The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  In their bed, David tried to please her, to make her happy in a far more conscientious way than he had before. He wanted to keep her there. Keep her his. But the shadow of what she knew came between the moments of intimacy and turned slyly into a thing of impurity and lasting sadness.

  ‘Then you met Fergus?’

  ‘Then I met Fergus. And he was fun too, and made me laugh and…’

  Nikki smiled. ‘He was absolutely wild about you and remained so until the day he died.’

  It was true. Fergus had been wild about her. ‘We all flirt and are attracted in a passing way to other men; it gives us a little fillip, it’s part of being alive and young. I suppose in my case the feeling was exaggerated because I had begun to doubt my self-worth, my own attraction. With Fergus, physically, it all fell into place like a jigsaw I’d known was possible but had never had. It is amazingly seductive to be an object of desire for an attractive and lovely man.’

  ‘So did you fall in love with him and out of love with Dad?’

  Fleur shook her head slowly. ‘No. I never, ever stopped loving David. I never pretended to Fergus. I knew he loved me, but Fergus accepted I was married with two small children.’

  ‘But he wasn’t that honourable, coming on to you, was he? He was supposed to be one of Dad’s best friends.’

  Fleur made a face. ‘What a horrible expression. He never came on to me, as you call it, until he discovered David was gay.’

  ‘How did he?’

  ‘He saw David talking to his Indian driver, a very beautiful youth. Something in his body language alerted Fergus and he asked me outright.’

  ‘Had he never suspected before?’

  ‘No one did, Nikki. Your father was not remotely camp. He hated that in gays, as a lot of his generation did in the days before they came out.’

  ‘So Fergus was shocked?’

  ‘He was shocked and immensely angry with David for marrying me. Nik, can you remember your father at all?’

  ‘A bit. I remember him being big and happy and he seemed to me to be always laughing, as if life was one big joke. He was always scooping Saffie and me up to take us somewhere…Life with him, as I remember it, was always exciting and fun.’

  ‘Well, that’s because it was! He had a gift for making an ordinary day special. Someone once said to me, “ When David leaves a party, the party leaves with him,” and it was true, darling. Fergus couldn’t remain angry with David for long.’

  ‘Did Dad know Fergus knew?’

  ‘I think he suspected, because it was obvious something had changed between them, but he didn’t associate it with me. I didn’t want to hurt David or cause gossip so I used to meet Fergus in the Botanical Gardens in Singapore. At first we just walked and talked, then…I was terribly attracted to him.’

  ‘Then you had a full-blown affair?’

  ‘No. But we would have done, Nikki, eventually.’ Fleur got out of bed. ‘I need a shower and a glass of wine. Ah Lin is going to put supper on the table any minute.’

  Nikki also got heavily off the bed. ‘I’ve had a shower. I’ll go and ring Jack. Mum, we don’t have to talk about it any more tonight. It’s making you sad.’

  ‘Yes, of course it makes me sad, even after all these years. But now I have to think about what…what it all might have led to.’

  Nikki said quickly, knowing she must deflect Fleur, at least for tonight, ‘Mum, I could never be a hundred per cent sure who I saw that afternoon with Dad. I was only five.’

  Fleur turned on her way to the bathroom. ‘Something is niggling at me, something I should remember. I can pinpoint the moment David changed, was late home more often, seemed distracted, and sadder. There had been a big interservice exercise on in Malaya. As well as Fergus, who had been posted in, extra pilots had been sent out for a few weeks to back David up and cut down on his flying hours. He came back from that exercise pre-occupied and a little distant.’

  ‘You think he was involved with someone?’

  ‘I think it was more serious than that. I think he might, for the first time, have fallen for someone and shocked himself.’

  ‘In a few weeks?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nik. Maybe it started on that exercise. Maybe it was someone he had known before. It’s possibly why he told me when he did.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘I felt as if everything might slide from under us. Fergus was wonderful; always there…just to listen. Then, one day I went into Singapore to buy some material for a dress for a dinner night. I saw this amazingly wonderful red silk and I thought, I’ll show him. David, I mean. I had it made up into the most daring dress I’d ever worn. And I made a provocative entrance. I was sick of being sad; I wanted to be happy and young again. I danced all night, especially with Fergus, and I was excited by the sense of power I suddenly had in that daring red dress. A terrific sense of being sexually attractive and the centre of attention.

  ‘David had been hugely amused by my dramatic entrance. I certainly got his attention. But I knew that night that soon I was going to sleep with Fergus. I wanted to…I suppose I was beginning to fall in love too.’

  ‘I remember that dress, Mum. You looked amazing. I remember it.’

  ‘Do you, darling?’ Fleur was surprised.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Fergus was kissing me on the dance floor and David saw us. We looked up and there he was. All three of us just stood rooted without saying a thing. It was an awful moment. David was ashen. He looked at me in total disbelief. He was so sure I single-mindedly adored him enough not to do anything. He turned and went out through French windows into the Mess garden and I went after him. It was as if Fergus and I had stabbed him in the back.

  ‘He kept shouting and asking me how long it had being going on. I tried to tell him I had not slept with Fergus but he wouldn’t listen and I saw that he felt impotent, powerless, because there was nothing he could say or do to put himself in the right.

  ‘Suddenly he went quiet and gave this deprecating, bitter little laugh. He nodded to himself and looked down at me and said quietly, “I think it’s called poetic justice, darling. If I wasn’t married to you I couldn’t wish for a greater guy for you than Fergus…my old friend Fergus…”

  ‘I realised that he thought I was going to leave him for Fergus. He must have seen me and his beloved twins slipping from his grasp. He turned and started walking away from me and I started to run after him and I was screaming, “I will never leave you…I will never leave you,” over and over, but he wasn’t listening any more, he was just walking away from me as fast as he could. He didn’t come home that night and the next day he went flying. I never saw him alive again. I never ever saw him again.’

  Fleur crumpled onto the floor, her hands covering her eyes. Nikki drew in her breath, the anguish in her mother piercing her like shards of glass. She bent awkwardly to the floor.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault, Mum.’

  Fleur lowered her hands. ‘But it was, darling; that is the point. If he hadn’t seen Fergus and me together, he wouldn’t have died. He would have taken more care.’

  ‘Mum, Fergus must have said it to you a hundred times. You don’t know that. Dad was a pilot; he wouldn’t have taken risks with other people’s lives. A storm blew up. That is what happened. The tragedy is that you quarrelled the night before he died. That is the saddest thing.’

  ‘The saddest thing is he died thinking I was going to leave him.’

  Nikki levered herself up and sat heavily in a chair. ‘Mum, we can’t do this any more. Go and have your shower and I’ll pour you a drink. Do you want something stronger than wine? A drink that talks to you, as Gran always says?’

  Fleur smiled. ‘Yes, Nik. I think I’ll have a whisky.’ She got to her feet. ‘Forgive me, darling, you’re supposed to be resting. This can’t be good for you.’

  ‘It’s about time I understood, Mum.’

  Fleur turned on the shower and came back into the room. She sai
d desperately, meeting Nikki’s eyes, ‘It’s why I drank that afternoon; why I took strong painkillers…I just wanted to shut it all out.’

  Nikki held Fleur’s eyes and then she said, with difficulty, because it was hard, ‘I know, Mum. You were not to blame for Dad’s death…or for Saffie’s. Have your shower and I’ll find you that drink.’

  Gently I shut the bathroom door on my mother. I stood in the empty room listening to the sound of water running and watching the bats swoop in the dark beyond the window.

  My heart was filled with an impregnable and lasting sorrow. Indirectly, my dad might have contributed to Saffie’s death. If it was his lover that killed her. And Fleur would have known him.

  As I stood there I saw that when my parents’ lives together ended, my dad was only thirty-two and Mum was twenty-five. If he had lived, it wouldn’t have worked, their marriage. It couldn’t have done.

  We would have grown up and been less dependent on him. Mum would have fallen in love, as she later did, and left him for Fergus or someone else. Dad would have got more promiscuous and less careful. Their lives together would have been unlikely to have had a happy ending. The happy ending that has lived in my head, all of my life, despite my love for Fergus.

  I needed to know that my father had been gay to understand this. But how old and full of remorse I now felt comprehending this simple fact.

  I thought of Jack and the inequality of our love. I wrapped my arms around my swollen stomach. Jack had been so patient, waiting and hoping for me to say words that would mean commitment to him, to our child and a life together.

  I thought of Fergus, how gentle, in waiting, he had been with Fleur, because he loved her so completely and selflessly. I saw how close they had become, living their lives so absolutely together with all its tragedy and joys.

  I wanted that. I wanted that with Jack. I was now so sure. My life lay with him and I must ring and tell him this. It felt like my first really considered act. I was a grown woman. I was thirty-three years old, much older than Fleur had been in her life with my father.

  I would always love the memory of my dad, for it was my memory, a large, beautiful man who made us squeal with laughter. A man who never grew old and tetchy. A big solid rock of a man who brought happiness wherever we went. But he was also the same man who, knowing what he was, married a young dancer, let her turn her back on her talent, for him, when he must have known the danger of it. He knew, he knew how much she absolutely worshipped him. He broke her heart, the father I loved. He broke my mother’s heart and she never used this as an excuse, not to anyone. She wanted me to keep the lovely dad of my childhood and in doing so nearly broke Fergus’s heart too; having to watch me punish her day in, day out.

  I remembered how hard Gran had been on her. Laura had considered Fleur weak and feckless. I wondered if Grandpa had suspected. He was always so close and protective of Fleur.

  I walk out into a night that is so warm that the air is like velvet on my bare arms. The sun has left scarlet wavy lines. Dark cigar-shaped clouds tinged with gold hang above a sea that moves imperceptibly from here, small glints lighting the waves.

  I stand, holding the rail of the balcony, aware of my hands on the wood, of the scents coming in on the night. Blossom, spices, faint sewerage; Chinese music and high sing-song voices. The ghosts of my father and Saffie seem to hover in the dry rustling of the palm trees.

  But what I am really thinking of is the extraordinary courage of my mother. Love and loyalty to David lasted long after his death. I know, too late, it is possible to love two people in quite different ways. One love does not negate the other, but is as much a part of it as Fergus was of Dad’s life as well as Fleur’s.

  I am past tears though not past sorrow. I cannot change my mother’s life, but I can change the defiant passage of my own. Each time my child moves inside me I feel closer to understanding Fleur. I cannot marshal my thoughts or understand my feelings in a matter of hours and I know that what I feel now will change into something else. But it must be something that I am able to accept and live with.

  All my life I have wanted to go back to a time of safety and happiness, when we were a real family. Mum and Dad, Saffie and me. When the tropical sun shone down but never burnt. When the rains were swift but no one ever drowned in the monsoon drains. When Saffie and I drew little square houses with windows and a garden path with flowers and a matchstick mum and dad with happy, smiley faces.

  This is what Fleur was bravely protecting me from the whole of my life. The moment when you realise none of it really exists; it is just an illusion, the sunshine and the smiley faces. It is what lies behind that counts.

  I think of Jack. ‘No worries,’ he always says, as they do in New Zealand, whatever happens. ‘No worries, darlin’.’

  Damn. I’m not crying. I’m not.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Inspector Blythe was waiting for an update from London. He had asked for the current whereabouts of everyone staying at the government rest houses in 1976. He did not care if they were now living in Timbuktu. He wanted them located and their movements traced back from the 1970s to the present day. He wanted to know when they left the forces and why. He wanted to know their progress through the last twenty-eight years, and if anyone was dead he wanted to know where and how.

  He got up early to sift through every witness statement. He went over and over their movements that afternoon to see if there was any small thing they had missed the first time round. As everyone, except two of the teachers, had slept in the afternoon, there was little to find.

  The two teachers in question had been in Kuala Lumpur for the night so they were ruled out. Of the other two, the only tiny significant paragraph was that one of them, a Daphne Broadbent, had heard running footsteps and a door slamming somewhere. So had Mrs Christine Dury, because she had got up to breastfeed her sixth-month-old baby. But a door slamming somewhere was hardly indicative of murder.

  The pregnant Mrs Addison, apart from Mrs Campbell and Nikki of course, had been the last person to see Saffie alive that day. Before Mrs Campbell’s parents had left for Penang, they had asked if the Addisons would keep an eye on Fleur for them. Beatrice Addison had gone to see them on her own around lunchtime. Her husband, Alex, recovering from the same crash that had killed David Montrose, had thought it would be better if he stayed behind as his wife was better at the emotional stuff.

  Beatrice, being pregnant, had a couple of soft drinks with Fleur. She had admitted reluctantly that Fleur had had at least two strong lunchtime gins, and who could blame her?

  Both husband and wife had slept after lunch. Beatrice had slept longer than Alex. He had got up before her to take a walk, but he had seen no one except Major Gardam of the British High Commission, who had gone down to the beach in the late afternoon to swim with Andrew and Paula Right. They had been at different ends of the beach but had waved at one another. None of them had seen anything out of order or vaguely suspicious.

  They had been at different ends of the beach. Not near enough to see each other’s faces. Not near enough to see if any one of them was behaving oddly.

  So…nobody had seen or heard anything except the faint slamming of a door. Inspector Blythe wondered what had made two people even mention the door. Because it had woken them? Because it denoted haste and for some reason had alerted them, that non-specific, ordinary sound?

  He got on the phone again. ‘When you locate Daphne Broadbent and Mrs Christine Dury, assuming that both are alive and still have their faculties, will you make sure they see the statements they made at the time and ask them why they particularly mentioned or remembered the slamming of a door? I want to know what it sounded like. Because the doors out here are very light and made of rattan. I cannot see that the slamming of a door would wake anyone.’

  ‘Inspector, you’re talking about twenty-eight years ago, for God’s sake!’

  ‘I know I am. But would you ever forget a holiday where a small child suddenly disappeared, never t
o be seen or heard of again?’

  There was silence and then, ‘No, Inspector. I’ll get on to it.’ Another pause. ‘A thought, Sir. Finding the child’s body has been reported in most of the papers here. Not headlines, of course, but I’m wondering if any one of those families who stayed in Port Dickson at the time will get in contact with us.’

  ‘Now that, DS Blake, is a very interesting thought. You might pass it on to the team. We don’t want to miss anyone who might ring in. Pin their names up in large letters on the board.’

  Mohktar came into the room as Blythe replaced the phone.

  ‘Shall we go, Detective Sergeant?’

  ‘My car’s outside,’ Mohktar said. He looked at the inspector with an expression Blythe couldn’t interpret.

  ‘Is there a problem, Mohktar? Please don’t tell me either Miss Montrose or Mrs Campbell are unwell again or the time isn’t right. We are police officers, not the confessional.’

  Mohktar didn’t rise to this. Englishmen often got irritable in the heat. ‘No problem, Inspector. No problem, indeed.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it. Let’s go.’

  When they were in the air-conditioned car and purring along the coast road, Mohktar said, ‘Today I have a phone call to say the body of the child can be released for burial.’

  Blythe turned to look at him. Mohktar’s face remained impassive, his long, thin fingers relaxed on the wheel. Bugger it! Blythe thought. Why do I get the impression this man is censoring me gently, for being a policeman, for doing my job? He remembered his own words on the telephone: ‘Would you forget the day a young child disappeared?’

  He sighed and leant back in the seat. This was not a case you could stay strictly uninvolved in. The two of them were both stuck bang in the middle of it, trying to make sense of all the implications that were surfacing, while two women were wildly treading water before struggling for some recognisable shoreline.