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but he assured the hack they were working on a solution. By the following day it was all arranged. The club asked only that there be no goat-slaughter on the premises, no outdoor cooking fires, and that noise be kept to a reasonable level.
    It was something, I tell you, Mrs. Livingston. We were drummed into the Majesty in full regalia, me in my sari, my husband in turban, kurta and dhoti, heads held high. You could practically hear the sound of privilege crashing down. Even the kitchen and dining-room staff stood and applauded. You cannot possibly imagine what it was like, my dear. The discrimination —
    Ahh, yes, of course. How insensitive of me. Your name tends to suggest a different history. One does forget, you know, thatyou acquired it from your husband. Italian immigrants after the war. You were still the enemy, weren’t you …
    But listen to us, trading old humiliations — let us not forget the triumphs, too! Do you know, my dear, what I consider to be the greatest triumph of all? That we’ve survived, Mrs. Livingston. We’ve survived, and we’re here to savour it.
    The next day there were photographs in the newspapers, and lengthy stories turned out by the hacks. But the real story, as everyone well understood, was that the Majesty Club could not go back to its old ways. We celebrated Old Year’s that year at the Majesty, and we were far from alone …
    There’s a touch left, my dear. Would you …? No? Then I think I shall …
    Yes, yes, I know. All this sugar. But I am treating myself just for today. I shall return to my sensible ways tomorrow, don’t you worry.
    So to get back to your question, how did I see it? My dear Mrs. Livingston, I saw it as the action of the man I had agreed to marry. I didn’t judge it. I admired his courage — but I did think, I confess, that he might have chosen a more appropriate occasion …
    Regret? No, I don’t think so. I entered this marriage with full knowledge of his ambition, but I was only just beginning to learn just how deep that ambition went.
    But this explains, Mrs. Livingston, why I know what humiliation feels like, and far worse. It is, my dear, why the colour of my skin is precious to me, even though it does not define me. You see, on our wedding day my husband reclaimed the dignity that had so long been denied us, and dignity opens up the world. After that day, how could I be ashamed — of anything?
    Precious, precarious world, isn’t it?
7

    AFTER BREAKFAST IN the lounge — dark panelling and wicker greedily absorbing the sunshine from the steel-barred windows — Yasmin smiles at the new desk clerk, nods at the new guard, and steps outside. She expects to be called back, cautioned. But daylight changes everything: they barely acknowledge her.
    The morning air is cooler than she expects, the sun bright and splintery and gentle on the skin. Across the street, swallowed by the darkness of the evening before, effaced in the diminished view through her windows, is a large park: trees and lawns and paths, beds of tended flowers, sprays of shrubbery. Tacked to the tree trunks and rising above the flowers are the rectangular plates of botanical identification.
    She feels herself lighten, feels a smile come to her lips.
    Farther down the street, she sees a sight a TV story producer would film for “local colour.” A discouraged horse harnessed to a wooden cart, the tray heavy with a mound of fresh coconuts. A man in ragged shorts and a hat leans against the tray, sipping from a metal cup. He is shirtless, so thin that his chest appears concave. A producer would get him to wield his machete, to open up a nut:
local enterprise in the dying economy.
    She thinks of Martinique, with Jim, two weeks in February a few years ago. A bus tour through the misty mountains of tropical rainforest, through the remnants of St. Pierre ruined at the turn of the century by volcanic eruption, past endless banana