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

the import of the idea from India. In Japan a man cannot sneeze without giving offence. A group of children notice him and run alongside the man, shouting. Foreigner, devil, what a stink.

Next week is meant to be the first day of autumn when, Makoto says, women and country people will assume autumn clothes regardless of the weather. Tom is hotter than he has ever been, hotter, it seems (though cannot logically be) than in Singapore. He fingers the fan Makoto has given him, made of some kind of shiny paper with the fossils of leaves in it. Merely a tool for a job, he thinks, and plenty of men here use fans, but he would feel a fool, a red-haired man being wheeled about in a giant perambulator fanning himself, and anyway the air is so damp that the effort of waving the fan would probably generate more heat than its draft would alleviate. It will be cooler at sea, and when they reach the island they are to stay in a house on the shore. Tom will rise early, he thinks, and perhaps swim before the day’s work begins. He imagines the waves tugging at his knees, soothing the heat rash behind the joints, slapping around his white belly and then lifting him so he can look back at the land, at Japan, from water that may eventually surge onto the sand at Gyllyngvase. He could launch a message in a bottle: my darling Ally.

They pass the last bridge over the widening river and there are the docks, the buildings without depth under the midday sun, pale stone too bright for English eyes, and the sea a mirror for the white sky.

K

ATE’S

B

ABY

C

RYING

A

GAIN

Who is it with you, my dear?’

Ally, despite herself, glances round. ‘With me, Mrs. Ashton?’

‘The cold one. Terrible cold. Shaking with it.’

Her heartbeat lurches. May. No. May is ten years dead. However much Ally has longed for May, whatever joy it would bring to see her on earth again even for a moment, to reach for her wet hair and shivering bones, May is gone. Interred.

They are looking at her. Ally shakes her head. Mrs. Ashton suffers constantly from delusions and often speaks to invisible beings.

‘There’s no-one with me. Though it has turned cold, hasn’t it? And the leaves are beginning to turn, I noticed.’ Soon be Christmas, she stops herself adding.

Mrs. Elsfield stops making her bed. ‘Are the blackberries ripe, Dr. Cavendish? I mean Mrs. Moberley. Whatever you call yourself. Though I must say, calling yourself two different people tends to cause trouble. In my experience. You’ve met the Lady Clarinda. I’d stop pretending to be a doctor, if I were you. They won’t like it.’

Ally nods. ‘Not yet, Mrs. Elsfield. Just a few beginning to redden. It will be another two or three weeks, I’d say, and they will need some more sun.’

‘She’s often with you, isn’t she?’ Mrs. Ashton says. ‘The cold one. She has something to tell you.’

Much to tell, Ally thinks, many things unsaid. But May is not here, or anywhere. There is a draught on her neck. Dr. Crosswyn says it’s impossible to keep the asylum warm in winter and that he will postpone lighting fires in the wards as long as possible. There were incidents with patients and fires last winter.

‘Where is Mrs. Middleton, Nurse? Dr. Crosswyn asked me to visit her.’

Nurse Miller is still at home. Dr. Crosswyn must know that the collarbone of a healthy young woman will have knitted some time ago. This is the small mousy one with a Cornish name, Penhallow or Pol-something. She looks up at Ally with her mouth open.

‘Nurse?’

Mrs. Elsfield shakes what passes for her pillow. Ally sighs: if there is scant money for coal, there will be none for new bedding. ‘She’s on the pot. Be back in a minute.’

Mrs. Ashton stands up and comes towards Ally. ‘She shakes with cold. Did she pass outdoors?’

‘How are you today, Mrs. Ashton? I hope the new medicine is helping with your sleep?’

It will be. No one could stay awake on that dose.

Mrs. Ashton reaches out to touch Ally’s arm. Her hands are grimy, a crescent of dirt under each long nail. Ally’s arm clenches, but instead of pushing the hand away she makes herself pat it. Mrs. Ashton herself is cold. Mrs. Ashton has no chance to walk up the hill from the station, or even up the stairs, to make her heart pump and her blood surge. Mrs. Ashton doesn’t see the fruit ripening in the hedgerows or the ebb and flow of the sea. It is no wonder that someone so deprived should attend more and more to the voices and images of disordered fantasy.

Ally shakes her head. ‘Nurse, is there a wrap for Mrs. Ashton? We don’t want her to take a chill.’

Mrs. Ashton laughs. ‘I expect we do, you know. It’s cheaper that way. And there’s Kate’s baby crying again.’

Kate—Miss Rawson—doesn’t have a baby, but across the ward she is yet again sitting down and pulling at the front of her dress. Nurse Miller used to put Kate Rawson in the closed gown to stop her exposing herself so.

‘He’ll never thrive, whatever she does.’

It is Mrs. Ashton, Ally thinks, who ought to be kept in solitude. The little nurse finds her tongue and tells Kate Rawson to leave her dress alone, for shame, can’t she see the doctor’s here? Kate looks up, her eyes blank, seeing no doctor.

‘She does no harm, nurse,’ Ally says.

Mrs. Elsfield folds down her top sheet for the fifth time. She gets stuck, sometimes. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Cavendish. She’s been feeding that child at least three winters now. Time it had some proper food, I’d say.’ She pulls the sheet out again.

Mrs. Middleton returns, her arm held by another nurse as if she might try to run away between the lavatory and the ward. She is twisting her hands and muttering about Satan. Most of these women, Ally sometimes thinks, wouldn’t alter