It took Ah Mei three moves to come to me. In the first house, she complained, the mem changed the bed sheets every other day, made her wash them, and paid her only ten dollars a month. In the next, there were three small children, innumerable nappies, the mem had a foul temper, the tuan drank, and then they had fights. I was her third move. I think she had planned to come to me from the start. ‘I wanted to stay with you ever since I saw you in the Hospital,’ she told me. I felt flattered then. Ah Mei was always and still is plausible, and I was, and remained, gulled by her beauty, disarmed by her charm.

Working for us she was always available to the Police. Confined within the limits of the little town, without an identity card, there was no need of a watch over her. With a police salary of seventy dollars, and nearly as much from me, her emoluments were equal to that of the highest paid servant in the town, the British Adviser’s cook.

My own cook, a charming swindler, his seven ravenous and wolflike children, and his enormous and surly wife whom her husband loved desperately and who never did anything except drink coffee and belch, seemed to get on well with Ah Mei.

The first premonition of Miss Lee’s extended visit to us was a magnificent bicycle parked in the hall when I returned from the Hospital one lunch time. A while later Ah Mei ascended the stairs to the living-room to tell me that Miss Lee had come to pay her a visit … could she be allowed to stay a few days? The Police Chief allowed it. I said yes.

Miss Lee came up later to thank me for my hospitality. She too spoke Mandarin, learnt at a Chinese school and later practised in the jungle. She looked at our radio on its small table in a corner of the living-room. ‘I have a much bigger one than that,’ she said with charming candour.

‘We are not wealthy,’ I replied.

But Miss Lee was immune to sarcasm.

In the weeks that followed, the population of the S.E.P. quarters became addicted to our bungalow.

In twos and threes, they strolled up the drive. Some pulled their new felt hats (purchased in Singapore) at a smart angle on their sleek hair. They grinned when they saw me at the upstairs window, and waved, or called: ‘Doctor!’ politely. Some were tall and handsome, and others had brutish faces, and quite a few had the faint marks of cruelty round their smiling mouths; and nearly all had murdered, and all had betrayed; and though they stepped indolently, and looked sleek now, they had been in the jungle, and there was another life behind their smiling eyes.