Trinity House, 1953
Funny thing happened earlier. I wasn't there or I'd have said something. I got it all second hand from Australian Kate – take it I've mentioned her to you. Point being, a man walked in and started quizzing Kate about a missing person. Said he was trying to find a sister. Would have been taken by the Japanese early in '42, he thought. No idea where to or anything like that. None of them ever has.
Usual sort of story. Everyone's always looking for someone at the Centre. Naturally didn't much listen until Kate started describing this sister. It was the eye-shape that got me. Almond, Kate says he said. Sat up immediately. Dark hair, eyes the blue between iris-flowers and Kingfishers. Does this nurse-doctor woman know the colour? That's what this man wants to know.
Forget Kate. I bloody did, didn't I? Not a thing you see every day, not in your particular mould. I knew just the way they crystalized when they ran cold and how lucent they go in the sun, and warm with affection. Exasperating woman, this Kate, because what she says next is that the only woman she can think of to fit the description was married and has a little girl. Forgets the name, some kind of bird, maybe.
Oh no, says this man. Can't be right. His sister had no children. Taught them, definitely wasn't married. He'd remember that. Would he, I wonder, because by then I'm thoroughly convinced I spent many years being told by the sister just how bloody absent-minded he was. Proved right, too, because when I asked the Kate Woman about his eyes later on she said funny I should ask, the one was patched. And come to mention it, his eyes were the blue he was describing.
Said that wasn't surprising, if he was hunting down a sibling. She made vague noises and said – you'll never believe this – did I suppose our Una Meredith had a sister. Ha! Realize you have but not one that fits that description! Wrote immediately, not being Ridiculous Kate. Can't possibly be that many one-eyed men living in sideways universes going about the place.
Another thing – He didn't look British, Una. Not according to Kate. He looked like he'd spent a long time in the jungle. Don't know if it was bug-watching or bandit-chasing or what. Be damn careful looking into it.
B
It can't be, Una thinks. She sits on the faded blue sofa staring at Bernice's latest letter and feels hope, feather-light and ticklish bubbling against her throat, neck, arms, breastbone. It cannot be Carl. He's been missing for years. He'd have found them before now, or Una would, or Frenny Razdan, or… But what was it Una said to Jerry, once? That resurrections hinge on remembrance? How often since Li's return have they reminisced, about Trinity House, Singapore, and, crucially, Carl?
Mentally Una wanders through all the possible what-ifs. Even Carl she thinks with wry amusement, would have tried looking for them at Trinity House at the first opportunity. And he'd have found…A bolt zings into place in Una's mind. Zing! Click! He'd have found Emily's Chinese characters on the exterior wall to keep bandits and looters away. Of course. If he came later…He'd have seen strange women running that house as if they lived there – which of course they did. Do. Earlier and he would have seen it as Una did that first time, the door swinging limp and nakedly open, the kitchen a ruin, the house deserted.
Carl, Una thinks, you nitwit. She resolves that if it is Carl, one-eyed and absent-minded, trying the Monica Radcliffe Centre for information, she will personally kill him for the long nights of the soul she still suffers at white hours when she remembers how she waited and waited and waited with Puck and Akela, and how Carl did not appear.
There's the padding of slippered feet on the carpet and a flash of canary yellow at the corner of Una's eye. Li.
'Who's made a statue of you, then?' says Li. She leans gossamer-light against the sofa at Una's back.
'Here,' says Una. 'You'd better read this.'
She hands the letter backwards over her shoulder. She holds it gingerly by the edge, where her thumb leaves an indent anyway. Hands it over with all the precision of one handling explosives. Li settles more firmly against the sofa-back, and by extension against Una's shoulders, and reads.
Una knows exactly where Li is in the letter by the noises she makes. Sharp inhale of breath at the description of Cecilia Meredith's eyes, shaky exhalation over Kate's answer, flyaway as a silk scarf in monsoon season. The strangled, almost painful wrench of the throat when Bernice mentions the eyepatch.
'You never told them,' she says. 'About you. About me giving you – '
'It seemed safer,' says Una. 'I never knew who'd be pulled in for what crime when. Bernice happened to find out, or I suppose I would never have told her, either. She bought the ring back for me, once.'
'Bought…' begins Li. Then she changes tack. She says, 'But the young girls, the way they tease, I always thought they knew.'
'Joan worked it out. But Bernice's Robert is dead,' says Una and shrugs. This has the unintended result of dislodging Li from the sofa back.
'Why shouldn't any love or spouse or whatever it was you linked me to with that ring be dead, too? I think that's what Emily and Elise always thought. Nellie too. I never disabused them.' Una shakes her head and as she twists to face Li she says, 'Anyway, all the people I was close to that way did seem to die. You have to remember that at that stage I had no idea if Percival Curtis got as far as Malaysia or not. But I thought not. And you and Iris – well, that was anyone's guess. Even if it had come up, Kate isn't one of ours. She was in another group.'
'And,' says Li, as she reaches for a stray tendril of Una's hair, 'you never thought Carl would come looking.'
'God forgive me,' says Una. 'No. It had been so long. He was the only one the consul had any faith or interest in finding, Li. When they didn't – well, as I say. It seemed so many people I loved had died. It was hard not to look at God and pray a requiem.'
'We still may have to,' says Li. 'If it turns out it's a one-eyed bandit looking for someone else entirely.'
'Yes,' says Una. 'But hope Li,' and here she puts out her arm to an incoming Kiki, who screeches like a freight train as she alights. Una laughs. 'Hope,' as she strokes Kiki's crop, 'is the thing with feathers on.'
At first, Una is terrified of telling the girls. For years after they got out of camp, Robin would tug Una's arm at the approach of men with their white-and-red canes or placid dogs, and say, 'Mama, is that…'
It never was. Of course it wasn't. Carl never did go up to the CNIB and wrangle assistance. Una forgets now if it was a point of pride or forgetfulness. Experience comes down on the side of the latter. Or maybe, Robin would catch a pair of blue eyes, dim and watery, while they sat in a café with Martin, or Faith, or just the two of them, and she would say, 'Mama, look!'
Remonstrating about pointing seemed pointless in the moment, because always Una's head whipped around as though tugged by some invisible heart-chord, and of course it was never Carl.
She was as bad, Una remembers. She would catch that grin that was mischief, riot and undiluted sentimentality as a father caught his dark-haired girl in the Chinatown market, or the playful exultation of a gentleman to the dog gambolling at his side, no lead, naturally, and Una's heart would beat Carl! In double-quick time. Five in the time of one. It never was.
Now Li holds a letter from Bernice in trembling fingers and Una's heart beats Carl again, still five in the time of one, still double-quick and buoyant. But if it's not – the crashing to earth will judder even Robin's young bones, and Robin never knew Carl.
Li feels this too, Una sees it, because suddenly, like Robin all those years ago, and like Una still in unbidden moments, Li's head turns at jubilant exclamations over children, over men who humanize their dogs and find the humanity in a blade of grass. To not tell Iris and Robin would be a thing unforgivable.
Iris reads the letter with owl-eyes, lambent and streaming in the evening sunset. She shivers aspen-delicate and silk-fluttering, even with Robin's head against her chest and arms cincture-tight around her waist.
'You think it's Daddy, don't you?' Iris says, as she sits with the sunset bleeding through the window. It streaks russet and orange against the seal-dark of her hair, highlights it and makes her alarmingly adult. Her tears develop a nacreous sheen, Una sees as Li brushes them away. Una looks at the girl-turned-woman opposite and wonders how, after years of watching for it, she still misses the moment of metamorphosis. There's the shell of girlhood, prised open at her feet, and only Robin's heartbreakingly green eyes hold the look of the girl-child still.
'It could be,' says Li.
'We hope so,' says Una.
'Will he come here?' asks Iris, 'the way Mama and I did?'
That's the question. Or it would be, if it was a question. Naturally, they cannot bring over a one-eyed man in search of his sister on the off-chance he's theirs. Certainly not on the strength of Kate, who to Una is an unknown quantity. Neither though, can Una take off for Singapore as she used to do when Cressida crooked her finger.
'Let Iris and I go,' says Li.
They are sitting in what passes for Innisfree's back garden, drinking oolong from the red tea bowls with butterfly stencil, while in the west the sunset curtsies seaward. In the eaves, chickadees warble their soprano chorale, chick-a-dee-dee-dee in counterpoint to a smattering of nuthatches and one determined woodpecker-friend of Kiki's. It nests, Una thinks, in the crown of one of the golden birches framing the garden. Tonight as it rat-tat-tats for its supper a loon laughs in the distance. The air is sweet-smelling, full of the last gasp of the lilacs and the apple-promise of sweetbriar.
'I can't let you do that,' says Una. 'Not alone. You wouldn't know Singapore now. It's not – it's not quite ours, any more.'
True, but not the whole truth, either. The other thing, the thing Una cannot bring herself to say, is that there are stories – hundreds upon thousands – of women who found their families, came home to them, and couldn't stay. This possibility squirms, eel-slick in Una's gut, congeals like putrefying jelly. The idea that the Carl in this letter – if it is Carl – is not a man that can understand Li is molten in its dread. It liquefies limbs and destabilizes gravity. But it could be true. There is no reason to suppose their triad of long-ago-family is so exceptional as to break any rules. Una cannot send Li and Iris alone to meet a man that may be a stranger to all of them. But to say that is beyond disloyal. There is no scrap of Yeats, no psalm contrite enough to counterbalance the unspeakable wrongness of a Carl that does not know them. Love them.
Li knows all this anyway. She too was encamped, and the only saving grace of that horrifying reality is that is spares Una articulating the unutterable horrors of her imagination. Even so, the smell of lilacs and sweetbriar cloys in the breeze. The woodpecker's beak misgives. The baby two houses down wails. Li cradles her tea bowl and considers.
'Would Martin go?' she asks, suddenly. 'Come with us? If you asked? Just – just in case?'
Once it might have been a joke. Something to tease Una with. But the sincerity of it is ironclad. The last fiery tendrils of sunset curtsey seaward.
'Yes,' says Una.
He does more than that. They are playing Scrabble when the subject comes up, letters sliding across the board in imperfect time to Art Tatum's rendition of Body and Soul. Martin has the letters for ADVENTURE partially distributed across a triple world score, gamely appropriating the E in Una's earlier gambit, EASTERN and the U of UNIT.
'That's easy,' says Martin. 'Marry me.'
'You don't need to do that,' says Una.
'Who says I'm being altruistic? I might want to.'
'Any particular reason?' asks Una.
'Lots,' Martin says and waves a hand off-handedly, Scrabble tile and all. 'Robin would be delighted to start with, but that's not really the point. For another, if it is Carl, and the others move back – '
'Which it may not be,' says Una.
'But who it may very well be… My dear, you were always going to go back for Carl. You were always going to stay in Singapore as and when you found him. You've meant to for years and I've known that at least as long. In which case, I choose to adhere to that bit of Ruth, if you'll let me. How does it go? Where you go I go?'
Popular at weddings, Bernice says of that one. This time Una does laugh, but there's affection there. 'That's the one,' she says.
The radio now crackles through Lullaby in Birdland. It's a showcase in improbably effective harmony.
Una raps gently at the half-finished bingo framing the edge of the Scrabble board with one pianist's finger. 'No adventures,' she says. 'And I don't mean you can't embark on them, I mean I'm not going along on them as with the later Adventure Books.'
'Oh, I don't know,' Martin says, 'Robin's Adventure books ended happily enough, didn't they?'
'Give or take a disastrous riverboat excursion or two,' says Una.
'Then you wouldn't suffer misadventure by river boat?' asks Martin, eyes shining.
'I'd do many things for you,' says Una, 'but not that, no. Allie Mannering can keep adventures.'
'But that's otherwise a yes?'
'Yes,' says Una. 'Now you'll forgive me, but you've won this round with that play, and I've got to wrangle passage for a parrot to Singapore.'
'I think,' says Martin, 'The Ship of Adventure has advice, if you hit a snag.'
Una ignores him.
Funny how things change. Age ten, Una Meredith wanted nothing more than to wear her mother's wedding dress at her own wedding. It would, naturally, be a church ceremony that, if not as elaborate as one Rilla Blythe's wedding to Kenneth Ford, would at least be respectable. But the Una Meredith of 1954, faced with planning a wedding on top of travel arrangements to Singapore, parrotlet inclusive, wants nothing more than to quietly slip away some Saturday afternoon and sign the necessary papers.
Of course Robin won't hear of it. She's full of grand ideas of what a wedding dress should be, and Iris encourages her. Improbably, Judith Carlisle aids and abets the girls, having spent years agonizing over the finer details of exactly this wedding, unbeknownst to Una. Li, ever Una's comrade-in-arms, deftly navigates the thin line between girlish over-excitement and Una's taste, and conjures a style that pleases all parties. Delicate enough to please Robin. Enough of a suggestion of lace to satisfy Iris. Elegant enough to please Li and Judith, and sufficiently blue to be discernably Una's.
Sam Blake's ministerial nephew settles the conundrum of a church by offering to take the service in what he affectionately dubs 'The New Bundle Kirk.' If it's not quite the parish Una ministered to in the old days, it's the next-best thing. Andrew Blake preaches after the fashion of his grandfather Jo; Extemporaneously, and in long, rambling tangents that beget tangents which beget still other tangents. It's like listening to a puddle spawn tributaries, and Una smiles at the thought.
The choir must be five people on a good day, and the piano on a level with the instrument Cressida reconstructed in camp. Kiki nearly destabilizes what musicality there is with an ear-splitting rendition of Van Amburgh is the Man. None of it matters.
Faith is gleeful, and Jerry, when he travels down, does not tease. He does not try to be Carl. He kisses Una's cheek and says for her alone, 'It's good to see you so happy. Mother Rosemary would have loved it.'
Una smiles agreement. But she finds, as she presses flowers into Isobel Blythe's hands, the wedding service has the feel of a musical grace note. A flourish woven into the fabric of life to decorate an otherwise complete phrase. Beautiful to listen to, but not essential.
Singapore thrums Una's heart, cat-content as she does all this. Singapore. Bernice, Cressida, Emily, Iain. Fireflies and guavas. Puck. Tea in red tea bowls with butterfly stencils no two the same. The sound of mynas hymning the morning and the brush of butterfly grass and catmint, the smell of curried noodle, coconut… Singapore…
The thought is like fine wine. Heady and fragrant. Jo Stafford sings Haunted Heart rich and redolent from over the record player, and it's not Walter, or even Puck it conjures as Una packs. Faith, watching of a ritual Wednesday evening late, doesn't wring her hands, but only, Una thinks, because she's not the type. She fusses and clucks and starts to say things like, 'Malaria can be…' But then she stops and says, 'God, I forgot. You know. You shouldn't know, Una. Are you sure this is necessary? It could be anyone.'
'But it might be Carl,' says Una and hugs Faith, hummingbird-light and darting. 'Our Carl, Faith. Wouldn't that be something?'
'You are my sister,' says Faith, 'and I love you. Come back to me?'
'Faith...' says Una, scrabbling. She smells salted guavas and buffalo, hears the thwack of ACS cricket bats on Emperor Day, the shriek of a monkey, the jocular call of competing market vendors. She sees Emily waltz on Iain's arms and Bernice at the piano, and Carl lying in the long grasses watching for bugs. How to say that to leave Singapore once was a wrench, but twice…Twice is impossible.
'Faith, I have to go home,' Una says.
Faith's eyes skim the Inisfree sitting room, taking in its contents from the blue and gold porcelain macaws to Robin's well-worn adventure books. There's a paperweight dome of Edinburgh glass perched on the leather pad of the rolltop desk and a red silk bookmark peeking out of Jane and Prudence. It sits o the coffee table, nested overtop of I Capture the Castle, one of the red teabowls with butterfly stamp atop both of them. There's Glen St Mary seaglass on the windowsill and any number of photos dotted about the mantle, bookshelves and desk. An argyle blanket lies draped over the back of the navy sofa, creamy white and brown diamonds alternating. Robin's Girl Guide sash adorns another chair, her latest badge imperfectly and incompletely affixed to her lanyard, the little blue triangle winking and crooked as one of Joan's irrepressible grins. It's a striking contrast to the many-pocketed grey overcoat of Martin's that lies underneath it. There are coasters under sundry other tea things and a box full of carefully-filed aerogrammes, also on the rolltop desk.
Mixed in with all of this is the jumble that signifies shared existence: Martin's worn leather shoes down the hall, his fountain pen bleeding ink onto the blotter. A pair of battered binoculars on the bookshelf and a half-finished Scrabble game on the floor. It's a room that looks lived in. Some might even say it looks like home.
And Faith, God bless her, sees all of this and says nothing. She squeezes Una's hands and says only, 'I know. I was afraid you'd say that. Keep in touch?'
'Always,' says Una.
Jerry says, 'Didn't I tell you he couldn't be dead?' The trunk call tempers his jubilation and distorts it, but Una can tell it's there, all the same.
'It could be anyone,' says Una. There are no words for the fierceness with which she wants this one-eyed stranger to be Carl. The intensity of it rattles, all angles and edges, through her bones. It jars them an leaves Una's chest aching. Even so. The uncompromising fact remains that Carl disappeared one night in 1942, and that was eleven years ago.
'You don't really believe that,' says Jerry. It's not a question.
'No,' says Una. Then, with a smile, 'All my hope on God is Founded.'
'He doth still my trust renew,' says Jerry. 'You picked a good hymn for a favourite. Pass on my love when we're proved right, promise?'
Recklessly, Una promises. God, is, after all, a merciful God.
