He probably recalls it as an ideal existence compared with the hell Jason’s making of his life, Helen thought. I’ll be lucky if he and Amah don’t give notice tomorrow. That alarming possibility prompted her to ask Mrs. Clayton, “Couldn’t he and Amah have got work with someone else?”
“Perhaps. Probably.” Mrs. Clayton detected the anxiety behind the question and supposed that the boy had been up to some of his tricks — but servants expected that sort of thing, and of course, being Chinese, they adored children. “It takes a lot to make servants leave, especially when they’re as well paid as yours are.” (Mrs. Clayton had helped Helen to fix their wages.) “Anyway, Alec was really very good to them, apart from the odd slap and abuse. When June died he didn’t need two servants, but he kept them on. They’d been with him for years, and they’d have found it hard adjusting to new people, a new place, new routines.”
“They’ve adjusted to us, or so I like to think,” Helen said.
“But mainly on their own terms, I suspect, not that there’s much harm in that.” Mrs. Clayton’s gentle laugh suggested that Helen was easier with the servants than she should be, for her own good or theirs. “But thank heavens Cookie’s still around. I enjoy these evenings out here, with him making sure our glasses are filled, when he remembers. It wouldn’t be the same at all with my two.” Mrs. Clayton’s servants were a pair of middle-aged sisters. “Docile and efficient, but no idea of how to put a good G and T together.”
Behind them, Cookie gave his discreet-butler cough, sharpened with a touch of urgency. Helen turned around. “Yes, Cookie?”
“Jason say no come in. He go there.”
As Cookie pointed seaward, Helen stood up. She could see Jason’s fair hair glinting in the sun’s last rays as he ran among the piles of sand and mud.
“The times I’ve told him he mustn’t go out on the reclamation!”
“I keep say wash-time. Jason keep say no.”
“All right, Cookie. I’ll get him.”
Helen walked quickly across the padang, then down the steps by the sea wall, calling to her son. Mrs. Clayton winced slightly. The dear girl had quite a pleasant voice, for an Australian, most of the time, but anger and volume made it strident. “Jason! Jason!”
That boy’s going to cause real trouble one day, Mrs. Clayton told herself as she finished her G and T.
Three days later, at sunset on the padang, Helen said, “Thank God Colin will be back from Taiwan at the end of the week. I wish his job didn’t keep him away so much. Jason needs a father’s hand, or at least I hope that’s all it is. He’s been nothing but trouble since we came here. He did have his naughty outbursts in Melbourne, but nothing like this. Otherwise I might think he was autistic.”
“Always a possibility,” said Mrs. Clayton, to whom this word was new. “Perhaps,” she added, with the facile wisdom of the childless, “all he needs is time to adjust to his new surroundings.”
“He’s adjusted well enough. He couldn’t be happier. But the rest of us have to pay the price.” Helen sighed. “His bike’s the latest problem.”
“He does seem to be having fun with it,” Mrs. Clayton said in a carefully neutral voice. Jason had almost knocked her down twice. He had said “sorry,” but she suspected there had been more calculation than accident in those near-collisions. His impertinence, now so outrageously overplayed, no longer amused her. Old and a bit silly though she might be, she could still tell a proper apology from one delivered with a smirk and more than a hint that she’d better watch out, or she might get really hurt next time. But she wasn’t about to add to this poor girl’s troubles by mentioning that now. “The way he goes whizzing around the padang!” she said.
“And out on the street.”
“Oh dear, in all that traffic. You must put a stop to that.”
“I put a lock on the bike, but he picked the lock. I let the air out of the tyres and took the screws off the valves, but he bought new ones. I’ll just have to get rid of it. And that will be his excuse to find some other trouble to get into. On the reclamation, probably.”
The reclamation stretched for a few hundred yards from the sea wall at the edge of the padang. Rock and earth quarried from Singapore’s few hills, and sand dredged from the sea, were being used to extend the island, creating new land for freeways, factories, and another airport.
“I don’t know why it’s not fenced off,” Helen complained.
“Such a big area, that would be terribly expensive, and I’m sure it’s not really dangerous, not when there hasn’t been rain for so long.”
“Then why have they put up a notice warning that it is?”
Mrs. Clayton, unable to argue with that, attempted a change of subject, at the risk of moving into even more contentious territory. “An only child. Perhaps...?”
“Oh, we tried. Had three miscarriages before our doctor advised against it.”
“My dear, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive.” Helen patted the old woman’s hand. “It used to upset me, but not now.” She said harshly, “There’s no guaranteeing it would have been a sweet little girl, and I don’t think I could have coped with another one like Jason.”
“I don’t want to tell tales,” Mrs. Clayton said, pointing to the reclamation, “but there he goes again.”
That night at dinner Jason contrived to upset his food on the floor. Helen had wanted to lock him in his room without dinner as punishment for going out on the reclamation and for teasing and abusing Cookie and Amah as they prepared the meal; but the effort of disciplining him threatened to bring on more tantrums, and she knew she was beyond coping with them. This ruined meal was her reward for leniency.
“You did that on purpose!” she shouted as he looked with satisfaction at the mess of food and broken china on the tiles and carpet. “Clean it up.”
“Oh, Mother, don’t be such an idiot,” he drawled. “Why do you think they have servants in this country?”
Cookie returned from the kitchen, where he had gone to summon Amah to bring a bucket and cloth.
“Please leave it,” Helen said. “I’ll do it. Or Jason will.”
But Cookie held out her chair until she sat down again. This weak-willed woman could never make her child obey her, and it was beneath his dignity to allow an employer to do work that should be done only by his wife.
Jason grinned as Amah cleaned up the mess and Cookie served him with more food.
“Stop that!” Helen wanted to slap him, but had a dreadful feeling that he might slap her back. “Go to your room.”
“Oh, Mother, really,” her son said, staying put.
Later, shouting to make himself heard over the heavy rain, Cookie told his wife, “Either that little bastard goes or we do.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Amah said, looking up from ironing one of the little bastard’s shirts. “He stays. Australians don’t like sending their children home to boarding school, not at that age.”
“Ah.” Cookie could still be surprised by the range of information that his wife had picked up from gossiping with other servants over the years. “Then we must go.”
“Where? There are too many servants looking for work as it is, and younger than us.”
“Taking care of that drunk Preston was bad enough, but otherwise it was an easy berth, and there weren’t the insults, day by day, and from a child. Perhaps...” Cookie went on to explain how his cousin had a friend who knew someone in one of the tongs who for a fee would commit unmentionable crimes. “He could fix the little demon, permanently.”