I took my place at the glass-topped table assigned to me and set out my dissection manual and instruments. Already I noticed a few curious stares. Alone among the cadavers, mine was that of a woman. For purposes of dissection, the human body was divided into four sections: thorax and abdomen, head and neck, arm, and leg. Each would occupy a term and be dissected by a team of two students. I knew no one at the medical school whom I could partner, apart from Peggy Gardner, now in her final year at Cambridge, and decided to select a cadaver at random. Then, scanning the list of numbers I noticed that one was identified as “17F.” Without hesitating, I wrote my name alongside.

Sure enough, I found myself sitting beside the bald head of a strong-shouldered woman who had died in her late middle age. Fine blond hairs rose from her shaved eyebrows, lips, and pubis, and her face had the firm set of a headmistress or hospital matron. In most respects she was indistinguishable from the male cadavers—her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue of her chest wall, while the genitalia of the males had shrivelled into their groins—but she was already an object of attention. Most of the students had spent the war in their boarding schools relocated far from the bombed cities and had probably never seen a naked body, let alone that of a mature woman.

Only Peggy Gardner was unimpressed when she entered the dissecting room and found me working with my partner, a Nigerian dentist in his thirties, who was taking an anatomy degree.

“There’s a lot more work there,” she said reprovingly. “You’ll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia.”

“It was the luck of the draw.” Embarrassed, I added: “For some reason I got the Queen of the Night.”

“Rubbish. And that’s awfully flippant, Jamie. You’re still trying hard to be different. You haven’t changed since Lunghua.”

“Peggy, that sounds like a death sentence.”

I may not have changed, but Peggy had transformed herself from the thin-shouldered sixteen-year-old who had sailed to England with me on the Arrawa. I remembered how she had started to mimic the fine-stitched mannerisms of the widowed Mrs. Dwight. Peggy had spent her first years in England in a world without men. Behind her handsome stride I could see the self-confident spinsters who had taught Peggy at her boarding school near Brighton. Stylish but well-buttoned, she sailed through the young demonstrators who tried to flirt with her.