Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  And on one count, at least, it seems that Aunt Mary is right. Ally has written to the Chief Medical Officer of the Truro Asylum, who has recently published an essay on the diagnosis and treatment of religious melancholy, asking if she might study with him with a view to developing a specialism in nervous and mental cases. There is a letter with a Truro postmark at her place at breakfast; yes, he would welcome her, and is pleased to see that some of the best new graduates take a serious interest in mad-doctoring. With the expansion of the great asylums, he believes there will be many opportunities for new research and employment in this area, and some women patients will doubtless respond better to a female physician. It is not a paid position. They will depend on Tom’s salary, for now, and will live in the cottage he rents, with a weekly girl to help Ally with the rough cleaning. You should perhaps, says Aunt Mary doubtfully, ask Mrs. Bridge to teach you to cook. Aunt Mary, who has not stirred a pan or sliced an onion these twenty years, has forgotten Mamma’s methods.

  They decide that she is too old for orange blossom and tulle, that it would be ridiculous to see a doctor blushing under white lace and a veil. In years to come, Aunt Mary says, I suppose there will be so many doctor-brides that their dress will not seem a problem in the least. I suppose professional women will find ways of doing these things. Ally will not promise to obey; it seems a bad idea, says Tom, to begin a marriage with an undertaking made in bad faith. Not being a parcel, she declines to be given away. They are making new rituals, building the road under their feet. There will be no honeymoon, for Tom, already back in Cornwall and barely able to spare time to come to London for the wedding, is required at work. It will all, he writes, be worth it in the end, when their ship comes in. Penvenick has won the big colonial contract and he is being sent to make the preliminary surveys. Mr. Penvenick will not tell him where he is going; the whole project is of the utmost commercial sensitivity, and while naturally he has complete faith in Tom or he would not be sending him, it is possible that even the nature of Tom’s preparations would betray his destination if he knew what it is. And so Tom must trust him, as he trusts Tom, and if all goes well they will both be rewarded.

  Presents arrive. Annie’s Mamma sends a tea-service, white bone china patterned with yellow and blue tulips, with pointed handles and octagonal saucers and plates. Tom’s mother passes on her own silver coffee-pot, sugar bowl and cream-jug on a silver tray engraved with roses, which will require constant polishing. When Papa sends a small Persian carpet, flickering with purple and blue, she knows he will not come. A post-card comes a few days later: Papa has been honoured by the inclusion of one of his pictures in the grand exhibition in Paris, and he and Aubrey are passing the remainder of the summer in France. There is a revolving bookcase from Miss Johnson and a hand-made kidskin doctor’s bag from the Manchester Women’s Education Association, whose scholarship paid for the first years of her training. They, at least, see no betrayal in her marriage. And Aubrey, who has not acknowledged her graduation, has written only once since May’s funeral, sends a framed design for a fan, a drowned fan. Seaweed creeps and reaches. And of her bones are coral made.

  HIS IMPORTANCE TO HER

  Aunt Mary will not countenance Tom staying at the house the night before the wedding, but she divorces tradition so far as to invite him to dinner. A cold collation, she says, the kind of dinner one might expect in a house whose daughter marries in the morning. He arrives earlier than expected, and leaves Fanny protesting in his wake as he runs up the stairs. Ally and Aunt Mary, hands full of tissue paper and underwear, hear his steps and stop as if they are about to be photographed. What if she doesn’t like him any more, what if the man to whom she has been writing all summer is not quite the same as the man about to come through the door? She bites her lip. Aunt Mary folds the paper around Ally’s drawers and goes to the door.

  ‘My dear Tom.’ She takes his hands. ‘And so you could not wait to see your bride! Shall we go downstairs?’

  Ally drops the petticoat she is folding. Why, anyway, are they trying to protect hidden garments from creasing? No-one will know if her chemise shows folds. His hair is bright even here, in the dusk of the attic corridor. He looks tired, travel-stained. And he is indeed himself, no figment of paper and imagination but bone, flesh, skin, freckles.

  ‘Ally.’ With a glance towards Aunt Mary, he kisses her cheek, stands back.

  ‘Did you—’ Ally clears her throat. ‘Did you have a good journey?’

  ‘No. But it doesn’t matter. You are well?’ He looks her up and down, as if her grey skirt and untidy hair will tell him any of the things she is failing to say.

  ‘Nervous. But well.’

  Should she enquire reciprocally after his health, as if they have only just met, as if they will not in the morning promise to love and cherish each other until death and in the evening… become intimate? She feels a prickle of defensiveness, as if they are two cats in one room, opposing magnets attempting to touch.

  He looks up. ‘I missed you. I am happy to be here.’

  Aunt Mary coughs. ‘Oh, very well. I will expect you both in the drawing room for tea in ten minutes.’

  Her skirts flow down the stairs behind her, like water over stones. Everything pauses.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ally. Downstairs, the drawing room door closes. ‘I also.’

  She swallows. ‘I had a letter. Yesterday. From Dr. Selby. He says I will be welcome to study with him. He appears to have no objection to women doctors.’

  Tom reaches towards her, touches her hair. And then changes his mind and drops his hand. ‘I am so glad. I have been speaking to the people at the cottage hospital for you, but that will be much better. And they have often need of an extra pair of hands if you should find yourself at a loose end. At liberty.’

  ‘Or if we should need the income. Thank you, Tom. You will not object, then, if I do not earn at the beginning? While I study?’

  ‘My dear. I thought we had established this. If you do not object to cooking for yourself, to living in a small cottage and keeping no conveyance, how could I object to your studying? And perhaps one day, you will be a famous physician and I content to entertain your aristocratic patients and fend off elegant ladies who would demand your attentions and waste your time.’

  ‘Ah, but you forget. It is the women accused of wasting time in whom I interest myself. Invalids and nervous cases.’

  ‘Then perhaps I shall fend off gentlemen with broken backs. In any case, I promise again: I would no more prevent you following your calling than you would have me resign from this journey. And I have been told, by the way, to prepare for a temperate climate not unlike our own.’

  ‘Canada?’ she asks. The west coast, they have thought, from where a Trinity House Committee has recently returned with a set of recommendations that someone will need to implement.

  ‘Perhaps. But then what need for secrecy? And anyway, in some regards the Canadians are in our vanguard in lighthouse improvements.’

  They reflect again, standing at the top of the attic stairs in Bloomsbury, on the globe, the spread of pink across the map. The Chinese treaty ports can surely not be described as temperate. The Stevensons are already at work in India. No-one would try to survey the Canadian east coast in autumn and winter. Australia, especially in this season, is hot. New Zealand?

  Tom shrugs, looking at her, still, as if she might be about to do something, as if she has omitted some necessary act. Even here, in the dimness at the top of the stairs, his copper hair seems to shine. You will have red-headed babies, Annie has said. No.

  ‘We should go downstairs,’ she says. ‘Aunt Mary—’

  ‘Aunt Mary fears that we will offend the proprieties. Or perhaps only that we will offend the proprieties in her house. Just tell me, Ally—you are happy? You look forward to tomorrow?’

  Her shoes are scuffed, must be polished before tomorrow. Her mind stretches towards the words
he asks to hear, towards the speaking of affection and desire. If she did not know better, she would say that there was a physical change in her, that her heart rests more comfortably under her breastbone for his faith. She would like to tell him that she sleeps more easily and wakes without the life-long start of dread at another day. That his importance to her is frightening. Without looking at him, she nods.

  DR. FORREST AND DR. MOBERLEY CAVENDISH

  Annie arrives while they are still at breakfast, accompanied by a maid who carries a rustling dress bag over her arms as if about to present it at the altar. Uncle James and the boys half-rise, a kind of reverse bow.

  ‘Good morning! Eggs, Ally? You are not too nervous, too refined, to eat at such a moment? Dear me, where are your bridal sensibilities?’

  ‘Somewhere in the schoolroom with my white veil and obedience,’ says Ally. ‘Have a sausage. Have two.’

  Aunt Mary dabs her lips and folds her napkin. ‘Really, girls. Please. Fanny, another cup for Miss Forrest, please. And you might help—Jane, is it?—with the dress. Annie, would you care for some eggs?’

  Fanny and Annie’s Jane murmur and Jane retreats, her tread heavy on the stairs. Annie sits down. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Dunne, but I have breakfasted. A cup of tea would be most welcome, if Ally is not in haste to dress.’

  Ally butters toast. She will not play the blushing bride, will not slip into the role waiting at her feet like a hole in the road.

  ‘I do not see why it would take me longer to put on a dress today than any other day. George is the slow dresser in this house.’

  George has recently progressed from combing his hair without being asked to using a pomade whose turpentine smell always flashes Papa’s studio into Ally’s mind. He checks his collar in the hall mirror before leaving the house and fusses over the crease in his trousers.

  ‘He’s started talking to girls,’ says Freddie.

  ‘Because it’s more interesting than talking to little boys who can’t open their mouths without trading insults.’

  ‘Stop it, boys. Today of all days.’

  They stand together before the mirror, Annie in her copper-green evening dress, made suitable for a morning wedding by the addition of an embroidered velvet bolero, Ally in cloudy blue that will take her to Penvenick’s Christmas party or hospital dances in Cornwall. Annie has pinned Ally’s hair for her and secured a gravity-defying hat that Ally will never be able to pin properly when she wants to wear the outfit again. Annie has dabbed Ally’s nose with powder and her cheeks with rouge, instructed her to pout and then grimace while Annie paints her lips the colour they are anyway. Mamma would not approve. Masked, costumed: she does not look herself.

  ‘I feel like taking it all off,’ she says.

  ‘I am sure Tom would be delighted.’ Annie hands her her bouquet, irises and baby’s breath. ‘You are beautiful. Come along.’

  She holds the flowers, from whose stamens Annie has thought to snip the egg-yolk pollen. Annie sweeps the door open before her, drops a mocking curtsey.

  ‘Hold up your skirt on the stairs,’ Annie says. ‘There will be a loop under the flounce.’

  There is.

  ‘Annie,’ she asks. ‘Annie, do you think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is too much?’

  They reach the landing. Annie dusts something from Ally’s shoulder.

  ‘I think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is splendid. And very pretty. Come.’ She crooks her elbow, and arm-in-arm Dr. Forrest and Dr. Moberley Cavendish proceed down the main staircase to the portico where their carriage awaits.

  PART TWO

  CORNWALL AND JAPAN

  A SCATTER OF BLACK HAIRPINS

  The white cottage feels different in Ally’s absence. Like a factory with the machines lying idle, like a ship becalmed. The papers on his desk breathe as the breeze off the river passes over them and he moves his fingers in the sun to see his shadow-hand thicken and elongate on the half-written page. It is not a bad thing, for a house to lie at rest, for the hum of his thoughts and the scratch of his pen to be what happens. That was how it was before they married, before he brought her back here. With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. Shadows strengthen on the lawn as the cloud that has chilled the morning for the last few minutes passes across the sun and out over the water towards St. Mawes. He holds up his hand in light strong enough to glow through his fingertips, to pass through the edges of himself. He turns his wrist to see the webs between his fingers translucent. Birds’ feet, he thinks. Maybe he will bathe from the beach this afternoon. Can Ally swim, does she own a bathing dress? He imagines her wet, a brief gown clinging around her legs, her arms white against dark soaked cotton. Come now, if he is not going to work he might as well have accompanied her to the boats. He applies himself.

  He is reading about the lighthouses of Japan. He rests the volume’s spine against the desk and leans back in his chair. A person would think that lighthouses must be particularly vulnerable to earthquakes. His mind’s eye sees a tower sway, sees cracks appearing in the brickwork as the structure twists like a wrung towel. Glass arches through the air, the reflector in perfect, glittering flight until it explodes on the rocks below as the tower shivers and falls, the land discarding buildings as a sleeper shrugs off a blanket. The waves below have turned around, running the wrong way because the Pacific Ocean itself is disturbed by upheavals in the ground on which it lies.

  But a person would be wrong. If correctly built, tall, columnar structures can counteract seismic activity. Unlike the long, low buildings in which people tend to live, towers can be made to bend rather than break. It is already known, after all, that the best lighthouses are the more responsive to wind and waves. The base must move with the ground on which it stands, but with good masonry, the top, the light itself, can be a still point, axis and anchor.

  The sun goes in again, and a seagull screams as if in protest. He closes The Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan. The writer of this article, a Scottish engineer, does not like the Japanese. They lie, he says, sometimes because it is the easiest way of getting what they want and sometimes for no discernible reason. They are characterised by ‘complete indifference to time and to the exigencies of circumstance.’ They imprison and enslave their women, and have no idea what to do with a cruet. He wonders if this man knew what to do with the Japanese equivalent, whatever it might be. However inscrutable the natives, it is the sort of thing it ought to be possible to learn. The sort of thing he will try to learn.

  He hears the front gate click, and stands, cranes forward, to see Ally cross the garden. She is foreshortened by the height of the house, abbreviated to hat, skirt and basket. The basket drags on her arm; the boats must have come in. A seagull, sentinel on the roof of Greenbank House, announces her return, and is answered from the chimney of Symond’s Hill and the ridgepole of Penwerris House. If he dies out there, he sometimes thinks, if his ship founders in the Bay of Biscay or off the Horn before he even glimpses the Inland Sea, the seagulls will cry his passing here weeks before the messenger comes up the path. The front door closes quietly. Trained in her father’s house, she is scrupulous not to disturb his work. He will go down to her; better to spend time with his new wife than in such morbid fantasies.

  She can feel the heat of the flagstones through her shoes. All the captains’ houses along Dunstanville have their blinds down to bar the sun flickering from the estuary and flashing from the windows across the water in Flushing. The Flushing houses are patent follies, with turrets stuck on the corners, crenellations in unlikely places and outbreaks of Gothic stone like carbuncles in modern red-brick walls. Papa would find them personally offensive, but Ally doesn’t mind. Let rich men have their games: it is entertaining if not edifying for the rest of us to see how like the daydreams of little girls are the trappings of masculine wealth. The monkey-puzzle tree in front of a captain’s white bay window bows over the pavement, embossing its dark limbs on the stucco of
the Greenbank Hotel. Captain Motton is said to have brought it back from Africa, along with a monkey which died and is now stuffed in a glass case on his sideboard. She likes Falmouth.