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Duvalier .’
    We passed the blackened beams of the house the Tontons had destroyed and mounted the hill towards Pétionville. Half-way up there was a road-block. A man in a torn shirt and a grey pair of trousers and an old soft hat which someone must have discarded in a dustbin came trailing his rifle by its muzzle to the door. He told us to get out and be searched. ‘I’ll get out,’ I said, ‘but this lady belongs to the diplomatic corps.’
    â€˜Darling, don’t make a fuss,’ she said. ‘There are no such things as privileges now.’ She led the way to the roadside, putting her hands above her head and giving the militiaman a smile I hated.
    I said to him, ‘Don’t you see the C . D . on the car?’
    â€˜And can’t you see,’ she said, ‘that he can’t read?’ He felt my hips and ran his hands up between my legs. Then he opened the boot of the car. It was not a very practised search and it was soon over. He cleared a passage through the barrier and let us go by. ‘I don’t like you driving back alone,’ I said. ‘I’ll lend you a boy – if I’ve got one left,’ and then after I had driven half a mile further I went back in my mind to the old suspicion. If a husband is notoriously blind to infidelity, I suppose a lover has the opposite fault – he sees it everywhere. ‘Tell me what you were really doing, waiting by the statue?’
    â€˜Don’t be a fool tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m happy.’
    â€˜I never wrote to you that I was coming back.’
    â€˜It was a place to remember you in, that was all.’
    â€˜It seems a coincidence that just tonight . . .’
    â€˜Do you suppose this was the only night I bothered to remember you?’ She added, ‘Luis asked me once why I had stopped going out in the evening for gin-rummy now the curfew had lifted. So next night I took the car as usual. I had no one to see and nothing to do, so I drove to the statue.’
    â€˜And Luis is content?’
    â€˜He’s always content.’
    Suddenly, around us, above us and below us, the lights went out. Only a glow remained around the harbour and the government buildings.
    â€˜I hope Joseph has kept a bit of oil for my return,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s wise as well as virgin.’
    â€˜Is he virgin?’
    â€˜Well, he’s chaste. Since the Tontons Macoute kicked him around.’
    We entered the steep drive lined with palm trees and bougainvillaea. I always wondered why the original owner had called the hotel the Trianon. No name could have been less suitable. The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the eighteenth-century manner nor luxurious in the twentieth-century fashion. With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the New Yorker . You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales. I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that I had found no purchaser. I believed that if I could own it for a few more years I would feel I had a home. Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. Even the violent death of my partner had not seriously disturbed my possessive love. I would have remarked with Frère Laurent, in the French version of Romeo and Juliet , a sentence that I had reason to remember:
    â€˜Le remède au chaos
    N’est pas dans ce chaos.’
    The remedy had been in the success which owed nothing to my partner: in the voices calling from the bathing-pool, in the rattle of ice from the bar where Joseph made his famous rum punches, in the arrival of taxis from the town, in the