Kslchen, fellow Adventure Book devotee, this one's for you. It's been too long since we had a ribald animal, eh?

Guest - apologies for not catching your review last week. I'm out of practice. I loved seeing it pop up in my inbox though - you teased out one of my favourite narrative observations in that bathtime scene and I'm glad it hit home. Those sisters love each other, but it's a complicated relationship to navigate sometimes. No one is where they left each other emotionally twenty years ago.

The parrot appears in summer of 1948. The parrot is called Kiki and would never have come into being if Una's summer days did not see her going regularly to the consulate. She is free to haunt it without the bookshop to manage. This is as well, because Martin Swallow – who lost his title and gained a Christian name somewhere between the indecipherable phone calls and his return – promptly disorders the place again. Robin is an eager assistant. It's infuriating, and Faith laughs when Una tells her so. Also the wrong response, but hardly surprising. Anyway, it frees Una to haunt to the consulate with the religiosity the devout take to church, and Una would know: She's still a regular at Hope Park and Martyrs, still prays her Yeats alongside Psalms and Trespasses. She still says, as she used to say to Li on trying days during the war, All will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well. It has to be, because otherwise Li, Iris and Carl might be dead.

So, Una supposes, arriving home one evening, it is entirely her own fault that they acquire Kiki. Kiki is green, with blue tipped wings and blue spectacle markings round her eyes. She has a white beak, and that she answers to Kiki goes without saying. Una knows Robin entirely too well. Robin tells her so, anyway, running Puck-gleeful towards the door, parrot on her heels with the glad tidings.

'Mama! We have Kiki, too!'

Una's initial instinct is to blame Martin Swallow, but the fault, apparently is Isobel Blythe's. At nigh-15, she has the grace to almost look abashed. Not quite though. She flashes Una the Blythe grin, the one Iain wore back in Singapore to charm her, and says, 'I couldn't resist, Aunt Allie.' She gives this all the archness her mother infuses Shakespeare's Rosalind with in a coy mood or Beatrice in a contrary one.

'Anyone less like Lucy-Anne Trent,' says Una to Isobel, 'than you or Robin, I cannot begin to think of.' But Isobel isn't wide of the mark, either. Allie Mannering also mismothers two orphaned children.

'I,' says Isobel. 'am Dina Mannering. Robin says so.'

This makes sense – well, it does to anyone fluent in Adventure Books – but not of the parrot.

Isobel's smile mellows into a thing that would turn the moon liquid. Coupled with those wide, soul-searching eyes Mara Blythe's children have, the effect is startling. For a moment Una sees the woman Isobel threatens to become, and spares a thought for all the helpless souls this combination of eyes and smile will ensnare. If ever a look could break hearts…

The moment shatters because dachshunds Yesterday and Tuesday come haring round the corner barking vociferously. To say neither dog is bigger than the average bratwurst, the noise is tremendous. Kiki adds to it, peppering the air with unlawful squeals of Murrrderrr! The fact that Tuesday is, perhaps, the oldest dog on record, is not remotely obvious from the speed of his white-socked feet as they pedal furiously parrot-ward. Kiki is unfazed. She swoops out of Tuesday's leaping, shrieking grasp, alights on the coat rack, which sways precariously, and begins chattering volubly. Murrrderrr! Murrrderrr! Murrrderrr! And all credit to Kiki, Una thinks, it certainly sounds like murder being comitted in the Larkrise hall.

Una thinks, It's going to be smugglers and castles next but charitably, because isn't that supposed to be what childhoods are like? Swiftly on the heels of this thought comes the revelation Kiki is in fact a parotlet. Una scrubs her eyes and thinks abstractly that as and when she gets hold of Carl, she has a bone to pick with him about quite how many lectures he practiced on her, because evidently she has absorbed several encyclopedias-worth of bird minutiae she never asked for.

Inspiration in the shape of Faith, who follows Una into the house, tries to hang her coat on the rack and encounters the parrot. Parotlet. Kiki dances a light, indignant avian hornpipe. Murrrderrr! She shrieks.

'Isobel,' says Una, 'I don't suppose you thought to ask your Aunt how she felt about hosting a parrot?'

'Oh, that's fine,' says Faith. 'As long as Tuesday and Yesterday don't mind.' Then, realising this is perhaps sisterly betrayal and that Una is, at least nominally, also this child's aunt, 'Sorry, took it for granted you meant me. You don't mind, do you Una?'

Hardly the vote of support Una needs to oust a parrot. Not that she wants to oust the parrot. As Faith says, 'At least it's smaller than a buffalo.'

Una decides to embrace the parrot.

Purely for form's sake she says, 'No adventures, little bird. Miss Mannering.'

'Eh?' says Faith. Robin laughs, Isobel beams, and Una knows she's said the right thing.

Kiki has the effect of propelling Una and Robin out of Larkrise permanently. Una has been working up to it for months and Kiki is the perfect, inoffensive excuse. No one can expect their sister to put up with unsolicited parrots that talk nonsense. Particularly when Murrrderrr! turns out to be Kiki's favourite word. She burrs it like a Scot and shrieks it at improbable decibel. Una suspects Isobel taught her. She also suspects that but for contacts at the station house, Kiki would have them all done for wasting police time. She suspects poor constable Benwick would like to do them for wasting police time anyway. Especially once the neighbours start taking her shrieks seriously and phoning an unsuspecting Constable Benwick with reports of murder.

At first Faith protests, but Una is adamant. If Faith does not quite know what to do with this sister who is as immoveable by the tree at the water's edge, she never lets on. Una watches Faith blink bewilderment as together they walk around a warm yellow-brick house with a honeyed door, white trim and shutters with an ivy cut-out, and Una asks questions about metres and electricity, and things that Faith manifestly does not expect her to know about.

To the question Faith doesn't ask, Una shrugs and says, 'Cressida was thorough. I expect Joan did just the same when she started house-hunting.'

'Cressida's the Anglican?'

When Una laughs, the joke is lost of Faith. But Una makes a mental note to write and tell Cressida that unsuspecting Merediths have labelled her a God-botherer. Then, to assuage the lingering crease in Faith's forehead, Una does her best to explain that between the sporadic bookshop work, Cressida's ridiculous lump sum, and the annuity Bernice and Emily insist on wiring for loan of Trinity House, she and Robin won't want for anything. Besides, there's still what's left of her ACS salary. There's Carl's savings, too, but accessing those involves declaring him dead, and Una doesn't dare in case it turns out to be true.

'Silly,' says Faith. 'I know you can manage. I'll miss you. It was nice having a gremlin about again.'

Una hugs Faith close. She says, 'You are my sister, and I love you. But we could never have stayed forever.' One hand skims unconsciously off the white felt poppy at her chest as Una lets Faith go, as if to underline this. 'You have a wonderful world Faith, a lovely one. It's been sweet looking through the glass at it the last few years. I don't transplant well, that's all.'

There's a long, tensile moment in which unspoken passes between them, You stayed before. For Carl. Despite the insects. You hate insects. Faith doesn't say it. She stands with her hands lightly atop Una's elbows, gold eyes searching. It's all Una can do not to explain, not to say that she and Carl grew together. That she still hates Carl's insects but would endure an army of lizards and a nuisance of monkeys if it would bring him back to her, blue eye devilled with merriment. She doesn't say it. Una senses she doesn't have to. The moment passes.

'All right,' says Faith. 'But visit often, parrot inclusive. Promise?'

Una promises.

They move in in August. There isn't much to move. Mostly it's the books accrued courtesy of Martin Swallow, and the clothes Una and Robin brought back from Singapore. Also the seaglass and pottery relics they've gathered summering in the Glen. Robin arranges the pieces on windowsills, mantles, and coffee tables. Putting the kitchen to rights is a matter of installing the two red tea bowls with butterfly stencil, no two the same, in pride of place on a high shelf. As Una does this, Faith drops by, armed with an African Violet, because, she says, setting it on a windowsill, 'You bring plants to new homes, don't you?'

That the chipped terracotta pot makes this particular plant one of the languishing Larkrise houseplants hardly signifies. Since Una knows the plant's origin and Faith knows she knows, Faith shrugs further and says, 'It misses your tender ministrations. If you don't save it, Judith will rescue it.'

'Does Judith know?' asks Una, laughter threatening. She cannot imagine Judith having plants foisted on her unaware. Clearly Faith can't either, because she laughs, too, and says, 'It was her idea. How much do you think I know about house warmings?'

Judith's contribution to the house was a delicate Darjeeling that Una brews while watching Faith navigate the sitting room. She trails her fingers over the mantle and then the rolltop desk. She lingers over photos. Carl lying on his stomach, chin pillowed on his hands, apparently scrutinizing the roots of a pomelo tree. Puck flanks him on one side, Iris on the other, ankles swinging over her head, floral skirt akimbo. Li kneeling among her beloved begonias, head half-turned away from the camera. Li and Una sitting on a picnic blanket up in the country. Photo-Una shields her eyes from the sun with one gloved hand, while the other brandishes the jade teapot they took travelling. A picture of Nenni astride Papatee the buffalo's monumental head. Una dressed for the theatre with Nenni on her silk-shod shoulder, claws kneading the sheer blue of her shawl. Akela and Carl wrestling. Una with her head against Papatee's side as she grooms him, Nenni weaving between her ankles, her tail an imperious, imperial question mark caught mid-swish. Carl again, crouching to converse with Harry the Lizard, emerald-bright atop the white of the veranda rail. Li coloured that one. Carl again, wearing a snake like a scarf. Carl and Li's wedding photo, pride of place. Naomi Arnold took that. Beside it, Carl and Li, heads together over an atypically restful Iris. Puck is in that shot, too, his head level with the swaddled baby.

THere are pictures of Emily and Iain laughing on the veranda, of Cressida in her terrible hat, of Una and Bernice at the piano. There's a picture of Joan dancing with Robin, Puck teasing her long-hemmed navy skirt. There's even one Iain snapped of the Trinity House women on the eve of their departure, encamped on the battered wicker veranda furniture, tea bowls in hand.

When Faith's breath catches, Una knows the picture that does it.

'Is that…'says Faith and cannot finish.

'Iris,' says Una. 'With Puck.'

'Have I seen it?' asks Faith. 'I don't think – '

'I had it with me in camp,' says Una. 'I don't remember if I showed you.'

It's framed these days, but the glass does nothing to diminish the giddiness of a whirling Iris or Puck's wide, cackling mouth.

'She has Mummy's eyes,' says Faith to no one particular. 'Your eyes.'

'And so much of Carl, Faith. You'd love her.'

'I will,' says Faith. The tea steeps ever stronger, the smell of floral Darjeeling filling the room, the red teabowls for once forgotten as Una pulls her sister into a hug.

Later, Martin Swallow doesn't so much call round as appear in the sitting room. Robin is ebullient. She rushes from front hall to half-unpacked sewing room with cries of, 'Mama! Come see!'

Una does, if only to ensure the apocalypse isn't here for the second time. It isn't. The world may end in Revelation, but that does not include Martin Swallow swooping Robin up into a bear hug and exclaiming while so doing, 'Miss Bird, you've grown!'

To Una he says, 'She has grown, hasn't she?'

'Children do. You realize it's usual for people to knock ingress?'

'I liked the idea of surprising you,' he says and shrugs. 'Besides,' he says over Robin's plaited head, now level with his nose, ''The windowbox is no place for the spare key. Anyone could find it.'

'Manifestly,' says Una.

Robin snuggles against Martin Swallow's shoulder and says, voice fuzzy and obscure, 'Auntie Joan said she used to keep hers on the overhang to her old flat.'

'Joan was tall,' says Una.

Simultaneously their guest says, 'That's worse!' Then, hopefully, 'Tea?'

Robin scrambles into a blur of supposedly helpful activity, tumbling seel-slick out of his arms and careening past Una's knees, Kiki in her wake. This leaves Martin Swallow fishing about in the pocket of a creased linen jacket. It's hardly Kingsport wear. More the sort of thing Una associates with Carl's Raffles days. He comes up with one of those cardboard-bound children's books Una is now entirely too familiar with. The cockatoo trying to be a parrot on the cover is the giveaway. He puts a finger to his lips to stop her saying anything. Una isn't sure if this is meant to forestall protestations of spoiling or ensure the surprise. Both, in all probability.

'Better come back, Robin,' says Una. 'I think there's something for you.'

Cue more careening, feet over knees over hands full of tea bowls, and a swirl of green feathers. Murrrderrr! says Kiki to no one. Una cranes her neck to read upside-down and across a foot of void space.

The book has Valley of Adventure stamped across the top, writing overlaying dizzyingly long stalactites. Robin's squeal rockets into the decibel of ear-shattering. Una doesn't try to parse by how much. She laughs, squeezes Robin's shoulder and prompts manners the way parents are supposed to. The whole thing is gloriously reminiscent of another life. She extricates Li's red tea bowls from Robin's excitable fingers, freeing Robin to seize her book. It's a temporary arrangement; the next thing Una knows, Martin Swallow appropriates one of the bowls and exchanges it for the heft of a paperweight with Edinburgh glass discernable through its glass dome.

'Didn't like to compete with Yeats,' Martin says and grins.

The kettle boils, and Una sees to tea. Robin seizes the opening and quickly commandeers Mr. Swallow's attention. In the time it takes Una to set the paperweight aside, fill the teapot and slice shortbread, Robin clambers onto their guest's knee, nestles her head against his chest, and when Una resurfaces, is listening avidly to the latest Mannering-Trent instalment. All with less than a by-your-leave from what Una can deduce. Una takes a vacant armchair, content to pour out and absorb Robin's sleek, feline contentment. Kiki alights on her shoulder and Una tracks the story with the part of her attention not on Robin. This time the children have only gone and boarded the wrong plane and are now living behind a waterfall.

This is as far as Una gets before Robin's attention shifts enough to register Una passing round teacups. 'Mama,' she says in the imperious way of young girls, 'Come listen.'

'I am, darling,' says Una.

This does nothing to stop Robin shifting into a semi-upright position and holding her arms out to Una anyway. 'Come here,' Robin kicks sluggish and half-fretful at the vacant sofa cushions.

Una tries and fails to conjure demurrals acceptable to the iron-clad logic of children. None are forthcoming.

Unhelpfully, their guest sides with Robin. He beams a seraph's grin and says from the other side of the book, 'I don't bite, honest.'

'If I thought you did,' says Una crossing the room, 'I'd hardly leave my bird with you, would I?' She half-lifts Robin's feet off the other half of the sofa and folds them onto her lap as she sits down. With one hand she maps a star-shaped birthmark on Robin's foot. The other cradles her neglected tea.

'How are you about lizards?' Martin asks. 'Phillip Mannering has adopted one.'

'Carl named his Harry,' says Una.

'Auntie Emmy gave me one,' says Robin, scrabbling suddenly upright. Mr. Swallow takes this opportunity to slot a thumb between the pages of the book. To Una he says, 'You're going to have to explain that.'

Una looks to Robin, still cat-contented there on the sofa, snug between her people. She does a fine impression of Mr. Swallow's seraph's grin as she says, 'You 'splain, Mama. I'm fetching Nils.'

'That's Emily's lizard-offering,' says Una, possibly needlessly, as Robin slips gazelle-lithe onto the floor and scarpers, leaving Una reaching backwards for memories of Trinity House and it's unlikely menagerie. The usual household pets, but also a monkey, a buffalo and an emerald-green lizard named Harry, all at least as adventure-prone, as it turned out, as the Mannerings and Trents, and indeed Robin, could wish.

Jerry travels down with the younger Wandering Merediths at the end of the summer, and Una looks askance at him as she meets him at the station.

'You hate cities,' she says from her side of the embrace. She has half an eye on his face and half on the conglomeration of Meredith and Challow twins running riot with Robin. Una hasn't seen Robin with children her age - ones that didn't name-call anyway – since the war ended, and it's simultaneously heartbreaking and wonderful.

'Love you, though,' says Jerry and gives Una's shoulder a squeeze. 'Missed you, too. All those years you never came home.'

Una doesn't say that she was home. She senses from the shift of Jerry's posture he knows this. He doesn't object when Una navigates them out of the city centre and down to the water so the children can paddle in the frothing sea. It's one of Kingsport's blue-dimpled days. The gulls wheel overhead in undemanding cacophony and eddies of indecisive breezes play against Una's hemline. Jerry riffles in a canvas bag, extracts a block-shaped pad, and soon charcoal mixes with the smell of the nearby dune-grasses and sea salt. The children launch into a rousing chorus of Polly Wolly Doodle, which Kiki promptly picks up. It should leave Una with a bone to pick with Jerry for ever teaching it to the children in the first place, because now in addition to proclaiming murder, Kiki has a novel way of disordering the yellow-brick universe of Innisfree. But it will give poor Benwick respite from the reports of non-existent murders, and it's nice to think there's another generation of Merediths scandalizing their neighbours to this particular tune.

'You weren't here for my fallout with cities, were you?' asks Jerry as they sit on the sandy bank of a dune seeded with prickly grass.

'Course I was,' says Una. 'Faith wasn't the only one writing anxious letters to Nan. Don't your remember my turn at Patterson Street?'

She sees memory register in Jerry's sudden smile. He smiles the way Carl does in placid moods, less a smile and more the lightening of his face. 'With the Blakes,' he says. 'I forgot. Ruthie loved Walter too, didn't she?'

Heretofore they've been watching the children leaping and scrabbling among the sea-slick rocks. This startles Una into looking away from their riotous spectacle and directly at Jerry. He stops his sketch and shrugs with the clumsiness of his boyhood. 'I know I went to pieces,' he says ruefully, 'but only after watching you try extremely hard not to. I'm sorry I never said at the time. I didn't know then how breathtakingly impossible it was, the thing you were doing.'

'Jerry,' says Una and presses a hand to his arm. There should be more, but the ghost he wakes is an old one, and even now leaves Una tongue-tied. The hand not resting on his forearm thumbs the spiked tails of her fish. When Yeats wells, it is heartbeat-soothing. I went into a hazel wood because a fire was in my head...

'Sorry,' Jerry says, still clumsy. 'I should know better than to poke bruises.'

'It was years ago,' says Una.

'Some things,' Jerry says, 'are indelible. Like Walter and Singapore.'

'Singapore wasn't all awful,' says Una.

'That came through your letters,' says Jerry. 'Carl's, too. He was delighted, because as it turns out, his brand of keen-eyed observing runs to more than bugs.'

'That,' says Una, 'I knew. I endured years of it.'

'Course you did,' Jerry says. 'I forgot. Mind – he was useless for telling tales out of school.'

Una laughs. 'He would be. If it wasn't the Latinate name for one of his specimens, he forgot it. Colleagues names, students names, my colleagues names... Li would have done you a much better line in gossip.'

It's Jerry's turn to laugh, the sound of it chocolate-rich and resonant in contrast to the shrilling of the gulls and the squealing of the girls in the water. 'There were things to tell, then?' He sounds astonishingly young and hopeful the way he says it.

'That,' Una says, 'would be telling.'

'And that,' says Jerry with a grin borrowed from one of Hell's more charming devils, 'is what you used to say when dodging Bruce's more impossible questions. I'm pleased. I liked thinking of you happy over there.'

Somewhere half a mile off a church bell tolls and brother and sister flinch. Robin slips over the seal-grey of a rock. Una starts to go to her, then realizes that little Jemma Challow will get there first. Beside her, Jerry's charcoal skitters and he rubs at it with the cuff of his shirt.

'That's hard to get out,' says Una.

'Do I want to know,' Jerry asks, oblivious, 'Why and when Una Meredith fell out with church bells?'

'No,' she says. 'You really don't.'

'Tell me anyway?'

There are people, Una knows, who lived uneasily in the long, fearsome shadow of dark-eyed Jerry Meredith. She isn't one of them. He is Jerry first and Good Conduct Club judge second. He was Una's anchor in the straights of fear after their mother died, whispering psalms childishly in her ear and holding her close. Once, it made him easy to talk to. It still is.

'They sound like Tenko,' says Una. She doesn't elaborate because there aren't words enough to explain this phenomenon. Its regular irregularity, the heat of the sun, the buzz of insects. The cool of the night, fractured by moonlight and the hours upon hours of standing. The weight of Robin, heavy in her arms or Elise, malaria-feverish hanging off her shoulder. Jerry doesn't ask further. Either the newspapers explained or Jerry has his own permutation of these unspeakable things. Awful thought.

Silence spider-delicate spins between them. Una breathes deep through her nose, counting to ten, to twenty, to thirty as she inhales the salt and spume smell of the sea. When she looks to her left, Jerry does the same. He exhales, inhales again, and says as he breathes out, 'You'll find them. When you do, you'll visit us in Struan, and then I'll personally put the lot of you on a boat back there. Promise.'

Una kisses his wind-chilled cheek. 'I'll look forward to it,' she says.