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

There are two letters on the mat, the Japanese ink from Tom’s pen already blurred and spattered with Cornish rain. She scrabbles for her pocket, crushes them in. The other is not Aunt Mary’s stationery; probably from Annie who is staying with a sister about to have a baby. Even in the high-walled garden, she has trouble closing the front door against the wind, and her skirts whirl up around her knees as she wrestles with it. She could stay at home today. It is not as if she were being paid to attend to the asylum. But they will be expecting her, Mrs. Middleton and Mrs. Elsfield and Mary Vincent, and the state of her clothes when she arrives will be of no moment to them whatsoever. Besides, the nurses need no additional ammunition for accusations of flightiness and unprofessional behaviour. She sees herself at home all day, watching the progress of the damp and trying to study against the sound of wind and rain. She pulls her scarf up over her hat, a pointless gesture towards conventional concerns.

The train comes. Ally takes a corner seat, dries her fingers and pats her face with a damp handkerchief, but her skirts cling about her calves and her shoulders are soaked to the skin. It would be the practical thing to borrow a set of asylum clothes. She will wait, she thinks, until she can take off her coat and scarf to read the letter properly, but she runs her fingers through the drier parts of her hair so they don’t damage Tom’s paper and takes down a hairpin to open it, just to peep and make sure the first line doesn’t say I write from my hospital bed or Please do not worry but. That’s when she sees that the other letter isn’t from Annie, or even from Cousin George at Cambridge. It’s from Mamma.

The carriage upholstery, the steamed-up windows, the damp coats and dripping hats of the other passengers, tessellate and dissolve. The smell of wet wool and pipe smoke is suddenly nauseating. No. Mamma has not written to her since her marriage, since the last letter telling her that in marrying she destroyed all her own work and threw away the efforts of all who had laboured so hard to support her. Ally’s breath comes short, as if there’s a great weight pressed on her chest. What can Mamma want with her now? Unless perhaps Papa has been taken sick, or is—She remembers the letter that told her May was dead. This is the letter I have been hoping not write, and you not to receive. She turns Mamma’s letter over and opens it.

Mamma wants Ally to return to Manchester. There is no reason, she writes, for Tom to be spending his money renting a house for Ally when there is a room for her in her parents’ house. It is not as if Ally had any real position at the asylum, or as if she were doing anything other than dabbling in philanthropy. An opportunity has arisen for a doctor committed to the care of the poor, a doctor willing to minister to those for whom there is no other hope, who must otherwise die like wild animals. Mamma knows that, especially with Tom away and no particular reason to remain in Cornwall, Ally will not harden her heart to such need. She will perhaps recall Dr. Henry, who does such great work in the Home and among the people of the slums? Dr. Henry, exhausted by so many years of hard service, has become increasingly unwell and eventually agreed to allow the Committee to send him to spend the winter resting on the south coast. A colleague is covering his private practice, and Mamma has assured the Committee that it would be to Ally’s benefit to take on his charitable work. The pay is of course not great, but it is something and therefore surely preferable to unpaid labour at the asylum. Mamma hopes also that Ally will not reject an opportunity to pass a season at home. Neither she nor Papa now enjoys quite the perfect health that was once theirs.

Ally looks out of the clear patch someone has rubbed on the window. The letter is not what she feared. Mamma sounds gentler than usual. She acknowledges Ally’s expertise, that her work deserves payment. It is an invitation, of sorts, perhaps the nearest thing to a welcome of which Mamma is capable. She remembers previous returns, all ending in Mamma’s anger and Ally’s reversion to cowed and nervous adolescence. It takes you days, Aunt Mary once observed, to speak to us again after you have been a night or two with my sister. Maybe it would be different now, maybe there is now room in that house for Ally to be the adult she has become, to take her place on almost equal terms. It is not like Mamma to mention her own health. Does Mamma herself require advice? She cannot remember that Mamma has ever been ill, not once in Ally’s whole life. She remembers the private penitence Mamma taught to her daughters, the stones in the shoes as a reminder of sin, the food denied to cure temper and ‘hot blood.’ The tests of endurance. It is not as if Mamma would have betrayed any bodily discomfort even to her own household. She remembers the candle flame. The night in the cellar. She shifts in her seat. She cannot say even now that she has not had need of everything Mamma taught her.

They are approaching Truro station. A man leaving the compartment stands back for her, gestures that she should go first, so Ally finds her feet, stands, queues in the corridor with her wet skirt clinging to her legs, tugs it free to climb down the steps to the platform. The rain has eased a little, dimpling the puddles rather than pounding out bubbles of air. The beggar