He would become a prince in his own right. Malays could be princes and rajahs. He would go to Celebes or to the Aru Islands and fight primitive tribes and soon enough come to rule over others. He would cease his perversions with men – except when he felt a violent need for them. He would marry a beautiful woman and make her his Ranee and father children. He would carry a jewelled dagger at his waist and wear rings on his fingers and a golden anklet on his leg. He would found a dynasty in his own name, while Sir Ralph would die without an heir, die all alone, unconsoled by his treasures, as the forest bore down on his ridiculously named Savage Road and infested it with tangled vines and the roots of vigorous trees and the nests of snakes – with the true essence of Borneo, in fact, against which the rajah had waged constant war, but never understood …

This outburst of Leon’s was so wounding that Sir Ralph felt himself descend into a feeling of helpless shock. He opened his eyes and through tears which now stung like nettles on his lashes, regarded his lover, who was pacing back and forth in front of the rajah’s bedroom window, where a coral sunset provided a blazing background to the scene.

He couldn’t speak, but his long and terrible thought was, ‘all my happiness is going to be lost to a dream. And the dream will fail.’

CAT’S CRADLE

The next day, the rajah walked to the river and saw Scaife making preparations for what he called ‘an explosion experiment’, placing his paper tubes of gunpowder just shy of the water’s edge, in the strange architecture of the mangrove roots. Wire fuses to set in train the explosion made tangled journeys in and out of the tubes.

‘I will start with a little powder,’ said Scaife, ‘to gauge the resistance of the trees. Then, if I have calculated rightly, I will put all in train for a very mighty blast. Once the debris is cleared away, you will have clean land, on which you can begin to build your canning sheds.’

Sir Ralph watched the shaking hand of the engineer placing the pods of powder and inserting the fuses. Beyond him, he saw what Leon had described as the ‘bloody chaos’ of the river, choked by felled trees, which the current was not strong enough to carry away, and it felt to him that this place was a terrible landscape of what was in his heart.

He wanted to tell Scaife to cease his work, to go back to Singapore, but now, after Leon’s diatribe against him, he feared to bring about more rage. He’d spent the night trying to work out exactly why Leon had said such hurtful things, trying to understand what it was like to be Leon. And he had seen, perhaps for the first time, that although he lived in comfort and luxury, Leon longed for something else: he longed to rule.