the guests wished to go on shore to explore the islands or to have dinner in a local restaurant, a pack of photographers waited to greet them; whenever the king disembarked for a morning of sightseeing, a jaunty holiday pipe in his mouth instead of the familiar cigarette, there would be loud shouts of “cheerio” in an exaggerated British accent. In Dubrovnik romantics reminded the royal couple how important it was to “long live love” by shouting “zivila ljubav” in their own language. One day the Nahlin slipped along the four-mile-long waterway that sliced through the isthmus joining the Peloponnesian peninsula to the Greek mainland. The towering sides of the Corinth Canal resembled the entrance to an Egyptian tomb, opening out not onto a long-abandoned burial place but instead onto the golden light of the Ionian Sea. The king remained on the bridge of the ship throughout the passage, mesmerised by the delicacy of the exercise, as the captain guided the Nahlin through the narrow cut. A pair of binoculars swung from his neck, and he was so engrossed in the manoeuvre that he appeared oblivious to the attention his half-naked state was attracting, delighting cheering onlookers with such informality. Evangeline noticed Lady Diana Cooper’s moue of disapproval as she watched the scene from the ship’s rail.
When the other guests left the yacht to go on land, Evangeline took to staying behind in the shade of the yacht. During the first week she had been determined to keep up and join in. But she had found herself quite out of breath and also vertiginously queasy on the precariously narrow paths. These walkways had been created over centuries by hundreds of indigenous black and white goats who continued to crisscross the rocky islands without a stumble. But each step of a canvas-shoe would send hundreds of little pebbles cascading down the cliff face, each mini-avalanche eroding the breadth of the path still further. Most of the Nahlin guests learned to navigate their way with confidence but such physical agility was denied Evangeline and the beauty of the view, high above a light-dancing sea, was compromised by her fear of falling hundreds of feet below into the water.
Evangeline’s habit of dawdling, whether to recover her breath or retie her laces meant that she often ended up a good fifty yards behind the person in front of her. From time to time the king would stop to tie his own lace and everyone would wait for him to complete the task. If there was a knot in the lace he would pause for longer, and during these interludes Evangeline would catch up with her companions, each one trying hard not to stare at the king’s bottom, which was stuck up in the air, quite unselfconsciously, as he bent over his shoe. Despite the benefits afforded by the king’s recalcitrant laces, after a couple of hours of wheezing and clutching in terror at tuffets of wild thyme to steady herself, Evangeline was always relieved to arrive at a crumbling temple, a lunchtime shelter from the heat and the glare. But these ancient buildings were hard-won goals and she soon decided that the quietness on the empty yacht offered an appealing alternative.
Sometimes she pleaded seasickness. This excuse was a beauty as it succeeded in absolving her from joining a terror-laden swimming party. On other occasions she would announce a previously undeclared passion for jigsaw puzzles, sentencing herself to a frustrating morning staring at hundreds of bits of odd-shaped pale blue and white fragments of wood and the impossible challenge of reproducing an impressionist’s cloud-spattered sky.
Evangeline had a further reason for wanting to be alone. She had begun to notice the increasingly tense atmosphere that existed between Wallis and the king. Wallis was often impatient and critical of her besotted suitor, who hovered anxiously and ever closer to her as if the earth beneath her feet would crumble at the faintest upset. He would go to every length to accommodate Wallis, agree with her or fetch things for her, giving an impression that the role of king and subject had been reversed. Evangeline tried to make sense of it. Wallis of course was not exactly a “subject,” and maybe that was the nub of it: respect. It was neither asked for nor given.
Everyone who spent time with the king, even those whom he claimed as his closest friends, treated him with a deference they showed to no other living person—everyone except Wallis. The oddest thing about