and set a bottle of the new Sauternes she had brought back from France in the wine chiller. Michael had a sweet tooth when it came to wines, and he had taken a liking to late-harvest Sauternes. She knew he was going to love this bottle, which had been specially recommended to her by Manuel, the brilliant sommelier at Taillevent.
To the majority of Singaporeans, it would seem that Astrid was in store for a lovely evening at home. But to her friends and family, Astrid’s current domestic situation was a perplexing one. Why was she popping into kitchens talking to cooks, unpacking luggage by herself, or worrying about her husband’s workload? This was certainly not how anyone would have imagined Astrid’s life to be. Astrid Leong was meant to be the chatelaine of a great house. Her head housekeeper should be anticipating every one of her needs, while she should be getting dressed up to go out with her powerful and influential husband to any one of the exclusive parties being thrown around the island that night. But Astrid always confounded everyone’s expectations.
For the small group of girls growing up within Singapore’s most elite milieu, life followed a prescribed order: Beginning at age six, you were enrolled at Methodist Girls’ School (MGS), Singapore Chinese Girls’ School (SCGS), or the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ). After-school hours were consumed by a team of tutors preparing you for the avalanche of weekly exams (usually in classical Mandarin literature, multivariable calculus, and molecular biology), followed on the weekends by piano, violin, flute, ballet, or riding, and some sort of Christian Youth Fellowship activity. If you did well enough, you entered the National University of Singapore (NUS) and if you did not, you were sent abroad to England (American colleges were deemed substandard). The only acceptable majors were medicine or law (unless you were truly dumb, in which case you settled for accounting). After graduating with honors (anything less would bring shame to the family), you practiced your vocation (for not more than three years) before marrying a boy from a suitable family at the age of twenty-five (twenty-eight if you went to med school). At this point, you gave up your career to have children (three or more were officially encouraged by the government for women of your background, and at least two should be boys), and life would consist of a gentle rotation of galas, country clubs, Bible study groups, light volunteer work, contract bridge, mah-jongg, traveling, and spending time with your grandchildren (dozens and dozens, hopefully) until your quiet and uneventful death.
Astrid changed all this. She wasn’t a rebel, because to call her one would imply that she was breaking the rules. Astrid simply made her own rules, and through the confluence of her particular circumstances—a substantial private income, overindulgent parents, and her own savoir faire—every move she made became breathlessly talked about and scrutinized within that claustrophobic circle.
In her childhood days, Astrid always disappeared from Singapore during the school holidays, and though Felicity had trained her daughter never to boast about her trips, a schoolmate invited over had discovered a framed photo of Astrid astride a white horse with a palatial country manor as a backdrop. Thus began the rumor that Astrid’s uncle owned a castle in France, where she spent all her holidays riding a white stallion. (Actually, it was a manor in England, the stallion was a pony, and the schoolmate was never invited again.)
In her teen years, the chatter spread even more feverishly when Celeste Ting, whose daughter was in the same Methodist Youth Fellowship group as Astrid, picked up a copy of Point de Vue at Charles de Gaulle Airport and came upon a paparazzi photograph of Astrid doing cannonballs off a yacht in Porto Ercole with some young European princes. Astrid returned from school holidays that year with a precociously sophisticated sense of style. While other girls in her set became mad for head-to-toe designer brands, Astrid was the first to pair a vintage Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket with three-dollar batik shorts bought off a beach vendor in Bali, the first to wear the Antwerp Six, and the first to bring home a pair of red-heeled stilettos from some Parisian shoemaker named Christian. Her classmates at Methodist Girls’ School strove to imitate her every look, while their brothers nicknamed Astrid “the Goddess” and anointed her the chief object of their masturbatory fantasies.
After famously and unabashedly flunking every one of her A levels