Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

It is Mrs. Rudge, wearing a large ticking apron over a worn blue dress and carrying a trowel.

  ‘It’s all right for me to be out here, isn’t it Doctor? Only I didn’t mean anything wrong. It’s good to plant in the mornings. My husband always used to say. And you said we could sow seeds. We’re already late, see, with the sweet peas.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mrs. Rudge. That’s why the key was by the door, so you can go out if you want to. Sweet peas are scented, aren’t they? They’ll be nice to put on the table in the summer.’

  Mrs. Rudge is still looking at her, expectant or anxious.

  ‘Plant away. I’ll make sure someone calls you for breakfast.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. Thank you, Doctor.’

  She watches Mrs. Rudge walk away and crouch over the soil where she left her trowel. At the very least, it will be good for the women to be outside again, to have sun on their faces and wind in their hair. Mrs. Rudge sits back on her heels.

  ‘Excuse me, Doctor, may I ask something?’

  Ally walks towards her. ‘Of course. Mrs. Rudge, you don’t need to ask permission to ask a question.’

  ‘Sorry, Doctor.’ Mrs. Rudge picks up the trowel again. Her hands are too pale, as white as fish-flesh.

  ‘What was it? Your question?’

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs. Rudge spoons up earth. She has half a dozen small earthenware plant pots from somewhere, each already lined with a layer of leaf compost. She puts the trowel down again and looks at the black smears on her fingers. ‘It was only—well—some of us were saying, maybe there could be hens here. They’d eat the kitchen scraps, you see, and we’d have the eggs and a chicken for the pot now and again. But I daresay it’s a foolish scheme.’

  Not foolish, Ally thinks. Just not the kind of thing that would have occurred to her, to a city doctor. ‘It sounds very sensible, Mrs. Rudge. You are accustomed to caring for hens?’

  ‘Four of us are, Doctor. We were just saying how you get to think they have characters, like.’

  Ally nods. ‘I’ll have to consult Dr. Crosswyn. I can’t see why not.’

  Leaving Mrs. Rudge to her tilling, she wanders down towards the trees, stepping over twisting roots and fallen branches. The cost of a henhouse, she thinks. The committee won’t like that. And how much does one pay for a hen, or four hens or however many will be required? And the killing. She who has opened a human rib-cage and removed a human heart, she who has weighed the heart and dissected it on a wooden bench, who has seen women exsanguinate in the operating theatre, she does not think she could take a living bird, feel its feathers warm under her hand, and lift a cleaver—no. And it is probably not the kind of thing one should permit patients to do. But that part of proceedings is some way in the future, and presumably one could employ someone with expertise. Another cost for the committee, the hen-killer’s fee. Foxes might come. Tom’s Japanese foxes, taking up residence, declaring themselves guardian spirits and pillaging the henhouse, although she doubts the people of Flushing need goblin foxes to justify their certainty that the mad are different from themselves.

  She comes out of the trees onto the beach and picks her way over the grey stones, smoothed and rounded by the sea. The tide is rising, licking at the dry stones and falling back leaving them shining and purple in their grey. She stands on the tide line, the seaweed a broad scribble of olive-green oil paint and fine strokes in red pen-and-ink. Tom has seen seals here. She remembers her vision of the departing ghosts. We should have a ceremony, she thinks, use our sewing materials to make effigies of those who haunt our minds, and push them out to sea in burning boats.

  She finds a dry rock and sits on it. Margaret Rudge was admitted nine months ago, mostly as a result of evidence given by her sister-in-law about a nervous decline resulting from Mrs. Rudge’s belief that her husband was unsuitably involved with a neighbour. Mrs. Rudge had been found more than once wandering the village weeping and drunk, and the sister-in-law had taken over the care of her house and family some weeks earlier after finding the youngest children alone beside an open fire. Her admission papers state that the village doctor had several times observed her ‘in a state of disorder’ and ‘plainly unfit for the charge of young children.’ She has given no trouble whatsoever at the asylum, and falls, therefore, into Ally’s category of patients whose insanity is likely to be caused, or at least triggered, by circumstance and environment. (Or, of course, some would say, patients who never were insane, but there are far fewer of these than the popular press would have its readers believe. It is in no-one’s interest to spend public funds confining capable citizens.) Ally is keeping detailed notes, for of course the problem is that it is not significantly easier to change an individual’s social and family situation than it would be to change her heredity. There are no control groups in this experiment. And it is almost breakfast time.

  A door inside the house bangs as she opens the front door. Open windows, a breathing house. There’s no-one in the dining or sitting rooms, only sunlight on new paint and daffodils in glass vases, and voices from the kitchen. The two parlour-boarders, who might quite properly wait in the dining room to be served, sit at the deal table in the middle of the kitchen, one spooning marmalade into a bowl and the other folding napkins. One of the kitchen boarders is putting eggs into egg cups, where their sea-shell shine lifts immediately into steam, and the other makes toast with more concentrated attention than Ally has seen paid to some surgical procedures.

  ‘Good morning,’ Ally says. ‘It’s a beautiful day outside.’

  They look up at her, as if she’s said something that breaks the rules. Mrs. Henning’s hands stop moving marmalade and then her face clears, as if she’s remembered a lost word.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor. You had a fine morning for your walk.’

  Ally smiles at her. ‘The bluebells will soon be out in the wood. More than enough for us to gather a few bunches.’

  This is how you build sanity. You speak of flowers and the weather. You put marmalade in pretty bowls and eggs into egg cups, and time has passed and nothing bad has happened, making it seem possible that more time will pass without bad things. Mrs. Curnow places the last napkin on her stack, damask that Aunt Mary found cheap and thought might cheer the table at Rose Tree House. I don’t say that nice table linen cures madness, she wrote, but the proper domestic appointments have doubtless a role in staying troubled minds. Aunt Mary would know.

  ‘When my daughters visit I can take them there,’ Mrs. Curnow says. She has not seen her daughters since her admission two years ago, shortly after the birth of the second.

  ‘You can take a picnic,’ Ally promises.

  She looks at the railway clock between the windows: there are few rules at Rose Tree House, but any community requires regulation and everyone has agreed to rise by seven and to attend breakfast at a quarter to eight, lunch at one, tea at half-past four and supper at half-past seven. Middle-class arrangements, several degrees west of the asylum’s boarding school and hospital regime whose daily aim is to return all patients to their beds at a nursery hour.

  Mrs. Henning clears her throat. ‘I believe Frances is having some difficulties, Doctor. She is—we are—unused to—well, to our own clothes.’

  Frances Gunner arrived only two days ago. Has she forgotten how to dress herself?

  ‘Please continue with your breakfast,’ Ally says. ‘Miss Mason has taken such care with the toast, you should eat it hot.’

  Miss Mason turns round to smile as Ally hurries upstairs.

  Miss Gunner is sitting on her bed, still in her nightgown, with her hands over her face and Emma Trennick standing beside her. Miss Trennick starts, her face alarmed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I didn’t mean to be late. I know the rules. I didn’t mean it.’

  Ally remembers herself once apologising to Tom in similar terms. I know the importance of your time, please believe that I never meant to waste your aftern
oon in this way. I am so very sorry.

  ‘It is nothing, Miss Trennick. Of course there will be times when your judgement tells you that the usual rules do not apply. But now I have come and you should join the others at breakfast.’

  She stands at the window while Miss Trennick’s footsteps pass down the stairs, giving Miss Gunner a moment to compose herself, to adjust to the change of presences. The sun is bright on the water now, a sharp white light behind the trees’ branches where last year’s rooks’ nests float like winter fruit. She turns back. The room is tidy, Miss Trennick’s bed already made with perfectly folded corners and the candle placed in the centre of a white linen cloth on the chest of drawers. It is restful, a room without paintings on the walls, scattered with tree-shadows.

  ‘Miss Gunner, it is breakfast time. You should dress and come down now.’

  Ally decided at the beginning that she would use the women’s titles, as the nurses in the asylum do not. Miss Gunner’s fingers clench over her face.

  ‘Mrs. Henning said there was a trouble with your clothes?’

  A muffled sound. Ally crosses to the clothes folded on Miss Gunner’s bedside chair. She does not handle them—they are not hers to handle—but they appear clean if worn and frayed around the seams. The women leave the asylum in the clothes in which they entered.

  ‘You know that soon you will have a little money. You may save a few weeks and then buy yourself a new dress.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Miss Gunner. ‘I don’t know what to wear. See? I don’t know. I don’t know how you decide.’

  Miss Gunner has been in the asylum for five years, since she was twenty-two. Her admission papers say that she interrupted a divine service to accuse the vicar of obscene acts, and persisted in recounting her allegations in coarse words quite outside her usual character. Since then, the written records state only that she spent two weeks on the hospital ward in the typhoid epidemic the summer after her admission and that the following year she was attacked by another patient and required stitches in her arm. Ally has not suggested to anyone that if Miss Gunner’s accusations are true then there is no basis for questioning her sanity, but the possibility that they are—and the fact that sometime in the last five years Miss Gunner stopped pointing out the possibility—is one of Ally’s reasons for accepting her at Rose Tree House. She sits down beside her.

  ‘Some days it is strangely hard to decide,’ she says. ‘The practical solution is to set out your clothes for the morning when you go to bed. Otherwise, you will need to consider what clothes you have and which is the most suitable, or least unsuitable, for your day’s activities.’

  Miss Gunner puts her hands in her lap and twists them. ‘I’ve only the two dresses. It’s just—I’m sorry, Doctor.’

  Ally wonders if she should add another rule: in the interests of their recuperation, boarders are forbidden to apologise.

  ‘Well, today you will be taking a walk and perhaps writing a letter or working a little in the garden.’

  Miss Gunner’s hands pause in their twining. ‘I’m no good at writing. May I sew? I heard something about us sewing.’

  Ally resists the desire to pat Miss Gunner’s shoulder. ‘If the sewing supplies come you may. I expected them yesterday but you know how the post is around here.’

  Miss Gunner nods, though it’s unlikely that the unreliability of the Cornish post has been high among her concerns.

  ‘So if one of your dresses is an evening gown or your Sunday best, you should wear the other one. Otherwise wear the one you like better. Change at lunchtime if you feel like it. And we will see you at the breakfast table in ten minutes.’

  On the stairs, she thinks, there could be a painting. But not one of Papa’s. One of the new French city paintings, to remind everyone that there are places where people dine at tables set out on the pavement and dance whirling by candlelight, where couples lean on bridges under starry skies. She finds herself smiling. Some of Degas’s dancers, admired by Aubrey and scorned by Papa, or one of Mr. Whistler’s new Parisian paintings, would do very well. And when the madwomen had had enough of looking at it she could sell it and buy a henhouse. The smell of toast and coffee drifts down the hall and Ally is hungry.

  A SHIP OF FOOLS

  He stays on deck long after everyone else has gone, back to their cabins to prepare for dinner or to the library to bag the newest books. It takes a long time to leave Japan from here, much longer than to leave England from Cornwall, and there are still islands and whole mountains, even beaches, occupying much of the foreground as the sun goes down. The intermission, the time between places, will begin soon enough and for now he wants to see Japan from this last point of view. He may, after all, return one day: life is long and journeys shorter every year. He may bring Ally. Ahead of the ship, a swathe of sea glints orange and the lowest clouds are sharp-edged, lit from behind. It is unlikely that Japan will have much further call for foreign engineers; in fact he can imagine that in not many years the traffic in expertise will be going the other way, but perhaps if there is need, if something goes wrong with the lights . . . Although it has been his job to make sure that nothing goes wrong with the lights. At the moment when his circle on the planet turns away from the sun, a white flash begins on the tip of the fading headland. He counts the beats.

  ‘Tom Cavendish! I heard you were finished in Kyoto. Saying a fond farewell, are you? You’ll be back, don’t worry. I remember doing the same thing myself, younger than you, thinking I was going back to a job in the City and I’d never get further than France for the rest of my days, but of course I wanted to and so I did and here I am, dear boy, here I am.’

  The light flashes again. Yes, one of his. One of Penvenick’s.

  ‘Professor Baxter! What a pleasure to have you on board. But whatever calls you west? Were you not determined to live and die here?’

  The professor shrugs. His beard is perhaps even more luxuriant than at New Year. ‘Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. My father died—don’t be sorry, dear boy, he was almost ninety, a blessed release, not least I dare say for my sister with whom he had lived for some years—and since my daughter is to be married this summer my wife is adamant, adamant, that I should return while the estate is settled. Worried my sister will get my share, I don’t doubt, but she says Helena longs to have me walk her down the aisle. I’d rather expect her to write and tell me herself if that were the case, wouldn’t you? Foolishness, anyway, it’s the man at the altar you want to worry about, not the one at the door.’

  ‘A wife and daughter? I had no idea.’

  There are rumours—more than rumours—about Professor Baxter and a Japanese lady who is said to have two half-European children. Bad enough, Tom thinks, without a wife at home, for such children are rejected by the Japanese and never taken home when European men reach the end of their Far Eastern residence. To bring another being into the world condemned to such a half-life from the moment of birth!

  ‘No more you did. Jane and I do best with the Pacific between us, have done for years. A perfectly civilized arrangement, no questions asked—by either side, I might add, Jane has her freedom too—and no hard feelings.’

  Yes, marriages do end, break and founder. And if one were going to run away and begin again, one would of course return to Japan, to a wooden house beside a canal where the mountains meet the city in the east of Kyoto. And it would be sensible for a European with a certain expertise then to seek a position at the university, to teach, for example, engineering. And to make every effort to learn Japanese, to speak and sit and eat the Japanese way. To return to a mountain village when there is a holiday, to take the train to visit a friend in Tokyo. If one were to begin again.

  ‘May I ask, how old is your daughter?’

  The professor comes to stand beside him at the rail. ‘Ask away, dear boy. She must be—let me see—oh, twenty-three, I think. Or four. It’s been a long tim
e. Are you going to ask to see a photograph?’

  Tom shakes his head. ‘Only if you wish to show me one.’

  Why would he want to see a photograph of a woman he has never met? The professor fumbles his pocket and pulls out a wallet, from which he extracts a small square of card.

  ‘Here. Pretty enough, I dare say.’

  The picture is so small and faded that it’s hard to perceive much more than a small white woman in a large dark dress. Her hair is darker than Ally’s and the dress fussier than anything Ally would wear. He passes it back.

  ‘A charming young lady. You approve of the match?’

  Professor Baxter pushes the photograph back into the wallet and stands on tiptoe to stuff the wallet back into his pocket.

  ‘Never met the chap, of course. My wife likes him and I can’t say that promises well.’

  Baxter’s face is blurring in the fading light. ‘If you’re going to change for dinner, Cavendish, you’d better look sharp. The cook’s French, did you know? So we can postpone the dumplings and suet pudding a few more weeks yet. Do you want me to get you onto the Captain’s table, exert a little pull? There’re a couple of very fine young ladies dining there.’

  Tom shakes his head. ‘Don’t waste your pull on my account, Professor. Fine young ladies were never my line. And they—or their mammas—would doubtless prefer you to bring someone more eligible.’

  ‘I am disappointed. But just as you like, dear boy. There will be plenty of time to talk between here and Singapore.’

  The professor cocks his head, almost, Tom thinks, crooks his elbow as if to escort him away, waiting for Tom to do as he is told and go below to put on a dinner jacket. Tom looks ahead and stays where he is. He wants to see Japan slip over the horizon much more than he wants to sit at a table in a hot room with eleven strangers. There is no rule that says a man must dine, is there? Heaven knows there will be time enough to contend with fine young ladies and their mammas. The crests of the waves are beginning to shine white against the grey sea, and their sound comforts him; Kyoto, after all, is perhaps too far inland for a maritime man. He remembers pausing on the bridges, as everyone pauses on the bridges, to look up river towards the mountains and see the weather coming down the valley. He remembers the cormorants on the fishing boats, and the herons wading, the morning and evening parades of umbrellas and parasols over the parapets.