But Peggy, at least, seemed at home in England, which for me was a zone of transit between my past life in China and a future that, annoyingly, showed no signs of arriving. I was marooned in a small, grey country where the sun rarely rose above the rooftops, a labyrinth of class and caste forever enlarging itself from within. The English talked as if they had won the war, but behaved as if they had lost it. My years at school had made me realise how much I was an outsider—the other boys were friendly, but left me alone, as if they found me threatening in some undefined way. I thought all the time of going back to Shanghai, but that escape route had closed in 1949 with Mao Tse-tung’s takeover of China.

Soon after arriving at Cambridge I invited Peggy to my rooms at King’s, with their windows onto the noisy, organ-weary chapel. Happy to see her again, I watched her stalk around my sitting room, shaking her head over the Magritte and Dalí reproductions on the mantelpiece and the novels by Camus and Boris Vian. I remembered our days together in the children’s hut at Lunghua when she had carefully explained, in at least twelve stages, the right way to sew a button onto my shirt. Sensible housewifery could hold any demons at bay, any hunger.

“Why do you read all this stuff? You aren’t going to the Sorbonne. Nobody’s heard of them here.”

“Peggy, they haven’t heard of anything in Cambridge. The dons are only interested in their damned madrigals and getting onto the Brain’s Trust. The whole place is fake gothic pageant with a cast of thousands of bicycles.”

“It isn’t gothic and it isn’t a fake.” Peggy turned the novels face down on the mantelpiece, clearly worried for me. “When they built King’s Chapel it was more modern than Corbusier and stood for something weird enough even for you to believe in. Go to the Cavendish—Rutherford split the atom there.”

“You make it sound like Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I have met E. M. Forster—he tottered into the provost’s sherry party yesterday. Whiskery old gent with sad eyes, like a disappointed child molester.”

“Good.” Peggy nodded approvingly. “At last you’re meeting the real King’s. Did he put his hand on your knee?”

“I waited, but no luck. The real King’s, all right. If you listen carefully you can hear the choir boys sobbing. That’s why they play the organ all day long.”

“You’re too old for him, that’s all. Those Addenbrookes nurses are more your line. They’ll completely corrupt you … all this brave talk about psychoanalysis.”