Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  The train comes. Ally takes a corner seat, dries her fingers and pats her face with a damp handkerchief, but her skirts cling about her calves and her shoulders are soaked to the skin. It would be the practical thing to borrow a set of asylum clothes. She will wait, she thinks, until she can take off her coat and scarf to read the letter properly, but she runs her fingers through the drier parts of her hair so they don’t damage Tom’s paper and takes down a hairpin to open it, just to peep and make sure the first line doesn’t say I write from my hospital bed or Please do not worry but. That’s when she sees that the other letter isn’t from Annie, or even from Cousin George at Cambridge. It’s from Mamma.

  The carriage upholstery, the steamed-up windows, the damp coats and dripping hats of the other passengers, tessellate and dissolve. The smell of wet wool and pipe smoke is suddenly nauseating. No. Mamma has not written to her since her marriage, since the last letter telling her that in marrying she destroyed all her own work and threw away the efforts of all who had laboured so hard to support her. Ally’s breath comes short, as if there’s a great weight pressed on her chest. What can Mamma want with her now? Unless perhaps Papa has been taken sick, or is—She remembers the letter that told her May was dead. This is the letter I have been hoping not write, and you not to receive. She turns Mamma’s letter over and opens it.

  Mamma wants Ally to return to Manchester. There is no reason, she writes, for Tom to be spending his money renting a house for Ally when there is a room for her in her parents’ house. It is not as if Ally had any real position at the asylum, or as if she were doing anything other than dabbling in philanthropy. An opportunity has arisen for a doctor committed to the care of the poor, a doctor willing to minister to those for whom there is no other hope, who must otherwise die like wild animals. Mamma knows that, especially with Tom away and no particular reason to remain in Cornwall, Ally will not harden her heart to such need. She will perhaps recall Dr. Henry, who does such great work in the Home and among the people of the slums? Dr. Henry, exhausted by so many years of hard service, has become increasingly unwell and eventually agreed to allow the Committee to send him to spend the winter resting on the south coast. A colleague is covering his private practice, and Mamma has assured the Committee that it would be to Ally’s benefit to take on his charitable work. The pay is of course not great, but it is something and therefore surely preferable to unpaid labour at the asylum. Mamma hopes also that Ally will not reject an opportunity to pass a season at home. Neither she nor Papa now enjoys quite the perfect health that was once theirs.

  Ally looks out of the clear patch someone has rubbed on the window. The letter is not what she feared. Mamma sounds gentler than usual. She acknowledges Ally’s expertise, that her work deserves payment. It is an invitation, of sorts, perhaps the nearest thing to a welcome of which Mamma is capable. She remembers previous returns, all ending in Mamma’s anger and Ally’s reversion to cowed and nervous adolescence. It takes you days, Aunt Mary once observed, to speak to us again after you have been a night or two with my sister. Maybe it would be different now, maybe there is now room in that house for Ally to be the adult she has become, to take her place on almost equal terms. It is not like Mamma to mention her own health. Does Mamma herself require advice? She cannot remember that Mamma has ever been ill, not once in Ally’s whole life. She remembers the private penitence Mamma taught to her daughters, the stones in the shoes as a reminder of sin, the food denied to cure temper and ‘hot blood.’ The tests of endurance. It is not as if Mamma would have betrayed any bodily discomfort even to her own household. She remembers the candle flame. The night in the cellar. She shifts in her seat. She cannot say even now that she has not had need of everything Mamma taught her.

  They are approaching Truro station. A man leaving the compartment stands back for her, gestures that she should go first, so Ally finds her feet, stands, queues in the corridor with her wet skirt clinging to her legs, tugs it free to climb down the steps to the platform. The rain has eased a little, dimpling the puddles rather than pounding out bubbles of air. The beggar girl is there again, blue-tinged hands hugging her legs to keep herself in the shelter of the archway, and a porter looking away, pretending not to see her. Someone should speak to her. Ally bows her head to the wind and sets off up the hill, rain spattering her wet face and clothes.

  ‘My dear girl. You should have waited for the rain to stop. Or at the very least taken a cab from the station.’

  Ally can’t meet his eyes. ‘We had an arrangement. Besides, it may rain for days.’

  She has made a fool of herself. She had forgotten that respectable adults take cabs. Dr. Crosswyn touches her arm. ‘Not like this. I do not expect you to walk a mile in such weather merely to take coffee with me. Promise me at least that next time you will take a cab. We may not at the moment be able to pay you a salary, but I do not ask you to give yourself hypothermia in the asylum’s service. My dear, I am quite concerned.’

  He ushers her to the fire, into his own chair.

  ‘My skirts will mark the leather,’ she says. ‘I will stand a little.’

  ‘Your hands are quite blue.’ He rests his fingertips on her knuckles a moment.

  ‘It is only peripheral. I am warm from the walk.’ I can take care of myself, she thinks, I am neither a child nor a patient. And also wrap me, warm me, feed me. Her skirt begins to steam in the fire’s heat.

  Dr. Crosswyn rings the bell for Agatha. ‘I will have them bring you some soup. I don’t know what we should do about your clothes. Perhaps one of the nurses?’

  ‘I am almost dry already. And I cannot take soup at this hour. Truly, a cup of coffee is all I could want.’ She hears herself, bordering on hysteria. She is a fool. And she is hungry.

  ‘You like to be hardy, I see.’

  ‘A certain hardiness is a necessity of our training, is it not?’

  A necessity met by Mamma’s regime long before Ally arrived in London. A necessity that has left her unable to say, I am hungry, or I am cold, left her without the first utterances of a child.

  There is a soft tap on the door and Agatha edges around it. She looks up at Ally, startled, and then gazes steadfastly at the edge of Dr. Crosswyn’s fringed rug.

  ‘Agatha. Good morning.’ It is Dr. Crosswyn’s habit, or perhaps gift, to give the impression that every encounter with a patient brightens his day. ‘Very well, Dr. Moberley Cavendish. We will have coffee, please Agatha. You won’t take a little sponge cake, doctor? No special pleading at all?’

  Ally’s stomach rumbles. She hears herself speak. ‘I thank you, no.’

  Ally doesn’t want to see Mrs. Ashton, doesn’t want to hear any more about the cold spirit at her side. She doesn’t much want to see Ward Four’s nurse. Mary Vincent has managed to give herself a mild concussion running her head into the wall so there is an excuse to start on Two. Although self-indulgence even in such small matters is habit-forming. Ally goes upstairs towards Four, the coffee sour in her stomach, tendrils of newly-dry hair waving about her ears. Tom’s letter crackles in her pocket. At least she has it, and him. Even if she does spend the winter with Mamma, in spring Tom will come home and they will live together again. What Mamma calls ‘going home’ will not be a return to past years. Not least, Ally thinks, because May is gone, and although May has been dead nine years suddenly there is a weight in her throat and heat behind her eyes. A doctor does not weep on the central staircase of the Truro Asylum. Quickly, before a nurse comes and sees her changing her mind between landings, Ally turns back towards Ward Two. It would be helpful to nobody for Mrs. Ashton to see what is in Ally’s eyes.

  THE LAST WOLVES OF JAPAN

  They climb through the woods. From the top of the pass, says Makoto, you will see that the first snow has come on the mountains, and then we will take the old road down onto the plateau. My parents’ valley is broad, good soil, but the hills are high and when winter comes it is hard to travel
. Leaves fall around them as they walk, Makoto first with a bell to warn bears of their presence. A dinner bell, Tom thinks, but Makoto would not see the joke.

  Tom has travelled enough mountain roads here to know that in some districts every house is a farm, and also that all farms are arable. Even so, he finds himself imagining some kind of Japanese barn, probably with ornate gables and—what is he thinking—sliding doors for the animals. A farmyard with hens, for in the absence of meat and milk the Japanese do eat eggs and presumably, though he has not been offered it, chicken. Haystacks, he thinks, the autumn smell of ploughed fields, damp and rich on the cooling air. He and his mother used often to walk out of Harrogate on Sunday afternoons, past hedgerows where hips and berries began to brighten around fields of wheat ruffling like lakes in the wind, and later in the year, after the harvest, he would carry a basket for her and reach high for damsons and crab apples. It is time he wrote to her again.

  Makoto has turned to wait for him.

  ‘There is a tea-house on the other side,’ he says. ‘We can rest a while there.’

  Tom stops beside him. There is birdsong, a woodpecker nearby, small creatures busy in the undergrowth. Dead vines drip from a tree sparkling with golden leaves. It is the first time he has been so far inland, so far from the way home. ‘I am not tired. I found myself thinking of home.’

  Makoto sets off again. The path winds up through the trees with no summit in sight.

  ‘It is an interesting tea-house. Very old.’

  Not the tea ceremony. Makoto took him to a tea-house in the city where he had to sit on his feet for most of the afternoon while a man in an exquisite kimono spent hours making bitter tea in a surprisingly crude grey bowl and Tom, who had hoped to be seduced by the experience as the authors of the books he’s read were seduced, felt like a gorilla obliged to attend a ball at Buckingham Palace. Uncomprehending, unclean and finally enraged.

  ‘But perhaps we should rather press on? I am sure your mother is eager to see you, and doubtless will have tea in readiness.’

  Makoto glances back, smiles. ‘This is a country place. Not the full ceremony, I promise, only a pot of tea and a plate of sweets. But you like the old Japanese houses, yes? This one is nearly three hundred years old. The same building.’

  Tom uses the roots of a tree as steps up a steep part, glad that Makoto persuaded him to send most of his luggage back to the city by road and rail.

  ‘The same family?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  The tea-house is set back from the path, almost overwhelmed by the trees clustering close around it, the ends of their branches meshing over its wooden roof. Fallen leaves lie thick against its wooden walls, as if the forest is slowly taking back its own. The building does not look as if it has been holding off the trees for three centuries, and if Makoto had not been there—not that he can imagine Makoto not being here—Tom would probably have taken it for some kind of hut or shed and walked on. The wooden screens are pushed back so Tom can see in to a bare earth floor with low platforms around the walls and a fire burning in a pit in the middle. He checks the roof again; there is no chimney.

  ‘Here,’ says Makoto. ‘We keep our boots on, this time.’

  There is a pair of stone dogs or wolves, one each side of the doorway. Tom hasn’t seen or heard any wolves; the Japanese government has almost finished exterminating them. The bounty for a dead one is more than a year’s wages for a rural labourer. He stops to look.

  ‘Inari,’ says Makoto. ‘Foxes.’

  Tom nods. He’s read about this. ‘To keep off evil spirits?’

  ‘Not evil, I think. Difficult. Can one say, tricky?’

  ‘Yes. Mischievous?’ Tom suggests.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Cornish piskies, Tom thinks, the Hidden People of rural Scotland, the invisible beings who hide the tool you need for the job in hand and finish the end of the flour that was going to do tomorrow’s loaf. He strokes the nose of the nearest fox. ‘They hide things, perhaps knock over cups or jars?’

  ‘In old stories. Superstitions and women’s tales. Come, our host is waiting.’

  A figure comes out of the darkness at the back of the tea-house, a white-haired man in a dark tunic and leggings, barely as high as Tom’s shoulder but holding himself straight and loose as a boy. Everyone bows, and then the man comes over to Tom and touches his tweed jacket, looks up into his face where, he knows, a bronze stubble is blooming like rust. Just grow a beard on your travels, the ambassador’s secretary told him, that’s what everyone does, but Tom thinks a ginger beard is more than any Japanese child could be expected to countenance.

  ‘He asks if your jacket is silk,’ Makoto says.

  ‘Wool,’ says Tom. ‘Baa.’

  But of course the owner of a Japanese mountain tea-house has never heard a sheep, has not recognised Tom’s bleating as different from the other sounds coming out of his mouth.

  The old man carries a cast-iron kettle to the fire in one hand and hangs it from a chain suspended from the roof beam. Tom stretches out his legs. It feels odd to sit indoors in his boots and his feet are cramped and hot inside the leather and lacing.

  ‘Is there any thought of introducing sheep here?’ he asks Makoto. Most of the upland he has seen is forested, but if railways and mining, if lighthouses and telegraphs, why not sheep?

  Makoto shakes his head. ‘I have not heard of it. It would hurt our silk manufacture and there is no demand for mutton.’

  Tom remembers a story in Brunton’s memoir, about a team of European engineers who came upon a cow belonging to a Buddhist monastery on one of the islands. They tried to buy it and were refused on the grounds that foreigners were known to kill and eat such beasts and this was a sacred animal, raised by monks who refuse all harm. The engineers tried harder, offered more money, and eventually gave their word that the cow would be treated with respect and not killed, that they wanted it only for the milk. They drove it over the hill into the next bay and slaughtered it below the tideline before rowing back to their ship with the dinghy full of excellent beef. The Japanese, Brunton complains, lie all the time, often for no reason.

  The kettle steams and rumbles. The old man comes forward again, carrying a tray holding a teapot and a plate of the inevitable sweets. There must be a woman somewhere in a back room, pounding and rolling rice dough.

  ‘You are thinking that sheep farming should be tried?’ asks Makoto.

  Tom shakes his head. The man lifts the kettle from its hook in one hand and fills the teapot. The steam and the scent of green tea rise in the gloom, and Tom is suddenly thirsty.

  ‘No. I know nothing about it. I think the climate may be too hot. And sheep would change your landscape.’

  He tries to imagine these hills stripped of their woods, turned to bare heath. There would be no heather or gorse. Of what could Japanese houses be built, without trees?

  Makoto nods, watching the old man’s hands lifting and pouring. ‘We were taken out on the—moors, you say? To see the purple flowers. Very beautiful.’

  Tom wants to see Britain from behind Makoto’s eyes, to see the strange and unnatural things to which he himself and everyone he knows is forever blind. The bleakness of the moors, where heather ruffles like water under the wind. Farmhouses of grey stone below grey-green hills. The pulsating verdure of a hedgerow in spring, bluebells scribbled purple in the shade of budding trees. The ancient forts and earthworks that form a chain across the uplands of the north.

  ‘It did not look odd to you? Perhaps desolate or bleak?’

  ‘Desolate?’ Makoto’s tongue still can’t quite point the ‘l.’

  Tom accepts his tea, ducks his head in thanks. ‘Er, comfortless, I suppose. Bare and unwelcoming.’

  Makoto’s back straightens. ‘We were most kindly welcomed. Most generously.’

  Oh Lord, Tom thinks, it is not possible
, even when an Englishman and a Japanese man speak the same language it is not possible to talk.

  ‘As I have been here,’ he replies, bowing.

  ANOTHER PRESENCE AT HER SHOULDER

  Ally is running through the woods, thorns snatching at her dress and hands. Although the sun is hot, there are no shadows and blood pounds painfully against her eyeballs and eardrums. She must hurry. She may already be too late. Something snatches at her ankle—a bramble, its barbs deep in her skin—and she tears free, tries to run faster but she’s dodging around trees and there isn’t a path, she may be lost, may be wasting even more time. Too late, too late, she has failed. A branch whips her face, snags her hair and she hurries on but it’s too late; by the time she stumbles into the clearing May is gone.

  She wakes sweaty, tangled in sheets and blankets meant for two. The mizzle has at last cleared and the moon stands bright in the window. May, she thinks, May’s grave under this same moon. She sits up. Her hair has come undone and is tangled around her neck, stuck to her hot face. She pulls it back. It is normal to have such dreams, normal for the unguarded mind to resurrect the dead, to re-enact the catastrophe that is so hard to accept. She gets out of bed to straighten the covers and brush her hair at the dresser whose mirror is full of moonlight. Her own face, swollen with sleep, gazes out into the dark room and there is no shadow, no flicker, of another presence at her shoulder. The hard thing, Ally thinks, plaiting her hair, is not that May is with her, trailing her, peering from behind, but that May is gone from the world. It is not ghosts but absence that is harder to bear. She fastens her braid and closes the curtains, rattling on their iron rail. Perhaps this idea offers some understanding of Mrs. Ashton; perhaps she is simply, childishly, in flight from mortality, fantasising spirits to spare herself the finality of death. She should see if Mrs. Ashton’s admission papers would offer some explanation for her disorder.