Читать книгу The Hour Before Dawn - Sara MacDonald, Sara MacDonald - Страница 16

Fleur’s only instinct was flight. Blind flight towards a place that had lain in her mind all these years. Distraught, fighting panic and finding herself back on Orchard Road in the noise of the traffic, with the crowds jostling and banging into her, she lifted her hand for a taxi. ‘The railway station, please.’

As they sat in traffic she felt as if she had been thrown suddenly into a bad dream. She wanted to wake up. She wanted to wake up and find Fergus beside her, gently nudging her awake, saying gently, Fleur, Fleur, you’re dreaming.

She stumbled out of the taxi and into the station. Hardly coherent, she asked if there was a train to Port Dickson.

‘Only to Seremban. Then you take taxi or bus to P.D. You go now, left, to the other side of station. Quick, train coming.’ The Chinese man in the ticket kiosk flapped his hand vaguely to her right and an incoming train.

Fleur ran for the nearest platform and waited for people to pour off, then she climbed in. The carriages were old and people pressed and pushed behind her to get on. She found a window seat and sat down. Too late she realised she had no water. Maybe someone would come round with drinks. She tried not to think about her dry mouth. The carriage was rapidly filling up with Malays and Tamils; all talking and laughing, bowed down with shopping and going home to their kampongs.

The noise rose as the train departed and Fleur closed her eyes against the curious glances at her.

The train moved sluggishly through the outskirts of the city and across the causeway into Malaysia, and Fleur, exhausted, slept. When she opened her eyes again people had grown quieter, dozing in the sun which slid off the paddy fields and cast shadows across bent figures in a scene so timeless Fleur could have been a child or young wife again.

She remembered looking down from the plane carrying David’s body home and watching the rice fields disappearing as the plane rose upwards. She had sat on that long journey home in a catatonic and bemused disbelief that he was really dead.

It had been spring when she and the twins had flown back to England to bury David in the place he had grown up in, the place where his parents still lived. That little middle-class village had remained a microcosm of the past even then, with its tiny roads and steep banks littered with creamy primroses.

It had been spring in the tiny churchyard, and, as David’s coffin was lowered to the bugler’s lament, Fleur had looked round for a moment at the graves and the stunned mourners. She had clutched the hands of the twins and thought, how can this day be so extraordinarily beautiful? How can the trees and hedges burst with new life when David is dead? When I will never recover from the horror of his death? When his life ended after an argument, when I had no chance to tell him he had nothing to fear, nothing to be jealous of. I loved him. He was the father of my children and I would always love him. Always.

It was the dichotomy of a world so new and green and perfect and the bleak finality of David being lowered forever into the ground to the trembling notes of a military bugler that had struck her so starkly that day.

In his parents’ cottage a cherry tree was bursting into pink, and bluebells shone in a haze of blue and white in the orchard. David’s mother and Fleur’s were offering plates of tiny canapés round and gracefully making small talk as if it mattered. As if it mattered. It is what they did, her parents’ generation. They never showed their grief, it just wasn’t done. It was true of the army too. Other ranks could yell the place down when they had their babies, officers’ wives bit their lips.

That day of the funeral someone had thrown the French windows open and Fleur saw David’s father standing with his back to the house, whisky clasped between his hands, for a moment totally unable to exchange inanities. She had walked out to him and he had wrapped his arms around her and in all the beauty of his garden they had rocked and rocked together, mourning, mourning the loss of the centre of their universe. The waste of a young life.

Stuart Montrose had whispered. ‘It is the worst, the very worst thing of all to outlive your child. It is the thing that breaks your heart.’

Fleur turned again to the landscape outside the train window. In the distance where the rubber plantations had once stretched as far as the eye could see now lay palm oil trees. As a child and a young wife she had found them eerie. On the long, long, straight road to the coast her father would stop so that they could all pee behind a tree, and if Fleur had not been desperate she would never have entered the shade of the rubber trees. The rubber tappers, their faces hidden by scarves, moved silently, sliding from tree to tree, emptying the rubber from the small tap on the trunk and moving quickly on to the next tree, like shadows or ghosts.

Fleur knew her fear was due partly to the stories her father had told her about the communist insurgents of the 1950s when plantation owners and managers had been attacked and killed, but she always found the stillness of the rubber plantations sinister and in some way threatening; a place where people could hide and pounce. The palm oil trees, with their thick green fronds, softened the landscape, their shape curving like the tops of pineapples.

After David’s funeral, Fleur had lain motionless in the dark, one twin each side of her in the lumpy bed. Saffie placed her fingers on her mother’s ribcage to see if she was still breathing. Her fingers felt, under the cotton nightdress, the flutter and throb of Fleur’s heart. She wanted to whisper to Nikki over her mother’s still form. She wanted to feel her sister’s warmth seep into her. If Mum died there would be no one, only their grandparents. They would have to live in this horrid village and probably go to boarding school.

Saffie trembled with fear of the future. Would they have to stay in this cold house of long corridors and draughty rooms? Here in this rolling garden full of huge fir trees that shaded the lawns and made you shiver? Where the roses smelt in the middle of the day but there was no scent of frangipani wafting in on the morning wind; no white frangipani petals covering the lawns. There was no familiar sound of the kebun brushing the bruised petals up with his long, slow, indolent sweeps.

No bougainvillaea climbed the walls of this house in a great purple cloud. There were no sounds of cicadas in the night or Ah Heng’s high cackling voice coming from the kitchen. Saffie ached with homesickness: for the Chinese chimes moving imperceptibly in the draught of the shuttered windows; for Ah Heng just a shout away.

Home; where Daddy had been, his laughter filtering through the rise and fall of sleep, making you smile as if you were awake. His laugh mixed up with the sound of music, of people chatting and partying.

Saffie thought of his largeness, remembered his happiness just beyond the darkness of the room making you safe to turn and sleep again. She strained for the memory of his face. She could remember his smell: soap and tobacco. She could remember the feel of him, the strength of his brown arms…but she trembled in case she forgot his face…Singapore…the safe place where Daddy had been.

Her face, curled upwards towards her mother, was becoming wet. She touched her cheek. These were not her tears. She was not crying. She reached up to touch Fleur’s face. Her mother was weeping silently, motionless. Her chest was not heaving, her mouth was not open; she was crying without sound, tears cascading out of the sides of her eyes. The pillows and her nightdress and Saffie’s hair were becoming soaked. Saffie did not know anyone could cry this quietly. She heard Nikki whisper in the darkness,

‘Mummy, Mummy, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’

Saffie leant up on one elbow. ‘It’s all right…we’re here.’ She got out of bed and padded across in the dark to the dressing table to get a box of tissues. She handed Nikki a bundle and together they tried to blot Fleur’s eyes and cheeks and neck until she slowly became aware of them, came back from a long way away and registered their distress.

Saffie thought, Mummy doesn’t even know she’s crying.

Fleur sat up and wiped her face and blew her nose, looked down at them, one each side of her. ‘Cuddle up, darlings, cuddle in close, you’re both frozen. That’s it; pull the covers up to our chins…that’s right. Now we’re like dormice…’ She held the children to her tight, rubbed her chin over their smooth hair that smelt like hay, murmured to them to sleep, that it was all going to be all right.

‘Mummy, do we have to stay here?’ Saffie whispered. ‘In this house?’

‘No, darlings, we’re not going to stay here.’

‘Where are we going? Can we go home?’ Nikki asked.

‘We can’t go home, darling. All our things have to be packed up and Ah Heng has to go and look after a new family. I have to go back to hand our house back to the army and Grandpa thought we might all go and have a last little holiday in Malaya…’

‘Where we used to go with Daddy?’

‘Yes, in one of the rest houses in Port Dickson.’

‘With the round baths, where the water comes out of a big plug and goes all over the floor?’

‘That’s right. Does that sound like a good idea?’

‘With Grandpa and Grandma, or just us?’ Saffie was unsure she wanted them to come. On the other hand, it might feel safer.

‘I like just us,’ Nikki said quietly. But she could not help wondering if her mother was going to be like she was now or like she had mostly been since they got back to England. Would she see and hear them like she did tonight? Or would she go back to a place where they could not reach her, when sometimes she looked as if she didn’t know them any more? As if she had gone somewhere else and forgotten all about them.

‘Of course they are coming with us, darlings. But after the holiday we’re going to find a little house together, just us three. OK?’

Saffie could feel her heart swelling with a strange sad happiness because Mummy was holding them and for the first time the dark felt safe again.

‘You will stay with us all the time? You won’t ever go away and leave us in this house on our own, will you? You won’t leave us even for a minute?’ Nikki asked breathlessly.

Fleur bent to her and kissed the top of her head with sudden passion and then did the same to Saffie. ‘My silly little peapods, of course I won’t leave you. There is just the three of us now and we’ll stick together always, won’t we?’

Nikki smiled and curled in for sleep. ‘Yes.’

Saffie could feel her mother’s body going slack as she fell asleep. After a moment she whispered, ‘Nikki?’ but no one answered. Nikki too was asleep.

Lying in the dark, Fleur’s breath moving her fingers like the quiver of leaves, Saffie heard a fox bark suddenly out in the garden. It was a primeval sound that made her heart jump. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, wanting to sleep too. She thought it was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.

The train slowed and stopped at a junction. Fleur smelt betel nut and curry powder and the musty smell of live chickens carried in cages. She felt a nudge and a fat smiling Malay woman with a child was holding out her bottle of water. Fleur took it gratefully, drank and then handed it back. The woman shook her head, showing her she had another bottle. ‘You keep. You keep.’

Fleur thanked her and leant back and closed her eyes.

After the funeral she had flown back to Singapore with the twins and Peter and Laura There was an army memorial service and a quarter to hand over…and then…And then I let it happen. I let my child die for one selfish craving for oblivion.

The train shunted forward again. It seemed to stop at every single station. Fleur sat up and looked out. The day was ending. The carriages were emptying. People were leaving the train in droves now.

The Malay woman and her child had gone. They were still travelling inland. Her heart jumped; she must be on the wrong train. Oh God, where was she going? She shook with jetlag and tiredness.

A large Indian with a purple turban was watching her with gentle eyes.

Fleur lent forward. ‘I think I’m on the wrong train.’

The Indian smiled. ‘I was wondering, Madam. You are on what we call the Jungle Railway all the way to Kota Bharu. Mostly workers travel this line. The journey from Singapore takes fourteen hours, no less! Where is it you are wanting to be?’

‘Seremban. I must get off there for Port Dickson.’ Fleur fought panic.

‘Well, Madam, the next stop is Mentakab. Here you must get off immediately for the next stop is Jerentut. There is nothing in between. I am afraid there will be no train back to Gemas tonight. This is where you must return to catch the train to Seremban.’

He watched Fleur’s face. ‘Madam, do not worry. Mentakab is where I alight. I will show you to the best place in Mentakab to stay and then in the morning you will catch a train back to Gemas and there change for Seremban. All will be well. Do not be afraid. I fear you are a little unwell.’

The Indian accompanied Fleur off the train and took her in a taxi to a small guest house belonging to his sister. Very good and very clean. It wasn’t, but Fleur was grateful. She lay on the hard bed, stiff with anxiety, beyond tiredness, unable to sleep or shut her mind to the image she had seen in the paper. She was hardly aware of where she was.

Early the next morning the Indian took her back to the station and made sure she got on the right train to Gemas. His sister had changed some of her Singapore dollars for her, and given her Malaysian ringgits.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I have so little money on me to thank you for your kindness.’

He drew himself up with dignity. ‘Madam, I do not wish for payment for helping a lady in a foreign land.’ He smiled, ‘I hope soon the thing that troubles you will disappear.’

‘Terima kasih. Thank you.’

‘Sama-sama.’ He smiled. ‘You speak a little Malay?’

‘A very little. Selamat tinggal. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Madam and Selamat jalan to you. Do not forget Gemas. Change at Gemas.’

The train drew out of the station taking Fleur backwards to Gemas, when all she wanted to do was travel forward to the sea. To reach the place where she could grieve silently and alone. Just for a moment to feel the warmth of a life lost. Just for a moment.