Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
W.B Yeats, The Second Coming

February 14th is St Valentine's Day and Carl risks the overcrowded shops to bring them sweets. This horrifies Una and Li, who are vociferous in their disapproval, not only because of the risk, which is excessive, but because of the cost of the eight chocolates his excursion nets them.

Iris screams the shrill scream of the jubilant treble. The noise rockets past High C, bypasses the E after that, overshoots the C above High C and settles somewhere around the F above the C above that. It is whistle-shrill and briefly agonising. Una thinks it jeopardizes the china in the kitchen as much as any shell, but she doesn't remonstrate. How can she? Her ears are ringing, and the child she loves most in the world is jocund as Wordsworth's daffodils. Who could resist such unbridled firecracker-happiness?

So, Una does not expostulate horror on the expense or the extravagance. Or even on the extreme jeopardy to Carl's life, which is considerable and alarming. She must look it though, at least in part, because Carl says with a grin as Quixotic as it is wide, 'Don't worry. I only had to promise them my immortal soul, my good right arm and my future descendants. They said I could keep my good eye.'

Now there are protestations of horror. Una says 'Carl!' more affectionate than exasperated, the ratio Una intended somehow backwards.

Li says, 'You can't say things like that! Your sister values immortal souls, if you don't.'

Carl affects the mock-injury of the unrepentant. 'Don't you?' he asks his wife. Li tosses an elegant, dark head and says, 'What would be the use? You're going to do with it what you will anyway.'

Carl staggers about as if wounded and Iris squeals at the pantomime. It is very good; Una is hard-pressed not to smile herself. She smiles anyway. A lightening of her features like a sunburst as it weaves between afternoon clouds. Carl says, triumphant, 'See, Una thinks it's funny, don't you?'

'I think,' says Una, 'that you're mad. Stark, raving mad. But then, I think I knew that.'

She thinks Carl could have been killed by a shell, but Una also thinks Carl knows that. She's certain Iris doesn't need to know it. So it goes unsaid. Carl laughs like a giddy loon, and Li's silver-bright laughter mixes with it. It's contagious, and soon they're all laughing, the momentary dread passed and over.

Iris reaches for a chocolate, unbidden. She lingers to ask, 'Can Puck have one?'

Puck cannot, chocolate being that rarity in Trinity House labelled Strictly For Humans. Puck sulks and throws peanuts, and Una supposes that if Carl is determined to risk life and limb to spoil them the least she can do is acquiesce with good grace. She plucks a chocolate from it's battered box. It's oyster-shaped. Dark outside, creamy hazelnut inside. Carl knows her far too well. The darker, nuttier hearts are for Li, and she knows it. Una watches the other woman study the box before acquiescing in her turn. Carl knows his people like well-thumbed books, and there's something soul-warming in that.

'Thank you,' says Una before biting into the chocolate. It tastes of hazelnut, of cocoa and of yesteryear. The filling sticks, sweet and heavy to the roof of her mouth and makes speech difficult, and for a moment Una can only sit there, remembering other years, other boxes of chocolates, less dearly won. She thinks of the chocolates like roses he brought her to celebrate that first, full week at the Anglo-Chinese school. Of the profusion of variegated samples he offered Li early in their courtship. He had no idea what she favoured, then, so bought the lot and fussily spread them out over Una's tea tray on the wicker coffee table of the veranda, in agonies of indecision. Una stole a peppermint cream just to nettle him, but it worked and Carl relaxed.

He bought them whenever they had guests, and back during the 1926 flood he bought them by the armload for the children stranded and sleeping on the floor of Trinity House.

'I thought it would sweeten the experience,' his excuse to his astonished sister, confronted with box upon box of chocolates and nowhere to put them.

'And you never,' said Una, 'considered penny sweets?'

'Oh,' said Carl, all rogue, 'I got those too. Do you mind?'

And now Singapore is under siege but somehow Carl has found a way to sweeten even this, too. There are melted traces of chocolate on Una's fingers. She can't offer them to Akela to groom, because chocolate is deadly for dogs, so she brushes them, childishly against her lips, because Singapore is besieged and she cannot justify wasting even the residual traces of chocolate by consigning them to starched linen napkins. And even if she could, she can't launder them clean. Iris follows suit. They all do. And then they help themselves to another chocolate each, careful to stick to their own particular flavours, because who knows when another occasion like this will present itself?

Carl has a kiss and a stray piece of sentimentality for all of them, and maybe, Una thinks, hope tastes like chocolate in the middle of a Singaporean February, sunbeams tumbling like acrobats across the windowpanes.

It's also their New Year's Eve, so they let Iris stay up late into the night with them. She is, after all, Una supposes, practically a young lady now. Isn't that what they said at her birthday? They sit with petal-delicate paper and fold it into lanterns for the next morning. Perhaps they will never light them, but it's tradition. Una believes fervently in Tradition. If nothing else, it's comforting, something to fall back on while the world spins ever more drunkenly off its axis.

Tchaikovsky says it best, Una thinks, and hears in her inner ear the opening sequence of Eugene Onegin or Seven Lyric Scenes spring to life. It's a perfectly symmetrical opera, aching and sweet as chocolate, and in that first scene, two women who love their girls sit making jam. And the mother sings – how often did Una's girlhood ghost trace these translated words through the score – habit comes from Heaven to take happiness' place.

Una believes this. She believed it first, unknowingly, when her mother died and she prayed reflexively to God. She believed it knowingly, when Walter died and the world split violently open, and Una read poetry the way a Catholic told beads, compulsively, for the comfort of it, Spencer tumbling into Done into Herbert into Shelley, Keats, Auden, Pound, Yeats, until she knew them all. And still she read. Una believes it now, with Singapore under siege and Iris's happiness and security weighed in the precarious, terrifying balance.

Oh yes, tradition matters. It grounds, it anchors, it tethers. Habit comes from Heaven to take happiness' place.

The coloured paper is wafer-thin. It looks like it should crumble with so much as a glance. Nenni, Una thinks with an ache, would have adored the sheering sound as she pounced on and decimated one colourful lantern after another. As it is, Akela lies, atypically silent, at their feet, and Li threads the lanterns with practised fingers. They hang them in the windows unlit. When the sun comes up they will catch the light and dazzle like the best kind of sun-catchers, filling the room with rainbow spills of colour.

'The year of the horse,' Li says, finishing with a lantern. The paper crinkles in papery susurration in her hands. 'Perhaps it will bring us change. Better luck.'

Then she rises and touches Kuan Yin's head. It's a reflexive gesture, lightening-fast. Carl echoes it, and then Una and Iris. Feeling the touch-warmed head of Li's goddess recalls for Una her family's last visit, and how strange they found this inbuilt tick in the Trinity House people. Even Nenni partook, tail swishing across the lucky head of Kuan Yin. But then, Nenni brushed up against everything. Carl said it was a territorial thing, Nenni's way of saying if Kuan Yin was indeed sacred then she was Nenni's.

For luck, Una thinks now, her fingers skimming the smooth surface. Perhaps she should recoil at the superstitiousness of it, the alien belief. These days Una thinks they should seize luck wherever and however it comes.

The sun rises on the morning of February 15 fiery red and bleeding with it. The sky is awash in the roiling, enemy colour.

They sit taut, alert, anticipating the whistle of shells. Instead, the all clear sounds. Chinese New Year at last and the bleeding red sky yields them this one, small thing. At nine o'clock in the evening, after a week of silence, what sounds like all the dogs in the city begin to bark. They bark, and bark. Una hears Akela first, sees him in her mind's eye, and then in actuality as she looks down at the veranda from her upper-storey window. Akela stands on the veranda, mottled head raised, ears flapping, howling at the moon and the low-flying aeroplanes.

He barks with a fury. The dog next door joins in, and the one two doors down the road and across the street from him, and the one three doors right of Trinity House. Another street down the dogs begin to howl. Around the corner and down a different road the call is picked up. The air ripples and tenses with the weird ululation of the moment. It passes on to the dogs in the heart of the city, and the ones deep in the country. They bark, howl and whine as they haven't in weeks.

Una stands at her bedroom window, hair unspooling, evening plait unfinished, and hears Akela. Her neck prickles and skin crawls. Gooseflesh courts her arms and skims off the hairs of her wrists. It makes Una's stomach coil, clench and uncoil in a tensile loop. Dimly she registers the pad-pad of Li's slipper-soled feet on the wood of the floor as she joins Una at the window. Still more dogs bark, and more.

Una watches as, down below, Carl lets himself out of the front door to stand beside Akela on the veranda. She sees him put his hand out to rest on that mottled head and hush Akela. Still Akela barks. And barks. And barks.

It is a sound like a heartache, like the heavens rending, like a shell shattering. It is a sound like the earth falling to its knees and cleaving in pieces.

Years, long years later, Una will sit beside a girl who is not Iris and read 101 Dalmatians. She will read about the twilight barking and think of precisely this moment in time. Of the bloody red twilight of Singapore breaking across the sky. She will hear again how the dogs howled and howled with eerie certainty because finally the Siege of Singapore was over.

A simian cry of horror. Clattering and rattling as childish feet careen down the hall. Iris launches herself at Mother and Aunt with as much accuracy as any Japanese missile. She is sleep-mussed and puffy eyed. Li's arms go out and around her daughter, and Iris spasms and sobs in Li's arms. Una enfolds them both. It is then, her blouse dampening with little Iris's tears, that she thinks of a night years ago, another dog howling, and little Bruce in her arms. Little Dog Monday knew, she remembers now, that Walter was dead. As they sit and rock to the hum Li's Northern Cradle Song, it occurs to Una to wonder what it is the dogs of Singapore know.

The clock ticks, the night wanes and day blossoms red and magnificent across the sky. Red sky at morning, Una thinks with a mind for her childhood, but she recalls the flag with its perennial red sun and ends by shivering. She realises as she sits there, stiff-necked and back aching that she has never hated a colour so much in her life. She did not know she could. Iris's hands go round her neck, cold with lack of sleep.

'Auntie?' she says. Una hands her to Li, goes down to see about buying a paper.

There is a sun-red flag flying from the Cathay building. Una sees it even before she leaves the house; it is the tallest building in Singapore. She stands on the veranda and stares until the early morning creeps into her skin. Stands until Li comes looking for her, Iris shadow-close beside her. She sees the flag and turns Iris's head inwards.

'Go inside, Firecracker,' says Una. 'Boil some water.'

Li releases Iris, and she runs off to comply, doubling back to ask brightly, 'Are you making tea, Auntie? Can I have some?'

Una can't think. Not about tea, not about anything. There is a flag with a sun on it high over Singapore. It is the end of the world, the coming of the kingdom. 'May I have some,' she says to Iris. 'And, of course you may.'

The Apocalypse at last, Una thinks, vaguely, surprised by this stab of liquid anguish. It pours out of her like blood, fluid as music, as she stares at the Revelation-scene before her. The end of the world, the coming of the kingdom, or perhaps, and this must be fluttering, tremulous hope, this wishbone thing at her breast, only the second coming. The harrowing of some, other, living Hell by her God. Una thinks this all in a matter of seconds. In the time it takes for the pulse to quicken.

Off Iris scampers, Puck at her heels like the greyling shadow of a shadow. And still the women stand on the veranda, transfixed by the flag.

'Singapore is dead,' says Li, and there is nothing else to say.

Parnokianlipstic - One of the things that I tried to keep a finger on writing this story was the way life ticks over. Animals leave such a gaping hole in the universewhen you lose them that it seemed inevitable Nenni join the ranks of Una's amassed ghosts. She might be dead, but watch her crop up in unlikely places moving forward. But to mitigate that a bit, we have Puck and his sense of hierarchy. Carl might have brought him home, but Una runs that house and Puck knows it and reacts accordingly. Monkeys are very big on ranking people - more even than dogs! And of course I hoped you'd adore the poetry. I've always loved the way characters Sayers Peter and Harriet get to almost talk in poetry quotations, and spar with them, and Una is a great excuse to steal the concept ;)

And it was lovely to see you bobbing up over in Warp again, at one of my favourite chapters, no less. Your music recommendation was perfect. I have a real soft spot for all things Latvian after university and this was no exception. And I thought of you while writing program music and citing Peter Gynt. Not quite your neck of the woods, but the atmosphere of it was the sort of thing I knew we'd both enjoy.