All Is Mended

by Alinyaalethia

There is a story, well-known, of the Changi Quilt and the women who pieced it. There is another story, lesser known of a monkey that brought peanuts to a woman at the end of the world. The monkey's name was Puck, and the woman Una Meredith. This is the story of Puck the monkey and Una Meredith and of how, after the Second World War ends, they put their family back together. Twice.

2. Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

They are late for dinner, because Cressida claims the bathtub and submerges herself there until further notice.

'Bliss,' she says as Una soaps her hair and ekes out the last of the rapidly-drowning lice. 'Sheer bliss.' And then, upon reflection, 'You used to do this for Elise, didn't you?'

'That's right,' says Una. 'Back when she was more half-stunned gazelle than girl.'

Cressida leans back, displacing a generous amount of water onto Una's dress in the process. 'God,' she says, sinking into watery depths, 'she was young.' Then, observing the dark patch blooming across Una's bodice, 'Sorry.'

'I've had worse,' says Una, unfazed.

'True.'

They sit silently the Raffles bathroom adjoining their communal sleeping quarters. The air bristles with steam and the smell of soap. Li, Una remembers, used to rinse Iris's hair in coconut oil and orchids. Raffles' soap smells potently of aloe and lemon. Someone raps briskly on the door, jolting both women back into the present. Then Bernice is in the room, without so much as a by your leave or an apology. They still don't stand on ceremony.

'I think,' Bernice says, leaning against the shining white marble of the counter-top, 'the young people will riot if we don't go for dinner soon.'

'Speak for yourself,' says Cressida. 'Personally, I consider myself very much a young person. It's not my fault that hellhole made it impossible for you to notice.'

'All the same,' says Bernice, 'mind how you get out of there, won't you? Una, watch her. All we need now is to break something slipping on floors that are floors.'

She sounds like Susan Baker, Una thinks suddenly, improbably, going on about – what had it been? – chickens that are chickens, that was it. Still, Una takes Bernice's point. Cressida must be twenty years older than either of them if she's a day. She will also swat a supportive arm away, so Una doesn't give Cressida the option. She hooks her arm through the older woman's elbow. It is prune-wrinkled and leathery, a mass of healing blisters, bedbug scabs and darkening sun-spots. Sun kisses Una and her family called them as children, but these are nothing so forgiving. She thinks, abstractedly, as she watches Cressida step into slippers that are more white fluff than shoe, that her dress is now all water. Una can feel it clinging, heavy and damp, to her body.

'Will I do?' Una asks Bernice, who still watches them critically.

'If you mean,' Bernice says, 'do you look a cut above half-dead and grubby, then I suppose so.'

'Oh, good,' says Una. 'Just what I was hoping you'd say.'

Cressida cackles. This sets everyone else off. Robin, with all the unabashedness of a cat bathing in public comes skittering into the room with squeals of, 'Mama! Finally!'

'You'll do, too,' says Bernice, narrowly averting a collision between Robin and the enormous white bathtub. 'Don't run, little bird. You'll slip.'

'Be fair,' says Cressida. 'She's probably never seen a polished floor before.'

'Out, both of you,' says Una, and begins to marshal Robin and Cressida both towards the door, Bernice helping. 'I did not scrabble for our collective existence for years for us to be felled by mutiny now.'

Cressida grumbles good-naturedly. Bernice nods approval. Robin tumbles back into the bedroom, where the others sit blinking at mirrors and caressing mosquito nets. Emily has somehow secured lipstick and is dabbing it to her mouth.

'Want some?' she asks, holding the little tube up for Una's inspection. Una can't remember the last time she wore make-up. War paint, Carl called it, she remembers that.

'Yes, all right,' she says, and then half-starts at how strange and alien the lipstick feels against her mouth.

'Me too!' says Robin.

'Can she?' asks Emily.

'Better ask Mama,' says Joan. And before Una can answer, 'Do you mind?'

'Go on, then,' says Una. She remembers – just – that this is the kind of antic Iris loved. She has fond memories of coming into Li's bedroom to find Iris awash in the stuff, her eyes cartoon-large and peacock-blue, not so much shadowed with colour as engulfed by it. Of Iris's mouth the creamy pink of a tea rose and her skin thick with paint. And how, if Una caught Li's eye, or Carl's, they collapsed laughing hopelessly against each other at the spectacle of their Firecracker.

Shrieks of delight bring Una back to the immediate present. She's not sure who is more excited, Robin or the women doing her up for supper. Bernice rolls her eyes and murmurs something about the folly of youth.

'Even you,' says Una with a shake of her head, 'must have been young once.'

'When I was young,' Bernice says magnificently rising to provocation, 'one didn't – '

Una rolls her eyes. She says before Bernice can finish, 'You're no older than I am and that's a fact. Of course we made ourselves up. The trick was making sure no one noticed.'

The younger women laugh. Cressida snorts. Robin breaks free of the flurry of powders and brushes and shouts wildly, 'Puck! Supper! Mama says!'

This, at least, is normal. Una wonders how often she has heard this particular war-cry. She no longer wonders if it will ever hurt less. Robin is not and cannot ever be Iris. But that doesn't mean there aren't flashes when the echo of one doesn't come tumbling through the other.

'Tread softly, little bird,' she says with a squeeze for Robin's shoulder. 'We aren't the only people around, any more.'

They shuffle, sandal-clad and scrubbed to brutal and red cleanliness, out of the sanctity of the room with its mosquito nets and camp cots. This clean their blisters and bites stand out, luridly, brightly red against their skin. They descend the stairs, Robin and Puck leading the charge. They race, squeal and tumble as they hare around corners and leap over steps. Puck scrambles onto a banister and begins to slide with simian grace. How far, Una thinks, they must look, from the civilized young women Aunt Martha rhapsodized about, tried, even, to turn Una into. Well, Aunt Martha never had to survive years in a Japanese Camp, and that's a fact. Una does not bat an eye at child or monkey. If a passing attendant looks alarmed, well, he can try years of unremitting deprivation and see which priorities emerge in tact. Somehow Una doubts propriety would be foremost.

The Raffles dining room, like so much else since that incredible lorry ride out of camp, is unbelievable. It is too much. The chandeliers sparkle, a jumble of crystalline rainbows that fracture and ripple overhead. Mile upon mile of silver dimples starlight-bright under those same rainbows. The linens are painfully, stiffly white.

Joan says for all of them, 'Here's what I want to know; How did they save all of this,' and she gestures at the old-world grandeur of the dining room, 'while we had Bernice rostering who got what coconut shell when at meal times? Remember when that awful man cracked half our dishes and left the rations to rot?'

'Don't,' says Cressida. Joan abates.

'She's not wrong, though,' says Una, because Joan isn't wrong. The extravagance of this room is astonishing. It is redolent with the smells of starch, of polished leather armchairs, of good food and – somehow this is most improbable of all – sherry.

'Remind you of church functions, does it?' asks Cressida, turning to Una and Bernice.

Gentle laughter. Bernice says, 'Don't know what kind of church dos you attended, my dear, but ours were nothing like this.'

Una makes the expected noise of agreement over Cressida's equally expected protestations. She stands blinking at the opulence of the place, the size of the meals. There is so much of everything. They have meat. Una cannot fathom…

Robin breaks the ice for them. She pirouettes into the room, misshapen and battered skirt fluttering butterfly-frail around her bony, bug-bitten ankles. Almost she collides with one of the soldiers who seem everywhere, these days. He puts out an instinctive hand to stop her, and Robin judders to a halt against a browned, war-roughened hand.

Something about the straight-backed placidity of him tugs at something in Una's memory. But time is a strange and wonderful thing, and it's true that in those first days in camp Una dreamed of the family she lost, of Li, Iris and Carl. That later, and sporadically, she dreamed in fractured fashion of her mother, of Faith, her father and the Glen. But even then, it was with the spiderweb-fragility of dreams, and she always forgot by morning. These days Una's dreams are of the women she has lived with for what must be a lifetime, and the world of the Glen is a thing long-past. Such stuff as dreams are made of, Walter might have said, quoting, had he lived, but more slippery even than Shakespeare knew.

That is why Una does not initially appreciate that the boy's incredulous exclamation – 'Auntie?' – is for her. Why, on first meeting Iain Blythe, all brown skin and eyes with a look that cuts to the quick of the soul, Una does not immediately place him as Shirley Blythe's boy. His surprise is monumental, that is obvious. Una is unsure quite where that leaves her level of shocked astonishment, but she thinks it is somewhere high in the stratosphere.

'Auntie?' he says again. In the split second in which Una does not know him, she catches the eye of Emily, who raises an anxious, questioning eyebrow. She stiffens and straightens next to Una, in case this boy in military dress has fabricated the association.

Then the boy says, 'The monkey. I don't think anyone else could – I mean – ' He gestures, baffled and speechless at Puck.

Robin looks from him to Una to Puck and says easily, 'That's Puck. Mama has had him forever.'

Not, strictly speaking, true. But Una still can't speak. Maybe the sheer muchness of Raffles has stunned her to silence. Maybe she is asleep and dreaming this moment of exquisite unreality. Maybe when transferred from internment camp to improbably posh islands of British elitism, one doesn't expect to run across errant nephews. Someone – Bernice, Una thinks – puts a hand to her elbow supportively.

'It is you,' says the boy. He lets go of Robin to scrabble in his pocket. He comes up with a photo. 'Aunt Faith – when she heard I was coming here – she sent it. Just in case.'

Cressida takes the photo. Una can't seem to rationalise the picture, which is of her on the eve of the dance at the Harbour Light, into a coherent image. Photograph Una stands moth-reluctant in midnight blue beside rose-gold Faith and the Ingleside twins with their silver-shod feet. Di looks like an Artemis-bow, all threaded yellows and golds, and Nan like a blushing pink lady's slipper in full flush. A lifetime ago. How Iain looked at Una, still in her sun-bleached camp cotton and recognized the girl in that…Una Meredith doesn't make a habit of questioning the Almighty, but she does now.

Robin comes running back and Una feels a tug at her sleeve as the little girl says, 'Mama, is that him?'

'No, little bird,' says Una. She supposes Robin means Carl and her heart twists. It asks, as it asked in olden days Where is Carl, but the hurt is less now, dampened by time. We do that, Una thinks, so that we do not shatter like broken vessels. 'But,' she says, because she can feel the women around her bristling like nervous cats, 'he's family. The way you and I are family, Robin.'

Imperceptibly the atmosphere relaxes. Bernice's hand remains anchor-steady at Una's elbow. Are you sure, the question it asks. But now memory comes back to Una like blood.

'Iain,' she says, and holds out a hand. She feels oddly formal, approaching Shirley Blythe's eldest child this way, but then they've never met. 'It's been years. How are you here?'

'How are you?' he asks, all wonderment. Then, recalling the others he gestures them forward, and says, 'Let's get you dinner, shall we? Does Puck still like peanuts?'

'I'm not dreaming, am I?' Una asks Bernice as they go.

'Not even you,' says Cressida, 'nor all the poetry in the world, could dream up this madness. It's less real than the camp.'

Maybe, Una thinks, as little Iain Blythe pulls out her chair, that is exactly the problem. Normal is now so far off it's axis that even the mundanity of dinner at a table with cutlery and real plates and bowls made of something besides coconut shells is inconceivable.

Perhaps, Una thinks, Iain senses this in her, in all of them. Because he talks as he pushes out chairs, about his part of the war. He tells them about how his company sat and waited for hours in banana boats just off the edge of the Malaysian jungle, the sun baking. Literally baking. It blistered and fissured their collective skins. Murmurs of sympathy all round. Baking, and playing bridge, which makes Una laugh, because they, too, played bridge when finally a pack of cards turned up. They were so battered they had gone soft, and were scuffed so you could tell one from another just by looking at their backs, but they played anyway.

Iain pauses to order for all of them, and they let him because no one can remember any more what it is like to have choice. The waiter nods, disappears and Iain begins to tell them about how he is actually quite good at bridge after years of watching his parents, Aunt Judith and her husband together, but refused to play all the same.

So, he sat under the noonday sun and watched his comrades lose hand after hand, fistful after fistful of money.

Laughter around the table. 'Sure he's one of yours, Una?' says Emily. And then to Iain, 'Your aunt is also very good at bridge. I suppose she taught you?'

'Hardly,' says Una. 'Entirely too much time and space between us. A'

Iain smiles. Una watches as he tries to fit this titbit about her from Emily into his concept of Maiden Aunt Una, Minister's Daughter. What, she thinks, can Faith possibly have said? It is a strange thing to look at this boy who is almost a nephew and realise he knows less of her than Bernice on her right, or Robin on her lap. Emily and Cressida opposite or Joan down the other end of the table.

Iain pulls her back into the present with talk of how, when finally they let him out of the banana boats, the man in charge misjudged the water level and they anchored and jumped out of the boats into water that came up to their waists. So, they walked like zombies, sluggish and leaden-legged to shore. Some men, he says, were half swimming. But that was worse, Iain says, because they were fully dressed and their clothes sucked and pulled at the half-hearted swimmers until they scrabbled upright and resumed the treacle-slow walking.

It should be funny. Maybe if they could all forget the exhausted, battered Australian soldiers in the early days of the occupation, it might be. If they could forget the zip-zip sound of Japanese bicycles speeding past the lumbering Australian horses with their terrible geography. Una can't forget. She looks at Bernice and sees she can't forget either. The humour dies, because all these years later the British and their subjects still can't seem to educate their men about the terrain out East.

The food arrives, offering a merciful change in subject. There is chicken rolled in onions and spices, glazed carrots, sprouts – and Una thought those were only for Christmas – golden potatoes that crackle when you cut them and vivid yellow squash. It is astonishingly English food. Susan Baker, Una thinks, would have made it and been proud to call it a feast.

Robin picks up a piece of chicken between thumb and forefinger, and there is a split second in which Una catches the stunned expression on Iain's face, but then she blinks and it vanishes.Melted into air: Thin air...

'Do you know,' says Una conversationally as she reaches awkwardly for a fork, 'I can't remember the last time I used a silver service.'

'You wouldn't,' Emily says conspiratorially. 'You and I were using chopsticks long before camp. All those recipes we used to swap for fun, remember?'

Una smiles her remembrance as she inhales the smell of chicken. It is halfway to her lips and memory ambushes her. The memory goes Smash! Crash! Smash! In the memory, Puck cradles Gladstone Blue Ribbon to his chest and wails a requiem for heirloom china, In this memory, the last of Una's Chinese hens lie bloodied and half-dead under the remnants of their home and the ruination of the china cabinet. Felled, if anyone wanted to know, by British shells. When Una broke their necks, it was a kindness. Unbidden, Una's nose prickles with the peculiar calcine smell of explosion, of bloodied feathers and china dust.

Carefully, Una sets her fork down. She eases the chicken off of it, mindful to use her knife. It feels cold and alien in her right hand. If it would not utterly astonish this interloper – no, that's wrong, her nephew – she would follow Robin's lead and use her fingers.

That hand at her elbow again. 'All right?' murmurs Bernice.

'Careful,' says Una. 'Your vicarage years are showing.'

Laughter, warm and honest. Puck hops from his perch on Robin's shoulder onto Una's. He leans over her shoulder to scrutinize her plate. Una can't seem to eat. With effort she gathers up a sunburst of yellow squash and swallows around the stones in her throat. To Puck, she says, 'You never ate birds. Don't be daft.'

'Bet he'd like tea, though,' Iain says. 'What say, Auntie? Shall I order some?'

'In times of crisis,' says Cressida, 'never underestimate the power of tea. Good lad. Now I'm convinced you're Una's family.'

Iain orders the tea. Someone says over the scrape and scratch of cutlery on fine bone china, 'We didn't believe you were coming, you know. The British. Even when you arrived, even once the flag was up and flying, we all kept pinching each other, just in case.'

He looks touchingly perplexed, Una thinks. For clarity she says, 'In case it wasn't real.'

'That's right,' says Joan. 'By that point it was pretty even odds that we'd all gone mad and were collectively hallucinating.'

A band strikes up, and begins to play. Iain holds out an arm. The young people hesitate.

'It's been ages,' says Emily.

'Nonsense,' Cressida says. 'Like riding a bicycle. Here, young man,' and she gives an astonished Iain her hand. It's a mottled mess of withered skin, age spots and blisters, and under it all the veins gleam blue in the unforgiving crystalline light of the chandelier. Iain's gracious about it though, and waltzes Cressida expertly around the room.

'Remember how she tried to tell us she couldn't dance?' asks Joan. Una, handing Puck the sugar, can't help smiling. Just for a moment she's back at that wild, caterwauling piano, Bernice beside her and they're playing The Minute Waltz. Elise leads a lesson in dance because that's that night's entertainment. The air is warm with bodies moving and trapped sunlight from the afternoon. It smells of baked earth and unwashed masses. Elise is a beautiful dancer. A frequent one, too, from the battered, calloused state of her feet. Nights, when they're back from the factory and the thrum-hum-whirl of the sewing machine, Una rubs them for her. But tonight she and Bernice play, and Elise dances. She holds out a hand to Cressida, who says feigning imperiousness, 'Oh, honestly! Do you think I bothered paying attention to that rubbish? What do you take me for?'

So Elise hangs off of Una's neck and says, 'Come on, give us something lively.'

'You want to show off, you mean,' Bernice says, not turning her head. But then, Una remembers, they segued into Mack the Knife and Elise's eyes went bright as the moon. At some point Bernice took her fingers off the keys and said with a nudge to Una's ribs, 'Go on, show them how it's done.' Una had laughed and improvised her way through the middle. Although Una cannot recall the dance Elise was teaching, she remembers the mangle Emily and Joan made of the step, and Cressida, resplendent in a ragged, outsized sack of a gown had said, more imperious than ever, 'Oh, for God's sake. Like this. You do it like this. Elise, come here.'

Una remembers the astonishment on the young girls' faces as Cressida and Elise danced shiver-fast and swan-graceful around that hot, stuffy room with no floor.

Cressida does it again, now. But this time she's on Iain's arm and he is no match for her peculiar combination of dignity and bluster. She rejoins Una with that grin like an orange peel and watches Joan risk the floor.

Iain dances with all of them, even Robin, though she has to stand on his shoes to do it. Cressida says to Una as the band begins to play Sentimental Journey, 'You play better, you and old Bernie. Even on that god-awful monstrosity of ours.'

'Supposing you're right,' says Una, 'it remains several turns away from normal.'

'Normal?' says Cressida. 'Normal? We left normal a lifetime ago.'

Iain turns Emily around the room, and the chandeliers tease out the sleek, roe-red highlights woven through the young girl's dark hair. The floor gleams and the brass sounds bright as the sun. Una finds Cressida's assessment a hard one to argue with.