The British had known their own war, a conflict with clear military and political goals, so unlike the war in China. They had coped with its unhappy memories and their reduced status like the adults in Lunghua camp. Over the rubble of bombed streets and the deflated hopes of a better world they had imposed a mythology of slogans, a parade of patriotic flags that sealed the past away forever, far from any searching eye.

Even the ex-servicemen I met in London bars, who had experienced real combat during their years in the British forces, seemed to have taken part in a different war, a bloody pageant not too far removed from the Military Tattoos which one or two of them, bizarrely, had helped to stage in Shanghai. But war, which had widowed and maimed so many of them, had never touched their imaginations. In Shanghai, from 1937 to the dropping of the atom bombs, we had been neither combatants nor victims but spectators roped in to watch an execution. Those who had drawn too close had been touched by the blood on the guns.

I tried to shut my eyes, dozing in the cramped flats of the hard-drinking physiology demonstrators, but the past endured. More and more, the cadavers in the dissecting room reminded me of the severed limbs I had seen in the Avenue Edward VII.

*   *   *

On the last Thursday in November I drove out to Cambridge airfield. I knew that Miriam often skipped her sports afternoon at school and sneaked away to watch Richard Sutherland practise aerobatics in his Tiger Moth. As I guessed, she was waiting in the Chevrolet when I arrived, running the car’s powerful heater. Cheerily, she waved me towards her and threw open the passenger door. Glad to be with her again, I sat next to her in the car, listening to the exhilarating drone of aircraft engines.

Comfortable in her untidy school uniform, Miriam held my cold hands. Her breasts trembled as the antique biplane flew over the car park, propeller wash drumming at the Chevrolet’s windshield.

“So, how’s everything in the dissecting room?” she asked. “There must be some news from the dead.”

“I’m still working on the arm—I’d like to get away from the place, but it has a kind of hold…”

“Jim, have you thought of giving up medicine?”

“Not yet. This is my first term. I’ll wait until I’ve finished the head and neck.”

“That might be too late. See your tutor, say that you want to read English.”

“After medicine? Why bother? Gray’s Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses.”

“It’s making you worse, not better. Cutting up all those bodies—it reminds you of the war.”

“Miriam…” I squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “Real bodies don’t look like dissecting-room cadavers. They look like the living—that is what’s so strange.”

“I want to help, Jim. But there’s nothing I can do.”