I plucked the cigarette from the ashtray. “Then what do you suggest?”

“That red silk. It got that V, Miss Lulu, that show off you bosoms.”

“Veryl! It’s a debutante ball, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, there’s nobody there to appreciate my bosoms.”

Again, the Mmm, mmm, but in an entirely different tone of voice. She lifted the corner of her apron and wiped an invisible smudge from the surface of the coffeepot.

“Well?” I demanded.

“I hear that French fellow back in Nassau.”

I poured in the cream, the sugar. “He’s not French, Veryl. He’s from Mauritius.”

“He talk French. He French.”

“Regardless. I heard he was off the island until the New Year. Hunting ducks or something.”

“No, ma’am. He in Nassau. He fly here on that Pan American yesterday.”

“Then I guess he had a change of plans. But I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. Or my décolletage.”

“Miss Lulu,” said Veryl, the way you speak to a child, “you ain’t getting no younger.”

I lifted the cup and wrapped my fingers around the bowl. Veryl waited, arms folded. Behind her, the surf fell placidly on the sand of Cable Beach, making comfortable noises as it landed. A woman of great and several talents, that Veryl. She was a chambermaid at the Prince George and we’d gotten to know each other on a daily basis during my period of incarceration. When Alfred de Marigny drove me out to Cable Beach in a giant Lincoln Continental to visit his properties there—no more than a week, I believe, after I received a check for two hundred dollars from Metropolitan magazine for the first “Lady of Nassau” column—and offered me this sweet little bungalow at a rent that was practically peppercorn, Veryl asked if I might be needing a housekeeper. I said, Perhaps. Not because I thought I needed a housekeeper—God knows I’d gotten along without them before—but because I thought it was generally a good thing to have someone trustworthy by your side in a strange, complicated country like this one, someone who knew the shape of the landscape. Someone to tend your mysterious tropical flowers, someone to brew your coffee just right and iron out the creases in just about everything, then to throw in the advice gratis. Perhaps, I said. Veryl said, Fine, boss-lady, I be working morning at you place and afternoon at the Prince George, Monday to Saturday, thirty shillings a week. I said, Deal. So I was bound to accept her advice, wasn’t I? Even on such intimate matters as my romantic affairs, or lack thereof. That was implicit in the terms of Veryl’s employment. I set the coffee cup back in the saucer and fluffed my hair.

“These are modern times, Veryl. I’ve got my own career to look after.”