“I hope you don’t mind my giving you all this advice, my dear,” she said. “You must think me such an old busybody.”
“Of course you are, Agatha.” Helen’s laugh sounded to Mrs. Clayton, the connoisseur of laughs, less merrily ironic than perhaps had been intended; but she was determined not to be offended, especially when Helen added, “Where would Colin and I be without your help?” and leant across the table and, negotiating the brim of the straw hat, kissed her cheek. “You’ve been our saviour.”
The family’s term in Singapore had threatened to go wrong from the start. Colin, appointed head of his aluminum-ore company’s new Southeast Asia sales office, arrived first, to hire clerical staff and arrange somewhere to live. Helen and Jason followed from Melbourne three weeks later, to be greeted by the news that the accommodation deal had fallen through. The British engineer whose house they were to take over had unexpectedly accepted an extension of his term in Singapore.
“Bloody Poms!” Colin said as he and Helen conferred over drinks beside the pool at the Goodwood Hotel. “I’ve always said you should never trust them.” He could not find another house in a suitable area. There were plenty of flats, but none with gardens where Jason could let off steam. “Bloody Pommies!” he said again. The heat was already getting to him, and he wondered whether accepting this posting, step up though it was, had been a mistake.
“I couldn’t help overhearing,” said an old woman at a nearby table, “and if you’ll excuse a bloody old Pommy for butting in...” The laugh that followed, girlish but with a suggestion of distaste for the loudness of Colin’s complaint and for the abusive slang term that Australians used for English people, was a refinement of one of the best in her repertoire.
“Sorry about that.” Colin blushed, annoyed at having given the old Pommy fart cause to think of him as another crass Australian.
Agatha Clayton gave her most gracious laugh a brief outing, then introduced herself. “I come here every Friday for afternoon tea. One of those little rituals we old Singapore hands go in for. Some people prefer Raffles, but that’s pure sentimentality, or nostalgia, I think it’s called these days. You can’t beat the Goodwood’s Black Forest or coffee sponge.”
Mrs. Clayton explained that the third-storey flat above hers had just become vacant. “On a clear day you can see Indonesia, or at least the outlying islands, though they’re just bumps on the horizon, really. And there’s a marvellous padang.”
Colin looked puzzled. “Padang?”
“Park, field — paddock, I suppose you Australians would call it. Wonderful for your boy to play in.” She smiled at Jason splashing in the Goodwood’s pool. “And the Singapore Swimming Club is just five minutes down the road — an even better pool than this one. I’m sure my husband could arrange membership for you.” She gave her most subtly ironic laugh. “They still accept some white members.”
While Helen and Colin smiled politely at the joke, Mrs. Clayton remembered that the servants of the flat’s late occupant were hoping to be inherited by the new tenants.
“Fine,” Colin said. “We won’t have to break them in and show them the ropes. They can do that to us.”
Mrs. Clayton laughed, with a touch of grimness, at this suggested reversal of the proper order.
“A built-in babysitter,” Helen said. “I can’t believe my luck.”
“Cookie’s a little set in his ways,” Mrs. Clayton warned, “and Alec Preston didn’t quite keep him up to the mark after dear June died. But I’m sure Cookie will soon adjust to your preferences.” She gave another slightly grim laugh, which trailed off as she smiled at the boy. “And, of course, the Chinese adore children.”
“Just as well,” Helen said. “Jason can be a handful.”
“Jason,” said Mrs. Clayton, sampling the name as if it were a recent addition to the Goodwood’s cake menu. “How very unusual.”
“We’ve got so much to thank you for, Agatha,” Helen said three months later as they sat on the padang.
Behind the two women Cookie gave what Helen thought of as his discreet-butler cough. He and Amah had a television set in their room, and the noises that came from there indicated that in the evenings they watched Hong Kong martial-arts films. But Helen suspected that he sometimes tuned in to a series based on P. G. Wodehouse’s stories. There was something so Jeeves-like in the cough with which he sought her attention.
“Yes, Cookie?”
“Dinner, mem?”
Helen looked at her watch. “Right, Cookie, and on your way in, please tell Jason to go with you. It’s time for his shower.”
She sensed a tension in Cookie as he accepted this order. Any mention of Jason these days seemed to put him on edge, hardly surprising in view of the boy’s increasingly malicious behaviour — such as giggling as he tracked dirt through the flat just after the floors had been washed. Helen felt like telling Cookie not to bother, that she would round up Jason herself. But what was the point, as Agatha often said, of having servants if you didn’t let them do the work? As a placatory gesture, she put the drinks tray on the grass and said, “If you’ll just take the table, Mrs. Clayton and I can bring in the other things, Cookie.”
As Cookie walked away, Mrs. Clayton said, “Alec Preston and I often used to sit out here in the evenings with our G and Ts, though with Alec, of course, it was far more G than T.” She held up her glass, as if studying the slice of lemon that floated in it. “As a matter of fact, he died while we were having a drink. Oh, not in that one,” she added quickly when Helen moved uncomfortably in the deck chair she had taken over with Cookie and Amah and the lease of Alec Preston’s flat. “We burnt the one Alec died in. It seemed the right thing to do.”
Helen wondered how much more Mrs. Clayton was going to say about their predecessor in Flat No. 7. The old woman barely mentioned Alec Preston.
“Alec and June were rather like Basil and me, Darby and Joan basking in empire’s sunset,” Mrs. Clayton said. “No children to call them back to England, no friends there either. We talked of going back home, of finding adjoining cottages in the Cotswolds, pottering through our last days amid hollyhocks and honeysuckle. But we knew it was just a dream. We’d been here so long it was the only place we’d be happy, while we could still totter around under our own power. The four of us were together for ages. Basil and Alec were clerks with Jardine’s, we had a double wedding, we survived the Japs together, and after that Basil and Alec set up their own firm.”
Mrs. Clayton fumbled ice into her glass with thin, veined fingers. “June and I established the ritual — the tradition, if you like — of sitting out here, on the padang, at sunset. Very rarely with our dear old boys. They’d go off to the club for an hour after work. Basil still does. That’s part of the trick of successful Darby-and-Joanism: don’t be in each other’s hair all the time. But when June died all the spirit went out of Alec.” Mrs. Clayton chuckled affectionately. “Or perhaps I should say a lot more spirit went into him. To be frank, he was an alcoholic. Perhaps you think it was foolish of me to encourage him, to sit out here drinking with him?”
“More a kindness,” Helen said, “at that age, if he was beyond redemption.”
“That’s exactly how I thought of it, my dear. He did manage to keep it within bounds, usually. A steady soaking, rather than binges, though sometimes, late at night, he’d keep drinking, get his second wind and become very noisy, and give poor Cookie a terrible time when he tried to get him to bed. Cookie was an angel the way he put up with it.”