Hark, the herald angels sing:

Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our King…

Up on the mantelpiece Sooty’s son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Siamese, lurks waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond eating, sleeping or fucking his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother, and lie there laughing while she runs screaming around the room. Jessica’s sister Nancy comes out of the loo to break up what’s becoming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird’s song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief comes away… “Oh sooper dooper,” she says, “think I’m catching a cold.”

You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me… .

2
Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.

—MERIAN C. COOPER to Fay Wray

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

THIS MORNING’S STREETS are already clattering, near and far, with wood-soled civilian feet. Up in the wind is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy, side to side, wings hung out still, now and then a small shrug, only to gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow faro shuffle off invisible thumbs… . Yesterday’s first glance, coming along the esplanade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray clouds, the Casino Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black sawtooth, hardly moving… . But this morning the trees in the sun now are back to green. Leftward, far away, the ancient aqueduct loops crumbling, dry yellow, out along the Cap, the houses and villas there baked to warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth’s colors, pale raw to deeply burnished.

The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings, turning the feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. Slothrop rattles his teeth at the crowd of birds aloft, shivering down on his own miniature balcony, electric fire deep in the room barely touching the backs of his legs. They have filed him high on the white sea-façade, in a room to himself. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his friend Teddy Bloat are sharing one down the hall. He takes back his hands into ribbed cuffs of a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning, the ghosts of his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a first cigarette—and perversely he waits for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket. Aware all the time he’s in the wake of a great war gone north, and that the only explosions around here will have to be champagne corks, motors of sleek Hispano-Suizas, the odd amorous slap, hopefully… . No London? No Blitz? Can he get used to it? Sure, and by then it’ll be just time to head back.

“Well, he’s awake.” Bloat in uniform, sidling into the room gnawing on a smoldering pipe, Tantivy behind in a pin-striped lounge suit. “Up at the crack, reconnoitering the beach for the unattached mamzelle or two, no doubt…”