I parked my car on the edge of a commandeered tennis court and watched a team of scene-shifters unloading the 1930s props—Chinese screens, Art Deco lamps, tigerskin rugs, and white telephones. All these technicians, I realised, from the barber who had given me a period short-back-and-sides to the carpenters, lighting specialists, and costume designers, were working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a child.

The clock of my life had come full circle, in all sorts of unexpected ways. In a kindly gesture, the director had invited me to play the part of a guest at the costume party. Grateful to him, I had accepted with all the nervousness of a passenger volunteering to parachute from an airliner. A benign conspiracy was already in motion. Many of my neighbours had worked for years as part-time extras and had been hired to play internees at Lunghua camp. Only the previous afternoon, leaving the wine store in Shepperton High Street, I was greeted by the mother of a girl who had gone to the same school as Lucy and Alice.

“Jim, I’ve just heard. We’re in the camp together! Tim Bolton and the Staceys are going to be there…”

Not only the mother but her daughter, now twenty-five, would play a Lunghua prisoner. I almost believed that I was dreaming, and that my sleeping mind was recruiting my Shepperton neighbours into the narrative of the dream. Walking home, I wondered why I had come to live in Shepperton in the first place. Thirty years earlier, Miriam and I had picked the town at random, but perhaps I had known even then that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai and that it might well be filmed at these studios, using my own neighbours as extras and the nearby mansions that had inspired the houses in Amherst Avenue. Deep assignments ran through our lives; there were no coincidences.

“Jim, you made it!” One of the American producers waved to me through the electricians and lighting men who were moving in and out of the house. She held my arm, as if suspecting that I might lose my nerve and escape. “We weren’t sure if you were going to turn up.”

“How could I miss it? I don’t mind saying, Kathy, it feels pretty strange…”

“I bet it does. It’s a good thing you decided against coming to Shanghai with us. How does the house look?”

“Uncanny.” White pigeons released during the shooting of the children’s party the previous day still strutted on the lawn, and a security man sent them fluttering into the roof. “I should have bought it thirty years ago.”

“Then you’d have had nothing to write about. And we wouldn’t be here … We’re shooting the party in about an hour, so you’ll have to change. The dresser’s waiting for you upstairs.”

“I need a disguise…”