Olga held my arm, the scent of her hair, throat, and breasts overrunning my senses. She stood beside me, staring at the mansions of Beverly Hills as if seeing the vanished façades of Amherst Avenue. I remembered how, forty years earlier, I had felt her strong hip pressed against mine as we stood in the glass-strewn ballroom of the Del Monte nightclub. During the dark days at school in England I had often thought of Olga. We would have made love on one of the roulette tables if I had been less intimidated by her, and particularly if I had offered a shortcut to my father’s office.

I embraced this exotic female chimera, with her dream’s ransom of a face lift. Her body was even older than mine, but her face was that of the White Russian teenager who had first looked after me.

She smiled to herself, perhaps amused by the memory of some childish exploit in the garden at Amherst Avenue.

“And your friend, James?” Her fingers loosened my tie and shirt. She ran her nails across my chest, making sure that my nipples were still there. “Is she back soon?”

“Not till tomorrow—she’s gone to see publishing people she knows in Santa Barbara. Olga, this has nothing to do with her.”

“Publishing? Then it’s okay…” She raised her face in front of me, a small screen on which was projected the image of a young woman.

I wondered why she had bothered to see me—perhaps out of pride, and to remind me that she could still dominate my life. Certainly, she would have felt no debt of honour for stealing from my parents before the war. But she knew that we were both victims in our different ways of Western rule in Shanghai, which my parents represented for her. We had once been wounded and corrupted by Shanghai, insofar as children could be corrupted, and by making love in this California hotel we would prove to each other that the wounds had healed.

“Good … you know, James, I never waited long for a man. This could be a bad example for me…”

She held my wrists in the same firm grip she had used half a century earlier to steer me towards the bathroom. Standing beside the bed, she closed the wardrobe mirrors so that no reflection of her back would reach my eyes. She began to undress me as if preparing me for a party, her fingers never leaving my skin as they moved around my body.

Delaying herself deliberately, she stood against me, playing the moody governess unsure whether to accord some trivial privilege to her charge. I kissed her affectionately, glad that she had come through and was happily married to her influential surgeon.

The film of our life rushed backwards through the projector, devouring itself as it hunted for some discarded moment that held the key to our earliest selves.

*   *   *