“Maybe it’s better if I don’t go back. Maybe my son—my little Johann—I’m a stranger to him—”
“Is that what this Hermann chap’s been telling you?”
“No. He doesn’t tell me things. He only asks questions, for the most part.”
Mr. Thorpe makes a noise that Elfriede will one day recognize as coming from the Scotch side of him. She remains in his arms, laid comfortably against his chest, shielded from his sharp, skinny bones by the woolen jacket. She doesn’t want to move. Has no ability, even, to stir from this place of refuge. His jacket, her Cloth of Tears.
“Anyway, he doesn’t love me anymore,” she says.
“Who doesn’t? Your son?”
“My husband.”
“Did he say that? Did he say he doesn’t love you?”
“No, but I saw it in his face, after I came back from the hospital. I was alien to him. He thought he’d married an angel, and as it turned out …”
“Speaking from the male perspective,” Mr. Thorpe says slowly, “of which I naturally consider myself something of an expert. Perhaps it was something else?”
“No. No. A woman can tell. A woman can tell when a man doesn’t love her.”
“Well—and I’m only speculating, mind you—a man whose wife—how do I put this? A man whose beautiful wife no longer allows him the singular privilege for which he married her—”
Elfriede starts to draw away. But Mr. Thorpe makes a little squeeze of his arms, not to keep her there, not so firm as that, but to let her know she’s welcome to stay, if she likes. So she pauses, no longer pressed against his chest, but close.
“It’s possible, you see, that he thought you didn’t love him. And a chap who believes he’s lost the love of a woman—forgive me—a woman such as you—well, I daresay it might ruin him.” Mr. Thorpe pauses. “That’s only conjecture, mind you. I haven’t met the lucky Herr von Kleist.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Another slight squeeze. Elfriede capitulates. The lure of comfort is too much for her. Warm human contact. Warm human arms, warm human chest. Things for which she’s starved. A famine of touch.
“Thank you for your music,” Wilfred says. “I was afraid you’d stop.”
“I wasn’t sure whether I should. I didn’t want to keep you awake.”
“Keep me awake? Kept me alive, I think.”
“Oh!”
“So why did you? Keep playing, I mean.”
“Because I … well, I …” She shouldn’t say the words, but she must. She might conceal her true thoughts from the doctor, but she can’t conceal them from Wilfred. Oh, his actual heart, thudding under her ear! She whispers, “Because I thought you might be listening.”
“Damn it all,” he says softly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just hellish fate, that’s all.”
Elfriede says, “Tell me about this girl of yours.”
“Girl? Girl? I’m afraid I don’t know any other girls.”
“You told me there was a girl.”
There is a sigh from inside that ravaged chest, far more sigh than Elfriede might have imagined possible. It ends in a cough. Not a bad one. Not the cough of two weeks ago.
“Right. Her. Well, you know, she’s quite the opposite of you. Older and rather cosmopolitan. Divorcée of a well-known composer, I won’t say whom. Just the sort of woman to render a callow youth—an ugly, awkward fellow such as myself—dizzy with ecstasy.”
“And did she?”
“Yes.”
“Pardon me,” says Elfriede, smiling a little, “but you don’t sound ecstatic.”
“That’s because …”
“Because?”
“Because I shall have to go back to her shortly, I suppose. And the prospect is not what it once was. Don’t ask why.”
“Why?”
That noise again. “Let’s just sit here a moment longer, shall we? I daresay we’re not doing anybody any harm, just sitting here.”
“No.”
“I’m a man of honor.”
“Yes.”
“Unlike, I suspect, that blackguard Hermann.”
“Let’s not talk,” she says.
“An ugly, awkward chap like me. Emaciated with fever. Head like a pumpkin—why are you laughing?”
“That’s exactly what I thought, when I first saw you. Your head like a pumpkin.”
“Ah, well. At least a fellow knows where he stands.”
Elfriede stares at the trees opposite. The dark woods beyond. The wind whining quietly between the pine needles. “I love your pumpkin head.”
“But you hardly know my head.”
“You hardly know mine. Does it matter?”
Wilfred moves a little, turning his back to the tree as she had, settling them both more comfortably.
“No,” he says.
ON SATURDAY EVENING, I walked to Government House in my best summer dress of blueberry organza and a pair of tall peep-toe shoes that would have fared much better in a taxi, if I could have spared the dough. It wasn’t the distance; it was the stairs. Government House, as I said, sat at the top of George Street, aboard its very own hill, in order to ensure (or so it seemed to me, at the time) that the ordinary pedestrian arrived flushed and breathless for his appointment with the governor.
Still. As I passed Columbus on his pedestal and climbed the steps toward the familiar neoclassical facade of pink stucco—heavens, what a perfect representation of the Bahamian ideal—I had to admit to a certain human curiosity. Like everybody else, I knew Government House from the outside, as a passerby, an acquaintance. I hadn’t the least idea what lay inside. Now its portico expanded before me, all pink and white, Roman columns and tropical shutters, windows aglow, music and voices, a thing of welcome, alive. I paused at the top of the steps to pat my hair, to adjust my necklace of imitation pearls, to gather my composure while the noise of an engine clamored in my ears, and an enormous automobile roared beneath the pediment and slammed to a halt exactly at the front door. As I watched, too rapt to move, a stumpy man in a plain, poorly cut suit popped from the back seat and patted his pockets.
Now, in the many years since I inhabited the Bahamas, I’ve come to understand that memory is a capricious friend, and never more unreliable than when we trust it absolutely. But I’ll swear on any Bible you like that I identified Sir Harry Oakes right there on the portico of Government House that evening with photographic precision.