I spun to face him. “What did you say?”

His face was heavy with remorse. “I’ve been called back to London.”

“And you agreed?”

“Don’t, Lulu,” he said. “You know I haven’t got any say in this.”

“I know!” I shoved away the tears with the back of my hand. “Don’t you think I know? But you don’t know what it’s like, to be left behind. Not a word. Just helpless. You might be in Timbuktu or dead, and I’d never know. Nobody knows about us, except Veryl. Your family’s never heard of me, have they? Have they?”

He answered with a frown. I threw up my hands.

“You see? Where do I go if you never come back? Whom do I turn to? I’m nobody to you, as far as anyone else is concerned.”

Thorpe released me and sat on the edge of the bed. He stared at me from what I called his thinking face, which was really no expression at all, just this blankness, topped by a furrowed brow. He’d worn it often during the past year, usually right after making love. I suppose there’s something about fornication that gets you thinking. His eyes, catching the yellow sunlight, were nearly green.

I stepped to the chest of drawers and stubbed out my cigarette.

“When the war’s over,” he began.

“When the war’s over you’ll be dead, Thorpe, and I’ll be alone, or worse, I’ll be pregnant with some baby who has no father to speak of, no family to speak of.” I sat down and gathered the pillow in my lap. “And with my luck, he’ll have your goddamned hair!”

Thorpe rose from the bed and pulled his trousers from the floor. “Now, hang on a moment, darling. I thought you liked my hair.”

I threw the pillow. He dodged it and reached for his shirt.

“Where the devil do you think you’re going?” I yelled.

“Out, of course. Veryl should be swinging through the door any second.”

“Veryl already knows about us, you bastard.”

“Keep your voice down. The neighbors will hear.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what the neighbors hear!”

He leaned over the bed and kissed my forehead. “I’ll come back, my beauty.”

“You always say that.”

“And I always do. Eventually.”

An instant later, I was staring at the door. Which was not at all how I’d imagined this scene would end.

Years later, in her autobiography, the former Mrs. Wallis Simpson calculated—among other things—some thirty thousand eggs personally fried by her bony, capable hands in the kitchen of the United Services Canteen of Nassau, but I dispute those numbers. For one thing, she wasn’t exactly there every day. For another, the woman can’t count up much else except pieces of eight.