Dawn glittered into morning, morning was quickly swollen with gold heat, heat would soon bleach the sky to a dull tin, thicken the soft air as milk curdles, people the horizon with sluggish back-to-back clouds. Heat-ravished, the sky would stoop ominous about the city, wearing its noon-load as a menace poised; thunder crackle, rain in great slinging swathes slash at the houses and the sea, the harbour and the ships. And then light, a little space of coolness, and bougainvillaea rain-studded lifting their eager leaves-in-flower; all afternoon the slow sleazy steaming, the suffocating stew of glossy streets, the bright puddles of the roads exploding water jets under car wheels, and the open sewers of the city running their narrow torrents in peaceful hurry. The first hint of evening on the pink and grey roofs, the silver tarmac drying in a topaz lapse of sun, the fabulous set madness in the west, orange, vermilion, and purple, to which no one paid attention. Then curt, abrupt, night.

The Abacus knew it all, with pleasure watched it, and never said a word. How her family would have laughed, her husband, relatives, and friends, laughed with that shrieking boisterousness which practical, sensible people reserve for dreamers. ‘You a business woman,’ they would have exclaimed, this being the honest compliment in any society in Singapore, ‘talking of the sunset and the rain like a poet, there must be something wrong with you.’

‘Mabel!’ she called. Mabel, her adopted daughter, a nurse at the tuberculosis hospital, appeared in a white sharkskin dress girt with a wide black nylon elastic belt, the latest Hollywood fashion in Singapore. Her Chinese name was Thoughtful Jonquil, and her pet name at the Chinese Athletic Association, where she won all the prizes as amateur weight lifter, was Marilyn Monroe, for she was all over honey-gold and of wondrous architecture. Half a dozen young men (among them a lawyer, a doctor, and a detective) could not sleep at night for thinking of her, and pestered their mothers to arrange for them a marriage with Mabel. But Catholic Mabel of the superb curves wore a small gold cross between her breasts, and desired to be a nun in the happy convent of her school days.

The Abacus lay on a rattan long chair, on a Dunlopillo foam-rubber mattress covered in orange cretonne, and deft Mabel pounded her back, small hands rounded to soft dimpled fists, padding evenly and quickly up and down the spine, up and down firmly, beat, beat, beat, until the muscles tingled, the blood ran stronger, the ache went, and The Abacus lay limp and happy. ‘It’s that damn air-conditioner,’ she said in English.