It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight.

"I don't know what you mean, Thomas."

"Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can't trust men like The. They aren't going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind."

"We?"

"The old colonialists."

"I thought you took no sides."

"I don't Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force."

"Of course I always value your advice, Thomas," he said formally. "Well, I'll be seeing you."

"I suppose so."

The weeks moved on, but somehow I hadn't yet found myself a new flat. It wasn't that I hadn't time. The annual crisis of the war had passed again: the hot wet crachin [моросящий дождь] had settled on the north, the French were out of Hoa Binh, the rice-campaign was over in Tonkin and the opium-campaign in Laos. Dominguez could cover easily all that was needed in the south. At last I did drag myself to see one apartment in a so-called modern building (Paris Exhibition 1934?) up at the other end of the rue Catinat beyond the Continental Hotel. It was the Saigon pied-a-terre [пристанище] of a rubber planter who was going home. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and barrel. I have always wondered what the barrels contain; as for the stock, there were a large number of engravings from the Paris Salon between 1880 and 1900. Their highest common factor was a big-bosomed

woman with an extraordinary hair-do and gauzy draperies which somehow always exposed the great cleft buttocks and hid the field of battle. In the bathroom the planter had been rather more daring with his reproductions of Rops.

"You like art?" I asked and he smirked back at me like a fellow conspirator. He was fat with a little black moustache and insufficient hair.

"My best pictures are in Paris," he said. There was an extraordinary tall ash-tray in the living-room made like a naked woman with a bowl in her hair and there were china ornaments of naked girls embracing tigers, and one very odd one of a girl stripped to the waist riding a bicycle. In the bedroom facing his enormous bed was a great glazed oil painting of two girls sleeping together. I asked him the price of his apartment without his collection, but he would not agree to separate the two.

"You are not a collector?" he asked.

"Well, no."

"I have some books also" he said, "which I would throw in, though I intended to take these back to France." He unlocked a glass-fronted bookcase and showed me his library - there were expensive illustrated editions of Aphrodite and Nona, there was La Garfonne and even several Paul de Kocks. I was tempted to ask him whether he would sell himself with his collection: he went with them, he was period too. He said, "If you live alone in the tropics a collection is company."

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

"I don't think my paper would allow me to buy an art-collection."

He said, "It would not, of course, appear on the receipt." I was glad Pyle had not seen him: the man might have lent his own features to Pyle's imaginary "old colonialist" who was repulsive enough without him. When I came out it was nearly half past eleven and I went down as far as the Pavilion for a glass of iced beer. The Pavilion was a coffee centre for European and American women and I was confident that I would not see Phuong there. Indeed I knew exactly where she would be at this time of day - she was not a girl to break her habits, and so, coming from the planter's apartment, I had crossed the road to avoid the milk-bar where at this time of day she had her chocolate malt. Two young American girls sat at the next table, neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice-cream. They each had a bag slung on the left shoulder and the bags were identical, with brass eagle badges. Their legs were identical too, long and slender, and their noses, just a shade tilted, and they were eating their ice-cream with concentration as though they were making an experiment in the college laboratory. I wondered whether they were Pyle's colleagues: they were charming, and I wanted to send them home, too. They finished

their ices and one looked at her watch.

"We'd better be going," she said, "to be on the safe side."