Wilfred moves a little, turning his back to the tree as she had, settling them both more comfortably.

“No,” he says.

Lulu

July 1941

(The Bahamas)

On Saturday evening, I walked to Government House in my best summer dress of blueberry organza and a pair of tall peep-toe shoes that would have fared much better in a taxi, if I could have spared the dough. It wasn’t the distance; it was the stairs. Government House, as I said, sat at the top of George Street, aboard its very own hill, in order to ensure (or so it seemed to me, at the time) that the ordinary pedestrian arrived flushed and breathless for his appointment with the governor.

Still. As I passed Columbus on his pedestal and climbed the steps toward the familiar neoclassical facade of pink stucco—heavens, what a perfect representation of the Bahamian ideal—I had to admit to a certain human curiosity. Like everybody else, I knew Government House from the outside, as a passerby, an acquaintance. I hadn’t the least idea what lay inside. Now its portico expanded before me, all pink and white, Roman columns and tropical shutters, windows aglow, music and voices, a thing of welcome, alive. I paused at the top of the steps to pat my hair, to adjust my necklace of imitation pearls, to gather my composure while the noise of an engine clamored in my ears, and an enormous automobile roared beneath the pediment and slammed to a halt exactly at the front door. As I watched, too rapt to move, a stumpy man in a plain, poorly cut suit popped from the back seat and patted his pockets.

Now, in the many years since I inhabited the Bahamas, I’ve come to understand that memory is a capricious friend, and never more unreliable than when we trust it absolutely. But I’ll swear on any Bible you like that I identified Sir Harry Oakes right there on the portico of Government House that evening with photographic precision. I remember the sense of awe I felt as I said to myself, Why, that’s Harry Oakes. Maybe it was the car, or the confident electricity that inevitably surrounds the richest man in the British Empire. He had struck gold in Canada or someplace, after years and years of prospecting, one of the biggest strikes ever made, and now he lived here in the Bahamas, because of taxes. I guess he figured he had already paid his dues, like that Swedish fellow.