“I didn’t see that much of the place. It’s a glorified academic gift shop for American universities, where they can buy some quaint little professor for a few dollars. You need to be a tourist or an au pair girl to get the most out of it.”

“I took a course of lessons at the flying school. For some reason I wanted to go crop spraying in British Guiana. It’s curious the delusions one has.” David shook his head at himself. “A girl and I went on the river in a punt. Cambridge seemed a good place to be.”

“The Americans have their nuclear bases there. Advanced jets sit on the runways loaded with hydrogen bombs, while huge quartermaster-sergeants cruise the country lanes in their Chryslers, looking for turkey farms.”

“Nuclear bases—I imagine you spent a lot of time hanging around them?”

“A little. Better than singing madrigals every hour of the day and night, or pretending to be Rupert Brooke.”

“Only in a way. You should have gone to Yale—though I wouldn’t put it past them to be singing madrigals there as well.” David stared at his hands, holding them up as if he had just discovered a new weapon. “You know, we ought to join the American air force. You’d look great in a USAF uniform, Jim, driving around Cambridge in a Chrysler. It’s really what you’ve always wanted to do. You could lay all the girls who haven’t already been laid by the boys in USAF uniforms. Jim, think about it.”

“David, I am thinking about it. It’s quite an idea—in fact, the first new one I’ve heard for years.”

“And not just for the girls…” David steadied his cutlery, glancing around the tables as if he wanted to straighten all the knives and forks in the restaurant. He was smiling at me with the excited but reassuring eyes I remembered from our afternoons in Shanghai, when he invited the wary Chinese bar girls to the apartment he rented from a Russian dentist in Imperial Mansions. As usual, he had soon provoked these young prostitutes into abusing him. Sex, for David, was as close as he could get to that terrifying evening in the guardhouse with Sergeant Nagata and Mr. Hyashi.

A career as a military pilot offered an even more direct entry to the realm of violence for which we hungered. For both of us the war years in Shanghai still set the hidden agendas of our lives. David dreamed of violence, in his concerned and thoughtful way, while I was looking for a means of re-creating the pearly light I had seen over the rice fields of Lunghua beside the railway station and which seemed to hover so promisingly over the American air bases near Cambridge.