The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  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 past

  Into different lives, or into any future;

  You are not the same people who left that station

  Or 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.

  SEVEN

  At lunchtime I locked the house up, drove round to the marina and sat waiting for Jack. He had rung to say he’d taken the afternoon off and we were going to have lunch together on the seafront in Paihia. I sat in the shade of a tree, a book in my lap, watching the Maoris who were often there diving for oysters off the concrete pier, collecting them in great piles to cart away in their aged pick-ups.

  Petrol from the boat engines lay in purple-green pools on the surface of the water, but it did not seem to worry them. They called out cheerfully to their beautiful raggedy children who watched with their legs da
ngling in the water, their white teeth suddenly dazzling at some private joke.

  A young Maori boy was poling an ancient canoe around the edges of the bay in the shallows by the trees, bending and digging his pole into the mud, his arm muscles flexing as he began to make it skim across the water, gaining confidence and pace with each stroke.

  Out of nowhere came a memory. So slight it was a floater dancing in front of my eyes; a second, a fleeting second of remembrance. A long, empty beach at evening and a Malaysian fisherman poling fast across the horizon as the sun faded. He was silhouetted in black, like a cut-out against the dying sun, before he disappeared into the suddenness of a tropical night. Suddenly, behind me a shadowy figure appeared from nowhere, sliding past me away fast into the darkness; gone before I could turn.

  The image faded abruptly leaving me full of unease. I saw Jack coming towards me and I got heavily to my feet and walked towards him. Whenever I saw him from a distance I felt a rush of gratitude. He was a lovely, uncomplicated man who made life easy; made loving effortless.

  We got to Kerikeri early and Jack immediately got talking to people he knew, not difficult in a small place with a tiny landing strip. I paced up and down watching the sky, imagining Fleur emerging from the plane, getting into our ancient car, viewing our house for the first time. I wanted the time to come and go in a flash, leaving us as we were, content and hidden in our own lives, without any outside interruptions to halt the succession of each day.

  The speck in the sky appeared and everyone stood looking skyward, jangling car keys, waiting. There were mutters and sometimes ribald murmurs. Most families, it seemed, had wanted and not so wanted visitors about to descend from the small jaw of the aircraft.

  Jack threw his arm around me as the little two-engined plane circled and landed. Steps were wheeled out, and as the aircraft door was thrown open I realised that I was hardly breathing. Would Fleur be first out? Last?