Sara MacDonald - The Hour Before Dawn

Her book and the vague whiff of Fleur’s scent. Nikki moved closer to the bed. Mourning Ruby, by Helen Dunmore. On the cover, a small girl in a red dress was running through autumn leaves. She had plump brown legs, small feet encased in plimsolls.

Mourning Ruby.

The pain was like being hit suddenly with a cricket bat. Fleur, like Nikki, still mourned. Each and every day of her life.

Mum. Mum.

Nikki crumpled on the floor and wept.

Fleur’s only instinct was flight. Blind flight towards a place that had lain in her mind all these years. Distraught, fighting panic and finding herself back on Orchard Road in the noise of the traffic, with the crowds jostling and banging into her, she lifted her hand for a taxi. ‘The railway station, please.’

As they sat in traffic she felt as if she had been thrown suddenly into a bad dream. She wanted to wake up. She wanted to wake up and find Fergus beside her, gently nudging her awake, saying gently, Fleur, Fleur, you’re dreaming.

She stumbled out of the taxi and into the station. Hardly coherent, she asked if there was a train to Port Dickson.

‘Only to Seremban. Then you take taxi or bus to P.D. You go now, left, to the other side of station. Quick, train coming.’ The Chinese man in the ticket kiosk flapped his hand vaguely to her right and an incoming train.

Fleur ran for the nearest platform and waited for people to pour off, then she climbed in. The carriages were old and people pressed and pushed behind her to get on. She found a window seat and sat down. Too late she realised she had no water. Maybe someone would come round with drinks. She tried not to think about her dry mouth. The carriage was rapidly filling up with Malays and Tamils; all talking and laughing, bowed down with shopping and going home to their kampongs.

The noise rose as the train departed and Fleur closed her eyes against the curious glances at her.

The train moved sluggishly through the outskirts of the city and across the causeway into Malaysia, and Fleur, exhausted, slept. When she opened her eyes again people had grown quieter, dozing in the sun which slid off the paddy fields and cast shadows across bent figures in a scene so timeless Fleur could have been a child or young wife again.

She remembered looking down from the plane carrying David’s body home and watching the rice fields disappearing as the plane rose upwards. She had sat on that long journey home in a catatonic and bemused disbelief that he was really dead.

It had been spring when she and the twins had flown back to England to bury David in the place he had grown up in, the place where his parents still lived. That little middle-class village had remained a microcosm of the past even then, with its tiny roads and steep banks littered with creamy primroses.

It had been spring in the tiny churchyard, and, as David’s coffin was lowered to the bugler’s lament, Fleur had looked round for a moment at the graves and the stunned mourners. She had clutched the hands of the twins and thought, how can this day be so extraordinarily beautiful? How can the trees and hedges burst with new life when David is dead? When I will never recover from the horror of his death? When his life ended after an argument, when I had no chance to tell him he had nothing to fear, nothing to be jealous of. I loved him. He was the father of my children and I would always love him. Always.

It was the dichotomy of a world so new and green and perfect and the bleak finality of David being lowered forever into the ground to the trembling notes of a military bugler that had struck her so starkly that day.

In his parents’ cottage a cherry tree was bursting into pink, and bluebells shone in a haze of blue and white in the orchard. David’s mother and Fleur’s were offering plates of tiny canapés round and gracefully making small talk as if it mattered. As if it mattered. It is what they did, her parents’ generation. They never showed their grief, it just wasn’t done. It was true of the army too. Other ranks could yell the place down when they had their babies, officers’ wives bit their lips.

That day of the funeral someone had thrown the French windows open and Fleur saw David’s father standing with his back to the house, whisky clasped between his hands, for a moment totally unable to exchange inanities. She had walked out to him and he had wrapped his arms around her and in all the beauty of his garden they had rocked and rocked together, mourning, mourning the loss of the centre of their universe. The waste of a young life.

Stuart Montrose had whispered. ‘It is the worst, the very worst thing of all to outlive your child. It is the thing that breaks your heart.’

Fleur turned again to the landscape outside the train window. In the distance where the rubber plantations had once stretched as far as the eye could see now lay palm oil trees. As a child and a young wife she had found them eerie. On the long, long, straight road to the coast her father would stop so that they could all pee behind a tree, and if Fleur had not been desperate she would never have entered the shade of the rubber trees. The rubber tappers, their faces hidden by scarves, moved silently, sliding from tree to tree, emptying the rubber from the small tap on the trunk and moving quickly on to the next tree, like shadows or ghosts.

Fleur knew her fear was due partly to the stories her father had told her about the communist insurgents of the 1950s when plantation owners and managers had been attacked and killed, but she always found the stillness of the rubber plantations sinister and in some way threatening; a place where people could hide and pounce. The palm oil trees, with their thick green fronds, softened the landscape, their shape curving like the tops of pineapples.

After David’s funeral, Fleur had lain motionless in the dark, one twin each side of her in the lumpy bed. Saffie placed her fingers on her mother’s ribcage to see if she was still breathing. Her fingers felt, under the cotton nightdress, the flutter and throb of Fleur’s heart. She wanted to whisper to Nikki over her mother’s still form. She wanted to feel her sister’s warmth seep into her. If Mum died there would be no one, only their grandparents. They would have to live in this horrid village and probably go to boarding school.

Saffie trembled with fear of the future. Would they have to stay in this cold house of long corridors and draughty rooms? Here in this rolling garden full of huge fir trees that shaded the lawns and made you shiver? Where the roses smelt in the middle of the day but there was no scent of frangipani wafting in on the morning wind; no white frangipani petals covering the lawns. There was no familiar sound of the kebun brushing the bruised petals up with his long, slow, indolent sweeps.

No bougainvillaea climbed the walls of this house in a great purple cloud. There were no sounds of cicadas in the night or Ah Heng’s high cackling voice coming from the kitchen. Saffie ached with homesickness: for the Chinese chimes moving imperceptibly in the draught of the shuttered windows; for Ah Heng just a shout away.

Home; where Daddy had been, his laughter filtering through the rise and fall of sleep, making you smile as if you were awake. His laugh mixed up with the sound of music, of people chatting and partying.

Saffie thought of his largeness, remembered his happiness just beyond the darkness of the room making you safe to turn and sleep again. She strained for the memory of his face. She could remember his smell: soap and tobacco. She could remember the feel of him, the strength of his brown arms…but she trembled in case she forgot his face…Singapore…the safe place where Daddy had been.