Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘If she’s in trouble, it’s not showing,’ she says. ‘And nobody’s hurt her that we could see.’

  ‘Thank you, Nurse, that will do.’

  The patient lies on her back, her head propped at an uncomfortable angle against a pillow. Her hair, which looked dark as Ally’s own when wet, has dried to a honey colour. She is slim, her collar-bones prominent as handles in the wide-necked gown, but the wrists are rounded and the hands pale, without obvious marks of labour. She looks young, but also like the sort of woman who will always look young. The patient gazes at the square of white sky above the bed opposite her own. Lifting it carefully, not to wake anyone else who might have a taste for grisly detail, Ally sets a chair beside the bed and sits down. She dismisses an urge to take the patient’s hand.

  ‘You are in the London Women’s Hospital,’ she says, as if making some observation about the weather. ‘You were pulled out of the Hanborough Ditch yesterday and brought here. You were not breathing. One of the doctors revived you. You have pains in your ribs and chest because she had to push the water out of your lungs. Your throat is probably sore because you vomited several times. You may have a headache or feel sick.’

  She stops. The patient has not moved, her eyes have not wavered.

  Ally tries again. ‘We don’t know your name,’ she says. ‘Would you like to tell me your name? I am Miss Moberley and I am finishing my medical training.’

  There is no response.

  ‘You will need to stay here for a little while. Sometimes people catch a fever from water like that, and it will take time for us to be sure that you are quite well. Would you like to send a message to anyone? Family, or friends? We can write if you have no-one in London.’

  The woman does not blink. Her brain, of course, may be affected by the drowning, or she may have been an idiot before she jumped into the water. Is it true, Ally wants to ask her, that drowning doesn’t hurt? Did you come up three times before you sank, despite the stones? The stones are at the police station: where did she find stones in central London? Bricks would be easy enough to come by. Ally can, she finds, imagine perfectly well what it would be like to prowl the newly-made streets where clay-red terraces spring up overnight, in search of bricks to hold herself down. The sun has risen and the rumble of the streets, of London, has begun. Soon, she will go home, have breakfast, allow herself a couple of hours’ sleep before she meets Tom. She wants to take him to the new Kensington Museum, which has just bought one of Papa’s stained glass windows, and then perhaps there will be time for a walk in the Park before he must give his lecture. She should attend one of his lectures, while there is still opportunity. It would be good for her to think about mathematics again.

  After all, she pats the woman’s arm, lying inert in a hospital sleeve on the blanket.

  ‘Very well. Try to rest. I will come back to see you again before I go home.’

  THE GLORIES OF THE MUSEUM

  He likes to see her on her way to or from work, likes the authority in her step, the neatness of her movements. He watches her approach along the courtyard, her skirts swinging with her brisk walk. She has not seen him yet. It is not that she is diffident or clumsy at home, but she is different, her posture perhaps less upright, her gaze more often averted. She is, like him, like many men but no other woman in his experience, someone most at home when at work. There. He steps towards her, offers his hand. Her hair is slipping from its knot, the colour of raw oak, and his fingers would like to push it back for her, tuck it behind her ear, under the tilted straw hat. No, she is not like a man, not at all like a man, only not like any other woman he has ever met.

  ‘Mr. Cavendish. I hope I have not kept you waiting?’

  No, he says, not at all, only his first appointment left him time to walk a little around the museum. The cast gallery, he says, hoping she will not expect him to hold informed opinions, most interesting. And the Dutch still lives, you can see the fruits of a great trading empire in those paintings. Would she perhaps like a cup of coffee? He has heard that the tea-room is one of the glories of the museum.

  She smiles at him. It is indeed, although she would not like her Papa to hear her say so; he would have liked that commission himself and therefore cannot entirely approve of Morris’s work, and yes, they serve excellent coffee.

  Somewhere behind her eyes he knows she is laughing at him, with his tradesman’s eye on the paintings and his preference for coffee over the admiration of stained glass. He does not mind.

  A RIVERINE ODOUR

  She returns with the glories of the museum still buoyant in her mind, and the solidity of Tom’s muscled arm under her gloved hand. She has dreamt of Tom, dark, tumbling dreams for which she has a perfectly adequate vocabulary. The freckles on his wrists probably extend across his back and shoulders, the firmness of his arms means a taut belly and open chest. She sees that chest, those shoulders, moving over her own and catches her breath right there in the corridor. You would think that knowing the human body as she does, knowing the layers of skin, fat, muscle and bone, the pathways of blood, mucus, urine and feces, would diminish enchantment. Apparently it does not, and considering the numbers of married doctors and, come to that, nurses, this should be less surprising than she finds it. Of all the forms of learning, this should have protected her. And has not. She shakes her head, as if lust could be swatted like a fly.

  The east-facing ward darkens early. The gas has not been lit, although dusk softens the lines of the metal beds and high walls. She passes her days, she thinks for the first time, in geometric spaces, her learning cradled by the perpendicular. Remembers again Tom’s vertiginous perspective. May’s mind must have been changed by the shape of her island, the sheerness of cliffs and the sweeps of hills. There are, surely, hills in that place?

  The patient appears not to have moved. Catatonia, the first time she has seen it. She approaches the nurse first; the patient wet her bed but has not soiled herself. She has not responded to any approach. She has not taken food or drink, even when Nurse Selwyn tried spoon-feeding. Dr. Stratton instructed them not to hold her nose, a technique occasionally used—not by Ally—to medicate children and the delirious. There has been some coughing, to which the patient appeared oblivious. The nurse turns to light the lamps as Ally walks back down the ward. The earth turns, the lights come on. Soon it will be bedtime.

  She draws the chair forward again, seats herself. Of course the patient has been washed, but she wonders if there is a riverine odour, a ghost of water-weed and bubbles. Good night, sweet ladies. The patient’s pulse is strong and regular, her breathing slow.

  ‘You see, I have come back. I will be here, in the hospital, for the rest of the night and I’ll ask the nurses to call me if you want to say anything, if you begin to respond. We are able to keep you safe here. We will keep you warm and clean even if you don’t acknowledge us.’

  She wants to go on and say that the patient can stay here for as long as she likes and that no-one will force anything on her, but it isn’t true. The patient cannot be allowed to endanger herself by starvation. The hospital is not an asylum: once it is clear that the physical after-effects of her drowning have resolved, they will need to consider the girl’s sanity. It is beyond doubt that she has committed the crime of attempting self-murder, witnessed by a police constable, and unless the police decide to pretend that she fell in while carrying stones for some other reason, there is no protection from the consequences of that crime. At the very least, enquiries will have to be made so that her relatives can be contacted or the appropriate parish billed for her admission to the lunatic asylum. Very soon, there will be considerable pressure, probably some coercion, to respond.

  It is a quieter night. The crisis of a patient on the fever ward: there is nothing she can do that would not be better done by the nurses, but she stands, anyway, at the foot of the bed, watching and waiting until the woman’s temperature turns, her muttering quiet
s and she falls into a natural sleep. A surgical patient wakes sobbing with pain: laudanum, and a more authoritative reassurance than the same words uttered by a nurse. Back to bed, pacing the corridors that will confine her dreams for years, through a building that will stand longer in her mind than on the ground. She will, she thinks, look in on the drowning girl. What is unspeakable by day can often find utterance now, in the hours of darkness and the place of sickness, both more and less real than the ordinary world.

  She can see from the door that the patient has moved, and as she walks down the ward the nurse comes to meet her. The catatonia must have broken; now, then, the story can be told. There is no love worth dying for, she will say, or at least no love that grows from death. Shame can be redeemed, sin pardoned: even for extreme poverty, on an individual level there are possible solutions, and in her experience those who feel most alarm at their destitution are also those most easily shown to be deserving of assistance. The patient can be sent to Mamma’s Home, to Canada, even, should she wish to confess any truly criminal act, to prison, where she can expiate her wrongdoing. There is no life, Ally will tell her, that cannot be changed, no-one beyond redemption. We can outlast sadness and despair. Whatever damage has been done to this girl, whoever has harmed her, she is, is she not, still here? Still able to begin again?

  Nurse Sedley touches her arm. ‘It’s fever, Miss Moberley. Set in these two hours. We were about to call you.’

  She hurries to the bedside, still careful to tread quietly past the uneasy sleepers under the gaslights. Nurse raises her candle. The patient’s eyes are open but unfocussed, her face flushed. Her breathing is fast and audible. Ally touches her forehead.

  ‘One hundred and three,’ says Nurse Sedley. ‘Going up. I’ve sponged her.’

  ‘Has she taken any fluids? Eaten anything?’

  ‘No. I spooned in brandy but she let it run out of her mouth.’

  ‘Bring some clear soup, please. And a spoon.’

  The woman in the next bed, not, after all, asleep, sits up to watch. ‘Throw it in her face, I would. Soon wake her up.’

  ‘And a screen, please, Nurse.’

  Ally strokes her patient’s arm, folded, now, protectively across her breast. ‘You’re running a bit of a temperature. I expect you’re feeling hot and your limbs ache, maybe as if there’s a heavy weight on your chest. It’s important that you drink something. We also need to keep your strength up so I’m going to offer you some broth.’

  She wants to say that without it, her patient will become sicker, faster, but this may be exactly what the patient wants. She holds her cold hand and listens to the shallow breaths until Nurse Sedley returns. For Ally, the patient closes her mouth and turns her head away—acknowledgement, perhaps, of a kind—but she does not eat, and as the night passes, her fever continues to rise as her breathing becomes laboured.

  NO CLEAR BORDER

  I can’t, Al,’ says Annie. ‘Really. We’ve only got three weeks. It’s not the time. It won’t make any difference if we go after the exams.’

  Annie’s right, she knows. Now she should be concentrating on her preparation, tending to the exact balance of study, exercise and rest required for success. There will be six hours of examinations on four consecutive days, and then vivas the following week. One must train as a horse for a race, and all else must wait, must be put aside until afterwards. But what if something distracts, if there is such a persistent slipping of the mind that it would be perhaps more efficient to address one’s distraction in order to return, single in mind, to revision? She has made it her business to find out what might happen to the next suicidal patient. Two doctor’s signatures are required—and sufficient—to confine a patient to an insane asylum, to suspend, in most cases permanently, a citizen’s most basic rights. The mad have no freedom of movement, no right of habeus corpus. Lunatics, like women, may not vote; may not control money, may not marry, cease as the doctor writes his name to be the guardians of their own children and the owners of their own houses. It is widely acknowledged that there is no clear border between madness and sanity, and widely known that sane people are and have been confined as mad for spurious reasons. It is, then, not the least important aspect of a doctor’s calling to make this distinction, deciding who in this nation of eccentrics may safely be left to practice unusual habits and extraordinary ideas and who poses a danger to him or her self and others. Or perhaps who cannot be entrusted with an estate, or a child, or who is so lost in fear and despair that confinement in a place of safety and routine is an act of charity. One would think that the ability to recognise such states and distinguish one from another would be as important as the ability to tell pneumonia from a cold or a twisted ankle from a compound fracture.

  Annie closes her toxicology book, her finger squashed in the later pages. ‘You are quite right, Ally. Papa would agree with you. You should write to the authorities and suggest a change in the curriculum. And I will willingly accompany you to the asylum after the exams. But exactly because the treatment of the insane is not part of our syllabus, I see no need to address it now.’

  Ally, leaning against the chair beside Annie’s, stops fingering the brass rivets securing the back of the green leather upholstery. There is blue sky outside and the garden will be full of sunlight and rustling leaves. The loops and twists of Annie’s hair shine like polished mahogany in the sunshine coming through the window, and her shadow makes a cameo on the green baize tablecloth.

  ‘I know. But it seems wrong to graduate without having visited one. To accept the responsibility without understanding the consequences. Without at least having seen where we’re sending our patients. Asylums are surely not as bad as people imagine.’ And if they are, all the more reason to go, to know what damage is being done before and while doing it.

  Annie takes her hand, soothes the bitten fingertips. ‘I will go with you. I promise I will sign no confinement orders until I have visited an asylum. But not now.’

  UPSTREAM

  She is late. A quarter of an hour late. Of course he has gone. He is a busy man, his days in London already short, and if she cannot show him the fundamental courtesy of valuing his time, if she has not even the professional competence that requires punctuality—He is down there, on the quay below the bridge, talking to the man with the boats. She lifts her skirts, too high, and hurries down the stone stairs.

  ‘Mr. Cavendish, I am so sorry. I was at the asylum and underestimated the time for the omnibus, and by the time I had understood how late I might be there were no cabs to be seen. I hope you will forgive me. I did not intend to waste your time.’

  The boatman is gazing at her. Hysterical female. She must stop.

  ‘Please believe that I do understand the claims on a busy man’s day. You would have been perfectly in the right had you given me up; you are most kind to wait.’ Stop, she thinks, be quiet. You reveal too much.

  ‘Miss Moberley, please. Do not say another word on the subject. It is a pleasant day to dally at the riverside. So much so that, instead of walking, I thought we might hire a boat. I have been missing the water. Could you trust yourself to me on the river?’

  She has not been in a boat since Aubrey rowed her and May across the lake in Albert Park. Certainly not since May—The river at her feet flows to the sea, out into the Channel, which is a backwater of the Atlantic Ocean. It runs brown and silent here, the colour of milky tea, and it is hard to imagine fish or even weeds below the surface.

  ‘Of course. Anywhere.’

  The boatman smiles, raises his eyebrows. She must not be obvious. She does not know the correct way to accept such an invitation; perhaps it is not correct to accept. She draws aside and stands watching the brown water absorb sunlight and carry it out to sea while Tom pays the man.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he says, taking her hand, and she does let him. The boat wobbles under her as she steps in, as she stands with her feet below the
water level. She has to tuck her legs under her to give him space to row. The tide is turning, he says, and they will go upstream first. He likes to see the Houses of Parliament from the river; she will have quite a new view of London. He has removed his jacket and she can see the muscles bulging and flexing under his shirt sleeves. He rows energetically, as if there is haste, and soon his face reddens under the freckles.

  She should say something. The least she can do is make conversation for him. She clears her throat. ‘Do you row in Falmouth?’

  He nods as he bends forward. ‘Sometimes. Up the river. Penvenick keeps boats.’ The oars trail a moment. ‘Easiest way of getting around down there.’

  She rubs the lace on her cuff between her fingers. The shadow of her straw hat makes an ellipse on her grey linen skirt. Water drips from the oars. She should think of something else to say.

  He glances at her. ‘There are some places where the trees grow right out over the water. You can row under them, into the woods. Inlets without paths. Jungle, I sometimes think, though I’ve never seen a jungle.’

  She looks up. ‘Should you like to?’

  ‘Maybe. I’d like to see more of the world. And you?’

  The river swirls around the bridge pilings, making whirlpools and eddies of foam. The water is still silent and she can hear the oars dip and drip. Even from so close, she can’t see into the river at all, as if it’s really only two-dimensional.

  ‘I hope only to be a doctor. It is ambition enough, for a woman.’