The Hour Before Dawn. Sara MacDonald
as well as yours. Don’t shut your children out…or me.’
As the coffin disappeared into the bowels of the plane Fergus felt like weeping. ‘Keep an eye on her,’ he said to one of the air stewards, as Fleur and the children climbed the steps into the plane. ‘She’s still in shock and I’m not sure if she is capable of looking after her little girls.’
‘Don’t worry, Sir,’ the corporal said. ‘We’ve got army wives on board. We’ve also made arrangements for the stops at Gan and Cyprus. The colonel’s wife is going to be with her.’
Fergus walked back to the car and stood to watch the huge plane prepare for takeoff. The heat beat down and drenched his uniform, shimmered over the tarmac in the lee of the plane revving up and moving noisily along the runway, gathering itself for flight.
Last week he and David had played tennis. They’d swum together at the club…But that had been before the barbecue…the barbecue where Fleur had worn the shimmery red dress to shock. And it had shocked the older officers’ wives, and caused admiration and envy in almost everybody else.
At first, David had been highly amused at her entrance, had let out a whistle of pride. Fergus had felt startled, almost dismayed. Fleur was making a sudden statement. Her beauty hit him between the eyes, but this wasn’t the Fleur he knew. She was glittery and hard and…hurting. It had been disturbing. As if that night she had to prove to David, and perhaps to him, the power she had to attract. It had been awful watching them hurt each other and using him to do it. He loved them both.
He watched the plane carrying his friend’s body take off in a roar over the paddy fields, signalling an ending: to everything.
Ah Heng, in the back of the cool, air-conditioned car, watched her babies fly away in a plane like a heavy, pregnant bird. The sun radiated in waves over the ground where it had been standing. She watched the glint of silver in the sky until it was a speck and wondered if she would ever fill the hole that was opening making each and every breath painful.
Every time a British baby left it hurt, but this time it tore out her heart. There were no babies in her next job, back in the city with the British High Commission. No babies at all.
As the plane started to descend for Changi airport, Fleur looked down, but the paddy fields had gone. No black-clad figures, knee-deep in water, bent to the rice in their wide-brimmed hats.
Yet, excitement gripped her. If she closed her eyes she could almost be a child, a young wife again, with a safe, happy life and children before her.
The smells as the doors were thrown open were as she remembered. Shimmering wet heat, petrol, and spices. No frangipani this time; the vague, pervading scent of blossom was missing.
Fleur sat in an airport bus as the rain sprayed out from the wheels, splashing cyclists. The luggage, balanced precariously at the front, wobbled and swung behind the driver. The heat was swallowed behind cloud and air-conditioning. The other passengers were as dazed and tired as Fleur, and the bus was oddly silent.
Fleur, looking out at a changed landscape, still felt she knew the basic geography of it. She had driven so often on this Changi Road, to the sailing club, to the military hospital, to see friends. She supposed all the buildings must still be there in a different guise. Was the prison still standing; the atmosphere around it heavy with despair and death; full of the ghosts of captured servicemen imprisoned there by the Japanese in the Second World War.
As they reached the outskirts of the city she recognised the long Bukit Timar Road and thought she remembered some of the older buildings hidden beneath and between vast skyscrapers. Land reclamation started so long ago had continued and the city had spread out into places once underwater. Spread out and out and up.
The bus weaved in and out of the fronts of hotels, dropping passengers and their spreading pools of luggage in front of ornate glass doors with tall turbaned Indian porters. Fleur and two couples were the last to be dropped off at the Hilton in Orchard Road. An old couple who looked on the point of collapse and a young, possibly honeymoon, couple. They all smiled wanly at each other, tiredness and jetlag making everything distant.
The young couple hauled their suitcases up the hotel steps before the porters had time to rush out with their trolleys and admonish them for even thinking of seeing to their own luggage. Fleur and the old couple stood waiting, knowing, unlike England, that their cases would be loaded carefully onto a trolley, and when they had checked in they would be seen efficiently into the lift and up to their rooms.
Once in her room the young Malaysian porter showed Fleur how everything worked and she dived into her bag to tip him, trying to find her Singapore dollars. The porter held his hand up. ‘Later, later, you tired, Mem.’
Fleur smiled gratefully and thanked him. ‘Terima kasih.’
He gave her a wide smile. ‘Sama-sama. Selamat tidur.’
‘Selamat tidur.’
Night was approaching. Fleur went to the window and looked down on Orchard Road, at the streams of traffic heading home or into the city to eat and shop. The pavements were full of people and the volume would increase as the night wore on. Singapore was a city for serious shoppers.
She had wanted to be in the centre of the city where she could walk to shop for presents for Nikki and Jack. Right here, in the centre where, even after all this time, much would be familiar. Fleur smiled, leaving the curtains open, and went to the fridge and took out water. Then she had a shower and lay on the bed, the hum of the air-conditioning masking the noise of anything outside the room.
Fleur knew she must not sleep or she would never come up from the depth of jetlag, but she closed her eyes and let her body relax. She longed to phone Nikki, to say, Here I am in the Singapore Hilton and so, so looking forward to seeing you the day after tomorrow, darling; to meeting Jack; to looking at your lovely face, which I miss every single day…
But she couldn’t. She had brought a phone that would work anywhere in the world, but she could not ring her estranged daughter. There were no small intimacies or concerns or chit-chat that could be exchanged as comfort. Not yet.
It was the thing Fleur missed most of all with the death of Fergus, having anyone to tell, I got here! I’m fine! You needn’t have worried. Really, the journey was wonderful…no problems at all.
The room hummed around her. She knew she must get up if she wanted to go out into the streets before she collapsed. So strange that hotels could be the loneliest places in the world when they contained hundreds of people.
She dressed quickly in clean clothes and went out into the corridor. There was a lounge eating area on the same floor which served snacks and light food. Fleur ordered a coffee and helped herself to some fruit and nuts beautifully laid out on a table. She went and sat in a corner where she would not be self-conscious on her own and looked out at the night.
As she stood in the lift going down to the foyer the old couple joined her. ‘We’re just going to have a quick look round the hotel and call it a day, we’re much too tired to explore tonight.’
Fleur smiled. ‘I’m just going out for an hour or so.’
‘Well, you be careful, on your own…’
‘I think,’ Fleur said, ‘Singapore is probably the safest place I know. Certainly safer than London. Sleep well.’
She swung out of the glass doors and down the steps into the street and turned right and walked slowly up Orchard Road. She wanted to buy Nikki a Chinese blouse, green silk. All the little night markets seemed to have disappeared, to be replaced by glittering designer shops and huge stores. There was even a Marks & Spencer. Fleur, tired, did not think she could tackle working out the currency tonight. She would scout and return in the morning. She walked, jostled and pushed by the good-natured crowds. There were no rickshaws