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little pale man were going in to drinks with him and there were other people there, men in uniform, and she, Wallis, was all dressed up in a taffeta gown and a fur stole, and hoping to God there might be a martini some time soon. And then bang! The door slams right in front of her nose. Could you imagine such a thing?
    But Hitler did what he liked. And what he liked was bringing death.
    She was far away somewhere by the time it happened, but there was darkness and death in London, that’s what they told her, later on. This is coming back: being in sunshine miles away from where it was, but knowing that in places she’d loved there was horror beyond what she could ever imagine. And knowing Hitler had caused it. He was the architect of this horror. He slammed the door on her and on that beautiful past, and then things were never the same.
    She never saw London again. Did she? It had been her home, her adopted home, and then it disappeared from sight. And everything in it disappeared from sight. The sooty parks. The trolley buses. The Ritz Hotel. The roof garden at Derry and Toms. The crowds outside the Empire, Leicester Square. The milk carts. The baskets of violets for tuppence a bunch. The pale-green drawing room at Bryanston Court. Ernest.
    So this is it. This must be it: the important thing the hag wants her to remember. She wants her to remember Hitler. How she let him kiss her hand. How, after he’d kissed it, he didn’t save the world but took it all away. A girl should never forget a thing like this. The hag’s right. It is immoral. She should be ashamed of herself.
    So now she’s got to call the hag, or the ‘ Maître ’ as she calls herself, tell her OK – whoever you are – I did it: I remembered. I remembered the horror. And maybe I was to blame in some way, for what happened to the world when Hitler got hold of it. Was I? Is that why you slap my wrist, my cheek? Not only because I forgot, but because I was polite to Hitler in that mountain resort. Because, before he slammed the door on me, I sat with him on some precipice and admired the view? The little man was there, smiling, approving, as I praised the German scenery, and it was then that the Führer kissed my hand. And still we both smiled, the little man and me. Smiling with our sky-blue eyes. I guess he knew no better at the time and I knew no better and neither one of us imagined that after he’d kissed my hand, Hitler could make London disappear into darkness.
    There’s a bell hanging from a cord near Wallis’s bed. When she presses the bell, someone usually appears. There’s always a gap, between pressing the bell and the person arriving, as though they had to walk right across the damned Bois to get here. In days gone by, in Bryanston Court, servants used to arrive promptly, but here, in this ghostly room, she waits and waits, and sometimes the waiting goes on so long she can’t remember why she rang the bell in the first place and she has to send the person away.
    After a while, the man-woman arrives. She smells of rain. She hauls Wallis up in the bed, from where she’s slithered down, then grabs a brush and begins that same, repetitious brushing of her hair she seems to want to do so often. It might be nice, except her hair’s white now. White and brittle. Wallis has seen it on the pillow, like some old hermit had lain himself down beside her. Why bother to brush that?
    â€˜Stop,’ she says.
    â€˜ Non , non . I make you tidy, Wallisse.’
    On she goes, the silver-handled brush heavy as iron. Wallis reaches up and clutches the hag’s arm, which is always clothed in some moorland tweed.
    â€˜Stop,’ she says again. ‘I remembered.’
    Now there’s silence in the room. Not a tree moving outside, nor any far-away whisper of cars on the cobbled roads.
    The companion puts away the brush, sits on the bed, takes Wallis’s hand. ‘ Mon dieu ,’ she