What Christopher did in Saudi Arabia was another problem. After a bad argument, Christopher took a car that needed work and drove off to Jordan, where the princess liked him and would take him in. The car broke down in the desert, the only car on the road, and Christopher sat in the sand and cried, sure it didn’t matter that he was wasting his body’s water, because he was going to die. It was a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, and he had no water with him. Finally a Bedouin bus full of sheep came by, and Christopher rode with the sheep all the way back to Riyadh, where he called Miles to come pick him up. “The smell in that bus, I was positively reaching,” Christopher would say, telling the story.

(Miles had the precise and modulated accent of the British diplomat abroad, and he could keep a doomed luncheon alive, but there were words he’d made decisions about, and the decisions were wrong. “Retching” was one of them. He would say, “Well, it’s a mute point.” Of the Falklands War: “Those Argentine boys were platently not ready to fight.” Christopher picked up each of Miles’s mistakes without question.)

The desert rescue by the Bedouins was the last news I had heard from them. I knew they had split, and that Christopher wasn’t forthcoming about why. But Miles had reclined on this dark terrace and told Eugénie everything—and now Eugénie was as forthcoming as she could be.