Still wearing the breakfast robe, Olga sat on my father’s bed, her hand stroking the satin cover and smoothing away the creases. She was caressing the imprint of my father’s shoulders, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to slip between the sheets.

“He does know many things, but…”

“I can remind you, James, it’s Friday the thirteenth. Is that a good day for starting a war?”

“Hey, Olga…!” This news brightened everything. I rushed to the window—superstitions, I often noticed, had a habit of coming true. “I’ll tell you if I see anything.”

Olga stood behind me, calming me with a hand on my ear. Much as she loved the intimacy of my mother’s clothes and the ripe odour of my father’s riding jacket, she rarely touched me. She stared at the distant skyline along the Bund. Smoke rose from the coal-burning boilers of the older naval vessels. The black columns jostled for space as the warships changed their moorings, facing up to each other with sirens blasting. The darker light gave Olga’s face the strong-nosed severity of the mortuary statues I had seen in Shanghai cemetery. She lifted the breakfast robe, staring through the veil of its fine fabric as if seeing a dream of vanished imperial Russia.

“Yes, James, I think they’ll start the war for you today…”

“Say, thanks, Olga.”

But before the war could start, my mother and father returned unexpectedly from the country club. With them were two British officers in the Shanghai Volunteer Force, wearing their tight Great War uniforms. I tried to join them in my father’s study, but my mother took me into the garden and in a strained way pointed to the golden orioles drinking from the edge of the swimming pool.

I was sorry to see her worried, as I knew that my mother, unlike Olga, was one of those people who should never be worried by anything. Trying not to annoy her, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my playroom. I listened to the sirens of the battle fleets and marshalled my toy soldiers. On the next day, Bloody Saturday as it would be known, my miniature army at last came to life.

*   *   *

I remember the wet monsoon that blew through Shanghai during that last night of the peace, drowning the sounds of Chinese sniper fire and the distant boom of Japanese naval guns striking at the Chinese shore batteries at Woosung. When I woke into the warm, sticky air the storm had passed and the washed neon signs of the city shone ever more vividly.

At breakfast my mother and father were already dressed in their golfing clothes, though when they left in the Packard a few minutes later my father was at the wheel, the chauffeur beside him, and they had not taken their golf clubs.