Sara MacDonald - The Hour Before Dawn

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.

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 dangling 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.