Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Ally?’

  ‘Sorry, Tom. I’m sorry.’

  No crying. He does not need this: weakness, hysteria, nerves, on his last day. He knows her strong. He married a doctor, not a patient. She bites her lips.

  ‘Did you find out how long you will be in Singapore?’

  He pats her hand. ‘It will depend, I think, on the weather and what speed we make. But probably several days. Penvenick will cover a hotel so I can leave the ship. He said I would be ready enough to walk out by then. And of course I will be able to send letters.’

  She nods. Tom stepping out, his jaunty gait under a tropical sky, his feet safe on foreign ground.

  ‘You will like to see the city.’

  She imagines herself there too, holding his arm and catching the scents of strange fruits and flowers under a tropical sky. Herself at the rail of a ship watching a new land rising over the horizon, a warm wind on her face. But he does not ask.

  Even the seagulls are sleeping, but through the gap in the curtains he can see that the night is beginning to fade. It is today. His trunk is the shape that stands waiting by the door. Ally lies tightly curled, her back to him as if he is already gone, as if there were no comfort for her. It is a betrayal, this journey. Even though they both knew about their separation before agreeing to marry, even though she has said nothing about wanting him to stay and knows that it would be impossible for Penvenick’s plans to change, it is a betrayal. Instead of creeping out into the night, to breathe the dew on the grass and the red roses at the gate and feel Cornwall solid under his feet, he curls around his wife, tucks her into his arms, cradles her breast in his hand and her head against his chest for what may, what very well may, be the last time.

  AN ARRANGEMENT OF PLANTS AND STONES

  The screens are open a few inches and in the gap is outside, a stripe of leaves and bark and rain between the paper windows which remind him of pages, of the blank expanses of unwritten letters. The leaves, some in red lace as well as a variety of fleshy greens, bounce like struck cymbals as the raindrops hit them. As well as the patter of rain there is the chiming of running water, which must come from the bamboo gutters he noticed earlier, or perhaps there is a fountain out there. He reaches out to open the screen, hesitates. The taut paper looks fragile. The woman, whose name he could not say even if he had heard it clearly, probably set her windows just as she wants them. Who is he, to go around rearranging her house? He puts his eye to the gap instead, a child peering in to a room he is not allowed to enter, a servant at the keyhole. It is—probably—a garden. It must take a human mind and hands to make such an arrangement of plants and stones. His eye measures the spaces between wavering branches and crouching rocks, notes how the curves of the gravel path pull the beholder into the intricacy of green shadows under the bushes. No flowers, or flowerbeds. No straight lines, but a garden nevertheless. He feels a gaze on his back, and she is standing there, in her slippers. He will have to get used to that, to the way these buildings are silent about their occupants’ movements. You can see everything at once, if you keep looking, but if you’re not looking you won’t hear anything until it’s too late.

  She kneels and bows her head almost to the floor, as if pretending he’s one of her idols. His knees creak and his trousers tighten across his thighs as he reciprocates: even if it is incorrect, he hopes that mimicry at least suggests the right intentions. Her hair stays in perfect place. All the women’s hair is blue-black, the shade of bad bruises, and it all looks cold to the touch. He straightens up. His knees hurt. They practice these postures, he has read, from infancy, but even so he does not see how a human body can remain so folded without damage. Muscles, bones and vasculature are surely the same everywhere?

  She murmurs and sits back on her heels, gestures. Food? Are there meal-times in Japan? There was a drink that seemed a little like both coffee and tea when he awoke, and a bowl of sticky rice and some kind of clear soup. When the student arrives, he will ask. Tell me from the beginning, he will say. Take me for a savage, for a child raised by wolves, and tell me how to wake and sleep, to empty my bladder and bowels, to bathe. Tell me what to eat and when and how, and in return I will advise you on the building of lighthouses. It does not seem much of a bargain. She smiles at him, rises smoothly to her feet, and leaves, silent as a cat. He has no idea what is happening, but he seems to have succeeded in his present ambition, which is not to give offence. He does not know when the student will arrive; Makoto will call on you tomorrow, he was told. He would like to go out, begin to feel Japan under his feet and smell its air and hear its birdsong and the wind in its leaves. He is hungry. He lowers himself onto one of the square cushions on the floor and takes out Fulham’s Structural Engineering, his prize copy inscribed by Professor Fulham himself. For now, he must wait.

  He waits.

  The light in the room has changed by the time she comes back. From behind the split curtain hanging in the doorway, feet and the bottom half of a yellow kimono approach, and then the curtain in his own room’s entrance flutters blue and white. He wonders what she has been doing while he read. She carries a tray, black lacquer on the inside with tongue-and-groove boxed corners in polished bamboo on the outside, and in it there are upturned cups and bowls. She sinks to her knees and the tray remains horizontal. She positions it on the table from which he hastily removes Fulham. She speaks, gestures towards the door. There are two empty bowls, or handle-less cups. Makoto?

  To Tom’s relief, Makoto is wearing a suit, with a bowler hat over his short hair, and as Tom scrambles to his feet Makoto holds out his hand to shake.

  ‘Mr. Cavendish. How do you do.’

  Makoto bows as they shake, his grasp firm.

  ‘How do you do. Mr. Makoto?’

  Is Makoto a Christian or surname?

  ‘How was your voyage?’

  Just as if we were meeting in London, Tom thinks. Makoto’s English has odd stresses and elisions, as if he were singing the words of one song to the tune of another, but it is entirely orthodox.

  ‘I enjoyed it. You are recently returned from England yourself?’

  Makoto bows again. ‘From Scotland. Ah, you are reading Fulham? I was honoured to meet him.’

  Foolish to be startled. He knew that Makoto had been in Britain to study.

  ‘He taught me. We correspond. He advised me to come here.’

  ‘He is a great man. I was most honoured.’

  Honoured, Tom thinks, a word he encounters repeatedly in all he has read about Japan. Does it always translate the same Japanese words, or do the Japanese have as many refinements of obligation as the Arctic peoples proverbially do of snow? The woman, who has stood like a servant in the corner, steps forward, bows and speaks, and this time Tom knows that he is being asked to sit down and take tea.

  THIS THIN SLIP OF LAND BETWEEN TWO COASTS

  From the bottom of the drive, the Truro Asylum looks almost like one of the larger country residences of English gentlemen. There is a central block with a pillared portico, a wing on each side, and grounds spreading around it down the hill. It is only as she approaches that the bars on the upper windows and then the absence of curtains and drapes begin to suggest that this is not a place of comfort. The front door is not used except when the Inspectors and the Committee are expected. She continues on the gravel path towards the porter at the back. The sky is lowering and she slows down, wanting the rain on her skin and in her clothes before she goes into those halls. Inside, the air is worse than the Chelsea Asylum where she worked as a Visitor after her examinations. Dr. Crosswyn says that he stopped noticing the odour a long time ago, but it still assaults her every time. Any of us, all of us, would smell so were we without the means of bathing, too alienated from our own bodies and their needs to anticipate the filling of bladder and bowels and without sufficient attendants to supply clean linen when required. Would you have turned your face from Christ himself, Mamma
used to say, as he came from the wilderness mired and sick? Are you such a fine lady that you see your Maker’s image only in fresh clothes and perfumed bodies? Mamma could bathe the feet of destitute fallen women and dress the sores of street children but not stroke the hair or kiss the cheeks of her own daughters. And Mamma had no charity for the mad, for those incapable of striving for betterment or profiting from her advice.

  The rain begins, a fine drizzle only just heavy enough to fall. Mizzle, Tom called it, and said he’d rather have real rain less often, actual precipitation or a dry day, but Ally likes the way the droplets settle and cling to leaves, grass and hair, as if water were forming there rather than falling from the sky, and she likes the way the mizzle veils this thin slip of land between two coasts. Here, the crest of the hill, is one of the places from which one can see both. She slows more. The porter will see her dawdling here and think her—well, will think her without sense to come in from the rain.

  There are too many voices in the asylum. Listen to their soliloquies, says Browne, but to do that she would have to be able to give each an audience and a stage. It is not an original thought that the overall effect of the asylum is maddening, that the insane compound each other’s insanity. And this, after all, is why her new profession beckons: how might one devise a regime to cure the mind? It is not the taxonomy of madness that intrigues her but the possibility of individual salvation. If some situations are maddening, others must be—ought to be—sanitary. But probably not for two thousand people in the same way at the same time. She sees that the porter is indeed looking out at her and waves instead of ringing the bell.

  ‘Morning, Doctor.’ William is one of those people who enjoys calling her ‘Doctor.’ ‘Nice weather for the time of year.’

  ‘The garden needs the rain,’ she says. They smile at each other. William is an ex-patient, a man who had nowhere to go after ten years’ incarceration, and he is, in Ally’s professional opinion, the sanest person on the premises.

  He closes the door behind her and selects the largest key from the chain around his neck. ‘We had a spot of bother in the night.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  William’s ‘spot of bother’ could mean an attempt at suicide—or murder—or just a bad fit on the epilepsy ward.

  ‘Women’s side. Ward Four. Well, I wouldn’t be telling you else, would I? Mrs. Middleton in a taking again, threw herself down the stairs while they were moving her to the back wards. Mrs. Middleton’s all right, see, only Nurse Miller broke her collar bone trying to catch her. Bad business.’ He leans against his desk beside Ally.

  Mrs. Middleton, like a good third of the women patients here, is R.M., religious melancholy. There is a much higher incidence, says Dr. Crosswyn, sipping his glass of wine at lunch, in those areas of the country where Methodism prevails. Temperance, too, seems to be a strong predictor, though more in men than women.

  ‘I can imagine. Where’s Nurse Miller now?’

  ‘On the sofa in Matron’s room. Dr. Crosswyn says she’s to go home to her mother soon as she can be moved and stay there till it’s quite healed. Full pay, too.’

  Ally nods. ‘Naturally. A broken collar bone is very painful. But complications are rare. I would expect her to be back with us and fully recovered in six weeks.’

  In six weeks Tom will have been in Japan for at least a fortnight. She has read about autumn in Japan, about how people travel to particular hillsides to see particular leaves redden and fall, the opposite of the cherry -blossom viewings in the spring. He will be there then too.

  ‘Yes, doctor. You’ll find Dr. Crosswyn in his office.’

  * * *

  There is the scent of coffee in the corridor, and she knocks quietly because Agatha tends to scream and drop trays at sudden noises. Agatha is also, in theory, an ex-patient, paid for her work as a parlour maid and sleeping in a room on the servants’ corridor, but she has not left the Aasylum grounds since she was admitted with mania and delusions as a young girl.

  ‘Ah, Dr. Moberley Cavendish. Just in time. Agatha brought a cup for you, didn’t you, Agatha? Sit down, won’t you.’

  Ally takes the green chair to the left of the fireplace, where she can see out across the grounds. The mizzle has thickened and is blowing in sheets between the walled garden and the plum trees. There is no-one out there. Agatha, startled by her arrival, seems to have frozen beside Dr. Crosswyn’s desk.

  ‘I should think you might put the coffee on this table, Agatha,’ Ally says. ‘Then I can pour for Dr. Crosswyn while he finishes his letter.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. I mean Doctor, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you, Agatha.’

  Dr. Crosswyn thinks it likely that Nurse Miller’s deportment during last night’s incident was not as it would have been had he or Matron been present to witness her actions. It is not the first time Miller has been involved in scuffles with patients, often patients who seem to cause little trouble to other nurses. Since it is she and not the patient who was injured, there is no reason to begin a formal investigation, and in any case the taking of witness statements tends to be a demoralising and divisive process for all concerned, but he has made a note in her file and before Miller leaves, he will have a serious conversation. Mrs. Middleton’s case is not intractable, she has previously posed no risk to anyone but herself, and conditions in the back wards are likely to worsen her symptoms.

  ‘Does she regret her actions?’ Ally asks.

  Dr. Crosswyn looks up at her over his coffee. ‘It had not occurred to me to ask. You consider it significant?’

  ‘If she is genuinely contrite it is because she knows that Nurse Miller’s experience is as real as her own. And that she herself is responsible for what she does and perhaps able at least to imagine herself doing otherwise. Although of course contrition is often taken to excess, especially in women.’ And self-awareness, she has often thought, is a marker of sanity but not of happiness.

  He nods. ‘You had better go and talk to her.’

  Ally swallows. In London, Dr. Camberwell simply refused her admission to the back wards. No, he said, it is no place, no sight, for a lady. But there are women there, she said. I doubt most of them even know they are women, he said. And I forbid it. Here, she has walked those corridors once. And does not want to do so again.

  ‘Where is Mrs. Middleton?’

  He passes her a plate of biscuits, shortbread made by an inmate who used to run a tea-shop in Penzance. ‘Oh, I had them take her back to Four. I don’t think she knows what happened. They’re all in a bit of a fluster. I thought you might smooth some feathers?’

  She wonders again: is this medicine? Should she not rather be conducting appendectomies, or at the very least attending women in childbirth, poor women who are otherwise left to the care of untrained neighbours and friends, or treated as teaching material for young men?

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And there are two new admissions, a farmer’s wife from the Tehidy estate and a young girl from Mylor. You could examine them?’

  She goes up to the ward first, the smell intensifying as she climbs the stairs. The walls are painted the same shiny green as the London Women’s Hospital. A nurse passes in the corridor above her, and a moment later she hears the banging of pipes that the nurses think the doctors do not know is their code for warning each other that a doctor is coming. Dr. Crosswyn says they are not hiding anything very terrible, more probably some untidiness, perhaps tardiness in the making of beds, than any abuse of patients. The asylum is hardly a place to keep secrets. One of the disadvantages of all the locks and keys, in Ally’s view, is that their noise makes it impossible to surprise anyone. She opens the door to Ward Four.

  As usual, half of the patients turn to stare at her and the other half continue to mutter or sing or stroke their hair as if there is no stir in the air around them, no change in the light. There is Miss Carpente
r, who is sometimes Lady Clarinda, although in neither character does she seem to Ally to offer any threat to herself or anyone else. Lady Clarinda sings, mostly in Italian and mostly rather above Miss Carpenter’s vocal range. One summer day seven years ago, Lady Clarinda went around Miss Carpenter’s village knocking on doors and demanding that her tenants serve her tea and present their household accounts for her approval, and since then both have lived here. And there is Mrs. Middleton, who tends to be vocal about her own damnation and the similar fate of those around her, but today is in bed, silent and facing the wall. This turns out to be at least partly because the nurses have put her in a ‘closed dress,’ a stiff garment whose sleeves are sewn into the side-seams and sewn up across the cuff so that the wearer’s arms are fastened at her sides and she cannot use her hands. Closed dresses are made by patients in the asylum sewing room. The nurses have also fastened the sheets around her mattress so that she can’t sit up; it is against the rules to apply physical restraint on the wards but for some reason the closed dresses don’t count and this kind of violence by bed-making is tacitly allowed. With one nurse injured, it is better not to antagonise the others, for Dr. Crosswyn is right that the patients are in the end dependent on the tempers of their attendants, and also that the more intelligent and charitable nurses do not choose to work in madhouses.

  ‘Mrs. Middleton? How are you this morning?’

  There is no response. Ally probably wouldn’t feel like making conversation either if she were sewn into a nightdress and fastened down by sheets.