by Sarah Moss
‘I thought the point about throwing people to the lions was that other people stayed to watch. Anyway, James won’t devour him. But he certainly won’t trust him until they have talked it through.’
‘Man to man,’ says Ally. She doesn’t want to do cross-stitch, but she does, sometimes, see the point of having something to do with your hands.
‘Man to man.’ The needle flashes across Aunt Mary’s lap. ‘I like him. He was polite to Fanny.’
There was trouble, a few weeks ago, when one of Uncle James’s clients took too much wine and followed Fanny onto the back stairs where he was impolite.
‘I had the impression he is unaccustomed to servants.’
Mr. Cavendish’s father, he told them in response to Uncle James’s not especially subtle enquiries, died when Mr. Cavendish was a child. His mother has not remarried, and assists a friend with a dress shop in Harrogate. It seems a long time since she last heard her own northern vowels on another person’s tongue.
Aunt Mary holds her cross-stitch away to see the effect of the new colour. She ought to have spectacles. You can’t judge colour by lamplight anyway. ‘I don’t know. I dare say his mother cannot keep much of a house but he handled the silver with perfect aplomb.’
‘Oh, Aunt Mary.’
She looks up, innocent. ‘What?’
‘I wondered why the fish-forks and grape-scissors. You were testing him.’
‘I? No such thing. Anyway, if I were, he would have passed. But my dear, whatever one’s children may choose or find themselves obliged to do in later life, you must see that training them for the best company opens the way for any ambition they may hold. Even Grandmamma taught us to behave before she sent us into the slums with our Bibles and her good intentions. And George is still very young; naturally I don’t wish to send him into rough company. Especially not when it’s plain that he worships the man. Do you know, in some ways it was much less worrying when they were small and one’s greatest anxieties concerned chicken-pox and whether they would eat their meat?’
Ally crosses her feet. Her new shoes hurt. ‘Chicken pox can be a very real anxiety. They are both strong, fine boys, Aunt Mary.’
‘I know, my dear. I am unfairly blessed. Your poor Mamma.’
The dining room door opens, but only one set of footsteps crosses the hall. George stands in the doorway. He seems, Ally thinks, to stand in doorways rather a lot at the moment.
‘Did they send you away?’ asks Aunt Mary. What is it in Aunt Mary’s life that has given her such placidity? Not anything that Mamma shared.
‘Papa said one glass of port was more than enough and run along now. Don’t you like Mr. Cavendish, Mamma? The story about St. Antony Head?’
‘He is not a natural storyteller.’ Aunt Mary peels a scarlet thread from her basket, snips it with her silver snake-scissors, wets the end in her mouth and re-threads the needle. George’s face falls. ‘And so one believes what he says. My dear, he seems perfectly pleasant and personable. Perhaps a little too inclined to speak of his calling but that is most excusable in one of his age.’
George leans on the doorframe. ‘You see why I want to work with him?’
The red begins to make its trail across the canvas. ‘Dear boy. Yes, I see why you want to go off to wild places and build towers on the waves. And I see why Mr. Cavendish’s enthusiasm is contagious. I also see why your Papa will say that this new vocation must stand the test of a little time before we change our plans for you.’
‘But, Mamma—’
‘I know. You want it now. But you are barely sixteen and it is our role, darling, to prevent you from making hasty decisions now that curtail your future in ways you will regret when it is too late.’
George looks at Ally. ‘You chose medicine, didn’t you, when you were younger than I am.’
The fire pops, sending a cinder onto the hearth. Yes, she did. Or had it chosen for her. Aunt Mary has stopped stitching.
‘I chose to study more seriously than other girls. And I chose to attend extension lectures as well as my school lessons. It is not as if I had the opportunities open to you, George. We were not even sure it would be possible for a woman to graduate when I was sixteen.’ She looks at Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary who has not only housed and fed but also cosseted her these five years, whom she will not betray now. ‘And remember also all the men and boys for whom university is only a painful longing. You are prosperous and male, George. The world is yours. Don’t waste your choices by acting like someone who doesn’t have them.’
Aunt Mary nods, sends Ally a quick smile, and bends to her work. What she has said is not untrue, and after all if George really has found his vocation nothing his cousin has to say will turn him from it, and—at least as long as he refrains from marrying—nothing likely to happen in the next few years will prevent him returning to engineering after Cambridge. Papa and Aubrey developed their practice as artists while taking degrees. The dining room door opens again and the two men come through, laughing together.
HIS TEA-CUP
Mr. Cavendish calls again, once while Ally is out, when, George says, he and Uncle James had a long conversation about Mr. Turner’s shipwreck paintings, and then one day when Ally returns from the hospital at tea-time, having been there since eight o’clock the previous evening. She walks home through a slow winter sunset, the bare branches of the plane trees black against a glowing sky. She and Dr. Stratton lost the patient, a maternity case who haemorrhaged after a long breech labour. The baby lives, for the moment, as, it turns out, do three of its siblings, now in all probability cases for the Children’s Home. She drops her shoulders, allows her arms to swing a little as she walks, and draws deep breaths of the cold. Good doctors can set aside both triumph and defeat. It took her half an hour to coax a cry from the baby and she is far from sure that her work was in its best interest.
She hears his voice in the drawing room as she closes the front door, and almost decides to slip straight to the kitchen and coax tea and toast from the new cook, who shows signs of being impressed by her work where the others have tended to see a poor relation. She can’t hear the words, but Mr. Cavendish is speaking fast, energetically, the way Papa and Aubrey used to talk about painting and design. The way people talk about work when it’s going well. She finds herself walking, not creeping, up the stairs.
He’s sitting on the Ottoman in the bay window, his red hair extravagantly back-lit by the pink sky. Horizontal sunbeams pick out each droplet in the steam twisting from his tea-cup.
He stands up, holds out his hand. ‘Miss Moberley! Mrs. Dunne told me you were at the hospital.’
Ally hopes he doesn’t have damp palms. She dislikes shaking hands. ‘I was at the hospital.’ He doesn’t. ‘I stayed on to see through a maternity case.’
‘A happy ending?’
‘No.’ She sits down. By this time of day, she usually prefers to keep going until after dinner following a night’s work, but she’s too tired now. She must sleep very soon. Aunt Mary pours a cup of tea for her. ‘People say working women give birth easily, that it’s the rich who make a fuss, but it’s not true. Poor diet and overwork make nothing easier.’
‘Ally,’ murmurs Aunt Mary.
Ally frowns. Is there blood on her skirt, is her collar awry?
‘Oh. Forgive me, Mr. Cavendish. I spend too much time at the hospital and forget what subjects are considered proper for polite conversation. It is a very pretty sunset, is it not?’
He sits forward. ‘Indeed, Miss Moberley, it would be better for all of us were there more overlap between what is correct and what is important. Do you find that maternity cases do better in the hospital than at home?’
She sips her tea, comforting and too hot, glances at Aunt Mary.
‘Go ahead, my dear. Consider me your antediluvian aunt.’
‘The charity cases do, of course. At the very least we offer r
est and cleanliness. Otherwise, the mother and infant may share a bed with other children from almost the very moment of birth. And where it is necessary, we can make a case to the Foundling Hospital for infants who would in all probability face a brief and uncomfortable future.’
‘Really, Ally.’
She sits back. ‘I am sure Mr. Cavendish knows that babies are not found under gooseberry bushes, Aunt Mary.’
Amusement plays about his eyes. ‘I believe I do, yes. And that they do not always appear at correct moments, or indeed in correct arms. George tells me you have contributed also to rescue work, Miss Moberley?’
‘Ally, what have you told the boy?’
Ally tries to remember. ‘Very little, Aunt Mary. But he hears things at school and he is at an age to be curious. I told him to ask Uncle James. It is my mother’s work, Mr. Cavendish. I do not try to combine medicine with any other calling. And you? Surely your work leaves little time for charitable concerns?’
‘Little time for organised philanthropy. I try to be mindful of the needs around me, and mindful also that my mindfulness does not in itself help anyone and indeed denies me the excuse of ignorance for my inaction.’
They smile at each other.
‘Ally, have a sandwich,’ says Aunt Mary. ‘I am sure you did not eat lunch.’
TIDES ARE ALWAYS IN MOTION
It is, she has found, possible to mistake other men for him. He has a type, a genus, that makes it hard to be sure until she can see his face that the compact body, red hair, and bobbing stride are Tom. Half the men in London, this part of London, carry a briefcase and wear a black coat and hat. He is, as ever, exactly to time; crowds dissolve before the omnibuses Tom rides, shoe-laces untangle themselves, verbose suppliers remember important appointments. If a thing won’t work, he says—keys, the lid of Aunt Mary’s sewing box—there is a reason, and then it is his practice to find the reason and resolve the difficulty. In most cases, things do work for him, not only the tools and machines that realise his calling but the small intricacies of daily life. His clothes do not get lost at the laundry, his letters do not miss the post. Dear Miss Moberley, I hope to call on you this afternoon and thought that as the sun seems likely to shine you might enjoy a walk in the park. He takes the weather seriously. She moves back, behind the curtain, just as he glances up before stepping under the portico and onto the step. She pauses before the mirror as the doorbell rings, pushes strands of hair back into her chignon and tugs her waistband smooth, merely ritual adjustments that undo themselves as she walks through the room.
He offers his elbow as they cross the road, where the first open carriages of the season jostle among the hansom cabs and carts. She finds that she has taken his arm, and also that she feels no objection when he does not release her as they enter the park. The plane trees have come into full leaf since she last thought about them, a rich blue-green too dense to paint in water-colour, and ducklings hurry behind their mothers around the fountains in the square pond.
He tucks her hand against his coat. ‘This time last year, I was holding onto the rocks to stop myself blowing into the North Sea. I suppose there were tulips here then too.’
She tries to remember. April. The fever ward. ‘I cannot say. I am sure I did go outdoors by daylight but the experience has left no impression.’
He does not reply. Perhaps she sounded repressive. ‘You were building a lighthouse?’ she asks.
His hair is even brighter in the sun, a metallic, inorganic colour. Copper, she thinks, more than bronze. ‘Unbuilding, this time. A strange place. The sea is in retreat, and the land so low that the channels shift from one year to the next. There had been a tower there for three hundred years, perhaps as much of a mark for those travelling by land as by sea, for in those parts the fields are flatter than the water. But there was a navigable channel when Richard Penvenick was first commissioned to put in a new light twenty years ago, and two years after that there was a great storm. Even the greatest towers, you know, can be moved by the waves, but on this occasion it was not the building but the water that moved. On the morning after the storm, the channel was no more than a trickle through the sand, something a boy could cross without wetting his short trousers. We waited, of course, to see if the whim that moved the water would return it, but after maintaining a redundant light for eighteen years Mr. Penvennick sent me to remove the mechanism and lens.’
A child in a blue dress and white pinafore runs across their path, pursued by a smaller child in a sailor suit much impeded by a fit of giggles.
‘I have always thought of the coast as static. As it is on a map. But of course it is not.’
‘No. Quite apart from the movement of the land, the falls of the cliffs on the south coast and the shifting sands to the east, the tides are always in motion. I should say that the nation gains and loses some dozens of square miles of sand and rock with each revolution of the planet.’
Her steps check, as though dizzied by his extra-terrestrial vantage-point. She sees the Earth in its stately waltz through dark and light, each landmass expanding and contracting as though breathing.
‘But your lighthouses stand firm.’
He turns to smile, a slight pressure on her arm. ‘We hope so. It is my job, our jobs, to make sure that they do. But it is a constant battle against wind and sea, fought at least as much by mathematics and physics at Mr. Penvenick’s desk in Falmouth as by stone and mortar on the shore. We do not always win. Mr. Penvenick encourages us to believe that failure is as useful to our science as success, but that is an old man’s philosophy.’ He frowns, looses her arm. ‘I cannot say that I have learnt to love my mistakes.’
She wants to take off her gloves, feel his tweed sleeve under her bare hands. ‘The same is said of surgery. And that most of those who die on the operating table are saved from a slower and more painful end. But there are lives in our hands. As in yours.’
More lives, in some ways, in his, since ships carry many hundreds of souls. She sees again May’s hair rippling like weeds in the water. Her hair would have come unpinned, surely, in the waves.
His other hand pats hers. ‘We are too solemn for this bright day. Tell me, Miss Moberley, shall you take a holiday this summer? Celebrate your graduation? Or will you be returning to your family?’
The cold breath of the hall at home yawns around her. ‘I hope to find work, and will go where it takes me. It is still difficult for a woman, you know, in private practice, and few hospitals welcome us. There may be an opening here. I am not eager to return to my parents.’
She thinks of her best friend, her only friend, Annie, who wants to go on living with her cheerful family in their cheerful home. She chose long ago to love Annie too much to be envious; different people have different paths through life, that’s all. Ally feels, when she thinks of the summer, of the future opening before her, like a fledgling. After a certain age, most of them can land well enough. It is taking off again that is the problem. She pauses.
‘I will be returning to Cornwall,’ he says. ‘Mr. Penvenick has just won a new colonial contract. He did not communicate the details but he wants me to assist him with a new set of designs. I have hopes—well, he is sixty-five. And his son is a railway engineer who shows no interest in the lights.’
‘Oh.’ Something else that is changing. She should not have allowed herself to come to depend on his calls, which have bejewelled her winter’s work. He comes, probably, mostly for George’s sake.
‘But I do not leave for another month. So we must make the most of the springtime, must we not?’
He meets her gaze. She blushes, and then blushes again for the blushing of a spinster and a professional woman, a woman who made an open-eyed decision to have a career, to be unentangled, single in vision. He nods, and looks charitably at the river, at the fat stone colonnades on the bridge where two small boys sit precariously fishing.
THE SPLASH AND A CRY
Doctor!’ Nurse Johnson’s voice is high and sharp.
Dr. Stratton puts down her needle. ‘Please excuse us one moment. Miss Moberley?’
Ally hands the patient a pad of gauze. ‘Hold this firmly on your arm. We will be back very soon, but please ring this bell for a nurse if you are concerned or feel unwell.’
The woman, who has said nothing, not even explained what appears to be a knife-wound on her arm, nods, her gaze not quite focussed.
‘Good.’ Is it good? She hurries after Dr. Stratton.
There’s a policeman whose uniform is dripping onto the floor, muddy smears and footprints across the tiles, as if someone has dragged a bag of earth through the room. A crowd of people around the nurse’s table, someone sobbing, a child left to itself cruising determinedly along a row of chairs.
‘Dr. Stratton?’ she says. ‘Do you need assistance?’
Muttering, the crowd parts. There’s a bundle of wet cloth on the table, more water—sepia-tinged water—pooling around it, around Dr. Stratton’s neatly-shod feet. The bundle contains a white hand, a thrown-back face over which Dr. Stratton bends.
‘Roll her,’ says Dr. Stratton.
Hands reach from the crowd and push at the bundle, resolving it into human form. It contracts and spews more brown water onto the front row, coughs. The policeman sits down as if someone has cut his strings. Dr. Stratton waits, her fingers on the wrist. The patient gasps, retches again.
‘She will do now,’ says Dr. Stratton.
Under their gaze, life resumes.
It is Ally who is called when the patient awakes. The sky is paling, and from the doctor’s bedroom she can hear the first birdsong. The policeman did not see the young lady jump, only heard the splash and a cry, but the stones in her pockets tell a story that will be hard to belie. Ally follows the nurse down the corridor, where the gas jets flicker like ghosts in the brightening day. The patient nearest the door stirs, mutters as they pass. The nurse, standing at the end of the bed, seems disposed to stay, to harvest a story for the tea-table.