“To be honest, I don’t know yet.”

“You’re going to try again?”

“In a month or two. Dick is keen to film me.”

“Mad … all this for a television programme?”

“I’m humouring him there. It’s hard to describe the intense light, the sense that one’s about to witness some huge revelation.”

“But what?”

“I’ll find out. The same light lay over Lunghua on the day the war ended.”

“It never ended—for you.”

Peggy stood in the open doorway with her back to the garden, looking at me in the same kindly and tolerant way I remembered from the children’s hut, when I had outlined some madcap method of finding food for us. The light touched her strong shoulders and the handsome hips I had never held. In a real sense we knew each other too well. Sex was for strangers, and as soon as one ceased to be a stranger desire died. Miriam had always been careful to keep part of herself veiled from me. Perhaps one day Peggy and I would become strangers to each other, as we grew older and apart …

The light shifted, a retinal veer. For a moment I saw Peggy suspended in the air above the pear tree, angel of our suburb. I imagined this spinsterish doctor in her sensible woollen suit and court shoes, positioned at various points above the rooftops of Shepperton.

“Are you all right?” Peggy was staring at my eyes. “You were miles away. What about the children—is Sally going to look after them?”

“Dick’s asked a friend of his, Cleo Churchill. She brought her daughter and slept on the sofa. She’s more level-headed—I think he’s frightened that Sally might—”

“Poor Sally. You people use each other like deviant children.”

*   *   *

I kissed Peggy fondly, watched her drive away, and then helped the children with their homework and prepared our lunch. Deviant adults? The reproof stung, however much I reminded myself that Peggy’s stance of responsibility and good sense was more at odds with the world than she realised. She might care for her deprived and abused infants, but she had never loved a child of her own, with all that love entailed. Spectres stalked the little garden of her house in Chelsea. It was not only in my mind that the four Japanese soldiers still waited at their wayside railway station for a train that would never come, as trapped by time as we were. War was the means by which nations escaped from time. Peggy and I and those Japanese soldiers had been marooned on that island platform, waiting for another war to set us free. They had tormented the Chinese to death in the hope that cruelty alone would release the mainspring of war.

*   *   *