No one answered. I think we didn’t know which was less likely: an invasion, or Eugénie fleeing the Peloponnesus in her eighties, for any reason. Eugénie invited my husband to Greece every summer because she wanted him to publish her memoir. She had lived a remarkable life but didn’t have a remarkable book, and it dragged through slow ghostwritten revisions. Every year, at work in the hot city, I thought of blue water and white bougainvillea and forgot how exhausting it was to be her guest, to stay in favor and say the right thing. So each summer we would arrive, look at the new draft, give careful suggestions that would not be taken, and find ourselves on the terrace waiting for her to trip mercifully off to bed.

“It’s terrible,” Eugénie said again.

The silence went on too long; Eugénie broke it.

“Miles Sheffield was here a week ago,” she said. “He came alone.”

Here there was interest. Here was news, not opinion, and we jumped at it. Eugénie drew her white wrap across her throat to keep off the breeze that wasn’t there. Her eyes shone with the awareness of an audience; she had found her topic.

I had met Miles Sheffield at Eugénie’s house years before. He was English, and traveled with a young man named Christopher who seemed more like a child than a companion. Gregarious and impossible, Christopher demanded loud music at dinner and dropped arch hints to Eugénie’s chef to make lemon meringue pie instead of the chocolate he hated. The week I met them, the chef served chocolate every night: a mousse, a cake, a soufflé, a layered torte, chocolate ice cream at lunch, working Christopher into a barely concealed rage. Christopher was blond and tan, and got by on his looks, but it was Miles who brought him along.

Miles was an asset to everyone; he made a living at it. He knew every name that came up at any dinner, and the stories he told made his listeners wish he would tell stories about them. He had left his legal studies to take a job with the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where he made himself indispensable. He was the ambassador’s lover and his protégé, and he assimilated to Arab life faster than anyone since T. E. Lawrence. When the old ambassador died, Miles stayed on. When I asked what he did exactly (it was something for the embassy still, some diplomatic role), he said he was the last of the white slaves. By which he meant last of the colonials: a fixer, a smoother-over, a friend of British oil interests. When he met Christopher in Biarritz, he took him back to Saudi Arabia. Miles was so well liked that the diplomatic community protected his privacy and asked no questions.