I held her tightly, sucking back the blood from my mouth, unsettled as if I were embracing a sister. She calmed me with a hand and began to caress my chest as we lay together, settling the movements of my diaphragm. Decades of need and dependence surged from me to her breast as I held it to my mouth. I moved her knee onto my hip and eased myself between her legs, wishing that we had once conceived a child together.

She wiped my blood from her nipple and raised it to her lips. “Quiet blood … that’s good, Jim. Now I can remember…”

I moved inside her, in that deep interior embrace, glad that I could no longer feel her bones.

“Peggy … I wanted to do this thirty years ago.”

“Poor boy, you couldn’t have managed it then.” She kissed my forehead, cleaning her lips and leaving a damp bow of blood that I could feel on my skin. “This is the last time—you’ll have to wait another thirty years.”

“I’ll wait…”

I rested within her as she began to make love on her own. Her eyes watched her breasts as they rose and fell, and she touched her nipples to excite herself and then steered my fingers to her pubis, letting herself into some reverie of lust as private as a dream. Her mind was far away, beyond this little house and the King’s Road rooftops. She gazed at her strong ribs against my chest. Her brisk interrogation in the sitting room had been her devious courtship of me, and the blood in my mouth allowed me to play the sick child again. For a few moments we were lying on my bunk in the children’s hut. In her roundabout way she was making her own return to the war, to her first desire for me. Now that her parents had died, she and I had taken their place and we were free to go back to Shanghai. Once again we were twelve-year-olds who had made a small marriage of need among the rags and malarial straw.

*   *   *

When we had dressed she straightened my tie and jacket, brushing away a fleck of dandruff in a wifely way. She said goodbye on the doorstep and kissed me robustly, sending me out into the world.

“Talk to David’s lawyer,” I reminded her. “He’ll telephone you.”

“I’ll see what I can do—I can tell the magistrate he was abused by the Japanese.”

She embraced me for a last time in front of the passersby. A window into our childhoods had opened and closed.

*   *   *

“Teatime—thank God.” David sat up, our chess game forgotten. “The biscuits are good here, the best in Summerfield.”