There were other distractions, with moments of unexpected brightness, even when things started to darken in Saigon. I had already been invited to a Tet celebration at Danh’s family home, a riotous occasion that contrasted with my own family’s austere Thanksgivings, and a short while later I received an embossed invitation to his wedding. It took place in a side chapel of the Notre-Dame Cathedral – it was the first time I had ever been in any place of worship other than the one in which I had grown up and it was a strange experience sitting under that vaulted ceiling and absorbing so much that was different to all I had been accustomed to. And despite the warmth of the occasion, the unfamiliar and, to my eyes at least, gaudy iconography made me uneasy. I know the importance of religious iconography in the sustenance of faith and by the end of this story would come to understand it in a better way, even though my Presbyterian upbringing has done its best to ingrain a reverence for the plain, the unadorned. But I’ve been in enough yellow taxis where drivers of many different faiths hang their religious talismans from rear-view mirrors, or decorate the dashboard, to know there’s a very thin line between faith and superstition. In more recent times the cathedral would provide its own ‘miracle’ when worshippers claimed to have seen the statue of the Virgin Mary shed a tear, causing thousands of believers to flock to the site, ardent to see the weeping mother of Christ. But the closest they probably came to a tear was through buying one of its postcard images hot off the presses.

I felt a stranger inside Notre-Dame but also that it represented the painted backdrop to Donovan’s world and so was part too of the glaring disconnection between what was supposedly believed and what was done, and how the orbits of these two separate worlds never seemed destined to touch. But all such metaphysical speculation faded quickly because after the Catholic ceremony there was another, more traditional one, followed by a banquet at a restaurant where I lost count of the courses and where everyone seemed to have access to a natural joy that made me feel both at ease and conscious that it felt so strange. The happiness of the newly-wed couple permeated the room and I hung back from them as if unwilling to come too close to what I wanted for myself in case, like some mirage, it vanished at the very moment it appeared most real.

Afterwards I walked home alone through the dusk and, as the wedding’s vicarious happiness faded, felt an almost unbearable weight of loneliness. I passed bars where bored hookers hustled mechanically in doorways lit up by interior light so that they were momentarily transfigured, and wondered if it would take it away. Part of me wanted to believe it possible, and once I hesitated, paused for a second before moving on with the girls’ taunts following me, including one that offered to introduce me to her ‘very nice brother’. But to do the deed with one of the bar girls I knew I would have had to hate her and I knew it wasn’t hatred I wanted to give or receive.