“One lump or two, darling?” asked Basil St. Florian.
“Why, two of course,” she said. “I should think you’d know by now.”
“The ruckus we raised last night was so intense,” he said, “it turned my memories to vapors.”
“Are you referring to the first bash or the second?”
“Both were cracking good fun then, were they not?”
She lay back in the bed and, though by profession an actress and capable of applying any emotionally apposite affect to the exquisite symmetries of her face, actually allowed a genuine expression of pleasure to occur, that is, before she remembered that one doesn’t admit to such carnal earnestness easily, and adjusted back to simple, banal cinema beauty.
Basil dropped the two lumps into the Claridge’s fine cup of Darjeeling—how did they get it, now that the world was seized up in lurid politics and battle?—and brought it to her in bed, where she lay swaddled in sheets, her perfect heart-shaped face aglow with eagerness.
“I do hope you can stay a bit, darling,” she said. “The war doesn’t need you desperately today, does it?”
“It hardly ever needs me,” he said, “and never desperately.”
An hour or so later, he was back in the shower, and then engaged in donning, adjusting, and finally perfecting his uniform: Captain, British Army, of the Horse Guards, a few measly ribbons unimpressive in an era when most guardsmen boasted sheets of bright designations of courage on their chests. One would have thought Basil’s war was spent taking dictation.
