PEI is a jewel of an island the day they arrive. It's summer and the sun is high. It turns the sea into a rippling, iridescent curtain of aqueous blue. Li was good with blues, and Una wonders what name she would give this shade. It is too light for an evening sky, to dark for a twilight one. It winks sapphiric in the streaming sun, a compliment to the eye-bright emerald of the fields, the dusty red of the roads. Una looks from sea to fields to the Li's ring on her hand. Once there were two. Jade for luck, Li said, and the blue for her eyes. The jade is buried on the finger of Elise English, who needed the luck more. The colours are not quite the same, but Una sees her in the surrounding countryside anyway. Both of them. Elise wears many and variegated greens in Una's memory as the Una of pre-war days wears an equal variegation of blues. Robin cranes her neck, wide-eyed and strains her ears for the hum and bustle of a city that doesn't come. There is no sound. Not even the lap-lap of the waves or the susurration of wind through leaves. Even the cicadas are asleep. The air is gravid with silence and it astonishes Robin. Una sees this in her ever-more incredulous green eyes.
Even the air smells different, Una thinks as they stand on the still, soundless platform. It's salted, like their guavas, cool and fresh, almost like a kiss, the kind one gives for politeness, the breeze skimming childish and capricious through the trees. It picks up a half or quarter knot and makes their leaves skitter, makes the cicadas change their tune. Finally. Conversation. Signs of life.
'Are we home, Mama?' asks Robin, twisting and turning at Una's side like a leaf herself.
No, Una wants to say. Striving for honesty, she says, 'We're here now, little bird. No more travelling.'
There are taxis waiting, but Una can't face them. It's a new development. In the old days one made the trip to the station by horse. Una remembers it well, the clip-clop of the hooves against the packed red dirt of the road, the fight to keep one's hat in place, the whinny of the horses and the chatter and clatter of fellow travellers. The last time she travelled that way to this place, a young man gave her a brother's kiss goodbye and the world shivered. Una shivers now.
At Una's elbow a conciliatory porter asks about their luggage. He calls her Missus, which is bizarre, not to say wrong, and Una realizes without thinking about it that he is doing what Li hoped people would do years ago. He looks at her ring and makes assumptions. Una opens her mouth to correct them and catches sight of Robin, twisting kite-wild in the wind as she spins on the platform. Una does not correct him. She makes arrangements for their cases to be sent on and only then does he seem to recognise her, because he says, 'You're one of the Manse girls, aren't you?' And before Una can confirm this, 'I was sorry about your father.'
'Oh,' says Una, nonplussed. 'Yes. Thank you.'
She has no idea what he means. Is her father ill? Dead? But surely someone would have…No. She was with Robin in a camp at the end of the world and several circles short of Hell, and anyway, the post was under more than scrutiny back in the days of Syonan-to. Red Cross parcels never got through and the women's letters never got out. The porter clasps Una's hand and she feels briefly the roughness of it, and feels a pang of envy for the mild harrowing he has had working at this place with the noise of incoming trains and the throngs of departing boys. Then he lets go and the feeling is gone. It is only Una and Robin there on the platform faced with the ranks of waiting taxis.
Because Una cannot face the waiting taxis, she takes Robin's hand in hers. She says, 'Ready to walk, little bird?'
Robin laughs and says, 'Can we catch the blue?'
She means the sea, Una supposes, and what's the harm? A diversion would be welcome. So they walk done to the water, blue and sparkling in the shimmering warmth of this June afternoon. Robin squeals to see the way the waves lap at the shore. How they swoop in for a kiss then pull away, then swoop in again. They are fickle and indecisive as an anxious sweetheart. Today they are not foaming or frothy, only serene as Li is serene, and elegant as the dancers they used to talk with of a rare evening out.
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea…
Robin runs on unsteady feet to meet the lapping waves, arms outstretched. 'Look, Mama!'
'Robin, your shoes!' says Una, but there's a laugh to her voice, because this is good. Different than Singapore, maybe, but Una can bear an afternoon by the sea with Robin. Watching her, Una slips her off shoes and then strips away her stockings. The Una-ghost she left here would be horrified at the idea, Una thinks as she does it, and smiles.
'Like this, Robin,' she says. She digs her bare feet into the powdery white sand. It feels sun-warm and sugar-fine. The kind of high-quality sugar Una hasn't seen in years. Robin is agog at this spectacle, but she follows suit with inbuilt childish grace. Shoes, stockings, and then she runs, with no thought for her skirt, into the lapping water.
Una runs after her, skirt in hand, and laughs at Robin's indignant squeal.
'It's icy!' she says. 'Like ghosts, Mama!'
Una, who never used to paddle, risks the shock of the water. Ghosts is not an inaccurate summation of the bone-chill of the water, she thinks. Snow is better. The freezing burst of winter air when you open the door to a blizzard. Una has braved worse than cold water.
She bends, willow-fluid the way Li taught her, and dips a hand in the water. It ripples around her fingers, and they wrinkle in the sudden cold. So many white prunes. She drags them ever quicker through the swirl of the water until they froth and the water leaps at Robin. She shrieks and splashes back in her turn. Una's hem slips forgotten into the water as they laugh and plash in the shallows.
Afterwards, the wind whipping their damp skirts, they walk hand in hand along the edge of the sea. This is easy because it leaves behind an impression, like a spine in the sand. They can count it's many vertebrae as they walk, and they do. It makes the sand cooler and harder-packed than the fine white powder half a yard off and their wet feet slap against it as they go. Their skirts slap too, against their feet, flip-flap. It makes Una laugh, and Robin too. Now and again Una scoops something up; A shell, a piece of battered and smoothed sea glass, a shard of pottery. Perhaps a rock, good for skipping. Always it's that willow-flexible bend of the old days, koi pond smooth and willow-fluid. After years of rigid, stiff-backed bowing, this feels good.
They stuff their pockets with their treasures. They're none of them rare or expensive but it's hard not to hoard what little they have after years of nothing. Pockets rattling with their bounty, they turn for land. They go slowly because their skirts are four inches damp with saltwater at least and heavy with it. They flap like gulls against their ankles, ticklish with salt and the sand that has stuck to the damp patches. Flip-flap. Slip-slap.
They linger a minute to retrieve their shoes but do not put them on yet because the sand is still stuck to their feet and it feels good after the long, hot, crowded train journey. Una thinks she could live in this moment always, her and Robin there by the sea with the gulls wheeling and the water lapping, the sand finely misting their toes.
Eventually, they turn back to the road. They cross the bridge connecting beach to harbour still barefoot and pause to re-don their shoes. Una brushes the sand from Robin's feet but it's impossible to do it thoroughly and Robin scowls when the sand prickles against her stockinged feet.
'Ah, little bird, we've had worse,' says Una. Another child would protest; Robin only says, 'Like the flies?' and Una's heart turns over for her.
The flies were Robin's particular chore. They were every child's chore but Robin never got old enough for hte easy but terrifying work of sweeping the guards' quarters or the hard but boring task of cutting the grass with a rusted knife, blade after blade. But anyone, any age could catch the requisite ten flies a day to keep the numbers down. It never made any difference, a fact incommunicable to the Commandant. He had never summered by Canadian water, ears buzzing wit hthe swarm of the little black, biting fly.
'Yes,' she says, 'that was worse. Or those needles you used to fill for me, remember?'
Robin laughs as she tucks her hand into Una's. It sits there snug, sandy and sea-damp. Una squeezes it. She thinks for a moment of the quilts they encoded. Hears again the patter of little feet darting here and there around them to keep the needles going. Robin loved the bustle and the chatter, but she hated the activity. It was fiddly, fussy. Una blinks and the memory dissolves. Soon they are cresting the hill towards the Glen, it's slope steep and effortful after years away. Now and then they pass a stranger and Una feels the hot-poker prickle of strangers' eyes on them.
They remember Una, Una can see this in the way they look. But they do not remember Robin, sleek, slender and dark-haired as Una ever was. This is because at ten years old Una Meredith also knew what it was to be hungry, albeit for entirely different reasons. This does not occur to the strangers, and Una can see that even now they are drawing their own conclusions. She wonders how quickly it will be round the village that Una Meredith, who was always wild like her siblings, has brought a Chinese daughter back from Singapore. Whether it will be, as Faith used to say, fast as racing demon, or whether the war has hampered the local grapevine. Una is confident that these facts – that Robin is neither Chinese nor Una's daughter – will not signify. Not even if she stands up in her father's pulpit and explains in detail how she watched Elise English die in the delirium of cerebral malaria and promised this dying woman to keep her daughter safe always.
A car trundling down the hill swerves suddenly and screams to a premature halt inches from Una. Startled, Robin drops Una's hand and dives behind her. There's a whoosh as the window of the car comes down and a fierce man with dark eyebrows says, astonished, 'Una? Una, is that you?'
He looks, if it's possible, more incredulous the longer he stares at her. His forehead knits in confusion and suddenly Una is a girl of twenty again, standing over a heartsick brother as he prays for the little Belgian babies.
'Bruce?' she says, and that is a question, too.
His face lightens at the recognition and he says, 'We had no idea... We'd have met you – we thought –'
He thought she was dead. But Iain said…Iain sent…No, Iain told Ernest Henderson to send a telegram. The idiotic man never did. Una deduces all of this in the space of a fractured heartbeat. Bruce says, 'Where are you going?' And quickly, before she can answer, 'The manse… you can't...Let me. It's ridiculous, you walking that far.'
Una has walked farther under worse conditions. To say this seems impolitic. Besides, Una doesn't want Bruce to know this, ever. Una does not say it. She moves to step into the open vehicle door and this has the effect of making Robin suddenly visible.
If the scrutiny of strangers was bad, Bruce's scrutiny is worse. As they talk Una senses Bruce critiquing her the way a doctor would, ticking off those things that are not right; Too thin, not enough greens, not enough vitamins, scars left by bedbugs, sun-damage…All these are minor considerations set against the greater landscape of Una's life lately. Against the death of Puck and the holes in her family where Li, Iris and Carl should be. Where she wishes Bernice, Cressida, Emily and Joan still were. Una watches as Bruce's black eyes narrow and his eyebrows draw together in consternation at the sight of little, birdlike Robin.
'We heard things, of course,' says Bruce. 'Mother caught the World Service whenever we could get the signal. It sounded awful.'
This is a monumental understatement. Una adds this private observation to her ever-increasing catalogue of things she does not say. 'But we never thought,' says Bruce, 'we never thought you would be– that they…' he sounds horrified. He looks horrified. He is looking at Robin with a look of utter horror. Robin's green eyes are limpid jewels of lizard-green, and they can charm down off a duck. They don't work on Bruce. Una pulls Robin into the shelter of her skirt.
'Mama,' says Robin fretfully and puts her arms around Una's knees. The look on Bruce's face somehow darkens further. Una must stop him, if only for Robin.
'No one,' she says with starched precision, 'touched me. Not like that.' Imperceptibly, Bruce relaxes. Una sees him relax still further as he watches her smooth Robin's hair, the play Li's ring makes in the sunlight.
'You never said,' he says. 'Mother thought…Never mind. I suppose letters were impossible.'
'They were,' Una says. 'But that isn't what happened either. Trinity House only ever got the one wedding, and it was lovely.'
Bruce nods understanding. Una is grateful for this. He motions them both into the car with an easy, 'I suppose the war got in the way. It got in the way of everything else, God knows.'
'Bruce,' says Una in warning tones. She is exhausted and wrung out of arguments.
'Sorry,' he says, misunderstanding the reprimand. Una doesn't enlighten him. Cannot, with Robin awake. It would be cold, and brutal. Una has had enough of cold brutality to last her until Judgement Day. Until after Judgement Day.
So she does not say that Robin is not hers and they drive onwards. Green mile after green mile after yellow-waving-wheat-mile slips past them and Una begins to feel the customs of the Glen come back. They pinch, like a gown she outgrew, and she wonders why she came back.
Because Puck died, says a voice in her head. And you thought you could find the others better here. Because the RAPWI woman was going spare with no one to put on that boat and Emily needed you to look up that uncle… In Una's arms the rattle and thrum of the car lulls Robin asleep. The car sounds like Nenni, Una's beautiful, spotted, long-ago-departed cat, and Una's heart squeezes because of it.
'What was he like?' asks Bruce now, nodding in cursory way at Robin. 'Her father? You must have cared quite a lot, if –'
'Her mother never told me,' says Una. She can say this now, with Robin asleep. She says it gently, even so, afraid to wake her girl with talking. 'I don't think Elise knew.'
'But,' says Bruce, eyebrows knitting together again, 'she called you – she said –'
'Robin,' says Una as she strokes the little girl's hair, 'called her mother Mummy. And when she died…No. As her mother was dying, she made me promise to look after Robin. She made me swear I would do it on the grave of my mother. It was a terrible thing to do. A terrible and necessary thing. Which I did. After her mother – mummy –died, Robin called me Mama. Not right away, because she still remembered Elise. But memory is traitorous and time slippery, and – Robin became mine. She remembers Elise was Mummy because I've told her that, but I became Mamma because she needed a mother and I needed a daughter.'
'But Iris,' says Bruce, 'was Carl's?' He frowns, in the seat beside Una, hands drumming on the steering wheel.
'And Li's,' says Una. 'And I loved her fiercely. Sometimes…'her stomach clenches. 'Sometimes she would do something so brave and clever and funny that I would know she was mine, too. You must have nieces like that. Nephews.'
'Maybe if I saw them more,' says Bruce. He doesn't contradict her, though, Una notices.
The car begins a slow, lugubrious journey up yet another hill and Una realizes with a jolt Bruce is taking them not to the Manse but to the Old West House. His house.
'There's a great-aunt,' Una says. 'Somewhere in England, I think. As soon as I can find her, I'll write to her about Robin, but until then…'
Bruce nods. The car shudders and comes to a halt. Robin jolts awake.
'Are we here, Mama?' she says.
Una looks to Bruce, who looks immovably back. 'Not quite, little bird,' says Una.
'I thought we'd have something to eat first,' says Bruce. 'You look as if you need it.'
Una is not remotely hungry but neither can she remember the last time she ate. The train, she thinks, sandwiches in the dining car. She and Robin shared a set of four, quartered pieces, two for each of them. They were made of wonder bread, which tasted tarry and unnatural, and of fish paste spread thin. It was pink, like a raw salmon or sunburnt skin, perhaps an exposed tongue. Una tore the crusts off Robin's halves. Neither of them finished their share.
Consequently, Una lets Bruce lead them into the Old West House, which is now Bruce's house, to be gently fussed over by Maggie, the young woman who married Bruce back in the '30s and whose wedding Una could not get to. There seems to be a disproportionate number of children too, though perhaps this is coloured by Una's life at Trinity House, first with Iris and then with Robin. The revelation that one of this multitude is a little Una, Una Alice, dark-haired and dark eyed, with mischief at her fingertips, hits Una like a jolt of lightning. It is sudden, severe and electric. Then her brother does something to kindle righteous fury in this young Una and she vents her indignation on Thomas, and Una realizes equally suddenly, sharply and with terrifying acuity that Bruce and her immediate family believed she and Carl died. Believed they were all dead. Una isn't sure this is entirely the fault of Ernest Henderson. She does not know what to say.
How does one say that one is not dead? Does one explain how impossible getting correspondence out of an occupied territory is? Confess that sometimes there were postcards with their obligatory and ludicrous sentences, but that they never seemed to leave the camp? Tell how the guards vetted everything so that even if you did write it probably bore no relation once sent to the thing you wrote? Does she confess that she too, is terrified Carl may be dead and Li and Iris also? Does she say only that instead of dying she was marched to a place God-knew-where, where she watched other women die, and quilted to save her soul alive? Where she befriended women who infiltrated her heart and became better than sisters to her? What are the rules? Are there rules? Do they matter?
The parlour they sit in smells of fading pot-pourri and fresh-cut flowers. These sit, elegantly arranged, on the end tables, the stalks smelling green and crisp, the flowers, which are tiger lilies, smelling potent and sweet. They cloy badly next to the faded roses smell of the pot-pourri. Una watches as Maggie encourages Robin to play with the other children and Robin retreats in on herself. It's like watching the waves pull back from the sand. Robin slinks around the sofa until she is safely back in the haven of Una's lap and turns her face inwards.
Weakly, Una says, 'We've had a long trip.'
Maggie smiles apology and bustles off to collect the tea tray. Her children tear after her, clamouring for cakes and shouting of adventures.
Maggie returns burdened heavily with what Una thinks must be the largest tea tray she has ever seen. In Singapore, tea meant jasmine in ruby red tea bowls poured from Li's beloved cast-iron teapot. They served it with a glass platter of salted guava slices, and on rare occasions alongside a Victoria Sponge or almond biscuits. Sometimes it meant Gladstone Blue Ribbon vintage Cecilia Meredith. This is nothing like that.
The tray is a vast mahogany thing that makes Una's knees jar thinking about the weight. On top of it is spread a yellow-gingham cloth the colour of chequered sunlight. And on top of that…Bruce has inherited Ellen Douglas's Tobacco Leaf service. It is startling the way Ellen is startling and bold in the way Norman Douglas is bold. Una even quite likes the pattern. Singly, she thinks. A plate or a saucer alone. Taken together…Una cannot imagine looking at an entire service of Mottahedeh Tobacco Leaf china over breakfast every morning. There are delicate flowers at the border in some spots. Others feature leaves in midnight blue that contrast with paler leaves in green and pink, and even these are overlaid with more delicate flowers. There are gold ribs to the leaves and swirls of more flowers and the effect is dazzling. Or alarming. Una can't decide.
On this dazzling-alarming tea service on the dark mahogany tray is spread out one teapot, full of Assam. Una knows this from the smell of it. Rich, dark, not floral enough for Darjeeling. There is a smaller teapot of hot water, and there is milk, hot and cold because Maggie doesn't know which Una prefers. She says this as she sets the tray down. There are also a jumble of teacups (stacked), a platter of sandwiches (quartered, crusts off) and a gargantuan cake stand. The cake stand features a feast Susan Baker would be proud of. There are scones with jam (raspberry) and butter (real, not margarine), an elaborate silver-and-gold cake, delicate fruit tartlets that Una vaguely thinks Rilla requested as part of her wedding feast and found in Good Housekeeping, a second, chocolate cake in case Robin doesn't like the other, savoury scones with chutney, and ginger biscuits.
The whole thing is terrifyingly English. It reminds Una of the Raffles tea room back when Una, Robin and the other women lived there care of RAPWI. Or the army. Una was never clear on that point. There is, inevitably, no polite way of saying they cannot possibly eat all of this so Una doesn't try to. She asks instead, as people do, about the baking and how did Maggie possibly have time to make it all herself, and what are her recipes, etc, etc. Once, Una was very good at this sort of thing.
But, Una thinks as she fingers a cucumber sandwich, that was before the death of civility. Before the days when Puck sounded an alarm that sent Una and Li running with Iris for the attic, where they lay on the floor and listened to the tramp-tramp of the men marching down Evelyn Road crying out for the women of the town. It was before even this, was Una's instinctive and habitual civility. It belonged to a time before Li, a time when to be civil was to be mild-mannered and loving involved no mental calculus for the sake of familial safety. Before the slurs of neighbours and the shunning of Li by her family, before they fought, Una and Carl and Li, for their right to that same civil, mild-manneredness from others. Almost Una forgets how to do this.
It belongs to a time longer ago than a fairy-tale, this kind of butterfly-delicate civility. In that time, longer ago and farther away than the dawn of Creation, Una sat on the veranda of Trinity House and watched a monkey, grey, scruffy, a ruff at his neck, pour tea. She sat there and traded recipes in her imperfect Chinese with a tentative Li, and watched the other woman's face break in the first of many waterlily smiles. To do it again with Maggie should not feel like a betrayal. It does.
Una tries though, because she still loves Bruce and because Maggie seems honest, good and all those things Una wished for her brother. They swap recipes and gardening advice, they talk weather and the hazards of travel with young children. Una tempts Robin with this nicety or that and Robin nibbles, birdlike at the thing of the moment. Then, one of Bruce's goslings, careless, drops a crumb or a crust on the floor and Robin dives for it, lightning-quick. She doesn't eat it, just tucks it into her pocket. The scrutiny of so many people trying not to be horrified is unbearable.
Finally, Maggie must go find the children and make a start on dinner – will Una stay?
'Do,' says a familiar voice from the doorway. Una turns, half stricken-deer, half a moon-burst of relief to return the gentle petition of Rosemary Meredith.
'I didn't realize you where visiting,' she says.
'I'm not,' says Rosemary. 'I thought I'd let you young people catch up. I've been here ever since…'
Rosemary does say the rest, Una just doesn't hear it. There's ten seconds in which she hears words but cannot take them in, because it sounds like Rosemary says Una's father is dead. This can't be right. Opposite Una, she sees a muscle in Bruce's jaw twitch. Una's ears begin to work again as Rosemary says 'I thought Bruce had told you…'
'I thought you knew,' says Bruce. 'But of course you couldn't know. Father died.'
This time Una does hear it. It's another jolt of lightening. Another blow with the ferocity of a freight train. Rosemary sees it and suddenly, Una is a child of ten again, enveloped in the arms of this frail, willow-slender woman who still smells of lilacs and flour.
'Come here,' she says, 'both of you,' and holds Una and Robin close. There is no horror there, only shelter, respite.
'When?' says Una. She thinks she is numb. She is sure of it when Bruce crosses the room and begins making an examination of her.
'Last September,' said Bruce. 'Mother thought he was asleep. The radio was on, the World Service.'
'Then,' says Una, cradling her ridiculous teacup in Tobacco Leaf stamp close, 'he knew…' she cannot finish. Does not.
'He knew Singapore was free. That you were safe. He was smiling.'
Una nods. Rosemary strokes Una's hair as if she were the child Robin still is, and says, ''We thought – we all thought you must be dead.'
'I know,' says Una.
'Not your father, though,' says Rosemary. 'He swore up and down he'd know, that he'd dream it or hear it or feel it. He said you couldn't be dead. And here you are.'
There is a second where time runs backwards and Una sees a flash of the woman her father fell in love with, how she must have looked to him. Rosemary smiles, older, more tired but still radiant, still a fellow dreamer of dreams. She smells of lilacs and of flour, and she is crying. So is Una. Not volubly because that is not the way of either of them. This is mute and unbidden and maybe, Una thinks, that makes the tears thicker and denser as a result.
Bruce tries to offer them something else to eat. A cake, a tea biscuit, a crustless sandwich.
'No,' says Una, 'I couldn't.'
There is a long, pregnant moment in which she feels Bruce's scrutiny of her, and of Robin. The catalogue Bruce makes of the brittleness of their nails and the divots in the nailbeds, how thin and short Una's hair is these days, the sparrow-rib construction of their ribs.
'Really,' Una says, 'I can't.'
'I know,' says Bruce, finally. He cannot possibly know. Una thanks God that Bruce, at least, has never felt the gnawing pains of raw, unmitigated hunger. That he did not witness the brutal week in which Robin gradually built up enough strength to eat an entire boiled egg without making herself ill. But he is a doctor now, and medically speaking he could rattle off half a dozen things that plague her and little Robin if he were so minded, Una is sure. She accepts that medically speaking, Bruce understands why, after years of not eating, she and Robin cannot dent the surface of the Old West House hospitality.
'I'm so glad you're home,' Bruce says instead and clasps Una's unencumbered hand in his.
Home, Una thinks and feels tears prickle at her eyes. Home smells of jasmine and guavas, sounds of Puck scrabbling across the varnished floor and onto the kitchen counters, the swish of his preternaturally long tail in the sink, teacups, mixing bowls. It is Iris's shriek of glee and Carl's jubilant Firecracker! as she comes running for his outstretched arms. The swoosh of them as he sweeps Iris up and swings her, arcs her through the air. It's the smell and the softness of buffalo, of Una's beloved Nenni, feline-regal and tiger-elegant slinking through the long grass. Harry glistening jewel-green on the veranda and Akela wrestling with the ACS children, with Iris, barking the alarm when everyone from Rev Peach to Una's squabbling, squawking Chinese hens come trouping past. It's mynas singing her hymns and the thousand, thousand lights of a city winking and blinking in the distance while the fireflies make orange-gilded lanterns for them on the veranda. Home tasted of salted guavas and jasmine tea in butterfly-stencil tea bowls the bright, ebullient red of rubies or fireflies.
Home was camp – bizarre thought – the dim, stuffy atmosphere of their hut as they sat po-faced and heard Emily's latest titbit from Essays in Idleness. It was the sound of the Go pieces while the guards played, or the bell ringing Tenko. Home means bickering with Bernice and Cressida, during the war elbow-to-elbow at those sewing machines and afterwards as they stood and gawped in the Singapore market. It tastes like biting into a guava and tossing half to whichever woman was on hand, like weak, watery tea and rice imperfectly rid of weevils. It's Emily's bell-peel laugh and Joan's practical diagnoses. Like the relief of an exhausted nurse as Nellie sighed more than said Oh, Thank God and Joan Makori took over the sickbay.
Home meant Trinity House after the war, five women and Iain sharing a tin of bread. Or sleeping on the floor of Raffles Hotel because the camp cots – management sends apologies – were too soft. It was sharing baths and soaping each other's hair and watching Emily and Joan seized upon scraps of make-up as if they were jewels. Home was Cressida carving that grave marker for Puck, and Bernice insisting on evening dresses so they would look almost-respectable, even while she insisted she was a woman first and a vicar's widow second. Home was the crystalline rainbows of the Raffles dining room and watching Iain waltz Emily across the floor while Una sat and bickered gently with Bernice.
Una cannot say this to Bruce and Rosemary, though she feels the ache of it, the truth of it, bone-deep. Home is not here. Bruce looks at her with the kind of awed wonder men reserve for their God, or perhaps saints. Rosemary does it too. Una is neither God nor Saint. She is only a woman who has survived the ordeal of a lifetime and she is exhausted.
'Home,' she says and musters a smile for him.
'Are we, Mama?' asks Robin. She is doubtful and uncertain, which is how Una feels. No, Una wants to but cannot say. She smooths the silky, dark head pillowed on her knees.
'For now, little bird,' she says. It seems a safe compromise. 'We're home for now.'