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She wore a jade swimming costume that advertised the swell of her breasts.
    My initial impression was of a wrinkled, garish, rather sad woman who obtained her leverage by knowing who everyone was – and making sure that they knew her. Much of what she told me I had already gleaned: how she had started coming here after the Second World War, after her husband returned from Burma. How her husband – ‘Oh, where is he? You two would get on’ – used to work for the British Biscuit Company and now was with Makertich & Co., importing textile machinery.
    Sylvia Billington didn’t think of herself as a transient ex-pat like the rest of us around the pool, but as a local with roots spreading far back. She had been born in India, the daughter of a Protestant Irish cotton merchant. India was where she had met and married Hugh before the war swept him further east.
    On this first occasion, she alluded to her husband’s ‘heroics’ and was fishing for me to ask questions. She was even getting quite annoyed that I wasn’t playing along, when one of the Russians yelled out and I turned to see a leather ball bouncing in our direction.
    It was intercepted by a figure I hadn’t really noticed before: a human bulldog, obviously British, in white shorts and a maroon and blue bush shirt. He sprang forward and with a surprisingly adroit motion fielded the volleyball, returning it in a hard, accurate throw.
    The action had wrecked his cigarette. He paused to heel out the embers before advancing towards us.
    â€˜Hugh, come here,’ said Sylvia, waving him over.
    Hugh Billington struck me then, and in subsequent conversations, as a man of decent instincts, principled, unbegrudging – and disarmingly dull.
    â€˜Have I intruded?’ He brushed a fly from his fleshy nose.
    â€˜I was about to tell him about your time in Burma,’ Sylvia said.
    The saltiest morsel concerning the Billingtons was how Hugh’s ‘very good war’ was stippled by Sylvia’s disappointment that he had not made greater capital of it, as if in some deliberate way he had beggared himself. But her pride in her husband was touching.
    â€˜I have to sing his praises,’ Sylvia said to me. ‘Being brought up in a certain way, Hugh doesn’t talk much about anything, do you, darling? But you remember everything.’
    I thought I glimpsed in her look the intensity of Sylvia’s nostalgia to recapture, beneath the pot belly and strands of white hair, the brave man who had disappeared into the jungle for three long years and made it out.
    I also saw a firm resistance on Hugh’s part to being recaptured.
    He stood there in the afternoon light, shrinking slightly.
    â€˜I suppose I do,’ he said, already puffing at another of his Indian cigarettes, ‘but I don’t want to know some of it.’
    Then. ‘We should be on our way.’
    â€˜What are you doing later?’ Sylvia turned to me suddenly, and before I could answer asked if I would be their guest at the Lancaster nearby, where they were having dinner.
    In the hotel’s inexpensive restaurant that night both Billingtons became quite tipsy. I had always enjoyed listening to older people and I must have seemed interested in their story. Besides, I liked them in their different ways. Sylvia, who had changed into an ankle-length dress and switched her lipstick from pink to mulberry, did most of the talking. I tried to bring Hugh into the conversation, asking him about his work, but he was evasive. These days, twenty-three years after Japan’s surrender, he was, in his expression, ‘a very small biscuit’ whom local bigwigs offered up as a friendly, familiar face to British businessmen looking for opportunities in the textile industry. ‘A lot of them are scared to invest because, will they get paid? The Indians have a track record of paying eventually, but “eventually” didn’t suit my first