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

his wife’s company to that of the bottle and expects his friends to do the same. Aunt Mary, catching Ally’s eye as Fanny removes the dessert, makes an unannounced exception for Mr. Cavendish. The men rise as they leave the room.

In the drawing room, the fire crackling, the winter curtains drawn against the cold pressing itself to the windows, Ally takes the blue armchair. ‘I feel as if we have thrown Mr. Cavendish to the lions.’

Aunt Mary picks up her cross-stitch. It has crossed Ally’s mind that Aunt Mary, like May, does cross-stitch as a private snub to Mamma and indeed to Grandmamma. Devoting time and money to mere adornment, expenditure and effort with no rational end or measurable result. She wonders what happened to her sister May’s unfinished embroidery, presumably left on the island when May set out to sea.

‘I thought the point about throwing people to the lions was that other people stayed to watch. Anyway, James won’t devour him. But he certainly won’t trust him until they have talked it through.’

‘Man to man,’ says Ally. She doesn’t want to do cross-stitch, but she does, sometimes, see the point of having something to do with your hands.

‘Man to man.’ The needle flashes across Aunt Mary’s lap. ‘I like him. He was polite to Fanny.’

There was trouble, a few weeks ago, when one of Uncle James’s clients took too much wine and followed Fanny onto the back stairs where he was impolite.

‘I had the impression he is unaccustomed to servants.’

Mr. Cavendish’s father, he told them in response to Uncle James’s not especially subtle enquiries, died when Mr. Cavendish was a child. His mother has not remarried, and assists a friend with a dress shop in Harrogate. It seems a long time since she last heard her own northern vowels on another person’s tongue.

Aunt Mary holds her cross-stitch away to see the effect of the new colour. She ought to have spectacles. You can’t judge colour by lamplight anyway. ‘I don’t know. I dare say his mother cannot keep much of a house but he handled the silver with perfect aplomb.’

‘Oh, Aunt Mary.’

She looks up, innocent. ‘What?’

‘I wondered why the fish-forks and grape-scissors. You were testing him.’

‘I? No such thing. Anyway, if I were, he would have passed. But my dear, whatever one’s children may choose or find themselves obliged to do in later life, you must see that training them for the best company opens the way for any ambition they may hold. Even Grandmamma taught us to behave before she sent us into the slums with our Bibles and her good intentions. And George is still very young; naturally I don’t wish to send him into rough company. Especially not when it’s plain that he worships the man. Do you know, in some ways it was much less worrying when they were small and one’s greatest anxieties concerned chicken-pox and whether they would eat their meat?’

Ally crosses her feet. Her new shoes hurt. ‘Chicken pox can be a very real anxiety. They are both strong, fine boys, Aunt Mary.’

‘I know, my dear. I am unfairly blessed. Your poor Mamma.’

The dining room door opens, but only one set of footsteps crosses the hall. George stands in the doorway. He seems, Ally thinks, to stand in doorways rather a lot at the moment.

‘Did they send you away?’ asks Aunt Mary. What is it in Aunt Mary’s life that has given her such placidity? Not anything that Mamma shared.

‘Papa said one glass of port was more than enough and run along now. Don’t you like Mr. Cavendish, Mamma? The story about St. Antony Head?’

‘He is not a natural storyteller.’ Aunt Mary peels a scarlet thread from her basket, snips it with her silver snake-scissors, wets the end in her mouth and re-threads the needle. George’s face falls. ‘And so one believes what he says. My dear, he seems perfectly pleasant and personable. Perhaps a little too inclined to speak of his calling but that is most excusable in one of his age.’

George leans on the doorframe. ‘You see why I want to work with him?’

The red begins to make its trail across the canvas. ‘Dear boy. Yes, I see why you want to go off to wild places and build towers on the waves. And I see why Mr. Cavendish’s enthusiasm is contagious. I also see why your Papa will say that this new vocation must stand the test of a little time before we change our plans for you.’

‘But, Mamma—’

‘I know. You want it now. But you are barely sixteen and it is our role, darling, to prevent you from making hasty decisions now that curtail your future in ways you will regret when it is too late.’

George looks at Ally. ‘You chose medicine, didn’t you, when you were younger than I am.’

The fire pops, sending a cinder onto the hearth. Yes, she did. Or had it chosen for her. Aunt Mary has stopped stitching.

‘I chose to study more seriously than other girls. And I chose to attend extension lectures as well as my school lessons. It is not as if I had the opportunities open to you, George. We were not even sure it would be possible for a woman to graduate when I was sixteen.’ She looks at Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary who has not only housed and fed but also cosseted her these five years, whom she will not betray now. ‘And remember also all the men and boys for whom university is only a painful longing. You are prosperous and male, George. The world is yours. Don’t waste your choices by acting like someone who doesn’t have them.’

Aunt Mary nods, sends Ally a quick smile, and bends to her work. What she has said is not untrue, and after all if George really has found his vocation nothing his cousin has to say will turn him from it, and—at least as long as he refrains from marrying—nothing likely to happen in the next few