“He was just waiting for television to come along.”

“He was waiting for you.” Peggy paced over to the mantelpiece and stared at me through the mirror, as if the reversed image might give a clue to my sinistral dreams. “Sometimes I think he set up that bogus experiment just to meet you.”

“He didn’t know I existed.”

“Someone like you. Obsessed with the Third World War, your head full of all those American bombers and Lunghua…”

“I never talked about them.”

“You didn’t have to! You were desperate for violence! It made sense of everything, but you needed television to fill the air with it, play all that horror and pain over and over again. That really excited Dick. He gave you Miriam as the only way of holding on to you.”

“Isn’t that a little callous? He’d have found his way to television if he’d never met me.”

“The Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Congo, those ghastly ratissages … they might have been invented for you.”

“Peggy, that makes me sound like a war criminal.”

“Miriam used to say you were. And you love your children.” Peggy pressed her hands against the mirror, touching the secure glass. “Before we left on the Arrawa you took me to a film in Shanghai, about an American aircraft carrier…”

“The Fighting Lady—a collection of newsreels.”

“I thought you might get carried away in the dark, but I needn’t have worried. Your mind was up there, moulded against that screen. I was so amazed I couldn’t stop watching you.”

“It was the only film in Shanghai. Anyway, I was fascinated by flying.”

“You told me you’d seen it ten times!”

“The Americans brought it with them and gave us all free tickets. I had nothing else to do.”

“Nothing else? In the whole of Shanghai? You’d been locked up for three years and all you wanted to do was sit in the dark and watch those suicide pilots crashing into American ships?” Peggy turned from the mirror, ready to face me. “Tell me, you know that Dick has a copy of that film?”

“I think he does.”

“You know he does. Miriam told me that you used to watch it together in his garage at Cambridge.”

“Once or twice. Dick had a pilot’s licence and I’d flown in Canada. Besides, it’s a remarkable film—those American pilots were brave men. And the Japanese.”

“Of course they were. No braver than the Russian pilots or the British pilots. What the Americans had was more style and more glamour.”

“Like everything American. So?”

“And that’s exactly what you’ve always needed—glamorised violence. That terrible afternoon on the railway line near Siccawei—you’d seen dozens of atrocities by then.”

“We all had. That was Shanghai.”