I held her tightly, forgetting the dissecting room and its cadavers, the nuclear bombers and the November fens.

*   *   *

Soon after, Miriam returned to her Trinity friends and her work for Richard Sutherland. She was unsettled by my obsessive visits to the American bases and aware that I was still ensnared in a past from which I made little effort to free myself. She realised, too, that I was under the sway of a woman whose body I knew even more intimately than her own. Concerned for me, she tried to make me talk about Shanghai and the war, and even asked another medical student to smuggle her into the dissecting room, ready to confront her rival. But I cared for Miriam too much to risk exposing her to the past.

So, in her wise and kindly way, she kissed me against the mantelpiece, formally turned my Surrealist paintings to the wall, and with a friendly wave closed the door of my rooms behind her.

I was sorry to see her leave, but she was right in thinking that a strange duel was taking place between herself and the dead physician who had begun to dominate my waking hours in Cambridge. Through the milky eyes of this silent woman I felt that I was joined once again to the Shanghai I had left behind, but which I still carried with me like a persistent dream that gripped my shoulders. Inside my head hung the façades of the Bund and the Nanking Road. When I looked from the windows of the Anatomy Library at the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, with its American air bases and their glowing vision of a Third World War, I could see the abandoned paddy fields near Lunghua. The railway lines that carried me back to Cambridge after my weekend visits to London seemed to lead to the small country station where the four Japanese soldiers still waited for me.

Without speaking to me, the woman doctor on her glass table had identified herself with all the victims of the war in China and with the young Chinese clerk I had seen murdered against the telephone pole. By dissecting her, exploring her body from within, I felt that I was drawing closer to some warped truth which I had never been able to discuss with anyone since sailing from Shanghai on the Arrawa. Its refrigerated meat holds had carried a secret cargo back to England. I had left Shanghai too soon, with a clutch of insoluble problems that postwar England was too exhausted and too distracted to help me set aside.