Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  Firelight plays on Makoto’s face, on his closed eyelids.

  ‘Not yet, of course. I have my work. And my father is still strong. But later, yes. This is my home.’

  Tom tries to imagine having such a home, a place that would call him across years. It is probably necessary to be born to it, it is probably not something one can buy, even with the figure De Rivers mentioned. He tries to imagine having a father, to tell him what he is allowed to do.

  ‘But your parents perhaps need your salary? Or they are proud of what you have done?’ Perhaps they don’t see why their son should throw away years of work and turn back on the great stride between a village that strikes Tom as essentially medieval and the Engineering Department in Aberdeen.

  Makoto puts his hands behind his head, opens his eyes and stares up at the ceiling. The rain seems to have stopped.

  ‘No. It is the foxes.’

  Tom must have misheard. Or Makoto’s English is at last succumbing to the drink. The shochu. The Japanese, James Moorhouse observes in Three Years in the Land of the Rising Sun, have a child’s tolerance for alcohol.

  ‘Foxes?’

  Makoto huffs in exasperation. ‘We own foxes. We are kitsunemochi. It is stupid. A winter’s tale for old women.’

  Tom lies back. A person, he supposes, could own a fox. ‘You mean you farm them? Perhaps for fur?’

  ‘No. No-one does that. No, in the countryside some families are said to be kitsunemochi. It means there are foxes on the land. I should have known. I should not have asked my father.’

  ‘Well, there probably are foxes on the land. I saw some only today.’

  Makoto waves his arm, as if swatting a fly. ‘Not real foxes. Spirits, perhaps you would say. Not devils but bad.’

  ‘Goblins?’ Demons, he thinks, elves, ghosts. It’s all the same.

  ‘I have not heard the word. Goblins. Very well. So in each village there is a family who have goblin foxes. And we are that family. And I have annoyed my father by raising the subject again.’

  Tom lifts his head to drain his glass again. He is not sure which of them is deranged. ‘You have goblin foxes? You, an engineer?’

  Makoto sits up and pours again. ‘Some of the new railway lines are said to have their own fox spirits. People see trains coming to hit them but when the train is on them there is only a fox.’

  ‘What?’ And what are people doing on the railway lines anyway, fox or no fox?

  ‘We have had them since my great-great-grandfather’s time. He was adopted into the family, you see, and then inherited and the villagers did not like it. And they said he owned foxes. They cause trouble.’

  ‘Stealing hens?’ We must make haste and tell the King, because the sky is falling down.

  ‘No. I told you these are not real foxes. No, they spread lies about people. Gossip. They borrow things and leave them lying around, or they make things break. Sometimes they eat up all the food.’

  Gossiping foxes? Tom gives up. ‘I saw two foxes earlier,’ he says. ‘Dancing. The dog fox was dancing for the vixen. At the temple.’

  Makoto lies back again. ‘At the temple? Don’t tell my mother. She’ll say you saw—what were they?—golbins?’

  ‘Goblins,’ says Tom. ‘Though I’m not sure that’s right.’

  They lie there. It’s warm, and the Japanese clothes are very comfortable once you get used to them. Tom thinks about what he doesn’t understand.

  ‘Why do the spirit foxes mean you can’t come back?’

  ‘They don’t. That’s what I tell my parents. My father says these stories aren’t told in the city, no-one there calls me kitsunemochi, so I should stay there and live my life without these lies. He says they sent me away so I could escape this story. He says he does not wish to hear of this again.’

  ‘Why don’t they move somewhere else? Another village?’

  Makoto drains his glass. ‘They have always been here. And no-one would buy the land because of the foxes. I should not have asked.’

  In the morning, Tom thinks, he will try to make sense of this. He will be able to see where the problems are, in the morning.

  ‘Like the stone foxes?’ Tom asks. ‘At the shrines? I mean, temples?’

  Makoto rolls onto his side. His eyes are closing. ‘Inari. No. And yes.’

  They are woken by the maid, pulling back the shutters to fill the room with a blinding white light. Tom groans and rolls over. His head hurts. What is the etiquette for vomiting? He pulls the striped gown closed, although the maid must already have seen his hairy white belly. There are reasons for the buttons on European clothes. She speaks to him, the global things that women with things to do say to men who ought to know better. His neck is stiff and one arm is numb. The maid scolds and clucks. Makoto is lying on his back like an effigy, apparently oblivious to the morning. There are kitchen noises: soon the rest of the family will appear, washed and dressed for breakfast. Tom uses the functioning arm to push himself up and sits there, rubbing his neck. A bath, he needs a bath, but as far as he knows bathing is possible only in the evenings. He stands up and the room tilts. It’s a long time since he last drank spirits and he’s felt like this only once before, one night in Aberdeen after exams when he stumbled back to his rooms, his disgrace along the way veiled by a freezing fog that seemed sent to slap him awake. He makes his way to the lavatory like someone testing the ice.

  When he comes back, at least approximately washed and dressed, Makoto is sitting at the table with his family. There are steaming bowls on the table and the smell of fish and soy on the air. Tom’s throat closes and he swallows hard. Makoto doesn’t translate his greeting and apologies. He had better wait, he thinks, to ask about the foxes.

  FOUR DARK TWIGS

  She leans her head on the window, lets the train shake her skull, as it pulls her across England. Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire. It is all the same, all rolling pasture scattered with trees and clumps of stone houses. There is more or less grey cloud and the water flowing through England, hills to coast to cloud and round again, runs in larger or smaller channels. Sometimes someone comes to sit in her compartment and she pulls her wrap up around her face, shakes her head when a woman with knitting asks where she is going and a man with a newspaper flaps and folds it and asks if he can bring her anything from the tea room at Salisbury station. As there are clothes for mourning, so there should be clothes for failure, clothes that mark the wearer’s degradation. Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire. The tracks run along a canal plucked by raindrops. A man and a boy work a lock with sacks wrapped over their heads while a horse grazes at worn grass. Birmingham begins, smoke and red brick. Where money is made, Alethea, there is always misery and suffering beyond the imaginations of so-called respectable citizens. The carriage fills up and she turns in her seat towards the window. The light has dimmed and the brickwork outside is stained with soot and smoke. Staffordshire, where patches of pastoral England pretend to outwear brick chimneys and gouged hillsides. Workers in the Potteries die of the poison glazes they handle for a livelihood. But you have not the excuse of ignorance, Alethea. When you devote yourself to trivial matters instead of saving those who have no other help, you cannot say that you know not what you do. More canals, and ragged children walking beside the horses in the rain. The mortality rate for canal children is relatively low, probably because there is less overcrowding on boats than in the rooms of the urban working class and better sanitation. And because they are not left unattended in infancy while their parents work, although on the other hand they presumably remain uneducated. Mamma is right, England is not a civilised country.

  The hills of Derbyshire rise, and in the distance she sees the village where Papa and Aubrey took her and May one summer. She remembers climbing a hill, May and Aubrey jumping from tussock to tussock across a bog, and later herself reading Virgil under a willow tree, refusing ham and plums at lunch
because Mamma doubted her self-discipline. In the valley bottoms where rivers fall, grey mills rise like cliffs. Like the asylum. She closes her eyes. In the mills, machinery bangs and roars. Children pull carts of babies through the streets, taking them to be fed by mothers who sacrifice their own moment to eat in doing so. The weight of outrage and unmet need presses down on this country like wet cloud. Burn it all down, wash England away into the sea, and start again.

  Stockport, the brick viaduct slashing the valley like oil paint thrown on a watercolour. Rows of terraced houses plough the hillsides and smoke hangs above their tiled roofs, waiting for the rain to wipe it down into the roads and backyards. Nausea thickens at the back of Ally’s throat: not long now.

  She has to put the trunk down on the wet pavement three times between the omnibus and the front gate. She has hooked Tom’s small valise over her forearm. Other families, other parents, would have come to meet her at the station. There is no point in such thoughts. The trunk bangs against her leg as she sets it down to open the gate. The black paint is peeling and the hedge is overgrown. There are weeds in the gravel path and green stains under the gutters on the white sections of half-timbering. Ally looks up to the window of the attic, where she slept the year Mamma said her nightmares were disturbing May, and to Papa’s north-facing studio, where he has had larger windows made and a balcony put in over the porch. She stops, her hand on the gate. Even now, she could turn away. And show Mamma a new kind of failure and weakness. She lifts the trunk onto the gravel and closes the gate behind her. It may be different, this time. It is three years since she was last here. Mamma wrote, did she not, that she is sorry to hear of Ally’s difficulties at the asylum, that she looks forward to seeing Ally happier in more useful work. She herself is changed. She is a doctor. She lifts the trunk for the last time and approaches the porch.

  It is Papa who answers her third ring on the bell, when she is peering through the stained glass of the sidelight and thinking that if there is no-one in, if despite her letter there is no-one in, she will go and sit at the back door to avoid the ignominy of waiting like a stray dog on the front step, in view of the street. He looks through the fanlight before he opens the door, as if he doesn’t know who might be there.

  ‘Ally. Darling girl. I didn’t know you were coming today. Come in.’

  He’s wearing his painting smock. It can’t be same one, but the ochre smear on the left sleeve looks familiar. She humps the trunk over the step.

  ‘Oh, remember the parquet. Scratches if you breathe on it.’

  Ally bows her head. ‘Sorry, Papa. We have only painted boards in Cornwall.’

  He watches her taking off her coat. Mamma won’t like it, and won’t like her bustled skirt. Papa is greyer than last time, and his eyebrows have begun to sprout white hairs, but he still carries himself upright and his face is unlined. She hangs her coat in the cupboard, as she always did. A winter cloak that must be Papa’s is on May’s peg.

  ‘So, you’ve come back to us?’

  ‘Just for the winter, Papa. To help with Dr. Henry’s clinic.’

  Papa nods. ‘Your mother said so. I don’t recall that you and Dr. Henry were such great friends.’

  Mamma used to consult Dr. Henry for Ally’s nervous troubles. He prescribed blistering and hard work, as a medieval physician might have done, although the rest of his practice appeared to be conducted along approximately modern lines. More than once, Papa simply countermanded Dr. Henry’s orders. The child will turn into a calf if she eats so many milk puddings.

  ‘He always did good work with the poor. He never spared himself.’

  Papa sighs. ‘Nor anyone else. Just as you please, Ally. You are surely old enough to do as you will. I was in the studio, my dear, when you arrived, and if you don’t mind I’ll just go back up. Your Mamma expects to be home this evening, I believe.’

  ‘And Jenny?’ she asks. She has been weakly dreading Jenny, who has known her since infancy and has never been taken in by any pretence of strength or competence. Who knows her a useless and foolish thing.

  ‘Oh, Mamma pensioned her off last year. Said she’d had a harder life than my coddled imagination could compass and deserved to pass her last years in comfort. She’s living with her sister, I think. Mamma will have the address if you want to visit.’

  He hurries up the stairs. She should perhaps have known when he didn’t answer her second ring that Papa was painting, not to be disturbed. But I did write, she thinks, I did give them the time of my train.

  The towel in the downstairs lavatory is grimy and soft, and there are stains in the WC. She decides not to try to carry the trunk upstairs and risk banging the banister spindles or the treads. She moves quietly, not to disturb Papa. The door of her room, her room and May’s, is closed and she stands on the landing, her hand on the concentric circles of the doorknob. May’s bed. The pillow on which her hair lay spread every morning, however tightly it was plaited at night. When Ally came to change the sheets or make May’s bed, there was the scent of May, a powdery drift for which she can now remember only the words. She opens the door, and May’s bed is bare and flat, the mattress covered only by a ridged cotton bedspread exactly as it was last time Ally visited. Someone—it can only be Mamma—has left in a glass vase four dark twigs of bronze beech leaves from the tree in the garden. A gesture, a hand lifted in the direction of the cut flowers that would seem to Mamma an intolerable waste of money urgently needed elsewhere. Maybe this time it will be different. On Ally’s bed against the opposite wall, there are folded sheets and the same worn green blanket that was always hers. She is, then, expected. She moves the pile to the table where she used to do her homework and begins to make the bed. The text from the gospel of Matthew is still on the wall: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.

  The house was always cold, cool even in the height of summer. Ally opens her trunk in the hall and carries up piles of clothes and books until it is light enough for her to take the whole thing. She finds herself putting her possessions back into the trunk instead of the chest of drawers, as if her visit is so short there is no point unpacking. She slides her garnet engagement ring over the first joint of her finger and back down again, making a tiny click in the house’s silence as it rejoins her wedding ring. She wants, anyway, to add the trunk bought for her wedding journey to the furniture of her childhood. Things have changed. She blows on her fingers and rubs her hands. It is not as if she will be here in the house very much. The clinic may at least be heated, and she will be too busy to mope. In the street, the trees are shedding their last leaves, and through the branches she can see the other houses. The children across the road, who used to go out in a carriage with their Mamma or accompanied by a nurse to the park, will be grown up now. She remembers them chattering and skipping along the pavement, dressed in clothes of which May was fiercely envious,. Next door was a banker and his wife; he used to leave early and return late on foot while she seemed rarely to leave the house, although other rich women called in carriages on Thursday afternoons and a maidservant took a lapdog around the block twice a day. It is not as if she is going to be here, in this house or in this room, enough to learn these patterns again.

  Ally presses her cold fingertips to her eyelids until she can feel the chill in her eyeballs. What has happened to Mary Vincent now? She is on the back ward, inevitably, perhaps still in isolation. Not restrained, surely Dr. Crosswyn would not authorise such a long period. Although the nurses seem able to use the closed gown at will. In some ways, Ally thinks, it would be a relief to be so tethered and put to bed, to be required to do nothing except remain warm and still for days. That, after all, is the principle of the treatment, inasmuch as there is a principle and it is a treatment. Mamma is right, it will be better for Ally to be stitching cuts and setting bones, treating the contagious diseases of prostitutes and the fevers and infections of slum children.

  Darkness is falling. It appears t
hat Papa still resists gaslight. The briar rose curtains are faded on the folds and threadbare at the hems. She remembers the curtains new, and Aubrey sitting on May’s bed telling her and May about the prince who came to hack his way through a hundred years’ growth of thorns to reach the sleeping princess. You stuff their heads with nonsense, said Mamma, as if a woman’s life began and ended with romance, as if girls had no souls but only hearts. I won’t have it. The next day the black and white text was on the wall. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

  Ally eases the door open and closed behind her. Her feet remember where the creaky floorboards are. There is a line of golden light under Papa’s door, behind which will be velvet drapes, candles and a log fire. The hall is full of winter dusk, thick around her ankles. The kitchen door handle is sticky to her touch, but inside there is warmth by the range and candles still in the same drawer. Papa might at least permit gaslight in the kitchen, where he hardly sets foot and certainly would not paint. Ally lights the lamp on the table and holds it up. The tiled floor is spattered with food around the range and table, and there are crumbs and hairs in unswept corners of the floor. She carries the lamp to the sink, where there are slimy potato peels piled up and stains on the enamel. She can smell the damp cloth on the draining board. It is clear, at least, what she should do until Mamma’s return.

  HE IMAGINES BEING A CHILD

  The station was much nearer the village than Tom expected, barely two hours’ walk down the cobbled track through the forest, and then along the valley bottom over a swooping new bridge and so into a town where a stone school building with glass windows squatted among the wooden houses and shops. No, Makoto said, he did not go to school there but from the age of ten stayed with his mother’s brother in another town. The train comes so close, Tom thinks. Any of those villagers who believe in demon foxes and stare at his white skin and red hair as if they had never heard of other nations could walk down here, where there are newspapers in the shops and even milk for sale, and be in the city by dinner time.