‘What upset me before, our lack of a real sex life, suddenly seemed unimportant in the light of not having him at all and having my whole life pulled from under me…’

‘Go on, Mum.’

‘He came back looking as dreadful as I felt. Possibly close to breaking point. He stood at the top of the stairs as if he had no right to come into the room or back into our lives. We just stared at each other for what seemed a lifetime and we both knew without saying a word that we could never live without each other. He needed me as much as I needed him. He held out his arms and that was it.’ Fleur closed her eyes. ‘The relief, the pure relief that he wasn’t going to leave me, that he did not want our life to end, suffocated any other feelings for a while. We packed the car up for the weekend with you and Saffie in the back and headed for Mersing.

‘It was strange, we should have gone on our own, there was so much we needed to say to one another and we were quite selfish in those days. We could have left you and Saffie with Ah Heng, but we both needed you with us…as if…’

‘You needed us to validate your marriage?’ Nikki asked softly.

‘Yes,’ Fleur nodded. ‘As if we needed our children to make us whole again; to be as we were.’

‘But you couldn’t be as you were, could you? You couldn’t pretend the words hadn’t been said, that you didn’t know?’

‘Of course we couldn’t and we both knew that. The only thing we were both sure of was that we wanted to stay together.’

‘But Mum, you were still only in your twenties, how could you possibly live without a sex life, and what would Dad…do? He was an army officer.’

Fleur looked at her daughter. ‘Oh, darling, we had weeks, months of intense discussion on the way we could live together and make it work. We argued; I often felt bitter and betrayed. Then I got a really bad dose of dengue fever and it seemed to lower my resistance to everything. I felt constantly low and depressed. We went home on leave and I ended up in hospital. David had to fly home with you and Saffie without me.

‘When I got back to Singapore, in bad moments I accused him of wanting marriage as a shield. In those days if anyone had known about him he would have been out of the army in a flash.’

Fleur smiled, her whole face lighting up. ‘But he really did want marriage and a wife and children and a normal life. I never doubted that he loved us all far more than a life he might have had and could have chosen.’

Nikki bit back the thought: Having his cake and eating it.

Fleur suddenly remembered, It was not true, what she had just said. It was true she’d never doubted his love, but she had agonising misgivings about his control over his sexuality. She tortured herself with the moment of their last love-making, going over and over her waking and knowing in a burst of humiliation that it was not her that had aroused him that morning but the thought of some man.