‘Why are you so quiet, Auntie? I’m sorry I’m such a pain, but I don’t have a friend here, and you’ve been nice to me. Would you please take care of me and Baby?’

‘You’re paying me,’ Auntie Mei said. ‘So of course I’ll take care of you.’

‘Will you be able to stay on after this month?’ Chanel asked. ‘I’ll pay double.’

‘I don’t work as a regular nanny.’

‘But what would we do without you, Auntie?’

Don’t let this young woman’s sweet voice deceive you, Auntie Mei warned herself: you’re not irreplaceable – not for her, not for Baby, not for anyone. Still, Auntie Mei fancied for a moment that she could watch Baby grow – a few months, a year, two years. ‘When is Baby’s Pa coming home?’

‘He’ll come home when he comes.’

Auntie Mei cleaned Baby’s face with the corner of a towel.

‘I know what you’re thinking – that I didn’t choose the right man. Do you want to know how I came to marry someone so old and irresponsible?’

‘I don’t, as a matter of fact.’

All the same, they told Auntie Mei stories, not heeding her protests. The man who played chess every Sunday afternoon came from the same village as Paul’s wife, and had long ago been pointed out to him by her as a potentially better husband. Perhaps she had said it only once, out of an impulse to sting Paul, or perhaps she had tormented him for years with her approval of a former suitor. Paul did not say, and Auntie Mei did not ask. Instead, he had measured his career against the man’s: Paul had become a real professional; the man had stayed a labourer.

An enemy could be as eternally close as a friend; a feud could make two men brothers for life. Fortunate are those for whom everyone can be turned into a stranger, Auntie Mei thought, but this wisdom she did not share with Paul. He had wanted her only to listen, and she had obliged him.

Chanel, giving more details, and making Auntie Mei blush at times, was a better storyteller. She had slept with an older married man to punish her father, who had himself pursued a young woman, in this case one of Chanel’s college classmates. The pregnancy was meant to punish her father, too, but also the man, who, like her father, had cheated on his wife. ‘He didn’t know who I was at first. I made up a story so that he thought I was one of those girls he could sleep with and then pay off,’ Chanel had said. ‘But then he realised he had no choice but to marry me. My father has enough connections to destroy his business.’