Fanette Archway greeted her Betty darling enthusiastically. Old Mrs Chang was also there with her blue-rinsed hair, and as usual the o.b.e. embroidered in gold and silver thread and precious stones upon her dress. All were bending with genuine admiration over a small parcel wrapped in a dainty lace handkerchief.

‘My stones,’ explained the owner proudly once again, having just returned from the States with an expensive operation scar and three stones removed.

How quaint and too thrilling, the ladies declared, and Fanette poked a silver enamelled nail at the brown round pebble and said it felt crumbly … medical science was too wonderful these days, the things they did, think of dear Tony Eden and His stones … but Lady Weatherbore asserted that there were still many diseases unknown to science and baffling to physicians which only Divine Agency could heal. She herself had suffered with terrible pains in the back for years until Christian Science had cured her, and now she played bridge and mahjong nearly every day and golf twice a week without the slightest twinge.

It was true, said Fragrant Orchid, doctors didn’t know everything. She herself, fallen into deep incurable melancholy a few years ago, had been unable to eat until her mamma had taken her by airplane to a famous wise man of Bangkok, and in a tiny hut among the klongs, the canals, she had been made to kneel, bared to the waist, while the flame-of-the-forest petals on the floor shrivelled with the heat and the hours, the coconut milk dried in the cups, and the banana leaves wrapping saffron rice and tobacco moved with devouring ants. The incense sticks hazed the air with their substance of smoke, and the wise man with the droopy eyes and sleek hair, fat and smooth skinned as any buddha, had chanted over her, until suddenly out of her left shoulder had jumped a long black hair to the mat on which she knelt. ‘Now this is your disease, come out of you, placed by an enemy while you were sleeping, poisoning your body.’ Since
then she had been well.

And then some talked of their sons and their daughters, safely studying in England or America or Australia, having such a good time, only of course becomingly homesick for the food and the comfort and the gardens of Malaya … but London was a bit unsafe, nowadays, too much freedom, look at poor Mrs Toh’s daughter, for instance, come back a Socialist … but perhaps there was bad blood in the family, these tendencies could be hereditary. …

And Fragrant Orchid talked of her new enthusiasm, Family Planning, and asked her sister to help, for truly Singapore’s birth rate was alarming; but Intellectual Orchid, in spite of Fanette and Lady Weatherbore’s instances, found herself too busy with Tuberculosis, also alarming in Singapore. Finally the ladies struck a bargain. They would help their dear Betty with her Charity Ball for Tuberculosis, and she would help them with a Charity Bazaar for Family Planning …