‘I’ve seen that face …’ Luke held the snap strongly in his hands, staring at the girl who stared back … where had he seen her? Why should he remember her? Somehow it wasn’t in Singapore … then it must have been in Malaya, possibly in Johore … ‘May I have this snap?’

‘Certainly, we’ve got the negative.’

‘And you say Betty Quo … Intellectual Orchid will be leaving tonight from the airport?’

‘Yes …’ John Symonds looked quizzically at Luke Davis. ‘ … would you like to go and wish Mrs Tam a pleasant trip to Hongkong?’

Luke grinned, still gazing at the snapshot. ‘I might,’ he replied.

*  *  *

3-5 p.m. Zodiacal Sign: Man and Woman.
Mystic Significance: Female Supremacy.

His nephew’s wife, thought Quo Boon, in Kuala Lumpur, became more round and motherly every year, though she remained sterile after a decade of marriage. She had studied for the Bar in Lincolns Inn, and was, in Kuala Lumpur, a favourite of relief and charity committees. But her lack of children had had a strange effect upon her. Intent on proving to the world what a perfect old-style Chinese matriarch she could have made, instead of practising law, she remained at home. Apart from good works and committee meetings, she devoted herself to the most punctilious observance of those minute etiquettes which once held a Chinese family together. She spoke and dressed as if she belonged to the old world of the Nonyas, the Chinese women born in Malaya clinging to a world of old customs, where impassively the mother-in-law waits at the foot of the bed for the virginity cloth to be brought to her, in the morning, to prove the purity of her son’s wife, bride of the previous night.

With hooded eyes Quo Boon looked at her as she played after lunch with the children of the concubine, whom she had purchased in Penang for her husband. The two little girls were taking ballet lessons, and called her Mother. She explained that a third was on the way, and this time it would have to be a boy … otherwise she would lose patience with the breeder, and provide another. She bustled with second-hand motherhood importance, almost persuaded of her progenitive power, having but borrowed someone else’s womb for her purpose. Quo Boon knew that she sought his approbation (as they all did). It irritated him, this constant deference to himself, though at one time he had required it. And now this habit of subservience was the main reason why he found no one to succeed him … except perhaps Intellectual Orchid, who was a woman, and childless.

‘I’m going to Ipoh next week to see the mines, and how they’re getting on there.’ Another docile son, smooth and competent, was there, in charge of the family’s tin mines. His nephew’s wife misunderstood: ‘Their last child died’, she said quickly, ‘died of dysentery, I hear.’ For she imagined that Quo Boon visited his family for one purpose only.