On that first night, the first night of the rioting, Jonathan woke abruptly. He had been dreaming of plums, the yellow plums his mother used to put out for show in a blue bowl. Something of their sweet perfume, their sticky softness stayed with him so that he was adrift in the velvet darkness of the tropical night, the click of a gecko connected with the suppleness of flesh, the salt licked from his fingers with the brine of another’s skin, the rush and gurgle of his own body with the steady rise and fall of breathing beside him. Her back curving away from him, and beneath, the swelling of her buttocks and the bud of her anus, smooth thighs parted to a bent knee, still smelling, still smeared with his semen. He touched his tongue to his teeth and raised himself from the bedclothes. He would wake her with his fingers, with his mouth.

Beneath him, she slept on, her legs extending down the bed in an echo of his own sleeping shape, her face half-turned from him, half in shadow, and the way her arms were thrown about her head, like a child, touched him so that he felt a tenderness for her. She slept with abandon. She had abandoned herself to him. But even as he gathered his body across hers, he heard the scrape of a foot at the door. It was unmistakable, Khit Tin, padding closer on bare feet. Bringing tea—no doubt as an appeasement for his absence, but Jonathan also suspected prurience. He had learned to listen for the sly chink of cup against sugar bowl on a tray held in steady hands. Khit Tin’s Burmese way of creeping about like a spy when there was a woman in the apartment, on his face a blameless expression so like insolence.

Jonathan sat upright, his body tight with rage at Khit Tin’s incursion. Behaviour that would ordinarily irritate him tonight had consequences beyond himself alone. His servant must not see Winsome. Silently, Jonathan eased himself from the bed and moved towards the door, his body taut. He found the handle and turned it quickly, flinging the door open to surprise Khit Tin, perhaps even to upset his tray of tea things.

There was no dim shape looming from the darkness. It was not morning; it was not even dawn. There was no Khit Tin with his tray. The narrow hallway opened out onto the sodium-blue light of the empty living room. The air was cool on his face. He was thirsty. He moved through the hall to the kitchen to find some water.

The little kitchen was close and hot; the window overlooking the back of the building, with its mess of servants’ lean-tos and cooking huts, was shut tight, insects thudding softly against the glass slats. The electric light did not work. Instead, he had to search for matches, a candle. He found tumblers too; a tray, a cloth to line it, a steel jug, which he positioned beneath the ceramic chatty before opening the spigot. Tepid water trickled out.

As he performed these small tasks, his hands looked strange, as if the water, the tray, were nothing to do with him at all. A large moth hit the window with a solid thud and set his heart beating fast. It left a splash of iridescent dust.

He was still unnerved by the force of his reaction to Khit Tin’s imagined presence, the defensive reflex. He did not wish for Winsome to be compromised in any way, was aware that it was yesterday’s violence that had led to the intensity of feeling between them, their appetite for one another honed by the heightened emotion of the riots. People behaved differently in dangerous times, or so he had read. Now he knew it to be true. Yet his own fury at Khit Tin he did not understand—it was more than protectiveness towards Winsome, it was a feeling—not honour, or decency or delicacy. More than the simple wish not to be an agent of harm.

The jug was almost overflowing. He snapped the spigot shut, then looked about for lemons, or limes. But there were none to be had, no ice in the box either, in fact; no sign that Khit Tin had been there at all the previous day. Jonathan blew out the candle and carried the metal tray back through the apartment.

After the stale air of the kitchen, the openness of the living room soothed and distracted him. A breeze, scented with rain, came through the tall windows; careless of him to leave them open. He set his tray on his desk and walked towards them.

The night was still dark but, from the freshness of that breeze, Jonathan judged dawn to be no more than a few hours away. On the very hottest nights, nights such as this one, he often slept at the foot of these windows, cooled by these same night winds. He knew that the natives made a habit of sleeping outside on their balconies, sometimes without nets despite the mosquitoes. The movement across his skin was pleasant and he thought that perhaps he could have made a makeshift bed right here for himself and Winsome, for both of them—it would have heightened his pleasure. Outside the wind sighed a little, and he stepped over the low sill and onto the balcony.

Rain had washed away the smoke and the tropical foetidness. The air was clean and the city still. He could smell trees, the river; he was briefly, powerfully reminded of an English midsummer’s night. Looking out over the city, he could see the gleam of the water and the Lewis Street Jetty, where the trouble was rumoured to have begun. Further still were the narrow streets of East Rangoon and a little to the north the cream-coloured government buildings— the courthouse, the customs house, Lloyds, the Imperial Bank, the European Surety.

Despite the riots, the grounds of the secretariat building were still lit up, the brightness showing through the thick fringe of palms and banyan trees. Above the city, in the Pegu Yoma, rose the grand houses around the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the Golden Valley where excellent little men and their excellent wives looked out over the lakes. He had taken lovers from that set; had gone with women like that.

Those women. Winsome was so unlike them he couldn’t imagine her in their company. She was not schooled in the social mores of the Golden Valley, she would be defenceless against its cruelties. She was not sharp, she had the dust of the convent about her. She was not chic, she was not even beautiful, not in their way. Not of his world. Not free. Not his.

As if in empathy, a low groan reached his ears. Some poor devil lying injured in the street below. The groan came again, but this time he was able to locate it in the apartment, his apartment. It had come from behind him.

Jonathan climbed back over the threshold, heart beating solidly, rapidly against his ribs, and peered into the greyness of the room. ‘Winsome?’ he called, his throat very dry because he was almost certain that what he had heard was a man’s groan. And now he was equally certain that he had not left the windows open. He strained to hear what he could. There was only silence. But he felt the presence of the other, the groaning man, injured and desperate.

He wiped his mouth, took another step and called out again, louder this time, ‘Someone there?’ The same voice moaned in the dark; with it, the creak of a cane chair. Peering into the murk, Jonathan caught a movement in the half-light and the sheen of sweat on skin.

‘Who is that?’ Slipping further into the room; his fingers brushing the tray on his desk. He picked up the box of matches, struck one and held it up.

Khit Tin stared back at him from across the room, as if conjured by thought alone. His eyes were bright and glittering. He cradled one arm with the other, and Jonathan could just make out a slick raggedness beneath the shoulder where the skin should have been smooth. Khit Tin moaned once more. The match went out.

Jonathan crossed the room and knelt beside his servant. There was the rust smell of blood and fear. Another stench he couldn’t identify, too foul and vegetal, sweet like decay. In the flare of another match, Khit Tin’s belly shone black. His skin was febrile and when Jonathan prodded at the edges of the wound, his servant gasped. Something had pierced his flank, leaving a wound that was deep and torn, but did not mean death.

‘This needs suturing,’ Jonathan stated, surprised that his voice sounded cool, authoritative—like a white man’s—when he still felt shaken by his earlier fear. He turned back to the desk for the jug of water, the cloth from the tray. He found the stub of a candle, a half bottle of gin and all the while reminded himself that Winsome was asleep in his bed.

He tried the electric light and, wondrously, it came on, but threw only a dim glow—an effect of the riot, no doubt—so that it was difficult to see the wound; he needed more light. Instead, he felt for the edges of skin. Slowly, methodically, as gently as he was able, he cleaned the area with the rag and the alcohol. Khit Tin was silent and almost still, never once acknowledging the pain; and it would be painful, Jonathan knew that. As he worked, he thought that he could feel his servant’s fear, but perhaps it was loathing, for on that yellow skin, in the dark of the night, Khit Tin’s blood was as black as ink.

He thought back to the men, his patients, who had come into the hospital that morning. On the bellies of those Burmans who had suffered the most violent wounds were designs of some ancient and native origin, painted onto the skin with a thick dark substance.

The muck he was wiping off Khit Tin’s skin was black and grainy as well as gluey. Not just blood, then, or soot, or grease from some leaking machine. He understood these patterns marked men as warriors; they were signs of power and commitment. He imagined a knife molten in the air, then his servant’s ragged steps as he staggered through the shadows, eluding the patrols of police, slipping up the back stairs to this flat, returning to his master and the pretence that characterised their relationship—which, for the moment, they seemed to have laid aside.

Jonathan put down the cloth and wiped the heat from his own face before going to fetch his bag from beside the desk. Sitting beside his servant once more, he laid out his suture scissors, his needles, the black silk.

Servants talked. That was the way of things. Even servants who slipped through the night, holding their guts inside their belly with one limp hand. The number of Europeans, even counting the Eurasians, was small. Rumours and half-truths were constantly being circulated through the clubs, the hospital, the European restaurants and assembly halls. He would have to make things clear, despite the humiliation of explaining oneself to a servant (but perhaps he and Khit Tin were past that now). He was obliged. He could not take his actions back. And so, for Winsome and also for Desmond, he must make sure he was understood.

When Jonathan pierced his skin with the needle Khit Tin didn’t flinch or look away. Bending over the wound, Jonathan drew the silk through the skin, looped the thread to make a knot and tied off the stitch before pushing the needle into flesh once more. He wondered how messy this could possibly become.

‘There is someone else here, Khit Tin.’ His servant was used to unexpected visitors, and yet Jonathan felt rather than saw those black eyes flick upward, then down again. This was his only reaction. Jonathan’s fingers slipped against the needle and he paused to wipe them before continuing. ‘This person is a woman. It was not safe for her anywhere else, with the fighting in Rangoon.’

Khit Tin’s neck strained forward—the stitch was too tight, Jonathan could feel how it bit into the flesh. He slid his scissors under the black thread, easing it loose. He preferred not to leave a scar. ‘So I brought her here to protect her.’ Khit Tin drew a long slow breath. ‘She is still sleeping. We won’t wake her, will we?’ Beneath his fingers, the edges of the wound met evenly. It was a neat job that should heal perfectly, barring infection—God knew what was in that black muck. He was about to ask Khit Tin whether it was still painful but instead, placed his fingers against the wound and pressed down hard. Khit Tin gasped. He covered Jonathan’s fingers with his own hand.

For a short moment, they looked steadily at one another, Khit Tin’s eyes as dark and opaque as the paint Jonathan had cleaned from his skin. His servant gently lifted Jonathan’s fingers from his then he pointed with his chin at the room behind them. Jonathan turned. Winsome was standing there.

Grunting with the effort, Khit Tin hauled himself from the chair. For a moment he teetered on his feet, then seemed to sag. Jonathan wondered if he would fall, or if perhaps he was going to confide in them, explain his absence and beg forgiveness, promising his silence as compensation. Perhaps he had misjudged his servant. Blood always looked black in the night.

Khit Tin righted himself then turned his gaze towards Jonathan. ‘I will make breakfast,’ he said, his English, as always, so careful, such a delicate morsel in his mouth. He shuffled through the apartment towards the kitchen.

Winsome walked over to the cane chairs. The grey light that pierced the windows made the lines of her face, her jaw, her full lips, the curve of her cheek, exquisite. Soon day would fill the room. He watched her take in the needle, the black silk, the crumpled rags—stained, but not with blood—the room around her, the light outside. She reached for the switch and turned off the lamp.