It was not that she wanted to walk but that she wanted to be with him on the Sundays he spent walking. He knew this, and supposed he was challenging her to confess it like a fault. “It is here,” he said, and they turned off the Magazine Gap Road onto a shoulder of gravel. There was an opening in scrub, then the path. There was even a lettered sign—three English words set on a tilted post, in soil so dry you might have lifted the pole out of the ground like a dead plant.

His finger prodded a skyline. “Our path goes right across that chain of hills.” She could see it zigzag, disappear, flick out again. “And comes down at Repulse Bay.” The names were often like this—combative, ballistic: Magazine, Repulse. It was a fact, universal, of colonial life.

He took her wrist and swung it lightly, let it go. The girl ambled contentedly, relieved of the dis-ease of being where he was not. Only too glad to have left, because of him, the green, ordered side of the island where the city was a plaster lozenge in long agglomerations of Chinese towns, and habitation seethed in a snake dance along the shore. To have left the sister who said, “You’re daft,” sullenly, from bed, as she pulled on sandals, tugged at mousy curls, dropped the comb in her pocket as sole equipment for the journey. In the bedroom windows, vegetation was as dense on slopes and heights as tenements were below, the tropics terraced around irruptions of pastel villas that climbed into humidity—pale houses ripped open by looters during the Japanese withdrawal, some scaffolded, others already restored.

In the city you might glance up any teeming street of stairs to find jungle at the top in a green overhang. The passageways of steps that led up from Queen’s Road were stacked, like shelves, with merchandise—whole walls of print materials in bolts, looped-up cascades of plastic handbags, Niagaras of colored belts, rafts and wheels of paper flowers for funerals, everything your heart could desire from UNRRA supplies to ivory penknives, table napkins from Swatow, and trays from Amoy stenciled with vermillion dragons. Ascending like an offering, all this branched at last into extravagant green leaf.

Her checkered dress had exhaled its last breath of starch in the boiling cab. She had no hat and as she walked her eyes squeezed up against the sun. She had not learned to wear sunglasses, was always taking them off to see the colors. He kissed her salty wrist and again released it. He said, “I am too young to be involved with women half my age.” Constantin was thirty-six.