His father was in the process of winding down the family business. It was too labour-intensive, having roomfuls of women hand-stitching beads onto dresses. The modern taste was for imported frocks, cheaply machine-sewn printed fabrics. The fast girls around town, the ones who read the European fashion magazines, all knew what they wanted—the New Look. Modernity; soft, clean lines; subtle luxury after the dull, discoloured war years. No one wanted to take on the business, so eventually they sold off the premises and got what they could. There was enough money for his parents to live off, but not much more.

When Siew Li departed, his parents’ mouths clamped shut. The effort not to say I-told-you-so was visible in their clenched jaws, and he knew he could rely on them for dutiful support, but nothing else. They would take care of the twins while he was at work. They would not tell him he hadn’t been foolish, that loving Siew Li hadn’t been a mistake. At first they tried to introduce him to other girls from good families, but he tartly reminded them he was still married, and they backed away.

It was an awful day. He’d had a frantic phone call at work to say Siew Li had gone out with a friend and never come back. He’d rushed home to find Mollie in tears, the children howling. They turned on the radio and heard there’d been more arrests, though when they went to the station, the police swore they didn’t know anything. “We wouldn’t mind speaking to her, though. Let us know if you see her,” said a sergeant, and he thought like hell, like hell I’ll turn her over to you.

Yet she was gone, and so was that other woman, Lina. Their office was locked up tight, and no one knew anything. He felt implacable rage, unfairly, that she should be able to just disappear like that. He was stuck here, there was nowhere he could vanish to. All of them, with their grand plans. They’d stolen her, and she’d let herself be taken. Why hadn’t he been enough for her?

The next weeks were unbearable. He showed up at work, but sat in meetings glowering into empty air. His boss didn’t have the authority to send him home, and so put him on filing duties instead. This just fed his bottomless rage. Relegated to busywork, as if he were already useless! He’d had their future planned out, their fortunes set to rise along with the new country’s. All she’d had to do was play along. Was even that beyond her?

After work, he’d stop off at the kopitiam for a consoling bottle of beer or two, then show up to collect the kids late, eyes bloodshot. One time, he showed up after ten, and his mum said, kindly but firmly, “You might as well leave them here, you’ll just be dropping them off again in a few hours.” This was the closest she’d come to a rebuke. “Why not just let us take care of them until you can cope again?”