This was a prospect I dreaded, an even greater torture than the promise of unending peace. When Olga touched me, it was in a distant but oddly intimate way. As I lay in bed at night she would sometimes undress in my bathroom with the door ajar. Later I decided that this was her way of proving to herself that I no longer existed. As soon as my parents left for the golf club, my one intention was to give her the slip.

“David said that Olga—”

“All right!” Irritated by the ringing telephone, which the servants were too nervous to answer, my father relented. “You can see David Hunter. But don’t go anywhere else.”

Why was he frightened of Shanghai? Despite his quick temper, my father easily gave in, as if events in the world were so uncertain that even my childish nagging carried weight. He was too distracted to play with my toy soldiers, and he often looked at me in the same firm but dejected way in which the headmaster of the Cathedral School gazed at the assembled boys during morning prayers. When he walked to the car he stamped his spiked golf shoes, leaving deep marks in the gravel, like footprints staking a claim to Crusoe’s beach.

Even before the Packard had left the drive, Olga was reclining on the verandah with my mother’s copies of Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. At intervals she called out to me, her voice as remote as the sirens on the river buoys at Woosung. I guessed that she knew about my afternoon cycle rides around Shanghai. She was well aware that I might be kidnapped or robbed of my clothes in one of the back alleys of the Bubbling Well Road. Perhaps the terrors of the Russian civil war, the long journey with her parents through Turkey and Iraq to this rootless city at the mouth of the Yangtze, had so disoriented her that she no longer cared if the child in her charge was killed.

“Who did your father let you see, James?”

“David Hunter. He’s my closest friend. I’m going now, Olga.”

“You have so many closest friends. Tell me if the war begins, James.”

She waved, and I was gone. In fact, the last person in Shanghai I wanted to see was David. During the summer holidays my school friends and I played Homeric games of hide-and-seek that lasted for weeks and covered the whole of Shanghai. As I drove with my mother to the country club or drank iced tea in the Chocolate Shop I was constantly watching for David, who might break away from his amah and lunge through the crowd to tap me on the shoulder. These games added another layer of strangeness and surprise to a city already too strange.