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

coming up the estuary. Moored boats lift and bump as their keels feel water once more around them, and the light in the air shifts as waves cover the mud. The groynes at Flushing stand bare, the stonework of Dutch hands three hundred years dead exhibited for admiration. The seagull on the wall outside Tom’s window looks around, makes one tart remark and takes wing. Soon the fishing boats will be in.

Penvenick peers around Tom’s door. ‘I’m off home now, Tom. What are you working on?’

Ink has dripped from his uplifted pen onto the blotting paper. ‘Just the letters about the apparatus for Red Rock.’

Penvenick opens the door fully. He became stooped and drawn while Tom was in Japan. Tom wonders when his son last saw him, if he knows how age has come upon the man.

‘Taking you a good while.’

Tom dips the pen again. ‘I’ll stay till they’re done.’

Penvenick sighs. ‘There’s no great urgency. Mrs—Dr. Cavendish will be wanting you home.’

Tom keeps his head down. ‘She’s over at the convalescent home.’

‘Thought they had a housekeeper for the nights?’

‘Ally had to dismiss her. Not suitable.’

‘So your wife stays every night?’

Tom looks up. Penvenick already knows. He writes the first line of the address. ‘Most nights, yes. She won’t be wanting me home.’

Penvenick pats Tom’s shoulder and then draws back. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Tom. Truly sorry.’

What is he supposed to say? Thank you? It is nothing? It is not nothing. He has—they have—failed. He has not learnt to be a husband, has not sufficiently studied what husbands do. He assumed it would be obvious, matrimony. He assumed that love and good will would be enough, and he was wrong. He waits while Penvenick shuffles away and then writes the next line of the address. At least now the old man knows, he can volunteer for the Scilly job without having to give explanations. He dips the pen again.

There is still sunlight lying on the hill above Flushing when he leaves the office. From here, he cannot see even the rooflines of the palaces above Rose Tree House, only the sky above where Ally is and the sea before her. It will be easier to think of their separation in Scilly, from which England itself is only occasionally visible on the horizon. It would be easier still if he returned to Japan. A perfectly civilized arrangement. Not yet. The boats are all afloat now, bobbing and swaying companionable as sheep in a field, and the stillness that precedes sunset is settling on the water. He did not see this in Japan, the tender slowness of a northern dusk. He would need to go further: Aomori, Hakodate, Sapporo, the high forest places of the Ainu, who worship bears by taming them and nurturing them, calling them Brother until one day it is time to put the honoured creature to a slow death. The seagulls wheel and call over his head. He will walk out to the sea before he goes home.

There are flowers blooming in all the gardens, bright colours and variegated shapes foaming over walls and dripping from trees and fences. The terraced houses are painted pink, blue, green, as if by children newly entranced by the power of colour. Along Dunstanville, couples saunter, the women garish in aniline dyed skirts, laughing and chattering loud as ravens. He remembers beds of gravel raked into patterns that wove tapestries of shade under black branches and crimson leaves. He remembers Makiko’s grey and white bird kimono, her neat gait as she knelt and rose. He has passed the captains’ houses and is almost at Ludgate House. He finds himself on the doorstep, ringing the bell.

‘Good evening.’

He remembers the maid from last time, an elderly woman, tall and thin in her black and white, her hair scraped back under a lace cap.

‘I’m not expected,’ he says. ‘I’m Thomas Cavendish. I brought all the things—the hangings, the netsuke—from Japan?’

She waits, the door still her hand. The house is so big, he thinks, the panelling so deep and the brocade curtains so heavy, that he would not hear if there were a whole dinner party going on in there. He feels dampness under his arms.

‘And I was just wondering—well, I was thinking, perhaps if it’s not an inconvenience I would so very much like to see them again. In their places. Now Mr. De Rivers has had time to—to arrange them.’

She looks him up and down. ‘Mr. and Miss De Rivers are at table, sir.’

Inside are all the treasures, the foxes on the inro, the blossoms on the tea-bowls, the golden persimmons floating on the lacquerwork tray. And not the cranes, which are still there, still under the imperial roof in Kyoto.

‘Perhaps I might return?’

A door opens, a shaft of light across the dim hall behind her.

‘Who is it, Ellen?’ De Rivers approaches, napkin in hand. ‘Tom Cavendish! Good evening.’

Tom shifts. What is he doing, why is he here? He has completed his commission and been generously rewarded.

‘It’s nothing, Mr. De Rivers. Only I was passing, and thinking of Japan, and I found myself here wondering how the—the consignment looks in its new home. Foolishness, I’m afraid. I apologise for interrupting your evening.’

De Rivers watches a cart pass down the hill behind Tom. ‘Not tonight, Mr. Cavendish. Come back on—let me see—Wednesday. After dinner, if you please, but I dare say we can raise a supper for you.’

‘Thank you.’ Tom feels his face flush. He is, after all, always was, just a hired hand. A flunkey. He has no idea what hour is meant by after dinner and before supper. ‘Er, what time should I come, please? Only, I have business obligations, you understand.’

De Rivers is turning away, impatient for the next course. ‘Penvenick does work you hard. Nine o’clock?’

‘Thank you. Until then.’

Tom steps back onto the pavement with his fists balled. Wherever he goes, whatever he builds, however he might learn to conduct himself in a Japanese tea room or among the boys on