Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- W. B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Iris's birthday and still they are not saved. Una thinks, wistfully, of the Christmas pudding they set so gloriously alight and feels a pang. She touches a hand to the leaping, arcing triad of dolphins at her neck where they orbit their saphire the way Li touches the head of her Kuan Yin. Later, Una will touch that, too. But for now her Trinitarian dolphins in silver do the trick. The pang ebbs and an old idiom of Aunt Martha's ambushes Una. If wishes were horses…Una is not Aunt Martha, so does not finish this thought. She ties a bow on her gift for Iris, and goes in search of Li and Carl.
Carl has Iris's gift in hand, a long, slim thing. Not, Una thinks, a pen to go with the journal. Much too functional for Carl. Una smiles, shakes her head. She sees that opposite her and beside Carl, Li does the same. She touches a hand to her throat, where the trinity fish leap around their ember-heart of a ruby, and Una sees they are both wearing Carl's latest gift, too. Una's fish snug against Cecilia's locket, Li's exposed and dancing for anyone to see. The ruby an incarnadine heart, exposed and raw, protected only by its fish. Also, Una notices, Li wears her irises, actual and the broach Carl gifted her years ago. She plucks a stray flower out from behind her ear and hands it to Una. This is a long-standing tradition between them. Always Carl gives Li irises for their anniversary, and always, on Iris's birthday, Una and Li see the flowers get one, last, fashionable airing. Now, Una tucks the delicate blue flower behind her ear. It tickles.
'Lovely,' Carl says. He grins Puck's grin at them, the one three parts mischief and one part charm. He reaches across his wife's shoulder and plucks another flower, which he settles awkwardly behind his own left ear. Carl doesn't have enough hair to secure it, and what hair he has is thinning, so it takes a bit of fussing to secure. Li tries, and so does Una, but they're laughing too much at the spectacle he makes, so Puck takes over. This is not part of tradition. This is Carl being unrepentantly, mercilessly himself and they let him do it.
Puck finishes, sits back on Carl's shoulder, and crows, pleased with his work. Carl says, 'Will I do?'
'Very nicely,' says Una.
'Beautiful,' says Li. 'It brings out your eyes.'
They link arms, the three of them, and then tread cat-light up the stairs to Iris's room.
Iris is still in bed. She's always a reluctant riser, and on her birthday they indulge her. She's lying in bed, but not really asleep. Una can tell because Iris's eyes button too tight when she feigns sleep. In actual sleep she is as relaxed and fluid as water. Una always marvels at it. How can one little girl cover so much space? She lets Iris have her pretence, though.
They sing for her. Una an octave higher than the composer of this particular serenade likely intended, but at least in the right key, whereas Carl is – deliberately, Una swears – several keys and half a dozen semitones well out of pitch. Li grounds Una's treble, and Iris jolts upright like a jack-in-the-box, her hands clasped under her chin and eyes wide and pellucid as darkly shining moons.
'You remembered!' she says, as per long-standing ritual.
Carl stops his terrible singing. He affects a perplexed look as he glances between sister and wife. 'Oh,' he says. 'Is today important?'
They play along. Li says, 'Important?'
'No,' says Una. 'No I don't think – unless…I think there's something on at the school.'
'No,' Carl says, 'you're confused, Una. That's next week. No, today is…Is today when that very important guest is coming?'
Li shakes her head. 'We never have important guests, my love,' she says. 'No, I think today I promised Una we would go into the city…'
'It's my birthday,' says Iris, despairing of her adults. Puck leaps from Carl's shoulder to Iris's bed and there dances a delicate, simian hornpipe.
'Birthday?' Carl says. 'Oh, is that why we have these?'
He brandishes his gift and Una holds out hers on cue. Iris lunges. Li smiles her waterlily smile. Una laughs outright, and soon the others join in.
'Puck,' says the nine-year-old from her nest of coverlets and quilts, 'they're so silly!'
'Indulge us, Firecracker,' says Una. 'We don't get to be silly often.'
'Carl,' says Li, 'has ample opportunity.'
This is hard to argue with. Carl argues anyway. They join Puck on the bed and watch Iris savage the paper, which is thin, fine and makes a terrific sheering noise. Nenni hears it and comes running, murder in her eyes. Iris throws the paper for her, and Nenni gives chase, electrified.
The slim box from Li and Carl turns out to be jewellery. A necklace and earrings set, jade and heart-shaped. There's a fine silver chain around the necklace. Iris oohsover it and Puck moves to do the clasp.
Carl gets in the way. Gently, he bats at the monkey's paw and say, thickly, 'May I?'
Iris rolls her eyes and says again for effect, 'You see, Puck? They're really silly. And soppy.' But she lets Carl do the necklace.
'They're for luck,' Li says and Una feels something in her turn over in an unsolicited backflip.
'Mama,' says Iris as one thoroughly nonplussed, 'I know that.'
Li shakes her head. 'You're such a young lady now,' she says. 'We thought it was time you had a bit of extra luck.'
Iris is not so grown-up as to accede to polite niceties, though, and Una is soul-glad.
'You're always finding things for luck,' she says to her mother, but playful with it. Li shakes her head, unable to argue. Or perhaps, Una thinks, her mind slipping backwards to that long-ago January afternoon nine years ago, unable to articulate the fervour and soul-ache of wanting luck for this girl. The way the need for her perpetual happiness thrums like a sustain pedal against the heart strings.
Iris, Una recalls, was born with a caul. They still have it, kept that for luck, too. It's preserved forever around Una's neck, folded behind the glass of Cecilia Meredith's locekt.
Una watches Iris tear into her own gift with vim. Iris's eyes brighten at the dress she uncovers and she squeals the giddy squeal of the ebullient, jubilant child. It's the blue between midnight and first light, ethereal and floating. Blue as… unbidden the poem surfaces, yearning and aching like a bruise. Blue as the blue and the dim and the dark cloths... Yeats, naked as a niad in his unapologetic longing, gravide with hopefulness, swollen with tremulous, aspen-trembling faith. It is that blue, the blue and the dim and the dark cloth, heaven cloths, the blue of this dress spilling across the Sunbonnet Sues of Irises quilt, each woman with her different coloured hat and parasol. No lace, because Una couldn't find any, and also because secretly Una thinks nine is fractionally too young for lace. She wants to bask in the sunbeam of Iris's childhood as long as possible. As long as this war will let her. But because Iris loves finery and Una knows that she does, she hand-embossed dark, night-black flowers along the collar, sleeves and hemline. They look like night-wings. Una thinks her eyes will probably never recover from the working of it, late in the evenings after her niece was asleep.
'It's like yours but different,' says Iris and flings slender, bony arms around Una with startling tightness. Too-hungry arms, Una thinks but vaguely, murkily, the thought a half-formed moth-like thing.
'Just don't grow up too fast on me, Firecracker,' Una says. 'Promise?'
'Always,' says Iris. But she says it carelessly, in that way young children hurtling towards the abyss of adulthood can be careless. Tread softly, says the beat of Una's heart. She doesn't say it.
'I know you love a pretty gown,' says Una.
Iris laughs and says, recovering, 'You make the best ones, Auntie.'
She wears it all the rest of that day. And Una, who wondered privately what occasions would present themselves for Iris to dress up in a Singapore under siege doesn't argue the point. There is something exhilarating about seeing this much love expressed for a thing she created. It's only what Iris does, but always it turns Una over inside like a dervish. Whirling and twirling at dizzying speed until she can't tell up from down. It guddles her like a fish, leaves her hollow and stunned, her heart all raw and exposed as starlight for the trampling. Iris never tramples. She is not that kind of child. She carries her hearts softly, the way the poet advises, with not the least idea that she does it. A rare, wonderful gift.
Nenni thrums approval of this display of affection and Una strokes the cat but watches Iris and thinks, I'd do anything for her.
She bakes her a cake, anyway. Una uses the last of the sugar to do it, but what are ninth birthdays for, if not cake? So she bakes Iris a cake and it is gauzy-light, and jammy in the centre. Carl pronounces it to be like eating a cloud, which makes Iris laugh, her mouth full. But then she presses a hand to her mouth to stop the jam spoiling her dress and Una feels again that she is slipping away, over that thin, thin line to adulthood.
When shall we three meet again,asks the ghost of Walter from bygone years. And for the first time Una bristles, and thinks Oh, go away, you, before pulling herself back to the scene before her.
They burn lanterns while they can, enjoying the colours they make and the shadows they throw. The mynas swoop and sing, and Harry the lizard comes out of hiding to bask by the glow of a nearby lantern. Carl scoops him up onto the back of one hand and the lizard oozes into his shirt pocket.
When the blackout comes due they snuff the lanterns out, but linger on the veranda anyway. Una makes tea and serves it on the ruby-red tea bowls with their butterflies. They echo the ruby at Li's neck, warm and heartbeat-steady in its place against her throat. The jasmine smell of the tea is potent, and Iris cups her tea bowl with the reverence and wisdom of nine. The dragonflies dance, ethereal on the wind, sleek and slender as zero-planes, and the fireflies come out to court them. Deep beneath the jasmine, the butterfly stencils – each one different – wink and shimmer like water. No one has told the fireflies about the blackout and Una is glad.
They tumble all golden and silver light across the sky, throwing streaks across the cloths of heaven, the heaven-cloths of the birthday gown Iris wears still. It shimmers all the blues of poetry, the blue of night, of light-breaking dawn and the half-light of falling twilight. It makes Iris look at once both gracious, gazelle- girl-child and light-irradiated woman. And at her throat, green and lucent, that second heart, a jade heart for luck.
They let Papatee into the garden for the evening, and Nenni comes and sits on the top of his head, regal as ever on her unlikely thrown. Papatee makes snuffling noises and Iris gets up and feeds him some of her guava, but carefully, so that the buffalo doesn't crush her dress. It rustles with new-worn stiffness and shadow-sussurations as she moves, the hem sweeping the lawn in a lover's kiss.
They should take a picture, Una thinks, but of course there's no light and it wouldn't work, would only come out blurry and shadow-dense afterwards, the moment imperfectly rendered and starburst-fleeting. So, instead, Una basks in the moment of it, tries to trap it in the blue heart of the saphire at her neck, cocooned in its leaping, trinitarian fish. Across the table she sees that Li does the same, and Carl too, in his way, quietly drinking in Iris, gowned like a lady and barefoot as a baby, a dyad, a goddess. Such an impossible nexus, this comingling of girl and woman.
Iris's had goes to her throat, to the green of the heart there, and Una sees again the rippling of nascent womanhood, sees her too, storing and filing this scene with its animals, shadows and moon-soaked people away for future reference. And then the clock sounds, and Li says loving but brisk, 'Bed, Firecracker.'
Kisses all round. And, 'Come with me,' Iris says. So they do. Carl undoes the clasp of the jade heart and it comes away from Iris's neck, leaving her naked to Una's eye. Iris reaches for the buttons of the gown but fumbles them, so Una and Li do those together. And then she is their baby again, nightgown-clad and hair mussed as she half-sits under her Sunbonnet Sues and beams the beam of a worn-out but happy sunbeam.
'Was it a good day?' Una asks, watching her.
'The best,' says Iris. 'The very best birthday ever.'
Parnokianlipstic - I do love a good found family story, so I'm always pleased when a moment like that lands. It's a theme all my favourite shows and books seem to circle one way or another -and opera! That was always my favourite thing about La Boheme. Come for the love story and romance but stay for all the gorgeous cross-currents of love between these unlikely friends. I can't think of another piece with that same richness of texture, though I'm sure there are others. Carl's gifts made a very late entrance. I suddenly found myself writing about those fish and realised we'd better see them make an entrance! Mischievous is the perfect word. And maybe my rewatch of Fringe is showing, but I see a lot of Walter Bishop in Carl. Brilliant, playful, devoted to family but sometimes mentally somewhere else completely! But you're quite right. After this it's bring on all the disasters , from the mundane and personal to the larger catastrophes.