She came back at dusk, completely exhausted. I was hiding in the woods watching her, and when I saw her looking so tired and haggard, the last strands of my self-control snapped and I trampled the bushes around me like a lunatic. When I had smashed them to bits I went home in a rage. Having got home, I found I still couldn’t settle to anything. I felt as if my chest was packed so full that it was about to explode. I had to go and find Huang Yiyi. When she opened the door and saw it was me she sniffed and asked what was up. I didn’t look at all well; was I ill?

I said that I was unhappy.

She said teasingly, ‘If you’re unhappy, why come and find me? Though of course who does a single man take his troubles to? Well, since you’re here, you’re here, and I’m a single woman too – so it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

I said sneeringly, ‘Since when were you a single woman?’

‘You’re behaving really oddly today.’

‘That comes of spending the whole day trying to keep your temper.’

She looked at me curiously. ‘What’s your problem? What have I done to upset you this time?’

With a grim expression on my face, I asked her where she had been all day. She started, and said, ‘It’s a Sunday – why should you care? I went for a walk in the mountains, is that OK?’

‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘The problem is that you weren’t just going for a walk, you went to meet someone.’

She sat up straight. ‘Who could I be going to meet? Unless it was one of the mountain ghosts!’

I laughed coldly. ‘Maybe he is a ghost; he’s certainly got some kind of supernatural power, to bewitch you to this extent. I really don’t understand it – going that far, getting up at dawn and getting back after dark, walking five or six hours through the mountains, running the risk of being bitten by a poisonous snake – and all for the sake of a depraved and corrupt element, a moral degenerate!’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Gossip travels really fast in this place. OK, I’m perfectly happy to admit to what I have done, so I can tell you for free that I did go to see him, OK? Do you have some sort of problem with that? He isn’t a criminal, and besides which even convicts are allowed prison visits.’

‘If he receives prison visits, they can’t be from you!’

‘But I wanted to go – and besides which, it’s my business. It’s nothing to do with you.’