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

a ship, he will never know the codes of the rich. Even Mr. and Mrs. Dunne serve suppers only after evenings of dancing or at the theatre. How can a man be dining—he checks his watch—at eight and require feeding again an hour later? He continues down the hill, into town and away from the white cottage. Babies go longer between meals, he thinks, than bloated rich men. At least on a passenger ship there is the excuse of boredom. He is past the quay before his face begins to cool in the breeze picking up on the water.

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Mrs. Curnow’s trunk stands at the bottom of the stairs. The front door is propped open with a grey oval stone, and the tin trunk bathes in sun like a rock on the beach. There are scuffs on the floorboards now, and a dent in the wall where the door-handle hits it. The hall smells of the bluebells in a jam jar on the windowsill, and as Ally comes down the stairs she can hear the thump and roll of Miss Mason kneading dough in the kitchen and the hens squabbling in the backyard.

Mrs. Curnow is going home. Her husband has agreed to send the girls to stay with his mother for a fortnight and Mrs. Curnow’s sister is coming to stay so that she won’t be alone during the day when Mr. Curnow is at work. She will be ‘on probation’, as if madness were a crime and sanity as provisional as moral reform, and at the end of her probation she will have to prove her sanity in an interview with the committee. How will you keep yourself well, they like to ask. What will you do if you feel yourself weakening again? Do you consider yourself wholly cured? Yes means that the patient has unrealistic ideas and lacks self-knowledge, no means that she is still unwell. Ally stops in the kitchen to greet Miss Mason and then steps out into the morning.

The trees, now in full bright leaf, rise tall as churches around the garden, and the air is loud with their whispers. Even now, near eleven, half the garden lies under shifting shadows, and at first it is hard to see clearly across the sunshine to the two women bending in the shade at the far end.

‘Mrs. Curnow?’

They both straighten up, hands on hips. Mrs. Curnow’s hair has come loose and her face is flushed. She will need to look tidier for the committee. They are weeding the new vegetable bed, both able to distinguish the nurtured from the unwelcome green shoots as Ally cannot.

Mrs. Rudge gestures towards the basket at her feet. ‘I’m keeping the chickweed for the hens. And there’s plenty of it.’

Mrs. Curnow wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, smearing mud. ‘I’m not wanted already? He hasn’t come early?’

‘No,’ says Ally. ‘But it is probably time to come in and get ready. You will want to wash your hands and face.’ And it was not a good idea to weed the garden in the costume in which you propose to travel, she thinks, but it is too late for that.

‘Of course. Margaret, you won’t mind if I go in now? And you’ll come and say goodbye, won’t you, before I go?’

‘We all will, I’m sure. The first one. You’d best go make yourself pretty.’

They watch as Mrs. Curnow hurries towards the house. The grass is still long and rough, harbouring snails which are also given to the hens, but gradually the garden is being tamed. Dr. Crosswyn himself spent some time in personal combat with the brambles, and set up a highly irregular arrangement by which the gardener of the cottage hospital came to dig beds and build a henhouse in exchange for Ally’s attendance on the women’s ward one Saturday. Mrs. Rudge turns back to her work. Her children have not replied to the letter, and her husband shows no interest in assisting in her discharge. And Tom, Ally thinks, Tom has made no approach either, shown no desire for her return.

‘These are the marrows?’ Ally asks. ‘It is hard to imagine that they will get so big. The growth must be almost visible in the summer.’

‘Aye. But they’re not much use when they’re let get too big. Taste of nothing much and liable to fall into a heap when you cook them. We’ll eat these small and tender. Maybe with the wild garlic, if it holds on long enough.’

Because they will both be here, still, Ally and Mrs. Rudge, when the marrows are small, and when they are large, when summer nights flit over the garden and when the leaves begin to turn and fall again.

‘That sounds good. And this one is the chickweed?’

Ally stoops and pulls a few stalks, trying to tug gently so the roots slide out of the soil instead of breaking off. She does not like the hens, with their ancient scaly feet and unblinking hostile eyes, but she is glad that they are there, an audible counterpoint to the work of living together.

The house is resting, full of sunlight and shadows and the smell of flowers. Under its cloth in the kitchen, Miss Mason’s bread respires, grows, exhales the smell of yeast at work, of bacteria multiplying and grain lifting towards the sun’s warmth. Dust dances in the banners of light hanging across the hall, and the breeze from the sea comes across the stones and the trees to stir the curtains with an idle hand. Ally listens. Mrs. Gunner and Miss Trennick have gone across the water to a help at a church coffee morning organised by the vicar’s wife. I think you are so brave, she said to Ally, taking on such responsibility. I wonder you are not afraid to sleep there all alone! Anything we can do to help, of course—I do not sleep there alone, Ally replied. There are seven of us, and if you wish to