“Here’s what I remember,” he says. “I remember lying in the grass with you. I remember it was hot, I remember licking the salt from your skin. I remember how you took me in your hands. I remember the sound you made when we joined, the exact noise, and how I thought it was a miracle, how could this incandescent woman possibly allow me inside her, how could she possibly love me like this. I remember feeling as if you were consecrating me. When I spent, it was a holy thing. I had never felt so close to God. And we lay there in the grass, and I thought, well, it’s done. I’m all hers. I have left myself in her. She’s taken my soul into her soul. So I only live—I’m only alive, how do I explain, I’m only united with my own soul—in her.” He presses his mouth against her skin. Her head falls back against the wall. “You might not give a damn about my fidelity, Elfriede, but I do. I can’t live without it.”

“But I’ve only brought you misery.”

“You’ve brought me life. I only have life in you.”

Now the tears roll from both eyes and down into her ears. She holds his head against her, his lips against her skin.

“You can’t die, Elfriede. You cannot die. I’m inside you, I’m existing in you alone. Just allow me to stay, for God’s sake.”

What can she say? Nothing. She holds his head, that’s all, and only makes a low, soft cry when she spends in deep spasms against his mouth. The rest is silence.

War Office, London

WAR OFFICE, LONDON.

TO: MRS. ELFRIEDE THORPE, DUNNOCK LODGE, INVERNESS

4 JULY 1916

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT MAJ W. B. THORPE KILLED IN ACTION 1 JULY STOP LETTER FOLLOWS SHORTLY

Lulu

July 1943

(The Bahamas)

In the course of my journalistic research—no snickering, please—I once came across the wedding photographs of the former king of England and his American bride. The service was held in the south of France, I understand, at some magnificent villa owned by a friend of theirs. (Oh, the Windsors and their useful friends.) And if you’d listened to the king’s heartfelt address over the radio—the woman I love—and you assembled all these facts, the longed-for union, the wealthy friends, the villa, the south of goddamned France, you’d think what a happy couple they must be, married at last in the middle of paradise, troubles consigned to the past and all that. So the photographs might startle you.