EIGHTEEN
Fleur could not sleep. She paced, got up to drink water from the fridge, lay down with her book, kept reading the same line. She closed her eyes, tried to banish the memory of that small grave and could not. How was she going to feel if it was not Saffie? Relief that it was not her daughter buried in that lonely place for all those years? Or terror that it was some other child and that she and Nikki would never discover where Saffie lay?
She turned under the overhead fan in the hushed, hot afternoon and the silence pressed in upon her, weighing her down with the memory of that last time, sickeningly clear as if it had been yesterday.
The mosquito net stirred in the draught from the fan, ballooned gently round her like a parachute, and she was back, back in another room in a dusty wooden house long demolished.
Two weeks after the funeral in England Fleur flew back to Singapore with her parents and the twins. They had all stayed with David’s colonel and his wife. Fleur had wanted to go back to their quarter, but Peter had vetoed it. Ah Heng was no longer sleeping there and it would be traumatic for Fleur and the twins to return there without David and Ah Heng.
The pilots in David’s squadron and their wives were a close family unit and Fleur knew there would have been gossip. She and David had rowed publicly the night before he died. But when she returned to Singapore, people went out of their way to approach and reassure her.
‘Fleur, we all row,’ her friend Lucy said. ‘Please don’t let it eat you up. Everyone knows how close you and David were. You adored each other…It’s just made the…losing him worse for you…Just keep remembering how good you were together…’
Fleur wondered how she was going to get through another emotional ceremonial church service. The English funeral had felt unreal, but this packed army church full of uniforms and unfailing support was harder. David had been a charismatic and popular officer and the anguish and shock his sudden death had caused in the other pilots he worked with did not seem to have diminished in two weeks.
So many people had an anecdote, an incident they burnt to relate, and Fleur sat next to her father twisting her hands, dry-eyed, listening to every word as it took her back vividly to the man she had lost.
One of the pilots who had been flying with David on the night of the storm was still in Changi Hospital. He sent an emotional tribute from his hospital bed. He had managed to crash-land his helicopter just before David came down.
But it was Fergus who made people weep with his happy and funny memories of a man who had been his friend as long and as far back as he could remember. Fergus had also flown that terrible night and felt the sharp guilt of a survivor.
Peter, feeling Fleur begin to tremble, reached for her hand. Her eyes were riveted to Fergus’s face, but Fergus could not look directly at Fleur in case he broke down.
Laura had not come to the service but had stayed behind to look after the twins. They were too young to attend another tribute to their father, to be constantly reminded of all they had lost.
Everyone went back to the colonel’s house afterwards. He and Peter had decided the house would feel more personal than the mess. It stood on stilts, high on a hill looking directly out towards Malaysia. Bougainvillaea coated the front and from the lawns behind the house they could all watch the sun set behind the horizon.
Fleur went straight up to the room she was sharing with the twins because they would not sleep without her. It faced the garden and the sea. Voices floated up to her, glasses clinked, people laughed and called to one another as they faced the bruised and magnificent setting sun. Somewhere, far below her, she heard the twins’ voices.
Fleur knew she must go down. She could not stay here safe in her room. She wanted to turn and run; to find a little nest for herself and the twins and hole down and let the world go on turning without her. She did not want her father’s anxiousness or her mother’s restless sympathy. She did not want to go downstairs and be brave and bright and not let herself down.
She felt a blind terror of the future and what it now held. She was left with two little girls and no money. They had lived on David’s income. Her money from teaching dance, with no formal qualifications, was pocket money. There would be a small army pension, but not enough to bring up two children. She had never worked for a living. She had married David.
She would have to go back downstairs or someone would come looking for her. She could see groups of people glancing back towards the house as if wondering where she had got to. There was Fergus and a group of David’s friends standing awkwardly on the lawn. Fleur swallowed. Fergus. How strained and unreal things were between them. They were both shrouded in a deep and separate misery.
Fleur turned from the window and made her way down the wide staircase. As she emerged into the last golden rays of the sun, she caught Fergus’s eye as he stood by the swing with the twins. Had he been waiting for her? She almost ran for his bear-like hug. But she couldn’t. She had hurt him. She hadn’t set out to use him to wound David as David had wounded her, but that is what she had done. In a way she had betrayed them both.
She held Fergus’s eyes for a moment and he lifted a hand and she lifted hers in reply. The three of them had been too close for a permanent rift, but they both needed time to heal. How ironic, she thought, that when we both desperately need the comfort of the other, it is the one thing impossible to give. As she turned, she saw Laura standing very still watching her, her expression unfathomable.
Laura was standing talking to a small group of subdued officers and their wives, while keeping an eye on Saffie and Nikki. Where had Fleur got to? Was she wrong to feel irritated by her daughter? She knew she was. For heaven’s sake, they had only buried David two weeks ago. But these were his friends, their friends and Fleur should not just disappear and pretend this was not happening. She wanted Fleur to be brave and show her friends what she was made of, not leave her and Peter and the colonel and his wife to it.
People had come to honour David and to show solidarity. Fleur should be down here, dignified and present.
Laura felt anxious by her daughter’s crippling lethargy. Peter had always made life easy for Fleur, spoilt her. She had a nagging premonition that would not leave her, and guilt, because she knew her sympathy and love should be maternal and unconditional.
Laura was devastated by what had happened and shocked to the core by David’s death. She and Peter could not have had a better friend or son-in-law. She had considered Fleur too young and immature for David and she had been proved wrong. Fleur and David had had a wonderfully happy marriage.
But now Fleur had to be courageous because she had two children and their lives must be put above her own. Her own distress should be secondary to their security, even if this meant Fleur had to feign a stability and bravery she did not feel. Nikki and Saffie needed something to hang on to. A future that was not too frightening without their father.
This was just not happening. Fleur seemed completely detached from all that was going on, especially with the twins. She was going through the motions of caring for them but she was distant and unreachable most of the time. The twins panicked and clung and then turned reluctantly to their grandparents.
Laura watched Fergus pushing the twins on an old swing. He was making them smile, despite his own obvious misery. Children could not live with unremitting sadness, it weighed them down, suffocated their innate sense of life.
What were they going to do with Fleur after the holiday in Malaya? Peter had to return to Northern Ireland. It was a worrying time for him out there. Laura felt torn between a husband she wanted to be with and her daughter, who suddenly found herself a widow at barely twenty-five and who needed her far more than Peter at the moment.
I shouldn’t even hesitate – Peter is quite capable of living in the mess for a while. She was being selfish. Her life was being interrupted again. She had just got a part-time job in the army library – not much, but something – and she was tutoring privately, A-level English. S
he had waited all her life to do something in her own right.
It seemed to Laura that she had led a life full of halted expectations. A hundred homes, a million coffee mornings and dinner nights saying and doing the right things. Being nice to people she often had nothing in common with, because it helped smooth the way for Peter’s career.
Peter had never asked her to do anything she was not happy with, but it was what she expected of herself. Behind her back Laura had sometimes been accused of being the one with the ambition. She felt no resentment while she was doing what was expected of an army wife. It was when she looked back; looked behind her at the years since the children had left and remembered the thrill of her degree. Now it seemed a faded and rather pointless piece of paper. Like something secret or precious placed in a drawer and years later drawn out with only the shadow of a memory of why it had been so important.
Laura was not so selfish that she did not ache for her daughter or grieve herself for the loss of a young life. But she could not live Fleur’s life for her. She could not take David’s sudden death or the aftermath from her. She could not make this terrible tragedy go away. Fleur had two dependent children. She was responsible for them. She was a grown-up. Laura and Peter could not take this hurt away.
David was no longer here to make all the decisions, to shelter her, like her father had, from all that she did not like. Grow up. Please grow up and show us what you are made of. Surprise me. Make me wrong. Make me proud of you.
Laura walked towards the twins and Fergus. In the night Saffie sucked her thumb and cried out for Ah Heng. Nikki lay for hours with her knees drawn up to her chin, motionless. Turning, she caught Peter’s eye across the garden. He was signalling that one of them should go and see where Fleur had got to. Laura smiled. Peter, despite the dangerous and thankless job he was doing, was still the gentlest man she knew.
At that moment Fleur emerged from the house. She looked so young, and despite her thinness and the sallowness of her dark skin she was effortlessly beautiful, her movements languid and graceful. The twins, with a small cry of joy, left Fergus and ran across the lawn towards her. Laura felt love for her daughter well up inside her. I’m hard on her. I always have been. Did I want another son?
She smiled at Fleur. ‘Darling, are you all right?’
She turned and followed her daughter’s eyes. She was looking at Fergus and Laura suddenly caught the expression on Fergus’s face. Unmistakable. My God! He was in love with Fleur. Laura felt an icy finger run down her spine. Was guilt contributing to both their misery?
Laura had seen it all too often. An exotic posting, pretty wives and too many single males; a recipe for disaster.
Peter was walking across the garden towards them. ‘Darling, are you bearing up?’ he said to Fleur when he reached them. ‘People won’t stay too long, you know. Everybody just wants to feel they are supporting you…If you can just manage to say hello and thank people for coming…’
‘We’ll stay and circulate with you…You don’t have to stay talking…’ Laura grabbed a drink from a passing waiter and handed it to Fleur. ‘Have a drink, Fleur…it will help…’
Laura’s voice sounded as it always did. She surprised herself. She and Peter walked across the lawn with Fleur between them, but the small chink that had opened and warmed towards her daughter closed sharply again. David had deserved better than a flirtatious or unfaithful wife.
Peter had rented one of the government bungalows in Port Dickson for two weeks. They could reach Sam in Penang easily from there. They had booked the holiday in Penang some time ago and were meeting Sam and his girlfriend on their way home from Australia. Sam had done a year in a Melbourne hospital and had spent six months travelling before now returning to London and medical school.
Peter and Laura had hoped Ah Heng would go with them to Port Dickson before she started her job with the High Commission, but Eldest Brother died suddenly the day they flew back and there was a huge Chinese funeral that could go on for days.
After a week at Port Dickson, Fleur seemed more herself. Peter and Laura had no way of contacting Sam or any idea where he was coming from so one of them had to go to Penang to meet him. Sam, out of reach, did not even know David was dead, and Peter and Laura were reluctant to leave a message at the hotel. It would be too much of a shock.
Peter had not wanted to leave Fleur, but Laura would not travel on her own and he was torn. Fleur had assured them both she would be fine. She had to get used to being on her own. Of course they must meet Sam. She was OK. She could cope. Honestly…
They had left her reluctantly. There were no phones in the rest houses, which were quite basic, but there were other young families occupying the bungalows along the coast who promised to keep an eye on Fleur and make sure she did not feel lonely.
They had left her for twenty-four hours. Peter never forgave himself. Laura had to remember for the rest of her life, that she had, as always, made Sam her priority.
Port Dickson, 2004
At four o’clock Fleur gave up trying to rest, pulled her dress over her head and went and sat on the veranda, watching families beginning to trickle back onto the beach.
Ah Lin immediately materialised with a tray of tea and a piece of cake and nodded to Fleur to eat it. ‘I make,’ she said, smiling.
‘Thank you. It looks lovely,’ Fleur said, knowing she would have to eat it or smuggle it in to Nikki.
The amah disappeared again on backless little shoes and Fleur felt a lingering déjà vu, evocative as a sudden drift of familiar scent when someone passes. Sight, smell, sound; if you kept quite still you might almost believe it was possible to step back into your childhood…that sure, safe place where nothing threatened.
But you could not go back. Nor could you edit your life and take out that one second of total irresponsibility.
Fleur trembled, clutched her hands together…That day her parents left for Penang, one of the wives in another rest house, someone she hardly knew, had come round to see if she was all right. She had drunk two strong gins, even though the other woman was pregnant and not drinking.
After lunch she had taken the twins into her own room and put them in her bed for the long, hot afternoon. She had asked the amah to stay in the house, to be there in case they woke before her. The twins had gone instantly to sleep, and, longing, craving for oblivion, she had taken some strong codeine, thinking:
If I just take these maybe I can sleep too and then I can get through the evening. If I can only sleep and blot everything out…just for a couple of hours, I’ll be all right…That’s what I’ll do…I must sleep…
Fleur moaned, lifted her face to an evening breeze from the sea. She felt the creak of the wooden floor expanding as it cooled. A chit chat dropped from the ceiling and ran along the balcony rail and away. The cicadas stepped up their noisy rhythm as the sun sank and the shadows lengthened.
Somewhere in the house she heard Jack and Nikki begin to move about. She heard the thin trickle of a shower and the clink of crockery from the back kitchen. She absorbed these sounds like sun upon her skin. She saw her younger self, dry-mouthed, crouched, waiting. Waiting in a wooden house for the torches on the hillside to bring back a frightened little girl who had wandered too far from home.
She had the sensation of having never left this place, that a piece of her had remained forever here, absorbed and held, a ghost in the fabric of a wooden house. Part of the shadows…waiting.
NINETEEN
I wondered if DS Mohktar had pulled stings because he arrived the following morning as Fleur, Jack and I were having breakfast. We watched him walk across the beach towards us and my heart began to hammer and sweat trickled down the inside of my dress.
I glanced at Fleur. She had gone suddenly grey and her hand trembled as she replaced her coffee cup. Neither of us took our eyes off Mohktar as he came towards us, as if we could gauge by the way he walked what he was going to tell us.
Jack looked anxious and placed his hand over
my arm.
When Mohktar reached the wooden steps to the veranda he stopped and said quietly, ‘Selamat pagi. Good morning.’
The amah was pulling up another chair and she placed a cup of coffee on the table for him, before disappearing.
Mohktar did not sit. The tension coming from us all must have been intimidating. He looked at us with his kind eyes and with his hands on the back of the chair, he said gently, ‘I come to tell you that I have early this morning the result of the DNA test.’
Fleur was so still beside me I thought she had stopped breathing.
Mohktar’s eyes rested on us both, then he turned to Fleur. ‘The DNA was a match. It is your daughter, Mrs Campbell.’
The words hung in the air, filled the silence. None of us spoke. I heard the sound of the sea and children a long way off and a radio somewhere.
‘Thank you, DS Mohktar.’ Fleur’s voice was small and far away too.
Jack poured me a glass of water and wrapped my hands round it and made me drink. ‘Breathe, Nikki. Take a deep breath.’
Fleur turned to me. ‘Darling…’
‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ I whispered, and I did breathe, made myself breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Then I said, ‘When can we see her?’
Mohktar was watching me. ‘We must drive to Malacca, Miss Montrose. This is where your sister is.’
I turned to Fleur. ‘Let’s go now.’ I heard the urgency in my voice. ‘We should go now.’
‘I think later this afternoon would be cooler for you, Miss Montrose.’
Jack said quietly, ‘Nik, it’s not sensible for you to travel in the heat of the day.’
‘It’s not nine o’clock yet, Jack,’ I said abruptly. ‘And if anyone suggests I rest any more I shall scream!’
Mohktar said quickly, smiling at Jack to take the sting from my words, ‘We have one air-conditioned car in the police pound at present. If I can obtain this car, the drive to Malacca would be no problem, I think? It is not far, it takes about forty minutes only.’
The Hour Before Dawn Page 11