On she chatted, smiling, deftly moving small objects and putting them back. Miss Shen’s delicate nose wrinkled slightly, she pretended not to listen. And then Ah Mei went downstairs, and we could see her with Golden Orchid, both in their gay flowered cotton trousers and jackets, saunter towards the flower gardens round the corner where the dove-orchids had burst overnight into a spray of luminous white flowers, after a spell of coolness. Ah Mei’s voice was full of laughter, and her arm was about Golden Orchid’s shoulders, and they did not turn their heads.
- Wayang: Chinese open-air theatre. ↵
12
JOCUND ROLLS THE WHEEL
7–9 a.m. Zodiacal Sign: The Scales.
Mystic Significance: Seed Time.
A china pheasant morning of sharp brilliance, a garden of emerald lawns, sprayed with the vermilion petals of the flame-of-the-forest; jacaranda and angsana, luminous in blossom of malachite and chrome; buttercup trees flinging a golden wave against pink walls; frangipani, oleander, and bougainvillaea rose and white in a mosaic of light.
The Abacus, Intellectual Orchid, otherwise known as Betty, daughter of Quo Boon the millionaire, Chinese female aged thirty-eight, born in the British Colony of Singapore, rose from her bed, leaving her husband, Johnny Tam, asleep in the other twin bed of their large bedroom, which The Abacus loathed mutely.
She disliked the bedroom for its air-conditioning, which made her bones ache and abrogated her sense of time. The machine’s persistent drone, the unchanging artificial cold within the sealed room, cut off those small variations of the glittering night outside, the rise and fall in the scent of flowers, the lift and paling of the darkness, the ellipse of tree shadows absorbing the lawns, all infallible timekeepers of her body. Her instincts were the only mechanism that she trusted.
Within the bedroom, time denuded and therefore incomplete, she waited awake for the trill of the expensive Swiss alarm clock upon the rosewood carved side-table. At its purr she rose and opened the French doors to the veranda, and the Honolulu creepers bowered her, a crimson avalanche swung from the lattice roofing.