Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘She is still with you,’ says Mrs. Ashton. ‘Stronger day by day.’

  Ally straightens her skirt. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Ashton. Still sleeping well, I hope?’

  ‘She won’t leave, you know. Not until you hear her. Did anyone listen to her while she was among us, I wonder? Was she carrying secrets too heavy for her?’

  Aubrey, she thinks. But what May did with Aubrey, with Papa’s friend, is on the wall of the Manchester Art Gallery for all to see. Not secret at all. Ally takes a breath. One can see how it would be so effective, the suggestion that the dead had terrible secrets. One would need to pick over the past, reimagine and re-examine the actions of dead hands and the words of a dead tongue, and then, presumably, one would pay a woman who claimed to be able to finish the story.

  ‘Oh, we all have our secrets,’ she says. The living and the dead.

  The red-haired nurse backs out of the linen closet. ‘Oh. Good afternoon, Mrs. Cavendish. Sorry, Doctor. Come to see Mrs. Elsfield, have you? She’s on her bed. Not much a firm hand wouldn’t cure, in my view.’

  Mrs. Ashton looks up. ‘She tried that. A firm hand. Didn’t you, Nurse?’

  The nurse puts down her armful of sheets. ‘Now then. We don’t like liars on this ward, Mrs. Ashton. And you wouldn’t want to go upstairs, would you?’

  If there are no bruises, Ally thinks, I can do nothing. And one has to pretend to trust the nurses more than the patients or the whole system will collapse.

  Mrs. Elsfield looks oddly small lying on her bed with the swathes of a dress fallen over her body like a shroud. She lies on her right, facing the wall, and has turned her face into the crook of her arm. Apart from the blackberries, Ally has never seen any sign that Mrs. Elsfield is in any way disordered.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs. Elsfield. You’re not feeling well?’

  Mrs. Elsfield turns her head, puts her hands over her face and opens her fingers to peek at Ally.

  ‘Mrs. Elsfield?’

  Mrs. Elsfield turns her face back into the mattress. Ally looks around to find Mrs. Middleton gazing over her shoulder.

  ‘Poor old dear,’ says Mrs. Middleton. ‘She shouldn’t be here, not at this last. And it’s the vicar she’s needing, not the doctor.’

  Ally meets Mrs. Middleton’s eyes, perhaps for the first time. The first part of her statement is true.

  ‘I’d like to examine her and find out about that,’ Ally says. She glances around. There are no screens here, and it seems unlikely that Mrs. Elsfield will rise from her bed and accompany Ally to an office or to the sick ward. ‘Nurse, would you help me to undress her? Gently.’

  Watched by Mrs. Middleton, the nurse takes hold of Mrs. Elsfield’s hand screening her face and tugs. ‘Come along now. Don’t make this difficult, Maria Soon be over and done with if you help us.’

  Mrs. Elsfield curls herself smaller, tighter. Her thin grey plait, sewn at the end, moves on the pillow. The nurse yanks her hand and Mrs. Elsfield whimpers and tries to burrow away.

  ‘Leave it,’ says Ally. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘They have to do as they’re told or we’ll have no order. Last chance, Maria, or I’m sending for another nurse. Do you want her stripped, doctor, or is it just her chest?’

  Mrs. Elsfield shrinks again.

  ‘Neither. Please, nurse, stop this.’

  ‘Right. Excuse me.’ The nurse pushes in front of Ally and seizes both of Mrs. Elsfield’s hands, hauls on them. Mrs. Elsfield spits and the nurse slaps her.

  ‘Stop it,’ says Ally. ‘Nurse, stop it.’

  She remembers the housekeeper Jenny slapping May, holding her down and slapping her while May fought and shouted and Ally stood, hands behind her back, waiting her turn.

  ‘Now you see what we have to put up with.’ The nurse drops Mrs. Elsfield, who curls up again like a released spring. She’ll never get out now, Ally thinks, but she was never going to get out anyway. ‘I’ll call another nurse and we’ll soon have her ready for you. Not that I couldn’t deal with her myself, but we have to keep the rules, don’t we?’

  ‘No,’ says Ally. ‘Leave it. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. We do this kind of thing all the time. Have to, in this line of work. Stop that now, Maria, you’re only making things worse for yourself.’

  The others watch while two nurses hold Mrs. Elsfield down and open her dress so that Ally, with trembling hands, can listen to her chest. NAD, Ally writes. Nothing abnormal diagnosed.

  She’s on her way down the stairs to Ward Two when there are running feet along the corridor. The nurse from the sick ward.

  She sees Ally. ‘Where’s Dr. Crosswyn?’

  ‘Out,’ says Ally. ‘At the hospital.’

  ‘You’d better come.’

  The nurse opens the door of the sick ward and stands back. There is shouting. Mary Vincent, with blood running down her face and a contusion on her forehead with the white gleam of bone behind it, is struggling with two nurses. Her closed dress is torn at the shoulder. Leave me alone, she shouts, get off me. Stop that, say the nurses, stop that at once. The nurse who came to find Dr. Crosswyn goes to their assistance and uses Mary’s hair to pull her to the bed. They put her face-down and fasten a strap around her bare white ankles. Mary arches her bound body and tries to fling herself off the bed but they seize her again.

  ‘You don’t get out of going upstairs like this, Mary. Thought you could get some more time down here, didn’t you? Stop that now.’

  ‘Always been sly, haven’t you? Rather be lounging in bed here than on the ward.’

  ‘She’s hurt,’ says Ally. ‘Her head is hurt.’

  The corridor nurse looks up. ‘Some of them’ll try anything. She thinks if she hurts herself she can stay here. Ran herself into the wall.’

  Mary howls. The sound makes Ally’s scalp crinkle. Stop, she thinks, stop, I can’t bear it. The doctor can’t bear it.

  The other nurse puts her hands on Mary’s head, stubby fingers over her eyeballs. Silence. The nurse looks up. ‘Often works,’ she says to Ally. ‘Don’t have to press very hard, see, on the eyes.’

  Ally bites her lip, closes her own eyes. Fingers pressing on the darkness, and one’s arms tied.

  ‘We’ll take her up, shall we?’ asks the first nurse. ‘You’ll probably find her more docile after a few hours on her own.’

  They are going to put Mary ‘in seclusion,’ in a windowless room on the top corridor where Dr. Crosswyn himself has authorised the use of restraints on patients experiencing episodes of unmanageable behaviour. It is therapeutic, he says, for those who have lost all control and find themselves quite at the mercy of destructive mania, to remove all sensory stimulus and all means of destruction. It is not unknown for patients entering such a phase of illness to ask for seclusion.

  Mary drags her face around. There may be some traumatic deformity of the frontal bone and her eyes are already blackening. ‘No, please. I’ll stop, I promise. Please don’t send me up there.’

  ‘Pity she didn’t think of that earlier, isn’t it, doctor? Get the chair, Nurse Crawford. We won’t chance any tricks on the stairs.’

  They are going to tie her to a chair and carry her up those stairs.

  Mary’s eyes meet Ally’s. ‘Please, doctor.’

  ‘Trying to put one over the doctor now, are we?’

  So which are you, Alethea? A madwoman or a doctor? Did I not know, did I not warn you from childhood of your nervous weakness, of your propensity to hysteria and unreason? You chose the asylum, Alethea, because you indulge yourself in feeble-mindedness. Because despite all your training and all your so-called qualifications, you are still crazed.

  ‘No,’ says Ally. ‘No. Nurse, stop this. You are unkind.’ Her voice is too loud. All of them, even Mary, fall silent. ‘Tell me, nurse, how would you have to feel, to do as Mary does? How bad wou
ld it be, in your head, for you to run against the wall until your skull cracks, or to force a knife through your own flesh to the very bone? What would it take, Nurse?’

  There are tears on her face. She swallows.

  ‘That is how it is for Mary. That is it. She is like you, and like me. Like all of us. Only more sad.’

  She cries, there on the ward. She has not cried for years.

  They do not let her go. They take her down to Dr. Crosswyn’s office, a nurse on each side, where one of them stays with her, watching her, until he comes.

  A PLACE THAT WOULD CALL HIM ACROSS YEARS

  Drops of rain gather on the twigs and hang, suspended like icicles, longer than seems possible before gravity plucks. Concentric circles spread in the pond, reaching out until they overlap into miniature overfalls, sometimes tossing a floating leaf just as a small boat would be tossed by wind-over-tide. He has not yet seen a leaf capsize. Another drop gathers and rolls down the central vein of one of the last leaves left on the tree, hangs tantalising from its point. The weight of rain must have some bearing on the fall of each leaf. The drop falls, and an insect supported by the pond’s surface tension skids and rocks. He watches the ripples diminish, trying to identify the moment where they become invisible although the shock continues to spread, immeasurably, to the mossy bank, taking shape around the stepping stones and the water lilies. Tom shakes his head. In Japanese terms this may be contemplation, one of the purposes of the summer house. Penvenick would call it time-wasting. As soon as he gets back to the city, he will find out about those silk workshops. De Rivers could have given him a more specific commission: what if he purchases something that seems to him extraordinary and De Rivers does not like it? I bear that risk, De Rivers said, if I do not want it myself I will sell it and as long as you meet my specifications my investment will be sound. But get it right, Tom, and I’ll pay you a bonus, enough that that wife of yours can sit by the fire doing fancy-work as long as she likes instead of dragging your name around the county asylum. It’s enough to make a man wonder if you should pay a visit yourself, allowing it.

  Even at this distance, Tom’s buttocks and shoulders clench. But the money is enough, just about. Ally herself is a pragmatist; let him say what he will, she said. It does not hurt me and his money will certainly help. Goodness knows worse things have been said of all of us working for women’s liberation and not by people who are offering money either. One of her little smiles flickered out at him: we can use some of De Rivers’ payment to offer a small bursary at the Hospital for Women, if you like. His breath catches. Ally.

  Enough, he thinks, enough. What is he doing here, gazing at raindrops like an infant left in a crib? He will take a walk. It is wet, but not cold. The path to the shrine went on, winding up through the woods. A very old route, Makoto said. There used to be a monastery up there. He should try to tell someone where he is going, or that he is going, not slip away from his hosts like a thief in the night. He tries to imagine the pantomime, the risk of insult, of giving the impression that he does not intend to return or that he is going in search of something they have failed to offer him. He won’t be long, just far enough beyond the temple to see where that path leads.

  The forest is loud. Rain hisses on the dying leaves overhead and drips through the bushes at the edges of the track. Bamboo leans whispering at the path’s turnings; he remembers the creature he didn’t meet on the island, and Makoto telling him a country saying to the effect that it’s foolish to fear bears because one within twenty paces will kill you whatever you do and one at any greater distance will run away whatever you do. Bears will be preparing to hibernate now, and hungry. There is no birdsong, no slithering or pattering in the undergrowth. Everything will be sheltering, bright eyes peeping from under leaves and twisted roots, fur spiked with rain and feathers fluffed. Cold water is beginning to seep through the shoulder seams of his jacket, but he’s warm enough, walking fast.

  He’s only beginning to settle into the forest, to the rhythm of his tread and his breathing and the rain, when he comes to the torii gates, their red deeper and brighter than it was yesterday, echoing under the dim greys of a wet wood. He pauses to touch one again, as if physical contact could substitute for understanding. Each one is raised in prayer, he remembers. They are memorials, or hopes or fears made manifest in wood and left to glow here under the trees. His fingers graze each one as he passes, but as he comes towards the clearing he stops. There is something there, low to the ground and fleet in sinuous movement. He freezes. Two of them, feline in their delicacy. He slows his breathing. A fox sitting on the lowest step of the temple, tail curled around its feet, sharp nose turned towards its mate who swirls and leaps in the open space between the water stoup and the building. Dancing, the other fox is dancing, turning fast as a fish back on itself, flowing, red fur rain-dark and the white bib bright. Tom and the fox-wife watch. Fine feet lope, feathery tail brushes the damp air and flickers over the fallen leaves. The dog fox leaps and bends low, waltzes and jumps. And then the dancer sees the intruder. There is a moment’s shock and they are gone so fast that for a moment he thinks they have vanished where they stood, vanished into thin air.

  He stands a long time, in case they come back, and eventually makes his way to the step. There is no sign, no token of their presence, no footprints or shed hair.

  * * *

  He had planned to return to the summerhouse, to hope that no one would notice that he’d ever left, but he’s too wet not to go straight in to change. He returns the way he set out, through the back gate into the compound. The surface of the pond is still dimpling, circles still spreading, drops still gathering on the overhanging leaves. He can feel wet socks squishing in his shoes as he makes his way along the gravel path, and the water that crept through his jacket is now pasting his shirt sleeves to his arms. He climbs onto the veranda. The screens are open, but not far enough for him to pass through. It seems uncouth, to walk into someone’s house. At home he would knock, or at least call as he opened the door. He hesitates, and hears footsteps. Makoto, looking like a willow pattern figure clasping his gown under an umbrella, is coming along the path.

  ‘I am sorry to leave you again. I had a call to pay, and then I was in discussion with my father. I hope you have not been dull.’

  Makoto’s eyes are hooded, his gaze just below Tom’s face.

  ‘Not in the least. I would not have guessed that a summer house would be so beguiling in the rain.’

  He finds that he does not want to tell Makoto about his walk.

  Makoto nods. ‘In such a climate, we must build for wet weather also. But you are very wet!’

  As we should build at home, Tom thinks, but who makes a rain garden? We huddle in our dimmed rooms and blinker the grey skies with net curtains. And he is being foolish. There is no possible call for secrecy. In any case, most of the village has probably heard that he passed by.

  ‘Not so very wet. I took a short walk. Mostly I have been admiring your garden.’

  Their eyes meet, and slide away.

  ‘Back to the shrine?’ Makoto asks, as if he doesn’t already know, as if he hasn’t already been told that his foreigner has been sneaking around up there in the rain.

  ‘Makoto,’ he asks. ‘Makoto, just for this evening, do you have a suit of Japanese clothes I could wear? Perhaps you keep one for guests?’

  Rain scrabbles on the roof and the fire hisses and shifts. In the kitchen, cups and bowls chime as water pours and the maids’ voices rise and fall. What do they talk about, two servants at night in a Japanese mountain village? Makoto’s face is burnished by firelight, intent on the charcoal glow. Without looking up, he calls. There is silence in the kitchen and then lamplight from behind the curtain, the shuffle of sock feet over straw. Tom adjusts the cotton gown, feeling, as he has all evening, half-dressed, as if he’s gone to the office in his nightshirt. He thinks Makoto is asking for sake.


  It comes in a stoneware bottle, with two cups.

  ‘Yes?’ asks Makoto. No bowing, no invitation.

  ‘Please,’ says Tom.

  He repeats what Makoto says as well as he can—a toast, probably—and sips. His eyes water. Not sake but some kind of spirits.

  ‘No,’ says Makoto. ‘Like this.’ He tips back his head and tosses the draught. ‘Again.’

  The firelight dissolves and spins. They are both lying down now, like Roman senators at a feast. Makoto reaches for the bottle and closes his hand on it the second time he tries. Tom holds his hand over his cup, no more, but Makoto pours anyway. The charcoals glow dragon-red and Makoto’s legs and feet fade away into the room’s night. Tom licks his hand.

  ‘You’re so sad, to leave home again?’

  Tom hasn’t visited his mother since before his marriage, but his last nights there have usually been marked by a guilty sense of freedom, of a duty discharged, like the trickle of outdoor air into a stale room.

  Makoto rolls onto his back. ‘No. I have asked my parents for something and they have declined.’

  He’s too drunk to phrase an indirect question. Arranged marriages, they still have arranged marriages in Japan. Often, he’s read, the couple hardly meet before the wedding.

  ‘A woman? You want to marry. Or not?’

  Makoto sighs. ‘No. I want the land. To come home.’

  Tom sits up to see Makoto’s face. The land? To walk away from his career?

  ‘You want to be a farmer? After all those years of training?’