“Of course you haven’t! How could they?” she huffed, indignant at the very idea. “You’re the only one who was really there.”

“I’m not sure that’s true—I think the actors felt that I was the odd man out, the only one who wasn’t real. Most of them had been back to Shanghai.”

“You could have gone with them.”

“I know, but I hadn’t the nerve. I wasn’t ready to face everything again—I’ve spent my whole life trying to sort it out. This is the right way to go back to Shanghai, inside a film. In a sense they started shooting it fifty years ago…”

The world premiere would be held in three days’ time, at a theatre in Westwood. Seat belt fastened, I waited as the plane turned over the sea and swept in across the idle waves. Despite the long flight from London, and what I had said to Cleo, I felt remarkably at ease. I looked down at the deserted beaches, with their isolated palms standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean that I had last seen in 1946. I had never visited Los Angeles, but it seemed right that my childhood should meet its end in this desert city whose limitless imagination had remythologised the past and invented the future.

An hour later we were rolling along the San Diego freeway in the studio car, looking at the landscape of Los Angeles that neither of us had seen before but which was instantly familiar. Thousands of films and television series had installed an intact replica of the city in our minds, far more accurate than the preposterous Beefeater and pearly queen image conveyed by the British Tourist Board. Vaguely garish bungalows and storefronts stretched for miles under the tangle of overhead wires, a terrain of ticky-tack and painted glue fading in the sun, as if the entire city were a dusty film set waiting to be refurbished in some as yet to be financed production. I loved every inch of it and felt instantly at home.

Then, as we left the freeway and joined Santa Monica Boulevard, I saw the first anomaly, a jarring intrusion from another level of reality. A billboard the size of a tennis court stood beside the road, advertising the film we had come to see, my own name below those of the producers and director. For a moment the dream had woken and summoned its sleeper.