‘More trouble and expense,’ replied Lady Moksa tartly. ‘Good thing we’ve got some money from business, and my father, otherwise I don’t know how I and your children would live … I think you and father are mad, collaborating so openly with the red-hairs … it’s their fight, not ours. Pay and ask no questions,’ said Fragrant Orchid sleepily.

*  *  *

‘Darling,’ said Maxine, ‘what on earth could you find to talk about with this frightful little woman with the gold teeth?’

‘She isn’t frightful,’ said Luke, ‘she’s quite intelligent really. And amusing.’

‘You never looked at me at all,’ said Maxine, pouting and tossing back her hair. It had been a very pretty, fetching gesture, tossing back a slight mane of sleek gold hair, two years ago, when Maxine had come to Singapore to work as a confidential secretary in the Colonial Government.

‘I was working,’ said Luke shortly.

‘Darling, don’t tell fibs.’

‘Honestly.’ Whatever he said, or did, Maxine could always put him in the wrong. His mind went back to the bachelorhood now ebbing from him of his first years in Malaya, during the British Military Administration, and before the white women, the mems, had returned to the land; … to the pliable, docile Malays, to the pert, amusing Chinese, so thoroughly practical about love; but he put the memory away. Social intercourse had been easier then. Young Englishmen in Malaya went out freely with Asian friends. They still did, and chiefly when they were bachelors. But when the white woman came in, often – though not always – it no longer became easy, nor even at times possible. Luke wondered why, and found no answer. With a wife of his own kind, his social life, like a yoyo, would go back and forth between the club and the bungalow, consorting mainly with one’s likes. With Maxine, he would no longer be able to see much of Lam Teck, only in secret, perhaps, feeling half guilty, telling Maxine that he was out working.

He wanted to marry Maxine. He wanted a European wife, not an Asian. Too well he knew what would happen otherwise. The half-formulated disaffection with his world would crystallize; the shaky certainties would become vague, obliterated; he would never be sure that he was doing the right thing, here and now. Maxine would save him from all this. She was so sure. Her voice said so.

‘After all,’ Maxine thought … Fifty men to a woman in Singapore, they’d said. What rot. It had taken her two years to grab one and she was getting tired. She put one hand on his, looked in his eyes, and he smiled briefly, but the soreness remained.

*  *  *

‘Pa,’ said The Abacus to Quo Boon, ‘I think the Police may be on the lookout for Pearl. She has been foolish again.’