“Gerty!” he cried suddenly, spotting Miss Bell. “You two’ve met,” he said with a significant stare, which seemed to remind that lady that she’d been put on notice to play nicely with the new girl.

Miss Bell, tall and sharp-jointed, was covered from neck to ankle in gauzy lace and mushroom-colored silk. My sleek, defiant dress received a cool appraisal, but I held my head up and met her gaze, just as she’d instructed. She nodded, acknowledging this, and I took the opportunity to thank her for sending the lovely dinner to my room the night before. She appeared puzzled. Both of us turned toward Lawrence.

He coughed and found somewhere else to look.

“Dear boy! How very diplomatic,” Miss Bell remarked dryly. “And yet, you do find a way to get credit in the end, don’t you.”

Before Lawrence could respond, she introduced me to the gentleman on her right: “Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Wilson, until recently His Majesty’s high commissioner in Mesopotamia,” Miss Bell informed me. “We worked together in Baghdad.”

In his late thirties, this person matched Miss Bell’s own considerable height and had an equally commanding gaze, but seemed annoyed by the way she had characterized him. There was something muttered about “Persia, these days,” and oil, and then their interrupted conversation resumed without us.

I whispered to Colonel Lawrence as we moved on, “Those two don’t like each other much, do they.”

“It’s been a long day, and they’ve spent it arguing. Gert believes that no people will enjoy being governed very long by another. She’s for indirect rule in our Middle Eastern protectorates. Wilson is of the firm opinion that—apart from a few troublemakers—His Majesty’s colonial subjects desire nothing better than to be granted material and moral progress under the tutelage of Great Britain.”

I snorted, by way of comment. It was a bad habit, the unattractive-ness of which Mumma often noted, but Lawrence smiled with enigmatic satisfaction. “I thought an American might be amused.”

“Americans,” I recalled, “were notorious colonial troublemakers.”

“As the Arabs promise to be,” Lawrence said quietly. “A considerable portion of Mesopotamia rose against Wilson’s administration last summer.” Lifting himself on tiptoe to see over and around the shoulders of the crowd, he scanned the room while remarking, “Cost His Majesty’s Government eighteen million pounds to put the rebellion down. The Exchequer has been hemorrhaging money onto the sand ever since. Ah. There’s Winston, who’s angling for chancellor and earnestly desires there be something left in the Exchequer to preside over when he gets the job.”

Lawrence introduced me to His Majesty’s secretary of state for air and for the colonies, and I received a pleasant welcome from the man I’d originally thought was “Winston Darling.” Thickset and square, with a stooping head and hooded eyes, Mr. Churchill was not yet the bulldog he would come to resemble, but all the signs were there, even in 1921. He, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Clementine, a vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, visibly in love with the husband who was perhaps a decade her senior.

Other introductions followed, the names and titles coming at me so quickly I caught only a few of them. There was an elderly couple named Cox who were some sort of nobility, I gathered. Was I to call them Lord and Lady in direct address or some other variation on that imperial theme? The honorifics stuck in my democratic throat. “How nice to meet you both,” I said warmly and let it go at that.

Just then a uniformed gentleman pulled Lawrence aside. I was immediately taken up by a stylish young woman whose name I’d already forgotten. She was holding what may not have been her very first cocktail of the evening and made a point of exclaiming over my dress.

“How lovely! And so becoming!” I was told in a voice meant to be overheard by Miss Bell. “Wherever did you get it? Cleveland? Oh, but it positively screams Paris!”

I returned her compliment, for she was wearing a brilliant green-and-gold gown cut sleeveless and low. Breathlessly up-to-the-moment. She moved to stand at my side so that we could both observe Miss Bell, layered in elaborate Edwardian drapery and holding forth among the gentlemen.

“I heard what the dreaded Gertrude said to you,” the young woman whispered. “You’re not the first, believe me. She made the very same remark to me when my husband and I arrived in Baghdad last year. Horrible old thing …”

Having found this ally, I was hoping to be seated at the children’s table with her, but Colonel Lawrence reappeared at my side and steered me toward a damask-covered expanse with the Churchills and the Coxes, Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson.

“Cleveland,” Wilson noted, having heard the drunken girl’s cry. “Standard Oil, of course. And do you know Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Colonel Wilson served in Mesopotamia until recently,” Lady Cox informed me with a condescending pat. “He is with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company now.”

My reply was delayed by the arrival of an army of Egyptian waiters. Wearing spotless white gloves and starched linen jackets, they distributed the first of what would become a farcical number of courses. I hoped everyone would forget that I’d been asked a question, but the table remained attentive, so I answered, “Mr. Rockefeller and I do not ordinarily move in the same circles, Colonel Wilson, although I did work near a settlement house named for his daughter. I was a teacher until recently. I’m here on holiday.”

“How nice for you,” Mrs. Churchill said after an awkward pause that conveyed what everyone was thinking: Why on earth has Lawrence invited a nonentity like her to the table? Is this some sort of prank?

“Miss Shanklin’s sister was my hostess in Jebail when I was starting my thesis on crusader military architecture,” Lawrence told them.

I’d spent enough time with schoolboys to find his tone suspiciously innocent, but everyone else seemed happy with his explanation. Parallel conversations quickly developed. With a teacher at the table, Mrs. Churchill took the opportunity to talk about her children, the latest of whom was a daughter named Marigold, of all things. No, the children were not traveling with their parents, my query was answered. The Churchills had been separated a great deal during the war. This trip to Cairo was a chance for the couple to enjoy some time together, a sort of second honeymoon.

Over and around Mrs. Churchill’s praise for the nanny who was taking care of her younger children while she traveled, snatches of the conversation across the table reached me. Colonel Wilson, Mr. Churchill, and Miss Bell were all engrossed in the topic of oil and the administration of the lands it lay beneath. Lord Cox merely harrumphed occasionally, as though dismissive of everything he heard. He reminded me of the mummies at the Egyptian Museum: fleshless, lipless, rigid. On my right, Colonel Lawrence grinned, taking it all in and occasionally tossing out an incisive remark, rarely more than a few words long. Happily left out of that discussion, I leaned toward Lawrence to ask, “Were you by chance a middle child, Colonel Lawrence?”

“Temporarily,” he whispered. “I was the second of five brothers, and you’re right: one had to be quick to slip a word in.”

“What you must understand, Wilson, is that the British people are sick of war,” Mr. Churchill rumbled in a slightly slurred baritone. “We simply cannot sustain an expenditure of thirty millions a year to control the place.”

“You know as well as anyone, Winston: the Royal Navy needs oil,” Colonel Wilson replied. “There’s every indication that Mesopotamia has fields as productive as Persia—”

“The cost is all out of proportion to whatever we can expect to reap from that wilderness. If we pull the troops back, Trenchard assures me that we can keep order with airpower.”