody’s prey.”
“Not true.”
I lifted my eyebrows and stared at his large, earnest face, his eyes behind the spectacles. I thought he was going to say more, tell me some story, even if it wasn’t real. But the lips didn’t move. Just those two words, Not true, a pair of words that covered a vast territory.
“All right,” I said. “But I’ll bet you were evenly matched, weren’t you? A big cat like you. You could fight back.”
“Fair point. But I might say the same of you.”
“Me?”
“You might not be so big, of course. But you seem to me like the sort of woman who fights back.”
The streetlamps cast a soft yellow heat on his face. He stood with one foot braced on the step above; his hand rested on his thigh. I was conscious of my daring neckline, my exposed skin, my scarcity of sleeves, my breath trapped in my lungs, my thundering heart. The goose bumps prickling my arms, which could not possibly have sprung from the tropical air.
“That man on the airplane,” I said. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing at all.”
“No, that was something, all right. Something I wouldn’t mind learning how to do, should another wolf come bounding into my life, for example.”
Thorpe rubbed his fist on his knee and looked to the side, at an upward angle, as if considering the sky above the ocean. His nose was robust, almost Roman, and yet there was something vulnerable about his profile or else the way he presented it to me. “By college,” he said, “do you mean you were at university?”
“Yes.”
“And this girl. She was a friend of yours?”
I stared at his cheekbone. “We were inseparable.”
“I see.” He turned back to me. “I found myself at the bar at the Prince George a week or two ago. Happened to catch a glimpse of a girl sitting all by herself. She was drinking a Scotch whiskey, I believe, no ice, reading a book, and her hair kept falling over her forehead, and she kept pushing it back. Eventually she looked up and glanced my way—I imagine she must have sensed me watching—and I recognized her at once. The girl from the airplane.”
I held out my hand. “Leonora Randolph. But you can call me Lulu.”
“Lulu. I’m Benedict.”
“Benedict?”
“I was named after my father. His middle name.”
“I can’t call you Benedict.”
He shrugged. “Then call me whatever you want.”
HE WALKED ME DOWN GEORGE Street to the hotel. We didn’t touch, nor did we speak until we turned the corner of Bay Street and stopped. Thorpe stuck his hands in his pockets and looked toward the harbor. “Still the Prince George?” he said.
“Still the Prince George.”
“Sounds rather temporary.”
“I might be looking for something a little more permanent.”
He turned his head. “Really?”
“Seems I’m about to enter paid employment. If all goes well.”
“Congratulations. Splendid news.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I might have made a few inquiries regarding your intentions here,” he said.
I snapped my fingers. “Jack! That old so-and-so. I might’ve known.”
“I’m afraid I can’t reveal my sources.”
“There’s no need. I can practically smell him on you. Say …”
Thorpe lifted an eyebrow and stared at me patiently. Behind him, the street was empty, except for the British Colonial rising brilliantly against the sky. The air smelled stickily of night blossom, of the nearby ocean, of the lingering afternoon ether of automobile exhaust. There’s a particular odor to a Nassau evening, a perfume I’ve never encountered since. I wrapped my hands around my pocketbook and said, “I’ll bet that was you, wasn’t it? That drink the other night.”
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”
“Jack said you were a shy kind of fellow.”
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Beatriz Williams
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the New York Times bestselling author: a dazzling WWII epic spanning London, New York and the Bahamas and the most infamous couple of the age, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor The Bahamas, 1941. Newly-widowed Lulu Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine whose readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. But beneath the glitter of Wallis and Edward’s marriage lies an ugly – and even treasonous – reality. In the middle of it all stands Benedict Thorpe: a handsome scientist of tremendous charm and murky national loyalties. When Nassau’s wealthiest man is murdered in one of the most notorious cases of the century, Lulu embarks on a journey to discover the truth behind the crime. The stories of two unforgettable women thread together in this extraordinary epic of sacrifice, human love and human courage, set against a shocking true crime… and the rise and fall of a legendary royal couple.