Thanks to my half-hearted effort, the bedsheet with the painted sky and sea, the palm trees swaying on tiny islands, the distant silhouettes of seagulls dotting the sky, fluttered to the ground in the middle of Min’s piano performance that afternoon. The choked-back laughter made her hands stumble over the notes and I felt sorry for her as she stood and curtsied at the end. She was the sort of person who would always be disappointed. Others would never measure up to the exacting standards she held herself to.

The show went on for hours, and the ballroom grew stuffy. Most of the sailors who could be excused from their duties came, and their whistles and clapping were particularly loud for Jane and her friends, who shimmied and shook across every inch of the stage, not exactly in time but with enthusiasm to spare. Their costumes showed more skin than they covered, but that skin was all golden tan and unblemished. I stood up and applauded at the end of their performance, and for Brynn’s—not just because they were my friends, but because I could see that they were the genuine article. Brynn didn’t sit around and brood about what others would think of her juggling; she didn’t worry that people would whisper or laugh or think her not ladylike enough. She got out there with her broad shoulders and long legs, her infectious smile, and made it all look so effortless.

Even at that moment I knew exactly where in the room Jim was, towards the front on the starboard side, his hat in his lap, appearing relaxed and laughing with the other officers. Not once did he turn and look back at the audience, though I was certain he felt my eyes on the back of his neck, the hair bristling where it had been shorn by the ship’s barber. When he got up to leave during the intermission, he walked straight past me without so much as a glance. Barbara and I stood to leave not long after.

‘I’m starving,’ she said as we stepped out into the cool air of the early evening. ‘Will you come to the dining room with me?’ We walked in silence along the narrow passageways of the ship. I thought of how we were landing in two days, and how the last three weeks of my life had been the strangest yet. Learning of Jack’s death in one part of the world while I was steaming towards another, both of us as far as imaginable from our shared childhood. Yet that was where I thought of him now: not in a prison camp, but running down the bracken-spackled hill as fast as his short legs would carry him, me giving chase, Blackie bounding ahead. I could hear his baby laugh still, that high cackle of joy.