Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer...
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
The paper disappears. Una walks in to the city for a copy and finds it is now The Syonan Times, 5c a copy. 5c for a single sheet. She turns it over and finds the overleaf taken up with what announces itself: A Declaration of the Commander of the Nippon Army.
Warily, Una parts with the 5c and dares to read it.
Singapore is not only the connective pivot of the British Empire to control British India, Australia and EAST ASIA, but the strong base to invade and squeeze them and Britain has boasted of its impregnable features for many years and it is generally accepted as an unsurmountable fortress. Since the Nippon armies, however, have taken a military operation over the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, they have overwhelmed the whole peninsula within only two months and smashed the strong fort to pieces within 7 days and thus the British dominating power in British India, Australia and East Asia has collapsed…
On and on it goes, all about the British bloody squeeze and its plans for Malaya and Singapore. It reads not so much as a declaration, but a warning. Una looks at the paper, Syonan Times writ large, then out across the city. Back at the paper. Thinks of Li and Iris wherever they is. Alive. Please God, they are alive. She cannot take The Syonan Times in to Li with its talk of the British bloody Squeeze. Not least because Li is still away being counted, and little Iris with her. She cannot take it to Carl, either, because to do that is to alert him to the real and livid danger the occupation spells for his family. Which they know, but it's different seeing it bold and realising it's danger not only for Li and Iris, but all of them. One cannot be Chinese in Japanese Singapore, and neither can one be British, and Una supposes Canadian is close enough to British that no one will split that hair. Una doesn't think she minds for herself, oh not for any reason of martyrdom so much as because she has her ways of clinging on to quietude in the face of savagery and terror. Some of them she learned when the last war raged and some after, her white poppies, her silver fish, and some, like her steel-fingered tenacity, long before either war. But it's a hard won and aching thing, and Una doesn't wish that on anyone. Certainly not Carl, Iris or Li. But the paper is heavy with it's declaration. The ink, hot and new smells of vengeance and blood. Of danger.
It makes Una twitch, and the city too. All around disrupted families balance on private heads of pins, and not being angels, fail to keep their balance. They stumble blind from errands to house to work to house.
Yesterday Una stumbled into the ACS and Percival Curtis caught her faltering elbow just as he did all those years – months? – ago in the glass-dazzled Raffles quadrangle. Said, as he walked with her the mundane distance to her classroom, 'How are you and the animals?'
Una didn't know what to tell him. So, she told him that Akela lay all day and night on the porch with ears alert and that Puck sat on his head. She said that it reminded her of Nenni with Papatee, and how this was silly, because it was not remotely the same but it still hurt, and how anyway, Puck always came in to her in the evening to try and do what Nenni had done. How that was not really the same, either, and also hurt, but she appreciated the effort. And Una thought, saying all this, how the unsuspecting man probably had not wanted to hear any of it. But he nodded patiently anyway, and said 'The angels are stooping, then. They have such a particular shape, animals in a home.'
Gratitude rushed like blood through exhausted limbs.
Una agreed and then she was in the classroom and it was recitations from ungovernable pupils until elevenses. After that it was phantom elevenses and a lecture from Mrs Bowen about the dangers of optimism while they both pretended to peck at the food they didn't have. Frenny Razdan left her kitchen to find them and cluck over how thin they were these days. Una smiled at her, grateful of the digression from Mrs Bowen's everlasting indictment of hopefulness and tried to say something that mattered. But beyond the safety of the children, of her family, it was hard to scrabble for anything of merit, and then it was Drill, knees to floor, palms to floor, head to palms, and on the day wore.
Today is not an ACS day, so Una does not head that way with her paper. Instead, she tucks it under her arm and sets off for the university.
Down the remnants of Change Alley, a turn, another street, another angle and another turn. Finally Una turns sharply into Raffles Place, where, for the first time, she notices the guard. They are stiff, sober, and so very different to the pictures of the London Guard at Buckingham palace that peopled the history books of her childhood. Down Una goes along Raffles Place, or she tries to, but something stings her cheek, and that is when she spots the first sentry. It dawns on Una she has failed to bow to the guard. She realises only when she catches the woman ahead of her doing just this. So she bows and continues, stops to bow again, her cheek stinging when she takes fractionally too long to react to the third man. He almost looks apologetic, but then, it is all so new, and Una understands so little of what has happened…He might be thinking of anything or nothing. Perhaps somewhere, he has an Iris.
Una finds professor Dyer in his office. She is looking for but cannot find Carl, and Dyer does in a pinch. She knows him from his house calls, and he knows her, Puck and the rest. For a moment Una can only stare at this man, reeling, paper under her arm. The causeway fallen, the city in tatters, but still Raffles goes on educating its finest pupils. Because eventually the British will fix it all, never mind the causeway, or the inedible bread, the worse tapioca, the bowing or the shells Una has sidestepped, even this morning. Never mind the battered and beaten Australians who throng Una's city and look more exhausted by the day. Never mind that Una's faith in the Empire long ago fissured like the abused pipes of Singapore's overtaxed water supply.
'Miss Meredith,' Dyer says, looking startled. 'The ACS not running, then?'
She tells him – Una Meredith, who had once sworn never to act a lie – that it is too early for classes, because there does not seem to be enough time to go into the details of the catastrophe of their lives.. Besides, he must have his own version of this, his own private sequence of crises.
Not for a minute does Una think Dyer would care that the ACS is even now wrangling how to proceed, sew Japanese flags for security, and more if necessary, or trundle along, stoic and loyal to King and Country and maybe risk the children in the process. Certainly Dyer would not quote Yeats at Una, confronted with this unasked for volley. So no, it is not an ACS day, but the reasons don't signify, even to Una.
'Have you seen Carl?' Una says. Then she watches as the other man's face flits through a series of infinitesimal changes as he weighs and evaluates what to say. What he thinks he can say, Una realises, not with a little exasperation. The causeway has fallen, the city is devastated, the paper has been overhauled faster than a hot knife goes through butter, and he's standing here dithering about what he can say to his colleague's unmarried sister because of…Civility? Propriety? Some confluence of things that were probably shelled out of existence along with the docks? To quote Carl on that sun-drenched and horror-laden morning not long gone, Christ.
Una breathes through her nose, thinks of Li and Iris stuck in an interminable queue under the hot Singapore sun and tries to remember that this is not Dyer's fault. Not Carl's, not Professor Dyer's, not anyone's. Only terrible, awful, circumstance. Well, thinks some exhausted, careworn corner of Una's mind, Perhaps it is the fault of the British and their Buffalo Brewsters. And the Americans for leaving the British with the planes they had no use for.
The absurdity must strike Professor Dyer, too. He takes Una's arm in his and together they exit the college and begin to do a circuit of the quadrangle. It is not at its best these days, done in by its appropriation as impromptu triage site and battered with hundreds upon thousands of shards of broken glass. Dyer says, 'I could go to the Embassy. Talk with them for you.'
'That would be the Embassy they bombed out of existence?' asks Una. 'The same one caught in British bloody squeeze?' She gives the paper under her arm a tap. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots Carl coming into view. Relief, like an eiderdown envelops her. He isn't lost, after all, only chronically absent-minded as ever, a denizen of some universe slightly askew to her own. Sheresolves to kill Carl later, shifts the Syonan Times to her hand, and raises it to flag Carl down. He trails his academic gown like a flag felled and papers like confetti. Dyer looks witheringly at the paper-turned-flag and Una feels a spark of kinship flare between them.
'Ah,' says Dyer. 'You've read it.'
'We couldn't afford not to,' says Una.
Three days later, Una changes her mind. They can afford not to read the paper. In fact, they literally cannot afford to read it. The price of the Syonan Times climbs overnight from five cents to twenty and it is not the only thing.
Carl, returning without the paper, says, 'People were bartering for it. Barrels of rice, bunches of bananas. They're saying they'll have to run equivalent prices on tomorrow's edition.'
'They're bartering food?' says Una. She cannot fathom this. She wonders who they are, these people with so much food they can part with it for the luxury of a paper produced by the Japanese.
Carl shrugs. His good eye looks dilute in the mid-morning sun. He looks exhausted. He says, 'Would you like to walk into town and go to church?'
Una pictures the trip in her mind's eye. The stutter-stop way it would go, as they paused to bow to every guard they passed. She and Carl both have yet to grasp the Japanese bow – the new, mandated bow – which is stiff-backed and rigid. It's nothing like the willow-bend of Li and Iris, the way Una learned from watching her sister-in-law. Thinking this, she feels the painful spasm the absence of Li and Iris evokes, sees the space they create by not being there in the sun room with her and Carl.
'We can have church here,' says Una. 'When two or three are gathered together, you know.' She tries to offer Carl a smile. Opposite her, he equally tries to return it. They are neither of them themselves with their family sundered like this. The ghost of Nenni pads past Una's ankles and makes her startle. Hush-hush the whisper-rustle of Nenni's pink-soled feet on the floor. It makes Una's neck prickle, but not unpleasantly. Una nods to the vacant space, lingering to touch Kuan Yin's head en route to the kitchen. These days they drink tea in Gladstone Blue Ribbon, the way they did before Carl and Li married. But not today. Today Una wants Li there however they can evoke her, so she detours from the kitchen for the master bedroom, where a camphor chest sits at the foot of the bed. Out of it Una plucks two tissue paper nests, and from those nests, two scarlet tea bowls with butterfly stencils, no two the same. Una takes these two blood-red tea bowls down from their shrine. She cannot, as in olden days warm them in the standing water in the sink.
So much ritual now dead. Akela comes nosing along behind her, snuff-sniff, heavy-footed and galumphing, not at all like elegant Nenni. Una spares Akela a smile anyway, for the thought of the gesture. She scoops water into the kettle and while it boils she tussles Akela's mottled, leathery ears. I love you for a canine. She feeds the hens while waiting on the water, which boils faster these days, because she boils less of it than before. It boils too fast and the water scorches and this no longer offends Una's ritualistic sensibility when it comes to tea making. She fingers her sliver fish and thinks this is surely some kind of apocalyptic portent that John, beloved disciple forgot to record with all his talk of dragons and gryphons.
The chickens peck and cluck at their food and Una, manoeuvring around them, catches sight of the water in the sink again. It's not a good colour. It's brown, and probably it is breeding mosquito. Like the bomb shelters the British advised them not to build. But at least, Una reasons, they have water.
There are fewer hens. Una resolves never to tell Faith. But Iris loathes tapioca, they all do. And anyway, the hens don't lay as much, and it stings, the disloyalty of killing them, Tessie, Penny, Flora because they can't do what Una needs them to, but sight of Iris sparrow-slender stings worse. The hens finish their feast, which is minimal, and Una nods to them in apology.
Finally, she carries the tea tray through to Carl. All two scarlet tea bowls and Li's cast-iron teapot. The sight of them, carmine in a Sunday sun, gets a ghost of a smile from Carl, so that's one victory they score, Una decides. Even if she comes in on the tail end of Carl's lecture to Puck about something called Banana Money that is apparently being handed out in the street. He must catch her look, quizzical and inquiring, all raised eyebrows and unrecognition, because Carl says with a shrug, 'New currency, apparently.'
'Of course,' says Una, and sets the tea tray down on the low-slung coffee table.
They are still sitting there, Una in her chair, Carl on the robin's egg blue of the settle, when they come into the house. The Japanese. They knock, in a perfunctory sort of way, but it's not the kind of knock that asks admittance.
Akela, hitherto lying with his head on Carl's knees, growls low in his throat. Carl puts out a hand to still him. No one is sure, but menacing the men guarding their home, who stand even now unbidden in the sun-room, seems unwise. Puck leaps to his feet and shrieks anyway. Almost he throws a peanut but Iris honed Una's reflexes years ago and she reaches out, hummingbird-fast and catches his hand in time.
'No, Puck,' she says. Una says it sotto voce, in case some cultural rules as yet undisclosed precludes her speaking first with these strangers in the room.
Puck looks from Una to Carl, reads a double, unified negative in the closed, coiled language of them, and nervously nibbles at his peanut. It sounds unholy and obscenely loud in the stillness of the sun room. Only Carl's fingers move when Una looks. They comb endlessly through Akela's fur in an effort to stop him barking.
Una risks a sideways glance at their guests, their interlopers, their…What, Una wonders, are these people to them? She's stunned to see that they're in tweed. The weather is hot, muggy, even and when Una thinks of it, she worries about Li and Iris standing everlastingly in heat like this, their skin going dry and cracking with it. But these men stand stiff, their eyes averted in tweed. They say something now and Una looks at Carl to see if he understands. But Carl raises a shoulder, helpless too, and Una sees in it that he thought she could translate.
'Your ACS children never…?' he begins.
Una must look as quizzical as she feels because Carl abruptly changes tack. He says instead, 'But you've learned words from them, yeah?'
'In Cantonese,' says Una, 'And Mandarin. Tamil, even and Amoy. Not like this.'
'Of course,' says Carl.
Una says nothing. She sits there with the incarnadine of Li's wedding tea bowls curled protectively between the shell of her hands. She risks a tentative sip of the tea, still not brave enough to look directly at the interloping men. The tea tastes of water. Of hot water boiled and seared imperfectly. But it also tastes of the ghosts of teatimes past, of long indulgent evenings drinking oolong on the veranda and the morning breakfast rush as Una drank cups between Buffalo feeding and marking and taking a turn corralling an infant Iris to eat. It tastes of old friendships, with Li especially but Naomi Blake too, and it settles weighted, soothing and unremarkable in her stomach.
The guards grow impatient at not being understood. Una measures this escalation proportionate to the cooling of the tea bowl in her hands. She compares it against the emergence of the butterfly stencil from the watery cocoon of tea. Finally, one of the men gives up and snatches irritably at his colleague's sleeve. He holds the fabric taut between thumb and forefinger and with his unencumbered hand makes crude, jagged motions, up-down, up-down.
It is terrible pantomime, made worse by memories of outings with Iris as recently as the Christmas before this last one. It's BEHIND you! Shouted gleeful, shrill and childish. And around Iris, the lurid, gaudy sweep of colours, a giddy rainbow in the darkened theatre. The guard continues. Up-down, Up-down, his movements starched and crisp. Una watches Carl take it in blank and uncomprehending. Una understands. It takes this long but finally the terrible pantomime pulls on the right thread of Una's memory. She sees in her mind's eye Rosemary Meredith with the mending before her, coaching Una through this stitch and that. Stitches for hems, stitches for buttonholes, stitches for loops on gowns and for mending pleats. So many novel things for ten-year-old Una to learn, file away and cherish.
That is not what she is being asked to do. In what is probably equally dreadful pantomime, she mimics the motion of her machine, of keeping the fabric level and the bobbin loaded. Puck, who speaks fluent pantomime, catches on and makes an appropriate humming noise to accompany her. Almost Una thinks their guests smile, but not quite. Una doesn't smile, either. She nods a promise to sew for them and then one of them drops a bundle of bulky, heavy tweed onto her lap.
Una runs it through her fingers, testing the weight of it. She is doing this when she looks up to find one of their interlopers crossing the room to consult with a family photo. It features Li and Iris on one of their countryside excursions. Iris is in white linen trousers and a long blue tunic, the better to hare after Puck as he swings through the trees. Li is dressed for driving. If you squint, you can see her driving gloves, left of centre and neglected on the Argyle picnic blanket behind her. Li's arms are around Iris and Iris writhes for freedom, waving a lychee fruit high, like a cricketer about to bowl the ball. Looking at the visiting men looking at it makes Una's blood run cold. She sends a prayer of thankfulness heavenward that Iris and Li are not here.
She thinks, Surely Iris is safe, but has no way of knowing for sure. The tweed feels leaden on her lap, and when Una looks at Carl she sees that he is studiously not looking at the picture their guests make.
Una wonders what to say if they ask after Li, and wonders further if she would know if they did ask. She doubts she would understand and she is certain she couldn't answer. Wouldn't, either, but that's something else entirely.
Then one of them motions at the low-slung coffee table. Carl blinks. Una watches as he comes back to himself. He makes a gesture with his hand that might mean anything from What about it? To It's yours. The men infer the later. They kneel down and begin, piece by piece to disencumber the table of the reduced carmine and gold tea service with its butterfly stencils, no two the same.
Puck opens his mouth to screech horror, then looks to Carl and then to Una. Something about the way they must look stops Puck. Or perhaps, Una thinks, it is a feeling more than any one outward sign. Table divested of its contents the two men pick up the table and turn to depart. One of them lingers to make the sewing-machine noise of Puck's and Una nods assent. She will sew the tweed uniforms and hopefully – please God – it will stop them coming back and asking about Li in further detail. They can take whatever furniture they want, only leave her family in tact. Please.
When they leave, Puck goes to the place where the coffee table was and pads around it in confusion. He makes noises of simian perplexity as he sits in the now vacant space, picking up and putting down the tea things. He sees the divots in the carpet the coffee table leaves and puts a pawed hand into one. He tests it with the sugar tongs, and tries to marry another indent to the cast iron teapot.
Una watches and tries not to think about how Iris would love the spectacle. She thinks instead Iris will come back and see it herself. She prays, God, let her come back and laugh at Puck playing with the ghosts of our furniture.
'Dyer,' says Carl, 'said that might happen.'
'Sorry?' says Una. 'The sewing? And you never said?'
'What?' says Carl. Confusion chases across his face. Then the sun splits a stream through the window and clarity comes with it. Carl shakes his head. Says, 'No. The furniture. All these incoming Japanese need houses, apparently, and the ones that have houses need furniture for them.'
Una tries to register this fact. The Japanese are in her home, ostensibly to protect her and others against the ravages of war. And this entitles them to walk into her home, into the place where she and her loved ones live, and take her furniture. It doesn't register. To Carl she says, 'So long as it's only the furniture.'
She says it without thinking. Reflexively, even. The sort of thing one says because what else could one possibly say to the casual revelation that one's furniture can and will be appropriated by the enemy as it sees fit?
But it dawns sunbeam-suddenly, sickeningly on Una that the Japanese may want more than furniture for their homes. If they want housekeepers, wives...Una looks again at the picture of Li and Iris out in the country. Turquoise tunic on Iris, Li sans driving gloves, her hair loose and unguarded. The world lurches wildly off it's axis, like a drunken wooden top at the height of the ACS children's competitions. It careens sideways and veers sharply towards outer darkness with its dread horrors. I could never, she thinks, but knows she would, if it kept Iris safe. Knows Li would too. And somehow, that is more horrifying than anything else.
'You're all right,' says Carl. 'Akela and Puck and I wouldn't let anything else happen. You know that?'
Una nods. But she hears herself say anyway, 'Sometimes its nice to hear it as well as know it.'
At the Anglo-Chinese School Una discovers that she was right about the sewing. Mrs Bowen was also asked to sew as was the young Miss Mackey. She hasn't been here long, and Una wishes the young woman had had more time to know the Singapore she fell in love with. To see the bangsawan with its sparse scenery and fireworks for an opening gambit. She wishes Miss Mackey had known the lavish market fare, the rainbow spectacle of the lanterns at New Year and the untrammelled beauty of the botanic gardens.
'You agreed, of course,' says Mrs Bowen as they sit in a quiet corner of the staff room. The children are out, enjoying outdoor play under the careful supervision of the Drill teacher. Every now and then Una catches the echo of their merriment through the window. Every time she hears it she hears Iris and flinches because none of them is Iris and maybe she will never see her darling girl again.
'Of course,' says Una. 'What else could I say?'
'Well. Quite,' says Stella Bowen. Una doesn't elaborate. Doesn't mention the picture of Li with Iris on the day of that summer picnic back in '37. She has since had time to check the date, to remember exactly which excursion the guards intruded themselves upon. Neither does Una volunteer that Carl has since very quietly, and without a word to her, taken the family pictures and put them away in the camphor chest next to the tea bowls. She rubs at her circling silver fish and prays her Yeats mute.
She does tell Papatee, later. 'I think,' says Una, 'he thinks they would really do something.'
Papatee bunts Una reassurance. Well, he tries to. Una has to smile. When Nenni went in for bunting, her little head with its pointed, silky ears brushed Una's ankle. Maybe, if they were seated, it brushed Una's chest or her chin. Papatee does his best impression of Nenni and Una finds herself pushed backwards half a dozen steps. Papatee snorts and whether it's apology or buffalo laughter is anyone's guess. Una votes for laughter.
But being bunted by a sentient and affectionate house has a certain amount of security inherent in it. So, Una takes the heavy tweed and the patterns she is still negotiating out to the garage that is now and has ever been Papatee's home. She moves her sewing table too. She sits in the garage, the sun filtering in through the windows, and sews while Papatee huffs and chuffs buffalo encouragement to her. If anyone comes to wreak havoc on the women of Trinity house, Una thinks, they will have to go through Papatee. And if Una does not exactly dare them to try, well. She feels confident that she's safer with a buffalo vanguard than without.