They move into and then pass their first post-war Christmas in Trinity House. Not all of the women from their group, because there are too many. Only the particular knot that Una has come to feel closest to. There are three bedrooms. They put the young girls in Carl's and Li's room as was, and Cressida in the room that was Iris's. They should put Robin there, but for one thing, that would feel like a betrayal, an assertion that Iris was definitely dead. For another, Robin has never slept alone a night in her life. Camp didn't work like that. Una can't bring herself to force the change, now. So, Robin comes into Una's old room with her, and Bernice with both of them. She, to, isn't used to sleeping alone. Camp life didn't work like that, for the adults, either.
They still see the others – they go up to Raffles in the evening if only to let the RAPWI woman know they're still here, still making plans, not all of them involving boats home. Occasionally someone tries to persuade Una to take Robin back to Canada. Always Una says, 'I couldn't possibly leave Puck.'
There are other reasons too, and sometimes Una enumerates those. What if Carl came back looking for her? What if Iris turned up at Trinity House with no idea what happened to her Auntie? What if Li…
Once, Iain says half-heartedly, 'I worry it won't be safe, Auntie. For you, Robin, or Puck.' He knows better, Una sees, than to argue with Bernice. Touchingly, he thinks he can puncture her. Una says with a smile, 'Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?'
Iain is utterly lost. Emily promptly loses the game she invented years ago and laughs a laugh like a swan song. 'Essays in Idleness,' she says without enlightening Iain.
To Iain, Una says, 'It wasn't safe in camp, either. Or in occupied Singapore. Robin and I will be fine. Puck will make sure of that.'
There's still music in the evenings, and Emily still gets more of her share of dances than the rest of them, but no one minds and everyone teases. It's sweet. It's almost like a time slip, the lifting of a veil into the days when Una, Li and Carl went out together, except of course they aren't here and she is, and the laughing girl with hair sleek and midnight-dark is not Iris, after all.
They make plans between dances. Joan nags the RAPWI woman about the boat to England. Cressida bypasses nagging, skipping directly to harangues of epic proportions. The RAPWI woman bears them stoically. Puck, ancient though he is, steals the RAPWI woman's clipboard and runs off cackling, to write in glorious simian shorthand all over her notes. She bears this less stoically, and the ghost of the woman Una was sympathises, because Puck can be – Puck turned out to be an aptronym. Still, Una doesn't tell Puck off. After years of keeping her and the others alive, Una reckons the Puck earned his fun. He dances with Robin on the eel-slick dance floor and then with Cressida. He helps himself to Bernice's pink gin and she slips the monkey a guava to go with it. Salted, like in the old days.
Una, Iain and Emily hash out how to find their missing family. Bernice threatens to investigate somewhere to stay, and Una, for once in her life out-glowers the other woman and says, 'Don't be ridiculous. You'll stay in Trinity House with me and Robin. Emily too.'
Emily inclines her head, swan-graceful. Bernice narrows her eyes. Iain says, 'Look, if I get called away, I'd really feel much better with all of you stuck together.'
'Oh, all right,' says Bernice. 'No need to take on so, the pair of you.'
And then, one morning, Una wakes up in Trinity House, and knows something is wrong. She lies perfectly still in her makeshift bed – she still cannot seem to work up to the comfort of her bed that was – and wanders mentally through the house. Robin? No. She can hear Robin's sleepy, snuffling noises close by. The pipes? Not that either; There is not enough sound. Creaking floorboards?
Una lies on the floor, sun spilling through the curtains, and pricks her ears for , snores gently several feet away. Much too quiet for Cressida. Emily, perhaps? Joan? But no – Now that they can luxuriate in their mornings, neither girl rises earlier than she can help. Una doesn't mind. She thinks it might even be good for them. So, they sleep cat-like in the room that used to be Carl's and Li's. Una is sure they are still asleep now.
Realization dawns as Una tries to move her arms. Puck fell asleep in them last night, his body snug between her and Robin. He's still there, and still warm, but only just. Puck is too stiff in her arms, his clawed hands too still. Puck is dead.
The weight of this – the death of Puck – collides with Una with all the brute force of a freight train. It hits her chest so hard she winces and it is nothing to do with being too old or too stiff to be sleeping on the floorboards of her old room. Puck. Dead. Puck dead in her arms with Carl God-knows-where. Perhaps Carl is dead, too.
Almost that is comforting, because if Carl is dead then Puck won't be alone and it is suddenly, horribly important that Puck not be alone. Puck, who screamed at looters and slipped Una peanuts through the gates of that awful camp. Puck, who she taught to play the piano and who chased Iris round the garden. Puck, laughing gleefully because he beat Carl at chess. Puck screaming indignation for everyone save Carl and Nenni because there is a buffalo in the garden. Puck screaming terrifying, simian warning as the men marched up Evelyn Road and called for the women to come out.
The thought of Papatee, sweet, gently giant who Una loved and killed to save her family, makes the tears come. They boil hot and unbidden on sleep-heavy eyelids. Puck hated Papatee. Puck did not want there to be a buffalo in his house. Or in his garage. And honestly, Una didn't either, but then she was there and she was feeding him, and…
'Like you,' she says as she strokes Puck's stiff, grey fur. 'I didn't want you, either Puck, and then…' Her voice breaks. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Una doesn't know what changed, anyway. Not the war. Una loved Puck before the war and in the tracery of her heart she knows this. Oh, they had always kept up a kind of merry war, but it was for form's sake. Because Puck loved Iris and Iris was family and that made Puck family. And Puck saved Una's life. Robin's life.
The Chinese have a saying. Li taught Una this, years ago. When you save someone's life you owe them a debt. And Puck saved Una's life several times over.
'You owe me a debt, Puck,' she tells the too-still monkey, because that is what Li says.
Robin is still asleep. She looks peaceful. Quietly, so as not to wake her, Una eases out of the jumble they make, herself, Puck and little Robin. Balancing on her heels she begins the process of extricating Puck from what remains of his partial nest. His hands went slack curled around Robin's dark hair, and Una tries to release the child breeze-gentle. Puck gives her no help. He can't, poor thing.
'Here, let me.' This from Bernice. Una had not noticed the snoring had stopped. Now Bernice stoops, practical and efficient as ever, and does deftly what Una cannot. She separates Puck's clawed hands from the child's hair and hands him cold and boneless to Una.
'Oh, Puck,' says Una again and hugs him close. It's different. She cannot feel his heart and his arms do not come round her neck. He says nothing in reply. He will never say anything to her again. Never throw another peanut or scream at a buffalo or battle her for the teapot. He will never groom her hair, or Robin's or…There are too many ors.
Una now has a new problem. She must bury Puck, that is obvious, but she cannot leave him lying exposed to be gawped at by Trinity house. Not where anyone could find his little grey body. Not after what they have been through. She recalls how he tumbled into her arms outside the camp and falls back onto her knees. Puck doesn't complain. Puck should complain. Puck used to complain just to be contrary with her. He doesn't even complain that she is crying into his fur, making him soggy. Puck hates being soggy. He screams at the rain, overturns the dish Una uses – used – for his bath. Unless, of course, Iris was having her bath, and then he would clamber in with her, and do the soap. Make great mountains of it on her skin, laughing when she laughs. He would hop out of the water, soap-spattered, dodge past Li's towel and run soapy, slippery and suds-spattered around the house, leaving sopping footprints in his wake. And Una would scold, but then afterwards, with Li, she would laugh. How they laughed.
Neither can Una shroud Puck. Not because that isn't the done thing with animals, but because Puck would hate it. Una cannot bring herself to do anything Puck would hate, not now with the first slats of sun illuminating his scruffy grey fur. Shakespearean, Una amends. Rosemary always says his collar makes him look Shakespearean. Like a court jester. Feste, or Jacques or…
She shifts him in her arms. The camphor chest full of all their best-beloved worldly goods is still in attic. It still sits askance in the middle of the floor, where Una pulled it out of the shadows that day Iain brought them home. Now Una sets Puck down, carefully, so carefully, on the attic floor next to her as she sifts through the contents of the camphor chest. It smells of camphor and olden days.
Una's hands skitter off the red silk of the pillows Bruce sent as a wedding present, off those sacred shards of Gladstone Blue Ribbon, sharp, not quite whole. Off of that blue dress of Una's, so beloved of Iris and long-since worn out, and the tea bowls she did not, after all, take with her away to camp. Una fishes one out. Thinks, Li won't mind. Una keeps digging. Carl's books, Li's sketches. Kuan Yin is not there because the first thing Una did was move her back to her rightful place in the hall. She wishes now she had thought to save Carl's chess set, now battered and short many pieces. Una holds onto that thought. It grounds her in the reality of the moment. Finds, ah, there. The remains of Puck's teacup. She scoops them out, careful, careful, so as not to hurt her fingers. But she can't let them hurt Puck, either, that wouldn't do. So Una tears a strip from that old blue dress. It was the very blue of the sky between midnight and dawn, and Iris adored it. Una tears it at the hem and wraps what is left of Puck's teacup in it. She takes it and the tea bowl in one hand and Puck in the other. Una is careful to arrange his arms around her neck so he will not slip. Almost, but for the heartbeat, she can imagine him alive.
In the sun room Una pauses and plucks one of the chess pieces from the remnants of the game. People have been looting the pieces for years, and Una wonders at that. Why not take the whole game? She's glad now that they didn't. She tucks the white knight into one of Puck's claws.
Peanuts, Una thinks. She's faintly aware how absurd this is. All this fuss for a dead monkey. But it isn't for a dead monkey, it's for Puck, and he owes her a debt. She owes him a debt. Una has lost track. There are still peanuts in the kitchen. They cost Cressida a fortune. Everything costs a fortune these days. But Puck cannot be buried without peanuts. He would haunt her, Una is sure of it, if she tried. She takes the last of the peanuts and puts them in the red tea bowl. Then she looks at it, sees that it is whole. No chips or nicks or dings. This is right, because Una saved it. It is wrong for Puck. Una crosses the kitchen, which is still a shell of itself, and finds the six ruby red tea bowls she used to carry in her pockets. They are chipped and pockmarked from all that wear and close contact with her, with ACS drills, with the war.
Carefully, so as to spill nothing, Una tips the contents of the whole tea bowl into the battered, chipped one. War wounds. They both had them, Una and Puck. This is better.
Una is digging his grave when the women join her. It is harder work than Una would ever have believed. The ground is full of roots – dendrochronology, says the part of her mind that absorbed chatter from Carl and Li – and it makes digging slow going. But Una cannot bury Puck elsewhere. This was Puck's home. This was where his family lived. Lives. They buried Nenni here, and Papatee.
The shovel splits open all the weak parts of Una's hands. She thought, after life in the camp, there would be none of those left, but she is wrong. Her hands bleed, and painful gashes across her palms weep in sympathy with her because Puck is dead and maybe so are the others, and maybe Carl will never know that Puck was Una's guardian angel all these years. The air smells of earth, blood, and of Catmint and butterfly peas because they planted these things over Nenni and Papatee. Bernice's voice says, 'I can do that, if you like.'
Una startles. She stops digging to acknowledge Bernice, Cressida, Emily, Joan. Women Una wouldn't know but for a quirk of fate. Women she cannot imagine leaving to return to Canada, even as she knows in some oblique, shadowed corner of her mind she must. If only to find her family. Maybe the part of Emily's family that are supposed to be there, too. I cannot leave Puck, Una had said, and now she doesn't have to. Cressida leans, scrawny as ever against the wall of the house, knife flashing in her hand.
Bernice reaches for the shovel and Una's bleeding hands close tight and slippery against it. Now the air smells of blood, earth, catmint and damp wood.
'Thank you,' she says, 'but no. It's a job for someone that loved him.'
They don't argue. Una is vaguely aware of Emily and Joan slipping into the background, like shadows at the start of the day, short, shorter, shortest until you can't see them at all. They sit on the kitchen stoop, arms around each other, and keep vigil over Puck. Bernice hovers mother-henishly at Una's elbow. Una clings to the lifeline her presence offers and keeps digging.
Robin joins them. Her grief is visceral; She screams the way Puck used to scream. She thrashes and lashes, and Una stops digging to try and comfort her. She catches Robin in her arms, bird-light, and feels the sensory echo of Iris once Papatee was dead, her hunger-furred tongue, the way she had wailed and beat Una's chest. She remembers the smell of the buffalo meat as it dried, how they had not wanted to eat it but had choked on it anyway. There was too much and that was worst of all because Iris was starving and here was more food than they could eat, and all the while Iris wailed to rival a banshee. Puck wailed with her. He does not wail with Robin. He does not wail with Robin because Puck is dead. Una cannot get past this fact. Once she couldn't get past the mere fact of monkey. Now the monkey has become Puck and Puck is dead and this is as unacceptable as any heresy.
'There, little bird,' says Una and rocks with Robin on the ground, her hands bleeding, the smell of her blood mingling with the still-sleepy smell of Robin and of the catmint nearby. With earth and damp wood, butterfly peas and death. Overhead the mynas begin to sing All My Hope on God is Founded. A good hymn for a funeral, Una thinks. Bernice takes it up. Then Cressida, self-pronounced heathen that she is. Emily is next, and Joan close behind her. It is not the raucous singing of the other day with Iain. This is different. Tuneful. If not quite a choir, then not a bad second, either. It's the anchor of Una's faith, and she takes it up with them. Sings, quaveringly but resolutely,
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good, and only true.
God unknown,
He alone,
Calls my heart to be his own…
'Here, little bird,' says Emily, holding out her arms. 'Come to Auntie. Let Mama look after Puck.'
Robin does not move, not right away. Una senses that she doesn't want to. Truthfully, Una doesn't want her to go, either. What if she turns around and Robin is dead too, and Una must bury her, also? This is a ridiculous thought, but the force with which Robin is crying…Oh, to be gosling-young and weep that unabashedly again. To wail and gnash one's teeth in the face of death.
You never did that, says a voice in Una's head. Your mother died and you saw how bruised your father was, how angry Jerry, how confused Carl and how stricken Faith, and you hugged your grief to yourself. You would not have cried like this if God Himself had granted you permission. And later, when it was Walter – But that was different. Una wasn't entitled to tears, then.
'Come,' says Joan, low and soothing. 'We'll sit with Puck and look after him. See all these lovely things your Mama brought to give him, specially? Let's make those ready for Puck.'
Reluctantly, Robin's hands loosen around Una's neck. Una watches her trot, slow and steady towards Emily and Joan. Every pace or two she looks over her shoulder to make sure Una is there. To see, Una thinks, that Una is still alive. Una musters a smile for her.
When Una can't shovel any more, from the pain and the roots, she kneels down and claws at the earth with her hands. The earth sticks under her nails but it hardly registers. It cakes her bloodied palms, and that probably isn't good because maybe it will cause infection. Una hardly registers that, either. She claws and claws at the earth. If they think she is mad, no one says so. Not mild Emily and medical Joan, not opinionated Cressida or Bernice with her glower to rival a cat. Una does not believe they do think her mad. Cressida works quietly on a project of her own devising and behind Una, the girls and Robin prepare Puck for burial. It hurts horribly. It would hurt still worse, Una thinks, if they were not there with her and Robin.
Finally, the roots and stones and pebbles subside. Una takes Puck's little grey body and lays it in the ground. She sees that Emily, Joan and Robin have arranged him so that his one hand is folded around the chipped tea bowl full of peanuts. The other clutches the white knight tight between little clawed fingers.
'Carl would want you to have that,' she says as she touches the chess piece. 'You were his favourite opponent. He said you were the best chess player there was. Not that he knew many.'
Una's hand drifts to the tea bowl. It winks red as glistering blood in the afternoon sun, its butterfly stencil concealed by the peanuts.
'Li won't mind,' Una says as she touches the chipped lip of that ruby red tea bowl. She won't be able to bring her family back a full set now, but then, Una's family will never be whole again, either. Not if they live to own seventeen monkeys, a dozen cats and a whole pack of dogs. 'They were an odd number anyway, after the occupation. This will even them out.' Una tries and fails to smile.
'I'm sorry about your teacup,' she says and slips the pieces, still in the shred of her old gown, still to stop them hurting Puck, in beside him.
'Li and I really did mean to get it fixed, you know. It wasn't only talk. But suddenly I had to get them out of here by Japanese edict and –You were there, Puck. You remember. And then I wasn't there, and I'm sorry for that too, because that must have been terrifying, coming after me like that. When I think of the guards and the things they could do if pressed…'
Tears again. They create myriad rainbows that shimmer in Una's immediate line of sight and remind her of the Singapore that was, all those thousands upon thousands of lights shimmering against the night sky, like auxiliary stars. Bernice's rough, browned hand thumbs them gently away.
'And I'm sorry,' Una says, but unsteadily now, 'that I never got Carl back for you the way I promised. I never forgot, Puck, any more than you forgot me. I just couldn't look. I'm looking now but if…If you see him first, Puck, or Firecracker, or Li, or any or all of them…Tell them I never stopped looking. I'll keep looking, because we can't be all that's left. But if you do see them – Let them know.'
Una touches a hand to Puck's eyes but doesn't close them. There is no need. He died in his sleep. Perhaps he died dreaming of Carl.
There is nothing else to say. For a moment Una sits there, staring at the little grey body there in the ground. He could be sleeping. Una looks at Puck with his chess piece in one hand and the tea bowl full of peanuts in the other, the pieces of his particular teacup shrouded beside him, and feels a myriad of other, unsaid things well up. Unsayable things, most of them.
'I did love you,' she says now. 'But you knew that. I didn't say it, not ever, I think. Not at first because I didn't, but you knew that, too. Afterwards, Iris and Carl said it so often I thought it would give you a bit of manners not to say it. Stop you growing too proud. Not that I minded, not really, because Iris adored you and Carl loved you, and somewhere along the way I loved you too. Afterward even that…' Una's voice catches and the tears shimmer and swim before her again. More rainbows of refracted sunlight. Bernice's fingers again, gentle and work worn, at the tracery edges of Una's eyes.
'Afterwards,' she says, 'I was afraid to say it. Because I said it to Li and Iris at that train station, didn't I, and we might never see them again. Well, you will, someday. I may not. Not until or if I catch you up. So, after that I couldn't say it to you because maybe I'd never see you again, either. But I thought it Puck, so, so often. What was it we used to say to Firecracker? I loved you to the moon and back.'
Una folds one cool, bleeding hand around Puck's hand, the one with the white knight. Her hand is still bleeding and some of the blood spots the ivory but no matter. Bernice leans over and her handkerchief is there, dabbing it away. But for all that, Una knows that even in life Puck wouldn't have minded the blood. In life, he might have bandaged her hands. Slowly, deliberately, Una Meredith bends down and kisses the grey furred forehead of Puck the monkey.
When she says, 'Rest in peace, and rise in glory,' it is not the stuff of staunch Presbyterianism. It is something Elise English, fiercely Anglican, mother of Robin, used to say as the women around them died. Bernice, vicar's widow, still says it. As Una looks up at her, she catches the tail end of the other woman's reflexive sign of the cross. Una is glad now that she learned it. Even if it means that between Li, Bernice and Elise she is so many miles wide of staunch Presbyterianism that she couldn't find her way back to it for trying.
'Let light perpetual shine upon you,' Una says to Puck in his hard-dug grave, the smell of catmint and guavas, of blood and earth, sharp and sweet on the air. Another Elise-ism. Also Anglican. Bernice says it with her. Una Meredith means it as much as she has ever meant anything in her life. Then, slowly and with precision, so as not to separate Puck from his treasures, she begins to fill in the grave. The others help.
'Goodbye Puck,' says Robin. Her voice is watery, teary. Una folds both arms around her and holds her. 'You were my best friend after Mama.'
'And mine,' says Una. She smiles for Robin, but fleetingly because Carl told her once smiles frightened monkeys and she mustn't frighten Puck.
'He was all of our best friends, I think,' says Joan.
'Yes,' says Emily, 'and couldn't he make us laugh?'
'And how we tried not to,' Cressida says, 'because of the guards.'
Bernice says, straight-faced and sincere as she ever is, 'We ought to sing him something. Funerals always end with a hymn.'
The mynas have already sung All My Hope on God is Founded. Una doesn't want to sing it again. Doesn't think she could. Abide with Me is too solemn. Jerusalem the Golden is too pompous for Puck. Una thinks of Puck as he was, how childlike in his credulity, how deeply, painfully loyal. That is why, finally, they settle on All Creatures of Our God and King. It seems appropriate.
Una doesn't think she can sing this, either. They get as far as Ye who long pain and sorrow bear,/Sing praise and cast on God your care before Una falters.
By the time they reach Let all things their Creator bless, her throat is tight and she is weeping continuously for this monkey that Carl loved, Iris worshipped and that she affected to tolerate but who really Una cherished as much as anyone.
As they depart the grave, Cressida bends over and settles something carefully on the grave, pushes deep into the ground. Cressida does it gently, so as not to hurt Puck, his tea bowl or the white knight. Something is a grave marker. Cressida must have carved it imperfectly while Una dug the grave. The writing is clumsy but even. It says:
Puck.
Friend first. Protector later. Family always.
So, goodnight unto you all.
Una would have never thought to do it, but she sees as the stone settles to earth that the grave is complete.
'Thank you,' she says. The air tastes of the earth she has dug and the blood on her hands. Of catmint, butterfly peas and the last traces of peanuts.
'What will you do now?' Bernice asks. It comes out a question but Una senses the other woman doesn't really need to ask. There is only one viable answer. The consulate here is still a useless ruin. Ernest Henderson's evasions are worse than useless.
These days when he says, 'We're trying but I couldn't possibly comment at this time,' Una senses he has no more intelligence of these greater mysteries than he grasps the horror of the situation in camp. Li, Carl and Iris might be anywhere. Robin's family are God-knows-where. There's nothing else for it. I couldn't possibly leave Puck was Una's line these last few months. Now, she won't have to.
The words strange and foreign-tasting in Una's mouth, she says to Bernice, 'First, I'm going to the nearest lawyer and drawing up papers putting you and Emily in charge of Trinity House until further notice. That way, until I come back, no one can drive you out of it. Then I'll tell Miss RAPWI to put me on a boat, too. We'll go with Joan and Cressida to England. And then, God willing, Robin and I will go to Canada.'