‘You are the only one who can help her now,’ she said again, but I still didn’t understand. ‘You can take Tuyen with you. You can say you are getting married. That she is having your child.’

She stood up and her eyes were pleading. From outside in the street came a stutter of distant gunfire. We both looked to the window.

‘We can pay you,’ she said. ‘We have dollars. And Tuyen make a good wife. Very good wife.’

‘It’s not about money. I don’t want your money,’ I told her as I tried to think what to say.

And what thoughts rushed through me in those moments? Tuyen’s beauty, undoubtedly – I couldn’t look at her mother without being reminded of that – but so many other things as well. There was the sense that they were owed and the opportunity to repay some of that debt had fallen to me. In some way it felt like the honourable thing. So I could do what they asked but I knew too my responsibility to Tuyen and her child wouldn’t stop at a seat in a plane, even if I could engineer it, and a little part of me had already started to think that Donovan might be willing to see me conveniently forgotten about – just another administrative oversight in the chaos of war. It was paranoia, of course. But there were other questions seeking answers. Abandoning her in a strange land was little different in my thinking to abandoning her in Saigon. But how could I make such a commitment to someone who had taken so little notice of my presence and in the normal course of events would never seek to be part of my life? And more than these, and shadowing everything else, was my instinctive aversion to becoming in an instant the surrogate father of Donovan’s child. The child – I always imagined him as a boy pressed in the mould of his father – was destined to be a constant reminder of what I wanted to forget and a lasting impediment to everything I longed for. Quyen saw my hesitation and took a step closer. Her hand reached out to my arm.

‘I think you are a good man,’ she said and she was welling up again. ‘Please do this for Tuyen.’

But the good man she saw was already beginning to think of escape routes, of imagined wives, invented fiancées – for some reason the archaic word ‘betrothal’ ricocheted round my brain. It felt like too much was being asked and ran counter to all the dreams I held about love, and yet another voice told me it was a simple and decent action that might serve to redeem a little of what we had done that was wrong.

‘I should try to get her out, get all of you out through the Embassy,’ I told her, momentarily avoiding the need for a decision.

‘He won’t let that happen,’ she said. ‘I know he won’t.’