Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  Except for the red lettering on some of the white paper lanterns still hanging under the awnings of restaurants, the colours are gone by the time he reaches his own street corner, the city blocked in shades of dark. He slides open the front door, steps in, and shoulders it shut behind him. The house closes around him, dark and still, holding him like a heart under its ribs. No-one will see him, there will be no more speech, until Tatsuo calls tomorrow morning.

  THE KEY IN HER COAT POCKET

  Spring advances hour by hour as the train moves south and west. In the park yesterday, there was only the first suggestion of green on the trees, infant leaf-buds still curled tight on the lindens and clenched fingers of furred grey on the horse-chestnuts, the wind still sharp about her ears. In Wiltshire she sees the first bare field dusted with grass-green, surveyed by a scarecrow and a boy with a rattle. In Somerset there are lambs leggy and bounding, grouping together on a rise like schoolgirls to watch the train pass, and the shadows of clouds scudding across the Levels from which the spring floods are receding, leaving the land damp and black and simmering with life. Devon: the kind of Englishness she had not believed until she saw it, thatched cottages whose garden greens, hedge-dark and lawn-bright, are already flecked with daffodil yellow and lily white. Almost, she thinks, almost one can see the cream and eggs on a gingham cloth on the kitchen table. Almost one can smell the lavender scented sheets on the beds and the polish on the wooden furniture made to last. And she thinks, as she always will in the face of comfort or pleasure, of the children in every way stunted by malnutrition and cold in the back streets of Manchester. But one must either devote oneself to total revolution, forsaking all else, or find ways of seeing happiness and beauty without grudge. These are both possible courses of action: she persuaded Annie—in a gloriously unsuitable hat—to accompany her to a lecture on Socialism last week, but for now she has other occupation, ambitions easier to achieve than social justice. She glances across to the compartment’s other occupant, a man who boarded the train at Reading and has been asleep since Castle Cary. His mouth has fallen open and his head, wobbly as a new-born’s, settled at last against the partition at an angle that will cause him pain for the rest of the day. She feels in her bag for Dr. Crosswyn’s letter, which she has been carrying as a kind of talisman, a passport that offers, after such a long period of limbo, justification for her presence, or at least, if justification is not required, permission to call herself a doctor again.

  She unfolds the letter. I meant to write earlier to congratulate you on the publication of your excellent paper, he writes, but the delay means that I now also make a proposition on which I hope you will look favourably if you are still at liberty and intending to return to this part of the country. Partly as a result of your essay and the attention it has received, I have been able to persuade the Committee to open a Female Convalescent Home, to be established in Flushing where the patients will have opportunity to enjoy and indeed rehearse the amenities of Falmouth while remaining visible and, one might say, secure on the outskirts of a village. Crosswyn does not say so, but he is thinking that Falmouth town offers too many means of escape from exactly the normal life to which the patients are to be returned. Ships bound for blue water, bars, an endless procession of sailors with money in their pockets and fire in their bellies. The stone walls of the docks, dropping fifty feet into cold water, and the dark cliffs on Pendennis Point and over Castle Beach. Mineshafts hidden in the woods under brambles and bluebells, trains rounding a winding track twice an hour until well after dusk, and enough people lost or wandering, in the wrong country or county or continent, that no-one notices another stranger. But there’s one road to Flushing village, a settlement mostly of those who have made their money and retreated from Falmouth to live in peaceful gentility, and Crosswyn’s right that Flushing is a better place to relearn the ways of respectable sanity. We require a Medical Director and I am delighted that the Committee authorises me to make haste to offer you the position. I do not doubt that you have received several offers since the publication of your essay but I venture to hope that your connections in this county may favour us. Whether Ally is the best person to teach these ways is, as neither Annie nor Aunt Mary could resist suggesting, a different matter. Are you quite sure such a position will really suit you, darling? Only you have made such progress with your health this spring, we would not like to see you unwell again as you were at Christmas. It is my work, she told Aunt Mary. It is what I do, thinking about madness. And it was not my work at the asylum that made me ill. Aunt Mary did not point out that if Ally had not had to leave the asylum she would not have been in Manchester in the first place. Annie was more direct: Al, it’s the last place you should be. Come and work with me. Join our practice. Deliver some babies. Set the children’s broken bones, visit their mumps and measles and see their mothers through bronchitis in the winter. Look after the neurasthenic girls if you really must. Let some kindly man prepare farmers’ wives to go back to their kitchens and servant girls back to their work. Ally remembered Mary Vincent and shook her head. No, Annie, thank you. Of course I will miss you greatly but my life is in Cornwall now and I have chosen my work. Who better to help such patients than someone who has strayed near their path herself? And we all, really, have personal reasons for what we do, however we dress our desires and motivations in the language of our profession. You keep happy families happy and I attend sick minds. Come and visit, if you want to see how I do.

  The line runs beside the River Exe, flowing wide and fast. Fir trees mass, protecting a gentleman’s residence of the last century from the noise of the train and passengers’ curious gaze. The gentleman’s lawns, punctuated by flights of shallow stone steps and bits of statuary, roll down to the river, where he has a Palladian boathouse and swans. Ally tucks the letter back into her bag. The edges of Exeter begin, and the grey stone cathedral raised high over the redbrick terraces and tiled roofs. She will go back to Truro Cathedral, she thinks, and see how it is coming along. It is a rare thing, to see a cathedral built.

  There is another letter in her bag, one written a few days ago amid the business of packing and preparation and not posted. It is better, she decided, to maintain contact with Mamma and Papa, for them to know her address. Otherwise they become monsters in her head, wolves and ogres from whom she must hide as prey from a predator. They are not gods, not embodiments of power, but haunted beings like herself. She does not wish to be prey. She does not wish to go in fear. Dear Mamma and Papa, I write to tell you that I am returning to Cornwall to take up a salaried position as Medical Director of the Truro Asylum Female Convalescent home. She devoted some thought, some uncertainty, to ‘salaried.’ See, Mamma, I have paid work at last, I am independent of you and of the scholarship committee and of Uncle James and even, since it concerns you, of my husband. See, Mamma, the world judges me worth the air I breathe, the food I eat, the roof under which I shelter. But these proofs suggest that Ally accepts Mamma’s logic, that even now she hopes to appease. She wants both to triumph over Mamma according to Mamma’s own rules and to deny Mamma’s understanding of the world. It is one of the reasons why the letter has not been posted. I am sorry for the distress and inconvenience at Christmastime. No, don’t apologise. Mamma will hear an acceptance of culpability rather than the wish that things had been different, that Ally had been braver earlier. I do not expect that we will meet again soon (don’t come, don’t come to get me, not by word or thought or deed) but when we do (don’t be angry with me, don’t read this letter as further evidence of my madness) I hope it will be under happier circumstances (I hope that if I avoid you for long enough you will learn to treat me as a civilised adult. I hope that you believe in my good will—even I have little reason for it—because if you do not believe me good-willed you continue to know me mad and bad). It is hopeless. There are things that should be said, but no way of saying them, no form of words that does not require, or even contain, instant contradiction. No form of words tha
t does not say that Ally is deranged or dishonest or both. The train whistles, shrieks and halts on Platform Four at Exeter.

  It is the next few miles Ally likes best, where the line runs under the red cliffs and sometimes waves breaking against the sea-wall send spray splattering against the carriage windows. The sea, again, at last. The waves are brisk and white, sparkling under the sun, the water a rough tumbled blue, and out to sea a backwards-leaning ship scrawls a horizontal line of smoke across the spring sky. Despite her brief intimation of May’s hair drifting on the water as her body sinks, despite the way May’s skirts and petticoats swell and rise about her dead face in Ally’s mind, she feels herself steady at the sight of the open sea like a bird settling onto a current of air, gliding open-winged at last between water and sky.

  The branch line train is waiting at Truro and she crosses the platform with everyone else, glancing down the line to the guard’s van to make sure her trunk is being moved. She unwinds the scarf she tied as the train stopped, her body schooled to expect outside to be cold. It’s not cold. Even the wind has spring on its breath, green growth and soft rain. She draws a deep breath before climbing into the Falmouth train.

  From the window she sees the cattle-market, and behind it the hill leading to the asylum. In a few days she will go back there, up the lane and along the drive to the portico, to the double front door and the tiled hall, greeting William, who has seen madness and sanity and treated them just the same. She will go back to Ward Four, and see if Mrs. Elsfield has made it through the winter. Could Dr. Crosswyn be persuaded to regard Mrs. Elsfield as curable? (Is it possible, or desirable, to cure Mrs. Elsfield of the asylum, and is it necessary to count her invisible companions manifestations of madness?) Smoke rising from the great tower at Bissoe mine, and the land scarred and scoured orange and brown, tunnelled and churned and flooded with strange green water, and then the Methodist church at Perranwell, its spire reaching as if to exceed the enfolding valley. Gorse in yellow bloom. Kissing’s in fashion, Tom liked to say, when the gorse is in bloom. Perranwell Station, and a large woman with a basket waiting under the clock, the station-master in piped jacket and peaked cap straight-backed as if on parade. The train jerks, and is off again. Open fields, woodland—daffodils—and then the viaduct above Penryn, the road and the grand stone buildings cascading down to the estuary. Blue water again, the tide so high that the boats moored to the groyne at Flushing are almost at the windows of their owners’ houses.

  Here, then, and now: homecoming. The lightening of her very bones, the slowing of her dancing heart as the air of this place fills her lungs and her blood. The wind off the sea, the watery colours of a summer night in the far west where nightfall is postponed almost until morning. It is home, she thinks. This is where all shall be well, although she knows it is not true, that there is no such place on earth and that particular difficulties await her in this return. She arranges for the trunk to be delivered, calm as if she is just an off-season visitor, here for a week’s sea air or sketching while the hotels are cheap. She walks, not the shortest route but the one that takes her down Killigrew Street, past Jacob’s Ladder and home along Dunstanville where the ships rest at their buoys with folded sails and the water mirrors the hillside, the rocks and trees. The Greenbank Hotel, last and first night’s rest on land, in England, for professional men going blue water, to America and Australia, to Jamaica and Ceylon and Singapore. There are daffodils under the monkey puzzle tree in the captain’s garden, tulips growing out of the stone urns by the neighbour’s wrought iron gate. And the turn up the stone-flagged ope, under the limestone archway to the white cottage, the air now heavy with falling dusk and the house waiting, behind the pink-blooming camellia bushes and the ancient holly tree. The key in her coat pocket, where it has been all winter.

  A HOLE IN THE WALL

  The dreams came again. A shipwreck, this time, and Tom guilty of leaving before the end, taking a place in a lifeboat while there were still passengers, women, screaming on the deck. Cold water smacked his head, filled his ear, and he struggled and clung, seeing from the peaks of the waves the masts broken off like fallen trees, knowing the depth under his senseless feet, knowing how far there is to sink. He wakes in darkness, before the chanting and the gong, and lies in the silence, feeling the house too small around him. In England it will be lunchtime, broad daylight and time to get back to work for the afternoon. In England Ally will be sitting over the end of lunch with Aunt Mary, the end of last night’s pudding—apple pie, perhaps, or marmalade dumpling—still on the table while Aunt Mary speaks of the last concert or party and Ally thinks about the frailties of the human mind or the limits of charity. It is no longer terribly cold. He pushes back the quilt and walks through the dark to the top of the stairs, finds the first polished wooden step with his foot and the rail with his hand. Downstairs is in darkness, as always except in the middle of the day, and he goes down the stone step to the front door, the bare earth of the entrance hall soft and dry underfoot, and pushes the door open far enough to see out. Dawn is near, the eastern sky pale, and the air damp with dew and the smell of spring. He reaches for his coat and shoes and steps out into the street.

  There are three people out already, hurrying hunched—to work so early? To buy breakfast? He closes the door behind him. It’s still too dark to tell what the weather will be, but the sky feels low and the cobbles are greased with dew. The three people are going north, which is also the way to the hills where it would be no more than eccentric to head for an early morning walk. He might see the sunrise from a mountainside above Kyoto, the sort of thing regularly recorded by the writers of artistic travel books. He loses sight of the first of his neighbours but the other two turn right at the crossroads and pass the lamp-maker’s studio and the grocer, both still shuttered and dark. They disappear between two houses, and when Tom reaches the gap he sees a high stone arch, a gateway fringed by bamboo black in the dim light. He advances and stands in the shadows, the bamboo waving at shoulder height. What is he doing here, standing in an alley with his pyjamas under his coat and his feet bare inside his shoes? Go home, he thinks, go home and take a bath and begin this day again. And then red lanterns bob across the courtyard in the front of him and he sees faces and robes streaming to the temple. The gong sounds as the sun rises and he stands still, neither here or there, like a leper watching the divine service through a hole in the wall.

  When he returns to the house he knows as soon as he opens the door that Makiko is there, that there is another being breathing and moving within his walls. She comes from the kitchen to the hallway, her face full of question. What are you doing? Have you been out all night? She’s wearing the grey kimono with the white birds around the hem and back.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ he says.

  She bows.

  ‘To see the sunrise. Though it’s too cloudy, really. I should try again another day.’

  She murmurs something—yes, it’s dull today or it’s good to start the day with a walk—and bows again, gestures him in to the house.

  ‘Tatsuo’s taking me to see a silk workshop today. They make embroidered hangings, mostly for temples but apparently the Emperor himself has bought some. He gave one as a gift to President Hayes.’

  He should stop. Makiko looks worried. A curved tortoiseshell ornament holds up her shining hair and the collar of her kimono has tilted back to frame the curve of her neck. He thinks she is the daughter-in-law of the family whose annex is this house, but she may be an unmarried sister or even a serving girl. He cannot pretend he has not wondered, has not looked for a Japanese equivalent of the wedding ring.

  ‘Tatsuo-san?’ she asks.

  He bows. ‘Yes, Tatsuo-san. He’s taking me out today.’

  She bites her lip. He must stop. She will think there is an emergency, that he requires Tatsuo to be summoned immediately.

  ‘If I can order some hangings from this place, maybe three or four, I’ve more or
less fulfilled my commission. At the end of the week I’ll be able to go to Yokohama and arrange my passage home.’

  She raises a hand, a gesture that in Europe might mean I give up or please stop talking and he finds himself reaching out to touch her palm, to feel the warmth of her skin, the lines in her hand. He pulls his arm back and bows deeply, hiding his face, hoping she thinks the half-salute was some foreign sign of respect. Of honour. When he stands up he nods to her and goes to kneel at the table where she has set out breakfast for him. He sits still enough to hear her footsteps on the tatami mat and the sliding of the door as she returns to her own quarters where her own family waits for her to serve breakfast.

  ROSE TREE HOUSE

  She takes her morning tea, made with Aunt Mary’s smoky leaves still dry in their tin, into the garden and sits on the doorstep with the door open behind her and the house, she hopes, inhaling the sea air and exhaling the winter’s damp. Even the sheets left on the bed are mildewed, and the curtains mottled and frayed where they have rested all winter against the cold glass. Before Tom comes, she must arrange for painting and new curtains and the washing of blankets and quilts. She will herself hang the carpets and cushions over the washing line and beat them with a carpet-beater that she will buy, a chore offering a satisfying combination of violence and housewifely virtue. She will write to Aunt Mary for advice about the curtains: nothing of Papa’s design, and nothing too dark. White is not practical, but perhaps a very pale grey with white sprigs or fleur-de-lys. Ally prefers small geometric patterns to Papa’s botanical outbursts. Maybe if Aunt Mary chooses fabrics she will be persuaded to come and see the results.