The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  I held out my hand. “Leonora Randolph. But you can call me Lulu.”

  “Lulu. I’m Benedict.”

  “Benedict?”

  “I was named after my father. His middle name.”

  “I can’t call you Benedict.”

  He shrugged. “Then call me whatever you want.”

  He walked me down George Street to the hotel. We didn’t touch, nor did we speak until we turned the corner of Bay Street and stopped. Thorpe stuck his hands in his pockets and looked toward the harbor. “Still the Prince George?” he said.

  “Still the Prince George.”

  “Sounds rather temporary.”

  “I might be looking for something a little more permanent.”

  He turned his head. “Really?”

  “Seems I’m about to enter paid employment. If all goes well.”

  “Congratulations. Splendid news.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “I might have made a few inquiries regarding your intentions here,” he said.

  I snapped my fingers. “Jack! That old so-and-so. I might’ve known.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t reveal my sources.”

  “There’s no need. I can practically smell him on you. Say . . .”

  Thorpe lifted an eyebrow and stared at me patiently. Behind him, the street was empty, except for the British Colonial rising brilliantly against the sky. The air smelled stickily of night blossom, of the nearby ocean, of the lingering afternoon ether of automobile exhaust. There’s a particular odor to a Nassau evening, a perfume I’ve never encountered since. I wrapped my hands around my pocketbook and said, “I’ll bet that was you, wasn’t it? That drink the other night.”

  “I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Jack said you were a shy kind of fellow.”

  “Jack was quite right. I’m practically a recluse.”

  “I wouldn’t say shy. The way you swooped in, back there in the library. Plucked me out of Wenner-Gren’s talons. The way you handled that fellow on the airplane.”

  Thorpe squinted upward again, judging the stars. His hands remained in his pockets, causing his wide shoulders to hunch slightly. “Well, what else was I to do? Allow the blackguard to continue occupying my seat?”

  “Why not? Less trouble that way.”

  His gaze dropped back to my face, and I swear to God, he peered right through my skin and bone to the matter beneath. Those placid eyes. I couldn’t move. I stood there like a fool, soaking it all up, the shining spectacles, the eyes and the pale skin, the hazy moon, the bare head glinting. “Tell me something, Mrs. Randolph,” he said quietly. “What brings you to Nassau? And don’t tell me some rubbish about your dead husband. We both know that’s not the case.”

  I opened my mouth and made—to my eternal shame—nothing more than a strangled gasp.

  “As I thought. You’re a terrible liar, Mrs. Randolph. Not cut out for this business at all.”

  “And what business is that?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  I tucked my pocketbook under my arm. “I’m a journalist. Here to scoop the scoop of the century, if I can find it.”

  “Some kind of scandal, you mean? Parting the curtain of the Windsor boudoir for a breathless Metropolitan audience?”

  “Now see here. How did you know the name of the magazine?”

  “As I said, I made a few inquiries.”

  I threw up my hands. “Jack.”

  “Jack knows my intentions are entirely honorable.”

  “Honorable. There’s a pact, you know, an unspoken pact of discretion between girl and bartender—”

  “Don’t blame Jack. I was persistent, and what’s more, I pay well.”

  “No doubt. It’s just I’m starting to think you’re not the only one making our Jack sing like a canary, that’s all.”

  “Oh?”

  “The duchess knows everything about me.” I waved my hand in the direction of Government House, which still glowed above us from the top of George Street. “Although I don’t suppose it’s done me any harm. She practically invited me inside the sanctum, just now. The chance I’ve been waiting for.”

  “Did she, now?”

  “She did. She’s concerned about the Windsor public image, poor dear. Wants to make sure it’s shown in the most flattering light possible, by a pet journalist trained to eat right from her hand.”

  “And that pet journalist . . . ?”

  “Yours truly. The idea’s to feed me all the best tidbits, in order to keep body and soul together. Exactly what the magazine had in mind, in fact. If I play my cards, I’ll have my own column, a nice salary, expenses all paid in an almost-tropical paradise. Everything a girl could want, and just exactly when I was down to my last dime. It’s almost too good to be true, don’t you think?”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s everything.”

  “That’s the truth?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “I see,” he said again. He reached up to the basket of flowers that hung from the streetlamp and plucked a small pink flower I didn’t recognize. “Some might feel themselves obliged to offer you a word of warning, where the duke and duchess are concerned. Caveat emptor, or something like that.”

  “Except I’m not buying anything, am I? I’m selling it.”

  He just looked at me, mere black and white in the darkness, the feeble crescent moon. I reached out and took the flower from his fingers.

  Around us, Nassau had fallen asleep. The air was warm and still. If you listened hard, you might detect a faint hum of gaiety trailing from the windows of the British Colonial, an automobile rumbling down an unseen road. A dog barked from some great distance, no louder than the beating of our hearts.

  “Where’s home for you, Thorpe?” I asked softly.

  “Home? Now there’s a question. I was chiefly raised in the Scottish Highlands by my fearsome grandmother—”

  “I mean here,” I said. “Here in Nassau.”

  “Ah. I see what you mean. At present, I live in Shangri-La, Mrs. Randolph.”

  “Shangri-La? Do you mean Hog Island? Wenner-Gren’s place?”

  “A cottage on the property, yes.”

  “You’re his guest? Why didn’t you say anything? Back there in the study.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because it—because he—” I tucked my nose in the flower. Curiously, it had no scent. “How do you know him?”

  “He was kind enough to offer his cottage as a base for my research, when I first arrived.”

  “Your research?”

  “I’m a botanist, Mrs. Randolph.”

  “A botanist. Of course. A botanist of international repute, according to our hostess.”

  “A kind exaggeration.”

  “It’s just—that fellow on the airplane—I pegged you for something else. Something a little more martial.”

  He pointed to the spectacles. “I’m afraid my eyesight got in the way of all that. In any case, my research requires a bit of space, you know.”

  “How will you get back?”

  “Why, the same way I came over. By boat.”

  “At night?”

  “Why not? It’s not far.”

  He said this without irony, a little amazed at my amazement, as if sailing across the harbor were about the same thing as bicycling down the street. I don’t know, maybe it was, around here. Not far, he said, and for an instant I thought I glimpsed this, him, a boat, moonlight, paradise, and for the space of that instant, that minute carved away from myself, I was somebody who stepped in a sailboat and fell in love.

  And the instant passed, and I was myself, Lulu, standing on firm, dry land, ribs held together by a thick layer of scar tissue, impregnable.

  “Well,” I said, “be careful, that’s all.”

  “I shall. Good night, Mrs. Randolph.”

  “Good night, Mr. Thorpe.”

  I turned to head down
Bay Street to the Prince George, a few buildings down. The Royal Bank of Canada stood before me, a brick giant, all shut up for the night. As I forced my legs into stride, I heard him call out, “What did you read at university?”

  “Read?”

  “Study, I mean. What course of study?”

  “French literature,” I said. “And a minor course in music.”

  “Music? How interesting. My mother studied music.”

  I made a noise of exasperation and stepped under the awning of the hotel. From the street came the sound of whistling, a bar or two, and then Thorpe’s voice, just as I crossed the threshold into the hall.

  “It’s how they met, I’m told. My parents. My father heard her playing the piano and fell in love.”

  Naturally I marched straight toward the bar, with the fixed intention of giving Jack a piece of my temper. I was roiled, you see, overturned by the conversation on the corner of Bay Street, while the stars gazed fuzzily on Thorpe’s bright head and the seagulls screamed. The salt air had done something to my head. I thought I was going to burst. Relief or disappointment or something, straining against the scar tissue, creaking my poor ribs.

  “Jack, you son of a gun,” I began.

  Jack turned swiftly. “Now, there you are, Mrs. Randolph. Fellow came for you. Gave up about a half hour ago.”

  “What fellow?”

  Jack reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a piece of paper. “See for yourself.”

  I took the note and opened it.

  My dear Mrs. Randolph,

  Should you decide to prolong your stay in Nassau after all, may I humbly bring to your notice a convenient cottage on Cable Beach, available to let on reasonable terms, local landlord.

  Yours sincerely,

  A. de Marigny

  Part II

  Lulu

  December 1943

  (London)

  Miss Thorpe’s flat. Around the corner from the Basil Hotel it isn’t, quite, although that might have something to do with the funny route taken there by Miss Thorpe, turning corners and doubling back, until we arrive at a house surrounded on both sides by empty lots, scattered with rubble.

  “The Blitz,” she says simply, jumping up the steps. She’s got her key out already and shoves it into the lock. Thank God, it opens readily. She steps back and motions me through.

  “Third floor,” she calls softly.

  I start up the steps while the sound of the bolt clangs behind me. Then her footsteps, tripping along as if the climb is nothing at all. We reach the landing and a single door, which she unlocks and opens, ushering me past into a hallway that smells of damp wool, just exactly as if I’m the ordinary kind of guest who drops by for tea and crumpets in the afternoon, pinky finger primed for business.

  “If you’ll hang your coat and hat on the hook, there,” she says. “The radiator should dry them out. I do hope you haven’t left anything important at the hotel.”

  “I haven’t. Although that fellow back there thinks I have, which should keep him busy for a bit. Assuming I haven’t killed him.”

  “You haven’t,” she says dryly. “That man’s indestructible. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? You do drink tea?”

  “When I must.”

  She disappears through a narrow doorway into what I presume is some sort of kitchen. I hang my hat first, then the coat. Before I turn away, I pat the left breast, and the stiffness of the paper beneath, tucked inside the inner pocket, is like a miracle. “Sit,” calls Miss Thorpe, over her shoulder, and I sit, I simply collapse on one of the four chairs around the table, and it’s only then that I realize my arms and legs are shaking, my breath is so shallow in my lungs that I can’t seem to get any air. I lay my head on the wood. The room’s dim, because of the blackout and because you’re not allowed to use excess electricity around here, every ounce of energy must go to the war effort. The radiator should dry them out, Miss Thorpe said confidently, but if the radiator’s doing its duty at the moment, I’ll be damned. The atmosphere inside the flat is hardly any warmer or dryer than the atmosphere outside.

  At the sound of Miss Thorpe’s footsteps on the floorboards, I summon myself and lift my head from the table. Like her brother, she’s tall and slender, and now that she’s removed her hat, you can see the trace of ginger that links her to Thorpe, and to the pair of unknown parents who produced them. She has a sharp, neat profile and beautiful skin: so smooth and pale in this strange dark London room, it makes you think of the moon. She sets out the cups and asks me about milk and so on. She warns me there isn’t much sugar, that the milk is the powdered kind. I make reply. The tea appears before me, and I can’t remember what I told her, sugar or not. I raise the cup and sip, and she raises her cup and sips, and our eyes meet over the rims, Miss Thorpe and Mrs. Thorpe.

  She sets down the cup. “Leonora—”

  “Lulu.”

  “Lulu,” she repeats, as if she’s tasting something overly sweet.

  “Only my mother calls me Leonora.”

  “I see. Lulu, then. I’m Margaret. Margaret Thorpe, but you know that.”

  “You received my letter, then.”

  “Yes. I came home early and found it in the post.” She glances at my left hand. “Rather a shock. He never said a word about you. And now you’re here, and he’s—he’s—”

  “In prison.”

  She swears softly and reaches for her pocketbook. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  She lights me a cigarette and then one for herself. The tea, the cigarette calm my nerves. Or maybe it’s Margaret, who radiates that peculiar English calm, like there’s nothing that can’t be solved over tea. A cat leaps unexpectedly onto her lap, black with white points. She strokes him absently.

  “What’s his name?” I ask.

  “What? Oh, this little criminal? Tuxedo. Not very clever, I know. Benedict brought him home one day, during the Blitz.”

  “Thorpe lived here?”

  “We shared the flat. He was good company when the bombs were coming down. He kept me from panicking.”

  “Funny, you don’t seem like the panicking type to me.”

  “When one returns home from a night spent on a Tube platform to discover both neighboring houses turned to rubble,” she says crisply, tapping ash into the tray, stroking the cat, “it does try one’s nerves.”

  “Was yours ever hit?”

  “No. Not a scratch. I suppose even bombs have a sense of irony.”

  “Not really,” I say. “That’s just human illusion. We imagine there’s an order to things, because it’s too awful to consider the randomness of fate.”

  “I’ve never subscribed to the idea of fate.”

  I set down the cigarette and swallow tea. “Still, it must have been swell, having your brother around at a time like that. A fellow you could trust.”

  “Swell.” She tests the word. “I suppose so. And then he was gone. Off to Nassau. I was so happy. I thought, well, at least one of us is out of danger.”

  “Did you ever find another roommate?”

  The cat jumps from her lap to the floor and commences making love to the leg of the table. She reaches down to rub his chin.

  “No. In case he came home in the middle of the night, you see.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  She lifts an eyebrow and stares at the mantel. A pair of small, framed photographs anchor the left side, too far away to see properly. “But I don’t believe he’d mind if you shelter here for a bit.”

  A pool of silence spreads between us, but it’s not the awkward silence that two ordinary women might experience, having just met, trying to think of something to say, trying to discover some common ground. It’s the common ground that holds us silent, the common ground that lies between us. She finishes her cigarette first and stubs it out in the ashtray in slow, precise thrusts. Only then does her gaze return to my face, where it spends a second or two. I have the feeling she’s tryin
g to see me through her brother’s eyes, she’s trying to imagine me as her brother imagines me. The current in the light bulb fails, starts, fails, and returns—some interruption of the supply of electricity—and the flickering casts a strange pattern of shadows across her face, which she doesn’t seem to notice.

  The cat, having wound his way among the legs of the table and chairs, reaches with his nose to sniff my skirt. I lean down and hold out my fingertips, and the delicate texture of his tongue meets my skin.

  “You know, you haven’t asked me what happened,” I say.

  “What happened in Nassau, you mean? No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe I’m supposed to know, am I? It’s confidential.”

  “But you want to know.”

  “Only if you mean to tell me.”

  Tuxedo pulls back on his haunches, gathers himself, and leaps onto my lap.

  “That’s interesting,” says Margaret. “He doesn’t like strangers, ordinarily.”

  “Do you have strangers often?”

  She starts to light another cigarette. “Not often. But sometimes.”

  Tuxedo kneads my thighs. A low purr starts up in his throat. He’s got long, fluffy fur, a tail like a feather duster. I lay my hand on the top of his head and stroke all the way down his back. “There was a murder,” I say. “A fellow named Harry Oakes was murdered last July, in his bed, in the middle of the night.”

  Murder. It’s one of those words, isn’t it, that sounds as dreadful as the deed itself. Certainly it shocks me to say it out loud like that, though I have lived and breathed this thing for months now, though the terrible end of Sir Harry Oakes haunts me now as it did the first day I learned of it. And you would think that a statement like that—There was a murder—might pierce the composure of anybody, even Miss Thorpe. But maybe I forget that the rest of the world knows all about poor Oakes. Even in the middle of war, people will pay attention to the killing (there’s another dreadful word) of a man so wealthy and famous as Sir Harry, in a location so exotic as the Bahamas, in a manner so gruesome as—well, as it was. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Miss Thorpe’s expression remains cool and ageless, that she doesn’t so much as lift her eyebrows.