Guest -You have a knack for picking out favourite moments of mine. The Jerry scene is really a darling I couldn't kill. But The Blythes Are Quoted would have it that even Susan knew about Una's love for Walter, so I thought we might as well have a scene with someone more emotionally proximate. And Faith, well she's compassionate at her core, isn't she? It's why she helps Lidie Marsh and it's why she's so quick to love Iris, I think.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush

In summer of 1949, the consul says without preamble, 'It's not good news.'

He looks awkward and apologetic. The impression is of a pair of overstretched shoes. He gabbles impossibly for ten minutes. Ten minutes stretches into twenty and he is no closer to his point. Say what you like about the Commandant, Una thinks, but at least he had the grace to say what he meant how he meant it. Una decides to put the writhing, eel-squirming consul out of his misery.

'Who is dead?' Una asks. She is brisker than is strictly necessary and she knows it. But Una's heart has plummeted to earth. The hand curled around her silver fish feels the prick of their spiked tails and unbidden rises up the old line, Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams…In her ear, an old traitorous ghost whispers, Carl will not come home. Not ever. Una tries to quash it, but it's hard, faced with a gabbling consul. Iago hisses, stubborn, Li is dead too. So is Iris. Una tightens the hand around her necklace, and the spiked silver fishtails piece her skin. They leave little pinprick stigmata behind. Una prays stubbornly, Preserve us O Lord while waking... Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

Opposite Una, the consul does not know Yeats. This is Una's uninformed surmise. He trundles stalwartly on, gabbling semi-cogently about a Chinese man with a name he can't pronounce. As explanations go, it is hopelessly inadequate and more than Una dared hope. Iago slithers serpentine-graceful away.

Hope, traitorous, feather-light blooms warm and liquid in Una's chest. Her heart unclenches and rises effervescent back to its place under her ribcage. Li, Iris Carl – They are still alive somewhere. Maybe. But then Una thinks of Emily's round, hopeful face and a chill blossoms along her spine. It courts her skin, races up and down her dancer-light. Emily, she thinks. I'm sorry.

Una braces her heart, nerves her arm and asks what happened. Nothing on earth could prepare her for the answer.

'Administrative error,' the consul says.

Briefly, Una thinks she mishears him. Surely, he has not, would not say…He resumes gabbling with all the cogency of a cockerel in season.

'He died in a Japanese internment camp.'

Una's curdling blood curdles further and now approximates yoghurt in its leaden thickness. Its temperature drops from tepid to freezing. Faith in a temper goes hot. Una knows this. She goes cold. Her children at the Anglo-Chinese School familiar with the story used to say that if you made Miss Meredith angry, she turned into the Snow Queen, all gardens of ice and prickling cold. In the staff rooms the fact that she had never once raised her voice, had never had to, was a thing of legend. Una never intended it that way. It is how her God made her. She did it to Mary Vance on a bitterly cold day when her hands were frozen and Mary kind enough to offer her a muff, and she does it now.

When she speaks next she sounds as even as a perfectly leavened sponge, collected as a telegram. 'He was Chinese,' Una says.

'As I say,' says the consulate's representative. 'Administrative error. Happened quite a lot.'

Una can believe it. She has, officially, lived too long in the world not to understand how this kind of administrative error happens. But she wishes for the unbelief of her girlhood. She wishes she could be incredulous. But Una isn't. Quite the opposite. And now she must find a way to tell Emily Carnegie the last of her family is dead.

It occurs to Una that she can write to Iain and tell him. He would tell Emily, if she asked, and maybe that would be better. It would certainly be easier. Just this once hand the difficult, impossible thing off to a younger, stronger person. Una's heart twists and she thinks of Carl, Li and Iris. If it were them, there are very few people she would accept the news from. Bernice, maybe. Cressida, possibly. At a pinch the consulate. But a young, half-alien nephew of Bernice? Una can't see her way to it. Oh, it's not the same thing at all, not really. People are variegated as silk shading, and more complex. Emily's letters are as full of Iain Blythe as his are of Emily. Even so. Emily asked Una to find the last of her family. So, Una will tell Emily what happened to them. Not Iain. Not Bernice. Not anyone else.

But for a moment, Una allows herself this imagining. Then she bundles her dead and her ghosts to her, and goes to find Robin at the bookshop. She swoops the girl up into an unexpected hug and holds her close. Martin says not a thing. He goes and puts the kettle on unbidden.

What Una would like to do in the days following, is hover in the consulate all day every day until the impossibly young consul finds her family. But family now means Robin, and Robin needs family that is present. The thought feels astonishingly disloyal. But Una remembers those grief-raddled Maywater days vividly, and their early tenure at Glen St Mary. The Ditto and the curdling dread; She would not wish this on Robin. Nor would Una dare miss Robin as she is these days. Bruised from playing, yes, and reluctant to explain said bruises to Una, Martin or Isobel, but also birdlike but bright eyed and chattering. Una cannot tear her eyes away. Not even for the dubious luxury of ensuring the consul does his job.

So, the consul gets a reprieve, and Una writes to Raffles, instead.

Inisfree, 1949,

To: E. Henderson,
Would remind you of your promise to make inquiries into my family. Thomas Carlyle Meredith and family continue missing. You have sent no word. Appreciate the cost of international post is extortionate. Please save army outgoing expenses by directing correspondence to B. Allerstone, Trinity House, Evelyn Road if more convenient.

U.C. Meredith

Unable to do more than remotely clip the ears of awful Henderson, Una helps Faith sew for Christopher Blythe's impending wedding to Emma Blake. This is needful since Faith's sewing ability never progressed beyond buttons and – improbably – people. They leave the windows open and the summer scent of lilacs drifts over the sill. Sometimes they bring the ribald sound of Robin, Kiki and Isobel singing Polly Wolly Doodle. Other times it's Van Amburgh is the man that goes to all the shows...On those days Una misses Singapore like a pulse. The wind carries back not only Robin, Isobel and That Impossible Bird but the ghost of Iain, Bernice and the others singing as they walked to Trinity House, Puck cackling the harmony.

Occasionally Mara Blythe and Judith Carlisle join them and the women speculate idly as to whether Judith's Ben will work up enough nerve to ask Helen to dance as and when the wedding takes place. Almost, Una thinks, one could forget there was a war lately. Or she would, but for the persistent, cold-hard absence of Carl, Li and Iris. But too, for the ongoing letters from Singapore about food scarcity and riots.

Robin's well out of it, Bernice opines long-distance. Hard to disagree, watching Robin slither up the spidery trunk of a silver maple to the tune of Up in the air, the junior birdsmen, Kiki at her heels and Isobel spotting. It doesn't stop Una missing it – the smell, the people, the anchor-deep feeling of home like a heartbeat.

One August evening, Una and Faith shelve weddings in favour of sorting through Sophy's old winter clothes, age seven. Robin will need them when the cold weather arrives. In what Una presumes is a hold-over from their war, the girls that pinned hopes sent clothes for their girls all-hands-round. The rule of thumb seems to be that if they didn't, it was because the clothing was past usability. This means that any clothing that did not pass from Sophy to Isobel to Nan's babies is nothing much to write home about, but if Una doesn't have to sew it up from scratch for a fast-growing bird, neither is she complaining. Una sifts through and discards several nightgowns and a child's school blouse stained past redemption.

'Awfully quiet today, aren't they?' says Faith when neither bird nor children shrieks to rival a ghoul in the vicinity of the Larkrise back garden.

'I think Isobel is dancing,' says Una. 'Or breaking hearts.'

'Both at once, I shouldn't wonder. Where does that leave your various birds?'

'Drinking terrible tea in a bookshop and listening to stories of over-adventurous children, is my conservative guess,' says Una.

Beside her Faith picks up and scrutinizes a tartan skirt that may once have been more tartan than patches but is now two-thirds mend. She looks like a cat watching a sparrow, so it's not the surprise it might be when Faith says, 'He's quite keen on you, isn't he? That bookseller?'

'What he is,' Una says, extracting the skirt from lax fingers, 'is extremely good with Robin.'

'Silly,' says Faith. 'Course he is. How else is anyone supposed to get your attention?'

'Who says I want it caught?'

'Well, don't you?' says Faith.

Una shakes her head. 'I'm tired,' she says, 'of people disappearing, Faith. They always do.'

Faith abandons clothes sorting to squeeze Una's hands between hers. 'Not always,' she says. 'I don't think this one would. Nor does Judith Carlisle. I forget how they know each other.'

'Geordie's Intelligence work,' says Una, and uses an unencumbered hand to swat Faith with remnants of one of Sophy's school blouses. 'During our war. Not the children's.'

Faith's golden eyebrows climb high up her forehead. 'And you know that…?'

'Oh, go on,' says Una. 'That's nothing you and Jem hadn't guessed years ago.'

'Yes, but you knew,' says Faith. She shrugs and says, 'Interested or not, it won't stop people noticing you. And as I say, an ability with Robin is just sensible strategy that way.' She gestures vaguely with another of Sophy's skirts.

Una lifts it out of Faith's hands. 'I think this may be a lost cause.'

'Sophy's cast-offs or my fishing?' asks Faith and grins.

'Both,' Una says, rising. To Faith's 'Where are you off to?' Una says mildly, 'Collecting Robin. Possibly to quash whatever plot they've concocted in my absence.'

As plots go, the section of bookshop labelled Very Miscellaneous seems an unlikely place to concoct one. The signage is old an dilapidated and the books as haphazard as the name suggests. Robin and her worshipful devotees are ostensibly reading The Sea of Adventure. The book has no business being in the bookshop. It is as new as tomorrow and twice as young. Martin bought it for Robin on a whim, and if the two weren't thick as thieves before, they are now. They're bent, heads together, his grey and hers dark and plaited, over the book while the radio croons Ornithology to no one in particular.

'Apt,' says Una, coming in and struck by the brassy sound of it. 'Considering the parrot.'

Up come the two heads, startled, twice-broken and childish noses all but brushing. Collision narrowly averted. Heart-stopping green eyes and watery brown ones turn Una's way. The parrot in question shrieks Murrderrr in her most practised Scots and soars up into the rafters.

'More than you realize,' says Martin, as the song registers. Straight-faced he asks, 'How do you feel about puffins?'

'Puffins?'

'Huffin and Puffin,' says Robin, not elucidating.

'Phillip has them as pets,' says Martin.

Of course Phillip Mannering has pet puffins, Una thinks. There's opportunity to protest. It's what the conspirators ensconced in Very Miscellaneous expect. Once, Una might have done. She would this time, but an image of Carl, good eye jewel-blue as the sea ambushes her.

'I think,' says Una, as she leans gingerly against a nearby bookshelf and reads the latest Mannering-Trent instalment upside-down, 'He prayeth best who loveth best, all creatures great and small.'

'Coleridge?' says the man opposite.

'That's the one,' says Una.

'Excellent. I will investigate how to safely source puffins for you presently.'

'I thought they were for Robin? And I really think they'd be better off here. Increase foot traffic for you.'

'Tell you what,' Martin says, 'we'll share them out. What do you think, Miss Bird? Two for home and one for here?'

Una smiles indulgence, secure in the knowledge the thing will never happen. If it does, they're still smaller than a buffalo and less mischief than Puck. Even so, Una gathers Robin and assorted paraphernalia up and extricates her before child and man can conspire to expand the Innisfree aviary further.