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By Root 1263 0

in The Philippines. She sees them about once a year. I can’t imagine being separated from my child like that but that’s the sacrifice these women have to make to support their families, incomprehensible as it is to most spoilt Westerners. Myrna is good looking, like most of her race. I hired her before I’d heard the rumours of the bonking businessmen but if Tony is having any carnal thoughts about her he’s keeping them well hidden; I don’t think he’d ever be that stupid. I left Issy in her care the other day so I could go shopping in Causeway Bay. (Isabel has clearly taken after her father, recently declaring she doesn’t like the noise and ‘yucky smells’ of the city.) I cut short my expedition, thinking my young daughter may have been becoming anxious without me, but when I walked through the door she looked up from the story-book she was reading with Myrna and said crossly, ‘Why are you back so soon?’ I think might be on to a winner here.

Issy met this little girl called Chelsea at her ballet class and as a consequence I have now become best friends with Chelsea’s mother, an imposingly efficient English woman called Lily. Actually I didn’t have much say in the matter. Lily decided I was going to be her friend and that was that. She lives nearby in a bigger place in Headland Village, visits me at least once a day, calls me twice more and has pretty much taken over the running of my life. It’s like having a same-sex stalker.

I don’t want to sound unkind, however, because she really has been very sweet. Lily and her family have been here two and a half years so she knows all about the best places for kids in Hong Kong. It was through Lily’s recommendation that I found Myrna. Lily has four children aged under eight herself - two boys and two girls - and motherhood is clearly her vocation. She’s a pretty woman but the classic jeans, jumper and sensible shoe type. No adornments, no make-up, and she is clearly letting her hair grey naturally. I might consider that at age sixty but not any time before. Whenever we go on outings her children all arrive, immaculately kitted out, with neat little packed lunches in colour-coded plastic lunchboxes. She recently started bringing a lunchbox for Isabel as well! Perhaps I should feel insulted but I don’t feel she ever intended this to be a slight on my parenting skills. I think she just wants to add Isabel and me to her brood.

Mind you once I met her husband Roger it became clear to me why Lily had thrown herself into mothering. Roger is a banker. Think rhyming slang. Still, it’s too obvious for a nickname - no challenge there. You may not know it but apparently two and a half years’ residency in Hong Kong can make you a world authority on the place and on all Chinese history and culture since the Zhou Dynasty to boot. When I mentioned I’d been looking around for work, he tactfully advised that Hong Kong was a ‘global city’ and thus no-one would look at me with my Australian (read Hicksville) university qualifications and experience. He is particularly patronising to women: his wife, me and especially Lorinda, their live-in Filipino housekeeper. I think he is exacting revenge on all the girls who knocked him back for dances and dates before he acquired his only discernible asset - a high six figures income.

Women never cease to perplex me with their choice of partner. What possibly could she see in him? Lily doesn’t strike me at all as the gold-digger type and it certainly couldn’t be his looks that attracted her. You’d go far to find a man as unpleasant looking as Roger: oily dark hair that he is constantly trying to stick behind one ear even though it’s clearly too short for that, pasty skin and those little round wire glasses that I suppose are meant to make him appear intellectual but only succeed in making him look affected. And he’s fat; ‘corpulent’ is the word that immediately comes to mind. If you can’t disguise your girth under a dark business suit you know you’ve reached serious fatty boombah territory. He’s clearly indulged in too many long lunches with his Hong Kong banking