Jonathan slid his arms into the sleeves of the navy twill jacket. He was due at the club and because the evening promised a chill, Khit Tin had brushed this woollen jacket and left it out on the bed. It was one he used to wear in England, and he was fond of it, fond enough to bring it to Rangoon, where it mostly hung at the back of the wardrobe. As he shrugged it on he was pleased to find that the serge was tight across his shoulders and snug around his arms when only a few months ago it would have hung from his frame. This reassuring bulk, this hard-won flesh was a sign that he was returning to himself, like an invalid emerging at last from a long convalescence.

He pulled off the jacket and walked to the wardrobe to find another. Rummaged in his stud box for a different pair of cufflinks, then took a moment in the mirror over his tie.

It was not only his body that was stronger. Experience too had fortified him, lending him strength of another kind. Yes, he had made mistakes and he had acted without due consideration for the consequences. The words of Ronnie’s syphilitic friend came back to him, ‘Boredom, loneliness, the scourge of Rangoon.’

Well, he would be the first to admit that he had done harm, and that perhaps it was out of boredom and loneliness; of course he felt bad, but in no way a lesser man. In fact, one might even say that he was a rather better one. He had recognised his errors and had worked to make amends at some cost to himself and his own reputation. He had taken his blows. Now he could rightly consider himself inoculated against the fever-dreams of the rainy season, a man proof against waterlogged days to come. (He might think of her with a pang, but he had slipped those past months into—not memory exactly, nothing so solid as that. Call them impressions, a familiar scent, a snatch of a popular tune.) As he stood in front of the mirror, his reflection looking back, wrapping one end of a silk tie around the other, none of it seemed real.

Behind him the jacket lay dark against the cream counterpane. It would need letting out. This he could leave to Khit Tin but it was tricky job, easy to make a mess of it. Perhaps he would ask Ivy to recommend a tailor, she would know someone clever.

How was it that no one else had noticed the ironic tilt to Ivy’s ingénue smile? Her eyes, as she sat in the bar among the rest of the cast of Audrey Ambrose’s Adventure, had not flicked around the room, trawling for admiration. Instead she returned his gaze openly before standing up to walk over to him.

Would she like to take a row on the lake? (He had to say something and he was still in his rowing kit.)

‘Why don’t we?’ she replied, that same dipping smile playing about her lips. Ivy, for whom the point of abandon was always slightly further away than he would have guessed.

Later, their first night together, she was luminous with pleasure in the act of love and that mouth, its smile white in the moonlight, whispered again and again, ‘Why don’t we? Why don’t we?’

Jonathan left the flat without speaking to Khit Tin and ran down the stairs into the street. He decided against cycling; he would walk until he saw a taxi. A breeze that smelled of river water played across his face, the evening, like his days, like these past weeks, already unfolding with an effortless rhythm.

With a shrug of her slim shoulders Ivy dismissed all difficulties. She wrote for the fashion pages, she adored Chanel and Patou, was a slave to modernity for its clean lines, its clarity. She moved season by season, like an animal, and this, it turned out, was the knack to progress. She recognised things, people, places for what they were. She outstripped him, she left him trailing in her wake and what might wrong-foot him was invariably clear to her. ‘What else did you expect?’ she would ask, when he complained about Ronnie, or the club, or his servant, Khit Tin, that white smile an enticement.

On Sparks Street he found a motor-taxi, a big black Daimler and, hang the expense, he got in. The car slipped through the golden light, turned right and began to climb the hill. The engine barely registered the effort.

In his work, too, he was making progress. This was also Ivy’s gift. He saw now how he had been slow, distracted, naïve about so many things. For example, the park-like pastel gardens surrounding the big houses that dotted the Pegu Yoma, these had appeared to him as so many forced displays of ostentatious Englishness. Now, as the car glided past, they seemed rather a kind of parallel, a balance to the city below. He had learned that Rangoon, with its chaotic streets, its occult strangeness, was not necessarily his concern.

Except for Winsome, of course. For her he would always reserve a sweet regret. He had loved her. In a way, loved her still, of course he did. But where was the sense in continuing? The undeniable fact that there was no future to it had stifled love just as surely as guilt killed it. He could not take back any of the events of the monsoon. He had thought himself a man who did no harm to women; he was wrong. He had to live with that.

But had he hurt her, really? Ivy might point out that some men would not have made a choice. Some men would have strung her along, kept her on the go rather than breaking with her. His mistake had been to involve himself with a woman too young, perhaps, to know how the world worked. But what else did she expect? This was what Ivy would say, if he had felt he could ask her about it.

For Ivy came to love as a man might. Principles, misgivings— she saw that these were ideas frequently cut off from the way the world actually was, from love itself. He had no answer for her pragmatism, for her whispered ‘Why don’t we?’

With her, everything was possible, there was not that turning and turning forever within the same moment. She steadied him. They could have a life.

The road suddenly bent back upon itself, hugging a red laterite outcrop, and the car seemed briefly to swing out into space. The city’s rivers and creeks and narrow, snaking chaungs glinted beneath him, winding their way towards the horizon, across the delta and south towards the Andaman Sea; to the west, the Bay of Bengal. He hung above it all for a moment and then, the engine revving, the car powered on, rounding the curve and hugging once more the line of the road.

‘Why don’t we have a life?’ He said it aloud into the back of the cab. He imagined his hand cupped around one of Ivy’s slender shoulders, pictured her face, the familiar tilt of her lips, the life they would lead, their home together. All he had to do was ask.