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

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 afternoon 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.

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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