I walked away from him under a cinema marquee advertising the first of the Mondo Cane films, bogus documentaries that cunningly mixed fake atrocity newsreels with genuine footage of human oddity. Next to the marquee was a newspaper billboard promoting a special supplement devoted to the Kennedy assassination, with a grainy enlargement of the Zapruder frame that recorded the last moments of the stricken President. Near Piccadilly Circus a group of CND members were canvassing support for an anti-nuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. A well-nourished young woman pressed a leaflet into my hand bearing a photograph of a simulated nuclear attack, which showed hundreds of volunteers lying down together in a placid high street.

Fantasies of apocalyptic death fuelled the imaginations of these comfortable suburbanites. I was thinking of a different atomic bomb, which many of the Lunghua prisoners claimed to have seen above Nagasaki, the bomb that had saved our lives. In the rancid glare of the music arcades, as the hips of the young streetwalkers shook to Trini Lopez, I could almost believe that a Third World War might have saved Miriam and that the war to come after that might resurrect her from her grave. A secret logic that I had yet to explore seemed to connect her death with the dead in the Avenue Edward VII, as if the unconscious needs of the human race could only be fulfilled in an obliterating sexual apocalypse, replayed in an infinity of slow-motion photography. Fragments of deranged dreams veered across the night air above the raucous neon.

*   *   *

The lurid glare still hung in my eyes as I walked the children to the school gates the following morning. When I returned to my car I began to chat to a mother of two boys in Lucy’s class. We discussed the costumes for the children’s Christmas party, which she was helping to design. Keen to show me the patterns, she invited me for coffee at her nearby home.

As we sat at her kitchen table she explained that she and her husband had separated, but told me that he still brought his laundry home. Something about this admission seemed to amuse her. Without much prompting she added that they made love in the kitchen while the washing machine completed its cycle.

“Domestic routines survive everything,” I commented. “I like that. It’s rather touching.”

“Isn’t it…” Coming to the point, she switched on the washing machine. “By the way, you haven’t anything that needs washing?”

“No … except this handkerchief.”

“It looks a bit grubby. Let me do it for you.”