The noise rose as the train departed and Fleur closed her eyes against the curious glances at her.

The train moved sluggishly through the outskirts of the city and across the causeway into Malaysia, and Fleur, exhausted, slept. When she opened her eyes again people had grown quieter, dozing in the sun which slid off the paddy fields and cast shadows across bent figures in a scene so timeless Fleur could have been a child or young wife again.

She remembered looking down from the plane carrying David’s body home and watching the rice fields disappearing as the plane rose upwards. She had sat on that long journey home in a catatonic and bemused disbelief that he was really dead.

It had been spring when she and the twins had flown back to England to bury David in the place he had grown up in, the place where his parents still lived. That little middle-class village had remained a microcosm of the past even then, with its tiny roads and steep banks littered with creamy primroses.

It had been spring in the tiny churchyard, and, as David’s coffin was lowered to the bugler’s lament, Fleur had looked round for a moment at the graves and the stunned mourners. She had clutched the hands of the twins and thought, how can this day be so extraordinarily beautiful? How can the trees and hedges burst with new life when David is dead? When I will never recover from the horror of his death? When his life ended after an argument, when I had no chance to tell him he had nothing to fear, nothing to be jealous of. I loved him. He was the father of my children and I would always love him. Always.

It was the dichotomy of a world so new and green and perfect and the bleak finality of David being lowered forever into the ground to the trembling notes of a military bugler that had struck her so starkly that day.

In his parents’ cottage a cherry tree was bursting into pink, and bluebells shone in a haze of blue and white in the orchard. David’s mother and Fleur’s were offering plates of tiny canapés round and gracefully making small talk as if it mattered. As if it mattered. It is what they did, her parents’ generation. They never showed their grief, it just wasn’t done. It was true of the army too. Other ranks could yell the place down when they had their babies, officers’ wives bit their lips.

That day of the funeral someone had thrown the French windows open and Fleur saw David’s father standing with his back to the house, whisky clasped between his hands, for a moment totally unable to exchange inanities. She had walked out to him and he had wrapped his arms around her and in all the beauty of his garden they had rocked and rocked together, mourning, mourning the loss of the centre of their universe. The waste of a young life.