At the sound of Miss Thorpe’s footsteps on the floorboards, I summon myself and lift my head from the table. Like her brother, she’s tall and slender, and now that she’s removed her hat, you can see the trace of ginger that links her to Thorpe, and to the pair of unknown parents who produced them. She has a sharp, neat profile and beautiful skin: so smooth and pale in this strange dark London room, it makes you think of the moon. She sets out the cups and asks me about milk and so on. She warns me there isn’t much sugar, that the milk is the powdered kind. I make reply. The tea appears before me, and I can’t remember what I told her, sugar or not. I raise the cup and sip, and she raises her cup and sips, and our eyes meet over the rims, Miss Thorpe and Mrs. Thorpe.

She sets down the cup. “Leonora—”

“Lulu.”

“Lulu,” she repeats, as if she’s tasting something overly sweet.

“Only my mother calls me Leonora.”

“I see. Lulu, then. I’m Margaret. Margaret Thorpe, but you know that.”

“You received my letter, then.”

“Yes. I came home early and found it in the post.” She glances at my left hand. “Rather a shock. He never said a word about you. And now you’re here, and he’s—he’s—”

“In prison.”

She swears softly and reaches for her pocketbook. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Do you mind if I join you?”

She lights me a cigarette and then one for herself. The tea, the cigarette calm my nerves. Or maybe it’s Margaret, who radiates that peculiar English calm, like there’s nothing that can’t be solved over tea. A cat leaps unexpectedly onto her lap, black with white points. She strokes him absently.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“What? Oh, this little criminal? Tuxedo. Not very clever, I know. Benedict brought him home one day, during the Blitz.”

“Thorpe lived here?”

“We shared the flat. He was good company when the bombs were coming down. He kept me from panicking.”

“Funny, you don’t seem like the panicking type to me.”

“When one returns home from a night spent on a Tube platform to discover both neighboring houses turned to rubble,” she says crisply, tapping ash into the tray, stroking the cat, “it does try one’s nerves.”

“Was yours ever hit?”

“No. Not a scratch. I suppose even bombs have a sense of irony.”

“Not really,” I say. “That’s just human illusion. We imagine there’s an order to things, because it’s too awful to consider the randomness of fate.”

“I’ve never subscribed to the idea of fate.”

I set down the cigarette and swallow tea. “Still, it must have been swell, having your brother around at a time like that. A fellow you could trust.”