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

‘Look, for shirring. And this is for piping, so we can make it to match. And this must be for smocking. I’ve never seen one before. Well, I suppose I wouldn’t have done, would I, if they’re new.’

Mrs. Henning excuses herself and slips away.

What else, Ally wonders, have they missed? She should order back numbers of the Quarterly Review and the Englishwoman’s Journal, perhaps also the Gentleman’s Magazine. Wars have begun and ended. The Married Women’s Property Act has come into being, the age of consent changed.

‘Do you know how to do that?’ Miss Trennick asks. ‘How to make piping with a machine?’

Mrs. Rudge shrugs. ‘I used to. Used to work for Miss Whitney in Redruth. Before—’ she stops.

Before. The women will need words for this, ways of bridging the lost years.

‘Before you were unwell,’ Ally says.

Mrs. Rudge meets her gaze. ‘Yes. Before I was—unwell. Before I was unwell I worked for a dressmaker. And I made piping.’

‘Did you enjoy the work?’ Ally asks.

Mrs. Rudge reaches out to stroke the sewing machine, tests the point of the needle with her fingertip. She doesn’t look up. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I did.’

Mrs. Henning returns carrying folded off-white cotton. ‘Here, Margaret. Try it out on this.’

‘Your petticoat?’

‘That big packet yesterday was from my husband. New clothes. Well, old clothes, but ones I haven’t been wearing. Not since. Take it, I won’t wear it again.’

Since you were unwell, Ally thinks. Let us make this an illness, from which you have recovered. Mrs. Rudge shakes out the petticoat and they see faded stains, a rent and worn seams. Ally’s own underclothes have always tended towards this state—what is the point in concerning oneself with garments by definition unseen?—but she can imagine the pleasure with which another woman, a more particular woman, might dispose of such a thing. She brings a chair so Mrs. Rudge can sit up to the machine. Miss Trennick produces red thread from one of the workboxes provided by the matron of the asylum and they all gather around to watch Mrs. Rudge wrap the thread around loops and spindles, whirl the handle to wind a spool that fits under the needle and then begin to sew. She makes fine tucks and then shirring around the petticoat’s soiled hem, narrow stitches and broad. She embroiders Charlotte Henning’s name across the front breadth in a looping script and then snips the threads and begins an area of cross-hatching that turns into smocking when she pulls the stitches. She holds it out, laughing.

‘There. You could still wear it if you want, only you’d know you had all sorts going on underneath. Anyone else?’

There’s a silence. Miss Trennick looks up. ‘Could you do a butterfly? I mean, if we’re allowed?’

They glance at Ally. Are they behaving like sane people, is this acceptable? Women who for several years have taken clothes from a communal pile once week. Why should they be ordinary?

‘Or birds,’ Ally suggests. ‘The outlines are quite easy. Though maybe not freehand with a sewing machine.’

‘Reckon I can do it,’ Mrs. Rudge says. And she can: by teatime all the petticoats have red letters and flowers, birds and butterflies and for Ally a cylinder meant to represent her stethoscope and an attempt at a doctor’s bag. It occurs to Ally only as she folds the petticoat back into her drawer to wonder what Tom will think.

A G

ENTLEMAN’S

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ASTE

He finds a book on Japanese folklore in the library, on a shelf otherwise crowded with the pious hopes and more pious memories of English missionaries to various parts of East Asia. He wonders if there is any propensity for reciprocal journeys, if there are villages in India where people sell home-made sweets and chutneys to raise money to send priests to Europe in order to save other people from the delusions of Christianity. What would have happened if he had sought enlightenment at the temple with the gongs, if he had knelt at the curtained altar? He flips through A Light in the East and Three Years Among the Ainu Heathen and decides that whatever he might learn about Japan from a more attentive reading would be too dearly bought. He signs out the folklore book and takes it up to the deck, where the wind is a little fresh for comfort and the waves are cresting white.

There is a whole chapter about fox possession and fox worship. There is a new asylum in Tokyo, the author says, where more than half the patients believe themselves possessed and a good number of the others imagine themselves gifted with magical powers of exorcism. It is not a situation calculated to result in the cure of either group. The author himself has witnessed a village woman in the grip of such a delusion, who after many days of sitting silently with her face to the wall, refusing to respond even to the approaches of her own children, turned one day in rage and attacked her mother-in-law, only to allege the next day that it was not she but a demon fox in her form guilty of the assault. More commonly, however, foxes take human form to waylay solitary travellers, or sometimes to call late at night on those who live alone. One of the author’s village acquaintances, a man who had attended college in the city, once answered the door to a man asking help for his companion taken sick on the road. The friend followed his visitor by moonlight through the woods to where a man lay moaning and half-conscious at the roadside. Between them, they brought the man back to the village and settled him on a futon at the fireside. The writer’s friend cared for his guests and did not himself retire to bed until sunrise, but when he woke a couple of hours later there was nobody there but a single gold coin on the futon where the sick man had slept. So the friend returned to the roadside