Luke Davis woke as Ah Hong the mess boy knocked at his door, pushed it open, and walked in with the morning orange juice. Ah Hong never put anything down without spilling it, and this morning again as the saucer clattered on to the bedside table it was swimming round the full glass with tepid yellow liquid.

The room was untidy. Through the windows barred with vertical iron rods the sun drifted in a broad pale wave upon Luke’s bed. The uncouth black furniture (government issue) was littered with ash trays full of cigarette butts, and odd clothes: a sock lay upon the bookcase, a tie looped round the chair back. On the table were piled tan-covered files bound with pink tape, their voluminous foolscap contents half out. The room smelt of stale cigarette, sweat, and the whiff of male which pervades service messes anywhere.

Eight o’clock. Luke gulped breakfast, lukewarm coffee and some wilted toast which Ah Hong seemed to have prepared the night before, crossed the hall and was on the lawn with the sunlight glazing the glossy round leaves of the mangosteen trees massed in a stooped bulk at the end of the garden. The knobbed dark fruit was ripening, and soon it would appear among the imported Sunkist oranges, Australian apples, and local bananas on the Mess tables. An albizzia, with nude smooth trunk and boughs like an elongated Bali carving lifting her wooden hair with her fingers, spread a tracery of leaf against the sky.

The Mess stood unimaginatively four square, each window iron barred. A solid house, built in no style at all, it belonged to a Chinese rubber millionaire, a relative of Lam Teck’s, and was rented to the Police for a large monthly sum. The towkay and his family now lived in two attap huts on some waste land at the back. It was odd, thought Luke, how the Chinese could disregard all comfort and beauty, and live crowded in a small house in perfect happiness. It was this mental and physical agility, this instantaneous adaptation to noise and discomfort, which always awed him. Owners of this hundred thousand dollar property, they were content to live in a plywood shack, not much better than those of the rubber tappers in the new villages, and did not feel put out or lowered in their own esteem, nor in anyone else’s. The towkay’s two grown sons were studying law and medicine in Australian universities, but their father, strolling in striped cotton pyjamas, was occasionally mistaken for the Mess boy’s old father, a cured leper from the Leper Settlement three miles out of town, who often ambled in and out of the servants’ quarters on rubber slippers, smiling horribly from a face gnarled with burnt-out disease.