I A Contract

      IT OPENS IN paradise, with my great-uncle. He was woken by a thud from the ceiling directly over his head, followed by a flurry of squeals, as the little cobra that seemed to have got into the roof caught another rat. In the darkness of the bedroom, Dr Wulfstan Pike lay under his mosquito net and listened to the drench hitting the bungalow thatch and the cascade of rivulets from the eaves on to the garden outside his window. He could distinguish, too, the pelt of huge globes of water into the puddles in the compound. The steamy rot smell from the old carpet mingled with the flavour of his own sweat.

      He felt under the sheet for the woman lying at his side. Selama stirred in her sleep and turned over towards him; his palm traced the child-stretched skin of her belly to rest on the prominence of her hip. He smoothed the curve to her waist, and, as he bent his head near her hair on the pillow, he caught both the savour of the food she prepared, and the deeper note of her body’s secretions. The spicy confluence in his nostrils was so tender that he woke her with his kisses.

      Later, they slept until dawn. When he got up, he felt confident, as if the world these last two weeks really had not been shifting under his feet. Outside, on the veranda, the view towards the coast showed each leaf for miles rinsed and urgently viridescent. The huge sky was mottled with pearl.

      He stood, taking it in, still hardly believing after so many years the sublimity that lay around him – until a waft of fresh coffee announced that Musa, the kuki, was up and doing. A queue of patients had already begun to form on the other side of the front steps.

      The coffee pot, on its Chinese tray, had been served neatly to the sideboard in the dining-room. Dr Pike took his cup and clomped in his boots and dressing-gown to the teak table. Its top was completely covered with cut-out newspaper stories; but as if they were no more than a scrapbook in process he was at pains not to notice them.

      Most mornings Selama sent the cook, Musa, off to do housework or buy groceries, and made breakfast herself in an old shirt she’d taken a fancy to, a frayed blue one with cooking splashes down the front. Most mornings during the last fortnight she had begun the meal by objecting to Dr Pike’s mess of papers all over the breakfast table.

      Today, however, she wore the red kimono he’d bought her once in Kuala Lumpur. And, seeing her like that, he wished he could hold time still with Selama sitting opposite him just as she was, her brown eyes looking up for a second, her quick smile showing the missing front tooth, and her fine, slightly greying hair spilling down on to red silk.

      Isolated words from the expanse of print caught his attention: Blitzkrieg, cathedral, armour-piercing, Bydgoszcz. They flicked up at him with venom. He felt Selama watching him. She guessed exactly what was in his heart – of that he was certain. She knew he thought of quitting Malaya, of simply failing to return from his next leave. Part of him wished they could discuss his dilemma, another was relieved they never did. She knew he could never take her with him.

      Neither spoke over a breakfast of last night’s rice pancakes, heated up again and buttered. When they’d finished, he rose and went to kiss her cheek. ‘Dear, you know how I need you.’

      ‘I know and I don’t know.’

      ‘You know.’ In the haven of her neck, breathing her, he was overcome.

      ‘No, Stan.’ She stood up, crossly, and rearranged her lapel. ‘Haven’t you got patients to see?’

      My great-uncle sighed. Taking his quinine from the sideboard, he went to get dressed.

      As always, he stood in front of the long mirror in his wardrobe door. It showed nothing youthful, nor romantic; merely an ample, red-and-white Englishman with grizzled body hair. He was no more than his reflection, and age had caught up with him.

      How strange not to notice. Sag had occurred in several regions quite recently taut. And how thoroughly bald he’d grown. Only the eyebrows and moustache appeared to flourish, sprouting ever whiter and more luxuriant. Wrinkles he’d rather thought of as charm were bunched under the pale blue eyes. Surely his nose had enlarged while he slept. The jowls, simian; the ears, elephantine – it all added up to little more than roguishness.

      The amah, the Chinese woman who’d first looked after his daughter and still remained with the household, had left a jug of tepid water on the bedroom floor. A large enamelled tin bowl was the apparatus he generally used for washing his privates. Planting his feet either side of it, he would lower himself on to its rims and then work up a good lather by the action of his hands, diving all about, leaving no crevice of his life unexamined. But for some reason this morning found him too picturesque for his own good and he left the mirror. He went instead to the little bathroom which adjoined, in order to sluice himself from the monumental earthenware jar kept permanently there. The cool water slipped deliciously from his back and belly and disappeared through the slats in the floor.

      As he returned, dripping, to rummage in a drawer for underwear, Selama knocked at the door. ‘Stan! What’re you doing? It’s getting late. Are you lazy?’

      ‘Just thinking.’

      ‘You think too much.’

      Dr Pike’s old thatched