Читать книгу: «The Hour Before Dawn»
The Hour Before Dawn
Sara MacDonald
For my beloved twin Nicky, with love.
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, The future futureless, before the morning watch. TS Eliot
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Fleur treads water in the deep end as the twins slowly climb to the diving board. An older girl goes up behind them to make sure they don’t fall.
Fleur is laughing at their excitement. Nikki jumps first, plummets downwards, hits the water and keeps going down. Fleur hauls her up to the surface and she opens her mouth and screams with joy.
Fleur sits her on the edge of the pool and swims back to the middle for Saffie. Saffie leaps and lands almost into Fleur’s arms and Fleur scoops her up before she sinks. The onlookers round the pool clap their hands; it is an amazing sight to see toddlers jumping from the diving board.
‘We did it! We did it!’ they both cry.
Fleur swims to the edge and pulls herself out and sits next to them. ‘You’re so brave! I’m so proud of you!’
‘Now you! Now you, Mummy!’
Fleur looks at them, small brown bodies, wrists and ankles round and babyish still, their fair hair plastered to their heads. They could both swim before they could walk. They have no fear of the water, no fear of anything. She is suffused with love, overtaken; wants to pull them to her and bite into those plump legs and arms, bury her head in their wet little stomachs.
‘OK. But go back to the rug and get your armbands first.’
She watches them run noisily away over the grass; watches heads turn as they always do at the two identical little figures. When they return she blows up their bands, then blows a raspberry on each brown stomach making them shriek.
‘Go and sit on the edge of the shallow end, you noisy little girls, and don’t jump in until I’ve dived and I’m in the water. You know the rules. I mean it. If you jump in before I’m in the water, no more diving board.’
The twins nod solemnly and Fleur walks away and climbs the ladder to the top board. Over to her right the sea glitters over the Straits of Malacca and sounds from the naval base below reach her. It is late in the afternoon and a cooling wind is coming from the sea, ruffling the palm trees, touching her wet skin like a whisper. Colours are softening over the grass and families, some with amahs, sit scattered on towels and rugs around the pool, reading, talking quietly, and waiting for the men to finish work and join them.
Fleur stands poised, eyes almost shut, dark hair, dark skin, in a white bikini. She raises her arms, thinking about her movements and the alignment of her body as only a dancer does. She pauses, the diving board rocks, and then in perfect slow motion her body bends, jumps and turns in a perfect arc as she dives, breaking the water with hardly a splash.
She isn’t aware of the watchers, of the men turning from the bar, of the women stopping for a moment, of the children, their mouths open in admiration. She is only aware of this small act of precision reminding her of what her body can do.
When she surfaces, the twins are swimming like small, fat beetles towards her, racing to see who can get to her first. She laughs and propels herself towards them and when her feet touch the bottom she holds her arms wide, turning her face upwards away from their splashes. They grab her arms.
‘I won!’
‘No, I won!’
‘You both won,’ she says, clasping them to her. ‘Now let’s go and get dry because Daddy will be here any moment.’
She plonks them on the side and they start to pull their armbands off. When she looks up David is standing in his uniform watching them, his eyes shielded by dark glasses. Her heart turns over as it always does when she sees him from a distance. She thinks, ‘Oh God, he’s mine.’
The twins haven’t seen him yet and Fleur knows why he hasn’t called out. He likes to watch them. He likes to watch them when they are unaware because he too cannot quite believe in this happiness.
She smiles and the twins turn to see who she is smiling at, then squeak and jump up and run across the grass to him. He scoops them up and walks towards Fleur, laughing.
‘Ugh! Horrid, beastly little wet rats.’
‘No, no! Peapods. We’re peapods.’
‘You jolly well are not! Peapods are nice and dry and green.’ He drops them beside their armbands, takes off his dark glasses and bends and puts out a hand to pull Fleur out of the water.
‘Hi, you.’ He kisses her nose, his eyes amused, and Fleur wants to wind her arms round him, press her body to him; the feeling is visceral and overpowering.
‘Are you going in?’
‘Yes, I’ll cool off for ten minutes while you get these rats dressed. Can you get me a beer, darling? I’m parched.’
He walks back with her across the grass where the shadows are lengthening and goes to change. Fleur dresses the twins and gets out their colouring books. She walks over to the outside bar to get them cold drinks and the twins turn and watch her.
She has wrapped a thin, filmy piece of material across her hips and people turn as she passes. The young Malay waiter who is clearing the tables hurries back to the bar so that he can serve her. He carries the tray all the way back across the grass for her and places it on the table beside the twins.
‘Hello, babies,’ he says. He says it every time and they say in unison,
‘Not babies.’ And he laughs and gives Fleur his glittering smile and swaggers laconically away.
Fleur lies on her stomach in the last rays of the sun, soporific, listening to the different voices coming to her as the day fades. She can hear David’s voice faintly talking to someone as he swims. They will be talking helicopters or flight rotas or new pilots or the boss.
The twins move closer, their warm bodies touch her on each side. Saffie has her thumb in her mouth. They are both getting sleepy. Fleur puts her arms around them both.
What should she wear tonight? They are driving into Singapore with friends to have a meal and walk around night markets before going dancing.
How many times has she worn the green Chinese silk dress? It is ages since they’ve been into the city…maybe she will get some material for a new dress…
‘I love you, sweet peas,’ she murmurs, drawing the twins even closer so that they seem welded and part of her.
‘Blub you.’
‘Blub you, Mummy.’
The day is drawing to a close. People are leaving. It is the gap between afternoon and evening when only the single officers prop up the bar for a little longer before they too go and change for dinner. She hears Laura’s voice in her head.
‘You’re throwing your life away. I can’t believe that after all those hard years of training you can just…give it all up…What a waste! You’re a born dancer…You’ll regret it, Fleur. One day you’ll wake up and regret it…’
She hears David return, pick up a towel, drip near her feet. He takes a deep drink of his beer. He is humming under his breath.
Fleur smiles. I don’t regret it, Mum. I’ve never regretted it for one single second. I’m so happy I want to burst.
As she thinks this, she remembers someone saying, Never, ever say out loud that you’re happy because a jealous God will hear and strike you down. The sun goes suddenly, slips behind the sea and all is black and white.
I didn’t say it out loud. I only thought it so it doesn’t count.
Fleur sits up and David smiles. ‘I guess I’d better swallow this beer and get my three sleepy women home…’
ONE
I saw so clearly the hollow grave on the edge of the jungle and the small skeleton curled inside it that I woke up screaming.
Jack erupted from the pillow in fright and switched on the lamp.
‘God, Nikki.’
His startled face peered at me, still full of sleep. I clamped my hand over my mouth willing the image to fade.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered, but my whole body was shaking and I felt icily cold.
‘That must have been some dream. Are you OK now?’ Jack rubbed his hand up and down my arm to sooth me but it had the opposite effect and I shrank away, back under the covers.
Jack turned to look at the clock. It was four-fifteen.
‘Oh God,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve got to be up in two hours.’
‘Sorry,’ I said again, trying to stop shivering.
‘I’ll make you tea,’ he said in a resigned voice. ‘I might as well. I’m never going to get to sleep again.’ He got out of bed. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here.’
He wound a sarong around his naked body and went to the window which was wide open and shut it.
‘I wonder why it’s so cold? I’ll come back and warm you up…’ He paused, staring at me worriedly. ‘You’ve only had bad dreams since you got pregnant, haven’t you?’
I nodded and he grinned at me. ‘I’d better start monitoring what you eat for supper.’
When he’d gone the room was still, but it was full of something too, full of the cold darkness that was Saffie. Saffie, desperately trying tell me something. Why now, after all these years, when I had run so far and thought the past was settling into something I could just about manage?
Of course, she was always with me, each and every day, because she was my twin and her likeness was mine. Of course she was with me, a shadow, a mote in my eye, there on the turn of a stair, on the end of a street, waiting.
But I had never known her frightened before. She had never called out to me in my dreams as she was doing now. Nothing should hurt her. She should be safe.
I carried new life in me and I felt full of dread. I tried to tell myself that terrifying glimpse of a grave was something I had watched on the television and nothing to do with my sister.
As she faded the room warmed, and when Jack came back with tea and dry biscuits I was able to smile. He kissed the top of my nose and climbed back into bed.
‘Thank God, it’s warming up,’ he said.
‘Thank you for the tea.’ I smiled at him gratefully.
‘No worries,’ he answered sleepily, and I knew in a moment he would be asleep again, leaving me to wait for the birds and the sun creeping up over the bay.
An hour later I slid out of bed and pulled my clothes from the chair. I went into the bathroom and dressed quietly and pattered downstairs and out into the new day. I walked down the garden and the dew was heavy and cold and drenched my feet. The bay was full of yachts below me and the sea beyond the oyster beds was the deepest blue, yet summer was beginning to fade, the height of the season was over and soon Jack would be able to relax a little.
In England the worst of the winter would be over and sliding into spring and my mother would be leaving her London garden and making her way inexorably my way. I dreaded it. I dreaded the thought of her here in New Zealand, in our small piece of paradise. I wondered suddenly if that was why I was having bad dreams. If the dread was manifesting itself in my sleep, because it was difficult to articulate to Jack, to explain how I felt about my mother.
He looked at me in a certain way when the subject of her came up, a little shocked and uneasy, as if mothers were sacrosanct, and my not wanting to see her was breaking some taboo. And the worst thing was, I knew he would be charmed by her.
TWO
Fleur finished packing and sat back on her heels. She longed to ring her daughter to say, Let’s try hard. I haven’t seen you for years, darling. Just a few days together, then I won’t see you again for heaven knows how long…but she dared not risk it. She closed her last piece of hand luggage and walked slowly round the house wondering if the distance between them, literal and resonant, would ever end. Perhaps Nikki’s pregnancy would change and warm her somehow. A pregnancy Fleur would have known nothing about if she had not rung her daughter. It was still hard to bear the thought of Nikki living almost as far away from her as it was possible to live.
Fleur was planning a trip to New Zealand on the trail of Hundertwasser’s architecture as part of her dissertation and there was one of his buildings quite near where her daughter lived, in Kawakawa, a public lavatory, and Fleur wanted to see it. If she had rung her daughter and said, Can I come and see you? Nikki would have made excuses about being in the middle of a busy season, or that she was just about to take off with Jack, or, Frankly, it’s not convenient just now. So making Hundertwasser her reason for visiting was the only chance Fleur had of catching a glimpse of her troubled daughter for she had always refused to foist herself upon her.
Nikki was amused by the fact Fleur was a mature student, but she had never troubled to ask her mother about her paintings, which Fleur had surprisingly started to sell for quite large sums.
Fleur missed Fergus. She missed his love and encouragement, and somehow, when he was alive, the shadows could be kept at bay, for he had been a part of them and they had come through that awful time together.
They did not hide it away, that tragedy so long ago. They took it out sometimes in the dead of night and turned it over yet again to see if they could find some clue, if the shape of it could change. But it never did, and the best they could do, like so many other people who had to go on living a whole long lifetime afterwards was to carry it forward with them, haul it after them like a dead weight, until it became part of them and absorbed into the people they became.
Saffie was the first thing Fleur remembered when she woke and the last thing she thought about before she slept.
Nikki had given her and Fergus a hard time. Fleur was unsure how they had survived, but they had. Fergus had died suddenly, three years ago, leaving Fleur abruptly without warning, and for the first time in her life she was completely alone.
When Fergus retired he had turned his architect’s eye to painting. He had gone to classes and turned out pleasing little watercolours. Small paintings of the garden and of their holidays by the sea in Cornwall; of Tuscany on their last holiday together.
‘I have an eye for detail and can copy, that’s all,’ he said to any compliments. ‘To an untrained eye I might seem proficient, but this is strictly painting for my own pleasure.’
When he died, Fleur had the paintings of Tuscany framed and they now hung on the wall outside her bedroom. They reminded her of a happy time but also of the random cruelty of life. They had both felt young still, with plans to travel now that they had the time and money. There were so many things to do and places they had never seen. As well as shock, Fleur felt cheated of all the years she should have had with Fergus.
He was able to join his father’s firm when he’d left the army but he’d had to retrain as an architect, five long years when they were relatively hard-up. Fleur had to qualify too, to teach dance professionally, and without the help of both sets of parents they would not have survived.
Fergus was an imaginative architect and had worked long and hard to become successful. He’d relaxed a little as the money began to come in, then his father died and he had to take over the firm and his hours became even longer, until he suddenly realised he didn’t want to do it any more. He wanted his life back. He wanted to see more of Fleur and travel and enjoy the money he had made. He sold out and retired with huge relief and whirled Fleur away to Italy. Eighteen months later he was dead.
One night Fleur had gone to his little studio and stared at an empty canvas. She had picked up a brush and some of his paints and had simply thrown the colour of her grief and anger at the canvas. She had never looked back. It had released something inside her and she went each day to the place where Fergus seemed nearest to her. She painted her loss instinctively without thought until her work seemed to coalesce into form and meaning: canvases covered with strange abstracts with a hidden power that gave way to something gentler and infinitely lonelier. It was these paintings, full of the loss of him, that got her a place as a mature student at a college of art. Her world changed abruptly, and slowly became full of new and different people and a life that challenged.
She found, left to her own devices, that she was quite practical and deft with her hands, and now the hands that changed light bulbs and fuses also made pots and jugs and little bowls. She loved the feel of clay, the excitement of moulding something from nothing, and the bright fiery colours she painted on canvas and clay were the colours of her childhood; the colours of the east.
Fleur wanted Nikki to see the person who had evolved from years and years of dependency, to approve of the person she had become.
It had taken her a long time to decide whether she could bear to fly via Singapore. Just the name of the city on her lips made her shiver and ache with longing, but with fear too. The Singapore of her memory would have turned into somewhere unrecognisable, would have a different identity to the place of her childhood and youth. A city of memories where everything changed in the blink of an eye. From light to darkness.
Every morning of her life Fleur turned Saffie’s photo towards her; a missing child forever caught in childhood. There was rarely a night when Fleur did not wonder where her daughter’s body lay or worry about the possibility that she might live in some distant, alien culture, brought up with unknown people with little memory of her birth and a long-ago family who loved her.
It was the not knowing. The certainty, as the years went by, that they would never know, which haunted and maimed the lives of Fleur and her surviving daughter.
But it was Fleur that the long, relentless shadow of guilt fell on. She was their mother and her mind and heart had been on other things; on David. She had not taken care of her children. Haunted with misery, she had left them to roam free. She had left them to chance, ignored their safety, and something random and terrible had swooped.
It is this that my daughter can never forgive.
THREE
Singapore, 1976
The monsoon was coming. The wind was rattling the shutters, catching the chimes outside Ah Heng’s window. They swung and jumped and clashed in a mad little Indian dance. The strings would get all muddled and Saffie knew she and Nikki would have to untwist them in the morning.
The smell of rain filled the dark room, reaching up the stilts of the house, rising up from the damp earth full of bruised frangipani blooms and dead leaves and small branches of trees.
Saffie lay still, listening for the sound that had woken her. She was facing the open door, staring at the closed shutters that kept out insects and the great blind moths as big as sparrows who threw themselves out of the dark into the light, their fat little bodies hitting the lampshades; their dusty, fluttering wings falling into the twins’ hair, jumping across the surface of their skin like mice.
Saffie could hear the familiar sound of cicadas, but there wasn’t the heavy warmth of a coming day. Her feet touched Nikki’s feet at the other end of the bed. She did not think
her sister was awake, but she could not be sure. Nikki’s breath could be held, like her own; Nikki could be silently listening too.
Suddenly Saffie heard again the sound that had woken her. She saw the shadow of her mother in the corridor that was a balcony during the day when the shutters were thrown back against the house each morning. Fleur had opened a shutter and was leaning out into the dark, listening, looking upwards to the stars that filled the hugeness of the night.
With a lurch of sickness Saffie knew. Daddy was not home yet and she strained like Fleur for the sound of helicopters overhead. She could hear her mother’s voice keening. It was this soft, monotonous sound that had woken her, that and her mother’s fear. It shimmered across the night and reached both children, touched them with cold fingers and they shivered at their mother’s terror.
‘Oh, God!’ Fleur whispered. ‘Oh, God in heaven. Please. Please. Let him come in safely. I beg you, God.’
Both girls sat up abruptly as one. Stared at their identical selves.
‘Daddy!’ they whispered and reached for each other, catching their mother’s panic.
At that moment they heard the aircraft engines. Behind dense cloud came the faint sound of rotary blades. Clear, like knives cutting through the blackness, the sound of helicopters rumbling and whirring their way home. Tail-lights winking and blinking like comforting fireflies through the purple massing clouds, which were growling with thunder and bursting with violent wind and rain.
Saffie and Nikki leapt out of bed and ran to their mother.
‘Hurry!’ they called out into the night. ‘Hurry, hurry, Daddy. Hurry, Fergus…Hurry, everyone…the storm is coming. Hurry, hurry before the lightning comes…’
The sound of engines was louder now, near to them, and suddenly out of the clouds, in formation, five helicopters appeared out of the night.
‘Hurrah!’ Saffie and Nikki shouted. ‘There they all are…hurrah!’
‘Shush, darlings. Shush! I need to listen.’ Fleur’s voice was trembling.
They watched as the helicopters hovered over the airfield. One turned in a circle as if testing the power of the wind and then dropped slowly at an angle to land at the airfield beyond their sight.
The next two helicopters were being buffeted up and down and they too circled quickly, one after the other, well apart, and turned and dropped from sight into the darkness.
‘Three down!’ Fleur let out her breath like a sigh. A violent damp wind wrenched the shutter from her hand and it crashed back against the house, and then the rain came in slanting, weaving arcs, blowing crossways, bringing great suffocating black clouds which obscured their vision.
A white streak of lightning shot into the night making the children jump back. They all heard but could not see the fourth helicopter drop from the clouds. The engine was making a lot of noise as the pilot searched for the airfield lights below him.
The last helicopter emerged from cloud and circled. Daddy. It seemed to the twins to move nearer to the house, as if to say, I know you’re watching…I’ll be home in thirty minutes, Peapods.
Daddy was always last down. It is like being the captain of a ship, he’d told the twins. Your men’s safety comes first.
They saw the red flickering tail-light against the lightning as the helicopter hovered, tried to turn and drop out of the savage wind to land. But it was impossible. It was caught as the eye of the storm lifted and threw it about the sky like a toy. Pilot and machine were suspended and buffeted against a backdrop of lightning shooting and cracking across the sky like fireworks.
The helicopter looked pathetically small as it was thrown about the sky like an unbalanced bee and tossed this way and that. Fleur and the twins held their breath in hypnotised terror.
‘Land, Daddy. Land!’ Saffie cried out into the night. Nikki gripped the windowsill as they watched the tail rising, tail-blade whirring frantically as the engine screamed.
‘Holy Mary, mother of God…Please…’ Fleur was crying over and over. She clutched the twins, held them into her, gripped them so tightly she hurt, and her eyes never left the sky.
‘David…David…I’m willing you down…You can do it. I know you can do it…Come on, David…please, darling, get her down…’
Something terrible was gripping Saffie’s stomach in a cramp so painful she wanted to fall to the ground. Nikki was sobbing, still clutching the windowsill. They were only five but they both knew, like their mother, that their father was powerless to do anything to save himself, because he no longer had control of his machine, which was turning upside down and falling out of the sky and spiralling down to the ground so fast that if they’d blinked they would have missed it.
Already, far away, they could hear the sound of sirens. They heard the explosion as the aircraft hit the ground when it was out of sight. They saw the flames leap upwards into a sky cracking with thunder. They could not move, Fleur, Saffie and Nikki. They stood watching the sky where the helicopter had been a moment ago.
A long way away a telephone was ringing and Ah Heng ran in her little backless slippers to answer it. Still, the three figures stood, unable to take their eyes from the empty sky that was growing light now. The rain blew in great gusts sideways, filling the monsoon drains, flushing the snakes out of the dry collected leaves.
Into the dawn, low on the horizon, there suddenly sailed one small pink cloud. Fleur stared and stared at it. She said in a strange thick voice, ‘Twins…look…see? That cloud…Daddy will always be there to look after us. Always.’
Saffie reached behind Fleur for Nikki’s hand. They stared at the cloud in silence, their small bodies trembling, unable to entirely comprehend that their father was so suddenly dead. They did not want a pink cloud. They wanted their big, laughing, silly, whiskery, safe daddy, who called out each and every day, ‘Hey! I’m home! Where are my little peapods?’
Far away on the Chitbee Road they could see the military car containing the padre and the commandant and the military police making its way down the long road to their house.
‘Missie?’ Ah Heng touched Fleur’s arm, took the twins gently from her, holding them to her. ‘You come away from window now. You cold. You come away. I make Missie tea. Army men coming.’
But Fleur could not take her eyes from the cloud that was fading to orange and had only been the reflected colour of the flames.
‘You will always be with us to keep us safe,’ the twins heard her whisper. ‘Oh, David…David.’
But their father was not there to keep them safe. Did Nikki blame Fleur for what happened later? Was she angry with her? Yes, she was. If you had children you must look after them, no matter what happened to you or however sad you were. You must look after them and keep them safe forever, because you were their mother and if you didn’t, who would?
FOUR
‘What time is your mother’s flight from Auckland?’ Jack asked me at breakfast. He was standing at the sink, buttering toast.
‘Five o’clock, I think. I’m going to check in a minute. It’s OK, Jack. I can meet her on my own.’
‘No, Nik, we’ll both go. I’ll make sure I’ve finished by four; it will give us an hour to get there. Just be ready, we don’t want her standing around jetlagged waiting for us. Did you tell her to stay in the main airport until it’s time for the flight to Kerikeri? That other terminal is the pits.’
‘Yes. I e-mailed. It’ll be a miracle if she’s got to Auckland and not sailed off to Hong Kong by mistake…’ I joked weakly. ‘I don’t think she’s travelled so far on her own for a long time.’
Jack gave me one of his looks. ‘Well, she’s had the courage to stop off in Singapore on her own so she can’t be quite as dumb as you make out…’ He paused and I waited. ‘Your Mom is staying two nights, just two nights, Nik. Surely it can’t be too hard to be nice to her for a fleeting visit.’
He’s right, it shouldn’t be too hard, but it will be.
I was aware that the fault lay with me, that I was carrying a perceived injury long after it should have healed, that my feelings were immature, to say the least, in someone of my age. I wasn’t a teenager, for heaven’s sake. But there are some people who are so different from you that they get under your skin and make you itch as soon as they appear. My mother is one of those people.
‘Will you try,’ Jack kissed me, his mouth full of crumbs, ‘to be kind? Or it’s going to be embarrassing, especially as she’s meeting me for the first time.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Pollyanna is my middle name.’
‘Who?’
I grinned at him. ‘Just an American goody-goody schoolgirl book.’
When Jack had gone I wandered round the house tidying, trying to see all we had done here with my mother’s eyes. Then I took towels up to the spare room, which had its own balcony, and I looked out over the bay and then stared down at the bed my mother would sleep in. It seemed strange to think of someone I hadn’t seen for over three years lying there tonight.
Disturbing; a sudden mix of my two, so different, lives. One I had wanted to leave behind me, so that I could be born anew, slough off that old teenage skin and turn into someone else, perhaps the person I was now. I had come so far, to another culture and another continent, and it seemed suddenly as if my mother was following me, as if to remind me of the shadows I left and the person I once was. I didn’t want to be reminded.
The baby was moving now and I could feel the tiny flutter of life; a small, tentative movement to alert me to his presence, his curled life within me, slowly growing into the person he will be. And the person he will be will want to know his family and his English roots and his grandmother.
I knew, in the moment I stood by the bed my mother would sleep in, that I wanted them to know each other. I couldn’t deprive either of a relationship I had needed in my childhood.
I stared out to the yachts in the bay, beyond the garden Jack and I had created out of jungle, and remembered how hard I sometimes thought my grandmother was on my mother, yet I could do no wrong. I went out onto the balcony and breathed deeply, the sun warm on my face, and I swore that I would try my hardest to welcome my mother. She was obviously lonely without Fergus and seemed to have thrown herself into painting and studying the history of art.
I smiled. Fleur was quite brave really, to start again on something new at her age. I will be nice. I will. Jack was right, it was time to move on. After all, I didn’t know when I’d see her again.
I went downstairs and put my hat on against the sun and set off for my jungle trail. We had joined an experiment to cull the possums. They were ripping the trees to pieces and Jack and I had placed poison as small enticements, fixed to the trunks of trees.
I wished they weren’t so cute. I wished they looked like rats and then I wouldn’t feel so bad. But I knew it had to be done, we had more than enough stripped trees that were going to die on our land.
As I walked I felt a sense of achievement; it was an adventure, this life I shared with Jack. There were years ahead of us, preserving and finding new ways of conserving land that could never be tamed, nor would we want it to be. All these acres were becoming familiar, becoming home after years of nomadic existence. I never thought I could settle anywhere.
I hadn’t planned to get pregnant, although I knew time was ticking. There was so much to do and pregnancy had reined me in. Jack’s face was enough, though, when I’d told him. So instead of gardening in the heat I could only walk round checking things, feeding the hens and gently weeding up near the house, planting rows of vegetables that struggled in the poor soil.
As if by some tacit agreement, neither Jack nor I mentioned it to each other, but we both wondered if our time here would have to come to an end with a child. We lived in the middle of nowhere, miles away from a doctor, school or human habitation. Children needed other children and I didn’t want an only child, which is what I had become.
The horror and the loneliness when Saffie disappeared was like losing a limb that went on twitching with the loss of the other half of me.
I feel it, even now.
FIVE
Fleur woke early on the day of her flight to Singapore. She never drew her curtains and she saw it was the most beautiful day. The leaves of the tree outside were motionless. The day seemed to be holding its breath. A blackbird sang clear into the morning against the growl of cars in the distance as the city woke up. It felt like the first day of spring.
Fleur lay looking round her room, where the sun slanted across the floor highlighting the dust motes which hung and floated in the air. She felt a strange sad-happiness, when to be alive was almost enough in the moment of a bird singing; in the moment of sunlight on your hands; in the small awareness of yourself in a new day.
Since Fergus died she had learnt to be still and treasure these mornings, waking alone and listening, really listening, both to the sounds of a world waking up and to herself. The first moments of the day could reveal feelings she could not articulate or write down, but would sometimes attempt to capture in paint.
A lack of professional technique – for Fleur thought of herself as an apprentice – could not hide the intensity behind her paintings. A fleeting spiritual second could transform a simple painting into a canvas that people stood in front of and gazed at, captivated by the power with which Fleur captured the enormity of loss alongside the budding awareness of something beyond herself that went on moving and growing within her.
The loss of a child ended innocence. To be pre-deceased by your child was the worst that could happen to a parent. It took a lifetime of walking towards a hope of understanding to realise that there was nothing to understand. Sense could never be made of a random wicked and meaningless act. This was the bleak knowledge you carried all your life like a second self, buried, but always with you.
Fleur, triggered by the sudden loss of Fergus, found that she could suddenly translate this knowledge into colour and texture and turn it into something people could relate to. Something they felt in the core of themselves, in the pit of their stomachs, in the ache of their throats as they stood staring at her large, brightly coloured landscapes full of heat and bustle. Their eyes drawn to the one small object or person within the picture that stood quite separate and alone.
Fleur did not know from where her inspiration came. Only that it came from some unexplored source and she painted fast and concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, in the silent nights and into the pale, cold dawn of another day.
As she lay staring at the tree outside her window, she felt as if she had already left this small terraced house and begun her journey of discovery to her daughter and to Hundertwasser’s architecture, all without corners, all without angles, all part of the earth and its constant cycle of rebirth. She was aware of why she was drawn to his philosophy and architecture; it was connected indivisibly to her need for reparation with her daughter.
She felt in those first moments of sunlight that she might not return to this small house that she had shared with Fergus for so many years, or that even if she did, everything would be different, never quite the same again. Unease stirred, but she also had the sensation of moving inexorably towards something dark but necessary; that nebulous feeling that something was going to happen.
She got out of bed and pulled on Fergus’s towelling robe, caught the scent from a vase of freesias the gallery had sent, which stood on her dressing table. All part of this safe life she led. She padded downstairs and drew back the sittingroom curtains. The man next door was wheeling his bicycle down his path, pausing at the gate as he always did to fix his cycle clips. The teacher two doors down was gunning the reluctant engine of her Fiesta. Fleur found she was listening for it to start and thinking, This time tomorrow I will be in Singapore.
Fleur looked down across the glinting wing of the plane onto acres of perfect white cloud the texture of fluffy mashed potato. She remembered as a child the thrill of believing those clouds were solid enough to sit on, that she could have jumped from one floury cushion to another.
The mystery of land mass, ocean and sky from a height never left her. The changing patterns and shape of mountains and desert and the progress of herself encapsulated in tons of moving metal remained a wonder of human engineering.
It was as if, once airborne, between lives and destinations, all normal, taken-for-granted things were rendered, by stress or fatigue, abnormal. As if she was circled by an odd tight silence, worn like a cloak to distance herself, making her progress, a stranger among strangers, infinitely obscure.
Travelling forward through time, arriving thousands of miles into an unfamiliar or distant landscape of tomorrow, imbued Fleur with an almost catatonic immobility and invisibility. She neither moved nor undid her seatbelt but sat and stared out at the wondrous mass of virgin cloud.
An old man on the aisle seat was telling the woman between them how he had built the pipeline down in the vast dry expanse of desert below them in Dubai. For thirteen years he had toiled in the unforgiving sun, taking water to the Bedouins. His skin told the truth of an engineer’s harsh life in the sun. Unmistakable patches of skin cancer marked his hands and face like a badge of office.
Normally Fleur would have been fascinated by his reminiscing, but she wanted to remain in her no-man’s land, devoid of social interaction, the telling of stories, the re-telling of lives. She loved it when the lights went out, when the blinds went down against the night outside and she could lie tiredly listening to the rustle of passengers, the dull plom of the bell as they asked for drinks, the swish of recycled air around the cabin, as inexorably they ploughed through the night sky to Singapore.
Singapore and another life. She thought of David, tried to conjure his face, his voice. But they would not come or came blurred like an unfocused faded photograph. The city contained so much that had been a part of her young life. She had spent time there as a child and a young adult. She had returned there a married woman, carrying the baby twins.
So much happiness. A beautiful couple who had it all. Then, those small, relentless steps that led slowly but surely to tragedy.
Snatches of lines from somewhere popped into Fleur’s head…
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled[…]To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the pastInto different lives, or into any future;You are not the same people who left that stationOr who will arrive at any terminus
A sense of smell could unlock memories faster than the blink of an eye. Fleur could not tell what would leap out at her when she stepped into the shimmering heat and smell of a city where so much of her life had unfurled faster than she had had the wit to stop it.
SIX
Singapore, 1966
When Fleur saw David for the first time he was sitting on the edge of the pool at the Tanglin Club in Singapore City. She thought he was possibly the most graceful man she had ever seen. After her brother and the spotty youths she had travelled out from England with he seemed like a god.
She was fifteen and home for the long summer holidays. Her father, Peter Llewellyn, was colonel of a regiment on a three-year posting to Singapore. It was his second posting to the Far East and Fleur and her brother, Sam, had grown blasé with flying back and forth from boarding school in England. It was Singapore that felt like home.
They had both pretty much done their own thing that summer as their mother, Laura, bored with army life, was studying for an Open University degree, and she trusted Sam to keep an eye on Fleur.
David was on his first posting as a subaltern. He was dark and immensely charismatic rather than good-looking and he always seemed surrounded by teachers, nurses, or young service wives. He noticed Fleur, however, watching him covertly. She was still all angles, like a colt, but she walked like a ballet dancer and had a hint of the exotic, even at fifteen.
Fleur had her mother Laura’s dark skin, inherited from a French grandmother, that tanned easily, and a way of rolling up her hair like her mother in a quick and particular French way. Sam’s skin was fair like his father’s and he moaned about it.
Fleur loved the water and both she and Sam were excellent swimmers having been taught professionally by a Singaporean coach. Peter had insisted on lessons for both his children as he loved sailing. People would stop what they were doing to watch Fleur dive. She would take time to position her limbs in the same way she perfected her dance steps, and once committed her body would arch and spring and break the water almost soundlessly.
David thought her dive was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. He watched her shrugging off Sam’s friends and the schoolboys of her own age. She seemed perfectly self-contained and content with her own company. He was amused to see that, young as she was, she attracted the attention of the young naval officers who sailed into the naval base on the frigates, as well as the young army and RAF officers serving in Singapore.
They were all fairly cautious for she was the colonel’s daughter, but Peter Llewellyn was not a fierce man, he was more like a vague scientist than an army officer. He was popular with his subalterns, and underneath his slightly bumbling exterior lay a first-class brain.
At weekends the family would drive down to the naval base for the swimming pool, evening barbecues, and films. It was less stuffy than the Tanglin Club, which had more than its fair share of aging expats and high-ranking service wives who loved rules.
The Officers Club with a large pool faced out to the Straits of Malacca and looked down on the harbour and dry dock below. When the frigates were in, the navy would throw constant parties and Fleur never lost the thrill of being piped aboard. She would walk with Laura in front of Sam and her father, male eyes swivelled their way. The ships were often at sea for some time and any woman from fifteen to fifty was made to feel glamorous and witty. Sam was allowed to drink moderately as he was nearly eighteen. Fleur was not and Laura watched her like a hawk.
It was an incident at a cocktail party on board a small naval frigate that brought David and Fleur together. As they were piped aboard the sun hung low over the Straits, the sky flaring and fired by scarlet and orange. When darkness came, it came swiftly: no dusk, just velvety blackness. Fleur and Sam stood with a group of young sub-lieutenants drinking on the top deck. Her brother was eagerly discussing sailing, and Fleur, a little awed by so much attention, was swallowing a mixed-fruit cocktail rather fast as she practised the art of flirting.
She caught sight of her parents circulating from time to time and was impressed with her mother’s practised habit of throwing back her dark hair and laughing hugely; of putting a hand lightly on a young man’s arm and leaning towards him to catch his words, as if he was the most fascinating man in the room.
Fleur wasn’t quite ready for that yet, but she did practise the head-tossing and smiling up into young, tanned faces. The more glasses of fruit juice she had the better she seemed to get at this. A small warm wind blew in to the harbour bringing with it the smell of spices and petrol and rotting vegetation. A plump sub-lieutenant kept topping her up from a jug snatched from a passing waiter. Sam, suddenly aware of Fleur flushed and laughing louder than usual, moved over to her.
‘Fleur, you’re not drinking, are you?’
‘No. Just fruit juice and mint. Promise.’
‘OK.’ He looked at her closely for a second and then turned back to the group of young men. Fleur leant over the rail and looked down at the dark water. It looked invitingly cool.
‘Do you ever swim from the ship?’ she asked one of the naval officers.
‘Bit of a way down,’ the plump one said, laughing. ‘It’s not that far,’ Fleur replied.
Plump officer stared at her lazily. ‘I can’t see a girl doing
it.’
Fleur looked down, feeling dizzy, but it did not seem that much of a leap. No more than a diving board. She moved forward away from the crush of people.
‘You think I’m too scared to jump?’
‘I’ll put a bet on it.’
The other officers stirred uneasily. ‘Come on, let’s go below and get something to eat, Fleur. Take no notice of Billy Bunter.’
‘Of course she won’t take any notice. She’s a girl.’
Fleur moved fast, climbed the rail and put both her legs over. She wasn’t going to dive because her skirt would come up over her head and that would be undignified. She felt no fear at all, just exhilaration. She leapt into space.
The officers hurtled to the rail and looked down. One moved to the jug and picked it up and smelt it.
‘You stupid bastard! You’ve been giving her Pimms. She’s only a kid…’
David, making his way towards the group, saw Fleur leap over the side and plummet downwards. He took in the empty Pimms jug and the guilty and furtive fat officer. Fleur hit the water and disappeared. Someone was already undoing a lifebuoy. David leant over the rail with the other men, waiting for her head to appear. It did not.
Fleur, plummeting through dark water, wondered vaguely but without panic why she was still effortlessly headed downwards. It was not an unpleasant feeling, just interesting.
David threw his jacket off and dived, closely followed by the fat officer and Sam.
Everyone else held their breath. Senior ranks, alerted, moved to the rail with sudden alarm, demanding to know what the hell was going on.
Underwater, David saw Fleur now beginning to rise to the surface. He grabbed her and hauled her upwards, helped by the fat officer. As her head rose above the water she sobered abruptly, took a huge shaky breath, choking.
Sam grabbed her under her armpits and kicked his way back to the ladder, where two naval ratings lifted her up onto the deck and wrapped her in a blanket. Laura bent to her daughter, relieved, angry and embarrassed in equal measure.
The captain, furious, quickly assessed the situation and sent his junior officers to their quarters until he could deal with them. Peter Llewellyn turned to him without raising his voice.
‘If I accept an invitation I do so in the knowledge that my family are guests and as such my daughter is perfectly safe. Fleur does not drink. She knows that if she drinks she will be barred from all parties. There is a difference between high spirits and mindless stupidity. I do hope that your officers will be made fully aware that their crass behaviour could well have resulted in my fifteen-year-old daughter being drowned.’
He turned, white-faced, and gathered his wife and children. The party came to an abrupt end. Uncomfortable, people drifted away, back down the gangplank to the club where they could eat dinner and gossip about the evening.
Peter Llewellyn turned to David. ‘Thank you, David. You acted quickly. Go to the M.O. and get yourself a jab. The water is polluted. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Sir,’ David said quietly, unnerved by his colonel’s anger, which he had never seen before.
Fleur was being bundled into the car, still not entirely sober or realising quite what she had done. Sam said miserably, ‘Dad, it wasn’t Fleur’s fault, honestly. There’s so much fruit in those Pimms that you can’t taste the gin. Fleur doesn’t even like drink.’
Laura, getting Fleur into a hot bath soon afterwards, did not want to know the details. Her two concerns were the fact that they had been the centre of a stupid and avoidable incident and Fleur, by leaping inanely into the polluted water, had caused this. She was abrupt and short with her daughter.
It was Annie, the amah, who took Fleur hot chocolate and her father who sat on her bed while she wept with humiliation. Peter adored Fleur. He did not want her to grow up too quickly but neither did he want to deprive her of having fun. He wanted her to look back on this time in the Far East with excitement. His children were almost grown up, would soon be gone. This would be the last posting they would all have together.
He also believed that people were basically decent. Tonight had been gross stupidity, not evil intent, but he advised Fleur to be more aware of the things young men got up to and what they handed her to drink.
‘If it had been one of Sam’s friends, I guess I would have been on my guard, Dad. But I was with you, so I didn’t think…’
That was precisely why her father had been so angry.
‘I’ve rung the doctor,’ he said. ‘Go with your mother and get a jab tomorrow, just to be safe.’
‘Oh! Why did I jump? So stupid! Everyone will be laughing at me.’
‘No, they won’t,’ Peter smiled. ‘Sam’s friends will envy your panache and bravery in leaping that far for a bet.’
But Fleur was not thinking of Sam’s friends, she was wondering what Lt David Montrose thought of her.
The next morning the plump naval officer appeared outside Peter Llewellyn’s office. He apologised profusely. He had called to let the colonel know he was resigning his commission and that no other officer had been involved.
Peter, looking at him after a night’s sleep, thought this penalty a little excessive for one evening’s intoxicated foolishness. He invited the captain of the frigate up to the mess for lunch and they decided on a regime of a hundred hours of punishment watches and that his promotion would be delayed. He had jumped in the water after Fleur and he was deeply sorry.
Laura invited David over to their quarter in Singapore for supper to thank him. He brought orchids. Small bee orchids for Laura. Pure white for Fleur. She took them to her room and put the vase on her dressing table. They lasted a long time.
Peter and his subaltern discovered they had a shared love of classical music. After that night David would drive from the naval base to go to concerts with Peter and Laura. He started to sail with the family at weekends and sit and talk to Sam and Fleur at the club barbecues.
One weekend there was a film of The Tale of Two Cities on at the naval base. Fleur, sitting with Sam, thought with a jolt how like a young Dirk Bogarde David was. That thing they did with their eyes, half-closed as they watched you. How when they said something quite innocuous it could sound like a caress. The something gentle but stomach-churningly sexy about the movements of a man who had a beautiful body.
Yet there was also something trustworthy about David. It was why Laura and Peter never worried about Fleur or Sam when they were with him. Swimming, sailing or dancing with the young, David could always be relied upon to see them safely home.
When Fleur was back at school in England, she lived for the Easter holidays. When she returned to Singapore after her sixteenth birthday, the mouths of the men and boys round the pool literally dropped when she appeared. She was not a sweet schoolgirl any longer and Laura saw this immediately. Saw the knowingness in Fleur. The innocence of being an attractive child had flown. She had become, overnight, it seemed to her parents, a stunningly beautiful young woman, quite aware of the effect she had on men, young or old.
Oddly, Fleur realised with a pang, her budding new confidence in herself seemed to distance David, as if he too was unnerved by her rapid transference from sweet adolescent to full-blown feminine beauty. It was years before she understood the dilemma she posed for David by growing up so quickly.
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