I said, "Come back to the Chalet. Phuong's waiting."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I quite forgot. You shouldn't have left her."

"She wasn't in danger."

"I just thought I'd see Granger safely-" He dropped again into his thoughts, but as we entered the Chalet he said with obscure distress, "I'd forgotten how many men there are..."

Phuong had kept us a table at the edge of the dance-floor and the orchestra was playing some tune which had been popular in Paris five years ago. Two Vietnamese couples were dancing, small, neat, aloof, with an air of civilization we couldn't match. (I recognized one, an accountant from the Banque de 1'lndo-Chine and his wife.) They never, one felt, dressed carelessly, said the wrong word, were a prey to untidy passion. If the war seemed

medieval, they were like the eighteenth-century future. One would have expected Mr. Pham-Van-Tu to write Augustans in his spare time, but I happened to know he was a student of Wordsworth and wrote nature poems. His holidays he spent at Dalat, the nearest he could get to the atmosphere of the English lakes. He bowed slightly as he came round. I wondered how Granger had fared fifty yards up the road. Pyle was apologising to Phuong in bad French for having kept her waiting.

"C'est impardonable, [Это непростительно]" he said.

"Where have you been?" she asked him.

He said, "I was seeing Granger home."

"Home?" I said and laughed, and Pyle looked at me as though I were another Granger. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle-age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent, and I saw Phuong for a moment as I had seen her first, dancing past my table at the Grand Monde in a white ball-dress, eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who had been determined on a good European marriage. An American had bought a ticket and asked her for a dance: he was a little drunk - not harmfully, and I suppose he was new to the country and thought the hostesses of the Grand Monde were whores. He held her much too close as they went round the floor the first time, and then suddenly there she was, going back to sit with her sister, and he was left, stranded and lost among the dancers, not knowing what had happened or why. And the girl whose name I didn't know sat quietly there, occasionally sipping her orange juice, owning herself completely.

"Peut-on avoir l'honneur? [Позвольте вас пригласить?]" Pyle was saying in his terrible accent and a moment later I saw them dancing in silence at the other end of the room, Pyle holding her so far away from him that you expected him at any moment to sever contact. He was a very bad dancer, and she had been the best dancer I had ever known in her days at the Grand Monde.

It had been a long and frustrating courtship. If I could have offered marriage and a settlement everything would have been easy, and the elder sister would have slipped quietly and tactfully away whenever we were together. But three months passed before I saw her so much as momentarily alone, on a balcony at the Majestic, while her sister in the next room kept on asking when we proposed to come in. A cargo boat from France was being unloaded in Saigon River by the light of flares, the trishaw bells rang like telephones, and I might have been a young and inexperienced fool for all I found to say. I went back hopelessly to my bed in the rue Catinat and never dreamed that four months later she would be lying beside me, a little out of breath, laughing as though with surprise because nothing had been quite what she expected.

"Monsieur Fowlair." I had been watching them dance and hadn't seen her sister signaling to me from another table. Now she came over and I reluctantly asked her to sit down. We had never been friends since the night she was taken ill in the Grand Monde and I had seen Phuong home.

"I haven't seen you for a whole year," she said.

"I am away so often at Hanoi."

"Who is your friend?" she asked.

"A man called Pyle."

"What does he do?"

"He belongs to the American Economic Mission. You know the kind of thing – electrical sewing machines for starving seamstresses."

"Are there any?"

"I don't know."

"But they don't use sewing machines. There wouldn't be any electricity where they live."

She was a very literal woman.

"You'll have to ask Pyle," I said.

"Is he married?"