And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.

John Milton

The others want a party. Una does not but tells herself firmly that she survived for years in a Japanese camp on the strength of nothing more than a desire to reunite her family or die trying. If surviving an evening at Ingleside is the first hurdle in this trajectory, Una will bear it with equanimity. Is there any of the usual social occasions it is not difficult to avoid, she thinks and smiles as she pictures an ink-spattered Emily, her skin that much smoother than everyone else's for the respite of indoor work translating Essays in Idleness. Not unlike the women in camp, these are people that also love Una; This evening with it's banquet and lanterns is proof of that. It will be good to see them.

It is, too. Bruce, Maggie and the children are there. Likewise Di and the Inglesideans. Naomi Blake has somehow got her children into clothes only half-grass stained and muddy. She pulls Una into a fish-snare of a hug and says, 'I want to hear everything.'

'No I told you so?' Una asks, and smiles at this friend of old. It would be Naomi's right. In 1938, she stayed at Trinity House, covered the Sino-Chinese war, and begged, long before Percival Curtis ever did, for Una to get out of the country. Una couldn't and wouldn't do it. Neither would Carl. They were home and they could no sooner leave Singapore than they could fly. Naomi's hug intensifies.

'I'm saving that for when I can believe you safe and have helped you find your Firecracker,' she says. It's an unlooked for offer. An incredible one.

Una exhales thanks as Naomi releases her. She watches Mary Vance attempt a seizure of the Ingleside kitchen while also attempting to argue with Dr. Blythe about God-knows-what. Betty Meade as used to be is there, and Amy McCallister, who used to be so painfully keen on Carl. She cannot possibly be a McCallister still, Una thinks, catching the flash of gold on Amy's finger. Miranda Milgrave tries to offer elucidation but the crush of immediate family prevents Una hearing. Anyway, Amy still conjures Carl's ghost.

All the various arms of the Blythe-Meredith collective seem amassed. Faith and family are there, as are Shirley, his wife and a half-goblin girl that is unmistakably Iain Blythe's sister. She has dancer's feet like Elise English, Una can tell from the point and cast of them as she slithers serpentine across the room like a half-wild thing, and graceful with it. Those same eyes that cut to the quick of the soul, too, like Iain, and like, Una now realizes, their mother. There is Rilla Ford and family, summering on the island. Seeing them, Una mentally updates her family tree. When did little Rilla have another baby? When did Anthony get so chummy with Jerry's Mandy? And where is Jims?

'Don't ask that last one,' murmurs Di in Una's ear. 'It's a sticking point.'

Una barely has time to look quizzical before Faith has her in a bear-hug. She hugs Una so hard her ribs compress and Una thinks something will break.

'Faith!' she says weakly. 'Faith I can't – '

Faith steps back and surveys Una at arms' length in exactly the way Bruce did not long ago. Una decides her family has entirely too many doctors. She doubles down on this when she catches Helen and Christopher Blythe echoing maternal scrutiny. Alice Caldicote, district nurse, is, here too, Una notices, out of the corner of her eye, not family but near enough. Opposite Una, Faith talks nineteen to the dozen.

'So good to see you…Can't believe you're here…Heard what happened…'

Una hums and clucks in what she hopes are the right places. Faith moves on to the war and how awful it was, and Una knows comparisons are odious, that Shakespeare was right, but Faith was safe. Faith – oh, thank God! – spent her war in the safety of her own home agonizing over her children. This is awful and horrible and should be visited on no parent. But Faith did not crouch behind the stairs listening for falling shells, never murdered her hens out of kindness or a beloved buffalo out of necessity. Faith did not sit up in agonies, praying Yeats and bargaining with her God for Carl's safety as night bled into day and Carl did not come home. Faith never hid in an attic from men who shouted for women, never cuddled Iris close in terror. For a wild, unreal moment, Una thinks she might hate her sister. Then she remembers the awful lividity of these things and pulls Faith into a bear-hug of her own. Faith smells of ether and sea air, and faintly of roses. That always was her scent of choice, Una recalls.

'I'm sorry,' Una says into Faith's shoulder. 'It should never have happened. The children were supposed to be safe.'

Faith says something Una doesn't catch. Jerry emerges from a shadowed recess of a somewhere-corner and pulls Una into a hug different from Faith's. Tight, yes, and full-bodied, but not painful-hard. He is statue-mute as he touches a hand to the back of Una's head. She might be a child again and their mother newly dead the way he holds her. Then he winces at the crosswise noise of barking dogs, music and general chatter, and Una disengages. She propels him Nan-ward and allows herself to be led round the room, introduced to baby Lissy Ford and the other, younger children. Their ages bring home with brute force the sheer length of Una's time in Singapore. Little Joanie Arnold flashes in Una's periphery, a blur of swirling violet and clacking beads. The last time Una saw her she was a babe-in-arms, her parents stopping by Carl and Li's wedding as they left the Ipoh ACS for Canada. Faith's youngest, Sophy, exacerbates the problem. Una pictured her a baby, but Sophy is an underpaid writer for The Kingsport Chronicle these days. Even dressed up there's ink on her hands and her collar, and Una is sure someone tried to scrub it out with no luck. The famous Judith Carlisle or possibly, Mara Blythe. That reminds her.

'I saw your Iain,' she says to Shirley, when opportunity presents. He is still reliable as clockwork, here on the kitchen steps of the house, away from the crowds and blether. The air smells of the same herbs too. Thyme, sage, rosemary…That's for remembrance, I pray you love, remember… Una's skin prickles with ghosts more than cold. She thinks of Carl, Li, Iris and the women she said goodbye to so lately. It makes her suddenly, unexpectedly grateful for Shirley's unassuming reliability. The only difference is that Susan is no longer here to trot out biscuits with regularity. Una tries to remember if previously she offered condolences. Surely she must have.

In any event now isn't the moment, because Shirley's eyes go wide at the mention of his son, and he says 'Iain? How on earth – what was he doing?'

'Steadfastly refusing to lose money to bad bridge hands, the way he tells it,' says Una, and Shirley flashes her the Blythe grin, the one she has so lately seen on the younger face of his son.

'Also,' says Una, sensing he might want more details, 'there was something about a training course in India and an interval in Turkey refueling afterwards. Before traveling to Singapore, I mean.'

'But,' says Shirley, 'the geography of that – '

'We didn't understand either,' says Una. 'But we were too busy being shocked by mundanities like cutlery to take in the finer details of things like geography.'

'I guess you were at that,' says Shirley. He is as flat and unruffled as ever, and Una appreciates this. Even when he says next, 'You of all people were never supposed to live through the horror of it, the brutality,' it's without the exclamatory horror of other people. In Shirley's hands this is reduced to an observation of fact. He might be commenting on the weather. Then, so quietly Una nearly misses it, 'Walter would have hated the idea of you in the thick of it.'

'Walter would have hated the whole thing,' says Una.

Shirley says, 'He would have, too. God, d'you know, I told Jem once, way back when he was starting as police surgeon, the children would never live a war?'

'You and all the rest of us,' says Una. 'It was almost true until it wasn't.'

That gets a laugh. 'Truer words,' he says and offers Una his arm. 'Come on, they'll send out a search party imminently. If nothing else, I'd better rescue Jem before Teddy switches whatever that is,' and he waves a hand in the direction of the record player, rippling and crackling it's way through Mozart's Arabesque, 'for something nice and unholy, like jazz.'

'Not you too,' says Una but without rancour. 'I was always having this argument with Bernice. Music isn't supposed to be a museum piece. It would die off if it was.'

Another laugh, good-natured and sunshine-warm. 'I'd bet god money,' Shirley says, 'none of us has a proper sense of you any more. Letters notwithstanding.'

'Not according to your son,' says Una. 'Apparently the lot of you got me all wrong in the telling.'

'Right,' says Shirley. 'Better go set them straight, then.'

Back to the music and the clamour and the bustle of too many people in too small a place. The Arabesque is now The Children's Corner Suite. Nice, inoffensive. Easy to talk over. Not nearly posh enough for Raffles, for which a sudden knife-sharp stab of gratitude from Una. Into this inoffensive wash of sound, Mary Vance as was says, 'Margarine, Betty! Can you imagine? I thought after the war people would stop buying it – it's so awful! But they haven't. Margarine! Imagine!'

The room is suddenly too hot, too crowded and too full of well-intentioned strangers. Una has never wished harder for one of Bernice's glares or Cressida's barbs. Even Essays in Idleness would make a welcome diversion, even Elise's death-delirium or Nellie's unravelling nerves. No, that's not right. Una would much rather Elise as she was, green eyes charming the flowers, giddy as a whirlwind, or Nellie fighting a smile over one of Emily's Essays titbits. She wishes Bernice were at the piano, close as the air and it was them against the world playing Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree while the others sang along out-of-time and off-key.

Una murmurs something in excuse and picks her way through the amassed people. She bypasses her sister, feigns sightlessness to Jem's wave, eschews even Robin where she lies halfway asleep on the sofa. Naomi will keep an eye on her girl, Una has faith. Down the hall and past the grand old staircase they used to romp up on rainy days, Jem and Jerry in the lead with Faith at their heels. Past a tangle of boots on their mat and coats that have slipped their hook. Past the old stable, revitalised by Miss Abby's horses, Tam and Meg. Una lingers long enough to smile at the poetry, to think Walter would have liked that touch. The breeze, sea-salted and cool, carries the breath of Walter's ghost on the wind, and he whispers;

Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother's son, take heed,
Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd,
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,
Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear,
Remember Tam o' Shanter's mear.

Una spares the shade a smile, grateful he didn't opt for anything blood-curdling. In certain moods, Walter loved the thrill of that gothic, unholy Sabbath-table, and she has no stomach for spanlang wee, unchristened bairns tonight, and not just because she saw her share in camp. Past the kitchen steps and round again to a shadowed corner of the veranda.

There's a breeze still coming off the sea. It's cool and playful, and it carries away some of the hot bustle of the Ingleside parlour, leaving the scent of salt and fading roses in it's wake. Salt, fading roses and the sound of crickets thrumming. Carl says they produce this sound by rubbing their wings together. Una stands in the garden taking stock of these things – scents of salt and roses, sound of crickets – when Alice Caldicote finds her.

'They can be a bit much, can't they?' she says. She says it with a smile. It's not apologetic; Alice is too well-integrated into the Glen orbit these days to have to apologize for the casting of such minor aspersions on the Blythes.

She's not, as it happens, wrong. At least at Raffles, Una thinks, opulence was the point. Oh, it was too much and the beds were too soft, and they none of them ever got used to it – not Una, not Bernice or Cressida or Emily or Joan…But it was Raffles. It did a line in luxury. Ingleside prides itself on coziness, on the warmth of Inglenooks and quiet corners for sweethearting.

That's not it either.

'We ate crickets,' says Una, not meaning to. 'In camp. It was Nellie's idea. She said without them we'd catch beriberi, that we needed them because of B…' Una scrabbles for the vitamin. How can she not know it after all those well-intentioned lectures?

'B1,' says Alice reflexively. 'I'd never have thought.'

'No,' says Una. 'No one would. Not even Nellie. She brought the idea with her from another camp, but that's not the point. I had quite a reputation for spotting them. The crickets. I chalked it up to living with Carl. I used to say I hated his pets, and I did…'

'But I was at the end of the world, and Carl wasn't there, and neither were Li and Iris, and God knows I didn't want them there, because it was awful, and there were times I thought I'd never again get so close to knowing what hellfire was like as in that place – but I missed them. So, I'd watch for the crickets, and the mynas and whatever else there was, because it's what Carl would have done, and as long as I was watching for them, maybe he wasn't dead.'

'Then Nellie came, and suddenly this – spotting a cricket at half a pace – was a useful skill because it would save us from dying. I did it because I'd seen women die without that vitamin and it was a hideous death, and I was afraid. God forgive me, I was terrified.' Una's hand circles her fish, but when she reaches for Yeats it's not the old, well-worn verse about fish and hazel woods. 'Man has created death,' she says to the breeze, crickets and Alice Caldicote.

'And because I was afraid, when Nellie said to eat the crickets, I did. We all did. They didn't taste awful, either. I think that made it worse, because it got so that after a while it was easy to eat them. You could do it without thinking. The terrible thing was Nellie was right. Women stopped dying. So, we went on eating them, and I kept watching for them, only it wasn't about Carl any more. Except in a way it was because I couldn't get out of my head how he loved animals, how he was friends with all of them. Carl's gospel was Everything that lives is holy. William Blake said it but Carl lived it. So, I wondered, as I ate the crickets easily, unthinkingly, and made Robin eat them too, how I would ever look Carl in the eye again.'

'And here's Mary,' said Alice wryly, 'wringing her hands over margarine.' When she laughs it's a gentle thing, like the sea breeze. It takes some of the leadenness out of the evening. Una finds herself laughing with her.

'Bless Mary,' she says. 'For years she was the best friend I had. She doesn't mean it to sting the way it does.'

'No,' said Alice. 'Mary never does. Nine times in ten she's harmless. It's the tenth time that niggles, because of course she hasn't lived it. None of us has.'

'No.'

For a moment there is only the sound of the crickets humming as their wing-tips brush each other. Unprompted Alice asks, 'It's why you won't meat, isn't it? Because of Carl and the crickets?'

'Yes,' says Una. It's an easy answer. Nice, neat and explicable after all that talk of insects. So much safer, so much kinder and less painful than to explain about Papatee the buffalo she loved, dead in her lap, his blood on her hands and her niece screaming.

'Don't worry,' says Alice. 'I don't think anyone else has noticed. Not tonight, not any of the other nights.'

'I hope the Glen realizes it's luck, having you,' says Una. 'There's a lot of value in nurses.'

'It's starting to sink in,' says Alice with a smile. 'It took twenty odd years, but it's happening.'

'Good,' says Una.

She thinks of Nellie, bowed with the weight of communal sickness but shouldering the burden anyway. The hours she put in, even after sickness got her. Again Una hears that heartfelt Oh thank God escape Nellie as Joan Makori, Doctor, entered the sickbay. Sees, in her mind's eye the cross Cressida engraved – not smiling then, not like an orange peel – for Nellie.

They cannot stay out here in the garden with its ghosts of dead roses and nurses. Una gently disengages the hand at her elbow.

'Come on,' Una says, 'someone needs to commiserate with Mary about the horrors of margarine.'