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 a long time to decide whether she could bear to fly via Singapore. Just the name of the city on her lips made her shiver and ache with longing, but with fear too. The Singapore of her memory would have turned into somewhere unrecognisable, would have a different identity to the place of her childhood and youth. A city of memories where everything changed in the blink of an eye. From light to darkness.
Every morning of her life Fleur turned Saffie’s photo towards her; a missing child forever caught in childhood. There was rarely a night when Fleur did not wonder where her daughter’s body lay or worry about the possibility that she might live in some distant, alien culture, brought up with unknown people with little memory of her birth and a long-ago family who loved her.
It was the not knowing. The certainty, as the years went by, that they would never know, which haunted and maimed the lives of Fleur and her surviving daughter.
But it was Fleur that the long, relentless shadow of guilt fell on. She was their mother and her mind and heart had been on other things; on David. She had not taken care of her children. Haunted with misery, she had left them to roam free. She had left them to chance, ignored their safety, and something random and terrible had swooped.
It is this that my daughter can never forgive.
Singapore, 1976
The monsoon was coming. The wind was rattling the shutters, catching the chimes outside Ah Heng’s window. They swung and jumped and clashed in a mad little Indian dance. The strings would get all muddled and Saffie knew she and Nikki would have to untwist them in the morning.
The smell of rain filled the dark room, reaching up the stilts of the house, rising up from the damp earth full of bruised frangipani blooms and dead leaves and small branches of trees.
Saffie lay still, listening for the sound that had woken her. She was facing the open door, staring at the closed shutters that kept out insects and the great blind moths as big as sparrows who threw themselves out of the dark into the light, their fat little bodies hitting the lampshades; their dusty, fluttering wings falling into the twins’ hair, jumping across the surface of their skin like mice.
Saffie could hear the familiar sound of cicadas, but there wasn’t the heavy warmth of a coming day. Her feet touched Nikki’s feet at the other end of the bed. She did not think
her sister was awake, but she could not be sure. Nikki’s breath could be held, like her own; Nikki could be silently listening too.
Suddenly Saffie heard again the sound that had woken her. She saw the shadow of her mother in the corridor that was a balcony during the day when the shutters were thrown back against the house each morning. Fleur had opened a shutter and was leaning out into the dark, listening, looking upwards to the stars that filled the hugeness of the night.
With a lurch of sickness Saffie knew. Daddy was not home yet and she strained like Fleur for the sound of helicopters overhead. She could hear her mother’s voice keening. It was this soft, monotonous sound that had woken her, that and her mother’s fear. It shimmered across the night and reached both children, touched them with cold fingers and they shivered at their mother’s terror.
‘Oh, God!’ Fleur whispered. ‘Oh, God in heaven. Please. Please. Let him come in safely. I beg you, God.’
Both girls sat up abruptly as one. Stared at their identical selves.
‘Daddy!’ they whispered and reached for each other, catching their mother’s panic.
At that moment they heard the aircraft engines. Behind dense cloud came the faint sound of rotary blades. Clear, like knives cutting through the blackness, the sound of helicopters rumbling and whirring their way home. Tail-lights winking and blinking like comforting fireflies through the purple massing clouds, which were growling with thunder and bursting with violent wind and rain.
Saffie and Nikki leapt out of bed and ran to their mother.
‘Hurry!’ they called out into the night. ‘Hurry, hurry, Daddy. Hurry, Fergus…Hurry, everyone…the storm is coming. Hurry, hurry before the lightning comes…’
The sound of engines was louder now, near to them, and suddenly out of the clouds, in formation, five helicopters appeared out of the night.
‘Hurrah!’ Saffie and Nikki shouted. ‘There they all are…hurrah!’
‘Shush, darlings. Shush! I need to listen.’ Fleur’s voice was trembling.
They watched as the helicopters hovered over the airfield. One turned in a circle as if testing the power of the wind and then dropped slowly at an angle to land at the airfield beyond their sight.
The next two helicopters were being buffeted up and down and they too circled quickly, one after the other, well
