Months slip by. A greyling March ebbs into a rainy April, which rucks up against daffodil-jocund May. Una sings Robin to sleep with the old songs. She reads, then rereads I Capture the Castle. It opines, among other things, that all psychologists are charlatans. A discussion on food capsules gives Una pause – What would that have meant at camp? Could they have avoided starvation if food had been reduced to tablet form? She sees the Faith-that-was in the young girl who plunges boldly into an icy moat out of sisterly love and herself in Cassandra as she hides in the barn with Heloise the dog. Conversations with Miss Blossom conjure nights long ago, when she and Faith lay whispering into the small hours, their haven of everywhere warmed by their collective breath and smelling of lye. They never had a Miss Blossom, which is lamentable but perhaps for the best – After all, even Miss Blossom betrays the Mortmaine sisters. She sees Isobel in Cassandra as she whoops joyously over a dying Midsummer fire, and Emily in the nascent young woman charmed by a dance. Robin is Cassandra in the tin bath, indulging in her bar of covert chocolate. But it's the ending Una loops back to with each rereading, Only the margins left to write in… This pass through, she notices that Cassandra's journals increase in value as the book progresses. Iain's next letter, breezy, careless and playful.

Auntie,

Taking the risk of sending you Weeping Bay on basis I don't dare risk any of the Lewisian stuff – you've probably read it. I also take leave to question why you send any of it my way as it's obvious you are well-stocked for Aunt Judith alternatives. Leaf By Niggle is for Robin, obviously.

Speaking of conversationalists, why didn't you tell us you'd asked a friend to look into family over here? Bernice and Emmy very annoyed as would have given him run of Trinity House, not least because we all trust him miles more than Henderson. Did not send him the Thomas Carlyle, by the way – seemed a waste of a good book. Did tell Henderson he'd got Uncle Carl's name all wrong. You were right to argue against it. Some poor secretary got the brunt of his ineptitude.

Love always,

Iain

Innisfree, 1950,

Iain,

You only know what I do, which until conversation with Judith over the Utopia Limited interval, did not run to whereabouts of Martin Swallow. As always she left me with the strong impression she believes us to be members of the same club, only I have no memory of joining. Did learn that she talked your uncle out of Intelligence work when they married on the basis that she wanted what family she had left where she could see them. Not unreasonable, but arguably irrelevant to Robin and I. Which was her cue to segue into news of Singapore and Swallows. I had chalked the latest venture up to work.

Did you read Leaf by Niggle? For a man that purports to hate allegory, the symbolism has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Niggle's Parish indeed. Think you and I call it Heaven. Quite bypassed Robin, naturally. Will send a copy on to Jerry and girls anyway – he will appreciate the painterly imagery. Thank you.

Love ever,

Una

There are now several reasons to watch the post. Una looks religiously for Frenny Razdan's miniscule, and in idle moments for the scrupulously careful handwriting she knows from the bookshop's ledger. Neither comes. When a letter does arrive, it bears a Malaysian stamp. Una recognizes that hand, too. She thought the writer was dead.

The return address is for Horley Hall, the other arm of the Anglo-Chinese School, and for a moment Una stares at it, incredulous. But it's only a moment and then she tears impulsively at the envelope with never a thought for the letter-opener, parrot-handled and languishing in a convenient drawer of the rolltop desk.

Dear Miss Meredith,

I received your letter by way of Frenny Razdan. Truth be told I had no idea she was still alive. You'll recall – or perhaps not – I got out of the city shortly before – well, I was in Malaysia when word came they had rounded you and the others up. I don't suppose you know what became of them?

Una thinks, unbidden, Mrs. Bowen died early. Stella Bowen was, in fact, so forthright that the guards tied her to a post and left her. At grey hours, Una still sees her in her death throes. She tries not to do this often. It was awful. But there's no need to burden Percival Curtis with this detail. She would know his handwriting anywhere. All those hours marking communally will do that.

Naturally, I recall Iris. I suppose all of us that survived must – she was distinctive for that monkey of hers. And the lizard. And – there was a buffalo, wasn't there? I could never work out if that was your class talking or if that was a fact. I have a wild idea you once established it as fact.

When she turned up here I knew her at once. She had a different last name, so the connection wasn't immediately obvious. I gather she was adopted by a family up-country. Very rural, hence resorting to the ACS. But her eyes – well, they were yours, weren't they? The shape, obviously, not the colour. I'd know them anywhere. Even if I hadn't, she had a necklace to pray Yeats on. You'll know the one. I think it was supposed to cover her tuition. I refused to let Ipoh take it. Reminded them it was a mission school, Occupation notwithstanding.

She has your fire, to. The slow-burning kind, also Yeats, I think. It was him that talked about 'the slow-burning fire of Her hope?' You'll know, anyway. Fire and rapturous music – that one I know is Yeats. I see now why you always called her Firecracker.

We've started the paperwork to send her home. Are the relevant documents still at Trinity House? If so, can someone you trust send them on? The ideal thing would be to come in person, but that would mean a train journey and I wouldn't recommend it for women travelling alone…

There's more, but Una doesn't see it. She has her fingers at her lips and her heart beating hummingbird-fast in her throat. It's trying to do five in the time of one.

Iris.

Iris alive.

Iris at the Anglo-Chinese School in Malaysia and alive. It is not nearly enough. It is more than Una dared dream of. Her fingers move easily from lips to circling silver fish. Effortlessly Yeats bubbles up from it's wellspring, not Percival Curtis' quotation, but another, older and well-worn.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

'Yeats?' asks a voice in the doorway. Una whirls round, letter in hand to find Martin in the doorframe. No warning, of course, but when had that stopped him?

'May I?' he asks and gestures at the sitting room.

Una gestures ingress even as she says, 'I maintain most people knock. Or at least have a key.'

'I still like surprising you.'

Treading on worn shoes, he says without preamble, 'I come bearing books. Also, parrots.'

That gets Una's attention, He cannot possibly intend Una to cater to the whims of multiple Kikis. That would be madness. But no. The parrots in question are porcelain, glazed and painted in sea-blue and egg-yolk yellow.

'You were quite right, of course,' he says as he presses them into her hands. 'About the unbearableness of uncertainty.'

''A funny thing that,' says Una. 'I would have minded less if you hadn't been right. For all I know they are dead. Letting it go as a bad job would be the sensible thing to do.'

'That presupposes,' says Martin, 'sense and love go together. They often don't.'

'No,' says Una. Then, brushing a thumb against the porcelain parrots in their blue and yellow majesty, she says, 'Those are blue and gold macaws, not parrots.'

Kind eyes narrow in a gnomish face. 'How,' he says, 'can you possibly tell?'

'My brother,' she says, 'was an expert. Is one. Whichever it pleases God.'

'Do you absorb many from people you care about? Or are parrots the limit?'

Una laughs. She says as she sets the letter and parrots, 'Oh, there's lots. Poetry, music, abstruse theological arguments, quite a lot about Anglicanism and how it is not – emphasis not mine – Presbyterianism.'

'Nothing about bookshops, then?'

'Well, you will keep leaving Robin and I to work that one out at our leisure,' says Una. She motions Martin into a chair, then plucks the porcelain macaws off the table and installs them one on either end of the bookshelf that grows seamlessly out of the rolltop desk. Ingleside, Una remembers, was protected by Gog and Magog. Trinity House has Kuan Yin in her jade placidity. Why shouldn't Innisfree, all yellow brick and shuttered windows take its protection from this unlikely pantheon?

'You said something about books?'

A gnarled hand disappears into Martin Swallow's jacket pocket. As he fishes he says, 'You, my dear, don't half ask for impossible things.'

He grins the grin of a Cheshire cat, and with a flourish produces a slim, leather-bound volume.

'Cressida would have your head for that,' says Una, mildly. Since she is not Cressida, she spares the unsuspecting bookseller a lecture and accepts the offering instead. There are more egregious liberties and they have come from far worse people. In the shifting kaleidoscope spectrum of ills, Una doesn't mind this one from this man.

The book in hand is covered with green leather, silver plating, and stamped delicately on the cover, Essays in Idleness.

'I never asked,' says Una. 'You offered to hunt it down. Years ago.' She inspects it with half an eye, carefully thumbing through leaf-slender pages that crackle like ice at the touch. The giver has the brunt of her attention; Una's acutely aware of him watching her. He's pleased, she can see that, and he wants her to be, too. Acquiescing isn't difficult.

'Assumed you wanted the English,' he says. 'I'll let you guess how many people fancied translating from the Japanese, shall I?'

Una shakes her head. 'Entirely your territory, that. And for goodness sake, take your coat off, and stop hovering. I thought we re-established pax before you went haring off chasing geese. I'll make up tea.'

'Who said anything about geese?' comes Martin's disembodied voice from Una's sitting room.

'My nephew' says Una from the kitchen. 'Also Judith Carlisle. If I wasn't to know you'd gone off after long-lost Merediths, you neglected to tell them so.'

'Judith Carlisle,' says Martin, still disembodied but drifting closer, 'is part of the Anglican Inquisition. You can only trust one word in six.'

'I'll tell Bernice you say so,' says Una. 'And Iain comes from God-fearing Presbyterian stock. Well, partly. So I can trust him. Say one word in three. Was he wrong?'

Martin leans what must surely be uncomfortably against the kitchen door jamb, arms crossed. He says, 'I'd have said to you in the first place, only I didn't want – '

'To raise my hopes. I worked that out. Martin, if I really was made of spun sugar I would never have survived all that in the first place.'

'Or anything afterwards. It had occurred to me. It's the principle of the thing.'

Down come the red tea bowls. They are more worn these days than they were in 1929, but then so is Una. She reaches unthinking for a gold tin with a black-and-red design, the smell of Frenny Razdan's Assam, dark and pungent in Innisfree's galley kitchen. But then a memory stops Una short. The amber-gold of white tea in these cups, the floral notes of it comingling with guavas and the sound of mynas singing. Over her shoulder, she says half to Martin, half to a disquiet ghost, 'What's your preference? Li and I always made white tea in the evening, but…'

'What was it you said? Entirely your territory, that.'

Una laughs, unconcerned and sun-warm. The sound harmonizes with the bubbling kettle. She swaps gold-painted tin with black-and-red geometric designs for a silver caddy with blue and green inlay. She unscrews the lid and the delicate fragrance of hand-wrapped white tea unfurls, floral and airy. It smells of home, of Singapore, and feels entirely at odds with this blustery autumnal evening.

Contrapuntal to the kettle, her guest asks, 'Where's your Miss Bird?'

'Girl Guides,' says Una, 'She'll be sorry to have missed you.'

Martin has a photo in hand when she re-enters the room.

'Sorry,' he says, obviously abashed. 'Not really my business.' He reminds Una of George Cazalet, wayward ACS pupil, at his most contrite. Once Una looked up to find him walking to the far corner of the room, the one reserved for punishment, Because, he said when asked, You were going to put me there, anyways, Miss. It makes Una smile. She sets the tea down and crosses the room to look over his shoulder at the photo. Iris on that long-ago day, head thrown back, plait like a whipcord, arms out, and Puck on her shoulder. Una hadn't got so far as to realize Percival Curtis had returned it or that Frenny had passed it along.

'Our Firecracker,' says Una.

'The one you've been looking for all these years?'

'The same. I've only the one missing niece, thank God.'

'Four girls, though, haven't you?'

'Have I?'

'Well,' says Martin, helping himself to the empty frame on the rolltop desk and commencing to reinsert Iris' photo, 'Your Firecracker, just here,' and he taps the frame against the leather top of the desk ensuring the picture spreads evenly across all four corners. 'Robin, naturally. Then there's Emily over in Singapore and Joan in England. Am I wrong?'

He very nearly isn't.

'Five,' says Una, softly. 'Elise, too. Robin's mother. If you'd seen her – she was so heartbreakingly young. The way she was around the guards…I could never work out if it was men, motherhood or camp that frightened her most.'

Una hears his exhalation, whistle-sharp as she moves away to pour out the tea and hands one of the scarlet tea bowls to her guest. The white tea looks like liquid amber against the warm blazon of the bowls.

'I'm glad to be wrong,' he says, taking the tea bowl and catching at her fingers. 'About Iris.'

Una does not know what to say to this, so sips the tea, which is light and floral, seasoned with memories of another life. Martin does this too, and there's a weight to the silence, like music slurred or tied or tenuto that Una can't parse. Absently, he fusses with the radio, and it blares to sudden, static-raddled life, picking up midway through Nat King Cole's Straighten Up and Fly Right.

Una smiles. How baffled her gentle, soft-spoken father would be to know Cole's signature tune with its verve and zip' took inspiration from a sermon.

'Will you go back for her?' Not the volta Una expects, but this is not headline news where their conversations are concerned.

'No.' Una sets her tea bowl down on its coaster and reaches for and hands Martin the letter from the ACS. There's nothing in that can't be read by anyone, and Martin Swallow ceased to be anyone years ago. She resettles in her chair and resumes her tea. It still tastes of Singapore and warm twilight evenings. There should be salted guavas on the honeyed coffee table. Instead, there are meticulously-sliced shortbread pieces. Nat King Cole becomes Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, sinuous as memory. It gets into Una's blood like ghosts or damp cold. Opposite her, Martin reads, tea growing tepid.

'Ah,' he says, refolding the letter. It occurs to Una, idly, that he likely knows more of the contents than she does.

It's an evening for questions and answers, apparently, because he says suddenly, with a gesture of fingers at her hand, 'I take it he gave you that ring?'

'Hmm?' says Una, because at first she is too far away in memories of fireflies and guavas to register the question.

'Also not my business,' he says with another apologetic smile. 'I've always wondered where it came from, at the risk of treading where angels won't. You never talk about the people from before. Not the ones you were close to. I take the liberty of assuming, obviously there were people you were close to.'

Una smiles and shakes her head, because it's the kind of half-playful observation she expects from Joan or Emily, but more eloquently constructed. As fishing expeditions go, there have been clumsier efforts.

'It's a hazard of daring to love, isn't it?' says Una.

'Certainly I've found it is,' says Martin.

Sensing he won't repeat the question, Una says 'Percival Curtis never gave me jewellery.'

'What?'

They have circled so far past his original question that his forgetfulness hardly surprises Una. She says, again, 'Percival Curtis never gave me jewellery. Lots of other things, but not that.'

'Yeats?' asks Martin, for what, incredibly, is the second time that evening.

'Yeats,' Una agrees. 'Auden. Evenings out. He once tried very hard to persuade me to leave Singapore.'

Pleaded, more nearly. Hours and hours of anxious conversations over tea at the end of the world.

'And you wouldn't go.'

'No. I couldn't leave Puck. Or Carl. I was terrified – Li too – that he would come back to an empty house. And – this is going to sound absurd– I think she and I were afraid for the house if we left it empty.'

'Given what happened to empty houses,' says Martin, 'I make that imminently sensible.'

Una nods gratitude. She says, 'We left it that if I changed my mind I'd find Percival Curtis at the school in Ipoh. That ring came from Li. She thought it would keep me safe. Afterwards, it bought Robin respectability.' Then, on consideration, 'You'd have got on, the two of you. He was one of our white poppy number.'

That gets a response. Martin's eyes widen in surprise. All he says though is, 'Oh?'

Una hums. Says, 'I used to sew one for him each November. It was only the two of us at the school that wanted them, so I suppose that was part of it.'

'And now he's found Iris and is sending her home.'

'Yes,' says Una thickly. She is surprised to find her throat tight and her eyes prickling with tears. There are things in that letter, if Una thinks too hard, that beget ghosts. That necklace of Iris's for instance, because it isn't Iris's, it's Li's, and that means…It could mean anything, Una tells her pet Iago sternly. A ruby-throated Iris does not mean Li is dead. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine… Li isn't dead. Not until Una gets the sealed and signed documentation attesting to this fact. Preferably with a picture of the grave attached.

'I should never have asked,' says Martin.

Una swipes at her eyes and says, 'It isn't that – that was years ago. I hate to think of Iris alone. The life she must have had…'

The tears are back, prickling, hot things that blur the contours of the room and send rainbows coruscating across Una's vision. This time they aren't a surprise. The hug Martin pulls her into is. But it's comforting too, so Una allows herself to be cradled against his chest and to breath the smell of old books ink, and elsewhere. It helps, and as the thought of Iris eases, Una tries to remember the last time she cried like this. For Elise English, maybe. But then, it's entirely possible that she and the others were all wrung out of tears by then. Out of the corner of a half-open eye she catches the blurry impression of one of the porcelain macaws and thinks Puck, you cried for Puck. How Una forgot – but then, so much of Kingsport feels like a dream. Sometimes the consulate is impossible, and grey hours of the morning turn traitor, but it still has the unmistakable feel of a fairy-tale, where there's always enough food and the sea shimmers jewel-bright and the war is over and no one has to bow to anyone else.

The worn pad of a thumb traces the outline of Una's tears, catching them before they can fall. The radio burbles My Foolish Heart to no one in particular. It sounds like Singapore evenings and it should aggravate the tears. Instead, it mixes with the smell of ink, books and elsewhere and stems them.

'How does it go?' says Martin.

I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips,
And take her hands…

There is the hesitation of so many collective heartbeats in which Una registers that Martin means to kiss her and she means to let him.

It is not the first time anyone has kissed Una Meredith. But it is the first time Martin Swallow kisses Una Meredith and it is certainly the first time it feels like home. It begins as the promise of the moon slanting through cherry blossoms and escalates to the promise of storm-havens and safe.

Then there's the rattle of the hall door, and childish singing, off-key and wild,
Up in the air, the junior birdsmen,
Up in the air and upsidedown,
Up in the air, the junior birdsmen,
With their noses to the ground!
What does it take...

This is home, too, strange to say. They disengage as Robin and Isobel come sweeping into the house with the rustle and rapidity of susurrating leaves. Kiki shrieks Murrderrr, Isobel swaps The Junior Birdsmen for Van Amburgh's Menagerie, and Robin is all exclamatory greeting.

'You're back' she says.

'You've grown, Miss Bird,' says Martin, matching her italics. Robin stands to attention and verily preens parrot-fashion, arching her back to look taller than ever. Una resolutely does not catch Martin's eye, because she has no desire to laugh. So much of motherhood, Iris taught Una, was trying extremely hard to meet absurdity with deadly seriousness.

'How was the music badge?' asks Una. Robin either doesn't hear or is otherwise engaged. Una, were she the type to place bets, would bank on the latter. Robin rounds on Martin and asks, 'Did you bring us anything back?'

'Robin,' says Una, but ineffectually in the face of so much cumulative merriment. Martin doesn't help by reaching with ritual solemnity into his coat pocket and producing The Ship of Adventure. The girls fall on it, shrieking and squealing with a musicality even more dubious than the Junior Birdsmen chorus.

'You have an awful lot to answer for, persuading me into buying her those books,' says Una. Courteously, Martin neglects to mention that she hasn't bought a Trent-Mannering instalment since their first meeting. He's gifted Robin every book since and Una has let him do it. But even as she says it, the girls take their places on the sofa, keen to be read to. Robin nestles between her adults, and Isobel snugs herself against Una's shoulder, crushing her feet against the arm of the faded navy sofa.

'Me too, Aunt Allie,' she says, sounding atypically childish and sleepy. She looks it too, in her periwinkle blue uniform, yellow tie half undone and beret jauntily askew. Una tugs a wayward nut-brown curl into place.

'Of course, you too, Miss Mannering,' she says.

Never mind Isobel should have outgrown this ritual years ago; It's nice to think the war never harrowed her as it did Joan or Emily. Kiki joins them, still singing The Junior Birdsmen. The latest Adventure book unfolds and if the world is still askew, it is less askew than it was. Iris is alive and coming home. It's a home improbably full of parrots and wild stories, but it's theirs. Iris, Una thinks, will love it.