Just like Saffie. Snatched from under our noses; disappearing from us without trace twenty-eight years ago.

EIGHT

It was time to leave for the airport. Fleur walked round the army quarter which would soon be empty of all their personal things. She moved slowly, touching the heavy mahogany furniture, staring past the small Malay house that chimed in the window of the twins’ room, the sound as familiar as breathing in the easy, somnolent days spent there.

Far below her came the dull thud of the naval base and the hot morning breeze brought to her a vague smell of sea mixed with frangipani blossom from the garden. Fleur stood looking out, invoking the image of David moving through the house with her.

Surely if she closed her eyes for a moment she could shift time back, change by sheer will the sequence of events. Make it all a bad dream. A small tragedy you spot suddenly in a paper, the abrupt end of someone else’s life.

The sun flowed across the polished floor and touched one arm, making the other instantly cold. She shivered and moved to the front of the house. There it was, the black car moving sleekly up the road towards her, small pennant flying. Fergus would get out, immaculate in his starched uniform, looking as pale and stunned as Fleur; a familiar presence to take them to the airport and the long journey home to bury David.

Fleur turned and walked through the house and down the steps from the kitchen, and stood watching the twins and Ah Heng crouched outside the amah’s room. Ah Heng was filling little bags for their journey and the three of them squatted outside her door on the concrete, heads bent together, chatting in Cantonese like noisy sparrows. From her open doorway Chinese pinkle-ponkle music issued softly.

Two fair heads, one dark smooth one. Ah Heng, feeling Fleur’s stillness, looked up and in that fleeting unguarded moment Fleur saw the bleakness in the amah’s flat, impassive face. The two women stared at each other, accepting an ending where nothing in either of their lives could ever be the same again. No contentment so taken for granted; no happiness so whole.

In lives at each end of a cultural divide, they would, Fleur knew, remember in quiet moments their innocent rivalry for the twins’ love. Here in a house that had been filled with the cheerful life of Master and husband; a place the three of them had experienced together the thrill and joy of the twins, the flourishing of small lives.

‘Time, Missie?’ Ah Heng broke the silence.

‘Yes, Ah Heng. The car’s coming up the road. Saffie, Nikki, come on, time to go.’

The twins looked up but hung on to Ah Heng. Their mother had an unnerving listlessness, a restless preoccupation with something that lay beyond them. It was as if she could no longer see them, as if they had suddenly become frighteningly invisible.

Ah Heng gathered their bags and led them firmly up the steps past Fleur, through the kitchen to their bathroom where she made them use the loo and washed their hands and faces one last time. She checked that the small jumpers she had bought them were still in their cases. Missie had a habit of changing over the clothes she bought the twins from Chinatown. She led them down the front stairs to the open front door where the black official car was crouched, waiting for them.