The rajah was tempted to help Scaife to his feet, he looked so forlorn and foolish sitting there among the river debris, but he didn’t dare to side with him against Leon. Furthermore, he was inclined to believe that Scaife – humiliated by being sent away from the rajah’s house into a lowly cottage – had intended him some harm. Indeed he had always suspected it.

After the three days of Leon’s absence, Sir Ralph went in search of him. He couldn’t wait passively any longer, because over his sadness was now laid an intolerable frustration: Leon’s absence from his bed.

For all Leon’s bluster, the rajah knew that he sometimes crept away from this side of himself, to spend time with his mother Taminah. In the presence of his mother, Leon became more docile and quiet. He would often show Taminah tender affection. Sometimes, he swept her house and cooked a meal for her in one of her blackened pots. Sometimes, he helped her to wash her hair in the river.

It was to Taminah’s house, therefore, that Sir Ralph made his way. He found Taminah sitting on her hard chair on her veranda. She was cleaning sweet potatoes in a bucket. Beneath the black beech stilts of the house, her pet cockerels stepped daintily around, searching for seeds and grains of millet.

Taminah stood up and the rajah bowed politely to her. He had brought her the gift of some pomegranates and she took them in her thin hands and smiled at Sir Ralph, then disappeared into the darkness of her house.

He hoped that she had gone to fetch Leon, but she only re-emerged with another wooden chair, which she placed beside her own, in the shade, and a small cup of arak, which the rajah took from her gratefully. Though he wanted to ask her straight away if she knew where Leon was, he preferred her to think that he had called on her only out of courtesy. In his fractured Malay, he began asking her if she had been troubled by the explosion upriver. She had heard it, she told him, and she had found dead subaru in the pool below her house. She had netted these and cooked them, but thrown them away because they had not tasted right.

‘My son,’ she said, ‘he believes he will get rich from a cannery, but we who live along the Sadong don’t wish for machinery to disturb the morning. And we do not trust Englung engineers.’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Sir Ralph. ‘The one who came here was inept. But Leon may have gone in search of other people to undertake this. Has he?’

‘I have not seen him since the last rain.’

‘Ah …’

‘But when I see him, rajah, I shall tell him this: there is a plateau now, where the mangroves are gone. What he must do is to build there. But not houses for fish cans.’

‘Houses for families?’

‘No, rajah, Sir. Houses for the sick and dying. A hospital.’