Carl on the dock is Carl as Una has never seen him. This is Carl with a faded eyepatch and more lines than she has ever known at his exposed eye. It is still the blue of their mother's eyes, but there is sadness there now, too. Sadness and something else. Una feels it twist at her internally, compress her lungs and tighten her heart just that bit extra. He looks battered, but not as she has been battered, and bruised, like an over-ripened guava. His shirt is faded, and the hem has fallen on a trouser leg. Bernice was right to say he looked like one of the bandits Iain still wards off. His skin is brown and leathery, and his eyepatch askew. Almost he could be a stranger. He is Carl. He is alive.

Carl does not know where to turn first, which of them to embrace. Li, with her waterlily smile, Iris's crackling and tentative womanhood, or Una, careworn as he is, and buffeted like a ship in a gale, Robin like a limpet at her side and parrot on her shoulder. He doesn't know. Una can see this in the way he shifts from foot to uncertain foot.

Una has always worn her heart on her sleeve, always too close to the surface. Una knows this. Trailing feelings like lace, Faith had said once, describing Ruthie Blake as was, and Una understood. More lately Li said of her, you wear your heart like your white poppy, where anyone can see it. She isn't wrong. Li is different. Li is more like a pond, serene and placid until something, the sting of maternal rejection, the caustic comment of a passer-by, a gift from her child, sends a ripple flashing across the surface.

So it's Li that goes to Carl, serene as the moon, graceful as a gazelle. 'Carl,' she says and he gathers her to him, close and tight.

'Daddy?' Says Iris and it comes out a question. Somehow this is worse to Una than if she had not known him at all.

'Firecracker,' he says and extends an arm. Draws her carefully into the cocoon of his arms and presses her head next to her mother's on his chest. Safe.

'Puck,' says Una, hanging back, because she sees Carl looking just over his family's heads. 'Puck is dead. I was with him. He brought me peanuts when – after Trinity House. He came up to the gates and he handed them to me in the dark. Guavas, too. But he's dead, and I don't know about Harry. The shells frightened him and I lost track. I think he ran up a tree, or into one, but – '

'Christ,' says Carl with rare feeling. Gently he disengages wife and child to hold Una at arm's length, to look at her specimen-critically. 'Una, I thought you were dead. I went with you all those years ago to protect you from I don't know what – the world, strangers, men…And I thought you were dead. I asked at the convent and they said you got the others to the mainland but you stayed...And then I heard you had been taken away and I thought...Christ. I came back, you know. I looked at the house, and it wasn't ours any more, there was Chinese in someone's hand not my wife or daughter's, and there were strangers. I thought – God, I looked at Trinity House and knew bandits or looters had got it, and that even if you'd survived those camps they had the Britishers in, you couldn't have survived that. But you're alive.'

He's weeping openly. The tears fall dewily onto Una's shoulder as he pulls her close. They blossom and unfurl like cherry blossoms in spring. Carl's eyes drift, look past wife, daughter and sister. They find and land on Robin.

'Mama?' Robin says, rendered suddenly childish by the confrontation with the mythology of her girlhood. Carl looks at Robin, scientist-curious, but Una sees that split-second of horror in him as he tries to calculate Robin's age, the way Bruce did. Robin is slight for her age. Years of privation and malnourishment will do that to a girl. It's easy to misconstrue circumstance, to suppose one of the guards… Robin was a baby, after all, when Elise marched through the gate with her. Una watches Carl's horror, herself horrified as he tries to work out if this worst possible thing has ensnared the sister he loves. There are no words to communicate otherwise. Una reaches for them. Opens her mouth. Closes it again. Nothing comes. She feels the gently impatient tug of fingers on her arm, sweat-beaded and bird-fragile.

'They promised,' Carl says, apparition-pale, susurration-soft. 'They promised that if I – that they wouldn't…' He cannot find the words, either, for which Una's everlasting gratitude.

'Mama?'

'It's all right,' says Una and drapes a protective arm around the Robin's shoulders. Smooths thick, plaited black hair with the other. She doesn't know who she says it for. Robin. Carl. Herself. All of them.

'It's all right.'

'Is it?' Says Carl.

'There was no one else,' says Una. 'And we were both alone.'

'And yet, you're standing here, telling me it's all right. Oh God, Una.' His embrace goes cincture-tight and the dewy tears of before become voluble weeping. Carl, too, wears his heart visibly, as Una does her white poppy.

They weren't alone, of course. They had Bernice, Cressida, Joan, Emily, Elise, Nellie, and others. But Una doesn't know how to say this. As Isobel Blythe once observed, Una doesn't talk about camp life. Not if she can help it. Not to family. None of them survived it. Their war was – well, it would be uncharitable to say their war was safe and comfortable. But they did not starve, and they did not bow to the Japanese. They never picked weevils out of rice or ate crickets or…

The crickets, strange, improbable betrayal that they are, bring tears. Tears are exactly what Una does not want, because how to explain to Carl that they are not because she has lied for years about Robin's origin, or because the brother she so nearly despaired of is alive, but because she failed him in this unasked thing – the preservation of God's creatures.

'Here,' says Carl, 'come here.'

And suddenly he has Robin in his arms too, spindly, delicate bird of a girl that she still is.

'What happened?' Una demands of his shoulder, her voice muffled. 'Li and Iris went to be counted, and I was alone, Carl. Alone. I kept bargaining and bargaining with God, with Kuan Yin, with Puck, and you never came home.'

'I'm sorry,' says Carl. 'I'm so, so sorry.' Una feels more than she sees the way he strokes her hair.

'What happened?' more distinct this time.

'It's a long story.'

Gently Una pushes away from her brother with both hands so that she can meet his eyes.

'Carl,' she says. 'I thought you were dead. I have time.'

Improbably, Carl grins. It's a grin worthy of Puck, and it seizes at Una's heart so that it goes hop-skip against her chest. Beats five in the time of one.

'I guess you do at that,' says Carl. 'But not here. Is there somewhere we can talk? I know Trinity House isn't…'

'It's still there,' says Una. 'Come on, bet it's empty. It's one of Bernice's Centre days, anyway, and Cressida will be with Emily and the children.'

'Bernice?' says Carl. 'Cressida?' He gapes, gap-toothed and open-mouthed at Una.

The memory of camp life thrums under Una's skin. She hums non-comitally to keep it from bubbling over onto the surface. They walk leisurely through the city. They pass out of the rebuilt harbour into the winding narrow streets where merchants still hawk wares. Some of them looted, Una sees, catching a glimpse of a set of Royal Albert Canterbury. Iain still can't stamp out the looters, then.

Needlessly, Carl says, 'Careful. Some of these people are unpredictable.'

'I remember,' says Una. Carl has to twist, from where he is walking beside Li, to turn and narrow that saddened, creased blue eye on Una. She lets him do it.

'What exactly happened?' he asks. But there will be time for that later. Mercifully, Li intervenes.

'Oh, no,' she says. 'I've heard all about what happened to Una. It's your turn now.'

Down what was Middle Alley, which had all the best book stores, and Paper Alley with the stationers. Una used to be a known quantity to a shop there. It did delicate paper in blue with a watermark of a crane on it. A grandfatherly Chinese man sold it while asking unfailingly about the firecracker of a niece she lived with. Another turn and another and they pass by scuttling chickens, caged game hens, half a dozen escaped piglets. The air smells of lychee, livestock, and guavas. Iris smiles her old smile like a firecracker. It makes Una heart-glad to see it. She grabs Robin's hand and tears off and away through the streets.

'Race you!" Iris calls over her shoulder to the lingering adults.

Then they are on Evelyn Road, the dogs barking and the leaves of the camphor trees chittering in the breeze. Trinity House is immediately recognizable because of the gnome on the veranda, parrot at his shoulder. Also because of the emerald green lizard lounging on the veranda railing. The gnome raises a gnarled hand in greeting. Kiki swoops arrow-swift and sudden up into the air with a jubilant cry of Murrderrr!

'Harry!' says Iris and accelerates. She sounds as Una remembers her before the war, heartbreakingly young.

'We call all the lizards Harry,' says Robin. 'Just to be safe.'

Carl cranes his head to cut his good, sombre blue eye at Una. 'And she's not yours? Sure?'

'Robin?' says Una. 'Robin is very much mine. But not the way you meant.'

Una travelled with the two red tea bowls from Innisfree in her dress pocket. The first thing she did on arrival - even before going to the dock at Keppal Harbour - was reunite them with their kindred. She slips through the screen door to the rebuilt kitchen where they wink and blink, red and gold for luck, butterfly stencils no two the same, lambent and warm in the Singapore sunlight. She puts the kettle on, and slips again, spectre-easy into the garden. Breathes in the smell of butterfly peas and catmint as she plucks guavas from an overhanging tree.

In the kitchen she slices and salts them, then spoons hearty, heaped teaspoons of Frenny Razdan's high-grade Assam into a cast iron teapot. It's too early for fireflies, but Una's as close as a kiss to a wish. She goes back out onto the veranda, where the others sit, adults on Bernice's good, rattan swing with matching coffee table, girls lotus-fashion on the floor. Harry basks lazily on Iris's forearm.

'Now,' says Una as she settles the other side of Carl, 'what happened to you?'