Mrs. Pope hesitated as she picked up the phone. She had been made a fool of twice. Not just the embarrassment with the knitted rockets, but now the recent business with the French police. They had driven all the way to Poum and found the British man, just as she’d said, but his paperwork was exactly as it should have been. There were no dangerous women. They had asked at the café: no one had seen them in weeks. The head of the French police had complained to Maurice. He had suggested his wife should not be wasting police time.

Mrs. Pope took a deep breath. She dialed the operator. Prepared her best voice.

She had wanted to be an actress when she was young. People always said it: “What a little actress! She should be on the stage!”

And even though her parents resisted at first, she had persuaded them to let her try. She’d had a private teacher who taught her how to walk with a book on her head, how to tuck in her derrière. An elocution teacher taught her how to stand on a chair and recite Shakespeare—she could still summon the lines—“Make me a willow cabin at your gate”—and if she did, she could feel the expectation. The certainty. The fierce thrill of being watched.

She felt it now.

“Number, please?” asked the operator in French.

But Mrs. Pope hesitated.

She was remembering the day she had auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It was a memory she kept away from herself, but suddenly it was back. She remembered waiting outside the audition room, in her best frock, with other young women who looked more bohemian. She remembered walking with her straight spine into the audition room, wishing the panel a very good afternoon and clearly stating her name, asking for a chair and getting on top of it without bending her spine, and reciting “Make me a willow cabin” in her best frock and hat, with her white gloves, and in her best clear voice.

It had occurred to her she was shouting. It had occurred to her she should not be on a chair. It had occurred to her she could not remember what came next.

A delicious warm sensation down her legs.

The appalled politeness of the examiners.

The bohemian girls noticing the back of her frock as she fled. Putting their hands to their bohemian mouths to hide their bohemian laughter.

Her mother slapping her in the car because she couldn’t stop crying in front of the chauffeur.

Her parents packed her off to all the parties. She was engaged within six months, and on her way to the South Pacific a year later. And her life, which should have been one of Shakespeare and touring and greasepaint, was a round of cocktail parties and staying thin, and sheer stockings even when the thermometer hit ninety-six. It was going to bed fully made up, not because you had a play to do but because your husband must never realize your eyes were on the puffy side, and you had new wrinkles spreading out like feathers. Her life was not about remembering Shakespeare’s verse, but people’s names, and being interested in nickel mines when she couldn’t have given a damn. It was about keeping out of the sun for fear of freckles, and dressing up like Cupid in homemade wings, and never saying the wrong thing—how she wanted to swear—and not wolfing an entire plate of canapés even though her stomach was so starved and empty it was crunching inside her sodding Playtex girdle. It wasn’t even that she disliked the two women. Not really. It was that they had found a way to be themselves.

“Number, please?” repeated the operator.

Mrs. Pope cleared her throat, and spoke in her best French.

“Good afternoon, Operator. Please will you put me through to the French police, and afterward the editor of The Times in London?”