The Heat of the Sun

me, Mr Sharpless, but you don’t sound American.’
    I explained that I had grown up in France, and other places besides, with a father who had been in the consular service. When Kate Pinkerton raised an eyebrow questioningly at the past tense, I
told her that my father was dead, and she said that she was sorry, so sorry, and sounded as if she were. She adjusted the brooch, insisted I have some seedcake, and asked me brightly where else my
father had been stationed. Her interest, I assumed, was feigned, mere politeness, but the performance was smooth as any politician’s.
    ‘Turkey?’ She nodded. ‘Well, well... Ceylon? So useful an island.’ She gestured to the teapot. ‘Indochine? Mmm... And Japan? Fascinating. Tell me, what do you recall of Japan?’
    ‘Nothing. I was a baby.’ But an image came to me: a hillside, studded with boxy houses; a harbour, with water blue and glittering; boats, rocking hypnotically; and a sense of sadness
as a large hand led me from my vantage point, drawing me back into a shadowy house. Strange, these deepest recesses of childhood: days we have lived through that leave so little residue –
only shards of feeling and image, such as remain from a dream mostly forgotten.
    ‘Nothing?’ Kate Pinkerton, smiling, might have been relieved, and I could not think why. ‘I should have liked to travel,’ she mused. ‘Can’t you picture me as
some heroine of Mr James, urbanely conducting romantic negotiations in a stately Parisian ballroom?’
    Jamesian heroine? Never! I could see her only as the distinguished political wife, a personification of the ship of state. Clumsily I applied my cake fork to my cake, which was delicious.
    ‘But we Manvilles were never ones for Europe,’ she went on. ‘Nor anywhere foreign. Daddy’ – the word surprised me, coming from Kate Pinkerton – ‘liked
to say that America was a world unto itself. A continent stretches before us! Its riches, ours to reap! God has given bounty enough in these United States to build heaven on earth! Why look beyond
our shores? Perhaps he was right. Poor Daddy! The outbreak of the Spanish–American War was a blow to him. I think our victory shocked him even more. What, he cried, do we want with Puerto
Rico, with Guam? What do we want with the Philippines? What have we done but acquire an empire, just like the British we rebelled against? My brother died in the Cuban campaign. Daddy never got
over that. James was to have succeeded to Daddy’s senatorial seat – and, we hoped, to become president one day.’
    I was about to say I was sorry, when Kate Pinkerton added in a brisk voice that all that was long ago. ‘Time goes,’ she said, ‘time goes on’ – but there in Gramercy
Park, with the curtains closed against the twilight, with the fire, with the soft rustle of her gown as she shifted on her stiff sofa, time seemed arrested, held in a suspension that could never
break.
    She poured more tea. Silence extended around us like a spreading pool and, feeling myself obliged to speak, I asked whether Senator Pinkerton would again seek his party’s nomination for
presidential candidate. Though he had lost, as I recalled, in 1920 to James M. Cox, many felt he should have put himself forward in 1924, when John W. Davis proved an unworthy challenger for that
unctuous Republican, Calvin Coolidge. Lately, voices had been raised in the senator’s favour: The Party Needs Pinkerton! Pinkerton for President! What the senator stood for I could not
have explained, though his views on foreign entanglements, I gathered, would have disappointed his long-dead father-in-law.
    Kate Pinkerton asked if I considered myself a good friend of Trouble’s. I said I hoped I was, and she nodded. My last question, I decided, must have been too forward; she had skimmed over
it as if I had never said it at all.
    ‘But, Mr Sharpless, what can I tell you that you don’t already know? You’ve divined my son’s history. Plumbed it to its depths. Witnessed some of it. Which of his schools
was it you attended – Blaze? I had high hopes for him at Blaze. Visions of glory. The headmaster was discreet. Still – oh, the disgrace!’
    ‘Disgrace!’ I said, too hotly. ‘Trouble was a hero. He fought the school bully, a fellow twice his size, and won. It wasn’t his fault the bully’s father headed up
the Board of Trustees.’
    ‘So an injustice was done? The world is full of those. Alas, we cannot right the wrongs of the