If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,
...
I should go with him in the gloom
Hoping it might be so
Thomas Hardy, Oxen Kneeling

They return from England by way of Struan, fulfilling a long-overdue promise to Jerry.

It's beautiful, in a downy, deep, sort of way, and it is the perfect atmosphere to rouse ghosts. Una thinks this staring at a foreign ceiling early in 1950, the sky an unremarkable wash of greys and slates. Li, Carl and Iris are as elusive as hen's teeth ever were. The sun rises behind a cloud, it's face veiled. Emily's last living blood-family are dead. Robin's family number Una and the women from the camp, and one well-meaning Anglican priest. Unbidden, arrow-swift and more painful, she thinks, They are dead and untraceable. Maybe someone not you buried them under sun-bleached crosses with all the ceremony you gave Elise English. Less, even.

It's a terrifying thought. It is not the first time Una Meredith thinks this in tumultuous hours, but it is, perhaps, the first time it gets a foothold on her soul. Five years is, it must be said, an exceeding long time to go without a murmur, without a shadow of a murmur of a word from any of them. And Carl – Carl has been gone longer still. The thought snakes, silk-sinuous through the corners of Una's soul. Iris dead, Carl dead, Li dead. This is why no one can find them. Una can picture it, the sun-bleached crosses, the mounds of earth flattening to nothingness. She made those crosses, watched those mounds. The picture is too close for comfort. She presses her hand to her fish, and as she did that evening long ago in conversation with Alice Caldicote, comes up with Yeats. Man has created death.

Una stares at the alien ceiling and blames the New Year holiday lately fled. These days it evokes that dreadful New Year when Singapore was lighted up like a Christmas tree and they all thought the bombs were fireworks or a drill until they weren't. Una never sees the year in these days without conjuring the slim, blue-banded dragonfly ghosts of the zero-planes. With their shades stretching across an alien ceiling it is cold comfort knowing that she harasses the consulate routinely or Naomi and Miss Forster are in regular contact with journalistic sources out East. They have had no luck, and neither has she, and neither has Martin Swallow, for all his contacts and promises. As for Ernest Henderson, the less said of him the better.

It's impossible to sleep, so Una reaches for the light and attempts the next chapter in Some Tame Gazelle. Belinda theorizes that love is like bedsocks, which should land somewhere between hilarity and poignancy but in fact doesn't register. Una sips free of the appleleaf quilt decorating the Wandering Merediths' spare room and drifts, spectre-silent into Nan's lovely, maple-panelled kitchen. When the sun comes through the windows just right, it washes it in honey colours. There is no sun this morning.

This is why Una does not see Jerry at the kitchen table. He sits there, not sleeping, not nursing a teacup, only deeply contemplative of the nacreous grey skyline. He catches a kettle-wielding Una off-guard with his observation, 'You look entirely too natural doing that. How often do you brew tea at ungodly hours?'

Una reaches for a ghost of a smile to offer him. She adds another teacup to the tray and carries it over to the table, also Maplewood. Then she takes the chair opposite Jerry.

'Less than you think,' she says. Belatedly, needlessly, she adds, 'I hope I didn't wake you.'

Jerry's smile is also a ghost. 'Hardly. Even if you had – you can't sit there and tell me you never woke Carl or Li in moments of crisis?'

Una's smile threatens fracture because on the long night of her soul Li was not yet home. It was Una, Puck and Akela that kept vigil for Carl. Who may be dead. She cannot say that. She spins the sunshine-yellow of Royal Albert Woodland Glen between her hands – Mandy's anniversary gift to her parents – and says, 'They're dead, aren't they, Jerry? We won't ever get them back.'

Somehow – Una misses the how – Jerry slips the bounds of his chair and next thing has Una in his arms. He smells of sleeplessness and the sere of a grey outdoor sunrise.

Tremulously he says, 'No one's ever told you, have they? That if – if Carl is dead, it won't be your fault.' He hugs her fiercely, back of her chair and all.

'He should never have been there,' says Una into his arms.

'In war-torn Singapore? Good God, Una, neither should you.' The atypicality of this – Jerry never blasphemes – is jarring. Apparently he registers this through the stiffening of Una's back.

'Neither should you,' he says again, more gently, stroking her hair.

There's a bench abutting the table, built into the back of Nan's counter. Akela, would have loved the easy access it offers to the tabletop. Akela is dead and Nan has no dogs, so Jerry takes the long, inbuilt bench next to Una. He doesn't quite let her go. He keeps her hands enfolded in his as he says, 'I don't believe you think they're dead, not really. Neither do I. Carl in particular.'

'How – ' begins Una, but gets no further.

Swiftly Jerry says, 'If I gave Carl double pneumonia and that didn't kill him, neither can anything else.'

Jerry did not see the unmitigated horror of the Japanese. Thanks be to God. What Una says is, 'You didn't give him double pneumonia.'

Jerry cannot glower like Bernice, though he might aspire to. He sits adjacent to Una at the Maplewood kitchen table and Looks at her, the weight of those dark eyes oak-solid and immovable. It's a look many of the Glen inhabitants still call fierce. Maybe it's that too. Una feels only its anchor-weight. It's fireside-warm, and coffee-rich. If Una holds his gaze long enough, she will sink into the quicksand of reassurance. The tea is over-steeping. The tannin-richness prickles Una's nose, and she disentangles her hands to pour out.

'And if Carl is dead?' she asks.

'Then you pray Psalms,' says Jerry. 'You could always recite them like breathing.'

This time the smile Una conjures is genuine, no theatre illusion needed. 'You can shout at God in Psalms,' she says. 'Don't think I haven't.'

Jerry grins and squeezes Una's hand, the one not cradling a teacup. He says, 'So have I. I think all really God-fearing people do, sometimes. And when you run out of Psalms or just can't shout any more, pray the old prayer. The Gethsemane one, remember?'

'Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done.' That too, comes back like breathing. It makes Una think of Li, who used to sit on the robin's egg blue of the settle or in the Trinity House kitchen slicing guavas and ambush Una with theological trivia. Which one is the one about the deer being chased? How does psalm 127 start? Who says the bit about God being like a hen? What is verse four of psalm 134? Li loved watching Una reach for and surfaced the relevant scrap of scriptural minutiae. Bernice kept it going in camp, but she doesn't do it by letter. No one has made Una pluck scripture from the ether in years. The memory brings tears, blister-hot to the corners of her eyes. Jerry reaches for and finds he lacks a handkerchief, so hands Una the battered edge of a tea towel instead. Una accepts it then sets it aside for laundry later.

'Resurrection hinges on memory,' Una says, and sips at her tea. It is potent. It kicks at the back of her throat like a lightning-jolt, the taste astringent. Jerry sits up straighter, which shouldn't be possible, and pivots to face her, there in the nacreous sunrise of the Struan kitchen. 'Sorry?'

'It's in Luke. He is not here, but is risen: remember how He spake unto you when He was yet in Galilee... And they remembered His words, And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven. The Easter miracle hinges on the women remembering a promise.'

Jerry says nothing. Una sips more tea. It's still strong, still kicks like a mule, the taste still astringent, but the warmth of it seeps first through her hands into her palms and through them, into her blood and past that, too, to the still, unquiet part of her soul fretting away at the existence of her loved ones.

Jerry says, 'You sound like Father.'

'Even wavering in the face of watery sunrises?'

'You're forgetting Gethsemane,' says Jerry. His thumb brushes the ghosts of tears past from her eyes. 'Christ wavers, too. That's the point. Nevertheless, not my will but Thine…He didn't want death, either.'

'No,' says Una. 'He gave us divinity, we gave Him humanity. You're right, of course.'

'So, you cling to your psalms and you pray Gethsemane, and then, because I think you're right about resurrection and memory being inextricably linked, you hold onto Luke and the Easter story. And when I'm right, and none of them turns out to be dead, you pray…' Jerry twists his teacup in its saucer. 'You pray the thing Father prayed when Mummy died. I should know it because he was always saying it but I don't. Bet you do, though.'

'I am He that was dead: And behold I am alive forevermore. Amen. Revelation.

Brother and sister trade smiles in the face of the still-grey sky.

'Thank you,' says Una.

'Always,' says Jerry. 'Nacreous sunrises are awful snares of the enemy. Full of prowling lions that walketh about, seeking whom they may devour…But you learned that long before I did. And you never wanted a sermon.'

He rises and kisses Una's forehead. He's about to take his leave, but Una catches his wrist between thumb and middle finger.

'Whatever I wanted,' she says, 'that's what I needed. When Robin and I leave – promise you'll call, Jerry. However grey the sunrise?'

'Not,' says Jerry, 'that you're ever awake then.'

'Jerry.'

'I'll promise if you do,' he says.

'Promise,' says Una.

Una would like to say the brainwave that follows is the result of Psalms or Luke, Revelation, or even 1 Peter. It is none of these things, or perhaps all of them. Ostensibly, the brainwave that strikes Una on return from Struan in January of 1950 is the fault of Bernice, whose letter arrives on the mat with the usual airmail hallmarks, full of grumbling about That Officious Woman, otherwise Frenny Razdan. As portents of Divine Intervention go, it's an unlikely one. And yet it has all the promise of Noah's dove with its olive branch or the colourful arc of a rainbow.

Trinity House, 1950

As if I didn't have enough to do with operation bloody shoebox! That's what that Centre down in the city really is, if you want to know. The doctor's half-blind, a Chinese girl I don't trust because Emily doesn't does the teaching, and the most disorganized gentleman helms the operation or tries to….And amidst this madness, That Officious Woman is on at me to teach! Teach! Me! Can you imagine? I don't even like it. That, Miss Meredith, was all your lot! Emily's too, but obviously she is tied up finalizing minor things like wedding plans, so no help.

Anyway, The Officious One is on and on about it. Can I get you to come back, as if you also didn't have your hands full with bookshops and managing our Robin. And parrot! God, I always forget the parrot and remember. Also the impossible sounding owner of said bookshop. Rather you than me. Oh, and the small matter of locating three missing persons.

Naturally explained that no, you couldn't bloody help, but really think Officious One was too delighted you were Not Dead After All to care. Mostly because she spent a Very Long Time telling people you weren't and is now proved right. This never gets old. She then proceeded to rattle off names to me, as if this would mean something, but maybe they will to you. Retained none except Curtis –Mrs. Officious seemed to think you'd be glad…

Joy, affection and wry amusement tangle under Una's sternum. The urge to laugh and then to weep vie dizzyingly for supremacy. She feels feather-light and flyaway. The pertinent thing is that Frenny Razdan is involved in relaunching the Anglo-Chinese School. Una grasps at this like a lifeline. Bernice isn't wrong that Una can't return yet. She has a niece to find, and Carl and Li, too. But perhaps, someday…

Una sits at the rolltop desk, turns on the light, and writes three letters by its amber glow, one hand curled tight around her silver fish in their oroboros. She writes first to Frenny Razdan, then to Percival Curtis, who is also, it would seem, not dead after all, and then to the Rev. Peach, just to be thorough about it.

Innisfree, 1950
Dear Frenny,

I gather from Bernice Allerstone (you'll know her as the woman running Trinity House like a ship these days, no doubt) you are revitalizing the Anglo-Chinese School. If that's true, then I'm going to beg a favour of you and hope you'll forgive the liberty.

I don't know if you remember Iris – she was nine the last time you saw her. Before I went away, I sent her with her mother to China. I have no idea if they got there, because as you'll appreciate, I've heard any number of stories since from any number of women about torpedoes and boats off the Malay peninsula.

But if my Iris comes somehow through the ACS system, let me know. I'm enclosing a photo for reference, and also letters for Rev. Peach and Percival Curtis, on the basis I know where to find you, if not them. I trust, you being yourself know where they are as I do not.

Be well do good work and keep in touch.
Yours with gratitude,

Una C. Meredith

With great deliberateness, Una takes down a photo from atop the desk. She reaches into the frame and extracts the picture. For years it occupied the dusty corner of a platform bed. Iris is on her toes in the photo, her head flung back, and her hair a wild sweep of thick plait as it whips out behind her. One of those giddy moments peculiar to childhood. Una looks at the graven image of her girl and hesitates. Then she fastens the photo reverently to Frenny's letter and slips it into the striped airmail envelope. She addresses it and sets it aside for posting next morning.

Tread softly, Una thinks, her hand caressing those slender, spiky-tailed fish at her throat reflexivley, because you tread on my dreams, Frenny. And this dream is named Iris.

Finished, Una steeples her fingers. She finds she cannot sleep for anticipation. It crackles like molten resin through so many nerve endings. It hisses and pops and whispers dangerously hopeful, Iris.

No word comes from the ACS. Maybe it is still in pieces. Maybe resurrecting it defeats even Frenny Razdan. Ernest Henderson, however, has a breakthrough.

Raffles Hotel, 1950,

Mrs. Meredith,

Writing to inform you this formally concludes our investigation into Thomas Meredith Carlyle and family.

Regrettably could not find anyone alive by that name. Presume death in internment camp. Could not confirm a grave marker. My sincere condolences.

E. Henderson

Una stares at the note, unbelieving. She reads it with half an eye on Robin, three-quarters of the way up a shivering aspen, and Kiki higher still. The Great Divorce lies neglected on Una's knees, offering Ernest Henderson's letter an unlikely ballast. That awful man cannot possibly – But he can. He has. The idea that Ernest Henderson spent years looking for wrong person is not the revelation it should be. A gnarled hand lands on her shoulder and rubs it without fanfare or announcement.

'All right?' asks Martin.

'About to be,' says Una.

He rubs Una's shoulder and taps the Lewis and says, 'Much better reading, that. You'll like the theology.' Una protests the malleability of Anglicanism, but at weak-tea level disagreement, and promises to take this on advisement.

Innisfree, 1950,

Iain,

To coin a phrase of Carl's, Ernest Henderson couldn't find north with a compass or squirrels in acorn season. Boxing his ears is more than your career is worth and certainly more than he deserves. Do not let Bernice commit murder. Singapore well out of Carlisle jurisdiction. Do surreptitiously send Henderson a copy of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. He won't understand the text or the point being made but will make me feel better.

Screwtape Letters is for you. Do not waste that on Raffles. Much too interesting and would go well over that awful man's head. I want someone to discuss them with besides Judith Carlisle and people called Swallow.

Four Winds, 1950

Una,

Afraid my contacts are absolutely exhausted. No one knows anything. Ipoh is only half again as much a shambles as your Singapore. Kedah too, incredibly. Thought it might be safe, but no luck. The Mainland, naturally, is chaos. I don't want to give up but see no other option. Forgive me.

Naomi

To: Una Meredith

Cannot find anyone. Blame Mainland China situation. Refuse to give up. Have form. Ask Faith.

From the Desk of:
Catherine Forster
News Desk
Globe and Mail

No one knows anything. No one can find Carl, Iris or Li. Martin does no better.

One evening he says without warning, 'You won't like this next bit.'

It's one of his unlikely segues. They're sitting over the bookshop, in the starched, anonymous room. It's less anonymous these days, between Christmas gifts from Innisfree and improbable artwork from Robin, but still flirts with the edge of Spartan ideals. The radio croons How High the Moon courtesy of Django Reinhardt in a gypsy jazz rhythm that Una's fingers try to replicate on the arm of the sofa, but can't. Those chords in that progression at that kind of speed would defy any pianist, even Tatum, even Waller. Certainly Una hasn't a hope. But she enjoys the exercise. Or does until this conversational about-face. Una shifts her focus from the music the better to listen.

'Oh?' she says, mild. 'Why not?'

'Because I've tried everyone I can think of, Naomi Arnold has by your reckoning exhausted all her newspaper contacts out East, as has Miss Forster in Toronto. You have all but worn a hole in the consulate floor. The ACS either can't or won't help…'

More undoubtedly follows. Una, sitting in the familiar anonymity of the low-ceilinged flat doesn't hear it, because she goes suddenly cold. She stiffens on her side of the sofa, statue-rigid. She pictures unbidden all those sun-bleached crosses. Nellie Keene, Elise English, Stella Bowen…She refuses to emboss them with more family. With Carl Meredith, Li Meredith, Iris Meredith. Ice begins to form implacable and thick somewhere between chest and soft pallet. That Una lay awake not so many months ago and thought exactly this is not the point. It's one thing for Una to waver on the precipice of doubt at ungodly hours, but for anyone else to speak the awful thought aloud…To make it real…

'They cannot be dead,' Una says. The knife-edge of the ice is in her voice. She hears the crackle of it, registers the way it starches her posture. Thinks, as from outside herself, that her ACS children would know this tone and come to heel. The man opposite has never had cause to hear it, but registers it anyway. He reaches, not quite seeing, for her hands with one of his. The other scrubs at his face.

'I don't want them to be,' says Martin. More gently, 'Una, you're exhausted. You and Robin both.'

He is perhaps, not wrong. But once Una put Iris on a cattle car with her mother and promised them Safety. Promised to find Carl. To keep him safe. Keep Puck safe. And Puck is dead. Puck who kept her and her other family alive for years. Una cannot leave Iris in this terrible limbo. Nor Li, nor Carl. She can't survive with them languishing there, neither dead nor alive. It's all very well for C.S. Lewis and Screwtape, but limbo isn't a Presbyterian concept. It doesn't exist. Either Una's dead are in Heaven, or they are incontrovertibly…Not. It doesn't bear thinking about. She retracts her hands from Martin's, unthinking. The cannot be dead. Must not be.

'I can't stop,' says Una. 'If I stop looking, they are dead.' Because, as she so lately said to Jerry, Resurrection hinges on remembrance. If Una lets go of her firecracker girl, her waterlily sister and Carl in his impish, impulsive, extravagant love, then they are dead forevermore. The words to explain this fight to surface but get trapped under the ice of irrational anger.

'Would you stop?' she asks.

Una knows she still crackles and bristles like the ice that kept her ACS children in line, but she can't seem to do anything about it. Somewhere, a world away, a poet opines that the world can end in ice. When bombs fell on Singapore this made no sense, but it does now, in the anonymous flat of Martin Swallow with its low ceiling and How High the Moon burring and zipping along on the overworked radio. Tears threaten, then blister at the corners of Una's eyes. Ice notwithstanding, Martin closes the distance and offers a shoulder that she accepts, unthinking.

Indistinctly, Una says, 'Could you leave them be, if it was your family?'

'Sometimes,' he says, thoughtful, 'all we can do is let the dead bury their dead. That's what it says, isn't it?'

That's Luke again, Una knows, whence comes her Easter Gospel. Uncompromising in its injunction. Judith Carlisle did it. She said once that when her sister broke over forty years of silence to tell her their European family had stopped writing during this last war, she knew they were dead. Her whole family knew. And left it at that.

Jerry – God help him – did it when little Ursula rucked up on Mandy Challow's doorstep, the girl-child and granddaughter they never expected to meet, and told them her mother had died when bombs fell on Berlin. He, Nan and Mandy sat at that Maplewood kitchen with its honeyed light, and they wept and they buried Miri, loved Ursula, and they stuck another memorial up in the Glen Saint Mary church. Sacred to the memory of Miranda Olivia Meredith. Crucially, Jerry knew his child was dead. Una does not know that Carl, Li and Iris are dead. To leave them would be –is – impossible.

'Could you do that?' she asks, scrabbling for and missing the thawing of internal ice.

'No,' says Martin. He sounds as exhausted as he professes her to be. Gingerly he rubs at the knuckles of the hand that still wears Li's ring. 'But I wish you would.'

How High the Moon bleeds into Memories of All That, and the radio clicks resolutely off. Una misses the movement by which Martin achieves this.

'He said,' says Una, 'he would ransom worlds for us. Carl.' She says it shakily, tears prickly hot and blistering against her eyelashes. They come to bloom against Martin's shoulder.

'Those exact words?' Martin asks.

Una hums an imperfect affirmative – all she can manage – and feels his shoulder stiffen. There are drawbacks to being able to bat theology back and forth with Martin Swallow, first and foremost the fact that the Christological implications of Carl's extravagant, cavalier promise – I would ransom worlds for you – in the face of Armageddon are not lost on him.

'It strikes me,' Martin says, one hand stroking Una's hair, 'that you're the one that harrowed hell.'

'Very un-Presbyterian of you,' she says, and tries to muster a smile. Even so, she feels the earlier ice ebbing.

'You're one to talk,' Martin says. He does smile if she doesn't. It's Una's cue to grumble something half-hearted and insincere about how reductive Lewis is, how insubstantial Anglican doctrine. She doesn't have the energy. Without the music, silence descends, the thick, treacle-dense kind that pairs well with grudges but can also join hands with tea. Una half-rises to put the kettle on, but Martin forestalls her.

'Let me,' he says, and she does. Silence gives way to the escalating seethe and splutter of the kettle on its gas ring. The thick, white china comes out of hiding and the chipped teapot with it.

Una lets Martin fuss. He hunts down coasters – her gift to him several Christmases back – and teaspoons, badly tarnished. Robin's choice, and Bernice's influence in evidence. Also a disproportionate amount of paper that clutters the table and looks dangerously susceptible to tea stains.

Una shifts to squint at it and asks, as she is no doubt supposed to, 'What's all this?'

'Something I ought to have done ages ago,' Martin says.

This explains exactly nothing, so Una squints further over his shoulder at the mess of paperwork, which is close-written in the kind of language comprehensible to the likes of lawyers and perhaps Geordie Carlisle, but not herself at an impossible hour, wrung out with the loss of absent family, persistent ghosts and more tenacious loved ones.

'It occurs to me,' Martin says when no riposte from her is forthcoming, 'the bookshop should really be in your name.'

'Doesn't that trigger a capital gains tax?' asks Una. It's reflexive, obviously so. So obviously so that Martin's eyebrows raise in mute inquiry, even as he searches for a pen. Una doesn't recall agreeing to go along with this half-mad scheme but doesn't point this out.

She says, 'Cressida missed her calling.'

'I might have guessed,' Martin says. 'Estates like hers take upkeep.'

'That's a yes to capital gains?'

'There are other ways around the problem,' he says. 'If that's a concern.'

Una looks slantwise at this man, still scrabbling for and failing to surface anything like a writing implement. She's half-tempted to dare him to clarify what he's just said, but if he does she has to answer, and she's still half-mired in ghosts.

'Careful,' she says instead. 'I may take you up on that.'

Martin grins gnomically in the yellow glow of the electric. 'Duly noted,' he says. He sounds equal parts surprised and pleased as he finally locates and passes Una a fountain pen.

'If I do this,' says Una, 'what does that mean for you, when you aren't adventuring? Isn't the whole point of the bookshop to give you a presentable conversational line in church coffee hours? Something to talk about that doesn't involve men and their dogs?'

'I was taking for granted you might let me hang about the place,' he says, and improbably turns up the wattage on the gnomic grin that charmed her in the first place. 'But this way,' he says, gesturing at the papers, 'you and Robin would be guaranteed income, if anything happened to me.'

There's the annuity Bernice and Emily insist on sending, and Cressida's lump sum, never mind what Carl has in savings and what Una has herself accrued over the years. She says none of this.

'Is it likely to?' asks Una.

'I don't know,' he says. 'And I've got to go away again, sooner than expected. I like to think of you and your bird safe.'

It seems he has only just come back, or she has. Una does not say this. Neither does she say that she has seldom felt safer than here, anonymity of the flat and the disorganization of the books downstairs notwithstanding. She reaches for the battered teapot and pours out.

'Robin won't like that,' Una says as the tea tumbles, deeply browned Red Rose, into inexpensive and heavy china.

'Only Robin?'

'Perhaps Robin and I both.' She passes Martin a teacup and realizes as she does it the last of the ice has melted. Memories of Li at the end of the world ambush her, and afterwards this is the explanation Una gives Bernice for what follows. Without thinking to do it, she unpins the ichthys brooch she wears and fastens it to Martin's lapel.

'Take that,' she says, 'For luck. And haste ye back.'

He reaches for and hands her I Capture the Castle, a startling literary revelation from a man who has never previously tried to shape her taste in reading. But then he says 'From diversion from Investageteers while I'm away,' and they laugh over it.