As time passed, the reports piling up on my desk increasingly pointed to the undisguised impermanence of the peace, with constant accounts of breaches of the ceasefire and warnings about troop and supply movements, the build-up of military strength in a range of key areas. But still at this time just words on a page. There were, too, a great many about the jostling for position inside Thieu’s administration and military command, with a frequent bitter belief that they had been sold out in Paris. The tone seemed ever shriller, less likely to offer fence-sitting ambiguity in their analyses, and I passed them on to whoever’s job it was to make some deeper sense of them. And when I finished each day I mostly forgot about their contents and tried to fit into the life that had been given to me and, with the passing of the months, liked to believe I had assumed the confident manner of someone who belonged.

This, initially at least, was my protected and singular world. I bought fruit in the central market and outside the Botanical Gardens; played tennis or sat poolside at Le Cercle Sportif sipping citron pressé with Corley, thinking ourselves suddenly inducted into sophistication and trying not to stare at the young women in their bikinis, or those draped on the arms of older men of various nationalities and mysterious backgrounds; drank coffees in Tu Do Street; had a better quality of beer on the roof terrace of the Caravelle Hotel, or on the veranda of the Continental Palace, with its green shutters and slightly shabby interiors and where it always felt as if the waiters in their white uniforms were privy to secrets from days gone by. Mostly Corley would chaperone me round these locations and talk about how his novel was progressing. I soon realised, as he played the role of mentor, that he welcomed my friendship because he didn’t seem to have any other close friends, and a couple of times after I had turned him down because I was having a meal with Corrine and Danh, or meeting up with other work colleagues, I detected a sense of hurt, as if they had replaced him. Once, too, when we were at the Rex Hotel, a group of journalists mostly the worse for drink shouted derisively at him and mockingly called on him to share some good news with them. We pretended not to hear.

So time went on, and as I lay on my bed some nights before sleep I thought of the prairie town where I had grown up and where my parents and my younger sister still lived. A world that somehow managed to be expansive and open in its physical parameters but constraining in its effects, and I felt a certain smugness that I could evaluate it so clearly and had escaped its confines. I was already stepping out on a wider stage, had access to vistas and experiences that my hometown’s inhabitants could never imagine, and I knew whatever happened I could never return in any permanent way. And yet I still enjoyed the simple letters that arrived regularly from home, with their expressions of affection, the litany of small-town news – births, deaths, marriages, and the inevitable reporting of barely changing weather. I had been deliberately vague about my work, perhaps enjoying bestowing on it a greater sense of mystery than it deserved – until, feeling guilty about their increasing expressions of concern for my safety, I wrote explaining that I was safely ensconced in an administrative job, maintaining a little hint of my self-importance by saying I couldn’t elaborate due to reasons of national security.