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

thing. But you went, Ally would say, because you wanted to visit your things, because you miss them and you hope that seeing them in their new place will reconcile you to yours, and perhaps your instinct will prove correct; in any case the visit does no harm. Or at least that is what she might have said had she anything to say to him still. He looks across the water, to where the low grey sky is snagged and tangled in the tops of the trees on the hill. She will be inside, probably, sitting at her fireside with the madwomen whose companionship she finds preferable to his own. She will be reading or writing, in passionate communion with the minds of people who are not there. Ally, it occurs to him, finds it easier to be with people who are not there, or not all there. She likes people mad, or dead, or far away. Scilly may not be far enough.

The cottage smells of damp again. He pushes hard against the front door to close it behind him and throws his jacket over the bannisters. There is a letter, a London postmark and a scrawled handwriting he doesn’t recognise. Ally meant well, he knows, with the white paint and pale curtains, intended a new beginning purified from carpets thick with the dust of departed tenants and previous owners, from the condensed exhalations of everyone who has lived here in three hundred years. The plaster and paint may be evidence that she did not know until he came back that she no longer wishes to be his wife, but he misses the brown floral patterns, the mismatched chairs, a setting in which he was wholly unselfconscious. All this white, he thinks, this emptiness, it makes him feel like a performer, as if some propitiation is required for blotting it with one’s presence as a boy spoils a garden of new-fallen snow. He still has the letter in his hand.

It’s from Annie Forrest. Please forgive my writing like this out of the blue, an unwarrantable interference, and I find myself wishing to add, please burn this letter, but you will know best and I will, after all, say nothing that I would not say to her. I have heard of your separation from Ally and I could not let things rest. She thinks he doesn’t understand. She thinks he hasn’t tried hard enough, and she’s right, this is an unwarrantable interference. I imagine that when you were in Japan you were always trying to guess what people wanted and what they meant, trying to guess how you might appear in their eyes? Hoping that by rigorous observation you might be able to avoid giving offence? This idea of mine is a compliment, Tom. Many men, even if they travel, never live like this even for half an hour of their lives. But if it was like that for you, if you were watchful and hesitant from first waking until sleep, then you know how it is to be a woman and especially to be a woman entering a profession. We are always strangers in a strange land. I think Ally is like that all the time, hunted and cunning, because she has had no safe place, no home. She is now and has always been afraid of her mother. Her Aunt Mary and Uncle James love her but they don’t understand why she is a doctor and she has always known that she doesn’t know which fork to use or what should not be said in mixed company or among ladies with their gloves on. I think Rose Tree House may be the first place where she doesn’t have to guess or see herself through another person’s eyes, and that’s why she doesn’t want to be anywhere else.

Who is Annie, he thinks, to tell him about the mind of his own wife, to write from London about a marriage she does not know? He puts the letter down on the windowsill, stares out into the garden where the greens darken and creep in the heavy light. Annie does know Ally, he cannot deny that. She has known Ally much longer than he has. Hunted and cunning. He remembers a fox glimpsed once early in the morning in the rolling fields outside Harrogate, running so fast it seemed to move straight as an arrow over rich ploughed land only dusted with green, and then a few minutes later the inundation of the dogs and the reverberation of hooves in the ground under his feet, where seeds were unfurling in the darkness and sharp-nosed creatures beginning to sense spring. That way, he wanted to tell the men in their red coats, that way back to the river, not up the hill. But the hounds were on the scent and the hunters knew where they were going. He remembers the dance of the temple fox, the fierce joy.

He goes down to the basement and lights the fire he set in the stove this morning, to make hot water for a wash. At this time in Kyoto, all across town men are making their way home in the knowledge that a wooden tub of scented water has been prepared against their return, clean clothes laid out in square folds. Even the less fortunate, even, for example, a foreigner who might arrive there with no position awaiting, a man who might come to make his fortune, have the bath houses at their disposal. He touches the copper, only beginning to warm. It would not be the same, of course. It would be foolhardy to pretend that Makoto, Tatsuo, Makiko would welcome him without the state imprimatur by which even his unofficial activities were marked. Mrs. Senhouse was often passing remarks about the disgraceful proceedings of foreign drifters and the embarrassment they caused to respectable expatriates. No. Better to stay here, to justify Penvenick’s confidence and hope, in due course, to reap the natural reward. He