At eleven the radio was turned off, a concession to our rest. The guests would depart, lingering, throwing black velvet shadows from silver trunks and arms and heads, and the great glittering pale night belong once again to the Malay drums and their zigzag melody rising and falling in tune with the blood in urgent bodies.

*  *  *

Besides the S.E.P.s’ visits, it became a friendly habit for other people to drop upon us inoffensive protégès.

Our bills for electricity, water, and Cookie’s bills for food and especially butter, began to soar. I seemed to be eating more beef, pork, and cabbage, than a small hotel, and the three of us, con-genitally abstemious of fat, consumed two pounds of butter a week. I protested, but Cookie insisted that we ate more than we thought. Meanwhile his large wife swelled and rounded again, and it became evident that an eighth boisterous youngster would soon be acclaimed with red eggs.

On the telephone voices nasillant, throaty, laughing, or shy asked for Miss Lee, Ah Mei, and unknown others. Ah Mei would always know, even if it was I who took the garbled messages when she was strolling in the Sultan’s flower gardens, open to the public. Occasionally I supplied remedies for tooth-ache, ringworm, diarrhoea, and esoteric diseases such as tingling over the right eye and a pain in the left side starting at nine in the morning but ending just before supper was due.

One afternoon Evangeline was dropped. Evangeline was twelve and had been a bandit for two years in the jungle. Captured by the Gurkhas in a raid on the terrorist camp where she lived, wounded by bullets in the assault, she was treated at the hospital for seven weeks and became rather spoilt. Everyone in the hospital, from the friendly and vigorous English matron to the sleepy, coconut oil-smelling Malay sweepers, brought her toys and sweets and petted her and sat on her bed, admiring her.

Evangeline came up our stairs dressed in a gingham cotton gown with red, green, and yellow checks, made by a Scots nursing sister at night and fitted on Evangeline with the whole of the nursing staff brimful of advice standing round. Her two hands clutched the first toy she had been given, a duck fluffy with white downy feathers, on wheels, and with a yellow papier-mache beak. Evangeline’s hair was cut crew style, parted and brilliantined like a boy’s, and to cultivate a wave she wore a large curler on a spring. But her hair was too thick and alive and the curler snapped off and fell to the ground when she moved. Then she clipped it on again, firmly.

Gravely she bowed. Her eyes lingered upon the polished wooden floor and remained scanning it, measuring its extent, noting its surface.