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

of smugglers held the village as a private fiefdom. She looks at him pacing the floor as she has not seen him pace before; he is different now.

She swallows. She must not insinuate herself where she is not wanted, must not cling and clutch a man who wishes to be free, but nor must she give him to believe that she does not wish for his company, that she prefers a warm fireside to her husband’s conversation. ‘I could come too. If you like. But of course if you wish to be alone I understand, I have letters to write.’

He turns back towards the staircase. ‘Come if you want to, Alethea. Just as you prefer.’

No, she wants to say, as you prefer; I have still dignity enough to want only where I am wanted. He is not Mamma. She steels herself. ‘I prefer to be with you. As long as I do not intrude.’

He stops. ‘Good. Come too. But you’ll get wet.’

She shrugs. ‘My skin is no more permeable than yours. As long as we keep moving we’ll keep warm.’

He does not want her, she thinks. He would, on balance, rather she were not there.

At first they follow the track between the fields. The rain is only mizzle, just heavy enough to fall, beading the leaves in the hedge and the taller grasses with drops too small to run. Gorse flowers seem to glow, almost to pulsate, against the grey and green of land and sky, and on her right the sea and clouds merge. There is no birdsong, but the hawk hovers again on the hill. Before they have passed the beach he is walking ten paces ahead, although she has no difficulty keeping up. She has angered him somehow, has done something to annoy: perhaps he did not want her to come, or objects to her late rising or to the meagre lunch. He did not like to come back and find her washing the floor, he has never liked to see housework. There is no shame, she thinks, in any task done well, and does not he himself insist on cleaning his own shoes and emptying the pot under the bed? Perhaps he will like the slices of plum cake she has brought to eat at Prussia Cove. She must think of something to ask him, something he will like to talk about. She hurries to catch up. Her skirt is already mired and clinging about her ankles. It is too late. What marriage, what friendship, was ever saved by small talk?

She reaches to take his arm and thinks better of it. Don’t cling, don’t need. ‘Tom? What was your favourite of the things you brought back?’

He has spoken much of the places, of houses without walls and gardens without flowerbeds, but very little about his acquisitions.

He checks his pace and glances back at her. ‘For De Rivers, you mean? Or my own things?’

She just wants him to talk to her. ‘Either. The object you liked best.’

He walks on. They climb a stone stile and the path, free now of the fields, slopes down towards a deep inlet. He is not going to answer her.

‘I tried not to like them. Or at least only to admire, because I knew they were not mine. It’s a different thing, buying for another person. I did not much like that aspect of it. I had not thought, you see, that buying such things—well, works of art, I suppose one should call them—would be so unlike buying bricks or steel.’

She nods. ‘Uncle James says most people buy art the way they choose a wife.’ Without thinking, Uncle James adds, but she does not say that.

‘Perhaps it felt a little like choosing another man’s wife. There were so many beautiful things.’

In the inlet, below the short cliffs, waves buckle and swish, unable to run and break between the narrow walls.

‘So there was not one in particular, one more memorable beauty?’ She should stop. She knows that he does not want to answer.

He looks out to sea. There are folded seagulls bobbing on the waves. ‘Yes. There was one.’

She says nothing. Behind him, where he can’t see, she pulls up her skirts to climb over a rock. The path ahead rises now, up onto the headland. He is saying something but he’s several paces ahead and facing out into the wind. Something about the Imperial Palace. She catches up.

‘A kind of trade fair, with stalls. Someone from Nakayama. They’re famous, they made the hangings for the new palace in Tokyo. They were all extraordinary but there was one—cranes, and wisteria. You can’t imagine the fineness of the embroidery. Inconceivable, that someone would spend such time and energy sewing a feather.’

He is an engineer, she thinks. It is the process that fascinates him.

‘And it was beautiful?’

He walks on, ahead again. ‘Of course.’

‘And De Rivers appreciates it?’

‘I didn’t buy it, Al. I told myself it was too big, and so costly I dare not spend another man’s money so.’

‘But?’

He looks back at her. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It was very expensive. If De Rivers hadn’t wanted it I doubt it could have been sold here for more than I would have paid. But I didn’t want him to have it, I think. It belonged in Japan.’

It feels like a confession. The one that mattered belongs in Japan, and is still there, and also here in his mind. They reach the top of the headland, from which St Michael’s Mount is just visible through the rain, disembodied and floating above the bay. And she understands that there will be no outing there, no basket unpacked onto a gingham cloth under the trees. They will not sit together on the grass and see their shadows lengthen and merge in the afternoon sun until the tide turns and it is time to go home. They will not find each other at last in the whitewashed room when darkness has fallen. Not this time.

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The tide is