I don't like cliffhangers either. Pour a strong cup of tea before this one.
What happens to Carl is this. He goes, one morning in 1942, to Changi beach. He often does this when he has no classes, to look for insects and hunt among the rock pools. If he has no classes, he sets himself up with his back to a dune and sketches them, writing – Una would say scrawling – notes – Una would say illegibly – in the margins. Later he turns these into treatises and cross-references against encyclopedias, papers and other treatises while Puck, Iris and Akela compete to see who can help most. Nenni is singularly unhelpful, and usually ends by sleeping on top of the document Carl wants to read.
Some mornings though, Carl lies flat on his stomach, a thing which Una and Li both detest because it gets sand into his clothes makes laundry awkward, and studies the rock pool worlds. They are worlds within worlds. Little pocket-universes that hum and buzz with life. This is what Carl does on the fateful morning in 1942. This is why he does not hear the cat-graceful, priest-silent Japanese until the gun goes off.
Puck hears it and screams. A frisson of terror that would be alien but for the last war slices Carl like a knife.
'Puck,' he says, trying extremely hard not to scream, 'Go home. To Una. Go home now.' Puck goes. At the top of a dune he lingers, looking back over the scruff of his Elizabethan collar as if to say, 'Aren't you coming?'
'Now, Puck!' and this time Carl screams.
As it turns out, the Japanese aren't shooting at Carl. Carl has no idea who they are shooting at and he never finds out. Suddenly he is in the thick of artillery fire and the nearby dune is no protection. He and the unfortunate man they are after soon find themselves part of a long queue. Carl has heard things, horrifying things, about what the Japanese do to their enemies. In this moment, he fully expects to die, as he stands there, straight-backed and statue-petrified. Una would square her shoulders, he thinks wryly, because Una has this uncanny knack – and the irritating thing is that she never seems to realize she's got it – of looking a lion in the eye and not flinching.
Carl is not the sort to converse with lions. Carl is an etymologist. A good one. But still. He likes his animals small, lugubrious and indolent. Unless they are Papatee. These men with their guns are none of the things Carl likes in his specimens and he swears softly, fluently, and bass-low. Low as Una's monkey-wild spins on It Ain't Necessarily So. In his mind's eye, he sees Puck looking over his shoulder and then with a lurch, the sparrow-thinness of his starving daughter, the live, snake-slithering terror of his Li. And Una. Christ. Una alone. Li and Iris are God-knows-where and if these men kill him….God, prays Carl, soul-stricken and grasping, Don't leave her alone. Send my family home. Send her Puck. Marry her to that kind school teacher. I don't bloody care. But don't leave Una alone. Let me look my mother in the eye in heaven and tell her that much. That I left my sister with people who love her.
They begin to march. And now, as Carl reigns in the rattling of the cattle car of his heart he tries to pray halfway sanely. To say Forgive me to Li and Iris wherever they are. To Una, because he will not come home and God only knows what she thinks, there in Trinity House with a monkey she'd snap at as soon as – but no. Una loves Puck and Carl knows it. But she won't forgive Puck if Carl dies. Maybe. Or maybe she will bargain her own wild bargains, as spider-swung and gazelle-lithe as the jazz she plays of an evening, and safeguard Puck for him. Carl's not sure he cares which she does, if only she survives. If they all survive.
On they march. Carl thinks, If Li and Iris get back to her, Una will see them safe. Carl believes this, because knowingly or not, Una braves lions where Carl sits well back from them.
They don't go to Changi. Carl doesn't know where they go, except that it's hot, he's parched, and he is more certain than uncertain that this building they stand in used to be the property of the British Army. Laughable thought that, the British.
In the retelling, Carl has no idea what happens next because he has no Japanese. Not at the time. By the time he does, he can't remember what they were saying. What comes across is that they are pleased as punch to have a scholar, because scholars are clever and this one is English, and they need an Englishman with brains to write their orders in English.
Even years later, Carl finds this bizarre. They hated the British. Hated everything about them. And yet they insisted on handing out orders in English to prove they were what? Clever? Flexible? Willing to accept some cultural remnants of the country they invaded?
'If I do this,' says Carl, 'you will keep my family safe?'
They talk among themselves. Carl says, 'My – they're Chinese. My wife and daughter. Being counted. If I do this, you will release them to my sister and ensure no one loots the house or hurts them? That they aren't sold up-country or violated or –'
A babel-noise of confusion while they talk among themselves. Eventually one man bows and says simply, 'Yes.'
Carl accepts this. Honour at this stage still seems integral to the Japanese ethos. He gives them the Trinity House address and the names of his family and prays to God that this devil's bargain pays off.
All through the war he translates their orders. He addresses them, sends them off, bows when he's told and picks up more Japanese than he realized he could. Very occasionally, he uses it in conversation with the men who dictate to him, and they nod with approval, and almost seem human. They tell him that they have seen Trinity House and that it is still there. That everyone is convinced it is an evil place haunted by a lunatic ghost-monkey and don't dare enter it.
Puck, Carl thinks with an inrush of drunken gratitude. Puck, thank God. You keep them safe for me.
His superior discovers Carl can play chess, and they develop a standing appointment. He teaches Carl Go and Carl reciprocates with Triominos when the men loot them from some British house or other. It sets his teeth on edge, but then, Carl is acutely aware that if he doesn't stay alive, he can't find his family. So he plays Triominos, and Go, and Chess, and sips the green tea his Commandant gives him from teabowls painted with cherry blossoms that once Carl might have called beautiful. To say the whole experience is deeply surreal, the way an alternate universe is surreal is the understatement of a lifetime.
Carl gets some idea of how the war goes, because the orders start to fly around in a myna-confusion. Up country, down country, into the peninsula, out to the island, the Japanese have fingers in every pie. As Carl writes, he becomes aware of the runners, wiry and spry under the window, who go arrow-rapid back and forth. But they aren't dressed the way the Japanese dress. They don't wear tweed. They're deserter Australians, Carl presumes. Well, some are. Others are Chinese. One of them, incredibly, is the young face of Miss Mackay, late of the Anglo-Chinese School.
Carl keeps an eye out for her. Once he observed lizards and beetles, but these days he observes Miss Mackay. He waits until the guards go for their obligatory Go game and pounces.
Carl leans through the open window, through which drifts the idle sun and idler dust moats. 'What,' he demands, 'are you doing?'
Miss Mackay snaps backwards like an elastic band flung upon the universe by one of Una's more unruly pupils. George Cazalet springs to mind.
'What are you?' she hisses.
'I asked first,' says Carl.
Miss Mackay crosses her arms. 'Trying to reclaim the country, aren't I?'
Almost Carl asks after his sister, but can't bear it. If Miss Mackay says…Besides, the Japanese promised Carl Una would be safe. That his family all would be. Also, there isn't time.
'Let me help,' he says. 'I think I know things.'
That's how it starts. Carl is scrupulously careful. He treads, to misquote a pet love of Una's, as though he treads on the dreams of so many. Perhaps he does, because by the time the war ends, the clamour for Singaporean liberty is a roiling maelstrom of a thing. It hisses and spits like an over-boiling kettle or an enraged cat, and Carl cannot let the cause go. The enraged cat has it's claws in him, the kettle spurts boiling water onto his exposed arms and marks him. This is his cause, now, too.
Now the British come pouring back and rescuing interned women, and Carl can't clutch them by the elbow and demand knowledge of his sister because they would have him in a heartbeat. First for collaboration with the Japanese, never mind the reason why. And then for stirring up riots and bandits, never mind the rhyme or reason of that, either.
So, Carl circles Trinity House. The graffiti guts him like a fish. British Out. They promised, but here the place is, empty and branded. Empty. A thousand, horrifying thoughts spring to mind. Carl tears through his home unseeing, overturning crockery, riffling through bookshelves. He splits his knuckles and slices his fingers on the ruin of Una's kitchen. Obliquely, he realizes that the Japanese couldn't have bombed the house. They never bombed houses. The thought that it was a British shell, after all his faith – Una's faith – in the bloody Brits makes him spit white-hot and furious. It rattles poker-hot against his soul as he damns them to eternities of hellfire. Carl did not know before that he went in for this kind of Calvinism but that was before his home was guddled and his family gone. God knows what's happened to them.
Rationality claws for a foothold. Gets one. There's no Puck. The Japanese always said Puck haunted the place, not that they knew Puck's name. Maybe…But surely, thinks Carl, Una would leave a note. Una is the sort of person who leaves notes. He scours the mantel, the ruined kitchen. He sticks his arm into the guts of her piano and scrabbles like a scarab. Nothing.
He sees the old attic door lies imperfectly against the ceiling. Carl pulls at the handle and stumble-steps his way up the ladder. Afterwards, he wishes he left well enough alone. The place should be mired in dust, but it's not. There's tracery on the floor as if…Did they live up here? Hide up here? Carl scrabbles in the dust and finds a scrap of purple calico from one of Li's dresses and the stud of a silver earring in the shape of an empty cross. Not Li's, then. Carl presses Una's earring into his hand, belatedly registering that it has no back and that the tip is thorn-sharp. He scrambles back down the ladder and tries extremely hard not to be sick. Succeeds.
At the door to Una's room Carl baulks. Una Meredith never wore scent, but the damn room smells of her anyway. Of the flour she baked with, the lemon-fragrant ointment she rubbed her hands in, the remnants of what little paint she did wear, of cat and monkey and the chalk she wrote with. Carl riffles, ghost-restless and uneasy, through her jewellery box, which, bizarrely, is not looted. Apparently the Japanese did keep that promise. It smells more of her than anything else and the smell twists, tensile and arrow-rigid in Carl's throat. For a minute he is immobile, choking on memory as much as the smell of his sister.
Up comes their mother's locket. Never a good sign. Una never went without it. He splits it open with a bloodied finger and his family stare up at him. Baby Iris. Carl's photo-double with an arm around a beautiful Li. He snaps the locket shut, closes his eyes and reaches again. An old hair piece from their evenings out. A brooch of forget-me-nots from someone with more sense than Walter Blythe. A white enamel poppy Carl gave Una one Remembrance Day years ago. An old, faded letter that begins, We're going over-the-top tomorrow, Rilla-my-Rilla…Carl doesn't look further at it. He drops it like a hot coal. The fact that Carl doesn't think Una has touched the thing in years is besides the point.
Gratefully, he seizes on a strand of pearls, an amber cross – that from the giver of the forget-me-nots, Carl recalls. The name still eludes Carl, but he understood Una, this nameless ghost, Carl remembers that. Una's confirmation cross, slighter and thinner. Empty, equal arms at ninety degrees to the stalk of the cross for the Resurrection. A tie pin of their father's with Christ on the Cross, arms upraised. A position Una singularly hated because of a theological nuance Carl doesn't have time to try and remember. Why has she got that? Never mind. No time. A bracelet with pasque flowers, part of a set. The necklace that matches bears a thick cross in goldleaf, also with pasque flowers on antiquing. Una wears – wore? – it at Easter Sunday services. Rings. Una had these? A slip of a silver thing with an inscription inside that Carl doesn't read. Not for his eye, obviously. Another, with an iris circled around the top, little blue stones of no import set into it. From Li? Percival Curtis of the ACS? Some market purchase long ago? A jade heart like the one he gave Iris and a necklace-and-earring set the twin to Li's with Iris's birth stone in it.
The back of a brooch stabs at Carl's palm and briefly, he retracts it, bleeding. He wrings his hand until the worst has stopped and goes back to work.
A string of amber beads. A gold bracelet with improbable clasp. Another hairpiece. A costume bracelet.
Nowhere in here is there a note. Carl sits back on his heels feeling faintly ill, as if he has blasphemed in church or swallowed Communion Wine without the guarantee of Election. Gingerly he shuts the box, checking to make sure it's as he left it. If Una ever came back…
He sits there on the floor, with the ravaged jewellery box before him and swears on the grave of his mother, of Cecilia Meredith, that he will find his family or else visit vengeance upon the people that took them from him. It's a dizzying vow to make. Carl rocks off of his heels and onto his backside with an audible thunk. Half-mad, half-dazed he realizes the other thing wrong with the jewellery box.
Una's fish are missing. The three Trinitarian fish circling their sapphire. Carl recalls Una wore it often before…Before. He gave it to her December of 1941, the twin to Li's red one, and Una never took it off that Carl noticed. She wore it like a second heart. Like her battered white silk poppy. Did she die wearing it? Sell it? Gift it to Iris? Oh God, please not that. He cannot bear the thought she bargained for Iris's safety. When you save someone's life you owe them a debt. If Una saved Iris then she owes Iris that debt and cannot – wouldn't – die without honouring it.
He riffles in a cursory way through the night table but only finds Una's confirmation bible. No good. Her lap desk has nothing but her crane-stamped blue writing paper. Why in the name of God didn't you use it? Demands Carl of a silent house. But perhaps there was no time.
He combs through his room and Li's. Her jewellery box, though surely Una wouldn't look in there. But at least that feels less sacrosanct. Li was always handing Carl trinkets to put away for her.
Are they dead? Fled? They can't be fled because Una would leave a note. They can't be dead because Carl refuses to believe it.
He circles Trinity House for months, for years, in-between running Resistance errands. The anti-British graffiti goes away and gets replaced by Chinese. Then he sees the women in the house, women not Una or Li, and realizes groggily, unbelievingly, that they must be dead. Una would never let Trinity House be taken over. She ran the place like a ship and Puck loved her for it. But as Carl listens to someone not Una play Bach rather than Gershwin or Tatum on the piano, he accepts the grim reality. There was a war. Thousands upon thousands died. Many were civilians. Perhaps Una braved one lion too many trying to save Li and Iris and in the end that Japanese promise never mattered.
Maybe Carl put too much trust in the promise of the people who evicted him in the first place.
But first. Before giving up. He tries the ACS. Miss Mackay tells him it's a shambles and that – not that Carl asked – to the best of her knowledge the Japanese interned Una Meredith along with all the other British women in the city. Inanely, Carl says Una was – is! – Canadian. As if the Japanese cared.
Carl tries the Anglo-Chinese School anyway. He goes the long way, to avoid the grave of his house on Evelyn Road. The school is a shambles. Una is not there. No one he remembers from Una's teaching days seems to be. It seems the Japanese commandeered the Barker Road school for one of their headquarters and now it, too, is a spectre. Miss Mackay is nonplussed, to say the least.
Desperate and half-drunk on the last gasp of hope, Carl tries the Monica Radcliffe Centre. Some people have luck there, he knows. But the woman, nice, no-nonsense Australian type with an affable ginger doctor at her elbow, doesn't know Una. There's a moment, where Carl dares hope, and the hope flutters butterfly-translucent, gossamer-delicate in his ribcage. Because Una's eyes were a rare thing. Singular. His is, too, he's told, but Carl can account for his existence. And yes, Australian Kate says the eyes sound familiar. The flare of hope is wild and dangerous in Carl's chest as a flyaway spark around muslin. Then he hears the words married…child…and it gutters out as swiftly as it sprung to life. Someone else, then, with striking eyes. She's apologetic and sympathetic and Carl can't bear it.
He wrote home ages ago, of course he did, to the New Manse, but nothing ever came back except his letters. No Longer Lives Here. Return Sender. From this Carl surmises that his father is dead, and Rosemary too. Jerry and family might be anywhere, Wandering Merediths that they are. So that's no good. And Faith…Without Una, Carl can't place Faith's address and he doesn't dare brave the house full of strange women again.
As for Bruce…Carl has no idea how his baby brother passed the war. If he served at home or abroad. If he, too, is dead. After years of fruitless investigations and wrangles with an ineffectual, underpowered consulate, Carl can't bear to find out. So he does not write to Dr. Bruce Meredith, who he thinks once lived at the Old West House, because that way the letters will not come back Return to Sender. No Longer Lives Here. Carl chooses to believe Bruce is alive, and in choosing to believe, does not write. The irony is not lost on him.
So, he tries half-crazed to find Li and Iris, but they were two Chinese women against an army that hated them. If Una didn't survive, they can't have, either.
Then Miss Mackay finds him. She's been cornered by Frenny Razdan, who even now wants to resurrect the Anglo-Chinese School, and will she help. And will she start by telling Carl Meredith, who Frenny suspects of being in the resistance, to get in touch with her.
Carl does, and in short order finds himself lambasted by a wizened, Indian woman with her hair in a severe grey bun, who wants him to know in no uncertain terms that his sister is Not Dead, Never Was Dead, and Frenny Razdan has spent the best part of the war telling everyone who would listen so, up to and including the incredulous Percival Curtis of the old days, also Not Dead.
Then, Frenny Razdan relents. She pours Carl impossibly strong Assam tea, laces it with more brandy than is sane, and hands him a letter in – oh dear God – Una Meredith's impeccable copperplate. It's addressed to someone named Bernice Allerstone, Trinity House, Evelyn Road, Singapore. And Bernice – whoever she is – says Carl needs to read it.
And this is why Carl came to be standing on that dock, that morning, watching in wonderment for the family he thought dead to return to Singapore.
Guest - Martin was there, promise. He's the waving gnome on the veranda. I do have a tendency to be unwittingly oblique, so thank you for asking, and so glad you stuck with the story.