Janet takes pleasure in reminding him of the many ways in which he has failed them. She drops these into conversation like amusing anecdotes: the time Henry, aged seven, refused to eat his dinner, and Jason smashed his bowl of soup on the floor. The time Jason forgot to come to Janet’s graduation ceremony, as a result of which she has no photographs of herself. The time he beat them both for going into his room without permission. She still has the scars.

His daughter is an unknown quantity to him. She is a good mother—at least her sons have turned out well—but she seems as closed to him as she is to the world. Implacable, armour-plated, so sleek and single-minded that she appears to have no weak points. Quite often, when he hears her crisp footsteps approach the ward, his initial reaction is claustrophobic fear. When did this happen? Surely it used to be the other way round.

Henry, his son, has been in London for decades, and seldom comes back to Singapore. It would have been easy enough for Jason to get on a plane—especially with all these cheap flights now—but something about his sense of the fitness of things made him feel it was Henry’s duty to come back here, to his home, and not for others to go to him. What if Jason had gone, and been unwanted?

He allows himself to regret this. It would have been nice, at least, to know how Henry lives. His son has transformed himself, now has the patched tweed jacket and clipped accent of an English academic—he’s a professor of history at one of the less exciting London colleges. How is it possible to escape your origins so utterly? Henry has a flat in Bayswater, something he vaguely imagines from the few British novels he has read to be poky, damp, and smelling of cabbage. Janet has been to London a couple of times but never says much, apart from hinting darkly that she’s surprised the English did not succumb to cholera generations ago.

Large areas of his son’s life are not open to him. Why has he never married or had children? Jason never asked. He hopes his son isn’t damaged, afraid any woman he married would abandon him like the mother he has no memory of. Of course, Jason himself has never remarried, and couldn’t tell you why either. He and Henry have simply never talked about any of this, never talked about anything that mattered.