'Are you horrified?' asks Carl as he squints into the noon-bright sunlight, there on the rattan furniture, ruby red tea bowl in hand, it's butterfly stencil pellucid in the sunlight.

'Horrified?' asks Una. 'Because you did what the Japanese ordered to save your family? Carl, I did that for years. How could I be?'

'Words like collaborator spring to mind,' says Carl.

'Oh yes,' Li says. 'Britain would have a field day with you. Wartime collaborator turned Independence Champion. I'm not sure which is the worse offence. I'd ask what you were thinking, but I thought it all, too. Many times.'

Carl leans his head against Li's rounded, worn and sturdy shoulder. He reaches, half-blind and natural with it, for Una's hand, and squeezes it. He's got her left hand, Una realizes, because his fingers come up over the ring and his eye goes wide. Li's blue stone is still there, because she continues to refuse Una's attempts to return it. But now it's nested snug against another, unassuming band. Startled, Carl looks from Una to Martin Swallow, who has an arm around Robin. Una watches understanding blossom. He nods and says, more to himself than the others, 'That's all right, then. That's one prayer answered. You weren't alone.'

If Una closes her eyes and blots out the mynas singing, she can hear the Japanese marching up the road, tramp-tramp. The way they screamed for women. A shiver dances jazz-slick down her spine. But it dissolves in the face of rising cacophony, half-tuneful serenades of Van Amburgh is the Man and Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree mixed with the babel-sound of so many women chattering.

'I was never alone,' says Una. 'Not even for a minute. Puck wouldn't let me, and afterwards…'

Robin saves further explanation. She squeals, scrambles to her feet, ducks under Martin's arm, and tears down the veranda like a wild thing. 'Bernice! Cressida!'

Una's head whips round, narrowly missing Carl in the process. 'Emily!' she shouts. 'Iain!'

Emily isn't running. Women can't, Una remembers, after a lying-in. She remembers this from Iris's infancy as much as from the baby Muriel lost in the camp. But Iain comes running up the walk and swoops Robin up in a circus-wild parabola of an arc.

'Little bird!' he says as he swings her. 'Good lord, you've grown! Auntie, she's catching you up!'

'That's what I said,' Martin says amicably. 'But offers to cut her off at the knees are repeatedly vetoed.'

Bernice, not three feet away snorts what Una takes for a combination of approval and derision.

On the walkway the women unwind, and Una thinks this must look something like the way she and Li sat to attention on the night Carl brought home what they refused to believe was a buffalo. Papatee. Hats come off heads.

'Una!' says Bernice.

'You found them!' says Cressida.

'Emily! Emily come see! Una and Robin are back!'

'No, don't,' this is Bernice. 'Put the kettle on, Emily, can you? Oh, no, hang it all, I'll do it.'

'No,' says Una. 'I'll do it,' and she holds up the cast iron teapot. 'Emily's got her hands full, and you look dead on your feet. What did the Centre have you doing? Sit.'

Una rises and tries perforce to propel Bernice into her place. Bernice isn't having it. She wrestles the teapot from Una with an exclamatory, 'Fiddlesticks! 'Sides, you and that one there,' with a jerk of the thumb at Emily's armful, 'need introducing.'

Una cheats a look at Li, and sees the other woman's eyes have crinkled. She is trying, Una can tell, extremely hard not to laugh.

'Either,' Li says, 'you were at each other's throats for the duration, you and the tea making one, or you were an unstoppable force.'

'That's Bernice,' said Una. 'She's particular about tea.'

'As I say,' says Li. 'Murder or unstoppable force. You both appear to be alive, so I presume it was a case of God help any detractors.'

Una does not dignify this with an answer. Iris now hangs over the veranda, scrutinizing the interlopers. Robin tumbles acrobat-graceful from Iain's arms and barrels into leathery Cressida.

'Careful!' Una says.

'Gentle, Miss Bird,' says Martin.

'Never mind them,' says Cressida to Robin. They pretend Una cannot hear and Una plays along. 'I told your mother once it wasn't her fault camp stopped everyone noticing how young I was. Now she hasn't even got that excuse.'

Bernice bustles out with a tea tray. She does not appear, so far as Una can tell, remotely apologetic for offering the new arrivals tea in their own tea bowls.

'I told you,' she says as she sets the tray down on the replacement coffee table, which is rattan, like the sofa, 'you'd find them. Cressida, didn't I tell her?'

It occurs to Una that Li and Carl still don't fully grasp who this conglomeration of iron-willed women are.

To Carl Una says, 'They needed somewhere to live and I didn't like the house empty. The looting didn't stop with the war. I wasn't sure where you were, if you were alive or if you'd need the house.'

'Which was moot,' says Cressida, 'because she couldn't have sold it without getting a man to countersign it. No,' as Carl opened his mouth to say something, 'I don't understand why not either. Gave the bank hell about it. Me, not Una. She let me rabbit on quite a bit too before saying it wasn't what she wanted, didn't you?'

Suddenly Una is snared in one of Cressida's gruff, bony hugs. Exactly when the older woman liberated Robin and started on her Una is unsure.

'I've seen unstoppable forces meet immovable objects before,' says Una from the depths of Cressida's bosom. 'Stopping you seemed unwise.'

'Not to say impossible,' says Bernice.

'Hello, Kettle,' says Cressida cheerfully. 'I'm the pot. What colour would you say you are?'

As the women dissolve to bickering and laughing, Una disentangles herself from Cressida and tries to make introductions all round. Robin helps, basking in the cocoon of Bernice's arms. It's been too long, Una thinks. Correspondence isn't nearly enough. She watches idly as Bernice strokes Robin's hair, which is thicker and longer these days than it used to be, and suspects Bernice would agree with this assessment.

'We just want Joan,' Cressida says. 'I'll summon her.'

'Don't you dare,' says Una. 'Liz Merrick only went and moved down to London, and now St Aiden's is horribly short-handed. Joan would have your head. Not that she listens to you, anyway.'

Cressida cackles, witch-ribald. 'You,' she says to Una, poking her chest with a bony finger, 'may not have Bernice's glower, but Great Scot, do you put the fear of God into a body.'

Martin and Carl laugh outright. 'Been like that for years,' Carl says. 'Under all the civilized china-for-guests and tread-soft-on-the-landings manners of her. You were with Una in – I still haven't heard where the devil you got to,' he says rounding on Una.

'Much better that way,' says Una. 'One harrowing a day is my limit. Today we had yours. Emily, come bring that gosling in your arms up here and let me look. I want to know if it's a sparrow, stork or heron you've got there.'

'Mama,' says Robin, 'it's a baby!'

'Is it?' says Una, even as she puts out her arms and positions the jumble of blankets against the crook of her forearm.

'That,' says Iain, coming and hanging off his wife's shoulder, 'Is our Luna.'

'Hung the moon, did she?' asks Una. 'I always had other candidates, personally, but I suppose…' she strokes the sleep-downed face, and feels the butterfly lashes flutter under her forefinger. 'Beautiful wee bird,' she murmurs.

'Oh, well,' says Emily, 'the moon, too. Essays in Idleness, you know.'

'Emily!'

'I'm still not the one with a copy on her bookshelf,' says Emily.

'Just as well,' says Martin. 'The time I had finding one copy…'

'And yet,' says Iain, 'we live in a place named for a quote you assure me is out of said book. What Emmy is going the long way round to tell you, Auntie, is that we thought two Unas would be too confusing. Miss Moonlight here seemed a good compromise.'

'That's right, Auntie,' she says and grins at Una. 'I can call you that now, I take it.'

'Emily,' says Una, half-exasperated, half-affectionate, 'you could have called me that well before embroiling yourself with my errant nephew, and you know it.'

Little hands come out of their swathing bands and dive for Una's necklace with their spikey-tailed fish. Deftly, Una tucks them back whence they came.

'Excellent taste, both of you,' says Carl.

Murmurs of admiration and agreement all round. Robin scrabbles up onto her knees next to Una and squints down at the bundle in Una's arms. To Emily, Una says, 'Where's your other gosling? I've yet to meet him, remember?'

'Kate at the Centre asked to borrow him,' says Emily. 'God alone knows why. He's a holy terror, and I say that having watched that one there,' this as she waves a hand at Robin, 'sprout up. Your Adventure Books won't help.'

'Hardly mine,' says Una, with an expressive look in the direction of Robin, Kiki and Martin. She smiles ruefully anyway and says, 'You don't know the half of it.'

'I'm sure you'll soon find out,' says Li. She flanks Una and beams at the sleeping baby. How she sleeps through all the hubbub Una has no idea. Small miracles, presumably.

They move inside, and there's music, Una and Bernice at the piano, seguing from Ives to Gershwin to hymnody without thinking. When Una looks, she sees Li basking in the sound of it. She has Iris's head on her knee and her fingers curled around the hair at the nape of their Firecracker's neck. Carl sits on the floor, his head against his wife's legs, and he too looks radiant. There's still sadness touching that eye of his, but it's less now. And it's mixed in with relief and resurrection-hope and love unspoken.

Emily and Iain have got what's left of the sofa and Cressida is stretched out in the daffodil-yellow chair with the blue diamonds, her feet on the footstool. Robin sits snug against her despite being much too big for cuddles these days, and Cressida says nothing about it. Martin retrieves a chair from the dining room and repurposes it, the better to watch the tableau at the piano. They do indeed only want Joan, and Una supposes it won't be long before they get her out for a visit, short-staffed hospital or no.

At some point Cressida says without rancour, 'You'll want the house back, of course.'

Una half-turns, still playing a four-hands setting of Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree.

'Poppycock,' she says even as Carl and Li make protestations of their own.

'Iain and Emily must have a room or two spare in that mammoth house the army stuck Iain with. We'll go there.'

'Course you will, Auntie,' says Iain.

'You've beat me to offering,' says Emily.

'Come on,' says Carl, 'play the old song, Una.'

He holds a hand out to Li, and Una doesn't have to think. Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree becomes Rhapsody in Blue effortless as breathing. Bernice lifts her hands, holds them out for little Luna, and it's not long before Iain and Emily follow the example of their betters. Robin dances with Iris and Martin with Cressida. Life is – oh rapturous, novel thought – exactly as it should be.