Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [54]
They left the hotel and got into Edward Hong’s waiting car. Then, negotiating a series of pothole-ridden backroads and alleyways, they arrived at a small café on the front of which was a block of Chinese script and a large sign in Baharsa Malay advertising the merits of Tiger Balm. Edward Hong said something to the driver, who climbed out of the car and walked into the café. A few minutes later, Domenica saw him come out with a striking-looking young man with a blue headscarf tied across his brow. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of denim jeans. His feet were in sandals. The driver gestured to the passenger seat in the front and the young man got into it. He turned and gave Domenica a wide smile, exposing a brilliant set of teeth. Then he winked at her. She wondered if she had been mistaken, but then he winked again, and she realised that she had not. I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate, she said to herself. Not at my stage of life. I just cannot.
36. Singapore Matters
As they drove out of Malacca, heading north, Edward Hong entertained Domenica with an account of his life. He had a strange way of talking – that style sometimes encountered which conveys the impression that the listener already knows what is being said and the narrator is merely adding detail.
“We’re a Malacca family,” he said. “My grandfather, Sir Percival Hong, was one of the first locals to be on the bench. He was a very popular man – everybody liked him, and he was the one who built our house, actually. He had a very good collection of early Chinese ceramics which he built up with the help of a dealer in Hong Kong. I remember that dealer coming to the house when I was a boy. I thought that he was the last word Singapore Matters 113
in sophistication back then. He had a pencil moustache and wore his handkerchief tucked into the sleeve of his jacket, which impressed me greatly, for some reason.
“Then, after my grandfather’s death, when we had the appraisers in to value the collection, we discovered that virtually every piece was a fake. A clever fake, mind you, and an aesthetically-pleasing one, but a fake nonetheless. My grandfather simply had not known enough to tell what was genuine. And the dealer, it transpires, was a charming crook. And I must say it was better that my grandfather never found out, don’t you agree?”
Domenica looked out of the window. They were on the outskirts of the town now and passing a small section of paddy field that abutted onto a warehouse of some sort. A group of children stood at the edge of the paddy field, throwing stones into the water. At the far end, a large white egret rose slowly into the air, circled, and headed off on some business of its own. She answered Edward Hong’s question. “I suppose it is better. It’s never easy to discover one’s been taken in.”
Edward Hong nodded. “Then there was my father,” he said.
“He was destined for the law, too, but really couldn’t knuckle down to his studies, and so he joined a cousin of his who had a business in Singapore. I was actually born in Singapore, you know, and spent my childhood there. We had a rather nice house just off Orchard Road, which wasn’t so built up in those days. My father chose that in order to be close to the Tanglin Club, where he always went for a whisky after work. They had an arrangement whereby you could leave your own bottle of whisky in the club and be served from that if you wished.
“I felt a bit trapped in Singapore. I did not mind the government there, of course – it wasn’t that. In fact, I rather liked Lee Kuan Yew. He used to come for dinner at the house from time to time and he would talk about things they were proposing to ban. Chewing gum, for example. You did know that chewing gum is illegal in Singapore?
“I must say that I happen to think that that is the most remarkably enlightened bit of legislation. I can’t bear to see people 114 Singapore Matters
chewing gum – they look so vacant, so bovine. I’m sorry, but when I see somebody chewing gum, I can’t help but think that they look like a cow. It’s such a moronic