‘It should do but I don’t think my war counts for very much. Or yours, for that matter. We’re just shuffling paper, making up poor stories for someone else to tell.’

‘So you’d rather have been hunkered up in some foxhole in the Central Highlands fighting off Charlie?’

‘No, of course not, but if I had been, at least I’d know what it’s like to be fully alive in the moment because I guess that’s what it must feel like when faced with the reality of death. Sometimes, Michael, I think I’m just sleepwalking through my life and I know I’m never going to write my novel until I’m able to wake up.’

Then he fell silent for a while, as if exhausted by his self-dramatising efforts, and we went back to shyly studying the young women who paraded poolside.

I spent time with Corley because there wasn’t anyone else, but I don’t think we would have been particularly close friends in any other context. I liked him well enough, and he never did me any harm, but there was something unsatisfactory in him that occasionally irritated me. He came from a comfortable background – his father dealt in art in New York and his mother ran some kind of acting school. And whether it was because of that safety net, that silver spoon, there was a listlessness, a vagueness of purpose about him sometimes that got under my skin. My parents hadn’t been able to give me much more than a faith I no longer wanted, so I’d worked hard at college, avoided all distractions, taken casual employment in a downtown store where I sold gardening equipment to help pay my way. And if I liked to think that I had the virtue of steadiness, even though I understand now that it often became a form of passivity where I allowed my life just to happen rather than trying to shape it, then it seemed to me that Corley drifted on the wind like a seed head, fastening on whatever idea or course of action that momentarily offered him a place to settle. But when these thoughts prevailed I felt, too, a sense of guilt because I knew that without him I would have been solitary, without the benefit of a guide however faulty and incomplete the map he possessed.

I saw that people occasionally found us amusing when we were out and about, so there were moments when it felt like we were the two uncool kids in class, against whom the others were able to assert their superiority. And even though we secretly thought that we were above it, at times I wanted him to speak in a less affected way in front of others, not be so keen to let himself be carried on a wave of enthusiasm, not be so quick to offer assertive judgements on whatever was under discussion. And once I betrayed him. It was at some event in the Embassy grounds, the type of event to which neither of us normally ever got invited, held to mark an occasion I can’t remember, and Corley found himself holding forth to a group of women and I watched as he got pumped up on his own sense of insight into how the war should be brought to an end. He’d had a few drinks and was growing too loud.