As for Corley, although we never spoke about it, I think he wasn’t much more experienced than I was. He had a girlfriend back home called Sylvia, carried a picture of her in his wallet and corresponded on a continual basis. The young woman in the photo was blonde and pretty and he seemed smitten with her and intended asking her to marry him as soon as he had finished his tour. So together, at least, we never did anything about women, didn’t even talk much about them but simply looked as we sat in downtown cafés or round the pool at Le Cercle Sportif. Sometimes when he saw someone he considered particularly stunning he’d blow a quiet stream of air that momentarily rose then dropped his fringe or let his fingers tap against the side of his glass. And that was it as far as I ever saw. What he thought about my lack of engagement I don’t know. I guess now, like Meaulnes, I was looking for the woman I had fallen in love with, the only difference being that I hadn’t actually met her and yet I was able to conjure constantly what such a meeting would be like and how my life would be, continually playing out romantic scenarios in my head. And nothing in the bars or street corners of Saigon promised anything that would replicate that creation of my imagination.

Once, poolside, Corley talked about writing – it amused me to hear him refer to himself as a writer on the basis of his stuttering attempts to produce a novel.

‘I’ve been thinking about Hemingway,’ he told me, ‘and Steinbeck. Do you know what the difference is between them and us?’ And when I took too long to ponder his pretty ludicrous question he replied, ‘The biggest and most important difference, Michael, is that they wrote their books out of experience. Know what I mean? Both of them lived lives – did you ever read the number of jobs Steinbeck had? Ranch hand, carpenter, newspaperman – I can’t remember them all – roving across America, and Hemingway’s the same. So when they came to write they had so much stuff to draw on.’

He paused to try and find some decent music on the radio he had brought with him but eventually had to concede defeat. I took the opportunity to poke him a little.

‘But, Corley, a novel is a work of the imagination. You don’t need to have done things to have an imagination.’

He mussed the front of his hair as if I had hurt his brain and then, pulling his legs up towards himself, told me, ‘Yes, but the imagination has to have something to turn to. You need water in the well – something to draw on. I think that’s my problem. I’ve got nothing to draw on.’

‘But we’re here in a war in a foreign country, in the happening of history,’ I told him. ‘That must count for water in the well.’