Célia looks nothing like the rest of us. You’d think she was a changeling were it not that her face turns up like a new-minted coin somewhere in every generation of my mother’s family. In our time, apart from Célia, there was Aunt Monique who lived in Cairo—I say Aunt, but she was really a cousin of Maman’s. When I was a child Aunt Monique came to Alexandria in the summer expressly, it seemed, to show me how beautiful Célia would be when she was grown up. By contrast I was—and am—a fawn-colored, skimpy personage with pitiful legs and arms—vexing, since I’m actually quite strong—and my bust has never really needed a brassiere; hair an unremarkable dark brown, eyes the same without any kind of lustrous allure, and believe you me I knew what lustrous allure was. When I was a child I used to vent my jealousy in ugly comparisons—my sister’s hair is as black as Quink ink; her eyes, two bowls of chocolate torte mix; her lips the exact shade of a raspberry stamped all over the floor. But Célia didn’t care, she just sailed on like a figurehead with her fine-cut profile and gracious neck while her bust and her bum got steadily more ample and sumptuous and molded with every passing year. The wealthier echelons of our little society, people with far more social cachet than us, liked to remark that only ugly girls married RAF pilots because nobody else would have them. Ha! They couldn’t say that anymore. I’ve got a photo of Célia on my dressing table, she sent it a couple of months ago. She’s with Peter and the boys in their garden—or backyaad, as the boys call it—and she’s wearing sunglasses and sugar-almond lipstick with her hair in a curvy bob like poor Jackie Kennedy, and she looks just heavenly. She and Peter are planning to visit but it’s such a long way from Adelaide and I’m rather unwell at the moment. I want to be fit again by the time they come.

—

Anyway. After Célia had thoroughly banished Maman’s rudeness, we went out to the car. The jasmine vine covered half the front of the house these days and the very first flowers were out. The jasmine didn’t care about the war. It just kept on flowering.

Our streetlamps had been covered with so much blue paint that they barely lit themselves, but there was a glow in the sky from the moon rising behind the houses, and a palm tree stood like a signpost at the junction. Célia got into the back, James sat next to me in front. I started the engine and idled, foot hovering over the gas.

“Is this a Citroën?” James asked.