Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  She shifts the basket onto the other arm, smiling at what her aunt in London would say about her, Dr. Moberley Cavendish, haggling over fish at the docks. This time of year, the neighbour’s housekeeper told her yesterday, the boats go out at dawn and they’re back by lunchtime, often enough. When the boat’s full, it’s full, and the quicker the catch is on the London train the better. If you want fish, you want to be there on the quay when they come in. Mrs. Trevethan herself gets fish from her cousin, most people round here know someone on the boats and that’s why there’s no fish-shop, see? But as long as hotels haven’t got there first, should be someone will sell her a couple of mackerel or a codling. Mrs. Trevethan did not tell her that the fishing quay is upriver of the Packet Quay, the fishing boats having a shallower draught than the ocean-going ships, but although she was late there were still great coffin-sized caskets of dead fish lying in the sun. Hundreds, she thought, maybe thousands, and even at the top a few tails still flicking and silver faces mouthing outrage into the hot air. Some of the fish are still alive, she wanted to say to the men heaving wet nets around the stones, there is a medical emergency here.

  Ally tugs her hat forward to shade her face. She has not cooked fish before. Mamma did not serve it. Perhaps fish was unavailable in Manchester twenty years ago. She should, perhaps, have been less cavalier in dismissing Aunt Mary’s offer of lessons from her cook; it had not occurred to Ally that in rejecting the lessons she was condemning Tom to a domestic economy learnt from Mamma. But she has also learnt something from the years with Aunt Mary in London. She has not required Tom to choose between butter and marmalade at breakfast. She offers him cream in his coffee and sugar in his tea. And the cooking of fish cannot be especially complicated. It is necessary only to apply sufficient heat in one form or another to set the albumen, remaining mindful that boiled fish is inevitably abominable. Lighting the oven is difficult and anyway the warmth would be unwelcome in the house: let the soles, then, be fried. She enjoys the gleam and weight of her new copper pan. Boiled potatoes, with mint from the garden, and the rest of the plums for pudding. A meal of sorts. When he is gone—no, even in her own mind, even trying to make a thought about cooking, about how the cooking will be easier, she falters at those words. Time will pass, and he will leave. There will be endurance. There is always endurance as there is always air, because there is no alternative. She opens the gate. Now, anyway, she will put the fish in the pantry and write Annie a cheerful letter about sea-bathing and fishwives, reassure her friend that married life in Cornwall is not only exile from London work and London friends.

  But Tom comes down, his tread heavy on the bare wooden staircase, puts his arms around her from behind as she transfers the fish to a plate. It has skin instead of scales, and the scar of an old wound below the dorsal fin. Its orange spots have dulled.

  ‘I thought you were working,’ she says.

  ‘I stopped.’ He kisses her neck above the high collar. ‘It ought to be our honeymoon.’

  She leans against him for a moment, feels his breath in her hair. They have so short a time. ‘Yes. But it isn’t. Don’t make Mr. Penvenick angry. If you have work to do—’

  His hand touches her breast through the grey cotton and a response flickers through her body. But Mr. Penvenick, she thinks, he will be annoyed if your report is not written, he will chide you, he will express disappointment when he has trusted you so far

  He lifts her hair. ‘There is always work to do. Put the fish down, Al.’

  Her head bends as he unbuttons her collar.

  The weight of her head in the hollow under his collarbone is making his arm numb but he doesn’t want her to move. She probably knows, he thinks, how much the human head weighs. She has probably lifted a human brain with her own hands and placed it on a scale. Before the wedding, there were jokes that were not jokes about how at least a doctor would know what to expect, at least he’d be able to get down to business on the wedding night without first having to explain what goes where. Almost, said his junior George, draining his fourth pint, as if you were to have all the advantages of marrying a widow and all the advantages—Charlie took him outside and when they came back in George apologised. George means no harm, can’t hold his drink and doesn’t think before he opens his mouth, but Tom hadn’t been that close to hitting someone since his schooldays.

  She moves her head onto the pillow and lifts her sticky hand from his belly to his chest. He strokes her hipbone, the curve of her waist. Her hair has come down on one side and there is a scatter of black hairpins across the sheet behind her.

  ‘I forgot to tell you.’ He picks up some of the pins. ‘De Rivers has asked us to dinner.’

  She raises her head, the expression of satisfaction he was enjoying gone as if wiped with a cloth. ‘De Rivers? The big house at the top of the High Street?’

  ‘Ludgate House. He said he wanted to welcome you to Falmouth.’

  She sits up, sees his glance and hugs her knees to cover her breasts. ‘Why would he feel a need to do that?’

  ‘Maybe he’s proud to have a prize-winning young doctor in town.’

  She shakes her head. ‘How on earth would he know about my prize? And why would he care anyway?’

  He folds his hands behind his head. The crack in the ceiling probably isn’t really any bigger than it was last time he saw it. ‘He’d know because I told him. And it was in the Times, remember. Anyway, I accepted. For Thursday.’

  But married men, he recalls too late, say that they must consult their wives. He has assumed both her availability and her consent. An oversight, he is sure, but he has heard her and Annie speak of men whose sympathy for women’s suffrage lasts only until they find themselves obliged to pour their own tea. Perhaps he has not inspired trust enough to overlook such errors, perhaps she will fear that this is the first sign of his intention to dominate. If so, he supposes, he can only try to explain: it is not that I thought myself entitled to consent on your behalf but that—well—but that I forgot that I am now a married man. I forgot you. He waits. These sunny days have run golden lights through her sparrow-brown hair.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘I must air my grey dress. It will be something to tell Annie and Aunt Mary in my next letters.’

  He reaches out to run his fingers down the fine carving of her vertebrae.

  THE INVERSE OF NOAH’S ARK

  The sun goes down behind the town, sunset hidden on the western side of the Lizard Peninsula. But over the estuary the hill above Flushing glows with refracted pink light. The masts around the harbour are cradled by a kaleidoscope of land and sky reflected in the waves, and there are two great ships winging around Pendennis Head, their sails slackening as they pass the castle at St Mawes and enter the shelter of the land. It is not very long until he will be going the other way, watching the sails belly as the ropes tauten and thrum and the ship leans on the wind. The sea will expand around him as Falmouth, Pendennis, the Lizard, Cornwall, diminish to the north-east; the stones beneath his feet, the gardens and trees, replaced by the slap and foam of waves on the hull. And then some weeks later, he will arrive in Japan. He tucks Ally’s arm more tightly against his ribs.

  ‘We should have a fine view from the dining room,’ she says. ‘I went along the quay yesterday to admire it from below.’

  ‘Penvenick tells me it is a remarkable house, and apparently De Rivers is something of a collector. You will enjoy seeing fine pictures again.’

  Her uncle’s house was crowded with paintings and sculpture. He had never before seen a full-sized marble figure in a private house, and now he has brought her to a cottage most of whose walls would be too damp and uneven for pictures even if he owned any.

  She rubs her cheek on his shoulder. ‘I cannot say I have missed them. And somehow it seems unlikely that I will share Mr. De Rivers’ taste.’

  Taste. There are worlds in her mind that he cannot enter, ways of categori
sing people and their possessions that are foreign to him.

  ‘Ally?’ he says. ‘Ally, on Saturday, would you take me around the Art Gallery?’

  The Gallery has been open all the time he has lived here. It is one of the Yarrow family’s gifts to the town, municipal culture to improve the minds of sailors and tradesmen, and he has set foot in it only once, to deliver a public lecture on new developments in lighthouse design. There are also concerts he does not attend.

  She looks at his face. ‘Of course, with pleasure. They have a few interesting things. But I do not know that I can tell you much.’

  ‘More than I know now.’

  Her hand slides down his arm and takes his. She likes the insides of his wrists, not a part of his anatomy to which he had given a moment’s thought until after the wedding.

  ‘And you like to learn. Tell me, my love, shall I show you around the nervous system and the skeleton also?’

  ‘Why not,’ he says. ‘A man cannot have too much knowledge. Or, of course, a woman. Perhaps the human spine offers a model for an aseismic lighthouse.’

  ‘It is a weak point, the spine. And from what you have told me, perhaps prone to the same difficulties of physics as other columns.’

  He kisses her hand.

  They ascend the steps and he rings the bell.

  She was right about the view. Mr. De Rivers, a man who looks so much like a frog that it is almost a surprise to see him walk up the stairs, shows them all over the house before allowing them to sit. Dark oak panelling makes the square hall and shallow stairs cavernous, so the windows over the sea seem as radiant as the Canalettos she used to admire in the Manchester City Art Gallery. The bannisters are carved into barleycorns. The floorboards, bare ships’ timbers as in all the buildings in this town, creak as they pass. The house was built, Mr. De Rivers says, more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Mr. De Rivers puts his hand on her elbow, bared by the grey dress’s short sleeves, as if to guide her around the turn of the stairs. His hand is damp and she resists the urge to shake him off. Nine generations of births and deaths here, she thinks. His thumb presses against her triceps muscle. It may well be the oldest building in which she has set foot. Nonetheless, it feels familiar. She moves away from Mr. De Rivers, across the landing. Papa’s house was newly built for him and Mamma, with modern decorative brick coursing and bay windows, but like Papa’s, Ludgate House is designed for display, to impress. Six people could come down the staircase abreast. The timber in the panelling would build a ship to cross the seven seas, the marble in the fireplaces suffice to memorialise a platoon of much-loved sons. Ally peers at a small glass dome on a side table and suppresses a gasp when there is something inside peering back. It is too dim to see clearly; a small mammal with a pointed nose and grey fur, frozen as it ducks under a stripped branch. Tom takes her hand. There are potted palms reaching from behind occasional tables and more of those glass cases, shiny in dark corners. An antlered head protrudes from the wall over the fireplace, as if on a pike. She doubts, somehow, that De Rivers personally oversaw these animals’ deaths.

  ‘My Central America case,’ De Rivers says. They gather and peer. He reaches for her arm again but Ally sees his hand rising and moves to Tom’s other side, as if for a better view. The birds inside are not bird-coloured but turquoise, violet, scarlet and so small it is hard to imagine how they were killed. They are not big enough for a bullet. Chloroform, probably, after catching them in a net. The panicky wing-beats would slow, and then stop, the heads drooping as the eyes filmed. The birds’ hearts must be smaller than Ally’s little finger-nail, must beat faster than one could count.

  ‘You have been in Central America?’ asks Tom.

  Mr. De Rivers inflates himself a little. Ally’s fingers find the inside of Tom’s wrist, above the pulse point where she can feel the muscle rising under tender white skin. She likes these places in him, the junctions of softness with strength alien to the female body. De Rivers is saying something. ‘Oh, I have no time to gad around the globe. The mine does not run itself. But it is easy, here, when one knows the right people, to have almost anything brought from anywhere in the world. Why, Captain Polwarth has shrunken heads from Africa in his cabinet!’

  ‘Human heads?’

  ‘Forgive me, Mrs. Cavendish. It is not a subject for ladies. Here, let me show you my Chinese fans instead. Are they not exquisite? It is hard to conceive how such carving is done, is it not?’

  In a carved cedar chest are silks from China, painted with dragons and tigers. The light is too dim to see colour properly but he encourages Ally to touch, pours them into her hands while he watches her face. She looks away from him and wonders about the hands that made these. Papa would like them. There is a glass cabinet crowded with porcelain figures and—De Rivers winks at Tom—more put by that are not quite the thing for public display. There is another chest made by having Chinese carved screens cut up and rearranged by a Cornish carpenter. The waste-paper baskets are made from elephants’ feet and the candlesticks carved in ivory. It is a mausoleum, it is the inverse of Noah’s Ark. She imagines the noise if all these eviscerated animals came to life, if in the depths of a winter’s night their spirits returned fluttering bellowing squealing, oak panels splintering and bannisters broken off like trees in a storm—

  When they reach the dining room, there is a woman bending over an embroidery frame in an armchair by the fireplace, set in the darkest corner of the room. The woman stands up, holding her work as if it were a handkerchief and she about to weep. She is taller than Ally, older, and wearing a limp rabbit-coloured evening gown that makes her the same sepia tint from fascinator to shoes and must pass barely half an inch above her nipples. Ally finds her gaze dropping as if to protect a patient’s modesty; even she knows that such décolletage requires firmer upholstery beneath.

  ‘My sister. Deborah, Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish. Mrs. Cavendish, Miss De Rivers.’

  Dr. Moberley Cavendish, Ally thinks, but in the three months since graduation she has already understood that there are situations, many situations, in which there is nothing to be gained by saying this.

  She holds out her hand. ‘How do you do.’

  ‘Mrs. Cavendish. How do you find Falmouth?’

  Mr. De Rivers has placed his dining table, an expanse of mahogany with a surface area probably greater than her bedroom, in the window, and placed her, as newly-married guest of honour, on his right, where she can watch the hills and water darken towards the monochrome as the boats begin to prickle with light. As the soup is removed by a maid in white frills, outside the tide turns and the ships swing in the dark. Despite Tom’s explanations, the turning of the tide still seems mysterious to Ally, and until she arrived here she had not known that it would be so plain. Yesterday, she saw the moment of pause at low water and then the first rivulet of the incoming tide trickling upstream. Seeing the turn of the tide is as definite as watching a patient’s return to consciousness.

  ‘Mrs. Cavendish?’

  She meets Tom’s eyes.

  ‘Forgive me, Mr. De Rivers. I was distracted by your beautiful view.’

  He smiles. He is the sort of man who cannot smile without resembling a crocodile. ‘I dare say our little town is quite fascinating to one accustomed to London. And—Manchester, was it? I have not been there, and I cannot say I wish to return to London. I lived there, you know, as a young man.’

  Ally sips her wine. Excellent wine, as good as anything in Uncle James’s cellar. ‘Manchester is an interesting city. In some ways it is in the vanguard of a social change that may take many years to reach more secluded parts of the country. And London was not my choice, but the only place in Britain where it was possible for me to train. I was happy there.’

  His face tightens a little, as if she has mentioned something unmentionable, but the smile remains. ‘As I hope you will be happy here, my dear.’

  Tom puts down his for
k. ‘My wife will be working at the Truro Asylum. She takes a special interest in nervous cases.’

  Mr. De Rivers coughs. If he chokes, she thinks, he will be glad enough of her training. He takes water.

  ‘In the asylum? Your wife? Cavendish, what are you thinking?’

  Tom smiles. He can smile at anyone. ‘Dr. Moberley Cavendish is thinking that there is a great need for women mad-doctors. That, as we know, the majority of patients are female, and many of their troubles begin in exactly those crises of life where it is most desirable that women should be attended by women. Do I summarise correctly, Ally?’

  She nods. They still do not know why this invitation has been issued, but Mr. De Rivers is a powerful man who appears to take an interest in Tom. It is not necessary that he should sympathise with her cause.

  ‘But I will not begin my work until Tom leaves. I wish to spend as much time as I can with him, and having no acquaintance here, naturally I will need occupation in his absence. Tell me, Mr. De Rivers, what was your profession in London?’

  Mr. De Rivers’ shirt front puffs out over his waistcoat. ‘I would have thought that under such circumstances a young lady would return to her father’s house, but I see you have a mind of your own. My father thought it best that I should spend some time in an exporter’s office. The markets for much of our tin are overseas and he wanted me to understand that side of the business. I was glad enough to return to Cornwall, I must say.’

  Ally nods. ‘I can understand that. And that is when you found your beautiful house?’

  She can do this, now. Mamma never understood the power of courtesy, or that not every battle needs to be fought every time. Feminine wiles, Mamma would say, the cowardly tactics of those who fear the judgements of fools and care more for worldliness than salvation. Did the Son of God depend on toadying and sweet words? Did he fear to offend the moneylenders in the temple?