The Hour Before Dawn. Sara MacDonald

      A lack of professional technique – for Fleur thought of herself as an apprentice – could not hide the intensity behind her paintings. A fleeting spiritual second could transform a simple painting into a canvas that people stood in front of and gazed at, captivated by the power with which Fleur captured the enormity of loss alongside the budding awareness of something beyond herself that went on moving and growing within her.

      The loss of a child ended innocence. To be pre-deceased by your child was the worst that could happen to a parent. It took a lifetime of walking towards a hope of understanding to realise that there was nothing to understand. Sense could never be made of a random wicked and meaningless act. This was the bleak knowledge you carried all your life like a second self, buried, but always with you.

      Fleur, triggered by the sudden loss of Fergus, found that she could suddenly translate this knowledge into colour and texture and turn it into something people could relate to. Something they felt in the core of themselves, in the pit of their stomachs, in the ache of their throats as they stood staring at her large, brightly coloured landscapes full of heat and bustle. Their eyes drawn to the one small object or person within the picture that stood quite separate and alone.

      Fleur did not know from where her inspiration came. Only that it came from some unexplored source and she painted fast and concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, in the silent nights and into the pale, cold dawn of another day.

      As she lay staring at the tree outside her window, she felt as if she had already left this small terraced house and begun her journey of discovery to her daughter and to Hundertwasser’s architecture, all without corners, all without angles, all part of the earth and its constant cycle of rebirth. She was aware of why she was drawn to his philosophy and architecture; it was connected indivisibly to her need for reparation with her daughter.

      She felt in those first moments of sunlight that she might not return to this small house that she had shared with Fergus for so many years, or that even if she did, everything would be different, never quite the same again. Unease stirred, but she also had the sensation of moving inexorably towards something dark but necessary; that nebulous feeling that something was going to happen.

      She got out of bed and pulled on Fergus’s towelling robe, caught the scent from a vase of freesias the gallery had sent, which stood on her dressing table. All part of this safe life she led. She padded downstairs and drew back the sittingroom curtains. The man next door was wheeling his bicycle down his path, pausing at the gate as he always did to fix his cycle clips. The teacher two doors down was gunning the reluctant engine of her Fiesta. Fleur found she was listening for it to start and thinking, This time tomorrow I will be in Singapore.

      Fleur looked down across the glinting wing of the plane onto acres of perfect white cloud the texture of fluffy mashed potato. She remembered as a child the thrill of believing those clouds were solid enough to sit on, that she could have jumped from one floury cushion to another.

      The mystery of land mass, ocean and sky from a height never left her. The changing patterns and shape of mountains and desert and the progress of herself encapsulated in tons of moving metal remained a wonder of human engineering.

      It was as if, once airborne, between lives and destinations, all normal, taken-for-granted things were rendered, by stress or fatigue, abnormal. As if she was circled by an odd tight silence, worn like a cloak to distance herself, making her progress, a stranger among strangers, infinitely obscure.

      Travelling forward through time, arriving thousands of miles into an unfamiliar or distant landscape of tomorrow, imbued Fleur with an almost catatonic immobility and invisibility. She neither moved nor undid her seatbelt but sat and stared out at the wondrous mass of virgin cloud.

      An old man on the aisle seat was telling the woman between them how he had built the pipeline down in the vast dry expanse of desert below them in Dubai. For thirteen years he had toiled in the unforgiving sun, taking water to the Bedouins. His skin told the truth of an engineer’s harsh life in the sun. Unmistakable patches of skin cancer marked his hands and face like a badge of office.

      Normally Fleur would have been fascinated by his reminiscing, but she wanted to remain in her no-man’s land, devoid of social interaction, the telling of stories, the re-telling of lives. She loved it when the lights went out, when the blinds went down against the night outside and she could lie tiredly listening to the rustle of passengers, the dull plom of the bell as they asked for drinks, the swish of recycled air around the cabin, as inexorably they ploughed through the night sky to Singapore.

      Singapore and another life. She thought of David, tried to conjure his face, his voice. But they would not come or came blurred like an unfocused faded photograph. The city contained so much that had been a part of her young life. She had spent time there as a child and a young adult. She had returned there a married woman, carrying the baby twins.

      So much happiness. A beautiful couple who had it all. Then, those small, relentless steps that led slowly but surely to tragedy.

      Snatches of lines from somewhere popped into Fleur’s head…

       When the train starts, and the passengers are settled[…]To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the pastInto different lives, or into any future;You are not the same people who left that stationOr who will arrive at any terminus

      A sense of smell could unlock memories faster than the blink of an eye. Fleur could not tell what would leap out at her when she stepped into the shimmering heat and smell of a city where so much of her life had unfurled faster than she had had the wit to stop it.

       SIX

       Singapore, 1966

      When Fleur saw David for the first time he was sitting on the edge of the pool at the Tanglin Club in Singapore City. She thought he was possibly the most graceful man she had ever seen. After her brother and the spotty youths she had travelled out from England with he seemed like a god.

      She was fifteen and home for the long summer holidays. Her father, Peter Llewellyn, was colonel of a regiment on a three-year posting to Singapore. It was his second posting to the Far East and Fleur and her brother, Sam, had grown blasé with flying back and forth from boarding school in England. It was Singapore that felt like home.

      They had both pretty much done their own thing that summer as their mother, Laura, bored with army life, was studying for an Open University degree, and she trusted Sam to keep an eye on Fleur.

      David was on his first posting as a subaltern. He was dark and immensely charismatic rather than good-looking and he always seemed surrounded by teachers, nurses, or young service wives. He noticed Fleur, however, watching him covertly. She was still all angles, like a colt, but she walked like a ballet dancer and had a hint of the exotic, even at fifteen.

      Fleur had her mother Laura’s dark skin, inherited from a French grandmother, that tanned easily, and a way of rolling up her hair like her mother in a quick and particular French way. Sam’s skin was fair like his father’s and he moaned about it.

      Fleur loved the water and both she and Sam were excellent swimmers having been taught professionally by a Singaporean coach. Peter had insisted on lessons for both his children as he loved sailing. People would stop what they were doing to watch Fleur dive. She would take time to position her limbs in the same way she perfected her dance steps, and once committed her body would arch and spring and break the water almost soundlessly.

      David thought her dive was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. He watched her shrugging off Sam’s friends and the schoolboys of her own age. She seemed perfectly self-contained and content with her own company. He was amused to see that, young as she was, she attracted the attention of the young naval officers who sailed into the naval base on the frigates, as well as the young army and RAF officers serving in Singapore.

      They were all fairly cautious for she was the colonel’s daughter,