‘I cooked, I washed clothes, I sang songs, and we walked and walked and sometimes we ran. And I helped to chop wood. And I threw stones to kill birds and lizards. And one day,’ her voice rose vibrant out of its artificial submission, ‘I saw a tiger. A real one.’

‘Weren’t you afraid?’ asked Jimmy, forgetting the recorder.

‘Oh, no,’ said Evangeline. ‘But we were afraid of the Gurkhas, because they are terrible people. They chop heads and hands. They are Kling devils,’ she said.

‘Cut,’ said Jimmy. ‘I think we’ll have to prepare her a bit more, to give some shape to the broadcast. Now,’ he resumed, ‘what happened to your mother?’

‘She was killed,’ said Evangeline. ‘She was killed when I was taken.’

But no tears fell, she said it stolidly and wriggled her red sandals on the floor, and looked at her duck and patted it.

‘Now we’ll take a photograph,’ said Jimmy. We walked downstairs and stood in the garden in front of the bungalow, Evangeline with her duck, and the camera man snapped her alone; then with Ah Mei; then with all of us round her, a gay company smiling strenuously and blinking our eyes in the harsh sun.

Three more times did Jimmy come to the house, until Evangeline was ready and then they recorded her. Each time Mrs Lo came with him, to watch Evangeline with a rapt tenderness, with love to stroke her hair, and to offer her little drives in the car, and to bring her handkerchiefs and oranges and a bright red plastic belt to match her sandals.

One day Jimmy asked Evangeline what songs she sang in the jungle, and she started:

Arise, ye who do not want to be slaves,
With flesh and blood 
We shall build our new Great Wall.

‘Ha,’ said Jimmy, ‘that’s a communist song, little girl.’

But I remembered the song, many times heard during the war against Japan; in Chungking hummed by servants as they swept the courtyards.

‘Surely, Mr Lo, you remember this, our war song, yours too. It was not only a communist song.’

‘Yes, I know,’ replied Jimmy. ‘But many things which were nod communist have become communist now … in fact it is so difficult sometimes … but not for you,’ he added, his brow clearing. ‘Not for you or me … we are positively not communists.’ He meant to make me feel secure, above suspicion, in these suspicious days when all liberalism is suspect which is not tainted with servile acquiescence, but instead I felt suddenly a traitor, and nothing else.

‘I know another song,’ said Evangeline. ‘Our teacher in the jungle sang it, after lessons, playing it on the flute. He said it was old, from the ancestors’ country. But we could not march to iti He sang it alone, after food was eaten, and I listened.’

She sang in a harsh, unmelodic voice pitched higher thai normal, off-key and haunted with the old longing and grievance, old as the world of man: