The camp cots and their mosquito nets are – improbable thought – too comfortable. Una mashes her pillow into an indeterminate blob and rolls onto her side. No luck. Bernice turns the lights out but that doesn't help. Neither does Puck cuddling up against her shoulder.

He never dared do this in camp. Una realises this as she feels warm fur against her overheated neck, that she has missed him. She says, as she said in the days before she was taken away, before he marched after her to the boundaries of the camp, 'Goodnight, Puck. Love you lots.'

Una says it softly so as not to disrupt the other women, even now punching pillows, and rolling from side to side. Then she begins to cry. Not on purpose, and certainly not noisily. But suddenly her nose is stuffed and her eyes are brimming and there are little liquid ghosts tracing the shape of her face. They make the pillow damp. Puck brushes at them whisper-soft with his tail. There, there, says Puck's tail. I won't leave you again. Ever. Until Carl comes back.

Robin gives up first. She climbs into Una's bed and under the mosquito net with childish murmurs of anxiety.

'All right little bird?' Una asks. She says it thickly because of the recent tears, but it's nothing Robin might not attribute to grogginess. The others too, if they're awake. Robin burrows close. She thrusts her head under Una's arm like an overgrown puppy. Between child and monkey Una is warmer than ever, and sweat beads between her breasts. Robin, too, must be too warm, because she makes another disgruntled noise and flops, arm extended, across Una's chest. Idly, Una runs a hand through Robin's short-cropped hair. It's thinner than it should be and dark, and Una thinks that with the right care it might yet grow out silky and corded like Iris's. But, of course, long hair and lice are woefully incompatible, so she has not yet had the chance to find out. Robin snuffles appreciatively and scoots her feet so that they are snug against Una's knees.

Somewhere in the shadowy dark a clock ticks. For a moment Una disentangles herself from the mosquito net and feels for the watch Carl gave her. She doesn't have it. Of course she doesn't. She sold it to the pedlar that sometimes came through to buy eggs for Robin. To keep time between remembrances, said the inscription. In camp time was the last thing Una wanted to keep track of. She sold it early, before the battery wore down. That was back when Elise was still alive. But Elise had no fine jewellery, just a love of other people's. Una insisted Elise accept the eggs the watch bought. It was vital Robin not die. They all felt this.

It's no good. Una gives up. She pushes the gauze of the mosquito net away and hauls her pillow onto the floor. She leaves the pastel green blanket where it is.

Robin and Puck follow her. Bernice's disembodied voice says, 'Oh, thank God it's not just me.' Suddenly, they are all tugging pillows and blankets after them onto the floor. It's richly carpeted and still more comfortable than the uncompromising platforms of camp. It is also, Una suspects, terrible for their backs. Never mind. Robin is young. Emily, Joan and many others are similarly young. As for rest of them, a hard mattress hasn't been their downfall yet.

Puck curls at Una's feet and Robin slips under her arms. The floor is stiff against the curve of Una's ribs. Una kisses Robin's hair, and gives Puck again his ritual goodnight.

'Love me, too, Mama?' asks Robin, groggy.

'More than all the stars in the sky or fish in the sea, little bird.'

Finally, they sleep.

There is more food at breakfast. The fact should not astonish them quite as much as it does. But the tablecloths are out again, and as white and starched as hospital linens. It hurts Una's eyes to look at them in their austerity. The sun winks playfully through the glass of the chandelier, and the air smells of fried food. There are buttery yellow egg yolks spilling sloppily across crisp, fatty bacon, and grilled tomatoes blackened to perfection at the edges. Rice doesn't feature. Una turns her head away from the bounty of the other diners and finds Robin agog.

'What is that?' she asks Cressida, pointing. And then, before Cressida can answer, 'Or that, or that or – '

Oh how we failed her, Una thinks. Elise I'm so sorry.

Una sinks into more than sits in the chair Cressida proffers her. It's an elegant, antiquated thing with a back that curves and curls. Wooden wheat sheaves stand out of these carved curlicues. The seat, Una finds, is plush, with elaborate layers of too-soft cushioning. Well, at least she doesn't have to sleep on it. She puts out an arm to Robin and reels her in like a fish. Reflexively, one hand drifts to her neck, to her one bit of finery she could never part with. Yeats bubbles unbidden, I dropped a berry in the stream/ and caught a little silver trout…

'Come here,' she says as she hauls Robin up onto a chair of her own. 'Let's see what there is to eat.'

'I vote we have one of everything,' says Cressida. 'That way we can all swap round the bits we don't want.'

'And you can find out what it all is without confessing to Robin you can't tell kedgeree from omelet these days,' says Emily.

'Cheeky so and so,' says Cressida, but without heat. Emily looks unrepentant. A waiter, half-invisible, carries over a tea tray. They're a teacup short because no one told the staff at Raffles that Puck takes his tea in a teacup with three sugars. Una flags the waiter down again and he tries hard not to be shocked, but is anyway. Una thinks back to that afternoon long ago when Carl appeared on the Trinity House doorstep with a monkey and almost says she understands. But that was lifetimes ago and Puck – well, it seems disloyal. Bernice pours out, and Una passes Puck the sugar.

Puck, after all, was there when the war ended, which is more than can be said of the British or RAPWI. The day the war ends, it's the Commandant that tells them it's over. There are no British in sight. No Australians.

Una sees again, as she sips at her tea, the women in their Tenko rows as the Commandant read out the announcement of British victory. He was not happy about it. Quite honestly, Una was too hot, too exhausted and too soul-battered to be all that thrilled herself. The sun beat down on them unrelenting and the Commandant stood up at the front, fly-away scrap of paper vulnerable in his outsized hands. He wanted, Una could tell, to twitch and jerk like a puppet, but that was against good military form. He stood there and read out this long, ponderous document, stiff backed and disgruntled. Then he rolled it up and said, 'As a rule, tales which go about in the world are false.'

'Eh?' hissed Cressida in Una's ear. Her dress slipped off her left shoulder, exposing a particularly egregious cluster of bedbug sores to the sun. On Cressida's other side Emily said, 'Essays in Idleness. The rest goes, People always exaggerate things. More so, when months or years have passed.'

'Well,' says Joan, 'not this time they don't.' Then she smacked the fly gorging on Cressida's bug-blistered shoulder.

A cheer went up as they waited for the British, who didn't come, and didn't come. The most galling part was the afternoon the Commandant pulled Una aside and said he and his men would continue to take charge of the camp because, oh irony of ironies, the women needed protection from the British aeroplanes. The absurdity stunned Una so much she missed whatever that day's quote from Essays in Idleness was. Then an aeroplane dropped a bomb on hut three, killing half a dozen women and hurting more, and. it stopped sounding absurd. As Una came away, she passed the rubble of the British-bombed hut, where the Japanese guards played Go to keep themselves busy without women to guard. The clatter of the pieces sounded like dice, and unbidden came a flash Rainbow Valley, Walter with Lyrical Ballads on his lap. It was just the two of them. Rilla was busy with her war baby, Una was nominally knitting, and Walter was lying under the tree lovers, white feather twitching between the frenetic fingers of one hand while the other stroked beautiful, soft leather copy of Lyrical Ballads with gold-leaf trim and elegant, cursive script on the cover. He wasn't reading it, because he had the poems rote. So did Una, by then. But Walter loved the cover with its gold-and-silver etchings too much to leave it on the bookshelf. His voice dipped low, to a whisper that shivered down Una's spine. Is that Death? And are there two?/ Is Death that woman's mate?

Still the British didn't come, but Puck did, slithering under the fence in simian outrage that these aeroplanes threatened his trees. He cut his back slithering, and Joan doctored him as if he was as human as any of them, swearing softly all the while at the Japanese. So, of course, now that it's all sorted Puck can have a teacup.

The teacup between Una's hands is warm. The tea strong and fragrant. She smells roses in the leaves, and perhaps a touch of something else. Cloves. It goes straight to her head and behind her eyes with a kick to it like a mule. She rubs at them as though sleepy. It's nothing like the pale imitation of tea she drank for years, and her body protests the suddenness of the change.

Several weeks after their liberation, they brave the market, and family or not, Una is glad to have Iain along with them, because it's daunting, the strange, wildness of the universe. Not Walter this time. A different ghost recites, Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer…It is perhaps not quite that bad. But the sudden clamour of buyers and sellers, of money changing hands and squawking chickens, squealing piglets, indignant partridges…It's a lot. It's even more than a lot when set against the scents of curried noodles, lychees, guavas, tapioca – Oh God, thinks Una, does that still exist? She wonders if anyone buys it. How they could.

She is glad when Iain takes her arm in his proprietarially and says, 'That idiot Henderson was on about telegraphing home.'

Momentarily Una stiffens but then Iain says, 'I thought it best to leave your bird well out of it, Auntie. So, assuming he sends his telegram, which I doubt, they'll just know you're alive over here.'

Una goes with sunburst-rapidity from coiled spring to water placidity. Thank God for Iain Blythe and his common sense. He releases her arm and drifts towards the young people, as it should be.

The women linger over the dresses. This despite the fact that Una quickly and easily picks out a handful of cool, white linen dresses and skirts for herself. Blouses too, fine soft cotton, the sleeves short and the collars delicate. But Robin should have a spot of colour. Una fingers sunset oranges and apple reds, ponderous, watery blues that ripple and shimmer like spring water on a hot afternoon.

'Definitely that one,' says Bernice. She looms over Una's shoulder casting a glowering Anglican shadow, and taps a delicate periwinkle blue. 'For you,' she clarifies. 'Not Robin.'

'I don't need – '

'Yes, you do,' says Bernice. 'Didn't you wear blue before?'

'Often,' Una says.

'Well, then.' There's a pause as Bernice's eyes crease and narrow. Thoughtfully she says, 'Or is that the problem?'

Una hasn't thought beyond clothing that is clean and cool under a Singapore sun. And what bliss that it is a Singapore sun and not that boiled egg-yolk sun styled on the flags of Syonan-to. Bernice makes Una think and she finds herself acquiescing. Yeats, again,
Had I the heavens embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with gold and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths...

Once, Una made Iris a gown like that.

'Li, Iris, Carl – they would know me in blue,' she says. 'Go on, see if you can find something that suits.'

Bernice sets off briskly, and Una resumes styling dresses against Robin. It's hard to find something that doesn't hang off of her. Una rejects the robin-red-breast red of what should be an appealing calico, and a cherry-red thing with smocking. Will she ever, Una wonders, look at the colour and not see her captors? Eventually Una settles on a sunny yellow calico with winking pink flowers, a pine green dress with smocking on the bodice that turns Robin's green eyes to loadstones, then adds the periwinkle that caught Bernice's eye. Una always did spoil Iris, and Robin deserves the same treatment. She adds a green flyaway skirt with hidden smocking because Elise would have loved it on Robin, the way her eyes become lucent green ponds, and the way it swings ribbon-lithe around Robin's ankles as she dances. Then a crisp white nightgown and a handful of practical shirts.

Bernice marches back and spills her bounty across the nearest hanger for convenience. 'Have a look,' she says.. Una sifts through cornflower blue cotton with eyelet buttonholes, a cyan wrap-around affair, a summery, sky blue dress with an old-fashioned hem and white snowflake shapes for a pattern, and one that is more creation than dress It shimmers purple or blue, the intensity shifting with the sunlight. Shoulders low, sleeves capped short and butterfly-delicate, hem long enough to make Una feel comfortable with it but still short enough to be modern. Bernice obviously enjoyed herself. Gesturing at a darker, rippling gown in twilight colours that rustles like a susurration if glanced at sideways, Una says, 'What's this for?'

'Evenings, obviously,' says Bernice. 'It's non-negotiable. I've decided we should all look halfway presentable at dinner tonight. This way we might.'

'Right,' says Una. She thinks of Iris, ensconced in the old Trinity House wardrobe in Una's room, little body wrapped limpet-tight around Una's good-days dress. The memory makes her smile. Argument dies on her lips. But she can't resist needling Bernice. It's what they do. So, Una says, 'You realize to look properly smart we're going to need jewellery and that too?'

They can't justify the expense, and Una watches Bernice, because she knows they both know this.

'Even so,' says Bernice. 'Dresses that fit will be a sight better than sitting there in whatever we could cobble together. I hate the way Miss RAPWI stares.'

Una hates it too. Before she can say so, Bernice delivers her coupe de grace. 'It will go well with your fish.' Una's hand drifts to them and finds Yeats snug in that warm, blue centre. I went into a hazel wood, because a fire was in my head…

'And,' says Bernice, knowing full well, because Una once told her as much, that this next is a blatant lie, 'your wedding ring.'

Una doesn't even try to dissemble. She accepts that at this point she and Bernice have perpetuated this myth – Li's last act of well-intentioned protection for her sister – for so long that they wouldn't know how to stop telling it if they wanted to.

Una accepts the evenings-out dress. She even finds an inexpensive whisper of a robins-egg-blue shawl to drape over it. Also the old-world affair in sky blue, and the cornflower blue dress, too. More than enough colour to be getting on with. Joan appears and hats Una, Bernice and Robin, without so much as a by-your-leave. They're big, floppy-brimmed things that throw the ground at Una's feet into immediate and straw-slatted relief. Bernice squawks to rival a nearby infuriation of caged hens and Robin shrieks with laughter. Una watches as Joan tries to do the same to Cressida, who is considerably taller than wiry Joan and be-hatted still in that awful thing she took from the dead Japanese guard.

'Leave me be, woman!' Cressida says. 'Can't you see I'm fine without your raffia and straw stuff?'

'Here,' says Iain, gamely, 'I need a new one.' He sets the rejected hat jauntily atop his brown, curly head. 'Will I do?'

'Very nicely,' says Una, and smiles. It occurs to her for the first time that he might rub along with them all right after all.

Over supper, talk turns to what they will do next. They cannot stay at Raffles indefinitely, and Una doesn't want to. She senses none of them does. Not with the too-soft beds and the eye-wateringly bright silverware or the evening entertainment shifting forever between the old and the new. Last night it was a brass band playing jazz that snapped and twanged more than Una remembers being fashionable. Tonight, as Iain guides Emily onto what Una makes the dangerously-polished, eel-slick dance floor, it's a string orchestra that sounds like a sigh, a swoon, a kiss.

'I, for one,' says Joan with conviction, 'am going home. To England. That will shock the RAPWI woman, won't it? Where do you imagine she thinks I come from?'

'I wouldn't dare guess,' says Bernice, bristling with amusement. Not quite as rare a thing as Bernice would have people believe. Una doesn't betray this fact. Cressida nods approval. She says, 'If that woman says anything, Doctor, you come straight back to us. I personally will devil her into Hell if she tries it on.'

'Well past hell, more likely,' says Bernice. 'I almost feel sorry for our Miss RAPWI.'

'Don't feel too sorry,' says Cressida. 'I'll have fun.'

'You would,' says Una. 'Where will you go, Cressida?'

'I'd better go back to England, too,' she says. That has the effect of stunning everyone. Joan turns statue, gaping outright. Bernice's eyes narrow. Puck leans delicately over Una's shoulder and plucks Joan's untouched glass of sherry from it's place on the table. In his clawed hands, the spun-glass and gold-leaf trim looks more fragile than sugar sculptures. Cressida laughs at them. She says, 'I don't want to, but if Una is still set on finding Robin's blood-family…'

'I promised her mother,' says Una, and instinctively strokes Robin's sleep-mussed head where it presses uncomfortably against her ribs.

'Tosh,' says Cressida. 'You promised a fever-delirious woman you'd do what you could. The other promise, the thing she asked before she died, about keeping Robin alive, you're doing fine yourself. Not that anyone cares what I think.'

'Quite right, too,' says Bernice.

'Una doesn't make promises lightly,' says Joan.

Demurral and unease compete for dominance in the narrowing confines of Una's throat. She's grateful when Joan's dark young hand curls overtop of hers. There's life in those hands, blood and grit and things that have before now pulled women back from the edges of graves. The other women concede the point with all the bad grace of so many sulking cats.

'Anyway,' says Joan, obviously struck by a similar thought. 'If it was me in Robin's place, I'd want to know years later that someone had tried to find my family. Whatever Elise said about the father refusing to give her a name.'

Una brushes a finger along the shell of Robin's ear with its scarlet birthmark on the lobe and nods, because this is what she feels, too. The idea of actually handing Robin over to strangers makes her blood freeze and her stomach twist, but the idea of not honouring her promise to Elise…That curdles in Una's gut differently.

'I haven't Cressida's connections,' says Joan, 'but I'll help look.'

'I'm staying,' says Bernice. 'I dare that RAPWI woman to make me do anything else.'

'Is that wise?' Joan asks. Joan, Una thinks with a smile, could always be uncompromisingly practical. She had to be, there in their sickbay with its imperfect supplies. England is getting a fine doctor, and if they don't realize it, Una will have words for them. Cressida, too, no doubt.

'Damn wise,' says Bernice. 'I put up with years of everlasting mission work for Robert, and then he had the bad manners to die in that bloody camp and strand me here. We had years together here. We were supposed to have more. Now it's home. No one is taking that from me. The Japanese didn't, and that officious excuse of a RAPWI woman certainly won't. Una agrees, don't you, Una?'

The fact that Una bristles at being co-opted into the sharing of this opinion is counterpoised by the fact that she also wants to stay. There is a consulate in Singapore, or there will be once the British get it up and running again. Perfectly situated for hunting down her family. Li, Carl, Iris, and whatever of Robin's family is left.

'Of course,' she says, automatic as a clock's pulse or a heartbeat. Over the rising babel-horror of Joan, Una says resolutely, 'I couldn't possibly leave Puck. Canada would never let a monkey cross the boarder.'

She reaches over her shoulder and tucks her browned, blistered, and scarred hand into Puck's elderly one. He's still got the sherry glass, she realises, less the contents, when he raps it smartly against her knuckles. 'Where you go, I go, eh Puck?'

'That,' says Bernice, 'for the benefit of the heathens among us, is from Ruth, the book of. Exceptionally popular at weddings. It takes us right back to where we were with Robin. Her people, your people, all one and the same for my money.'

'It's the principle of it,' says Una. 'I'd like, someday, to be able to look Elise English in the eye and say I tried.'

They have to wait for Emily's part of this conversation because Iain has negotiated her into a second waltz by way of mute back-and-forth that leaves Una thinking, Like that is it? When the string quartet escalates the waltz into a tango, Emily retreats to the haven of their table, rose-spotted and breathless. This is a peculiarity of Emily, because Una remembers waltzes, and they are lovely, gentle things that don't interfere with breathing when danced at tempo. Or if they do, it's because of the dancer opposite, not the dance.

'Of course you've got to find them,' Emily says to Una, when Bernice manages to resurrect the conversation. 'I was going to ask about that, actually, because obviously my mother and father died when that bomb got our house, but they always said we had connections somewhere in Canada. One of mother's people, I think, so not a Carnegie. And I wondered, if maybe – I mean, I know it's a massive country – but I hoped if between looking for your family, and Robin's, you could –'

'Of course, I'll look out for them,' says Una before Emily can finish. 'Iain too, if he gets back there before I do. Won't you?'

If Iain is at all surprised by this conscription into Una's machinations, it doesn't show. He nods, unfazed. 'Course,' he says. He says it easily, carelessly, with all the weightlessness of the young. 'Least I can do, under the circumstances. Anyone else got relatives? Cressida?'

Definitely settling in, Una thinks, as she watches Iain say it. He grins pure devilment at Cressida and doesn't blanch when a diatribe meets this volley. Funny how time does that. The boy has gone in days from stranger to another facet of their close-knit group. Nellie and Elise, were they here, could tell him it's no easy thing. But they aren't. So, instead Una offers him the indulgent smile she once reserved for Iris, and watches the women reshuffle so he can sit down at the table.

Be careful, she almost says. Otherwise, you too may get stuck here for the sake of a monkey you never used to love. But even as Una thinks it, she senses Iain wouldn't mind if it were so. If he did stay – what harm would that do? Oh, it hadn't been easy, not always, certainly not these last few years. And there are things now that Una must do because of that love; Find her family to start with. Find Robin's, for another. Emily's, too, if she can. When the feast of Hungry Ghosts comes round she has dead to remember that are not all named Walter or even Elise English, all because she stayed and stayed in Singapore. None of this will be easy. But as Bernice pulls Una into a wrangle about plans for tomorrow, Una knows in the bone-deep way of incontrovertible truths that she would do it again. Would stay, and stay for love of Singapore.