For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also - Matthew 6:21, NRSV

The days whirl dizzyingly fast, like a too-fast polka or a giddy waltz. It's not long before Bobby Blythe and little Luna have got all the Merediths under their collective spell, staying at Moon-in-the-Rain.

Some nights Una wakes and walks the floor with Luna, or sits beside little Bobby and sings him asleep with the old songs. Northern Cradle Song, yes, but also Jerusalem the Golden, Firmly I Believe and Truly, All My Hope on God is Founded.

One evening they leave the children at Trinity House and take Emily and Iain out dancing, as once Rosemary and John Meredith took them. They teach them the old rule, about children and how the first person to mention them covers the evening's expenses, and take the dances in turns.

As Emily and Iain waltz to Haunted Heart as played by string orchestra, Carl mentions the university. Sheffield, not Raffles.

'I thought,' says Li, looking astonished, 'you were busy here, liberating our home?'

'I was,' says Carl. He reaches for Li's hair and coils a tendril around his finger. Li swats at him playfully. Painted nails flash in the low light, her gloves shucked and claws sheathed. An idle threat if ever there was one. 'But only because I thought the lot of you – well, you've heard all that. Una, you must have a version of this.'

'Yes,' says Una. 'Mine's much less exotic.'

'I don't know,' says Martin, disengaging one of Una's hands from the fish at her throat and kissing her knuckles. 'Here I thought my unpredictable travel arrangements kept you and Robin guessing.'

Una hums, the sound just discernible over the music. She turns back to Carl. 'Sheffield?'

'University,' says Carl. 'Red brick, so entirely opposite end of the spectrum to Raffles, naturally. I'm not sure I'd mind that. I could watch bugs again.'

'But Britain, Carl,' says Una. 'After all this. After all that time in Singaporean resistance.'

'The university there's been courting me for years,' says Carl. 'Before the war, obviously. Back when I had reputable things like an address. But I thought about it sometimes, when the war ended. It would have been a… better way to live, I guess I mean. When I thought you were gone, I couldn't stomach it. Who needed respectability if they had no family, you know? But…wouldn't it be nice, to not have to worry about bandits or looters and that?'

'Never mind you are one,' says Li. She catches Carl's hand and tucks it in hers, and tries to resettle her hair.

'I'm much more respectable these days,' says Carl, even as he kisses a spot beneath Li's right ear. 'I can't remember the last time I participated in a riot. If we're clever – and I can be very clever – Britain never needs to know that part of my war.'

Britain can't know any of Carl's war. His suggestion is absurd and not absurd all at once. Clean-shaven and with his hair cropped close, Carl certainly looks the respectable English part, even if his stealing one kiss too many from his wife belies this. His evening attire helps sell it. Lizard-shaped cufflinks that flash silver in the dim light, except their eyes, which shiver agate-blue in the candlelight. A suit jacket the blue of his eyes…More incredible ideas exist than that the man behind this costume could teach curious English students their butterflies from moths or iguanas from lizards.

They bat the idea back and forth. To be home. With Carl, Li and Iris. It's all Una has wanted for years. Home and unafraid and – Sheffield had a blitz. Una knows this, remembers it from talking to Joan back in England. Sheffield understands war, and how terrifying it is. How unsafe. How it rattles one's bones and jars the soul until Alban Berg sounds positively placid next to the anxious rale in one's heart, the whistle-stop sound of it beating. The noise, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick-tick like the slim pulse of a watch engraved on the underside with a white enamel poppy, gift from brother to sister.

They'll need to rebuild the university. And as Carl says, it's not the sleek, elite island Raffles is. It's red brick and rough edges and ordinary people who want to build ordinary lives. It could suit Carl.

Emily comes back to them, drapes an arm around Una's shoulder and kisses her cheek in that careless way she has.

'Auntie,' says Iain, 'your turn.' He holds out his hand with the old-world courtesy that comes of years brought up at Fox Corner under the tutelage of Shirley Blythe. That's not what startles Una. It's the music that does that, Unforgettable in the capable hands of a string orchestra.

'In a minute,' she says to Iain. 'This one has a story to it,' and leads Martin unresisting onto the dance floor.

'All right?' Martin asks as they waltz.

'Perfectly,' says Una.

Graciously, he forebears comment. Probably, he knows as well as she does that she wouldn't know where to begin.

Long after the dance has ended and the party dissolves of an evening, Una still doesn't know where to start. She passes a long night walking the floor with Bobby, who can't or won't settle. Una is decidedly not asleep when Iain raps tentatively at the door, sleep-tousled and says, 'Auntie, I hate to ask, but would you… I've tried, and Emmy's tried and…'

Resolute wailing from a red-cheeked toddler.

'Nothing's worked, hmm?' says Una. Iain doesn't have to answer. He grimaces apology as she pushes herself upright and dons an iris-blue dressing gown stamped with so many white, trailing lilies even as she reaches for the little boy.

'You'd better not have inherited your father's ears,' she says. And to Iain, 'I don't suppose you remember that.'

'You weren't there, were you? In 1927?'

'I was not,' says Una, jostling Bobby on her hip. 'But you'd better believe letters were full of it. I'll never forget – kitchen table surgery was hardly the breakfast reading Dr. Blythe or my sister thought it was. Off you go. Try and sleep.'

'With that image imprinted on my mind's eye?' says Iain, and it's hard not to laugh.

Up and down they go, first the length of Una's room, and then the length of the hall, and when that doesn't work she drifts with Iain's boy to his nursery and rocks with him in Emily's cane rocker. Iain's not wrong about nothing working. And all the while Una murmurs as she goes, about Singapore, and her family, and how improbably tangled the two have become.

'All I wanted,' she says as the child cries himself out, 'was to get them all back together. I suppose it would be a bit much to have specified where. At the time it didn't seem to matter.'

It shouldn't, Una thinks, rubbing Bobby's back. Finally, mercifully the lusty wailing ebbs and the baby curls bonelessly against her chest. Una smooths his hair and hums snatches of this, pieces of that. Northern Cradle Song becomes All My Hope on God is Founded becomes I've Got Rhythm becomes Unforgettable.

'What will you do?' asks Li, puncturing this reverie.

Una misses her entrance, crooning to the baby. But the rocker creaks as Li leans against the back of it, trailing the scent of orchids and coconut oil, as in old days. Una turns her head. Li is slipper-shod and wearing a buttery yellow silk dressing gown dappled with daisies like stars. Some are white, some are blue, others coral pink. She picks up the unspooling plait of her hair and leans further past Una to brush Bobby's sleep-pinked cheek.

'I'll go with family, when it comes to the point,' says Una.

Li hums, thoughtful. 'You've got family here, too,' she says. 'You and Robin both.'

And there, Una thinks, is the beating heart of the problem.

She worries this conundrum all through the next day. Sheffield looms an unknown quantity, and Una tries to picture it as Joan described it once. Red brick, paternosters, the rumble of buses and snort of horses clip-clopping up the lanes. Una makes a mental note to follow that up. It would be nice to have Joan close.

It's an impossible choice. Stay in Singapore with Bernice and the others, or go with Carl, Li and Iris to the green and pleasant land of Sheffield with its red brick, paternosters and unreliable trains. Una niggles and prods at it while working with Bernice on supper and doesn't harangue her companion nearly enough, obviously.

Bernice turns, brandishing the paring knife, and says, 'All right?'

'Fine,' says Una, and musters a smile.

Bernice harrumphs. Says, 'You don't look it. You look the way you did when Elise English was dying of bloody malaria. What the hell's the matter?'

'It's a nice problem to have,' says Una. 'Promise.'

The paring knife flirts dangerously with proximity to Una's nose. Bernice's eyes narrow to that infamous cat glower that quails lesser souls than Una's. Once even Una quailed, but that was several gross of arguments and nine lifetimes ago by Una's calculation. When no quailing or cowering seems imminent Bernice capitulates and asks, eyes still cat-slit narrow, 'Are you going to enlighten me?'

'No,' says Una.

'Any reason why not? You always used to.'

'In this instance,' says Una, 'I know your answer.'

'Well, I like that, I must say. Rendered me redundant, have you?'

'Now that,' says Una, 'would be a much harder proposition. Glad you mentioned it.' Then she plucks a guava from it's dish and lightly bowls it at Bernice, who catches it, laughs as expected, and shakes her head, none the wiser.

The next evening Luna fusses, and Una walks the floor with her, trading off with Emily, Iain and Martin by turns. Sleep is elusive as hen's teeth. When Una dreams, things jumble. There's a blazing red yolk of a sun flying over Kingsport, and a bookshop at the end of the world among the sun-bleached crosses of their home-made cemetery. She dreams of Robin and Kiki chasing Iris and Puck through Trinity House as it was, with the robin's egg blue settle and Nenni's footstool an obstacle to the alien foot. Joan leans against the counter of a Kingsport bookseller's desk and plays chess with Carl while Rhapsody in Blue drifts through the medium of their old Victrola. Elise English dances at the Alexandra theatre in Toronto and Faith leans against the Trinity House veranda and talks murder with Harry the lizard, who sits like a human and drinks from one of Li's red tea bowls with butterfly stencil, no two the same.

It's impossibly late and Iain has the baby. Martin says, 'What would you like to do?' Forget all the rest for five minutes.'

'About what?'

'Sheffield,' he says, quite as if this should be obvious. Apparently it was, at that.

Unbidden bubbles an old strain of Tchaikovsky in Una's inner ear. Seven notes swooning as they fall, a mother singing, Habit comes from heaven to take happiness's place. During the occupation, Una trusted in it like a Gospel truth. On the other hand, it isn't wartime and there are things to cling to besides habit.

Experimentally, Una says, 'What would we do if we stayed?'

'That's easy,' says Martin. ' You'd reclaim Trinity House. I'd teach Iain the art of adventuring.'

'Don't you dare,' says Una. 'Emily's got her hands full without adventures on top of the rest.'

Martin shrugs the shoulder not pressed into the mattress. 'I don't recall it put you off. Iain won't want to be in the army forever. Especially if the situation in Indo-China doesn't change. If he's not careful, his imperfect grasp of Emily's mother-tongue will look like an asset. Adventuring could start to look attractive.'

'You forget, Judith Carlisle always said – '

'She wanted the family she had close. Completely different thing,' says Martin. 'Emily's much more like you than Judith. And anyway, you asked. But none of this answers my original question, which was about you. And what you wanted to do.'

'Give me an impartial opinion?' Una asks.

'I hardly count as impartial. And anyway, it's not my choice to make.'

'No,' says Una, 'but I am so very tired of making hard choices. I thought – it's childish, this, but I thought after the war that would stop. Both times, as it happens.'

'That's not childish, that's the hazard of life,' says Martin, and if there's laughter there, it's sympathetic, burring pleasantly against Una's cheek. 'And I happen to think that when it comes to the point, you'll do what you've always done. You'll make the only choice you can.'