style="font-size:15px;"> My fingers rotated the end of the cigarette in the ashtray, round and round. De Marigny had a contradictory mouth, a thin top lip over a full, sensuous bottom lip, from which the smile had disappeared. He drank again, not deeply, and when he put the glass down he stared at me. The voices hammered around us. By some imperceptible means, our two stools had drawn closer together, almost in intimacy.
“And what did you say to that?” I asked.
“I refused, of course. Then I said some rather uncomplimentary things, which I shall not repeat, and which he pretended not to notice. He left the room. His—what’s the word—his aide-de-camp was horrified. I felt a little sorry for him, in the end.”
“The aide-de-camp?”
“No, the duke. He spends the first three and a half decades of his life being told he is like a god on earth. And he believes it! And now it’s a very different story. An attractive woman walks into his office and pays him the great compliment of begging for a boon, so he grants it—like a king, like an emperor—never imagining he cannot do this thing she asks. But what’s this? His subject won’t obey him. His subject crosses his thick colonial boots and tells the little emperor he’s nothing more than the governor of a pimple on the arse of the British Empire.”
“You said that?”
“Something like that, anyway.” He ground out his own cigarette. “Listen to me. When I was living in London, before the war, I met him twice. Once at Ascot. The second time at a hunting party in Scotland. He arrives in his own airplane, you see, flies in late to join us on his own bloody airplane, the Gypsy Moth—what an ass—and proceeds to tell us over dinner what a fine chap this Hitler fellow is, has all the right ideas, Germany and England should be the best of friends, stand firm together against international Jewry—pah. Half of us were disgusted. The other half could not applaud him enough.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Yes, interesting. That is what you wanted, after all, Mrs. Randolph. Anyway, you see what I mean. If you wish to become intimate friends with the royal couple, to learn all their secrets so you may write about them in your magazine, you had better not mention my name.”
“Understood.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “Forgive me. I have a dinner engagement. I am already late.”
“We can’t have that.” I held out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Instead of grasping my palm, de Marigny pressed the fingers briefly to his lips. As he released me, he raised his eyebrows. “But perhaps you can join us? We are just a few dull sailors from the yacht club.”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”
He smiled. “Yes, you would.”
“Maybe I would. But not this time. You’ve given me a little too much food for thought already.”
De Marigny reached into his pocket to retrieve a fold of bills. He plucked at them almost without looking and laid a five-pound note on the counter, next to his empty whiskey glass, which amounted—if I knew my shillings—to a four hundred percent tip for Jack.
“Of course, you can do with this information what you wish,” de Marigny said, rising from his stool, “but if I were you, I would not print these things I have told you, not yet, or you will never write another word in Nassau.”
“Then what would you recommend?”
“Why, it’s very simple.” He picked up his hat from the counter and settled it on his head. His eyes had regained their luster, his smile its charm, and I believe every head in the room swiveled to take him in, on cue. He didn’t seem to notice. “If you want to know all the best ladies in Nassau society, Mrs. Randolph,” he said, “you must join the Red Cross, of course. The headquarters is just around the corner, on George Street.”
I ORDERED A PORK CHOP for dinner and ate it at the bar, washed down by a glass of red wine. Afterward, I stepped outside and paused to light a cigarette. The sun was setting over the ridge, and the sky had that unearthly wash of color that stops your breath. Above my head, a pair of seagulls shrieked at each other. I stared north, toward the harbor and the slivery green paradise of Hog Island on the other side.
Having spent the last two years of my life in what you might call a prison, in a series of cheap boardinghouses in cheap American towns, I couldn’t quite accustom myself to this landscape of heat and color and clarity, this excess of blue that was the Bahamas. When I’d stepped outside the metal skin of the airplane to the earth of Oakes Field, three weeks ago, I thought I’d traveled into another universe. I thought I’d stepped into another Earth entirely, a paradise lit by an eternal sun, a release from everything old, everything dreary. Then I touched land and discovered that freedom was not so straightforward, that you could move to a different universe but you couldn’t escape the prison of your own skin.
Still, I hadn’t entirely lost that sense of unreality, especially when I found the line of that horizon and searched in vain for any cloud. The British Colonial Hotel sprawled ahead on West Bay Street, white and crisp like a castle made of wedding cake. A breeze came off the ocean, smelling of brine. The sand, oh. How I’d miss the fluid, delicate sand, slithering between my toes. I dragged on my cigarette and stared again at Hog Island, now gilded by the rising moon. The lighthouse twinkled from the western tip. Some Swedish fellow owned the island, an inventor, built the vacuum cleaner and the electric icebox, God bless him. Came here to the Bahamas because of the taxes—the absence of taxes, I should say, and why not? A fellow who invents the vacuum cleaner, he’s done his share for humanity. Let him wallow in profits and buy a goddamn island in paradise and call it Shangri-La. Let him buy the largest private yacht in the world and swan around the seven seas. Wenner-Gren, that was his name. Axel Wenner-Gren. There was a Mrs. Wenner-Gren too. No doubt Mrs. Wenner-Gren was invited to all the duchess’s parties. And she hadn’t even had to invent a solid-state electric icebox! Just to marry the man who had. I tossed my cigarette into the sand and turned to walk back to the Prince George Hotel.
As I reached the base of George Street, I hesitated. Instead of continuing to the hotel, I turned left, walked up the street, past the Red Cross headquarters to stand at the bottom of the steps that led to Government House. Darkness had drained away the pinkness of it, the confectionary quality. A constellation of lights shone through the various windows. I could just make out the guards at the main entrance, standing at brutal attention, and the perfume of the night blossoms, wafting from the gardens behind their wall.
BACK IN MY ROOM AT the Prince George, I changed into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, drank a glass of water, and took some aspirin. Fetched my suitcase from the wardrobe and opened it. There was a knock on the door, not entirely unexpected. I had asked for a final bill from the front desk, as I intended to check out tomorrow morning.
But it was not the bill at all. It was an envelope, addressed in an elegant, calligraphic hand to Mrs. Leonora Randolph. Inside lay an invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a cocktail party this Saturday at seven P.M. in the gardens of Government House, to benefit the Central Bahamas Chapter of the International Red Cross Society.
