“Only if you can prove that you’re the father.” Miriam loved his attentions, as she loved those of other men, revived by their compliments far more than by mine. She had always been a flirt, but five years of marriage and children made the lightest flirtation seem a serious business. To a mother of two children, sex was all or nothing. I knew that sometimes she longed to get away, to live on her desert island with three strange men—though with husband and children tucked into a decent pension in the next bay—and that she encouraged my writing as a way of being adventurous by proxy. I dimly guessed that one day she would have affairs and this second childhood would be over. I had learned that a woman could love her husband and children but still feel restless enough to want to leave them.

*   *   *

As we stumbled around the broken toys in the garden, David came to the point.

“I’m off to Hong Kong at the end of the month. All expenses paid. We’re filming a housing project in Kowloon for a Chinese developer.”

“What a plum. There are lots of old Shanghai hands you can look up.”

“I’ll avoid them. I want to go up to Shanghai itself.”

“Think of me as you stroll down the Bund.”

“As it happens, I wondered if you’d like to come?”

“To Hong Kong?”

“Shanghai, mostly. You could take a month’s leave. We need to go back and see the place for ourselves.”

“David, I can’t. Even if I wanted to, there are Miriam and the baby. You’ll find someone in Hong Kong.”

“No, thanks. Those old Shanghai hands, and all that talk of tiffin and mah-jongg and how many servants they had—nothing to do with what really happened. That’s why you and I should go.”

“Nothing did happen.”

“For a start, Jim, we happened. That railway station you were always talking about in Moose Jaw. We ought to find it for you.”

“That was a killing. Sad for the Chinese, but it meant nothing.”

“You used to say he was trying to tell you something. You need to get away from this—it’s potty botty doo-doo all the day…”

“David, it’s the only time I’ve been happy.”

“But you shouldn’t be too happy, Jim.”

After David had gone I mentioned his offer to Miriam.

“David’s a fool!” She thumped her saucepan onto the kitchen table, where the children had set up a miniature replica of their Magic World. “You haven’t flown for years. He’d have you killed the first time you tried to take off.”

“He doesn’t want me to fly. He needs me to go to Shanghai with him, walk the streets where we played hide-and-seek. Sometimes I think he’s still playing there by himself. He’s like those old Shanghai hands he hates so much.”