Now, I don’t know why everything caught up with me at that particular moment. I hadn’t shed a single tear, not one, throughout the length of Thorpe’s most recent absence. I was used to them, after all. Sometimes he went away for a week, sometimes a couple of weeks. Sometimes he would return for a day or two, sometimes for a week or two, and once—dear, blissful February—he stuck around for almost an entire month. And I never knew which it was. He never gave me the slightest clue. He turned up and disappeared without prior notice. Well, he couldn’t exactly emblazon his intentions in the sky, could he? So I’d learned to take him as I found him, each episode of his company a surprise, each kiss, each clandestine bender at Shangri-La, each stolen night at my bungalow, careful always to make sure we never gave ourselves away at a party, greeted each other coolly, flirted with others, left separately, raced to Cable Beach where Thorpe waited for me under one of the enormous, mature sea grape trees that brushed the patio. He had resumed his cigarettes, maybe because of the additional strain of hiding a mistress from the world, and I always saw the curl of smoke first, then his hair and his skin in the moonlight. Sometimes, when the party had proved especially unbearable, the tension between us too excruciating, we got no farther than the trunk of that tree for quite some time, and I still remember the scratch of sea grape bark on my spine with a certain sadistic pleasure.

Then he would vanish, and I tried not to think of him at all. I plunged myself into the socio-charitable whirl of Nassau. When Freddie and Nancy de Marigny returned from their honeymoon, such as it was—she’d had a terrible case of typhoid when they got to Mexico, followed by trench mouth, innumerable dental surgeries, just awful—I gave them a dinner party at my bungalow that went off quite well, I thought, under the circumstances. On Christmas Eve, we opened the duchess’s canteen at Fred Sigrist’s old Bahamian Club with a grand party chock-full of handsome young servicemen, and I’d been working shifts there most mornings since. So you see how terribly busy I was, how unable to spare even a moment to indulge in self-pity. The appearance of these tears shocked me. What was it about Thorpe? I never cried anywhere except with him.

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.”