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 past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or 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.