Hannah has sensed my preoccupation this morning and has already asked twice if I’m OK. I tell her I’m fine and then change the subject by asking about her boys. Tyrone is in college and I’m pleased to be able to help sponsor him. Charles is another story, however, and on at least one occasion I’ve had to speak on his behalf after he got himself into petty scrapes with the law. Sometimes when my mind slips into fantasy, as the mind is always able to do despite the encroachment of age, I think of asking Hannah if she’d consider being something more than a housekeeper. In my imagination of course she always says yes and so in these, my later years, I refind the comfort of companionship, of sharing a life with someone. Of having someone with whom you can experience tenderness and kindness. But it’s a question I’m never going to ask because the reality is that it’s my fantasy, not hers, and it frightens me to think of losing her. So I content myself with snatches of conversation, the noise of her busying herself in the kitchen and knowing that, as with every other day, it will end with the sound of her car setting off down the drive.

She’s knocked on my study door, even though it’s open, and is standing with a cup of coffee. It’s a room she never comes into, for some reason, so I go to the door and take the cup from her, try not to look too long into her eyes.

‘Thanks, Hannah,’ I say, as I do regularly throughout every one of her visits, and then I tell her that I’m going to take a trip, that I’ll be away for three or four days. Perhaps five.

‘Washington again?’ she asks, out of what I know is politeness rather than curiosity, and I say yes even though it’s not where I’m going. And as I finally allow myself to look at her, I understand that time imposes no limitation on need, that it never withers on the vine, and I don’t know whether this is a source of embarrassment or a vestige of life itself for which I should be grateful.

So what is it that sees me on a plane and flying towards my past? The need to know? The need to tie up loose ends? Perhaps both these things, but always something more. Something that’s hard to define. Part of it is being in a Saigon room with a mother asking me to marry her daughter, to be a father to her child, and despite the moral code that I’ve always thought I tried to live by, my inability to know what was right or whether I was brave enough to meet its demands head-on. And always somewhere in the back of my mind that same unanswered speculation about the course my life might have taken and whether it would have been for better or worse. There is, too, something else that gradually and reluctantly makes itself known – a need to see Donovan again, to stand before him no longer the naive young man subservient to his every order, to stand before him and let him see who I became, who I am, even though there is something shameful about wanting the approval of someone you despised.