The Hour Before Dawn. Sara MacDonald
and went to the window which was wide open and shut it.
‘I wonder why it’s so cold? I’ll come back and warm you up…’ He paused, staring at me worriedly. ‘You’ve only had bad dreams since you got pregnant, haven’t you?’
I nodded and he grinned at me. ‘I’d better start monitoring what you eat for supper.’
When he’d gone the room was still, but it was full of something too, full of the cold darkness that was Saffie. Saffie, desperately trying tell me something. Why now, after all these years, when I had run so far and thought the past was settling into something I could just about manage?
Of course, she was always with me, each and every day, because she was my twin and her likeness was mine. Of course she was with me, a shadow, a mote in my eye, there on the turn of a stair, on the end of a street, waiting.
But I had never known her frightened before. She had never called out to me in my dreams as she was doing now. Nothing should hurt her. She should be safe.
I carried new life in me and I felt full of dread. I tried to tell myself that terrifying glimpse of a grave was something I had watched on the television and nothing to do with my sister.
As she faded the room warmed, and when Jack came back with tea and dry biscuits I was able to smile. He kissed the top of my nose and climbed back into bed.
‘Thank God, it’s warming up,’ he said.
‘Thank you for the tea.’ I smiled at him gratefully.
‘No worries,’ he answered sleepily, and I knew in a moment he would be asleep again, leaving me to wait for the birds and the sun creeping up over the bay.
An hour later I slid out of bed and pulled my clothes from the chair. I went into the bathroom and dressed quietly and pattered downstairs and out into the new day. I walked down the garden and the dew was heavy and cold and drenched my feet. The bay was full of yachts below me and the sea beyond the oyster beds was the deepest blue, yet summer was beginning to fade, the height of the season was over and soon Jack would be able to relax a little.
In England the worst of the winter would be over and sliding into spring and my mother would be leaving her London garden and making her way inexorably my way. I dreaded it. I dreaded the thought of her here in New Zealand, in our small piece of paradise. I wondered suddenly if that was why I was having bad dreams. If the dread was manifesting itself in my sleep, because it was difficult to articulate to Jack, to explain how I felt about my mother.
He looked at me in a certain way when the subject of her came up, a little shocked and uneasy, as if mothers were sacrosanct, and my not wanting to see her was breaking some taboo. And the worst thing was, I knew he would be charmed by her.
Fleur finished packing and sat back on her heels. She longed to ring her daughter to say, Let’s try hard. I haven’t seen you for years, darling. Just a few days together, then I won’t see you again for heaven knows how long…but she dared not risk it. She closed her last piece of hand luggage and walked slowly round the house wondering if the distance between them, literal and resonant, would ever end. Perhaps Nikki’s pregnancy would change and warm her somehow. A pregnancy Fleur would have known nothing about if she had not rung her daughter. It was still hard to bear the thought of Nikki living almost as far away from her as it was possible to live.
Fleur was planning a trip to New Zealand on the trail of Hundertwasser’s architecture as part of her dissertation and there was one of his buildings quite near where her daughter lived, in Kawakawa, a public lavatory, and Fleur wanted to see it. If she had rung her daughter and said, Can I come and see you? Nikki would have made excuses about being in the middle of a busy season, or that she was just about to take off with Jack, or, Frankly, it’s not convenient just now. So making Hundertwasser her reason for visiting was the only chance Fleur had of catching a glimpse of her troubled daughter for she had always refused to foist herself upon her.
Nikki was amused by the fact Fleur was a mature student, but she had never troubled to ask her mother about her paintings, which Fleur had surprisingly started to sell for quite large sums.
Fleur missed Fergus. She missed his love and encouragement, and somehow, when he was alive, the shadows could be kept at bay, for he had been a part of them and they had come through that awful time together.
They did not hide it away, that tragedy so long ago. They took it out sometimes in the dead of night and turned it over yet again to see if they could find some clue, if the shape of it could change. But it never did, and the best they could do, like so many other people who had to go on living a whole long lifetime afterwards was to carry it forward with them, haul it after them like a dead weight, until it became part of them and absorbed into the people they became.
Saffie was the first thing Fleur remembered when she woke and the last thing she thought about before she slept.
Nikki had given her and Fergus a hard time. Fleur was unsure how they had survived, but they had. Fergus had died suddenly, three years ago, leaving Fleur abruptly without warning, and for the first time in her life she was completely alone.
When Fergus retired he had turned his architect’s eye to painting. He had gone to classes and turned out pleasing little watercolours. Small paintings of the garden and of their holidays by the sea in Cornwall; of Tuscany on their last holiday together.
‘I have an eye for detail and can copy, that’s all,’ he said to any compliments. ‘To an untrained eye I might seem proficient, but this is strictly painting for my own pleasure.’
When he died, Fleur had the paintings of Tuscany framed and they now hung on the wall outside her bedroom. They reminded her of a happy time but also of the random cruelty of life. They had both felt young still, with plans to travel now that they had the time and money. There were so many things to do and places they had never seen. As well as shock, Fleur felt cheated of all the years she should have had with Fergus.
He was able to join his father’s firm when he’d left the army but he’d had to retrain as an architect, five long years when they were relatively hard-up. Fleur had to qualify too, to teach dance professionally, and without the help of both sets of parents they would not have survived.
Fergus was an imaginative architect and had worked long and hard to become successful. He’d relaxed a little as the money began to come in, then his father died and he had to take over the firm and his hours became even longer, until he suddenly realised he didn’t want to do it any more. He wanted his life back. He wanted to see more of Fleur and travel and enjoy the money he had made. He sold out and retired with huge relief and whirled Fleur away to Italy. Eighteen months later he was dead.
One night Fleur had gone to his little studio and stared at an empty canvas. She had picked up a brush and some of his paints and had simply thrown the colour of her grief and anger at the canvas. She had never looked back. It had released something inside her and she went each day to the place where Fergus seemed nearest to her. She painted her loss instinctively without thought until her work seemed to coalesce into form and meaning: canvases covered with strange abstracts with a hidden power that gave way to something gentler and infinitely lonelier. It was these paintings, full of the loss of him, that got her a place as a mature student at a college of art. Her world changed abruptly, and slowly became full of new and different people and a life that challenged.
She found, left to her own devices, that she was quite practical and deft with her hands, and now the hands that changed light bulbs and fuses also made pots and jugs and little bowls. She loved the feel of clay, the excitement of moulding something from nothing, and the bright fiery colours she painted on canvas and clay were the colours of her childhood; the colours of the east.
Fleur wanted Nikki to see the person who had evolved from years and years of dependency, to approve of the person she had become.
It had taken her