Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Eat it, darling. And then I’m going to bring my embroidery and sit with you while you rest—I want the fire even if you don’t—and then we’ll talk. You can come down to supper if I think you’re strong enough, there’s no-one coming tonight and a relief after last week I can tell you. Fourteen to dinner on Wednesday! I could see in Cook’s eyes she was thinking of giving notice but you know how James loves to entertain. The boys will be so happy to see you. And Annie’s home for Christmas, did her letter reach you? You’d maybe rather consult her than Dr. Stratton.’

  Salt butter, bitter marmalade, crisp toast flood Ally’s tongue and the coffee seems to enter her bloodstream. Aunt Mary stands by the window. Her hair has greyed since the summer, but she is wearing a new dress in royal blue damask trimmed with silver braid. Aunt Mary’s love of clothes has always been somehow cheering, an assertion of the value of aesthetic pleasure that has little to do with personal vanity. Her dresses are flags for beauty.

  ‘That’s it, darling. You’ll soon feel better for some nice food. You didn’t eat at all yesterday?’

  Ally tries to remember. Yesterday. She lit the kitchen range but she doesn’t remember eating anything herself. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Aunt Mary nods. ‘You’ve got very thin. I never understood why Elizabeth doesn’t waste away. Alfred of course takes his meals elsewhere now?’

  Ally bits her lips. ‘Mm.’

  ‘Poor Ally. I’ll stop talking to you about it. Finish your toast, darling. More coffee?’

  Aunt Mary stays until Ally has eaten all that is comfortable, and then takes the tray herself. Ally lolls against the pillows, tries not to hear Mamma. Sating yourself in idle luxury when there is such suffering as even you would be ashamed to behold not five minutes from where you lie lazing.

  The fire crackles and there are hoof beats down the street, getting louder. The cart rattles past and then fades. A man’s voice in the hall—George—and the front door opens and closes. Her neck is stiff and she adjusts the pillow. How long since she was ill, since she lay in bed excused from ordinary life? This day only, she thinks, it would be too easy to become an invalid, to lie here and perhaps pass the days with novels or a little fancy-work. Mamma is quite right, ladies take to the sofa as gentlemen to the club, because it is a place where nothing is asked, where we are fed and coddled like babies at the breast and allowed to slide unknowing into damnation. Like some babies at the breast, some fortunate few. She remembers having measles as a child, before she and May started school. There is nothing wrong with Alethea except that she would rather mope by the fire than learn her lessons. If you are unwell, Alethea, please go to your room; you are scarcely a fit sight for the drawing room with those eruptions on your face. You vomited because you took too much water; did I not tell you that moderation is particularly important in cases of fever? And then one night Mamma came to her with a covered bowl, an egg custard made by her own hand. Here, Alethea, now that the fever is passed you should take some food. You must get strong and fit again.

  And she has seen Mamma at other bedsides, tending to women in the acute abdominal pain that characterises the progress of certain inflammations to which prostitution makes them especially prone, sitting up at night with a girl brought in from the street in the late stages of both tuberculosis and pregnancy. Mamma will sooner read the Bible to someone in pain than administer analgesia, but she chooses genuinely consoling passages, and as far as Ally can tell Mamma believes them. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Sleep now in peace, Mamma murmured, did not our Lord himself take Mary Magdalene into his keeping? Mamma is not wicked, or without love. Only without love for Ally. Ally finds herself crying again.

  A light tread on the stairs, Aunt Mary coming back. She taps on the door as she opens it, and comes in with her workbox in her hands.

  ‘Poor Ally. Do you want to tell me all about it, or not yet?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not yet, Aunt Mary. But thank you, truly thank you, for taking me in like this.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling. It is what any aunt, any friend would do.’

  Aunt Mary settles herself in the rocking chair with her box on the occasional table. Ally, who has no interest in fancy-work or embroidery, has always admired the workbox for its miniature drawers and folding trays, the neatness of the shiny wood and silver fittings. There are holes for thimbles to nest and a needle holder in the shape of furled umbrella. Aunt Mary takes out a piece of cross-stitch in a circular wooden frame and wets a length of red silk in her mouth.

  ‘Lie down, Ally. Try to sleep. You can rest now. I’ve told the servants that no-one is to be admitted and that I am not at home to anyone at all.’

  Ally pulls the pillows down into the bed and curls up. Refuge, she thinks. Asylum.

  THERE’S NO-ONE HERE

  He is woken by bells. No, by one bell, one sound. The note reverberates through the wooden walls and the floor, through the thin futon and around his ribs, his sternum. He rolls onto his back and waits for the next one. There. The echoes hum through the ground, through his shoulder blades and spine, and then the voices come, a low chant. A temple, he thinks, or a shrine, because there is meant to be a difference, now, between Shinto and Buddhism. Divide and conquer, probably. Didn’t lots of samurai retire to monasteries?

  Once again, the room lies calm and empty around him. He puts his hands behind his head and opens out his shoulders. It is perfectly possible to sleep very well on a futon but some postures result in stiffness; one should learn to lie straight. There is one banner showing four Japanese characters hanging on the wall in the alcove, with one green vase containing one sprig of bamboo beneath it. His trunk is downstairs, because he saw no reason to try to wrestle it up the narrow open-tread staircase, and his clothes are downstairs also, beside the wooden bathtub which he found last night full of boiling hot water and covered with a wooden lid. He had to leave it to cool while he ate the tray of food he found on the low table in the main room, accompanied by green tea from a lidded jug which was also disconcertingly hot, the person who made it surely still close at hand. It is like coming to the little house in the fairy-tale forest and finding supper steaming on the table and candles lit, as if sometime this morning he should expect a visit from his fairy godmother. Or someone else, the rightful owner.

  He sits up and tugs on the shutters, which were already closed when he arrived. They slide back to show paper screens set with small glass panels at the eye height of a person sitting on the floor, but there are outer shutters which are also closed. Three layers: why not just build a wall? But he knows why not. It is so that in summer one can open the whole building and live almost outdoors, using the shoji screens for shade or to keep out insects, or using the inner shutters for darkness without stuffiness and then the outer ones only to secure the house at need and for winter insulation. He tries to imagine Cornish houses so arranged, how different things would be. There must be some essential difference about the Japanese mind, or at least some moment very early in the human story, thousands of years ago, when what seems obvious to the rest of the world became strange and barbaric here. And vice versa.

  Cold air, smelling of the snow outside, seeps around the outer shutter. The urge to lie down again and wrap the quilt around his shoulders wrestles with his curiosity about the world out there, a new city waiting behind the shutters to be explored. Besides, he does not know when the provider of hot baths and meals on trays will return. He takes a deep breath of winter morning, pushes the quilt onto the floor and climbs gingerly down the dim stairs.

  The stove has been lit. There is a folded blue quilt beside it that was not there last night, and in the bathroom his clothes have also been folded—perfectly folded, along the seams and then at exact right-angles—and left in a stack on a wooden ledg
e low in the wall. Someone has been handling his drawers, his undershirt. Shivering in his pyjamas, he walks the house. It’s among the smallest self-contained dwellings he’s seen and no-one could possibly be concealed here, not even a tiny Japanese fairy godmother, but even so he pushes back the screen separating the four-mat room from the entrance way and checks the cupboard in the wall between the bathroom and the main room and then, idiotically, behind the bath and behind the curtain screening the street door. There’s no-one here, unless he’s missing something obvious, some door that looks like a wall (the sliding bookcase, he thinks, the fake panelling and the hidden trap door). Some of the more important Japanese houses, Professor Baxter told him, do have secret rooms, bare so that there are no hiding places for eavesdroppers or assassins, and positioned to make spying or ambush almost impossible. Tom grins to himself, remembering a complicated game he used to play with William Vickers who lived down the road and shared his taste for the cheaper and more exciting kind of boys’ stories. Perhaps presently he will be summoned to the secret chamber and entrusted with his quest. Meanwhile, he will dress by the stove and see if anyone brings him breakfast, and then if Mr. Tatsuo appears to take him out.

  AUNT MARY RINGS THE BELL FOR TEA

  For perhaps the first time in her life, Ally has nothing to do. After breakfast, Uncle James leaves for the office. No rest for the wicked, he says, kissing Aunt Mary, and he will be home for afternoon tea, but it is perfectly plain that after three days of Christmas there is a lift in his step as he sets off. Dear James, says Aunt Mary, he does love to entertain but he has always less stamina for company than he expects. Don’t be silly, darling, you’re not company, we’ve both missed you these last six months. But I can’t stay, Ally thinks, this isn’t a permanent arrangement. I can’t sit by your fire and eat your delicacies until Tom comes home. George goes out to walk with a college friend living nearby—a glorious day, Mamma, and we’ve hardly left the house since Midnight Mass, sure you won’t come, Cousin Al? She’s not going anywhere, said Aunt Mary, not yet. Anyway, Annie’s coming later. Ally can go into the gardens with Annie if she feels like it. And then Aunt Mary herself went down to the kitchen for her daily confabulations with the cook.

  Ally, left in the morning room, wanders into the bay and stands in the window. There are new drapes since the summer, thick velvet that will be troublesome to keep clean, in the shade of kingfisher blue that Aunt Mary loves to have in her clothes, and behind them swags of white muslin that will probably need laundering every week in winter with the fire burning all day and the fogs outside. Next door’s housemaid is scrubbing the steps of their porch, steam wavering above her bucket of water and rising from her breath as she works. A carriage passes, and two men in dark suits walk briskly towards the station. Across the road, the railings around the garden in the middle of the square have been repainted. A nurse with a perambulator and a child of two or three at her side is unlocking the garden gate. Ally turns away. You must rest, says Aunt Mary, but there is nothing restful about idleness. Mamma’s voice mutters in her head: are you then wholly abandoned to self-indulgence, Alethea? You have seen fit to excuse yourself all justification of your existence in this vale of tears? She stops herself putting her hands over her ears. Nothing in this room needs doing. There is no disorder, nothing to address. She begins to align the spines of the books on the shelf along the long wall, mostly Uncle James’s collection of voyages and travel writing. One or two are out of alphabetical sequence and can be replaced, but it doesn’t take long. She strokes Aunt Mary’s ferns on the plant stand, but there are no brown leaves and their soil is moist. George is right, it is a nice day outside. Annie won’t be here for another hour at least; perhaps she will take a walk in the park. Frittering away your time, says Mamma, casting around for ways of passing your very life. For shame, Alethea, for shame.

  She can’t concentrate on the novel Aunt Mary has put into her hands, something about three sisters living in a small town in Scotland. The middle sister, Aunt Mary says, is terribly clever and a great supporter of women’s suffrage and things like that, and the book always makes her think of Ally. It makes Ally think of doing something else. It is not five minutes since she last looked at the clock. It is too hot beside the fire anyway. She puts the book down on the side table and walks to the window.

  ‘Dear Al. You have never learnt to rest yourself.’

  Aunt Mary is settled in her usual chair, with her feet crossed on a needlepoint footstool of her own making, writing a letter on paper that rests on a padded tray balanced on the chair’s arm. The impedimenta of idleness, Mamma would say. Ally thinks that she should write to Tom, but she is too ashamed of herself, would not know where to start. Dearest Tom, I am with Aunt Mary once again because I found myself incapable of the work I had undertaken to do. Because I allowed my difficulties with Mamma to make me break my word and leave the most desperate and needy patients without any hope of medical attention until the spring. Because in the name of personal troubles I betrayed my profession. What will Miss Eastman be thinking now, having reached the Welfare Centre and found that Ally has not returned from the Christmas holiday? What will Mamma tell her? The breakfast kedgeree and coffee churn in Ally’s stomach. She has abandoned two posts, two sets of patients, in the last month. Who would write her a reference now?

  Aunt Mary sets aside her letter. ‘There now. I expect this will be Annie at the door.’

  Ally had not heard the bell, but there are voices in the hall and then Annie blows in before Fanny has time to announce her. A grey skirt, bustled and swagged, and a cream blouse with lace at the collar. Her hair somehow different.

  ‘Ally! It is such a joy to see you again. And up! I thought you might be in bed.’

  Aunt Mary comes to kiss Annie. ‘How are you, my dear? A happy Christmas? She should be in bed, but she is very naughty about resting.’

  Ally stands up. She had forgotten that Annie likes to kiss on arrival and departure. ‘I am glad to see you too. And really, I have slept. I am not unwell. I feel no need to lie in a bed.’

  Aunt Mary and Annie exchange glances. What on earth did Aunt Mary write in the note that summoned Annie? Ally has run mad. Ally is in the grip of a nervous crisis. What might be called a touch of hysterical tendency in a young girl bears a more sinister name in a woman over thirty.

  ‘Good,’ says Annie. ‘It is an excellent sign. But later, Ally, perhaps after we have taken a walk, you will allow me to examine you? For I gather you have had a shock and I see that you have lost flesh. You are a little pale, darling, and—forgive me—look tired even if you don’t feel it.’

  Ally returns to her chair, since it appears that the promised walk is not immediate. She is like an eager dog, following everyone who moves towards the door. Aunt Mary waves Annie to the sofa.

  Aunt Mary and Annie speak of Christmas, of Annie’s sisters, of the boys. Of Annie’s mother’s difficulty in replacing her cook. Of a play that both of them have considered seeing but not seen. Outside, the sun moves across the sky. In Manchester, Mamma tends to her fallen women, persuades her subscribers to give just a little more. In Truro Dr. Crosswyn visits the wards, writes letters, makes notes, reasons with the committee. Aunt Mary and Annie speak of a book that Annie cannot recommend. The sky turns pink and Aunt Mary rings the bell for tea.

  A PATTERN OF BUTTERFLIES

  A blade held between two fingers opens the silk like skin, lifts away the white shape as a surgeon might raise a tumour. Tom finds himself craning to see the flesh underneath but of course there is only the cutting board.

  Tatsuo leans over his shoulder. ‘Now the dyeing. Very beautiful.’

  There is a wooden tray full of steaming blue liquid on the bench under the window. The craftsman carries the breadth of silk tenderly, over both arms, and lowers a portion of it into the dye. Bright blue, azure, laps at the grey, and then the cloth is lifted and draped over a rack so that the blue drips into a tray with
out crossing the grey. The man’s hands are blue and his fingers calloused.

  ‘So. It stays to dry.’

  Tom nods. There are several kimono in process here, brought as lengths—tatami-sized lengths, he thinks, as if one’s whole life is measured in the same units—from the weaving shop across the lane. Two garments hang from horizontal poles on the wall, as if crucified, finished and awaiting collection. Spring kimono, Tatsuo translated. Irises grow from a pool of purple at the hem of one, lilies from pale pink on the other. The kimono is an artist’s canvas, its uniformity of shape and size freeing the painter from any consideration of the wearer’s body. Woman as picture frame. Would Ally find it better or worse than the corset and bustle? He thinks of the paintings he saw in Alfred Moberley’s London exhibition, Ally and yet not Ally. It is odd to have a wife on whose undressed body any man may gaze on the walls of the Royal Academy. Perhaps she would like a kimono, not one of these which are far beyond his means and anyway intended to be worn by the richest of women on the rarest occasions, but one like his fairy godmother Makiko’s.

  ‘You wish to see the sewing? The—embroidery?’ A difficult word for the Japanese tongue.

  ‘Please.’ Tom bows.

  He wants to see everything. He is a child at Christmas, wide-eyed and without discrimination. Tatsuo leads him up a wooden ladder so that his head emerges on the level of the floor where men sit on their folded legs around a kimono length stretched on a wooden frame. He tries to return their bows before he has found his feet and they regard him gravely for a moment before turning again to their stitching. One hand above the stretched silk, one below it, working together, the right knowing perfectly the actions of the left. The outlines of a pattern of butterflies and grasses are filling with silk in yellow, blue and green and the needles flutter above the work.