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

the wormy grey matter of the brain rather than the doors and chambers of the heart. The trees’ bark is a darker black, the leaves a brighter green, for the pulsating heat of the afternoon, as if today everything is more vivid, clearer to the eye, than usual. The doors of perception, she thinks, the chambers of the human heart. In my Father’s house are many mansions. We cannot speak even of anatomy without metaphor.

A seagull calls from the rocks ahead and the scent of pine needles hangs in the still air. She thinks of the women behind her, living for now in the shelter of Rose Tree House, between the institution of the asylum and the institution of marriage. So many of women’s griefs, she thinks, begin in marriage, in the expectation of a happily ever after set into perpetual motion by romance. It is not in romance, nor even sex, that we find the human purpose, but in good work faithfully done. In kindness, which finds sexual expression less often than one might hope, and in endurance. If there is happiness for her in the world, she will find it in the faith of those who never abandoned her, with Annie and Aunt Mary and, in a different way, with her patients and her colleagues. It is they who have sustained her, who caught her when she fell. She lifts her face to the dappled light, breathes in trees and sea. It is here that she will find her peace, in friendship, in the companionship of women and the satisfaction of the labour of mind and heart and hands. In the work of healing and in this place, in the green shade and along the tideline of West Cornwall where she first saw in her mind’s eye her taunting spirits crossing the water, first imagined her final parting from those who had so long haunted her mind.

She follows the path worn around the brambles by the feet of madwomen and comes out onto the beach, where the grey rocks reflect the white heat of the sky and the sea surges and spangles. It is a pity that all this analysis, all this understanding, does nothing for the causes and little for the symptoms of our pain, gives us only ways of thinking, ways of saying what cannot be borne. Goblin foxes, ghosts, and also the invisible sickness of what we call the mind: they are all stories, illness itself only a metaphor for what can befall the spirit. Ally steps across the granite, the same stone, probably, that makes the white cottage sitting empty across the water. The seaweed is pale and dry under the sun, the mussel shells closed tight until the cold tide rises over them again. She clambers over the last rocks until waves wash at her feet, lifts her face to the sun and closes her eyes to see the redness of her living blood, the motes in her own eyes. It is not metaphor alone, she thinks, that can save us, but also the act of living, of continuing to be with each other in the world. It is a life’s work, to watch the beating of the human heart, to name what we are doing and yet be able to do it.

She hears a footfall on the stones and opens her eyes. Tom is there, coming out from under the trees, crossing the beach to find her in her own place, in her right mind.

E

PILOGUE

H

OME

The trees on the shore are ten years nearer the sky, and the gulls who cried Tom’s return have fallen into the sea, feathers washed from flesh and flesh from bone, beaks and claws sand-sifted in the weeds and wash of the seabed. Rocks are water-worn, tide and current carved in granite as the sea rubs at the edges of the land, erases the outlines of our archipelago.

The boy runs. Small brown birds flee the bushes before him and a blue-gleaming magpie scolds from above. Sticks crack, leaves rustle. He runs on tiptoe over the ants but does not try to save them all; boys run and ants die, other ants lift their corpses and hurry on. He brushes a fly from the pale hair on his arm and runs on, leaps across the rocks and out onto the sand. There is a rock pool here where sea anemones curl tight as fists, where spider-sized crabs rush for crevices too small for his fingers. The afternoon sun has filled the rock with heat and he lies face down, feels the warmth soak through his shorts and shirt, through his skin and bone, the stone ancient under his cheek. He rolls over and offers himself to the sky full of white light.

Tree-shades lean over the tea-house. The first of the afternoon’s returning rooks crosses the sunlight, and under the bushes creatures of dusk begin to stir and nose. Sometimes she comes at this hour. Tom tidies the tea set, fills the bamboo caddy. He picks a stray leaf from the edge of a tatami mat and returns it to the outdoors. Sometimes, she comes here now.

The sea-sanded stone has rubbed paint from the door and begun to finger the wood beneath, disclosing rings of growth. Boots and shoes have ground soil, sand, leaf-mould, dust, the droppings of rabbits and chickens and the carapaces of insects into the painted floor. Coats hanging on the wall have somehow left their winter shadows under the empty pegs. Ally leaves the door open behind her. She doesn’t notice the annoyance of the crow on the lawn who abandons a fallen plum because of her passage, nor the scurry of the vole under the rose bush by the gate. Sometimes at this hour she finds him in the garden.

Tom and Ally walk together through the trees to the beach. There they find Laurence half-asleep by the rock pool, the day cooling around him. They dust him