Work Text:
Summer, 1935
Li Meredith stood on the dock of Keppel Harbour, Iris in her arms, and watched the incoming boats. Carl was there, and Una, steady and cool in the midst of so many bustling, scuttling people. Here someone bowed with crates of incoming supplies, there workers scrambled to grab the painter of an approaching banana boat, all of them running in crosswise directions. Nearby a gaggle of children were making a game out of skipping over cracks, and someone else was shouting orders to the crate haulers. Li watched all of this, but with half an eye only, because the bulk of her attention was on the boats as she scanned them for people that might be the Rev and Mrs Meredith.
Una spotted them first, Una with her eyes honed by supervising unruly schoolchildren and her focus not half-preoccupied with a squirming toddler. So it was Una that cupped her hands and called out, 'Father! Here!' to get his attention.
For emphasis she took off her broad straw-brimmed hat and waved it in his direction. This delighted Iris, who squealed and made a grab for its blue ribbon and nested flowers, but it obviously surprised the Rev Meredith. Li took half a minute as she disengaged Iris from her Aunt's hat to decide that Una Meredith, Minister's Daughter, did not, apparently, speak above the average decibel; Neither did she wave hats back in Canada. It was strange to think about.
She didn't get long to think about it, because all too soon, the Rev Meredith and his wife, he murmuring that there must be more people crammed onto the dock than Glen St Mary had ever boasted. Carl raised his arm high over the hubbub, and plucking a parasol from Una's disengaged hand waved it like a flag. It was difficult not to laugh, but Li tried not to anyway, because while these people were Carl and Una's family they were also strangers to her, and there was no knowing what they might think. Iris took no such trouble. She could afford to do this because she was still a baby, and laughter suited her.
Then the Rev John Meredith moved to embrace his children, and Li saw the face of his wife was creased in laughter over the parasol, so she allowed herself to smile – just a little thing, like a stray soap bubble, but it felt hopeful. The embrace was necessarily truncated by the bustling, jostling people on the dock. They all smelled of sea and travel, and something more exotic that Li marked as away. The senior Merediths had it too – funny to think there were Merediths that were not hers.
They looked uncertain, these unknown Merediths on the dock at Keppel Harbour. They looked the way Li felt and it was the strangest thing in the world, she thought, to see these wise, wizened people look butterfly-fragile on the edge of the Keppel Harbour dock. Li thought she must find something to say, but language had deserted her. She could process only Iris's wriggling uncertainty about her grandparents. Una solved it. This was, mercifully, what Una did on instinct. It was high on the list of reasons Li loved her.
'Come on,' said Una, linking her arm through Mrs Meredith's. 'We can talk properly up at the house.'
It was a good idea, and Li and her family set off briskly, ducking and weaving with a practised ease, chatting as they went, shepherding the newcomers with them. Occasionally they stopped to accommodate their guests. The familiarity settled Iris and conversation began to come back to Li, little titbits about the harbour that she had long since presumed everyone knew. But the Rev Merediths were not everyone.
'It used to be called Dragon's Teeth Gate,' she said of the harbour as they steered around a rickshaw. 'The entrance, you know, it was very narrow. There was one very tricky rock – they called that Lot's Wife.' She thought, as she delicately navigated around a slew of rampant guavas that had escaped the confines of their crate and ducked past the irate owner, that they would appreciate the detail about Lot's Wife. After all, wasn't Lot a character in Una's bible? Li knew she was; She forgot now how often Una had taught the story as a cautionary tale. On they went, Li in the lead, and the Rev Meredith followed, fascinated.
Past another rickshaw and she said, 'They've rebuilt the harbour since to be easier for boats. Now they want to call it New Harbour.'
'Though of course,' said Carl, bobbing up like a buoy and tucking Li's unencumbered hand in his, swinging it lovingly, 'it would be about as new as New College, Oxford.' He grinned, and his father grinned back, which was incongruous, because Li knew him to be a minister and the only minister she knew remotely well was Una's Rev Peach up at the school, and she never thought of him smiling. The Rev Meredith didn't smile either; He grinned broadly,even boyishly, and it was uncanny how much the Rev Meredith looked like Carl in that moment, with a smile lighting up his face like a Roman candle. Li almost missed the question he asked next about the harbour, because she was so struck by how that was Carl, too. Carl bent over his books and his research, or else coming up the walk absent-mindedly accompanied by the animal of the hour. Or else at dinner, distractedly, Do you think Papatee would like a best friend? And Una, with a look Li suspected had brought less tractable and more immediately present people to rule before now, He's got one. Her name's Nenni. Don't you dare try and try to undermine the delicate hierarchy with another buffalo, Carl.
Li laughed in spite of herself, and was grateful when Una relinquished her stepmother's arm to reach around the Rev Meredith and over Li for baby Iris.
'Let Auntie take her for a bit,' she said. 'Your arms must be wearing out.'
Li smiled gratitude. Iris migrated without complaint, tucking chubby hands snugly against the collar of Una's dress. Mrs Meredith – Rosemary she said to call her – cooed over her, and Iris's pale, wide-eyed face screwed itself up into nervous pleats and disappeared against Una's shoulder. They wove and wended their way now down one street and then another, and all full of shouting locals. Carl moved Li fractionally closer to him, were it possible, his arm migrating from its respectable place at her elbow to snug and secure around her waist. She opened her mouth to tell him off, because his family were there and might not be so amenable as Una. Could one carry on like that in front of a presbyterian minister? Even a married one? Li said none of this because Puck forestalled her. He had a fistful of nuts in each clawed hands and was all but tumbling over his feet as he shrieked and squealed and jabbered in its efforts to get to Carl, whereat he flung his arms, nuts and all, around Carl's knees and buried his face in Carl's unsuspecting trouser leg.
'Really, Puck,' said Una, before anyone, even Li had time to comment.
Across from her, Li thanked assorted deities for Una Meredith and Puck released Carl. He did not look pleased about the interlopers. Of course, he didn't look threatened either, but his mouth had an anxious cast to it. Li felt unexpected sympathy for him. Carl extended his other hand and tucked one of Puck's into it, peanuts and all.
'Missed us, did you?' he said.
'We weren't even gone all morning,' said Una.
Li thought, but could not be certain, that she rolled her eyes. Somewhere overhead a knot of birds chorused a seconding of her opinion. And then they were at Trinity House, the mynas singing that hymn of Una's that she had unwittingly taught them, the visiting Merediths stopped short at the sound of it.
'Is that…' began Rev Meredith, but never finished because then he saw the house.
Somehow Li hadn't thought that would stun him. Someone, often Di but not only her, was always sending snaps of Ingleside – Di's children on the veranda swing, or chasing the dog – was it called Dulce? – round the garden. Or else of the elder Blythes, her looking uncannily girlish as she hugged knees to chest on the veranda steps, him sitting laconically on the rail, feet trailing through calceolarias. ('Susan will have fits,' had been Una's emphatic verdict on seeing this last.) Or perhaps a tableau round a grandiose fire with Christmas 19 – , or Easter with Kingsport contingent, 19 – written in fine cursive script across the back. The size and sprawl of it made Li ache – the sheer number of people, the look of them, with laughter cracking their faces in two and crinkling eyes, the tumbling, romping whirlwind of the children, because Iris would never know it, and probably neither would she, and Carl had given it up for them, or because of them. And they had lovely memories, them four there at Trinity house with the animals, but to be part of that…
'I didn't think,' said Rev Meredith wondrously, recalling Li to the present, 'it would be like this. It's bigger than I expected.'
Li thought of the photographs with the acrobatic children, the calceolarias and the elegant veranda and was dumbstruck. That Trinity house with its wrap-around porch and two storeys could compete with that was incredible. Unthinkable.
Here a neighbour leaned over the rail and called a hello to Una, and she drifted gently away, with a kiss for parental cheeks, Iris in her arms, and stood chatting there a moment with leathery Stella Bowen, while her father stood stock still on the veranda and took in the wicker furniture, the low-slung bamboo coffee table, the boughs of the trees drifting in over the railing and sending witching shadows across the wood. Li was scrabbling for an explanation for the house, for a way of saying it had nothing on the fabled Ingleside, when Carl saved her.
'Raffles salary, you know,' he said, and smiled at his father disarmingly. It hardly mattered in any case as both men were duly distracted by a jewel-green lizard sunning himself lazily on the nearest rail. Carl let go Puck and crouched down and greet him.
'Hullo Harry,' he said, and gingerly stroked its bright green back. There was a sound like a puff of smoke and more shadow warped and wrapped across the deck.
'Nenni,' said a returning Una, 'leave that lizard alone. Carl's named it. That means we've probably been feeding it. Can't you…I don't know…harangue a newt or something?'
'Not a newt,' said Li. 'If she catches it we will spend forever looking to see where it has dropped its tail. It's happened before.'
Una laughed. Li reached for Iris and said, 'They are getting immersed very quickly in Trinity House life, your family.'
'Clearly,' said Una. 'Shall you make tea, or I?'
Li said she would do it, because Iris was beginning to fret in the presence of strangers, and anyway, Li was of the opinion Una would want to visit with her family. So Una led call-her-Rosemary to the wicker sofa, and Li went to make the tea.
When Li re-emerged Carl had joined – or perhaps remembered – them, the lizard lugubriously lounging on the back of his hand. Li set the tea tray down carefully, Iris tottering purposefully after her. She had born out a tray of Cecilia Meredith's old china, and it was hard to say which of her children was the more surprised.
'Oh!' said Una, startling. Carl just goggled
Li said, 'It is your family's china, and your family are here. We must use it.'
'You're family too, now,' said Una.
'Have been for ages,' said Carl and kissed Li's fingertips as they became unencumbered of the tray.
The Merediths hastened to agree; she was Carl's wife, of course she was family. The hugs that had been impossible at the dock were suddenly forthcoming; warm hands squeezed shoulders and kisses were traded. Li's eyes went wide with involuntary tears and Iris, sensing this, became more tremulous than ever. Li thought of the photographs in the letters, the swirl of children in motion the jumble of animals. The thought of being part of it after all, even in this small way, was dizzying.
'Of course you're family,' said Call-her-Rosemary. She pressed Li's shoulder, her hand at once inquiring and grounding. It said both May I and You are ours if you will have us at once.
Una had got Iris on her lap and was murmuring now, 'There, Firecracker. We like these people. They love you. Ever so much, you know.'
'To the moon and back,' said Rosemary, and helping herself to an Empire Biscuit off the plater Li had arranged, held it out to Iris. Puck crept closer, now food was in the offing. He hovered, half-dancing in anticipation behind Iris. Carl's father – John he had said to call him – made a quick study of the tray, decided guava probably couldn't hurt the monkey, and proffered him a slice.
'He's as bad as Carl,' said Li to Una, 'your father.' She said it quite as though neither he nor Carl was there, but she said it with a smile in her voice, and her eyes crinkled like paper lanterns.
'Sorry,' said Una. 'I should have warned you.' She brushed crumbs and icing from Iris's chin. Rosemary got hold of the Gladstone Blue Ribbon and began to pour out. Belatedly she turned to Una and said, 'You don't mind, dear?'
'Not at all,' said Una. 'It's just like the old days.'
The Rev Peach came to call early in their stay; He came full of plans for expanding the Anglo-Chinese School's outreach, and talked none of it because the Rev John Meredith kept wandering down interesting conversational side-roads. It was Carl to the letter when researching for his students. It was Iris too, as she tacked from one non-sequiter to another, stories about Papatee bleeding into excursions she and Auntie had taken seguing wildly into her need for something to eat.
'I need something for my hand,' she would say, and inside of half an hour her grandparents were not only wise to this code but endorsing it. Of course, Li thought as Una and Rosemary wrangled politely for the teapot, the rambling made sense in little Iris. Whenever Carl, or as now, John Meredith did it, Li wondered politely how they ever stuck to one topic for more than five minutes while talking before an audience.
But the Rev Peach let him digress further and further from the point, so that afterwards Rosemary said to Una, 'He's quite nice,' and Li smiled because she'd been saying it forever.
'Rosemary,' Una said with a gesture, 'meet Li. Li, Miss Emma Woodhouse. You can now plot together while I do the washing up.'
It didn't happen quite like that because Li and Rosemary stood almost as a unit, simultaneously protesting, then followed Una to the kitchen. There wasn't room at the sink for all of them, so Rosemary leaned with a swan's grace against the counter, arms crossed, and said, 'Should I infer you know Emma?'
'Una read it to me,' said Li, 'when I was pregnant with Iris.'
Here Una's hens rushed squawking from their cupboard, and Li had to laugh because even when startled Rosemary Meredith was graceful. Li supposed Una got that from her.
'Li liked Northanger best,' said Una.
Li smiled. 'I too,' she said, 'make an unlikely heroine. Like Catherine.'
'You're exactly as God intended,' said Una.
Another day they took the Merediths to the city to show them Paper Alley, Change Alley, and Middle Alley where the boats had sailed back in the flood of '26. They poured over slivers of fine delicate paper, and recognised among the stock the selection so particular to Una in her letters home.
Rosemary fingered it but ultimately left it; 'I could never,' she said with a shake of her head, 'bring myself to write on it.'
Li laughed, and Una joined in. They bought her some anyway, as a remember-when. Rosemary called it beyond extravagant and that only made them laugh more. Li said she would teach her to fold it into flowers, so it would at least look elegant while it sat idle on her desk.
Later, they picked their way towards the market, which was its usual chaotic self. A herd of piglets overturned a silk merchant's goods; caged chickens squawked their righteous indignation, bananas and guavas were sold all but on top of each other, and ring-tailed doves made no bones about stealing from both. They ate slices of tart papaya fresh from the tree practically, and followed them with curried noodles – this with more trepidation, but Iris's little fingers leaned gamely over to steal what wasn't being eaten, and she began to warm to these strange, familial interlopers. There were monkeys – monkeys plural! – everywhere, and when Li set Iris on the ground she chased them as John said his children had used to do pigeons. Li watched as for a terrible moment his heart stopped in case they retaliated and Iris was somehow injured. But when Iris slipped it was on nothing more innocuous than a stray orchid petal, and there were no tears. She laughed to rival Puck and ran incorrigibly through the wild mix of orchids, lilies, and the irises that were her namesake. Carl stopped and bought a bunch, and handed them to Li with a bow and a flourish.
'You still do it wrong,' said Li, with a laugh. 'Una is better. Like our willows. You insist on being British about it. Stiff.'
Carl grinned an eye-wateringly bright grin, and John was heard to inquire of no one discernibly present as to whether his youngest children had always been so impish, so heartbreakingly like their mother. He had thought once, that that was Faith's particular inheritance. But here among the oregano, cinnamon, orchids and guavas, the papayas and errant monkeys he began to change his mind.
'You like me as I am,' said Carl, and Li swatted him with the end of the fan she carried. Then she called Iris back, and Una hefted her up into her arms as they made their way down Stampford St to peer through the windows of the MPH bookshop.
'Will you go in?' asked Una, but John Meredith shook his head. He had all the books he could want at home, and had only ever read half of them all the way through by his reckoning. If that. No, he said, it was enough to walk with his children, all of them. He nodded toward Li and she felt a swell of ebullient feeling taut as elastic and light as air in the knowledge she was one of them now, more than an exotic photograph or strange face but someone they would reminisce about as they sat on that grand veranda at the place called Ingleside as the children rocketed around and down the lawn and the animals ran riot.
They went on to Raffles University, and this was Carl's world; Now he was the one stopping and chatting, while Li hung back with Iris. Rosemary fell into step with her and offered to take the baby, and Iris went reluctantly at first, but soon settled against Rosemary's chest and babbled to herself. They were striking together, sleek, dark-haired Iris with her wide, staring eyes, and Rosemary like a faded china shepherdess, or dying star. You could see, Li thought, looking at her, how she must once have been like one of those paintings of the woman Una said had mothered her God, haloed and golden and soft. It was perhaps the less striking now for time passing, but Li thought the likeness was still there, faint but traceable.
They came back by way of a tea room on Middle Alley that Carl was forever teasing Li and Una was their home from home; they had hardly stepped through the door when the proprietor gestured them towards a suitable table.
'The usual thing?' he said. Li looked to Una, and Una looked back at them, hesitant for the first time this trip. The usual thing was a fine, floral oolong. It was delicate and sweet in all the right places, but it wouldn't do now. Una knew it and Li knew it. Almost imperceptibly Li caught his eye and shook her head – only slightly, like the flutter of a butterfly wing or the heartbeat of a hummingbird.
'Our family,' Li said – and how irrepressibly proud and glad and giddy that our made her ! – 'they're Canadian, and they're visiting.'
Her eyes darted to Una to see if this was all right, to confirm she would not mind, but Una only smiled.
'Of course,' the proprietor said. 'I have just the thing.'
He bustled off and Li watched half-distracted as he rustled up a tea service more British than the Queen, all milk jugs and sugar-lumps and darkly brown pekoe. Another time she would laugh – perhaps later this visit even. But now Iris was bartering with her grandfather for sweets and Rosemary Meredith was already plotting supremacy of the teapot, and they were hers. The embarrassingly English china was bustled towards them with a bow and a show of gratitude and Li wondered, as John Meredith slipped his granddaughter a sweet, how she had ever been nervous. Carl was home, and Una was home, and now these people, former strangers from a strange place, were home too. How lucky we are, she thought as she nursed her tea with its filigreed handle. How immeasurably, incalculably lucky.