So when I think now of Saigon all these years later, it is not a montage of all the political and military realities of that ill-fated episode in our national history that I dwell on, but rather a woman asking me to marry her daughter, black snow falling from a cloudless blue sky, my eyes briefly meeting those of a prisoner, the colourless silhouette of a butterfly on a canvas awning. Twelve spies went to spy in Canaan; ten were bad, two were good. But who can ever say inside the churning maelstrom of history and memory’s distortions which we really were? And who can say if what took place all those years ago still shapes who we are today?

As for Corley, I think of him as a friend in only the most tenuous of ways, the long decades of separation enough to cast doubt on any belief that anything substantial still remains. But would I give him up? I would prefer, of course, that I never have to make the choice and so avoid arriving at a definitive conclusion, but if I can’t escape that moment then perhaps, and even to my own surprise, I think that I wouldn’t. If things happen and they are very bad things, then we have a right to know, even if ultimately we are prepared to accept them in the belief they are necessary for the greater good. If it stopped the planes flying into the towers. If it made our world safer. But I know, too, that nothing is ever that simple and mostly the idea of the greater good is merely a camouflage to do things we don’t want anyone to know about. And there is another thought, however self-interested it might seem, and it’s if things are allowed to happen in the far-flung dark corners of the world, then sooner or later they happen in the home place. And from all those distant days I remember Donovan’s words that though the sheep fear the wolves it’s the shepherd who kills them.

It isn’t Corley, however, I find myself thinking about in the hours that follow, but rather Ignatius Donovan. Somehow, even though I struggle to acknowledge it, I know that despite the passage of years, and all the times I’ve tried to deny it, a part of my consciousness bears the imprint of Donovan, despite wanting nothing more than to erase it. And thinking about Ignatius Donovan gave me a kind of permission to think also of Tuyen. If the truth has to be told, I have often thought about her, even on occasions constructing an alternative life that begins with her sitting beside me on that flight out of Saigon. It is a story that my imagination has often woven, threading it through the most secret moments of my daily existence and always ending with a desire to know what happened to her. Was it just some poor man’s tired Madame Butterfly fantasy, or because, as I have found out, loneliness is the powerful instigator of many forms of divergent thoughts and behaviours? Had Donovan helped her get away, helped her escape with the child she was carrying? The reality of his own family and Quyen’s conviction that he had abandoned them argued against that possibility, yet he had gone to their home looking for them. And when in moments before sleep or on the slow hours of plane journeys I try to imagine the life we might have shared, it is always stifled by guilt then superseded by the love I found with a different woman. There have even been times when I have thought of making discreet enquiries, but both the magnitude of that task and a fear of disturbing the pattern into which my life had settled prevented me.