It made me nervous, and I suddenly didn’t want to be the only person in the world he could trust and was no longer sure I was that entirely trustworthy person, so I said, ‘You don’t need to tell me, Corley. Sometimes it’s maybe better to keep stupid things private and after a while they probably don’t seem as bad as you think.’

He shook his head in a rebuttal of my words. I turned away from his intensity to stare at flooded fields where peasants worked with water buffaloes in tableaux little changed from bygone centuries.

‘I have to tell someone, Mikey, because it’s driving me crazy. That night I got drunk … ’ He paused as we squeezed a path between a broken-down truck and an oncoming farmer’s cart piled high with some indeterminate crop, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘That night before I got drunk I went downtown and did the business.’

‘You had sex?’ I asked, surprised but for some reason not shocked, and trying to evaluate the significance of his disclosure.

‘Yes, I had sex.’

‘And you feel guilty now. About Sylvia,’ I said, hoping that stating the obvious might give me a little time to work out what I should say to him.

‘I’ve cheated on her, Mikey. Cheated on the girl I love with a Saigon bar girl.’

‘She doesn’t need to know,’ I heard myself say, suddenly lapsing into how I imagined someone else might have spoken because I still didn’t know the right way to respond.

‘But I know. What was I thinking? How am I going to look her in the eye?’

I had no answers to these questions, nor was I able to tell him that I felt he had cheated on me too by leaving me in a club of one. I listened to him say ‘shit’ over and over again, his blond fringe bouncing with the synchronised jerk of his head. A tiny spot of spit hit the windshield.

‘You’re in a faraway country doing a difficult job. Under pressure. You’d seen things – bad things. And she hasn’t been writing so often as she used to and for all you know she’s found someone else.’

‘Jeez, Mikey, is that supposed to make me feel better?’

I half-apologised and then stopped myself asking questions about his encounter because I wasn’t sure I could hide the fact that they were motivated by curiosity slightly more than concern. And although I felt sorry for his present misery I was also conscious that no particular emotional state seemed to last very long and was as likely to be replaced rather than replenished by time’s passage.

‘How am I going to tell her?’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t.’

‘I want her to be my wife, so what way is that to start a marriage?’

I was hardly the best person to give him advice, but he had pushed me into that situation and I felt a responsibility of sorts to him, at least in the short term, to help him shed some of his misery.