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

But the doctor sees only difficult patients, constitutionally incapable of truth. And of course I had no speech with the woman herself. I am sure that if I were called upon to treat such patients I should find many difficulties not apparent in the abstract.’

‘But you would like to try?’

She would like to pass her examinations, to earn her title. ‘I cannot say. I must first qualify.’

‘We should turn around,’ he says. ‘Perhaps you would like to try rowing? It will be easier, going downstream.’

She is afraid to stand on the water, afraid of the rocking and tipping under her feet and the pull beneath the slick surface.

N

OTICEBOARD

They walk through the park, although the sun has set and there is only the last stain of red in the western sky, against which the skeleton trees stand black. The leaves are gone and there is no scent of flowers but it is not cold. Her dress is damp under the arms and perspiration prickles in the small of her back. She seems to be bare-headed. Tom is talking about ceramics, about a new pigment used in a glaze that comes out deep, strong turquoise but deadly poisonous if used inside dining ware. It is for flower vases only, he says, and she is about to argue that people prefer white china or glass to display flowers when she sees May, tightly laced and wearing her violet dress that Mamma gave away, running over the bridge. And then he is behind her, his hands over her breasts, his lips and tongue on the nape of her neck, and a flock of birds, starlings, rises from the trees in the dusk and whirls over their heads in a scrabble of wing-beats and scaly feet.

She wakes, mouth dry and pulse bounding. Her hands move to her breasts. Will he, will anyone, touch her there, ungloved fingers on bare skin? Scalpels, she thinks, the surgeon’s pen, the blade working over exposed ribs. She will not have a child, will not suckle. Mothers do too much harm. Her father’s friend Aubrey once unbuttoned her dress, untied her chemise and shift, helped her to pull them down and arranged her, nubile, a nymph, on the dais in his studio, holding uncomfortably high a lily from the arrangement in his hall. He touched only to guide the pose and although she shivered at each brush of his fingers he did not offer, and she could not ask, for more. Although perhaps May—

She sits up. Grey light seeps around the curtains. Her stomach turns. Today the final results will be posted. You may look, Dr. Stratton said, on the noticeboard outside the Committee Room from noon. And I am sure that none of you have cause for anxiety. But people—men—do fail here, at the end. The results are not exactly final in that it is permitted to repeat the year, sometimes more than once, but for men this is a merely individual shame; no-one is likely to conclude that one student’s, or even several students’, low marks mean that men are unfit to practise as physicians. To betray the cause now—her throat closes. How can she walk down that corridor, approach that board, knowing that her final failure may be pinned up for all to see? To have to tell Miss Johnson, Mrs. Lewis, Mamma—She pulls up her legs, bows her head on her knees. She could be sick, unable to leave her bed, and wait for Annie to send word. Could be weak. She hears a whimper from her own chest. It is all right for Annie. Annie’s brother-in-law, she says, failed two of his qualifying exams because his mother’s final illness disrupted his preparations. A good son, who has made a good doctor and a good husband. The light is strong enough to read her wrist-watch waiting on the bedside table. Ten hours to wait.

She discovers when she goes down to breakfast that she cannot speak. Bacon, offers Uncle James, and when she opens her mouth to say no thank you, just a cup of tea this morning, no sound comes out, not even the whisper of someone with a bad cold. Her lips move, she can pass air over her vocal cords, but she cannot make a sound.

‘Aunt Ally needs to see the doctor,’ says Freddie. Scrambled egg bounces off his tie.

The sudden onset, she wants to say, is strongly indicative of a psychosomatic symptom resulting from considerable nervous strain, the kind of the phenomenon to which the strongest minds may, given sufficient anxiety, find themselves prone. She can say nothing.

‘Perhaps,’ says George, ‘Aunt Ally, unlike some people, keeps silence when she has nothing to say.’

Uncle James lowers The Times. ‘Are you quite well, my dear?’

She nods, gestures and mouths towards the teapot.

‘Tea? Perhaps a drink will help you?’

Perhaps it will, perhaps the heat will relax the cords. George passes her cup.

‘It’s Mr. Cavendish’s last lecture today,’ he says. ‘Will you go, Aunt Ally?’

She had forgotten. It is possible that by this evening she will be gathering stones of her own. I may be detained at the hospital, she wants to say, but no words emerge. This will pass, she thinks. Panic pulses under her sternum. She will speak. There is no organic trouble, no physiological reason for her muteness. A dumb doctor would be no use. Dumb and female, doubly crippled. She tries to ask for the milk jug although her tea already has milk in it. This is a hysterical complaint, a nervous ailment, the kind of trouble that her detractors expect of women. Tom, who thinks her strong, must not know of her weakness. Seven and a half hours until the results will appear.

She has no memory of turning from the board, walking across the red and black tiles, past the shiny apple-green walls, for what may be the last time. She is on the doorstep, dazzled by sunlight, damp with sweat, hearing as if for the first time the roar and