But we all played with a display of commitment, even managed a few sustained rallies, and raising my own game, I suppose in a desire to impress, I eventually secured our win with a neat volley at the net. Afterwards we had drinks on the terrace and I was able to shut Corley out by chatting to Tuyen in French, but not before I heard him tell her companion that he was a writer. And, despite everything, Corley possessed a boyish charm that could be attractive when he wasn’t agonising about Sylvia or some other aspect of his life, so my conversation with Tuyen took place to the accompaniment of frequent laughter from Tuyen’s friend.

She asked me about my job and I told her as much and as little as was permissible while probably ensuring that the air of secrecy with which I described it gave it a romantic edge and inflated its significance without ever telling outright lies. I also exaggerated my relationship with Donovan but when I made a couple of mild jokes at his expense she didn’t laugh and instead gave me one of her fleeting smiles that, as always, left me uncertain as to what she was thinking. She wanted to become a teacher, she said, perhaps travel abroad, and she asked me if I’d ever been to Paris. It was pretty impossible, even without the benefit of imagination, to suggest I was some kind of well-travelled cosmopolitan rather than a small-town prairie boy, and more than once I remembered Donovan’s assertion that I was pitching out of my league. But even as we sat together I didn’t consider that I was actually pitching because, despite the pleasure I found in her company, at constantly looking at her but trying not to stare, I never really rated myself highly enough to think my prospects amounted to very much. Despite our intellectual pretensions, Corley and I were water-carriers, camp followers of Uncle Sam, so face to face with her beauty and what I thought of as her sophistication, even in the way she lit and held her cigarette, I felt only the weight of my unworldly inadequacy.

There was one more game of tennis on a Sunday afternoon, followed again by drinks, but little accrued from these encounters other than some unspoken and unshared wishful thinking on my part and boyish fantasies that always took place in Paris. And I never really knew who she was, and even though she must have been about the same age as me there always seemed an important part of her that was private, a part that I never got to see and which she never chose to reveal. In a way that suited me because I was able to construct her in the image that best matched my ideal.