The Golden Hour Read online

  The women turn the corner. A man begins a slow, arthritic progress from the opposite direction, bent beneath the weight of his coat and hat. He’s smoking a cigarette. I figure the fellow’s probably deaf, but I speak softly anyway. Soft and firm.

  “I understand your position, of course. I guess it’s about what I expected. I understand, I really do. But now I need you to understand me, Mr. B—.”

  He turns his face toward me and lifts his eyebrows. At last, his voice goes a little cold, the way a man speaks to another man, his equal. “Oh? Understand what, Mrs. Thorpe? Let us be perfectly clear with each other.”

  “All right, Mr. B—. Listen carefully. In the course of my service in Nassau, in my capacity as a journalist, as an intimate associate of the governor and his wife, I became privy to certain information. Do you catch my drift?”

  There is this silence. I think, Well, he knows this already, doesn’t he? I wrote as much in my note. At the time, I thought I conveyed my meaning in circumspect sentences, that my note was a clever, sophisticated little epistle, but now it seems to me that my note was probably a masterpiece of amateurism, that Mr. B— probably laughed when he read it. Probably he’s suppressing his laughter right now. His silence is the silence of a man controlling his amusement.

  He examines the end of his cigarette. “What kind of information?”

  “You know. The kind of information that might prove embarrassing—embarrassing to say the least—were it to be made known to the general public.”

  He drops his cigarette to the gravel and crushes it with his shoe. “Embarrassing to whom?”

  “To the British government. To the king and queen.”

  Mr. B— reaches into his jacket pocket and removes another cigarette from the case. He lights it with the same care as before, the same series of noises, the scratch and the flare, the covering of the flame. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says softly, “I’m afraid I have a little confession to make.”

  “Oh?”

  “I may have stretched the truth just a bit, when I told you I was astonished by the contents of your letter.”

  We still sit side by side, except we’ve turned a few degrees inward to address each other. Mr. B—’s elbow rests on the top slat of the bench. Because he’s looking at my face now, almost tenderly, I make a tremendous effort to keep my expression as still as possible. My fingers, however, have developed some kind of tremor. Imagine that.

  “How so?” I ask.

  “I received a memorandum a day or two ago. From a certain member of the Cabinet, in response to a cable sent him from Government House in Nassau. So we had some warning, you see, of your imminent arrival. We had some notion of what to expect.”

  “I see.”

  “Still, your note was—well, it was marvelous. I don’t wish to take anything away from that. My own men couldn’t have done better.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  He leans forward, so I can smell his cigarette breath, the faint echo of whatever it was he ate for lunch. “Mrs. Thorpe, I simply can’t allow that information to go any further. Do you understand?”

  “Of course I understand. That’s why I’m offering to—”

  He drops the cigarette in the gravel and crushes it with his heel. “No, my dear. I don’t think you really do understand.”

  And I’m ashamed to say it’s only now I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Not until this instant does it occur to me to ask why, if Mr. B— received my note in the morning—my note hinting delicately of treason at the highest level, treason within the royal family itself—he waited until the fall of night to meet me, to draw me outside, to walk with me into a darkened square before a thousand windows closed for the blackout.

  Why, indeed.

  I rise from the bench. “Very well. If you’re not going to cooperate, I have no choice—”

  With remarkable swiftness, he rises too, draws a small pistol from his pocket, and lodges the end of it in the middle of my coat, just above the knotted belt.

  “Mrs. Thorpe. I’m afraid I must insist you give me whatever evidence you’ve obtained in this matter.”

  “I don’t have it. Not right here.”

  “Where, then?”

  “In my hotel room.”

  He considers. The pistol remains at my stomach, moving slightly at each beat of my heart. Though my gaze remains on his, I gather the details at the edge of my vision: the trees, bare of leaves; the shrubs, the plantings, all of them shadows against the night, against the murky buildings surrounding us. I observe the distant noise of another omnibus, a faint, drunken cheer from a pub nearby. Possibly, if I screamed, someone might hear me. But I would be dead by the time this noise reached a pair of human ears.

  “It’s well hidden,” I continue. “I could save you a lot of trouble.”

  Mr. B— nudges the pistol against my stomach. “Very well. Move slowly, please.”

  As I begin my turn, I jerk my knee upward, bang smack into the center of his groin. A shot cracks out. I grab the pistol, burning my hand, and slam it into his head, right behind his left ear. He slumps to the ground, and let me tell you, I take off running, hoping to God I don’t have a bullet in me somewhere, hoping to God I knocked him out as well as down.

  As I dart across the street, there’s a shout. I don’t stop to discover where it came from, or whom. The sidewalk’s empty, the street’s dark. The sky’s begun to drizzle. I pass a red postbox, the house with the grand piano in the window I noticed this morning, except you can’t see that piano right now, I can’t see anything, the whole world is dark and wet, each stoop concealing its own shadows. I cross another street, another, not stopping to check for traffic—there isn’t any, not with wartime restrictions on brave, threadbare London—until the familiar white signboard resolves out of the mist, basil hotel in quaint letters.

  I pull back, undecided, but my momentum carries me forward into another human chest, female chest.

  Oomph! she says, and snatches me by the arms. I lift my hands to push away. I spy a coat, a neck, a fringe of blond hair gathered into a bun.

  The woman in the foyer.

  “Miss Thorpe?” I gasp.

  Her eyes are paler than her brother’s, but I recognize the shape, and the straight, thick eyebrows, though his are a darker gold. The same milky skin, the same freckles. She has pointed cheekbones, a wide, red mouth, a slim jaw. I’m able to drink in all these details because the world seems to have gone still, the clock seems to have stopped, and even the molecules of air, the motes of dust, have stuck in place. Only my blood moves, against the scorched skin of my right hand.

  “You must be Leonora,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  She snatches my elbow and pulls me down the sidewalk. “Come along, quick. My flat’s just around the corner.”

  And it occurs to me, as I career along in her wake, that this is just how her brother appeared in my life. Out of the blue in some foreign land, like a genie from a lamp, just when you needed a wish granted.

  Lulu

  June 1941

  (The Bahamas)

  On the magazine cover, the woman sits on a rattan sofa and the man sits on the floor at her feet, gazing not at the camera but upward, adoringly, at her. She smiles back in approval. She has a book in her lap, open to the frontispiece or maybe the table of contents—she doesn’t look as if she actually means to read it—and in her hair, a ribbon topped with a bow. (A bow, I tell you.) A pair of plump Union Jack sofa pillows flanks either side of her. A real domestic scene, a happy couple in a tasteful home. the windsor team, reads the caption, in small, discreet letters at the bottom. At the top, much larger, white type inside a block of solid red: l i f e.

  I’d been staring at this image, on and off, for most of the journey from New York, having paid a dime for the magazine itself at the newsstand in the Eastern Air Lines terminal building at LaGuardia Field. (It was the latest issue, now there’s coincidence for you.) I’d held it on my lap as what you might call a talisman, th
roughout each leg of the journey, each takeoff and landing, Richmond followed by Savannah followed by some swamp called Orlando followed by Miami at last, smacking down to earth at half past five in the afternoon, taxi to a shabby hotel, taxi back to the airfield this morning, and I still didn’t feel as if I’d quite gotten to the bottom of that photograph. Oh, sometimes I flipped the magazine open and read the article inside—the usual basket of eggs, served sunny-side up—but mostly I studied the picture on the cover. So carefully arranged, each detail in place. Those Union Jack pillows, for example. (We just couldn’t be any more patriotic, could we? Oh, my, no. We are as thoroughly British as afternoon tea.) That hair ribbon, the bow. (We are as charmingly, harmlessly feminine as the housewife next door.) The enormous jeweled brooch pinned to her striped jacket, just above the right breast—and what was it, anyway? The design, I mean. I squinted and peered and adjusted the angle of light, but I couldn’t make any sense of the shape. No matter. It was more brooch than I could afford, that was all, more jewels than I could ever bear on my own right breast. (We are not the housewife next door after all, are we? We are richer, better, royal. Even if we aren’t quite royal. Not according to the Royals. Still, more royal than you, Mrs. American Housewife.)

  The airplane lurched. I peered through the window at the never-ending horizon, turquoise sea topped by a turquoise sky, and my stomach—never at home aboard moving objects—lurched too. According to my wristwatch, we were due at Nassau in twenty minutes, and the twenty-one seats of this modern all-metal Pan American airliner were crammed full of American tourists in Sunday best and businessmen in pressed suits, none of whose stomachs seemed troubled by the voyage. Just my dumb luck, my dumb stomach. Or was it my ears? Apparently motion sickness had something to do with your inner ear, the pressure of fluid inside versus the pressure of air without, and when the perception of movement on your insides didn’t agree with the perception of movement from your eyeballs, well, that’s where your stomach got into difficulty. I supposed that explanation made sense. All the world’s troubles seemed to come from friction of one kind or another. One thing rubbing up against another, and neither one backing down.

  So I crossed my arms atop the magazine and gazed out into the distance—that was supposed to help—and chewed on the stick of Wrigley’s thoughtfully provided by the stewardess. By now, the vibration of the engines had taken up habitation inside my skull. This? This is nothing, sister, said the fellow sitting next to me on the Richmond–Savannah hop yesterday, local businessman type. You shoulda heard the racket on the old Ford tri-motor. Boy, that was some kind of noise, all right. Why, the girls sometimes had to use a megaphone, it was so loud. Now, this hunka junk, they put some insulation in her skin. You know what insulation is? Makes a whole lot of difference, believe you me. Here he rapped against the fuselage with his knuckles. Course, there ain’t no amount of insulation in the world can drown out the sound of a couple of Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp engines full throttle, no ma’am. That’s eight hundred horsepower apiece. Yep, she’s a classy bird, all right, the DC-three. You ever flown the sleeper model? Coast to coast in fifteen hours. That’s something, ain’t it? And so on. By the time we reached Savannah, I would gladly have taken the old Ford tri-motor and a pair of earplugs.

  On the other hand, it could have been worse. When the talkative fellow from Richmond disembarked in Savannah, he was replaced by another fellow entirely, a meaty, sweating, silent specimen in a fine suit, reeking of booze and cigarettes, possessed of a sticky gaze. You know the type. By the time we were airborne, he had arranged himself luxuriously on the seat, insinuated his thigh against mine, and laid his hand several times on my knee, and as I slapped away his paw yet again, I would have given any amount of money to have Mr. Flapping Gums in his checked suit safely back by my side. And then. Then. The damned fellow turned up again this morning in an even more disreputable condition to board the daily Pan American flight to Nassau, fine suit now rumpled and stained, eyes now bloodshot and roving all over the place.

  Thank God he hadn’t seemed to notice me. He sat in the second row, and by the stricken expression of the stewardess, hurrying back down the aisle this second with the Thermos of precious coffee, he hadn’t mended his ways during the night. I caught her eye and communicated sympathy into her, woman to woman, as best I could. She returned a small nod and continued down the aisle. The chewing gum was turning stale and hard. The wrapper had gone missing somewhere. I tore off a corner of page fourteen of Life magazine, folded the scrap, and slipped the wad discreetly inside.

  In the seat next to mine, a gentleman looked up from his newspaper. He was tall and lean, almost thin, a loose skeleton of a fellow, and he’d made his way aboard with a small leather suitcase, climbing the stairs nimbly, the last in line. I hadn’t paid him much attention, except to note the interesting color of his hair, a gold fringe beneath the brim of his hat. He wore spectacles, and in contrast to my earlier companions, he’d hardly acknowledged me at all, except to duck his head and murmur a polite Good morning and an apology for intruding on my privacy. Though his legs were long, like a spider’s, he had folded them carefully to avoid touching mine, and when he’d opened his newspaper, he folded the sides back so they didn’t extend past the armrest between us. He’d refused the chewing gum, I remembered, though the tropical air bumped the airplane all over the sky. Other than that, he read his newspaper so quietly, turned and folded the pages with such a minimum of fuss, I confess I’d nearly forgotten he was there.

  As the stewardess swept by, he bent the top of said newspaper in order to observe the fellow up front, unblinking, the way a bird-watcher might observe the course of nature from the security of his blind. I felt a stir of interest, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the quiet of him. Under cover of looking back for the stewardess, I contrived to glimpse his profile, which was younger than I thought, lightly freckled. All this, as I said, I captured in the course of a glance, but I have a good memory for faces.

  After a minute or so, the gentleman folded his newspaper, murmured an apology, and rose from his seat. He set his newspaper on the seat and walked not to the front of the airplane, which he’d observed with such attention, but down the aisle to the rear, where the stewardess had gone. The airplane bumped along, the propellers droned. I looked back at the magazine on my lap—the windsor team, what did that mean, what exactly were they trying to convey, those two—and then out the window again. A series of pale golden islands passed beneath the wing, rendering the sea an even more alluring shade of turquoise, causing me almost to forget the slush in my stomach and the fuzz in my head, until the gentleman landed heavily back in the seat beside me.

  Except it wasn’t the same gentleman. I knew that instantly. He was too massive, and he reeked of booze. A thigh came alongside mine, a paw settled on my knee.

  “Kindly remove your hand,” I said, not kindly at all.

  He leaned toward my ear and muttered something I won’t repeat.

  I reached for the hand, but he was quicker and grabbed my fingers. I curled my other hand, my right hand, into a fist. I still don’t know what I meant to do with that fist, whether I really would have hit him with it. Probably I would have. The air inside our metal tube was hot, even at ten thousand feet, because of the white June sun and the warm June atmosphere and the windows that trapped it all inside, and the man’s hand was wet. I felt that bile in my throat, that heave, that grayness of vision that means you’re about to vomit, and I remember thinking I must avoid vomiting on the magazine at all costs, I couldn’t possibly upchuck my morning coffee on the pristine Windsor Team.

  At that instant, the first gentleman returned. He laid a hand on the boozer’s shoulder and said, in a clear, soft English voice, “I believe you’ve made a mistake, sir.”

  Without releasing my hand, the fellow turned and stretched his neck to take in the sight of the Englishman. “And I say it’s none of your business, sir.”

  His voice, while slurred, wasn’t what you’d call ro
ugh. Vowels and consonants all in proper order, a conscious ironic emphasis on the word sir. He spoke like an educated man, thoroughly sauced but well brought up. You never could tell, could you?

  “I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid it is my business,” said the Englishman. “For one thing, you’re sitting on my newspaper.”

  Again, he spoke softly. I don’t think the other passengers even knew what was going on, had even the slightest inkling—if they noticed at all—that these two weren’t exchanging a few friendly words about the weather or the Brooklyn Dodgers or Hitler’s moustache or something. The Englishman didn’t look my way at all. The boozer seemed to have forgotten me as well. His grip loosened. I yanked away my fingers and dug into my pocketbook for a handkerchief. The boozer reached slowly under his rump and drew out the crushed newspaper. The Miami Herald, read the masthead, sort of.

  “There you are,” he said. “Now beat it.”

  Those last words seemed out of place, coming from a voice like that, like he’d heard the phrase at the movies and had been waiting for the chance to sound like a real gangster. His empty hand rested on his knee and twitched, twitched. The fingers were clean, the square nails trimmed, the skin pink, except for an ugly, cracked, weeping sore on one of his knuckles.

  The Englishman pushed back his glasses and leaned a fraction closer.

  “I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I’ve made myself clear. I’d be very grateful if you’d return to your own seat, sir, and allow me to resume the use of mine.”

  “You heard me,” said the boozer. “Scram.”

  He spoke more loudly now, close to shouting, and his voice rang above the noise of the engine. People glanced our way, over their newspapers and magazines, and glanced back just as quickly. Nobody wanted trouble, not with a drunk. You couldn’t tell what a drunk might do, and here we flew, two miles above the ocean in a metal tube. I myself had begun to perspire. The sweat trickled from my armpits into the sleeves of my best blouse of pale blue crepe, my linen jacket. The boozer was getting angrier, despite the soothing, conciliatory nature of the Englishman’s voice, or maybe because of it. The force of his anger felt like a match in the act of striking, smelled like a striking match, the tang of saltpeter in your nose and the back of your throat. My fingers curled into the seams of my pocketbook.