Aunty Lee's Delights (5 page)

When they first approached him, Selina Lee and Laura Kwee had made it clear that he was precisely the sort of patron (yes, Selina had said “patron,” which made him feel he was supporting a college or a hospital rather than a dinner club) they were looking to attract and had given him a very generous discount to boot. He had checked, of course, automatically distrusting people who talked about special deals. And he had learned from others at that first dinner party that they had indeed paid a whopping eighty dollars per head—double what he had been charged. It had made him enjoy the proceedings all the more. And of course he had found their later confrontations highly enjoyable. There was nothing more entertaining than watching women lose their tempers and take it out on each other—especially when you knew that at some level it was you they were fighting over.

Even though it was almost seven, he could see they were still messing around with table arrangements.

“Laura Kwee was supposed to be here early, to help Mark set out the wineglasses. Now it seems she’s decided not to show up,” Selina explained to the room in general.

Even though the wine was being served in the company of food (a big no-no for any genuine tasting), Mark maintained the need for separate glasses. For tonight, that meant four glasses per person to be set up at their places and filled precisely to the widest point in each glass at least fifteen minutes before the wines were to be sampled. After the confusion of the first wine dining, Mark now insisted on numbered coasters being set at each place so it would be clear to everyone which wine he was discussing.

“Nina, don’t keep messing with the plates. We can’t start until the coasters are ready, so go and help Mark write down the numbers!”

“What numbers should I write, sir?”

“Don’t worry, Nina. I’ll take care of it. Go and take all the glasses off the table so that I can arrange them on the coasters once they’re dry.”

At least when Selina was head prefect in school, she had gotten some credit for her ability to maintain order. But now her efforts were just ignored, criticized, or taken for granted. She supposed this was how the PAP felt. Not for the first time Selina wondered about joining Singapore’s omnipotent People’s Action Party . . . after all, Mycroft Peters himself must have put his name forward. But she had more immediate things to deal with; and even if Mark and Aunty Lee resisted her best efforts to organize their lives, she would get the dinner in order somehow.

As Mark fiddled, Selina watched what she could see of Harry Sullivan through the window. He glanced at the bamboo pot, looked around, and finally dropped his cigarette butt in the metal prayer bin standing on the road nearby. It was not yet the Ghost Month, but people still used the bin—foreign laborers and maids, Selina suspected. Fruits, flowers (obviously stolen from National Parks bushes), and even joss sticks often appeared on makeshift altars around the bin.

At that moment the Cunninghams, even though they were already late, stopped to photograph the bin and the makeshift altar beside it. Selina bit back her irritation at the sight of them. As Mark was always reminding her, what other people did was not her business.

“Everything’s very expensive here,” Lucy Cunningham said, “but it’s so clean and so efficient and everybody speaks English. It’s already starting to feel like coming back home!” She was a comfortably plump woman who seemed content to look her age; no signs of cosmetic surgery or even hair coloring. But in spite of her chatter, Mrs. Cunningham looked unhappy. This was not unusual for a woman her age. What was unusual was that her face did not look used to being unhappy. It kept lapsing into contentment and even curiosity and then, as if triggered by a thought or memory, it would cloud over again.

Aunty Lee wondered what was causing this. Because under her surface coating of worry, Lucy Cunningham emitted a glow of contentment. She also had the body of a happy woman, and at moments when she forgot her unhappiness, she took in everything around her with calm, unaffected interest. Perhaps she was suffering from food poisoning, Aunty Lee thought, or an argument with the husband.

“It’s so good of you to include us at such short notice. And I’m sorry we were late, but we took a walk and there was this antique shop and Frank saw some wood carvings he wanted to take a closer look at. He’s very interested in wood.”

Mrs. Cunningham had not argued with her husband, Aunty Lee decided.

Selina was gracious as she collected money from the Cunninghams.

“So glad we’re getting a chance to experience typical Singapore dining!”

Selina hoped the Cunninghams didn’t think they were in for a “typical Singapore” experience. The whole point of what they were trying to do was to lift their wine café experience to a level above what was “typical” for Singapore. Well, that was where Aunty Lee’s cooking would come in use, she supposed. No one could say
nonya
cuisine was not typically Singaporean. But still, Selina thought wistfully of the day when she could get Mark a place of his own. They would have more class than this café. She would serve bread sticks, perhaps cheese and grapes like she had seen in an Island City brochure . . . when she looked up from her daydream, Aunty Lee had gone—

Selina found Nina, who was flaming sticks of satay over the charcoal brazier in the alley just outside the back door of the shop.

“Do you know did Aunty Lee see this month’s
Island High Life
magazine yet?”

Nina looked blankly at her. “Sorry, ma’am?”

Sometimes Selina wondered whether Nina was deliberately acting stupid. No one could be as slow as she was. When Selina did not answer immediately, Nina turned back to the row of satay sticks she was squatting over.

Nina had put on weight since she started working for Aunty Lee, Selina thought. When she first saw her, Nina had been a scared, skinny little thing who had cried when she could not understand what Mark meant when he insisted on her finding their “special cups”—the glass cups that were kept just for Mark and Selina because they could not drink out of the unbreakable plastic cups Aunty Lee had bought for use in the house. Aunty Lee had even fed Nina the Brands Essence of Chicken that people had given her for Chinese New Year. “Too rich for me,” the old woman said. “The girl needs more strength, more meat on her bones!” Selina had been so furious. Whoever heard of feeding Brands to maids? And those were new bottles, not even expired stock that would otherwise be discarded. Selina was married to the son of the house and Aunty Lee had never worried about her health or offered her Brands Essence.

Selina had been sore enough to refuse to let Mark visit Aunty Lee for two weeks, pointedly saying they were too busy with work and too tired from doing business research and market studies (not surprising since no one thought to offer them the expensive supplements that were lavished on servants). This tactic had always worked with her own parents, but sadly Aunty Lee accepted their absence so stoically that Selina had caved first.

It was not the first time Nina had made life hard for Selina. When she first arrived in the household, Selina had even warned Aunty Lee that having a young servant in the house with an old man like M. L. Lee was dangerous. “Men are all the same. They get taken in by a pretty face, they feel sorry for her. Next thing you know, she’s got her claws into him!” But though Aunty Lee had thanked her and promised to keep an eye on Nina, she had not done anything as far as Selina could see. In fact she had bought Nina new clothes (“Because people work better in the right clothes”) and sent her for driving lessons and computer classes (“Because two old people like us, we need someone young with good eyes to keep us in touch with the world!”). Nina was still far from fat but she was no longer skinny. And in her loose brown slacks and long cream tunic top, she did not fit Selina’s idea of how a foreign domestic worker should dress.

“Are you pregnant?” Selina asked sharply. It would be typical of Aunty Lee to allow Nina to go out without supervision. Selina was well versed in the maid horror stories that revolved around lovers, stolen food and jewelry, and prostitution.

“Sorry, ma’am?” Still looking blank, Nina started to remove the satay onto a waiting plate, already lined with a trimmed banana leaf.

“I’m talking to you—please stop that and pay attention to me!”

“Is something the matter?” Aunty Lee popped up in the doorway. “Nina, watch the satay, ah, don’t let it get burned, otherwise we are all going to be in big trouble!”

Nina turned back to the satay and left her boss to handle Selina.

“I was just asking Nina—whether you had seen the latest
Island High Life
magazine,” Selina said. “I didn’t want to ask you in case you hadn’t seen it and got upset.” Even to Selina, this didn’t sound quite right. “Because I didn’t want you to be upset, I mean. So I wanted to warn her to be sure to keep it away from you.”

“What magazine?” asked Aunty Lee. “I don’t read magazines. Nina, did you remember to add the tamarind juice to the peanut sauce or not?”

“Yes, ma’am. Added already.”

“I didn’t want you to be upset,” Selina said almost desperately, “because it had a review of the café in it and it didn’t say very nice things.”

“Did it? Luckily I don’t read such things. Finished, Nina? Be careful. Don’t drop anything. Carry in and put on the table. Make sure you don’t move any of Mark’s precious glasses!”

Back inside, Frank Cunningham was fooling around with the paper napkins. Mark and his precious glasses were almost ready, Selina saw with some relief. She didn’t know anything about wine and frequently confused the bottles when she was trying to help her husband.

“This,” said Frank with boyish pride, “is for you.” He held up a paper napkin folded into a miniature replica of the Sydney Opera House and handed it to Cherril Lim-Peters. Cherril squealed with delight. Selina turned away to get more paper napkins—she would keep Frank Cunningham’s replacement napkin aside so as not to encourage the man, but she wanted to have it on hand so that when the dinner (finally) started, she could hand it to him with a reproving look.

“Can you believe it? It’s so incredible!” Cherril took out her cell phone to take a photograph of the paper replica. “I have to send this to Mycroft!”

Selina didn’t like Cherril—she was a stewardess and Selina could tell from her spoken English (fluent but flawed) that she was not of their class and brought down the tone of their gatherings. But as always, Mark pretended not to understand.

“We don’t have any class,” he had said. “My great-grandfather made money by putting rubber tires on rickshaws. Anyway, Cherril knows more about wine than most of the other people who come.” Mark and Cherril had met at a wine tasting, and thanks to her travels and interest, she sometimes came across interesting wine producers and dealers whom she put Mark in touch with. That was the other and main reason Selina disliked her.

“We’re from Sydney,” Lucy Cunningham was saying in her gentle, cultured voice. “Frank likes to make that wherever we go—just for a while there’s a little bit of Sydney here.”

“Oh, Harry is from Sydney too.” Selina recalled herself to her duties as hostess. “Have you been introduced? Frank and Lucy Cunningham, this is Harry Sullivan.”

“Sydney’s a big, big place,” Harry said.

“Harry Sullivan . . .” Frank said thoughtfully. “I know the name and you even look familiar . . . you’re much too young to know old geezers like us—are you named after your old man? An uncle maybe?”

“No. Sydney’s a big place, Sullivan’s a common name,” Harry said. “So what brings you guys to Singapore?”

It was a question any tourist might expect to be asked, often without any interest whatsoever on the part of the asker. Anything along the lines of “seeing the world now we’re retired” would probably have done the trick. But Lucy looked guiltily at her husband, who ducked his head and said, “Nothing. Nothing.”

“Have you two been here before?” Immediately Aunty Lee’s rat-scenting antenna was waving wildly.

“No, no. We’ve never been in this part of the world before. And it’s just chance, pure chance, that we decided to take a look in here for dinner tonight.”

Mark Lee crushed the napkin he was holding into a crumpled ball and put it on the table next to the Sydney landmark. “That’s the Esplanade,” he said. “Our national landmark.” He laughed. Others laughed too. Later, thinking about the six-hundred-million-dollar spiked domes that graced (or disgraced) the Singapore waterfront, Selina thought it very witty of Mark. But at the time she was anxious to get started and irritated by the waste of another napkin. She was also irritated by how clever Cherril Lim-Peters seemed to find the remark.

“Can we all sit down and get started? We’re late already.”

In the manner common to such occasions, hungry guests did not want to seem to be in a hurry to eat (convention did not allow you to say you were starving till seated) and harried hosts could not rush guests through cocktails and conversation no matter how worried they were about dishes overcooking or rapidly cooling.

Mark, who was normally more focused where his precious wine was concerned, was deep in conversation with Cherril Lim-Peters, who was saying something about “suppliers I met while traveling in the Loire Valley,” and Selina cut her off with a chilly smile. “Excuse me. We’re running late as it is.”

“I’ve got the names of some reliable suppliers,” Mark said to Cherril. “But if we really want to make it work, we should plan a face-to-face meeting. I find those are always more productive.”

“I only have a week there while Mycroft is having meetings in Paris . . .” Cherril simpered. “Unless I make a special trip.”

“Mark, please. I have to talk to you now!”

Selina clamped a hand just above Mark’s elbow and dragged him away physically. Selina didn’t like Cherril Lim, though not in the same way she disliked Laura Kwee, Marianne Peters, Nina, or Aunty Lee. There were so many reasons to dislike women, just as there were so many reasons to despise men.

When they finally sat down to the table, it was almost twenty minutes after the stated time, but no one seemed surprised. Selina insisted on the television and radio being turned off.