Later I realised that this seventeen-year-old daughter of a once well-to-do Minsk family was scarcely more than a child herself. On my cycle rides I had been shocked by the poverty of the White Russian and Jewish refugees who lived in the tenement districts of Hongkew. It was one thing for the Chinese to be poor, but it disturbed me to see Europeans reduced to such a threadbare state. In their faces there was a staring despair that the Chinese never showed. Once, when I cycled past a dark tenement doorway, an old Russian woman told me to go away and shouted that my mother and father were thieves. For a few days I had believed her.

The refugees stood in their patched fur coats on the steps of the Park Hotel, hoping to sell their old-fashioned jewellery. The younger women had painted their mouths and eyes, trying bravely to cheer themselves up, I guessed. They called to the American and British officers going into the hotel, but what they were selling my mother had never been able to say—they were giving French and Russian lessons, she told me at last.

Always worried by my homework, and aware that many of the White Russians spoke excellent French, I had asked Olga if she would give me a French lesson like the young women at the Park Hotel. She sat on the bed while I hunted through my pocket dictionary, shaking her head as if I were some strange creature at a zoo. Worried that I had hurt her feelings by referring to her family’s poverty, I gave Olga one of my silk shirts and asked her to pass it on to her invalid father. She had held it in her hands for fully five minutes, like one of the vestments used in the communion services at Shanghai Cathedral, before returning it silently to my wardrobe. Already I had noticed that the White Russian governesses possessed a depth of female mystery that the mothers of my friends never remotely approached.

*   *   *

“Yes, James?” Olga hung the fur cape on its rack and slipped my mother’s breakfast gown over her shoulders. “Have you finished your holiday book? You’re very restless today.”

“I’m thinking about the war, Olga.”

“You’re thinking about it every day, James. You and General Chiang think about it all the time. I’m sure he would like to meet you.”

“Well, I could meet him…” As it happened, I did sometimes feel that the Generalissimo was not giving his fullest attention to the war. “Olga, do you know when the war will begin?”

“Hasn’t it already begun? That’s what everyone says.”

“Not the real war, Olga. The war in Shanghai.”

“Is that the real war? Nothing is real in Shanghai, James. Why don’t you ask your father?”

“He doesn’t know. I asked him after breakfast.”

“That’s a pity. Are there many things he doesn’t know?”