SAIDEE, HIS Malay amah, small, fat, flat-nosed, and fifty-five years of age, had long since given up her pretence that she was Tuan’s lover and now adopted a motherly attitude. When he came home late she would scold him fondly: it never sounded impertinent in Malay; and when he was silent and moody, as this evening, she would try to cheer him up. She didn’t wait till he’d had his shower, but poked her head between the curtains, to tell him there had been two telephone calls, both from the woman with the big feet; by which she meant Jean. He was to telephone her at the hospital as soon as he got home.
He wasn’t pleased. Jean was capable of inviting herself to spend the night and he wanted to be alone, to brood about Leila. His house being isolated, at the edge of the sea with jungle behind, most of his women friends would not visit him at night. Jean, though, was not afraid to drive in the dark. She had once hit a water buffalo asleep on the road. Her radiator had been burst but her nerve hadn’t been shaken. Luckily the animal hadn’t been badly hurt. If it had been, her friends jested, she would have had it carted to the hospital and put to bed. Jean got things done.
She would soon rid him of his obsession with Leila.
Did he want to be rid of it?
One minute he did, and his heart sank with relief; the next minute he did not, and his heart leapt at the prospect of seeing her again.
As he was eating, the telephone rang. He let it ring and would have gone on letting it ring, but Saidee lost patience and answered it for him. She then informed him that it was the woman ‘with the loud voice’.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked that voice. ‘This is the third time I’ve called.’
‘I’ve just got home. I was playing golf with the Sultan.’
‘Oh. Picture me bowing my humble head. I’m phoning from the hospital. A bigwig, the Minister of Something or Other, has just been brought in, with acute appendicitis. So I’ll not be able to go with you to Jack and Mary’s. You haven’t forgotten, have you, that the country dancing’s at their place tonight? God, I believe you have forgotten.’
Yes, he had, completely. But he was in no mood for a boozy boisterous Eightsome Reel.
‘I might be able to look in later,’ said Jean, ‘but I doubt it. If you go on your own watch out for that cow Madge. Three whiskies and she’s got her fingers in your flies.’
She guffawed but he winced. He could never imagine Leila being so coarse.
‘I don’t think I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit tired after the golf.’
‘How was His Fatness?’
‘All right.’
‘Did you get a chance to drop a hint about the Principal’s job?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s time you did. I can’t afford to wait much longer, you know. I’m twenty-eight.’ Another guffaw.
She was thirty-four.
‘Mention it next time, just after he’s sunk a long putt. But I’ll have to go. Duty calls. Selamat jalan.’
He went back to his curry. What, he wondered, still wincing, would Jean have said if he had told her he’d fallen in love with Leila Azaharri?
She’d laugh. She wouldn’t be jealous. She’d remind him how conventional and cautious he was in his views. If, she would say, he got himself entangled with a black-arsed woman he’d mess his breeks with fright. She’d press his face against her own fat white breasts for a cure.