The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Una finds she can't sleep without Nenni at her feet. It's a ridiculous thing, because so much worse is ravaging her home. But at nights Una lies fitfully under the Trip Around the World Quilt and feels the absence of that warm, bespotted body. She tries to make up the difference at first with a hot water bottle and then with a pillow, but neither breathes. There is no ticklish sensation as she adjusts to the alien weight on her feet. No sudden spears of pain as affectionate claws go through the quilt and into the flesh of Una's ankle.

She says this to Papatee one morning and he butts her stomach in sympathy, because of course he is much too big to replace Nenni at her feet.

'I could get you another cat,' says Carl, who Una didn't hear come in. He leans now against a nearby wall, sleepy after a night watching for zero-planes. 'I know it feels like everything's all upside-down, but if it helped…I'd ransom worlds for you. Any of you.'

'I know,' says Una, meaning it. Once she would have asked about this statement, about were there worlds within worlds like so many Russian nesting dolls, or was this one of Carl's fancies. Una doesn't ask. She understands. If she could, she too would reach through the fabric of the universe and pull Iris, pull all of them, to some safer, gentler, kinder Singapore if she could. She cannot say any of this. Instead, Una says, 'Don't bring home another cat. But thank you.' She cannot quite bear the thought of another cat, not yet. Certainly not another bespotted Bengal, all regality and diminutive predator with a predilection for guarding human feet.

'Always,' says Carl. He comes and lays his golden head against Una's shoulder, wraps his arms around her chest. He says, 'You're getting too thin, you know.'

'Never mind,' Una says. 'I suppose we're all of us changing all the time these days.'

Carl hums. Unbidden, he says, 'I love you.'

It's an extravagant gift from Carl, who does not say this sort of thing often. Aunt Martha tried to train it out of him and Jerry both, but Carl especially. Una is glad that Singapore has undone all that hard work by Aunt Martha.

'I love you too,' she says, and touches a hand to his cheek. It still has flecks of grass on it, from some undisclosed mission watching something not zero-planes, and the sensation makes Carl laugh the laugh he gifted his wild, extravagantly affectionate daughter.

'That tickles,' he says and bats at her hand. Almost it is a gesture worthy of Nenni, but of course Carl lacks claws.

But still Una cannot sleep. She doesn't want another cat, thinks it would hurt fiercely. But every night she climbs under the covers expecting the somnolent pad of pink feet across the uncarpeted wood of the floor, the graceful half-predatory spring onto the bed. She expects the indulgent half-hour caressing Nenni as she flops with all the elegance of a fish out of water on Una's chest, this way and that, to ensure all her sides, which are all Nenni's best side, get adequate strokes, before mincing towards the foot of the bed and making an elaborate procedure of settling atop Una's feet.

Tonight as Una lies awake the silence is punctuated by a ghost. Click-clack go feet across the floor and Una half sits up, startled. Nenni doesn't make that kind of noise. Then she remembers that Nenni is dead. Nenni is asleep forever under the newly planted catmint. Click-clack. A graceful, calculated leap like a dancer. It is not at all predatory. And then little fingers comb though Una's hair.

'Puck,' she says with as much effort as she can muster in the middle of the unsleeping dark, 'get off.'

Puck grooms on, atypically placid and methodical. When he is satisfied with his work, he pats Una's shoulder and walks on all fours in springy, monkey-step, towards the foot of the bed. He settles on Una's feet, and wraps his tail protectively around her toes. It feels strange, and alien. He is the wrong size, the wrong weight, and Una has to shift her feet to accommodate him without straining anything. Puck lets her do it. He is, although Una would never admit this, certainly not to Puck, much more accommodating about her shifting and stretching than Nenni. Puck sleeps with his head on Una's ankles and his body curved around her calves, his long tail a delicate cord to hold her feet together. And for the first time since Singapore succumbed to a state of siege, Una sleeps.

When she wakes up, the sky is black. Black as pitch, as tar, as dread and roiling terror. At first Una thinks it is the strangeness of her bedfellow that wakes her. Puck smells all wrong for Nenni, especially after months of hoarding water like angel's tears. But then Una turns on her lamp and sees that it is well past the midnight hour, and the sky is black.

Una lies heavily under the Trip Around the World Quilt and thinks of Good Friday vigils. She recalls Norman Douglas with his booming voice reading from the lofty heights of the lectern, For behold, darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people. Isaiah. The Fifth Gospel, as per Una's father. It's not only a Good Friday reading, Una remembers. It's an Advent verse. An apocalyptic herald for an apocalyptic season. Is that what's happened, then? Una lies lead-limbed under her quilt, head tilted towards the darkened cast of the sky and wonders if it has finally happened. The wrong season, the wrong time of year, but darkness over the earth and a gross darkness over the people at last. For their transgressions. Their manifold misgivings. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us…

'I'm sorry,' she says, reaching sluggish and treacle-slow for Puck. 'You haven't done anything.'

He's chattering nervous-fast to himself down by Una's feet and she hauls herself upright enough to get the monkey in her arms, because it's what she would have done for Nenni. She brushes a cheek whisper-soft against his. What, Una thinks in horror, have they done with the sun? Once, Jims had asked childishly if God was dead and the good people of Ingleside and the Manse had laughed over it. It isn't funny now.

Now it feels like prophecy.

There's a wrenching from down the hall, a tearing noise like the sky sheering, and Puck is out of Una's arms and scrabbling spider-fast. Una runs with him, almost colliding with Carl and Li at the hall turning. She forgets the sun, thinks only Iris. Una thinks it like a pulse, like a heartbeat. Iris, Iris, Iris. The sky is black as a coal scuttle, as any sheer abyss, and now Iris is screaming. Perhaps she is hurt, hostage…

Not dead.

Iris cannot be dead.

And anyway, she is screaming, which would be impossible if Iris was illegally, impossibly dead.

Iris sits bolt upright in bed. She looks starched, the way she sits all stiff and immovable. Also, she is screaming. Her screams, by the time Una and the others arrive are less raw, because Akela going on all fours beats them to her, and as Una descends on one side of the bed, and Li and Carl on the other, Akela is already busily at work bathing Iris's face. Still, their hands fly out like moths, like butterflies, to catch and cosset and ask what the matter is. It's a matter of form, really, emotional paperwork. Of course they know what the trouble is. The sky is the colour of ink at seven o'clock in the morning. Midnight come early and it is terrifying.

Walter again in Una's mind's eye. He's lying in the shade of the tree lovers, trailing a hand in the brook and it's the summer he read them all through Milton. Into this wild abyss, his ghost declaims with appropriately gothic atmosphere, the womb of nature and perhaps her grave…

Oh, enough, thinks Una, exasperated, because Iris is screaming and Akela is frantic and the sky is the colour of burnished ebony.

'I'm going to see if I can find out what's happening,' says Carl. 'All right, Firecracker?'

Una watches Iris's eyes widen.

'We'll make it an adventure,' says Una. 'We'll pretend we're living a long time ago, somewhere far away where the sun only comes up for half the year.'

Li smiles her waterlily smile, tentative but beautiful. She gives Una's hand a squeeze across the bed and Una feels the relief of it – hers and Li's – love-heavy and anchoring, keenly. Iris can't quite muster a smile. She says, 'It's so dark.'

Into this wild abyss…

'You've never been afraid of the dark before,' says Li. But Una knows, and looking at Li, Una sees that Li also knows, that this isn't about the dark. Dark is bearable. Dark is normal. This is about the sky being the black of boiling oil, inkblots and death at sun-up.

'I'll make sure Daddy's all right,' says Una. That gets her a smile from daughter as well as mother. It's still gossamer-thin, but it's a smile. Una takes it. She leaves the lamps lit. Maybe they will banish Walter where she has failed.

Una takes the stairs with atypical rapidity, feet pattering bare and hard over the uncarpeted steps. There's a runner straight up the middle but Una eschews it lest she slip at this speed, one hand on the rale, one on the hem of what she belatedly realises is her nightgown.

She needn't have rushed. She barrels barefoot out the front door and this time does collide with Carl, where he stands stunned and frozen on the veranda. He trips, spins, and catches Una before they can fall together and tangle on the camphor wood of the porch.

Like boiling oil, Una thought minutes ago when she sat on Iris's bed, on the Sunbonnet Sues of her little-girl's quilt. Black like boiling oil. It was a stray thought in the moment, a scrap of borrowed poetry. Una never expects it to be true.

Standing on the veranda, her elbow in Carl's hand, Una understands that it is. The sky is not black. It is blue as irises, bluebirds, as the sea on a hot summer's high noon. Blue as the blue band of a zero-plane. If only Una could see it. The sky is as blue as any of these things but the air is black. It was black as char, as despair, as the night's high noon. It is black with fog and the fog is not a quirk of the weather. It is not an eclipse or a blotting out of the sun. It has nothing, Una realises as she chokes on the smell, which is hot, acrid and astringent all at once, with the transgressions of the world. The fog is black because somewhere, someone is burning oil.

They stand on the veranda, brother and sister, frozen and astonished. His hand cradles her elbow and together they weep black tears because the burning oil smell is nose-blisteringly sharp. It sears Una's throat and snakes into her sinuses. If she squints through the fog-blacked tears she can just see Harry, emerald green and slippery-glossy on the veranda. She sees Carl see him too and allows him to disengage her elbow to scoop up his unlikely pet.

Una goes to the garage, where Papatee thrashes and paws at the hard-earth garage floor with an unsettled foot.

'It's all right,' Una says. She scoops grass into her hands and walks towards Papatee, aware all the while that as long as the door is open the black of the oil-fog will seep in behind her. She suspects she smells of it, too, after her protracted spell on the porch. But her buffalo takes this in stride. He sees that it is Una, and that she too, is afraid, and his pawing slackens, his breath sloughs into gentle snatches.

Papatee crunches and chews and Una strokes reassurance down his hulking back. She makes little shushing noises as she does it, for him or her she doesn't know.

'I think,' she says, 'the British are doing it. They know their Buffalo Brewsters can't fly fast enough – pardon the aspersions – and they know they don't know the terrain well enough to beat them on the ground.'

Una pauses, and strokes Papatee's wet-velvet nose. She thinks for a moment of the exhausted Australian masses roaming the streets on foot. Sometimes they clutch at her arm, caught by the confidence of Una's bearing and ask for directions. Which way to the Oei Tiong Ham building? What about the Cathay building? How do they get to…Yes, if Una were them, she would burn oil by night too, and hope it confused the enemy into respite.

She is not them. Una strokes Papatee and whispers Yeats to him like a prayer, one hand on her silver fish, spikey tails nail-sharp against her palm, I went into a hazel wood, because a fire was in my head…

Una walks, blue scarf over her head and umbrella on her arm, to Barker road. She is not the only person so armed. By the time she arrives, the scarf, blue and myna-patterned, a gift from Carl, is grey. By the time she is back at Trinity House, late in the day, it has gone to black. She shakes the worst of the soot out, but doesn't wash it because these days there are better uses for water and more valuable things than a brother's gift to his sister long ago.

Even so, Una takes to wearing Carl's gift of a necklace under her mother's locket. Li does it too, Una sees, when she looks across the table at her over supper of cornbread and tapioca. The little, leaping ouroborus of fish with their orbital stones of blue and red are as much protection and love as they are Trinitarian these days. They nestle under Cecilia's locket over the dip in Un'as chest next to, but not quite touching her tattered white poppy. Some days, when the sirens sound and her children sob, she touches her fingers to it and quotes Yeats to herself like a prayer.

I went out to a hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head
And cut and peeled a hazel wand
And hooked a berry to a thread…

Una does this in the quite of the ACS staff room, which has become the haven of all over-worked, over-anxious adults in their spare moments. She does it reflexively as the sign of the cross or grace at mealtimes, not wholly realising. She has marking in front of her and a mug of imitation tea in her writing hand, her marking hand. And although Una should be but is not marking, she is still looking at this week's unreadable submissions for Composition, half her mind on the peculiar smells of pine, ink and over-boiled water that permeate the room and smell of safety to her and so many others. So, it startles her when opposite her Mr Curtis says, 'It had become a glimmering girl,/ with apple blossoms in her hair…'

The imitation tea lurches, not irreparably spattering gangly George Cazlet's composition to his and his teacher's dismay. Mr Curtis waves apology.

'It's the colour of them,' he says and expands the apologetic gesture to encompass the fish. 'The silver.'

'Something like that,' says Una. She raises him a smile and says, 'I thought it too. Still do. Mind you, I doubt Carl would know his way around poetry to quote it, much less take inspiration from it.'

Mr Curtis goes to fuss with the battered green kettle on it's gas ring, and Una says, not turning, 'The water should still be hot.'

He tests her assertion against his fingers, which he presses to the worn green metal, whistles through his teeth and shrouds them in a handkerchief. More tributaries wend their way across George Cazlet's doomed assignment. Mr Curtis curses and says, still fussing with water and tea leaves, 'That was for you and the marking.'

'Never mind,' says Una. 'It's weathered worse. And anyway, tea at the end of the world is necessary.'

That gets a smile. A bruise-battered sort of a smile, but it's the end of the world, so Una counts it a victory. 'I don't suppose,' says her companion, 'You've considered evacuation?'

It catches Una off-guard, this leap from Yeats and the occasional slip of white silk poppy to consideration of her life beyond the school. He poses the question with Una's mug halfway between hands and lips, and surprise sends tea splashing wild and wide of it's mark. Little brown droplets and larger brown lakes plash onto the lacquered table top. As the lakes develop tributaries and the tributaries embark on tributaries of their own, George Cazlet's ungodly handwriting remains improbably in tact.

'Where on earth would we go?' she asks. She cannot imagine it.

'England?' says Percival Curtis as if it is nothing. 'Australia?'

'The Germans are bombing England,' says Una mildly. 'The Japanese are bombing us. What difference does it make if we are bombed here at home by the Japanese or if we are bombed by the Germans in a foreign country?'

'Lots of people are going,' he says mildly.

'Lots of people went,' Una amends. 'The idea of taking a boat trip now – have you thought about that? What that would mean? What's in the water and under it?'

She twists her teacup between her fingers. It smells like the end of the world. But it is warm, and something to hold, and it keeps her diverted from the herculean labour of little George Cazalet's penmanship, and from the moil of dragons that writhe and twist in her stomach.

Opposite her, Percival Curtis concedes the point. 'What about Canada?' he says. 'That was home once, wasn't it?'

Una thinks about this. Remembers Glen St Mary after the war and how unquietly she fit in it. During the war it was different, because they were all of them still becoming, still growing into themselves. Then Walter had died and something jolted loose in Una so that she paused. She stayed paused, she thinks, until taking up with Jo's mission school.

'Years and years ago,' she says now. There is more, Una thinks, about Keppel Harbour and how her soul stuttered into place there on the writhing, unsteady dock, but she doesn't say it. For her, Percival Curtis says, 'Forgive the trespass. I should never have asked.'

'Not at all,' says Una and shakes her head. 'Coming here… it was like coming home.'

She smiles apology. And she is sorry, really, because this is true and because she can see how much the man opposite her knows that it is true and wishes it were not.

They drink the remainder of the tea largely in silence. It isn't uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. After the noise of the bombs and the clamour of so many people thronging the streets it is restorative. Once Percival Curtis looks up and says, 'I'm acutely aware all this is none of my business, you know. I just happen to think you'd be a lot more valuable to the school not bombed out of existence.'

Una favours him with one of her smiles. Li says these are rare and not easily won but Una disbelieves her. Anyway, she shrugs swan-elegant and says, 'So would we all. But it's hardly how mission projects work.'

'No,' agrees Percival Curtis. 'But they aren't supposed to involve boiling oil and the apocalypse, either.'

The black fog becomes black rain. It patters and splatters across the windowpanes, blacking those, too. Una's umbrella is up before she's out the door, but the black rain is the least of her problems. She walks into her classroom oil-smeared and rain-blacked to find little, asthmatic Liu choking at her desk. Of course she is. Una cannot get the smell of singed oil out of her nose but no matter. She sets the soot-spattered umbrella on the ground and kneels in front of the little girl, who is wheezing and coughing so that her face now possesses a colouration like plum.

Una thinks of the slow, deadly columns of smoke that rise and writhe from the burning British oil and purses her lips in credible impression of them.

'Breathe with me,' she says to Liu. She puts both hands on the child's back and rubs slow, concentric circles. To the hovering, anxious children, she says, 'Step back. George, the nebulizer. In her desk. Now.'

George blinks several times rapidly, and Una watches him parse the sentence. She breathes slow and steady as one of Li's smiles and mentally kicks herself for not finding the child-cadence Liu needs her to find to communicate with the others. But George is clever, one of Una's best, if most impossible, pupils. After several seconds frantic scrabble through wooden tops, pen nibs, crumpled paper and empty ink bottles he produces the nebulizer. He waves it like a victory flag.

'Good lad,' says Una reflexively and fits the bulb into Liu's hands. It's an old dance, and they do it together, the child squeezing the bulb even as Una fits the apparatus to her mouth. There's a long, terse silence when it seems the other children hold their breath, and Liu's colour relaxes. Ripens. She comes back to them with a shudder, slumping heavily against Una's chest.

Una smooths her hair. 'Why don't you keep that on you?' she says to Liu. 'Just to be safe?'

Liu nods, grateful and speechless because her lungs are still reacclimatizing to being operational again.

Something sounds. Something sounds like a siren. But not a real siren. It is one of the ACS's drills. Una drops onto the floor, where the sooty umbrella smears her dress and presses bone-jagged against her sternum, jars her flashing silver fish and sends their tail angle-jagged into her chest. Liu drops with her, nebulizer tight in her fist.

They lie there, knees to the ground, palms to the wooden slats of the floor, foreheads to palms, and all the while Una bargains with God. We cannot, she says to Him, live like this. Please. The British couldn't save us and the Australians don't know how to save us. Please. Give us our home back. Beside her, Liu's ragged breathing slows and normalises, and Una remembers to be glad.

Parnokianlipstic, I love long-winded and rambling. Very glad all of this works. I've said to others, but there's a long swatch of this story that got pieced together not out of the overarching movement of the war but by me reading and going, ooh, that's interesting, and that, and I wouldn't have thought of that! I'm not sure what a kind of picture it creates, but it tickles me it's working for people. And I love you finding John in Una like this. It's easy to lose sight of that sometimes, because she's more alert to the world, but they've got that same spark of inner pride, and of course to read your way though grief, that's very John. The poetry was a gift - thank you! In an overworked week that was a delightfu rabbit hole to fall down.

Ah, Fauste! I must give that another listen. Then the Met is streaming another new production on the 4th, and I'm looking forward to almost-live opera again.

I wanted to catch your other review here too just quickly, because of everything I've done, Not As We Were is still the story I'm proudest of. It was the right mix of House of Dreams and originality and music, or something. But I loved that world and I still live in it - I'm trying to turn it into a book I can publish and Mia with family makes a very different character, but still such a lovely one to write. So, of course I've had The Armed Man since reading your review there - that was always the soundtrack to that story. And I love too this observation about the greengage close world being about rebuilding. It's so funny how you miss things when you get too close to a universe, and I'd never seen that before. But you are right on the money, there. I'm always delighted by the love Nina and Stuart get. I haven't forgotten them, and that World War II story sits neglected on my desktop. I'm just never sure if Scilla's Toronto soujourn with them during the war is close enough to fanfic to publish here, you know? But it's there, with extra shades of Rosenkavalier, and someday I'll write it for you.