Laura invited David over to their quarter in Singapore for supper to thank him. He brought orchids. Small bee orchids for Laura. Pure white for Fleur. She took them to her room and put the vase on her dressing table. They lasted a long time.

Peter and his subaltern discovered they had a shared love of classical music. After that night David would drive from the naval base to go to concerts with Peter and Laura. He started to sail with the family at weekends and sit and talk to Sam and Fleur at the club barbecues.

One weekend there was a film of The Tale of Two Cities on at the naval base. Fleur, sitting with Sam, thought with a jolt how like a young Dirk Bogarde David was. That thing they did with their eyes, half-closed as they watched you. How when they said something quite innocuous it could sound like a caress. The something gentle but stomach-churningly sexy about the movements of a man who had a beautiful body.

Yet there was also something trustworthy about David. It was why Laura and Peter never worried about Fleur or Sam when they were with him. Swimming, sailing or dancing with the young, David could always be relied upon to see them safely home.

When Fleur was back at school in England, she lived for the Easter holidays. When she returned to Singapore after her sixteenth birthday, the mouths of the men and boys round the pool literally dropped when she appeared. She was not a sweet schoolgirl any longer and Laura saw this immediately. Saw the knowingness in Fleur. The innocence of being an attractive child had flown. She had become, overnight, it seemed to her parents, a stunningly beautiful young woman, quite aware of the effect she had on men, young or old.

Oddly, Fleur realised with a pang, her budding new confidence in herself seemed to distance David, as if he too was unnerved by her rapid transference from sweet adolescent to full-blown feminine beauty. It was years before she understood the dilemma she posed for David by growing up so quickly.

SEVEN

At lunchtime I locked the house up, drove round to the marina and sat waiting for Jack. He had rung to say he’d taken the afternoon off and we were going to have lunch together on the seafront in Paihia. I sat in the shade of a tree, a book in my lap, watching the Maoris who were often there diving for oysters off the concrete pier, collecting them in great piles to cart away in their aged pick-ups.

Petrol from the boat engines lay in purple-green pools on the surface of the water, but it did not seem to worry them. They called out cheerfully to their beautiful raggedy children who watched with their legs dangling in the water, their white teeth suddenly dazzling at some private joke.

A young Maori boy was poling an ancient canoe around the edges of the bay in the shallows by the trees, bending and digging his pole into the mud, his arm muscles flexing as he began to make it skim across the water, gaining confidence and pace with each stroke.