Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  Who is Annie, he thinks, to tell him about the mind of his own wife, to write from London about a marriage she does not know? He puts the letter down on the windowsill, stares out into the garden where the greens darken and creep in the heavy light. Annie does know Ally, he cannot deny that. She has known Ally much longer than he has. Hunted and cunning. He remembers a fox glimpsed once early in the morning in the rolling fields outside Harrogate, running so fast it seemed to move straight as an arrow over rich ploughed land only dusted with green, and then a few minutes later the inundation of the dogs and the reverberation of hooves in the ground under his feet, where seeds were unfurling in the darkness and sharp-nosed creatures beginning to sense spring. That way, he wanted to tell the men in their red coats, that way back to the river, not up the hill. But the hounds were on the scent and the hunters knew where they were going. He remembers the dance of the temple fox, the fierce joy.

  He goes down to the basement and lights the fire he set in the stove this morning, to make hot water for a wash. At this time in Kyoto, all across town men are making their way home in the knowledge that a wooden tub of scented water has been prepared against their return, clean clothes laid out in square folds. Even the less fortunate, even, for example, a foreigner who might arrive there with no position awaiting, a man who might come to make his fortune, have the bath houses at their disposal. He touches the copper, only beginning to warm. It would not be the same, of course. It would be foolhardy to pretend that Makoto, Tatsuo, Makiko would welcome him without the state imprimatur by which even his unofficial activities were marked. Mrs. Senhouse was often passing remarks about the disgraceful proceedings of foreign drifters and the embarrassment they caused to respectable expatriates. No. Better to stay here, to justify Penvenick’s confidence and hope, in due course, to reap the natural reward. He will go to Scilly. He puts his hand to the copper again. The water is warm enough now.

  The tall servant opens the door wider this time, and takes Tom’s coat, hat and umbrella. Mr. De Rivers is expecting him this evening, she says pointedly. The candles in the hall have not been lit, but in the drawing room the lamps are bright and there is still enough light reflecting off the sea for Tom to see the newspaper held before De Rivers’ face. And that there are no Japanese hangings on the walls.

  De Rivers lowers the paper but he does not get up. ‘Tom Cavendish. Well, well. Here you are. Please, sit down.’

  Tom sits, and then finds that he is low in a delicate little chair. A woman’s chair.

  ‘I’ll ring for some supper for you.’

  He is, then, to be fed like an indigent, as if he had come in search of a free meal. ‘Please don’t trouble. Unless you are taking something yourself.’

  De Rivers leans forward and touches the bell. ‘No trouble. Not to me. I told them you’d want something. Just dined, myself.’

  Tom glances around the room. It may be a new glass case, in the dimness beside the door, but the embroideries, the kimono, the three great vases, are certainly not here, and there is not room in the case for one quarter of what he brought. The maid opens the door and is told to bring a tray for our visitor. Not the lacquerwork persimmons, he thinks, let them not be putting hot dishes on the golden fruit. Although much of the point of lacquer is its strength; he himself was encouraged to scratch and bang. But did not.

  ‘Now then, Tom. I hope things are settling down, now you’re home? Back at work, and so on?’

  Tom nods. ‘Thank you, yes. I believe I was able to do useful work in Japan. Although I had hoped to see an earthquake—just a small one, of course, but sufficient to test the apparatus. It is an interesting challenge.’

  ‘And Mrs. Cavendish? I hear that she has not been idle in your absence. A new madhouse in Flushing, of all places. Ruffled some feathers, I can tell you that.’

  Tom feels himself flush again. Makoto should come, he thinks, and teach etiquette. ‘It is a convalescent home. The residents are not mad.’

  De Rivers sniffs. ‘Mad enough to have been confined in the asylum. It’s news to me a person can be madder than that. Anyway, your wife’s well?’

  Although Tom has never known Ally to be ill, she seems, he realises, in better health than he has seen her before. In her acceptance of their separation she has achieved something, a new bearing or manner.

  ‘She is, yes.’ He looks around again. ‘The embroideries—the silk hangings—’

  ‘Just what I wanted,’ says De Rivers. ‘I told you so. And you accepted your fee.’

  Tom leans forward, his face hot. ‘No. It’s not that. Not the money.’

  ‘No? Because I think anyone would agree that I have been generous.’

  Tom wishes he could throw handfuls of notes onto the floor. Take it, he thinks, take the money. Ally doesn’t want a house anyway. ‘Indeed so. But you do not display the objects? You do not wish them constantly before your eyes?’

  De Rivers sits back. ‘I cannot display everything, Tom. Even in such a house as this. Everything you brought me has been added to my collection, I assure you. Properly stored. I take care of my things, I promise you that. Properly catalogued as well, and not every collector does that, not by a long chalk.’

  There are footsteps, and the maid knocks and backs through the door, the tray in her hands. Tom rises and takes it from her. In the glass cases, false eyes glimmer with candlelight and dark fur merges with the dusk. Of course a man who likes the company of dead animals will not value the work of Japanese craftsmen. Tom feels sick. There is a small tureen of soup on the tray, with a ladle and a white bowl with a red and gold rim, and something under a white cloth. He returns to De Rivers. There is nowhere to put a tray. He stands.

  ‘Well, put it down, Tom. Here.’

  De Rivers throws yesterday’s Times on the floor and pushes the occasional table with his foot. The tray sticks precariously over both ends. Tom centres the tureen, to make it more stable. He serves himself soup, and the smell rises in the cold room like the smell of seasickness on a ship’s deck. He pushes the spoon around.

  ‘So they are in boxes still? The fans, the tea set. The netsuke? They are very small, surely easy to display. Although of course they should not be parted from the inro.’

  De Rivers frowns. ‘Eat up, it will get cold. You mean those toggle things? Charming little objects, aren’t they. Hard to imagine grown men going round with toys hanging round their waists. All quite safe in my storerooms. I didn’t get where I am by carelessness, I assure you.’

  ‘No,’ Tom says. ‘Naturally not.’

  He cannot eat the soup. Across the water, the harbour lights at St Mawes flicker and take hold of the darkness, and the first flashes from St Anthony Head scythe the dusk.

  She has brought him low, he thinks. There is nothing left. He will cross the water to Rose Tree House and ask her to start again from the beginning. Ally, his wife.

  A LIFE’S WORK

  Although it is the middle of the afternoon, equidistant from the daily offices of lunch and tea, Ally leaves the women in the house and garden and makes her way through the trees to the beach. Tom is gone from her now, she thinks. He has not come to find her, has not objected to her leaving, and there is a pain, a hollowness, in her chest. A pain, she thinks, caused by metaphor, since the correct understanding of anatomy would suggest that sadness should make its bodily manifestations in the head, in the wormy grey matter of the brain rather than the doors and chambers of the heart. The trees’ bark is a darker black, the leaves a brighter green, for the pulsating heat of the afternoon, as if today everything is more vivid, clearer to the eye, than usual. The doors of perception, she thinks, the chambers of the human heart. In my Father’s house are many mansions. We cannot speak even of anatomy without metaphor.

  A seagull calls from the rocks ahead and the scent of pine needles hangs in the still air. She thinks of the women behind her, living for now in the shelter of Rose Tree Ho
use, between the institution of the asylum and the institution of marriage. So many of women’s griefs, she thinks, begin in marriage, in the expectation of a happily ever after set into perpetual motion by romance. It is not in romance, nor even sex, that we find the human purpose, but in good work faithfully done. In kindness, which finds sexual expression less often than one might hope, and in endurance. If there is happiness for her in the world, she will find it in the faith of those who never abandoned her, with Annie and Aunt Mary and, in a different way, with her patients and her colleagues. It is they who have sustained her, who caught her when she fell. She lifts her face to the dappled light, breathes in trees and sea. It is here that she will find her peace, in friendship, in the companionship of women and the satisfaction of the labour of mind and heart and hands. In the work of healing and in this place, in the green shade and along the tideline of West Cornwall where she first saw in her mind’s eye her taunting spirits crossing the water, first imagined her final parting from those who had so long haunted her mind.

  She follows the path worn around the brambles by the feet of madwomen and comes out onto the beach, where the grey rocks reflect the white heat of the sky and the sea surges and spangles. It is a pity that all this analysis, all this understanding, does nothing for the causes and little for the symptoms of our pain, gives us only ways of thinking, ways of saying what cannot be borne. Goblin foxes, ghosts, and also the invisible sickness of what we call the mind: they are all stories, illness itself only a metaphor for what can befall the spirit. Ally steps across the granite, the same stone, probably, that makes the white cottage sitting empty across the water. The seaweed is pale and dry under the sun, the mussel shells closed tight until the cold tide rises over them again. She clambers over the last rocks until waves wash at her feet, lifts her face to the sun and closes her eyes to see the redness of her living blood, the motes in her own eyes. It is not metaphor alone, she thinks, that can save us, but also the act of living, of continuing to be with each other in the world. It is a life’s work, to watch the beating of the human heart, to name what we are doing and yet be able to do it.

  She hears a footfall on the stones and opens her eyes. Tom is there, coming out from under the trees, crossing the beach to find her in her own place, in her right mind.

  EPILOGUE

  HOME

  The trees on the shore are ten years nearer the sky, and the gulls who cried Tom’s return have fallen into the sea, feathers washed from flesh and flesh from bone, beaks and claws sand-sifted in the weeds and wash of the seabed. Rocks are water-worn, tide and current carved in granite as the sea rubs at the edges of the land, erases the outlines of our archipelago.

  The boy runs. Small brown birds flee the bushes before him and a blue-gleaming magpie scolds from above. Sticks crack, leaves rustle. He runs on tiptoe over the ants but does not try to save them all; boys run and ants die, other ants lift their corpses and hurry on. He brushes a fly from the pale hair on his arm and runs on, leaps across the rocks and out onto the sand. There is a rock pool here where sea anemones curl tight as fists, where spider-sized crabs rush for crevices too small for his fingers. The afternoon sun has filled the rock with heat and he lies face down, feels the warmth soak through his shorts and shirt, through his skin and bone, the stone ancient under his cheek. He rolls over and offers himself to the sky full of white light.

  Tree-shades lean over the tea-house. The first of the afternoon’s returning rooks crosses the sunlight, and under the bushes creatures of dusk begin to stir and nose. Sometimes she comes at this hour. Tom tidies the tea set, fills the bamboo caddy. He picks a stray leaf from the edge of a tatami mat and returns it to the outdoors. Sometimes, she comes here now.

  The sea-sanded stone has rubbed paint from the door and begun to finger the wood beneath, disclosing rings of growth. Boots and shoes have ground soil, sand, leaf-mould, dust, the droppings of rabbits and chickens and the carapaces of insects into the painted floor. Coats hanging on the wall have somehow left their winter shadows under the empty pegs. Ally leaves the door open behind her. She doesn’t notice the annoyance of the crow on the lawn who abandons a fallen plum because of her passage, nor the scurry of the vole under the rose bush by the gate. Sometimes at this hour she finds him in the garden.

  Tom and Ally walk together through the trees to the beach. There they find Laurence half-asleep by the rock pool, the day cooling around him. They dust him down, the boy, and take him back to the house where tea waits on the table and Ally’s patients gather as evening light from over the water fills the house.

  They take him home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sarah Moss is the award-winning author of four previous novels: Night Waking, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, Bodies of Light and The Tidal Zone.

  Signs for Lost Children was shortlisted for both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

  She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Warwick in England.