sounded the same. I should have considered the possibility that William Acton, surgeon at the Batu Gajah District Hospital, might be at this private party. And now I was stuck.
We waited in another room until they were ready to have us, which was quite normal, said Pearl. Besides, we were a little early. Kiong was always a stickler for punctuality. The room was somebody’s study: a very neat person, judging from the desk with its exact angles of ink jar and blotting paper. There was a tiger skin—a real one—on the floor. Rose said it gave her the shivers, but I thought it looked rather sad with its green glass eyes fixed in a petrified stare. That would be me, I thought, after William Acton recognized me. Goodbye to any chance of a nursing career, at least at this particular hospital.
“Did you see that little houseboy?” said Rose. “The one who opened the door for us? I thought his eyes would fall out of his head, he was staring so.”
I hadn’t noticed, but Hui had. “He’s a bit young to be chasing women,” she said wickedly. She was simmering with nervous energy: the same high spirits that had drawn me to her from the start.
Kiong knocked on the door. “Time to go.”
After that, it was business as usual. Kiong brought us out, rather like a string of show ponies, while a young red-haired doctor introduced us. That was Rose’s regular, she whispered.
“Very nice dance instructors from a respectable establishment,” he said loudly. There was some ribbing going on, but not too much. William Acton was talking to a guest in the back and didn’t seem to be paying attention, thank goodness. I’d noticed a couple of ladies—it was always better to have mixed company, though I wasn’t sure whether, for their parts, the ladies were that pleased to see us. One of them looked like a mouse, but the other was very tall and fair.
She laid a proprietary hand on Acton’s arm and started the dancing. There were five of us girls, and at least a dozen guests, all men except for the two ladies who were already gamely dancing. I’d have thought they would hang back at first, but most of the guests were young and apparently up for a good time. They were, by and large, polite though. No shouting out or calling dibs on girls as though we were cattle, which I’d been secretly afraid of without the strict dance-hall ticketing system. It was easy to see how an affair like this could go horribly wrong.
I danced with a short man with sandy hair, then another with sweaty hands. The music was very fast, faster than the live band at the May Flower played, and it was popular dances from five or six years ago like the Charleston and the Black Bottom. I realized that was to see whether we were any good at all. Which was ridiculous, because of course we could dance.
When the music stopped, we were panting from all that high-spirited leaping about and waving our arms. If they kept up this pace, I’d collapse before the evening was over, but thankfully the next piece was a waltz.
This time, I danced with a quiet young man who held my waist a little too tightly. You had to watch out for the silent ones; they could be troublesome in a sneaky way. As we spun sedately around the room, I kept an eye out for William Acton. If I were lucky, he might never dance with me at all, and perhaps with all the extra kohl and face powder, he wouldn’t recognize me anyway. We made a tight turn near the dining room, and I glimpsed a small figure in white.
It’s astonishing how much detail you can see in an instant. The flash of a face before it’s gone, like a lightning strike. For a moment, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wanted to turn back, but my dance partner was steering us in the opposite direction.
“What is it?” he said. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
That was exactly how I felt. The small square face, serious eyes and closely clipped hair. It was the little boy from my dreams. I stumbled and almost fell.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
He swung us around, but the doorway was empty now. I must have been hallucinating.
“You Chinese girls are so slim,” my partner said, smiling. He slid his hand farther down my back. “Has anyone ever told