‘Good,’ she said. She flagged a taxi. ‘You’re fine. Stick with him, Rowan.’ And with these words of wisdom she stepped into the cab.

Do as I say, not as I do. That was how it was with Sylvie. She wanted me to be happy and successful and secure. This was what she wanted in return for what she gave me, and it was what she hoped to see whenever she peered into my face. At times it made it hard to go to see her. It wasn’t just that I was busy, occupied with other things. It was the effort of looking nice. If I hadn’t done my hair I knew she would worry about me, would think I wasn’t doing well. So, not wanting her to worry, I stayed away from the cafe.

In August, as she flew out, I was breaking things off with Dave. I had contradictory feelings. Desolation. Annoyance. I was more attached to him than I thought. It was all that dash and glitter. He raged and was petulant, and even then, at his most caustic, he had a way with a turn of phrase. Afterwards I was lonely, but I found an answering desolation in the city’s wintry streets: the trees shedding their leaves and standing bare against the sky, the crystalline light when the sun shone, things stripped to their essentials.

As for Sylvie, she landed in Ho Chi Minh City. In the airport she moved among her fellow baby boomers. There were a lot of Americans, a lot of Vietnam veterans, holding paperback histories like guidebooks to the past. By comparison to Sylvie they were large and slow-moving, shuffling in their sandals and glancing uncertainly about, and she ducked and wove between them, boarding pass in hand. She had not gone to any war, had never picked up a gun. As it was, she had bounced about without much consequence. It suited her to be the little person in history. She lived in the long stream of the present, but events and memories recurred. The past was always with her. Maybe this was why she decided she didn’t need to search it out.

Because this was her decision, when it came down to it. She tucked her boarding pass in her pocket. At the time when they would have been calling her name at the gate, she was exiting the terminal, stepping onto a shuttle bus.

That night, she slept for an age in an airport hotel. The next day, she transferred to a resort town in the north. She let the second part of her air ticket go to waste; she did not fly on to France, did not rekindle things with Charles. Not that year or ever. That was it for the Silver Fox.