She generally talked about her past in terms of fragmented images, usually at night after having had too much to drink. As she spoke—either slumped in a chair or reclining on the bed—Gray would sit with his sketchbook hoping to catch her passing expressions. Although she told so many lies to so many men, she told him the truth.

She said that she had been born in the city of Leeuwarden in Holland's northern province of Friesland. Her father's name was Adam Zelle, and he had owned a haberdashery on the Kelders. She had three brothers, two younger than herself, one older. They often visited papa's shop on Saturdays.

After her mother's death and the failure of her father's business she had found herself living with an uncle in the town of Sneek, where she had briefly studied to become a kindergarten teacher until an instructor attempted to seduce her behind a gashouse. From Sneek she moved to Amsterdam to live with a friend of her father's. She would often read at night, and walk the canals in the mornings.

At seventeen she met a Dutch military officer on home leave from the East Indies. His name was Rudolph MacLeod, whom she described as a harsh man with a bald head and a sweeping moustache. On their first meeting they discussed the tropics. On their second they talked about marriage.

The ceremony was simple, with barely a dozen guests waiting on the steps of the city hall. They spent their honeymoon in Wiesbaden, and nine months later a child was born, a son. Although she had originally hoped to call the boy Jan, her husband insisted that they name him Norman after his uncle, a retired general.

Four months after the birth of their son, MacLeod received his papers recalling him to Java. They sailed from Amsterdam on the first day of May. The weather remained variable until well past the North Atlantic . . . There were overtones of a dream to her descriptions of Java, a certain sense of time slowing down and finally stopping altogether . . .

While describing those first illusory months, she tended to fix on small objects in Gray's room: a bottle of brandy on the windowsill, a burning cigarette, the gently billowing curtains. Then pausing midsentence, she would reach for a glass on the table.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Nicky?"

He shrugged, watching her eyes. "I doubt I've ever thought much about it."

"Well, Java is filled with ghosts, and I believe they have the power to influence people ..."

At first she and MacLeod lived in a bungalow outside of Ambarawa, south of Semarang, on the north coast of Java. It was a mean place, dark doorways and feeble lantern light. A breeze through surrounding bamboo sounded to her like someone sighing, and the birds like frantic children.