In Singapore, where money alone makes the grade, Mrs Archway’s income from art assured her of invitations to Government House, to the races, to the select gatherings open to all those convicted of wealth, or of a position in the Administration entitling them to the overt bribery of feeding and figuring in social events.

At the Tarn parties, Fanette, in scarlet slashed with lime-green and high-piled coils of shining hair, appeared with Sir Thomas and Lady Weatherbore, her dear friends, and smacked her painted magenta lips an inch from The Abacus’s thin cheeks, ‘Darling, how charmante you look, more exquisite every day,’ to which The Abacus replied with a gold-toothed smile.

But she was secretly gratified that Johnny’s present mistress was so presentable, a sound woman of business, quite unlike that young Hongkong singer at the Happy World cabaret who had made away with thirty thousand in cash, and nothing to show for it but a heavy medical bill. Fanette seemed fond of Johnny and being a red-haired she-devil would not take him away from his family. Putting up with an air-conditioner was a trifle, and as for being hurt The Abacus was too sensible. ‘After all, men are like that,’ she told her sister. I have better things to do than waste my time with Johnny.’

But she slept in the bedroom when Johnny was home, for she knew him afraid of being alone at night.

After the pounding, she put on a pair of navy slacks and a shirt, her working clothes. Her Cantonese amah laid breakfast on a small table on the veranda, a fried egg, a piece of toast, and some Kellogg’s cornflakes; listening to the bulbuls and orioles asserting, in loud melody, their claims to tenancy of the tembusu trees round the water-lily pond – where a few frightened goldfish, remains of the swift pouncing kingfisher, sank in the dark glass of the water – she sipped hot Nescafe, looked over her business mail and the bills, invitations and company reports Johnny had left on his desk. At eight, seated in the black Chevrolet, the syce with the modelled Javanese face and the curly hair under his black velvet songkok, at the wheel, she sped across her garden, past the gardeners bending over the flowering hydrangeas of the lawns, past the orchids, the bougainvillaea, the oleander, the wrought iron gates, and into the road with broad-leafed mahogany and pink cassia trees still wearing faint scarves of blue mist about their crown. The ochre winding track of Holland Avenue led on to Bukit Timah Road, lined with new housing estates, satellite rows of shops and grey dusty factories, amoebic elongations from the body of Singapore city, growing and pushing its sprawl into the island, every day reaching out its pseudopodia of factory sites further towards the Causeway, towards Malaya on the other shore of the waters of the Straits.

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7 a.m.