They have been at Raffles a month the day Una steels herself to return to Trinity House. The RAPWI woman is beginning to twitch gently, like a kite on a summer zephyr because no one has told her if or when they want to leave Singapore. But, as Una tries and fails to explain at some length to this angular woman with her clipboard and practised smile, it's more complicated than that.
Yes, the women here are family. Yes, she has a house in Singapore still, presumably. Somewhere, God alone knows where, are the family Una promised to look after, to find, to come back to. She has no idea how to do this, and neither, judging from his prevarication, does Ernest Henderson. In white hours at three in the morning, with the floor carpeted and soft against her back, Una wonders if she is best-placed to find Carl, Li and Iris by staying put. Henderson's interest in turning up a middle-aged Chinese woman and her half-caste daughter is minimal. Underwhelming might be to do him a disservice. Then again, it might not. He looked slightly more interested in the revelation that Una had a brother, and that the brother, who had fought in the last war was less one eye, Canadian, and missing, but he hasn't turned up anything yet. In reasonable moments Una decides this is because Carl's absent-mindedness could effortlessly turn him ghost-elusive if he wanted or needed it to. In uncharitable moments, like the white hours of three in the morning, Una chalks this up to the same British attitude that left her and her family stranded in the first place. Yes, they blew up the causeway. Yes, it was on purpose. Yes, the British would come back. Una said it, Li said it, the whole ACS said it, and all of Singapore went on believing it long past plausibility. Una was tricked that way once. Never again. Certainly not by Ernest Henderson with his Well I don't knows and Naturally, we'll do our best Madam.
Now, Una lingers half a moment in front of the startling, sun-bright glass of the communal mirror in their Raffles room, and tugs at the cornflower blue of her sleeves, traces the shape of her silver fish with her thumb. There's no one to look presentable for but it feels important.
If Carl somehow is home, or Li, or Iris, she wants them to see her clean, scrubbed and more-or-less fed, not skeletal and bedbug-raddled. On the vanity table, Puck claps his hands approvingly. Then he hops up onto Una's shoulder and promptly undoes the work of minutes.
Robin, hanging lazily from the door says, 'Mama, are we going now?'
Una hesitates. In her mind's eye she pictures Trinity House a shell, a gutted ruin of a building. A ghost of a house, like those gaping, half-shaped houses she saw everywhere after the bombs started. In the mirror, her reflection blanches. Supposing Carl or Li or Iris is at the house, they wouldn't know her like this, hair cut, arms scarred, a shadow of the woman that used to run their home like a ship. Well, that's not strictly true. She ran their hut just the same, didn't she?
'Come on,' says Bernice, poking her head round the door, 'Cressida's starting to climb the walls, and if she does, I don't know what I'm going to tell Miss RAPWI downstairs.
Una laughs, then blinks several times in succession. She says, 'You're not – You don't have – '
'Nonsense,' says Bernice. 'We want to come, don't we Cressida?'
'Good lord, yes,' says the older woman. Despite several weeks of hearty food, she is still sparrow-scrawny. 'After years of hearing about the place, you'd better believe I want to see that house of yours.'
Una doesn't argue. The relief of their nearness is like a tonic. It settles heavy and warm around her shoulders. She tucks Robin's hand securely in hers. Puck helps himself to Una's shoulder. This arrangement lasts as far as the stairs. Then Robin and Puck are up on the banister, racing each other down, and Una thinks, If that child dies of a broken neck after everything, I will never look her mother in the eye again. Not that Una can look Elise in the eye again. Not that Robin's jubilant squeal brooks resistance. Una's shoulders relax even as she watches them. This is childhood the way it should be.
All Una says on the subject is, 'Mind the newel post!'
Their procession gathers people as it goes. Joan leaves off chatting with another, older doctor and falls in step with them. Emily hooks her arm through Joan's, but briefly, because somewhere around the Raffles entrance, Iain Blythe secures the young woman's arm. Joan falls in with the older women, leaving Iain and Emily a duet to the others quartet. Una watches them with half an eye. It's awkward, with Puck back on her shoulder, but the monkey solves this by leaping off as they approach the old, familiar ground of the market. He dives for and seizes a banana, then runs off as a vendor shakes an aggrieved fist.
'Honestly,' murmurs Una as she pays the merchant his due, 'I thought peanuts were your food of choice?'
Puck cackles. When Una looks over at the others,she sees Cressida buying a bag of peanuts.
'That wasn't a hint,' she says.
'Course it wasn't,' says Cressida, easily. 'You only tolerate that monkey.' She flashes Una that infamous orange peel grin.
Robin runs ahead and from somewhere on Una's left Iain Blythe makes noises of unease. 'Shouldn't someone...' he begins.
'She's fine,' says Una. 'Iris was always doing that.' She feels it like a kick to the teeth, the sudden onslaught of memories of her Firecracker running riot through these same narrow streets. Then Una squares her shoulders and continues on. Soon she's abreast of Robin, and they're playing I Spy between the stalls.
As they crest the hill that leads to Evelyn Road, Robin begins to flag. She hangs heavily off Una's arm, and that causes her to flag, too.
'Here, Auntie,' says Iain, 'let me.' He drops Emily's arm from the old, antiquarian hold –Shirley Blythe trained his boy in the old ways, Una notes vaguely – and holds both arms out to Robin. More, Una thinks, for her benefit than Robin's, he says, 'Don't worry, I'm good with gremlins.'
Gremlins? Thinks Una, before she remembers that this is what her family in Kingsport call their children. Una, Carl and Li had only one, and she was their Firecracker. A bright, sparkling, ebullient jumble of girl-child. But Jem, Faith, Shirley and his wife were rich in children and they called them gremlins. Odds on they still do, because children never do grow up for their adults, not really. When Una thinks of Iris, even now, it's of the nascent nine year old that hugged her middle hard with the cattle carts in the background and begged her to come with them to Safety. In the Singapore market, Robin hesitates briefly, but as Iain swings her up onto his broad, almost-adult shoulders, she laughs a bright glissando of a laugh. Her mother's laugh, spun gold and harp strings.
Iain begins to march in terrible time. As he marches, he sings Van Amburgh is the man that goes to all the shows….
A wild, improbably song, raucous in its jubilance, alarmingly off-key. Bernice says, 'God, I haven't heard that in years,' and then joins in lustily. She gives the tune full whack, with such disregard for basic tenants of music as to belie her skill at a piano. Cressida dives in next. The young girls laugh. A passing dog howls and Una can't resist. She picks up the next verse and stubbornly adheres to the music as God intended, which has the effect of making Joan and Emily laugh harder. Una is heart-glad.
Up the hill, down the road, and Una can still see where the shells fell, where the bombs hit. Puck scrabbles deftly through maze of the ground the better to play navigator, darting ably between the ruin of the streets. Now and again he stops and raises a hand, calling out little simian injunctions. This way. Move along. This way … The Japanese did what they could, Una knows, to rebuild. After all, they needed plumbing and good roads as much as anyone. But there was a war on and nothing was constant, least of all the pavements.
Each pitfall makes Una's heart clench. They sidestep a canine skeleton and Una thinks, Akela, the pain as visceral and sharp as if it were yesterday the dog died trying vainly to protect her and the wicker basket she carried. This dog is not Akela but it is not the point. A lugubrious, jewel-bright lizard skims an overhanging branch and Una thinks Harry? Wonders, How long do lizards live? Wonders further that she never thought to ask Carl. That brings another heart-deep ache, and it's worse, because yes, she loved Akela, but Carl…it's a…Carl would call it an order of magnitude, the size of the difference. Beside her, Cressida must sense that it is too painful to talk, because she stops singing, enfolds Una's arm in her bony one and doesn't say a word. The atypicality of this gift feels as expensive and unlikely as it is appreciated. It makes Una think of Li, whose silences were natural and as untrammeled as newborn snow, and – will anything stop conjuring Una's ghosts?
Nothing will. Una knows this when suddenly she is there. Trinity House. Trinity House but not as it was, no more than she is as she was when she left it that last time. But Trinity House still, older and more bruised. The white paint of the veranda is peeling, the well-beloved wicker of the furniture splintering and blistered. Now if Una touched it, it would prick her fingers, slender off-shoots of wicker embedding in the flesh of the skin. Can a house die? Una wonders of no one in particular.
But it is there. That is something. Except the Lord build a house, thy labour is in vain. Una clutches the psalm lifeline-close in one hand and her fish in the other.
British Out! covers one wall in stark, bold capitals. As predicted, no one ever did care all that much that Una and her family were Canadian.
Puck snaps Una out of the spell the house weaves. He sprints up the stairs and through the gaping door with as much excitability as the day Carl first brought him home. Robin runs after him. Una cannot bear the thought of never seeing them again so she begins to follow. Then she sees Iain standing there, stationary, gobsmacked once again by the sheer magnitude of the thing that is the devastation of Singapore. The others are no better. Una feels this in the way their singing abates and their silences shift, taking on different weights and qualities.
'Come on,' says Una. 'If the kettle survived, I'll make us tea.'
There was a tin of bread that Una and Li were saving for the day the war ended. They were supposed to see it in together. They were going to open this tin and divide it up between the five of them, Una, Li, Iris, Carl and Puck. They said this to each other even after Carl disappeared. They said it right up to the moment Una put Li and Iris on the cattle cart to Malaysia and thence the mainland, because the theory was that they would be reunited and then…
The tin is still there. God knows how. Una finds it, deep in the back of a cupboard. She cannot believe it is still there, that the Japanese army didn't filch it. It is one of those mundane miracles that brings her to her knees in the ruin of her kitchen. The feathers of the dead Chinese hens have long since scattered to the wind, but their bones have not. Una kneels on their bones, on the ruin of the wooden whatnot, and the just-visible kitchen floor and sobs as if her heart is breaking. Which it may well be, Una doesn't know. Perhaps that has already happened. Overhead Puck runs gleefully about, thrilled at this chance to show off his tea-making skills.
He gets water out of the tap – another small miracle – and it gushes brown and unsightly into the kettle. Just as well Puck is boiling it, Una thinks and cries harder.
Footsteps. A shifting of bones and china as someone too old for Iain eases their way onto the ground.
'All right?' says Bernice. Before Una can answer, she says, 'Daft question, sorry. Course you're not.'
As Una watches, Bernice fishes in her blouse and comes up with ta man's oversized handkerchief. She offers it to Una, a square of white surrender in the remnants of the kitchen.
Una blows her nose, gratefully, and above them on the counter, Puck hops nimble as he ever was from tea box to teapot…Here a problem. The Gladstone Blue Ribbon teapot lies a corpse of a thing in the camphor chest upstairs. The rest of the set Una buried with Puck and their family years ago.
'Mama?' says Robin.
This makes Una aware that she is frightening her little girl and she sniffles, makes an effort to stop. She pulls Robin, all fine bones and sparrow-ribs into a hug.
To Puck, Una says, 'Li's cast iron teapot…that survived. Look for that.' Puck looks, and crows triumphantly when he unearths it. It's indestructible as ever, and Puck waltzes clumsily around the room with it, which makes Una laugh, and Bernice and Robin too. Una tries to take the teapot from Puck, but he's as protective of it as Una ever was in a teapot wrangle, which makes her companions laugh harder. Since the thing Una used to protect, her mother's china, is past saving, she lets Puck have his way. Well, that and Puck has more than earned the right to be possessive of a teapot. Una leaves Puck to make tea that is tea out of dried-up jasmine leaves and a tin of bread.
No one, Una thinks, could bring themselves to serve this spread to guests. Not even Aunt Martha. But Una is not Aunt Martha and currently she feels rich as a queen with her tin of bread and dried up jasmine leaves. So, she serves it, as promised, to Bernice, Cressida, Emily, Joan, little Robin and Iain. Rather, Puck does. He balances the tray on his head and skips his way into the sun room as was. Cressida has appropriated the piano bench and relocated it so that she can sit with her back against the wall. Joan sits next to her, and Emily at their feet. Opposite them, Iain sits on the floor on the rug marks left by the footstool Nenni the cat was partial to.
He grins that irrepressible Blythe grin at her again and says, 'Now there's a thing no one ever told me I'd see,' as Puck bows, the stiff Japanese bow, and sets the tea tray down. Then he clicks his teeth at Iain with increasing agitation.
'Leave him alone, Puck,' says Una. 'Nenni's been dead for years and that footstool gone about as long.'
'Oh,' Iain says, and he's up like a spring. 'I can – '
'You,' says Una, 'are absolutely fine.'
'We have cats,' Iain says.
'Your mother names them after Popes,' Una says. 'I remember.'
Bernice snorts and drops down onto the floor in the place where there was once a coffee table. Iain flashes that grin again. It is almost as irrepressible as Puck. He says,
'I saw a monkey once,' as Una sits opposite him. She sits elbow to elbow with Bernice, Robin in her lap, on the place where the low-slung coffee table used to live. They planned Carl's wedding around that table, and discussed baby Bruce and his future bride there, too. So many long, lovely chats. If only they'd known.
Little fingers scrabble in Una's pockets, and she realises suddenly that Puck wants the tea bowls. For weeks before that unrelenting march, she carried them on her, just in case. But when it came to the point Una was afraid of what would happen to them. They were too unapologetically Chinese, and though it had guddled her soul to do it, she left them behind. Li's voice in her ear was too close, to persistent, too terrified, and she said with the anguish of the day the world ended, the day Singapore fell, They will kill us, Firecracker.
'Upstairs, Puck' she says. 'They're in the camphor chest. The hope chest as was.' And what a potent name that is – Una wonders if the women of old had any idea what they were conjuring with when they coined it. Una did leave it full of hopes. For her family, reunions – full of tea bowls and pictures and wedding linens, maybe forever. Maybe to be found by Iris years hence. There aren't words for the treasures Una left, their worth.
Puck trots upstairs and Una's hand goes to her fish. She prays Yeats as she counts the seconds the monkey is gone,
I went into a hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head
And cut and carved a hazel switch
And hooked a berry to a thread…
She knows the tea bowls are where she left them when she hears a shriek of simian triumph. It makes the others – Iain inclusive – laugh, which is why it takes him a minute to resume his story.
'The monkey,' he tells Una, 'was part of a circus act. Uncle Jem didn't like it at all, though Isobel and the girls did. The novelty, I guess. Actually, I don't think many of us liked it. Animals do have souls, whatever they teach you.'
He risks a look at her, apparently anticipating staunch Presbyterian disavowal. It doesn't come. How could it? Una just let a monkey, scruffy, grey, arthritic, make tea in the remains of her kitchen. Una reaches backward and takes Puck's clawed little hand in hers.
'Don't I know it,' she says.
'Don't we all,' says Bernice with emphasis.
'Little imp kept us alive, and that's a fact,' says Cressida.
'Even the Commandant was a soft touch,' says Emily. 'Remember Mayonaka?'
Her inflection is not quite impeccable, Una thinks, but as approximations of the Commandant's sleek, black feline's name goes, it's an awful lot closer than the rest of them are likely to get. Cressida and Joan mutter things unlawful. Bernice bristles with something caustic. Only Una offers a half-smile. Iain dips his head in inquiry.
'The only thing in the world,' she says, 'that made him seem really human, that cat.'
Iain smiles, but it's not the Blythe grin, this time, it's more transient than that, more like a sunbeam on a spring afternoon. More like his mother, maybe, though Una wouldn't know. He reaches for the stale bread that came from a tin and crosses it, force of habit. Not a bit Presbyterian, but then, Shirley Blythe's children aren't, Una knows. It doesn't do anything to stop the tears when Iain takes it in hand, that stale, tinned bread, breaks it, and says the old, old words of institution.
'Whenever two or three are gathered together…Take, eat. Do this in remembrance of me.'
And they do.