by Sarah Moss
Annie sits back, nods. ‘He is pleased. And Mamma is glad that she will not lose all her daughters. Well, I mean—’
Annie has remembered May, the other kind of loss.
‘I know, Annie. It’s all right. She deserves contentment, your Mamma.’
‘Don’t think like that. Deserving. No-one deserves loss. It’s a kind of religious melancholy, Ally, can’t you see it? You believe yourself damned, and you despair, and then you chastise yourself for despairing and sink further. And if you feel a little better you condemn yourself for pride and luxury. A classic case. You’ll never win.’
She can hear Aunt Mary on the stairs. Religious melancholy. Patients who swing from believing themselves unpardonable, which is the sin of despair and leads to eternal damnation, to believing themselves saved, which is the sin of pride and leads to eternal damnation. Then they despair again because they are damned again. Annie has said this, things like this, to her before but for the first time Ally thinks she understands. We cannot achieve justification by works. We cannot earn our lives, our place on the green earth. Life is a gift and not a contract. According to Annie.
Aunt Mary puts her head around the door. ‘Annie, I hope you will stay to dinner? There’s no-one coming, we don’t dress.’
Annie stands up. ‘I would be delighted, but Mamma is expecting me. She has guests and I promised to help. Thank you for the lovely tea.’
Ally helps Annie to put on her coat, watches Annie’s face in the mirror as she wraps her scarf and pins her hat. For the first time, Ally returns Annie’s embrace as she leaves, and the two women hold each other in the hall, Annie’s hat brushing Ally’s cheek, as in the fanlight the clouds drift past the moon.
GOLD FLAKES FLOAT IN LACQUER
His hand reaches towards the box. The silk wrapping-cloth, the furoshiki, has fallen back like a discarded gown around the gleaming curves.
The man bows and lifts the box to his touch. Only Tom’s fingertips graze the lacquer, the gold. It is as if one could touch warm ice. In the grey winter light filtering through the paper screens, the golden leaves, the freckled fruits and the plump birds, pheasants or partridges, seem lit from within, glow like candle flames. On the fifth day of Christmas. The black background gleams deep as a winter lake.
‘Kodaiji maki-e,’ murmurs Tatsuo at his elbow. ‘Nashiji. Apple—no—pear skin. Gold flakes float in lacquer. I think the fruit is called persimmon?’
Tom withdraws his hand. ‘Suspended,’ he says. ‘Suspended in the lacquer.’
Tatsuo bows. ‘Is two hundred years old. Very beautiful.’
Tom cannot take his gaze from it, the bronze speckles in the golden persimmons, the way the birds’ breasts and necks echo the curves of the fruit and then the contrast between the trailing away of the feathered tails and the firmness of heads and wings, all shining gold. He imagines Ally’s face if he were to bring her such a thing, undress it on the table in the white cottage’s window.
The shopkeeper lifts the lid, disclosing a lacquered interior fitted out as if by a fine ship’s carpenter with fretwork and tiny drawers. A workbox, Tom wonders, a jewellery case? A toolbox for some exquisite and miniature craft? But one would not want to store blades and points under such a finish. The man speaks and Tatsuo translates.
‘For scent. And the paint of a woman, her face.’ He mimes someone painting eyebrows on a shaven forehead and a layer of white on Asian skin.
Tom nods. ‘But not for use, surely?’
Tatsuo shrugs. ‘Two hundred years past, perhaps.’
‘Where does it come from?’ It is not a question he likes to ask. He would prefer these objects anonymous, unencumbered by past lives.
Tatsuo speaks again with the shopkeeper and then turns to Tom. ‘As usual. There are debts. Money owing, and misfortune. They must sell some things. Old things.’
There is no good reason, Tom has decided, why these stories should be sad. Let the old order, feudalism founded as always on violence, pass away. What rational British man could mourn the end of the samurais’ absolute regime, especially given the largely peaceful end of a three-hundred-year reign of terror? If it is now possible for men like Makoto and Tatsuo to learn English, to stand in the presence of their hereditary oppressors and gain power and wealth through knowledge and intelligent work, who could argue that the aristocrats’ fall is any loss at all to Japan? And if those who once throve on the labour of others are now reduced to selling their gold lacquer cosmetics boxes to buy rice, who should grieve? Let them learn to labour like other men. Let them learn from their artisans to take pride in good work well done. He remembers a painter saying when Tom looked for his signature that either the quality of the work tells the artist’s name or he should be ashamed to associate himself with it. Wolf Rock, he thinks, Skerryvore. No-one needs to sign a lighthouse. But still he feels as if he is filching something, betraying someone, as he listens to Tatsuo’s delicate translation of his delicate inquiry about the price of the box. For whatever it costs, it is travelling back to Falmouth with him.
MISS GILLINGHAM’S MIRROR
Ally? Are you ready?’
Ally puts down her book and stands up. She cannot see what other preparation might be thought necessary. ‘Coming, Aunt Mary.’
Aunt Mary’s Christmas present to Ally was a breadth of tweed, heathered blue and grey, and the promise that Aunt Mary’s dressmaker would make it into a new walking suit. Good tailoring makes anyone feel better, Aunt Mary said, and whatever Elizabeth has to say about trivial minds I notice that most of these New Women have nice clothes. Call it armour if you prefer, Ally, but let me do this for you. Ally remembers Aunt Mary going through the contents of Ally’s trunk when she first arrived in London, nineteen and dressed in Mamma’s made-over cast-offs and men’s boots. Aunt Mary’s right about the armour, but Ally’s been invalided out of whatever war is being fought. If you are to be interviewed for a position, says Aunt Mary, you will give a better account of yourself in a decent suit. True enough, but Ally has failed, so far, to identify any position for which she would be a plausible candidate. A qualified lady doctor with no experience of paid employment and recent nervous illness seeks professional employment in West Cornwall. Did I not tell you so, Alethea? Did I not warn you of just such an outcome?
Aunt Mary judges the outing grand enough for her new hat, a triumph of form over function whose effect reminds Ally of the hummingbirds in Mr. De Rivers’ Falmouth house. She looks up as Ally comes down the stairs.
‘There you are. I am looking forward to seeing how Miss Gillingham has managed. And James has booked us a table at Quincy’s for lunch afterwards.’
Ally is being managed like a schoolgirl, taken out for a treat after she’s done as she is told. Did they think she would resist the fitting, that she is not grateful for her Christmas gift? She fastens her coat and opens the door for Aunt Mary.
‘Thank you. You and Uncle James.’
Aunt Mary pats her hand. ‘Not at all, my dear, not at all. Here, your hair is coming down.’
Ally stands obedient, hunched, the doorknob in her hand, while Aunt Mary reaches up to replace her hairpins. It’s sunny outside, and there are leaf-buds on the branches of chestnut trees bounced by a boisterous wind. The snowdrops in the square are visible from the doorstep.
‘That’s better.’
They set off, Ally checking her stride to match Aunt Mary’s unhurried progress. Aunt Mary looks smaller out of doors. It is not her natural habitat.
‘Will we walk all the way, Aunt Mary? It is such a nice morning.’
‘All the way to Markham Street? It must be miles!’
Aunt Mary suddenly reminds her of May.
‘Perhaps as much as two miles, although I doubt it very much.’
‘No, my dear. We will sit down on the bus and very probably take a perfectly comfortable cab home.’
Ally is startled by he
r own appearance in Miss Gillingham’s mirror. The tweed is a stronger colour than she, raised by Mamma and accustomed to echo the sober garb of men, would usually choose, a royal blue only just short of Aunt Mary’s own favourite peacock palette, and there are flecks of purple as well as grey in it. Almost too strong, she thinks, gazing at herself, almost overwhelming her pale skin, her light brown hair, her blue eyes. And then realises that this thought means that she does know what suits her, that she does have an instinct for her own aesthetic value. Grey matches her eyes, but must not be darker than her hair. Pink and brown make her look dip-dyed, the same colour all over. Green, perhaps, but no stronger than the colour of pears or her pallor will appear unhealthy. Papa’s trademark sage colour would be becoming if she could stand it. It is not entirely Mamma’s fault that Ally looked shapeless and unkempt all her girlhood; particular attention is required to make a tall pale woman with light hair appear to advantage and it is not attention that Ally herself usually cares to pay. But this suit—if she could wear such a thing every day—Annie, she thinks, likes clothes, and so does Mrs. Butler herself. Aubrey, come to that, or Street; most artists embrace pretentions or particularities of dress. One does not solve the problem of beauty by denouncing it. The new suit murmurs of men’s tailoring, the jacket double-breasted and trimmed only with frogging, the skirt cut trim and plain with the suggestion of a bustle at the back, and it fits Ally perfectly, shows that though tall and slim she does have a bosom, a waist. Flaunting yourself in the guise of our poor women of the streets, hisses Mamma, betraying everything I gave you. Ally smooths her hands over her hips, turns and looks back over her shoulder to see her three-quarter profile at full length. Aunt Mary is quite right; so attired, she will indeed give a better account of herself. Looking at her own clothes laid over the chair, she doesn’t want to take off the tweed suit, to go back into the world in worn and dated grey, but Miss Gillingham needs to finish the hem and sew the buttons where at the moment Ally is pinned into the waistband and jacket. Next week, Miss Gillingham promises, best leave it till Tuesday to be safe.
Back her in room among the treetops, stayed with sole in cream sauce and then orange pudding ordered for her by Uncle James, Ally looks through the notes she’s made of her rather arbitrary reading these last few weeks. How is sanity defined? The mad reside in homes, asylums, institutions. Are families or madhouses more likely to take, or make, a person’s mind? There is no research on the capacity for recovery of lunatics confined permanently at home, nor indeed much reliable information about their numbers. If a person can be driven to madness, by what means is she to be driven back to sanity? A place of healing, she thinks, a place of healing and hope for the future as well as a distaste for the past. It is not the first time such ideas have been voiced, but it is, so far as she knows, the first time a doctor has suggested that part of the work of an institution could be to undo the work of the family, that there are sick households as well as sick individuals. Households that can’t allow or sustain sanity. She thinks of her patients: Mary Vincent, hurt by her master; Mrs. Elsfield, reverting in her old age to the blows and harsh words of her long-dead mother; Mrs. Ashton, haunted by perverted grief for her lost brothers. She remembers Margaret Rudge saying that everyone has been hurt but not everyone ends up in the asylum. What distinguishes those who survive their harm from those found to be mad? There are undoubtedly cases of organic brain disease, but there is also a great deal of damage, often passed down from parent to child like Tom’s Japanese foxes. Ally gazes out into the branches, on whose winter lines the first leaf-buds are beginning to form. The sky is white, neutral, and from the street below the sounds of activity drift, people going places, moving things, working and coming home. The profession needs a definition of sanity, or needs at least a discussion about the definition of sanity, about the boundaries of grief and rage and pain. The profession needs someone to say that some domestic homes, some families, produce madness not by hereditary organic disorder but by a modus operandi that requires the insanity of one or more members. That families can be dangerous. She pushes back the hair from her face, picks up her pen and begins to write. She has things to say, and it is not as if her professional life has anything left to lose.
THE FOX INRO
The snow has melted. This morning, every roof and twig dripped as if the whole city had become one of the slow fountains in a courtyard garden and every step left a footprint as if stamped in grey ink, on cobbles now only furred with collapsing crystals of white. All morning he and Tatsuo have walked to the tinkle and sluice of water in bamboo pipes and gutters, purling through the drains and streams, and still he can see through the open screens drips falling from the eaves both here and across the street.
The shop’s screen doors are pushed back so the box he’s being shown lies in cold sunlight, and whatever heat is generated by the hibachi beside the counter does not reach Tom. He wriggles his toes inside his boots. He pulls his fingers out of his gloves’ fingers and balls them in his fists.
‘Spring, summer, autumn, winter,’ says Tatsuo. He steps back so that Tom can see.
Four inro lie in a wooden box. Indentations have been carved in the polished hinoki for each of them to nest, and their curves rise in way that reminds Tom of women lying on their backs, bellies and breasts mounded. Four different shapes: a cylinder, gold inlay on black lacquer; a disk with frisking animals—foxes?—carved in red lacquer; a rounded oblong whose corners beg a finger’s touch, embellished with pregnant bronze gourds, and a green-and-gold shape like a spinning top or a censer. Each of them has a plaited cord through it, because inro, he has been told, were the Japanese version of pockets, boxes to tie around the waist holding whatever small things a rich man might want during the day, originally seals but later paper prayers or amulets and then medicines or even playing cards. The toggles, netsuke, were used to secure inro to the belt, and each inro has a netsuke umbilically attached: a curled up fox, just the size to nestle in a man’s palm. A gourd with a stalk whose hairs are visible in what looks like ivory. A magnolia bud, blousy and peeling, and a tassel for the spinning top, carved in dark wood so finely that each strand of the plied silk is plain. It crosses his mind to wonder what De Rivers is going to do with such objects, already redundant even in Kyoto, but at the same time his hand is reaching out and he knows the answer. De Rivers is going to possess them. Tom removes his gloves and stuffs them in his pocket.
‘May I?’ he asks.
The seller lifts the red one from the case with reverent fingers. Tom places it in the palm of his left hand and lets his right index and middle fingers trace the carved foxes. Three weave around each other, the lines of tails and backs and pointed noses making one sweeping curve, and there is another small one sitting, head cocked, nose raised, under the shoulder of the inro. It is perfection, he thinks, the angle of their ears, the quizzical cast of their faces. How can a person carve four perfect foxes on a rounded and hollow shape smaller than his pocketbook? How could another person bear to use such a thing, to have it hanging at his side where it will get knocked and scratched and wet? It would be different, life would be different, if one walked through one’s days with a perfect object always at one’s side. He lets the fox netsuke crawl into his hand and nestle there.
The dealer holds out his hand for Tom to return the fox inro. Tom gasps. The dealer is breaking it up, sliding it apart. It’s made in sections, of course. Not a box but a stack of boxes, held together by the cord through the sides, although there’s not a trace of the join, not to the eye or the fingertip, when the five segments are closed, and the inside is as perfectly finished, as smooth and gleaming, as the outside. The merchant turns the pieces through the grey winter light so the inro leans, articulated, and then in one movement of his fingers reassembles it into the solid object Tom was handling. He wants it back, but the man picks up the next one, the spinning top, blows a speck of dust from it and passes it to Tom. The gourds are cold to the touch but the bronze l
ooks warm and the big-bellied shapes, the size of the top joint of Tom’s clumsy reddened finger, hold a golden light.
As dusk falls, he comes home. No need, he has persuaded Tatsuo, to escort him back to the house every day, and Tatsuo, who has mentioned a father once and friends twice, seems happy enough to return to the real world, where he doesn’t have to try to imagine how Japan might look to a man from somewhere else, where he doesn’t have to keep explaining how the paper is made to be waterproof or why some married women still blacken their teeth or what is the point of carving carrots into the shape of miniature carp. Where he doesn’t have to assist in the abduction of his country’s heirlooms. Tom pushes his hands deep into his pockets and lets his shoulders hunch to close the draught around his neck, but he doesn’t hurry. Nightfall is not as slow here as at home, but there is a twilight while people move around the city, from work to home, from the shops to the kitchen, from school back to mother. The raised wooden geta come into their own now, for Tom’s trouser cuffs are soaked in the slush and his boots beginning to leak. Two schoolgirls clatter past him, giggling behind their fingers as their split skirts flutter in the wind. Lights flicker and glow behind the window-screens, and the smell of cooking, of soy sauce and miso and fish, begins to drift into the street. Behind each of these wooden screens will be a family gathering around a hibachi, sitting close under the quilt laid over the stove while they share the news of the day, and in the background the bustle of women preparing food. Baths will be heating, and the man of the house changing from European or work clothes into the yukata in which he’ll spend the evening. There is singing in one house, and children’s laughter from another. And later, later they will roll out their futons and lie down together, man and wife and the afterthought of the stove’s heat still charcoal-scented in the air, warm enough that quilts can be thrown back, kimono opened, whatever is underneath eased away by gentle hands. He wants Ally.