Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

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