O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- William Butler Yeats, Among School Children
Christmas arrives. It arrives with an air of surrealism, because still the Japanese drop bombs on Singapore and all the while Una and her family swap gifts.
Una bakes the usual things, not all of them because food is starting to come at a premium, but she bakes Christmas pudding. She can do that at least.
'Not,' she tells Puck, who sits on the counter and uses his long grey tail to whisk orange egg yolks, 'because it's tradition, but because our Firecracker needs it to be Christmas.'
Christmas means Christmas pudding. It means Christmas Cake, too, and shortbread, short and buttery, but the country's at war and Una can't do all of these things. Anyway, Iris has a birthday soon, and they will need to do a cake for that. Nine is too important an age to forgo cake.
In the meantime, Una and Puck beg, borrow and steal the requisite ingredients for a pudding. Well, Puck steals, Una suspects. She goes up and down Evelyn road asking for pinches of this and bits of that on the basis that they need more than the five people – she counts Puck – to eat the whole pudding and her neighbours can help with this.
They are, Una finds, happy to do it. All up and down Evelyn road little preparations for the holiday are underway. Mrs Bowen strings lights around the pillars of her house. The Carters two doors down hang lanterns. People pop in and out of doorways with declarations of 'I was just going to market to buy thus-and-such for so-and-so. Do you need me to pick you up anything for…'
Standing in the ever-more-crowded market shops has become dangerous, so the denizens of Evelyn Road do this small thing for each other. They go in rosters down to the market to purchase gifts for family. Una watches Iris, little ears pricked with intrigue at who's getting what, and sees that all this plotting and precision adds an extra fission of excitement for the children.
Una slips the obligatory sixpence into the pudding, stirs and wishes fiercely that the British save them by the time Iris has her birthday. The kitchen smells plummy and spiced, as a good boiling pudding should. Cloves-heavy and rich. Una breathes it in, picks out faint notes of the chickens in their cupboard and the tea leaves in their chest. An odd, but complex and thorough olfactory harmony.
'Come and wish,' she says to Li, sitting at the kitchen table. Earlier she helped Una dice and slice ingredients. Now she distracts Puck with a card trick. The cards hit the table with papery thumps, thwap-rap-thwap. They keep time with Una's spoon as it jostles and stirs the bubbling pudding.
'It brings luck,' says Una, which Li knows anyway, but that does it. Li crosses the room, nudges Una away from the pot and takes the battered and bent wooden spoon in hand. It long ago bent to the curve of Una's hand, which makes it awkward for Li, but she closes her eyes, breathes in and wishes. Una watches her do it, watches Li's lips move, silent. The only thig Una knows to a certainty is that Li sends her wish up to Kuan Yin. Li always sends wishes to Kuan Yin.
'Firecracker,' calls Una, from where she leans against the counter.
'Wishing time!'
There's a rattling and bustling of so many elephants in miniature as Iris hears and obeys the summons. Una can picture her niece as she half-runs, half-tumbles down the stairs in her hurry. They have done a terrible job, Una, Li and Carl, of making an elegant lady out of their Firecracker. But then, Una thinks as brilliant black braids and flowing purple skirts the colour of African Violets swish into the kitchen, she wouldn't alter Iris for worlds.
At so nearly nine she calls herself that, Iris is almost tall enough to reach the bubbling saucepan herself. Una offers her a chair to stand on, or a stool, but Iris demurs. She says, 'I'm almost a lady now, Auntie. Teacher said so.'
Una thinks Teacher can't have heard Iris taking the stairs six at a time like a giddy buffalo, but doesn't comment. She smiles unapologetically. Bends and kisses the plaited, dark head. Iris has found and folded orchids into the plaits, Una sees. Unbidden this conjures an image of Rilla with flowers in her hair long ago. Thank God, Una thinks, half-prayer and half-relief, she is too young for all of that.
'Make a wish,' says Una, fiercely hopeful.
'I wish…' begins Iris.
Even though it is unnecessary, even though Una knows Iris knows, and knows that Iris knows that she knows, Una says, 'Don't say. Just wish hard, here.' She touches Iris's chest where her heart beats, ebullient and jocund as the girl herself.
Iris rolls her eyes for form's sake. She says, 'All I was going to say was that I wished for a pair of fox wings for flying, made of fox fur obviously, not flying foxes, and an otter that could speak any language I told it – for a friend, not a pet – and a pool of rainbow water, and…'
Una and Li try hard not to laugh. This largely involves not catching each other's eyes as Iris waxes ever more fanciful. Their Firecracker is a great dreamer. And while these things are lovely and exotic, Una knows they are not Iris's wish. She catches the moment where fancy becomes solemn and sees the real wish in Iris's eyes.
It happens so quickly that Una could blink and miss it. But then Iris frowns, slightly, eyebrows knitting together, her eyes creasing at the corners. One crease never quite goes away, and that is how Una knows that the wish makes the difference and fulfils Teacher's prophecy. Turns girl into woman. Iris wishes, and that one wrinkle at the corner of her left eye is forever. So, Una knows her Iris doesn't wish for fox wings or talking otters or rainbow water or anything else so wonderfully, exotically intriguing. No, Iris's wish is fiercer and sharper and goes soul-deep, and Una catches in it the echo of her own wish, of Li's wish. Let the British save Singapore. Soon.
'Puck next,' says Una, because she cannot bear this sudden burst of maturation in her little girl. Their girl. Firecracker.
Iris hop-skips away from the stove and hands the spoon to Puck.
'Make a wish, Puck,' she says.
Puck takes the spoon, dips it in the boiling mixture and stirs the way the women stir. Three times clockwise, once counter-clockwise. His little simian face creases and if Una didn't know better, she would say Puck was wishing, too. She decides Puck is wishing. After all, this is Puck's home and they are his people. Why shouldn't Puck want what they want?
Unbidden again bubbles another memory out of the pudding It's not of the last war, Una realises, parsing it, it's from earlier. It's not even of Christmas, but of the year Faith Meredith scandalised the Glen by inviting the Blythes over to carve jack-o-lanterns for All Hallows Eve. In this ghost of yesteryear, Christmas pudding is swapped for cider. Una alternates with Nan and Di stirring their bubbling, cloves-and-cinnamon brew. Jem and Faith compete for whose pumpkin can grim most luridly and electrifyingly, so the Glen girls stir by the sunset-rich orange of gourds-turned-candles. Nan is trying but failing to feign indifference to Jerry at the kitchen counter, who is equally failing to feigning indifference Nan-ward in favour of history exam preparations. But the air is thick with the smell of pumpkin innards, hideously orange as the goblin-light of the Manse and the witching-smell of cinnamon. Indifference goes badly for the Glen's infamous too-wise-to-woo-peacably pair, and it's all Una can do not to smile. Di doesn't smile either; She grins to rival one of Jem's pumpkins. Una pretends not to see when Nan smuggles Jerry a half-mug of premature cider.
What Una's ghost-self does not have to try or fail to ignore is the looming spectre of Walter Blythe, lurking spectral-fashion in the doorway. For once he slides ghost-graceful past her senses, usually so Walter-attenuated. She blames Nan and Jerry for diverting her. Nan, Jerry and the orange-guts-smell of pumpkin. Then Walter says with all the solemnity of the witching hour, When shall we three meet again/ In thunder, lightening or in rain, and gestures at the girls-turned-women around their pot of bubbling cider, oranged and honeyed by pumpkin-light.
The three girls at the hob stir as Una, Li, Iris and Puck now stir, a lifetime away. The ghost of the cider smell, cloves and cinnamon savoured comes back to Una, and she recalls she lost count of her stirring. When she startles she sends a generous portion slopping over the rim of the pot for the Manse's then-cat. Di takes the spoon in hand and punctures Walter's gothic atmosphere by saying positively gleefully, 'Well, I can't do next Thursday because I promised to tutor Addie Crawford in geometry. And Nan can't do Monday because…'*
Whatever was to happen on Monday was secret, clearly, because Nan jabbed Di's elbow with less than subtlety and Walter affected deep hurt.
'You wound me, Doss,' he says in Una's memory, 'Such prosiness, from you.' But then he grins, and it isn't Jem's goblin-grin but a grin like moonlight. The kind of gentle, fairyworld grin that could steal a girl's heart and hold it unsuspecting. It can still do it, even in memory, even as a ghost. Una feels the water-to-wine rush of it now, shivery and transmuted through time and place.
Back in the Singaporean present, Puck shifts spoon from hands to tail and holds it out to Una. She takes it and shakes her head to drive out ghosts. It almost works. But dizzying grins like moonlight are hard things to overcome.
'Run and fetch Daddy,' says Una to Iris. 'He's got to wish, too.'
Iris trots off, and Puck goes with her. There is a long, pregnant pause shared between aunt and mother, the two women who love Iris most in the world, excepting Carl.
'We're losing her,' says Li, wistful. She begins to gather up the cards where they lie loose on the kitchen table. They go thwap-rap-thwap as they collide with one another.
'Only the girl,' says Una. But she feels relieved that Li saw it too, that wish that turned serious, that first, incipient hint of the woman in the child. And she thinks of Walter, of Macbeth, the solemn cant of the boy's when shall we three meet again…and thinks hollowly that the answer is never. That even if there come other Christmases where they conspire over the pudding they will not have this Iris, childishly graceful and painfully sincere. She will be older, wiser and longer-lived. Li must sense some of this.
Her next words are, 'It's the right way round.' She says them to her cards. Thawp-rap-thwap. She looks up and smiles at Una. Says, 'But at least, whatever happens, we'll always have each other.'
'Always,' says Una. 'We can commiserate together when it's her turn to go dancing.'
'What are we commiserating over?' asks Carl, joining them. 'Whose turn to go dancing?'
There is no way to tell him, not really. Besides, Una thinks, it's different for fathers. Girls stay girls longer for their fathers than for the women around them. Something about becoming, she thinks. About the way women recognise and draw that nascent maturity to them and nurture it. Una hasn't yet plotted it all out. When shall we three meet again…
'You're making a wish,' is all she says to Carl in the event.
Carl wishes last of all, blue eye twinkling like a river in sunlight, all those refracted glimmers like starlight at high noon. And just as Una knows Iris's wish was serious, she equally knows Carl's is not. Carl, Una thinks, wishes them something frivolous to keep them all that way. For another buffalo, maybe, or the moon in a jar, or a string of starlight to gift Li this wedding anniversary. Twelve years is silk and fine linen, and probably Carl could get the silk for looking. But he's always been extravagant in his giving, lavish in his atypicality, so a string of starlight seems at least equally, if not more likely.
'What did you wish?' Una asks, to hear the fun of it.
'That,' said Carl, 'would be telling. And spoil the luck. You know better.'
He grins at her, a wide, toothy thing that is three parts mischief and one part undiluted charm. Una Meredith does not charm easily, but for now she allows Carl to charm her. She shakes her head and takes the pot off the hob. She feels the return to mundanity like the puncturing of a bubble, but not unpleasantly so. Perhaps, on second thought, it's like stepping out of an evening gown and into a nightdress. Comfortable, warm even, but without the sheen and sparkle of high fashion. She checks to make sure the silver sixpence is secure and begins the next stage of the pudding.
Christmas inches closer.
At the Anglo-Chinese School Una is gifted an Advent Candle and told to light it each day until Christmas, which seems not only a waste of a candle and anyway dangerously Roman, but also like a fire hazard. Apparently no one has ever seen Una's students in full, over-zealous throttle. She lights the candle anyway. Advent, she recalls her father saying, is an apocalyptic season. Her father, obviously, never taught school. The real apocalypse is not Advent, nor even the bombing of Singapore. It is William Cazlet holding a match to this Advent Candle and waving it like a fiery beacon.
In the evenings she sits at the piano and plays everything from Sheep May Safely Graze to Lead Kindly Light. Where there are words, and where Carl knows them, he joins in. Usually he is out of tune or sharp, or flat, and often Una thinks this is deliberate. Iris laughs, and dances around the room with Puck. They keep, as Li observes, much better time to the music than Carl.
'They get that from you,' says Li. She sits in fine, burnt-orange organza that glows like a sunset against the robin's egg blue sofa, one of Phil Blake's ridiculous Christmas mugs in hand. The mugs have Royal Albert Christmas Old Country Rose stamp, and Una considers the whole thing horrifyingly Victorian and sentimental. Also, they clash with everything. The furniture, Li's gown, the other Christmas china…On the other hand, Li fell in love with them for the sheer Victorian sentimentality of them in all its horrifying pomp and circumstance, so now they are a tradition.
For a moment Una slips back in time to the year Naomi Blake, newly married, came to visit. She hears again Naomi's laughter over those mugs. Gracious, says her ghost in its warm, laughter-bright treble, Did Mama give you those? I wondered where they got to.
Una's own ghost says in answer, You can have them back, if you're fishing. Though I never said, if Li asks.
And Naomi, rendered nigh speechless with mirth, Not on your life! Mama wasn't the only one to want shot of them!
Then Iris begins to sing with zeal, We WISH you a MERRY Christmas, We WISH you…and Una has to switch melodies to keep up with her. She does it with the kind of improvisational skill hard-won of years playing for the Glen choir, so that Carl says to the dancing child-and-monkey dyad, 'Auntie's just showing off now, don't you think?'
Iris is too busy singing to answer. She leaps for and skyrockets past the High B flat of Una's piano descant, landing instead somewhere on the C after the F after High C. Oh, to be a giddy girl-child at Christmas, Una thinks.
Li says, 'Well, someone ought to, and you can't. Why not Una?'
'Why not indeed,' says Carl and steals a sip of Li's cocoa.
It isn't really cocoa. They made it earlier of condensed milk, hot water and the last of a tin of chocolate powder. The smell is all wrong for cocoa. But it's hot, vaguely milky, and it's Christmas, so it does the trick.
Then, like a trumpet sounding, like a herald, Christmas is there. Una knows this because she and Nenni are ambushed by no small weight tumbling at an ungodly hour onto the bed.
The weight says in riotous cadence, 'Auntie! It's ChristMAS!'
Nenni bolts to horrified, electric alertness. She flattens her ears to nothing and hisses unceremoniously, yellow eyes beady. Una is slower to wake up. She pushes herself into a sitting position and scrubs at her eyes. Iris, fully dressed in her best dress, perches, limbs all akimbo, atop the quilt. She reaches for Nenni but Nenni dives, still horrified and offended, into the crook of Una's elbow. They make an improbable trio, Nenni bespotted and indignant, Una in her whitework nightdres, and Iris in the satin-sheen of evergreen taffeta, a darkly dyed blue lace at the cuffs, throat and hem. She looks like the peacock she sometimes pretends to.
'What's all this, Firecracker?' says Una. She thinks again, as she did that day over the pudding, She is too grown up. Hears again Walter too, in that kitchen doorway as they made cider. When shall we three meet again…
'It's Christmas!' says Iris, again with emphasis.
It is Christmas, and overhead, blue-banded zero-planes are winging, gliding and swooping like dragonflies. Like moths. Like falling stars. And it fazes Iris not at all. Thank God, says Una to her Maker, and crushes girl, self-righteous cat, and evergreen taffeta to her chest.
'Happy Christmas, Firecracker,' Una says. Iris snuggles contentment.
The neighbours come to eat the pudding. Little William Cazlet's family is there, and somehow he ends up with the task of lighting the brandy on fire. His mother's horrified look mirrors Una's own, but the others don't seem to register this. Iris watches him, fascinated, Puck sat to attention on her nigh-on-nine-year-old shoulders. His tail swings pendulum-rhythmic, like a grey scarf against her gown, and he grooms the coil of Iris's hair while all the while she watches William with the match.
Whoosh, goes the brandy, up goes the fire. It leaps and dances, the best kind of fireworks display, and then winds and dwindles to nothing, its fiery clockwork exhausted. They laugh and chat and eat the pudding, Puck and Akela ducking and weaving after guests to beg scraps.
Later, once they have gone, Li lights a fire and the little family trade gifts. Akela has had his already in the shape of the Christmas pudding, and Nenni likewise. Only she got that rarity that was a saucer of milk. A silly, idle use of milk but everyone approves.
The fire burns with the kind of witch-light that recalls Una's girlhood in Rainbow Valley. She watches it, with it's elongated shadows like dancers, or swan's necks, and feels the ghosts of those days circle. She wouldn't, she thinks, watching Iris tear into the paper of her gift, trade what she has now for what she had then. One can have too much of standing and waiting, whatever Milton might say about it. But sometimes she sees a spark in Iris's eye and thinks it would be a rare, extravagant kind of luxury to watch her fashion a birch cup at the sacred place, or lounge under the tree lovers with Puck.
Iris's paper yields a Woolworth's bear, and she crows. It's a childish gift. Una bought it for a girl that was younger than Iris is now that she's made her wish over the pudding. Iris doesn't register this fact. She crushes the bear to her, and then crushes Una too. This is awkward, because Una is perched on the piano bench and the momentum of child and bear sends them toppling backwards onto the keys, which clink, clank and jangle their boisterous endorsement of the embrace.
'I'll call him Edward,' she says.
'All bears,' Una says, 'Should be called Edward.'
Edward helps Iris unwrap the gift from her parents, and so does Puck. They compete, child, toy, and monkey, to see who can slash with most gusto at the crinkling paper.
'Careful,' says Li, and when Iris uncovers a journal, Una understands the why of this. It is more than the liability of the jacket to tear. It is a soft leather, emerald green like Harry the lizard, and Puck's clawed hands could slice it effortlessly. But that's not what Li means. Middle Alley, where Una knows Li bought it, is no longer there. There will be no more journals. Not for Una, Iris or Li. Nowhere for Carl to buy notepaper for his notes. Paper Alley is no better.
Iris doesn't know this, though. Iris doesn't need to. She's lavish in her praises. She strokes the leather as if it's a cat and sets it reverently on the low-slung coffee table next to the gaudy Victoriana of Phil Blake's mugs in Royal Albert, Christmas Old Country Rose.
Una swivels so that she's facing the piano, and says, 'Shall we have music?'
Puck scarpers to join her, even as the others voice assent. And there they sit and play four-hands, monkey and woman, all the best beloved carols. The fire crackles, the Christmas Old Country Rose is tempered by growing shadows, and the piano sends music tumbling like a waterfall. Like an acrobat. A crane. A silk scarf on the wind. Even, Una thinks, but vaguely, far in the back of her mind, like the swoop and dive of a Japanese zero-plane, all blue-banded and silver.
*with apologies to Terry Pratchett. its too good a bit not to nick.
Parnokianlipstic - Steel is the perfect word for the core of Una, and more on that in later chapters. The image I always go back to writing her in this dire situation is that little girl with the frozen hands who was too proud to accept Mary Vance's offer of a muff. She was covetting it seconds before and privately grumbling about Mary, but then she's offered unlooked for sweetness and htat little hint of steel slivers and says, no. Not that way. And I'm delighted someone appreciates the descriptions. Sometimes I feel like I'm telling more than showing, but I have all these first person accounts in my head full of details I want to share :) Agree completely about Walter. For a canon character that usually gets on my nerves he will keep popping up! And Barcode, another one for the soundtrack. Antonia whirling away unstoppably sort of suits the mood of escalating catastrophe, hm?