In fact you would have said a zone, not a country, a geology still simmering on who knew what banked fires. It was cracked and gashed to the bone, it was scooped and seamed by landslips or the rains. The valleys were ravines, dried watercourses, moraines of tumbled stone. And the sky, all sun, was crowded with mountains, clear of birds. No living sign, no indication of humanity—not even of human error.

He and she might have been first in this convulsed desert, but for the path.

The path narrowed, intent and serious. It was beaten earth, merely, and small stones. He had said, “Our path”—yet no route had ever more conclusively rejected possession, association. Except in regard to Sir Cecil.

She saw hillsides passing, and felt that he and she made their way up and down and put the appalling scene to some purpose. He, as if from far off, watched the pair of them creeping among all this obduracy. The hills of the mainland, on which at times he walked, were redder still, less tufted even than these of the island: the real thing, the hills of South China.

He said, “I have just a memory of the gorges in the north. I was—what—two, not even three. It is hard to impress a baby, but even a baby was impressed. When we came out of Russia it was across Siberia and down those gorges.” Constantin was safely British now, and had a passport. He had gone to schools in England and been brave for England in the war, and the least they could do was make him British: this least they had done. In the nature of things he could never be English. But a passport cannot be overestimated when you have passed your childhood stateless in Shanghai.

Constantin, securely British, remained foreign in ways that, giving intense pleasure to the girl, displeased in other quarters. He spoke the Shanghai dialect and had a Cantonese teacher twice a week. These were only some of his excesses. He could sing, for instance, and in French; had given her a copy of the memoirs, newly published, of Benois, from the bookshop in Ice House Street. In German prison camps, after Arnhem, he had translated Novalis to pass the time. None of this was usual, and some of it—though not the part about the book—had been reported to Whitehall, Eyes Only, in the pouch.

The back of her neck absorbed heat defenselessly, though it was up to her to have brought the hat.