Up the gravel drive of Quovilla went the car, between the clipped green lawns of grass conjured by our headlights out of smooth darkness. Bright hard stars protruded from the ebony sky. The car climbed between the odorous frangipani to the lighted porch, with its clusters of mock-marble columns, strung with red, white, and blue electric bulbs in honour of the guests. On the front steps stood a small man wearing a pair of enormous glasses, and a sharkskin white coat and a black tie, both loose on him. It was Quo Boon’s number two confidential secretary, Mr Chiap, who now bore down upon us beaming, raising his hands above his head to indicate that we had reached the right place.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ he cried, peering in front of him to discover the whereabouts of our hands, then shaking them determinedly. ‘Mr Quo Boon will be delighted you have come at last. We are all waiting for you … oh, no, you’re not late, not late, it’s quite early yet.’

As we went up the steps, a Malay syce with a black velvet songkok upon his head, and a white buttoned uniform, with a purple and silver-threaded sarong round his waist, got into our car and smartly drove it away. Another car roared up the drive, and Luke Davis came out of it with Maxine Gerrard, his fiancée. Mr Chiap repeated his welcome.

‘Welcome, welcome, Mr Davis, and Madame, we are all waiting for you.’

‘That means we’re damn late,’ said Luke Davis.

‘No, not late, not very late … still some more to come,’ beamed Mr Chiap.

Government House with its graded aides-de-camp, arrayed in formal stiffness, could not outdo Quovilla in the fine pomp of entertaining guests. Another of Quo Boon’s henchmen waited for us in the hall. It was Lam Teck, who often called Quo Boon ‘Third Uncle’, because their ancestors came from the same village in China. I had already met him with Luke Davis; he seemed to turn up everywhere.

Escorted by Lam, we walked into the reception room. Quovilla, built twenty years ago, was, like much of Singapore, grimly 1924 in everything but its bathrooms. Often Quo Boon spoke of tearing it down and building it anew. He had many houses, new, modern, streamlined, in the Federation and in Singapore. But he had grown fond of Quovilla, and contented himself with improving the sanitary arrangements; like all Asians, he knew the bathroom as a hallmark of progress.

There were so many people under the plaster cherubs grasping garlands of roses on the ceiling, the straight and blue blazing neon rods running round the walls dispensing acrid gusts of light, so many sitting or standing against the heavy carved furniture (Victorian Chinese), that it was only when looking for a chair to sit on that the hundred guests divided neatly, strictly as if they had never met, into their various racial professions.