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

a man she shouldn’t have come to breakfast without a companion. He bows and wishes her a good morning before taking a seat on the other side of the table. Steam rises from her coffee cup.

‘Good morning. Coffee?’

He nods and then rises to help her because she’s using both hands to lift the coffee pot and he can see the tendons standing out in her wrists.

‘Please don’t trouble.’

He pours himself coffee, allows her to pass the cream jug. She looks up as if she expects him to say something.

‘It’s good to smell coffee again,’ he says, although it isn’t, particularly, and he likes Japanese tea.

She looks down at her hands. No rings: she must have lost a parent rather than a husband, and anyway looks barely old enough to be married. ‘We were able to buy it quite easily in Kobe.’

Now what? ‘You were living there?’ he ventures.

‘Indeed so.’

He looks around for the waiter, who can hardly be unduly occupied. Her rudeness, he thinks, or at least her evident desire not to talk to him, excuses further effort. He smells bacon. The ship has begun to sway along again, and outside the waves are lifting. She is saying something.

‘I beg your pardon?’

She sighs, as if he should have been listening better. ‘You have been in Yokohama?’ She looks him up and down. ‘Some kind of trade?’

He raises a hand to the waiter standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Engineer. And I was travelling around.’

The waiter is coming over.

‘You were not at table yesterday.’

‘I was on deck and missed dinner.’

The waiter hands Tom a menu.

‘Porridge, please,’ he says. ‘And then toast and eggs. Scrambled, if I may.’

He should, of course, have made sure that the lady had placed her order first. He looks at her.

‘Fruit, please.’

The waiter bows and leaves.

‘You are sensible to take fruit now,’ he says. ‘I daresay we will be longing for fresh food before Singapore.’

She shrugs. ‘It is my habit. I cannot bear a heavy breakfast.’

I cannot bear a snob, he thinks, and sees with relief an older woman making her way to the table. He will be eating with these people three times a day for several weeks.

B

IRDS AND

B

UTTERFLIES

The cottage will soon look better. She of all people should know that one cannot make a thing more beautiful without damaging it. Dust-blankets shroud the furniture, piled in the centre of the room, and the workmen have left the prints of their boots on the floor. She touches the wall where she has painted squares of possible colours, a daffodil-yellow that is probably too bright and a blue that is too cold. She can’t hear Papa’s voice in her head the way she hears Mamma’s, which means that she can’t imagine what he might approve. Dark colours. Murk. Tangled foliage, as if the only mode for the mind’s eye were botanical. What if there were an anatomical wallpaper, a design of capillaries and veins, the blue-white curve of tendons and the bloom of red muscle? Her fingertips come dusty from the wall. White, she will have it all painted white, and if Tom has a fancy for something else, paint is cheap enough.

She goes upstairs, glances into Tom’s study which she is keeping just as he left it, and stands in his bedroom. In their bedroom. There is still a faint smell of damp, and the swollen sash squawks as she wrestles it up an inch or two. There are daffodils bobbing under the apple tree in the top garden and a fuzz of new green things that are probably weeds. She turns back the blanket and feels the sheet for damp. She remembers her nightgown tossed to the floor here, his hands on her body in this bed, but the memory is not quite real, has been worn out by reiteration. She and Tom will do that again, here. If he has a safe passage home. And if not, well, if not things will change less. She was feeling better, she thinks, at Rose Tree House, and now she is back in Tom’s cottage anxiety rises again in her chest. It is not fair to blame Tom. A domestic environment is uneasy for many women. She should leave a note for the painter and get back to Rose Tree House, where she has promised to oversee the setting up of the sewing machine which arrived yesterday. Not that she has ever used a sewing machine.

They open the boxes in the room Ally had imagined being used as a drawing room, for reading and talking and taking tea around the fire.

‘We’ll need space for piecing, you see doctor. Most use a table but I’ve always found the floor’s easier, specially with dresses and such, just so’s you don’t mind crawling around a bit but I don’t think any of us’ll be choosy.’

Miss Gunner laughs. ‘What, stand on our dignity?’

Ally remembers herself crouching on Mamma’s kitchen floor. ‘You have it back,’ she says. ‘Your dignity. You can piece on the dining table if you like. Or I dare say we could find another table to put in here.’

The machine came in a wooden crate, from which Mrs. Rudge has levered the nails. Miss Gunner and Miss Trennick hold the crate while Ally and Mrs. Rudge ease the contraption forward and stand it on the floor. It looks like part of a train, Ally thinks, or like a spare bit of the ornate ironwork that anchors the roof of Euston station, and she likes its shiny blackness, likes the fact that although it is made for women to use it has been decorated with gold scrolls and curlicues instead of coloured flowers. Its ebony cogs mesh, dangerous to fingers, and the needle gleams under the coil of hooks and spindles. The turning handle is cold to the touch.

‘May I open it?’ Mrs. Rudge has reached into the crate and is holding a green box. ‘I think it has extra parts.’

‘Of course.’

There are implements Ally couldn’t name, whose purpose she