This woman had always moved Sir Ralph. She suffered from a skin disease, for which no cure had been found, and which blotched Taminah’s face with patches of pure white pigment, as though a map-maker, beginning to sketch in the colours and contours of a world, had found himself at a loss and had had to leave portions of his work completely blank.

Taminah had lost all her sons except Leon, to drowning, sickness and the trade wars between the English and the Dutch. She, who had once been the matriarch of a large family, now lived alone and in semi-darkness. The two daughters she might have counted on to help her in her old age had married and gone to live in Singapore. Her husband, head-hunted by Dyaks for trespass on their tribal land, had died so long ago that Taminah had difficulty remembering his features. She still had dreams of the beloved head the Dyaks had cut off and strung up in the roof of their hut in rattan nets; she just couldn’t recall what it actually looked like. To Leon, she said: ‘It is better like that. If a head is separate from a body, then it must stay in the shadow of the mind.’

Now, Taminah, sitting by a small fire, received her son and the rajah. She stood up and bowed, pressing her palms together. Sir Ralph bowed to her in his turn while Leon went to his mother and embraced her, and the fire, stirred into new life by the current of air blown into the room by the opening of the door, flared bright coral for a brief moment. By this sudden light, Sir Ralph noticed that Taminah was sitting on an embroidered mat which had been a gift from him to Leon, but he was not disconcerted. His presents to Leon had been so numerous that his lover’s small room in the rajah’s mansion now appeared a little like a stall in a bazaar.

More than once, Leon had mocked Sir Ralph for his endless cascade of expensive offerings, but this had not prevented him from adding to it. His natural inclination, in his adoration of Leon, was to lay before him an unending quantity of material things. It was as if he imagined these objects would form a kind of protecting wall around his lover, ensuring that he would never leave and never come to any harm. His worst fear was that some quarrel with Leon would dismantle this fragile edifice and that he would be left alone, to pine for the rest of his life.

Always courteous to Taminah, Sir Ralph now sat cross-legged opposite her, while the smoke from the fire made ghostly patterns in its search of an escape through the roof aperture and the thunder began to roll overhead. The rajah apologised for disturbing Taminah, but explained that they had been journeying to the river when the storm began to threaten. They begged shelter from her until it had passed.