The Heat of the Sun

and I indulged in a long, drunken dinner. Mr Arnhem, doing violence to a samisen, yammered out the one about Naga-sacky where the
fellers chew tobaccy and the women wicky-wacky-woo; Goro, joining us, laughed over everything and nothing, then sobbed between gluggings of sake for his dead friend Yakuside. The girl Kiku,
covering her mouth, told jokes in broken English. The night was hot, the doors open; insects plunged and darted about the lamps. Mr Arnhem, growing sombre, played the one about the Japanese
sandman, an old second-hand man, trading new days for old.
    In the morning I said goodbye to Le Vol.
    ‘You’re sure you won’t come home?’ I asked him.
    ‘They’re only throwing me out of Japan, not making me go to America. I can’t pass up this chance. You should come too. Come on – China! It’s the story we’ve
been waiting for.’
    Was I a coward? Was I a fool? I held up my ashplant, my excuse for everything, and said: ‘Be careful, old friend.’
    My own ship, for San Francisco, was to sail a week later, but before it left, a restlessness claimed me and I departed early, bound for Hong Kong. Goro, by the gangplank, bowed to me deeply and
urged on me again the charms of his niece in Takeo. Tearfully, he babbled that she would wait for my return.
    A suspended period in my life began. I lingered in Hong Kong, that peculiar British outpost that seemed so disconnected from the massing bulk of China; I travelled overland to the French city of
Saigon and by ship to Singapore, secure in the embrace of the British Empire; further south to Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies; east, to Port Moresby in the Australian protectorate of Papua;
north-west to Manila, in the American islands of the Philippines.
    Everywhere I felt the press of strangers. Natives massed against me in promiscuous streets, and colonials slapped me on the back in clubs beneath laggardly, churning ceiling fans; I found myself
driven along jungle tracks or taken shooting, or hauled off to brothels by planters who had heard I was a visiting writer. Dutifully, I investigated temples and palaces and travelled on trains past
squalid shacks and dazzling lakes and lush terraced hills, but nothing could assuage the loneliness that gnawed at me like physical pain. I favoured hotels near the sea. At night, lying awake,
hearing the moon tugging at the tide, I would feel as if my soul were driftwood, buffeted on the waves, and wish that one day I could be washed ashore.
    In Bataan, shaving one morning, I saw that my face was bloated. My nose and cheeks were red, and my eyes looked boiled. Months had gone by. I was running out of money. I suppose I thought that
if I kept close to Japan I was somehow tied to Trouble, revolving, if distantly, in his orbit.
    At breakfast, I paid attention to the papers. The war in China had gone from bad to worse. For months, I had seen something strained in the faces of the colonials: the same fear, the same sense
of an ending. Yamadori’s threats were coming true. All across the Far East, palm trees swayed, rice paddies gleamed, rains pelted down and were soaked up by the sun, and rickshaws clattered
through stinking streets: all was as it had always been, yet something was over, as if a curtain had fallen.
    I sailed home via Guam and Honolulu.
    Arriving in New York one blustery afternoon, I realized a destiny that had lain in wait ever since I had taken my leave from Trouble at the temple of Shofuku-ji. When I reached Gramercy Park,
there were lights on in the houses. Slowly, I ascended the steep steps. The butler, with oppressive deference, showed me into the drawing room. I felt I was expected.
    Trembling, I looked about me: at Kate Pinkerton, like the figurehead of a ship, unchanged in all the years I had known her, swelling majestically over the tea table. At the ornaments, the glazed
spines of books, the ancestral portraits. At the guests: the lady-librarian type, hair up in a bun; this or that society lady in too many pearls; the society gentleman, sleek and neutered, whose
cheeks and chin appeared greased with oil. And there, standing at the fireplace, elbow on the mantelpiece at a jaunty angle, the guest who was not a guest at all. He filled my mind like a vision:
thick blond hair, neatly parted; pale grey lounge suit, with trousers knife-edge sharp; cigarette burning in a laconic hand.
    As I entered, he was deep in some anecdote, but he left off when he saw me. Kate Pinkerton cleared her throat,