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

the dawn, because of the seagulls, because while he is asleep he does not know where he is. The west-facing bedroom is still dim, full up with a submarine light strained by curtains whose green he didn’t notice last night. The wall a foot from his face is roughly painted, uneven as the face of the moon. He lies still so she doesn’t sense his consciousness, tries to breathe slowly so his body, his heartbeat and the growth of his hair, doesn’t signal to hers that there’s somebody here now. She does not love him, he thinks. It is all gone, whatever it was, and he cannot tell her anything that matters. Would it help, he wonders, could he get back to where they were last year, if he turned now, if he reached over her sleeping shoulder to unbutton the nightdress, if with his foot he pushed up its frilled hem until his hand could touch her thigh? If he rolled her over and before she was fully awake, before she could object, held her wrists and silenced her mouth with kisses? Would it be a relief to her simply to capitulate, is it the courtesies of negotiation and not the act itself of which they are no longer capable? He remembers Louisa, whose white flesh was indeed tender as ripe fruit, who dropped one layer of black clothing after another to the floor of his cabin and rejoiced when at last he understood his role, when he was not gentle. He remembers her.

He reaches around to touch the fox under his nightshirt. He has not told Ally about his tattoo. He had thought that she would find it, and he would explain. He had imagined her fingers and her mouth travelling over it, and himself telling the story of the dancing dog fox and the blue-skinned betto and the boy on the ship. And not telling another tale, which she does not need to know. Naturally there is awkwardness after so many months apart. Naturally they must learn to be together again. They have both been busy, absorbed in their work, both solitary and free. It is not as if she has spent the time embroidering handkerchiefs and ticking off the days of his absence.

She does not love him.

His shoes sit neatly together beside the bed, and on the chair his clothes lie folded.

He edges from under the sheets, not to cause a draft or a chill to disturb her. He does not know these floorboards, sidles tentatively as a man fearing quicksand. By the door he looks back. She is on her side, just as she went to sleep, with her arms pressed over her breast and her hands tucked under her chin, her knees raised so that her feet and her behind form one rise of the blankets. She’s pulled the sheets tight around her shoulders. He can’t really see her face, but her hair has spread across the pillow again. He bites his lip and goes downstairs, treading on the outsides of the steps where creaks are least likely.

He opens the curtains. The room smells of woodsmoke and the grate is full of ash, will have to be swept before another fire can be lit. He will need to bring in more logs. One thing at a time, and the day will pass, and then another day and at last they will return to Falmouth and the daily distractions of work. He should have taken his clothes from the chair upstairs. He puts his coat over his pyjamas, unlocks the door and steps out barefoot into the morning. Wet grass closes around his ankles.

The sky is hanging low over the peninsula, the horizon that called to him yesterday absent as the sun behind the clouds. They will have to go out and walk anyway, he thinks, they cannot pass the day in that house. He should have brought some work, the journals he missed in Japan, the beginnings of a paper he might deliver to the Polytechnic Institute and then perhaps the Society of Engineers. He had imagined, somehow, that being here, being with Ally, would constitute occupation. He cannot now recall how he thought they would pass so many hours. He crosses the grass, treading dandelions underfoot, and picks his way along the track to the beach. He will walk on the sand, let the waves come from Africa wash his earthbound feet, but when he comes to the bluff he sees that the tide is so high that there is no beach and the sand is under a man’s height of water and sullen grey waves. He clambers across the rocks and sits there, listening to the crash and hiss, trying to remember if it sounds the same as in Japan. There was sand the colour of a white man’s skin and palm trees black against the sky. His pyjamas cling around his ankles. It does not matter what he has done.

She does not love him.

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She does not know what has woken her. It must be late, she should not have slept so long, he will think she is in the habit of lying long in bed. She turns to find herself alone, because she has overslept, because hardworking people began the day hours ago. He should have woken her. Before he went away he woke her with his hands and his lips half an hour before his alarm clock rang. She pushes back the blankets and swings her feet to the cold floor. The chill reaches up under the flimsy lace-trimmed nightgown she bought with her first month’s salary. Flaunting yourself, she thinks, aping the younger and prettier woman you never were. She cannot do this. She can work, she thinks, she can be a doctor, she can write articles and perhaps eventually a monograph, but she cannot be someone’s wife, not anymore. She has made herself ridiculous, a woman with bony feet and greying hair got up like a young bride,