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

He nods. ‘And you, Professor.’

He stays at the railing until nightfall is complete and a piano and a woman’s voice join the hubbub from the dining room below. They must have passed a headland, for the ship begins to lift and sway under him. He plants his feet a little further apart and finds the rhythm. Ah, there. It is like breathing. He feels his body calm and settle to the motion, which will carry him, now, all the way home. Back to Ally, to his marriage bed. Away from here. Light flares as the door behind him opens and he turns to see a man helping a woman—a lady—over the mantel.

‘Good evening,’ Tom says.

She clings to her companion’s arm as if at risk of blowing away. ‘Oh, see all the stars! Starlight on the sea—who could object to the motion when there is such a sight?’

There may be six weeks of this, six weeks stuck on a ship of fools returning him inexorably to a country he no longer likes and a marriage he cannot quite remember. Tom tips his hat and retires to his cabin.

He is too hungry to sleep deeply, but lies feeling the ship’s movement, the Pacific Ocean’s movement, in his body, feeling his blood rise and fall with the sea, his muscles and bones and brain rocked on the surface of the water. The berth is too narrow for him to stretch out his arms as he has become accustomed to do on a futon, so he lies on his back, hands folded behind his head. How many other human souls, he wonders, are now afloat on this ocean, between eastern Asia and the west coasts of the Americas? On the other side of this sea there is daylight and somewhere in the middle, sunrise. Passenger ships, fishing vessels, traders. Canoes with outriggers around the islands, Chinese junks, the coastal bark boats of American Indians. Thousands. Tens of thousands, rocked by the same water. He turns over. At any given moment, what proportion of humanity is at sea? They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. How does it go? They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man. He always used to like that bit, that drunk men haven’t changed in however many thousand years. He bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm. He wonders, again, how intelligent adults, informed by experience as well as education, manage to believe these pleasant words. As late as the last century, some people argued that building lighthouses was an offence against divine providence, that it was impertinent to attempt to forestall the will of God as revealed by wind and weather. As, indeed, those of similar mind have argued against the development of abdominal surgery: if the Lord has seen fit to place a tumour in a belly, what right have doctors to interfere? He must remember to tell Ally this connection in his next letter, something they have in common. He sleeps, rousing through the night to breathe an unfamiliar air and see an unfamiliar darkness, to the insistence of hunger, to the waves whose mood will one moment change.

In the morning, Japan is still on the horizon, a low bulk that on a duller day could be taken for cloud. A fleet of white birds darts over the waves and out of sight. The sea moves slowly, as if gelatinous. And there is the smell of bread. He has not smelt baking bread for months. He remembers the ambassador’s wife’s performance of despair: they brew beer, she said, so they can’t pretend not to know about yeast. I had my maid show him with her own hands but they’re all the same, aren’t they, they just don’t want to learn. He follows the scent along the deck. The sails are barely holding their shapes, but it is, after all, only just after sunrise. And anyway, he reminds himself, impatience is even more pointless than usual on a long sea voyage. Wind and weather, time and tide. They that do business in great waters. It is for the captain to decide when to use the engine, and meanwhile Tom will enjoy the quiet and the clean air. Baking would be undetectable with a coal-fired engine roaring. He peers into the galley, where a cook whose appearance does not belie his rumoured Frenchness is stirring a pot and two Chinese boys are chopping things with big knives. It is true that he never quite came to terms with the Japanese breakfast, with soup and rice and salt fish on a parched morning tongue, even if it is no different from coffee and salt bacon. Toast, he thinks. And just possibly butter? Marmalade, anyway. He should have provisioned himself better for this voyage. Pickled plums, or something. Japanese cuisine offers little but dried fish to the traveller. Perhaps he should not have scorned the European offerings of the shops in Yokohama, the imported beef extract, cocoa and condensed milk. Perhaps, indeed, such things should be part of Japanese modernisation. Tools of empire: it’s much harder to outwit invaders who bring their own supplies. He checks his watch and wanders back along the deck. He’s not used to having nothing to do.

He waits four minutes after half-past seven, not wishing to behave like a dog waiting for the butcher’s door to open. There’s a seating plan at the door, and someone already at his table, sitting with her back to the room where she can see out of the window. A perfectly straight back, dropped shoulders and a swirl of black hair piled on the back of her head, making her neck look almost too thin for its function. And she’s wearing deep mourning. Doubtless certain conventions should obtain, but he’s too hungry to reflect on the etiquette of breakfasting alone with an unknown young lady; if she doesn’t want to be alone with