‘You’ve got the wrong dress on.’
‘Don’t care. I’ll wait for you…?’ she said hopefully.
‘In a minute then…’ But I fell asleep…
This time she would not leave without me. This time she made me go with her. She placed the chair under the window and climbed out onto the balcony and I followed. We ducked past the shuttered window where the amah was sleeping and we ran away, out into the deserted hot afternoon.
I ran after her and the tiny colourless crabs ran ahead of us like a little wave, and we laughed and headed towards the rocks by the sea. We had the world to ourselves and we caught hands and ran and jumped in small pools and laughed to be free.
Suddenly, as we rounded a corner there was a man sitting on the rocks. A man with his hands round his knees and a Panama hat on his head and sunglasses covering his eyes. He did not look at me, just Saffie.
‘Hello,’ she said cheerfully, staring at him.
I don’t think he was pleased to be disturbed because he did not answer for quite a long time, then he said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be resting?’
‘Yes,’ Saffie said. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m bored.’
‘Where’s your sister?’
‘She’s asleep and I’ve got no one to play with.’
‘I’m afraid I’m no good at playing. I haven’t got any little girls.’
‘We could walk and see the monkeys.’ ‘If your mother wakes up and finds you are gone, she’ll be worried.’
‘Mummy won’t wake up. She takes pills.’ Saffie moved closer and stared hard at him. ‘Were you a pilot, like my dad?’
‘Yes, I’m still a pilot.’
Saffie ran in little circles stamping at the crabs.
The man unfolded from the rock. He was tall, as tall as my dad, with long legs. I could not see his face properly but there was something familiar about him. I could see that he wanted to walk away from us. I could see that he didn’t want to talk to two children.
He turned and began to walk towards the steps and the forest path and I saw he had a limp as if he had hurt his leg.
‘Can I come with you? Can I come with you?’ Saffie called, running after him. She smiled her best smile. The smile Dad called our wheedling smile. ‘Mummy won’t mind if you are a pilot like Daddy…’
He kept walking away and he said as we ran after him, ‘No, you can’t come with me. Go home. Go back to your house now, to your mother and sister…’
I was fascinated by his long legs limping fast away. Long, long legs.
My heart jumped. I called to Saffie, ‘Let’s go home. Saffie! We’ve got to go back…’
She took no notice and ran ahead of the man, up the stone steps to the lighthouse. I ran after her into the sudden shade of the trees but I couldn’t see her. I darted about, whispering, calling her but she did not come.
The man came up the steps, took his glasses off to wipe them, blinking irritably in the sudden shadow, and my heart hammered. I knew his face. I knew where I had seen it before.
He called Saffie too, not her name, he just called, ‘Hello’ and ‘where are you?’
She was waiting at the turn of the path holding fir cones in her hand. ‘Here I am! I can walk with you. I can… We’re not allowed to talk to strangers, but you’re not a stranger, so mummy won’t mind.’
She went closer to him. ‘I think I remember you.’ She said, peering up into his face. ‘You were daddy’s friend.’
Saffie was lying. She didn’t remember him but she did not want to go back to the house.
The man bent suddenly in front of her and held her arms. I ran to her side. Saffie, come away! Come away!
‘What do you remember?’ The man asked and his voice was cold and hard.
Saffie, abruptly subdued, was silent.
‘What – do – you – remember?’ He shook her, bringing his face close to hers.
I bent to her ear. ‘Tell him, Saffie…Tell him the truth, you don’t remember him at all.’
But Saffie was frightened now. Her eyes were growing huge with fear at the thing in his eyes.
‘Come on, answer me. What were you going to say?’ His voice made us both shiver.
I wrapped my arms round Saffie from behind, held her to me.
‘Nothing.’ Saffie’s voice was tiny, like a whimper. ‘I want to go home now…’ She tried to pull her arms away from his hands.
‘But I’m your daddy’s friend, aren’t I? You said so. What made you think that? What made you think we were friends?’
Saffie looked at him bewildered, her bottom lip wobbling. Little beads of sweat lay on her forehead. ‘Because…because…you flew with my dad and…’ She stopped as he gripped her arms tighter.
I screamed then. ‘She doesn’t know! It was me! It was me. I saw you that day. I saw you…It was me…’
He did not hear me. He bent so that his eyes were level with Saffie’s.
‘So you do remember me as your daddy’s friend, Saffie?’ His voice was soft.
Saffie desperately nodded her head up and down, thinking this was what he wanted to hear. Her face was white and very frightened.
The man straightened up holding on to one of her arms.
‘Come along. Can you hear the monkeys? Let’s go and see if we can spot some.’
‘No! No! I want to go home now. I want to go back…Let me go.’
‘Sorry. You wanted to walk, young lady, and we are going to walk…’
Saffie began to cry, then to kick and scream. ‘Let me go! Let me go! I’ll tell Grandpa! I’ll tell…’
Suddenly the man whirled her sharply round and put a hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. I rushed. I rushed between them and held Saffie tight to me and I was screaming too. He was hurting. He was hurting…His hand was covering my mouth. I could not get my breath. I could not breathe. I kicked and twisted and the pressure on my neck increased and pain shot through my body. I could not move. Suddenly there was a crack, a painful pop in my neck and darkness came; an endless, endless darkness. ‘Oh, God! Oh, God! What have I done?’ he was saying over and over again. ‘Oh God, I didn’t mean…’
He lifted me, I saw myself dangling over his arms. He carried me into the darkness of trees. He was crying and shaking, I could feel his whole body shaking. ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Oh, dear God!’
He put me down on the ground and walked away and I heard scrabbling. I heard him kicking something and pulling and grunting. Then he came back for me and I saw what he was going to do…and I screamed.
‘Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. I don’t want my face covered. I don’t want to be buried under the ground.’
He drops me with a small sound like a sob and rolls me underneath the boulder and covers me with another stone and I disappear into the earth. I disappear screaming into the earth…
Suddenly, Saffie is with me, her arms lift me up and away and we are running, running across the sand, back home to Fleur, and I know Saffie is not so alone any more because I know now. I know what happened.
Saffie had my dress on. Saffie was killed because he thought it was me. He thought I was the twin who saw him that day.
THIRTY-TWO
Fleur knew she would not sleep. She had a shower and climbed into bed under the mosquito net with her books.
If you could have your life again who would you choose, David or Fergus?
It had always been impossible to explain truthfully about the two loves of her life.
How do you explain to your daughter that there are many different ways of loving? That if you are desperate enough to keep the person you love you will compromise, you will do anything to keep them.
Nikki was thirty-three. By the time Fleur was twenty-five, David and Saffie were dead, and her life had been blown apart. By the time she was thirty-three she was living another quite different life.
When she married Fergus he had come out of the army to join the London branch of his father’s architectural firm. It wa
s not the gossip and innuendo within the army that drove Fergus out; he could cope with that. It was Fleur’s shattered life. Fergus foresaw that Fleur would need a settled base if she was to survive, and a completely different way of life.
He could imagine the effect on her if, on a new posting with him, she was confronted by friends of hers and David. Neither of them needed to justify their relationship, but that would not stop people judging them. He did not want to leave her on her own for long periods, so he also, with regret, gave up any idea of becoming a civil pilot.
He too was grieving for the man he’d known from school-days and through Sandhurst. He had joined a small flying club where he flew for pleasure. He assured Fleur, always, it was much more fun.
Fleur, restless, got up and wandered round the house in the dark.
Death was like the resolute closing of a heavy prison door between you and the person you loved. You could never get beyond the wondering; you could never be sure of the shape of that lost life. You could never be entirely certain of either its substance or what its future would have been.
This prevented you answering anything completely truthfully because death ended any choices she and David might have had to make.
Fleur liked to believe that they would have weathered the sudden crisis in their lives. Yet she knew in flaring, painful moments of truth that she had been the one without a real choice. David would have had to make the decision. He would have had to decide between his two beckoning lives.
Yet he had died thinking she was the one who had given him an ultimatum, and she hadn’t had time to explain. This is what had tormented her. This is what had obsessed her after his death.
She could never undo it, or have that time back to reassure him.
She opened the thin screen door and went out onto the balcony. You think wounds heal, but some don’t; some never heal.
Palm trees wavered against the night sky. The sea lay glistening like a thin strand of metal in the distance and the ghost of the girl she had once been rose up to remember the good times here with her parents and Sam, and later with David and the twins. Now she was another woman altogether, here with her daughter to gather up her lost dead child and finally lay her to rest.
How could these two terrible deaths have happened to her? The girl Fleury, who had been full of hope and optimism and passion. Her eyes swept across the deserted beach and up to the lighthouse on the headland.
There, over there, someone casually took the life of a child. My child.
The shock of it never diminished. Fleur let her grief flow through her, as familiar as the blood coursing through her veins. The growing horror when she had been forced to understand that this was not a childish prank but something infinitely more sinister. The torches in the dark; the endless calling of Saffie’s name. The Military Police and local police arriving in Jeeps full of men. The loudspeakers; the willing Malay and English volunteers who beat for hours with sticks to the very edge of the jungle and found nothing.
The knowledge that in that noisy cicada-rubbing vegetation, the jungle sprang back relentlessly, hiding human interference as if it had never been. A small body covered forever.
Until now, this moment, when the world narrowed again to a small isolated focus. No David. No Fergus. Just her and Nikki again, walking a dark, familiar path. Just the two of them.
And me.
The flimsy door behind her banged in a sudden breeze and Fleur shivered and jumped at the shadow the palms made over the sand below her. It was as if a small child brushed past her, touching her briefly in a torn dress with little pink flowers.
She went back inside the house to bed, pulling the mosquito net down behind her. Saffie. Naughty little Saffie. She let herself wonder for a second how it would have been to have both her daughters, laughing and joking together; married and having children. She smiled at the thought of the endless telephone calls and private jokes and screams of mirth. All the trivial things that families and siblings took for granted. Nikki and Saffie as close as two peas in a pod.
She had to stop herself in supermarkets or on busy streets, when she saw a small child being slapped for being grizzly, for being tired, for being a child. She wanted to scream out, ‘Stop it! Don’t you realise how lucky you are?’
She shut her mind abruptly; thought again of Fergus. How good he had been at deflecting this persistent inner voice that pulled her back, back into the shadows of her first life, obsessively going over what she could never change.
THIRTY-THREE
Fleur bumped into Fergus on a flight home to Singapore from Brize Norton. He had been David’s best man and at the twins’ christening as one of their godfathers, but he and Fleur had never really had a conversation.
David had flown on back to Singapore with the twins. Fleur was recovering from a bad dose of dengue fever and had stayed behind recovering with Peter and Laura. She had spent ten days in a military hospital. Her army doctor wanted to take blood tests and try to stabilise her weight loss before he allowed her to fly back to Singapore.
On that flight home she had the strange light-headedness that comes after illness and excessive weight loss and she felt very odd to be travelling without children.
Both sets of parents had been worried about Fleur and David’s decision to extend his tour of service for another two years. Peter believed that three and a half years in the tropics at one time was enough. Health and marriages suffered, in his opinion, in that relentless humidity. It was unusual to be offered an extension, but David’s OC had gone sick, and David, as his second-in-command, knew the job better than anyone.
Neither Fleur nor David wanted to come home. To stay meant early promotion for David and he could still fly as well as do an admin job. Fleur was teaching dance twice a week at the International School. The twins would start school next year and they had both jumped at the chance of staying on at the naval base.
The day before her flight home, Sam rang her from Melbourne.
‘I hear you’ve been ill, sis, and look cadaverous!’
‘Gee, thanks, Sam. You and Mum are so good for my morale.’
‘Are you fit enough to go back? Dad seems very worried about you.’
‘Is he? He hasn’t said anything. I’m fine now. You know what these tropical diseases are like. It takes time to pile the weight back on.’
There was an unlike-Sam silence and then he said in a different voice, ‘Fleury, I don’t think it’s your physical welfare that’s concerning Dad, you’ve always been skinny. It’s what he calls your “air of sudden sadness” . Are things OK with you and Dave?’
‘Dad asked you to phone?’
‘Yes. Because he knows I’m the only one you ever talk to. I want you to know that you still can.’
A lump formed in Fleur’s throat and tears sprang to her eyes and ran down her face, surprising her with their suddenness. She did not want Sam to suspect so she coughed and said brightly, ‘Dad is sweet. I’m OK, honestly. It’s only…I don’t usually get ill and I guess it depressed me to be left here while David and the twins flew home.’
Fleur had not answered and Sam persisted. ‘So, you and David are all right, still happy?’
‘Why on earth shouldn’t we be, Sam? Of course we are!’
But the damn tears would not stop. They fell onto her hands holding the phone. They were going to make her voice thick and ugly with misery. They were going to give her away.
Sam, thousands of miles away, heard. ‘Fleur? You still love him?’
‘Oh, yes!’ he heard her whisper. ‘Oh, yes, Sam.’
‘And he loves you?’ Sam held his breath. There was the tiniest of pauses. You would have to know and love someone to detect it.
‘Yes. He loves me.’
But? Sam thought. Then, Bugger it! Dad’s right, something is wrong.
‘OK…Got a pen? Right, this is my telephone number and address for the next three months…I’ll let you know when and where I move on to. Tell Dave he owes me a letter, w
ill you?’
‘Yes, I will. Sam?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m glad you rang.’
‘So am I. Take care, Fleury.’
‘And you, Sam.’
Sam walked away from the phone with a heavy heart. Shit! Dave was obviously bloody well not behaving himself. He had seen so much of it growing up in a foreign posting. Too much temptation and too much heat, booze and bare flesh. Tiny cracks in a marriage would widen in that sometimes vacuous life with too little to do.
He had even watched his parents wobble once. Laura, fed up with the narrow confines of pool, Officers’ Club, Mess, wives’ club and NAAFI had decided to take a degree, as many wives with half a brain were driven to. She had had the eager and willing help one summer of a young American professor from Harvard who was passing through, but not quickly enough, it seemed to his father.
Peter, wisely, had merely exaggerated his air of never knowing who was where or why in order to create a gap for Laura. His mother, foiled of drama, had returned, faithful, Sam believed, to the fold and to his father’s bed.
He smiled to himself. That had been the summer some naval officer had got Fleur absolutely blotto and she had leapt over the side of a naval frigate causing a terrible fuss.
He remembered his sister turning from a gawky teenager into an absolute stunner. God, how determined she had been to throw away everything to marry David. He remembered his surprise when David had told him he was going to marry Fleur. Fleur had had a bit of a crush, but David always seemed to treat Fleur as a little sister. He had women flocking and a bit of a reputation for pulling.
God! How awful if David had given in for convenience, because it was easy. He got to know us all so well. He, Dad and I just hit it off from the very beginning. But he was very fond of Fleury, who wouldn’t be? He must have loved her, but enough? I’m not so bloody sure of that.
Fleur had been fighting the toaster in the accommodation at Brize Norton. There was a large table where you helped yourself. Her toast was burning and wouldn’t pop up. It seemed to her the eyes of a million men were watching her struggle with amusement when a hand reached over and whacked the toaster hard, and burnt toast flew out onto the spotless white tablecloth.
The Hour Before Dawn Page 19