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

girl is there again, blue-tinged hands hugging her legs to keep herself in the shelter of the archway, and a porter looking away, pretending not to see her. Someone should speak to her. Ally bows her head to the wind and sets off up the hill, rain spattering her wet face and clothes.

‘My dear girl. You should have waited for the rain to stop. Or at the very least taken a cab from the station.’

Ally can’t meet his eyes. ‘We had an arrangement. Besides, it may rain for days.’

She has made a fool of herself. She had forgotten that respectable adults take cabs. Dr. Crosswyn touches her arm. ‘Not like this. I do not expect you to walk a mile in such weather merely to take coffee with me. Promise me at least that next time you will take a cab. We may not at the moment be able to pay you a salary, but I do not ask you to give yourself hypothermia in the asylum’s service. My dear, I am quite concerned.’

He ushers her to the fire, into his own chair.

‘My skirts will mark the leather,’ she says. ‘I will stand a little.’

‘Your hands are quite blue.’ He rests his fingertips on her knuckles a moment.

‘It is only peripheral. I am warm from the walk.’ I can take care of myself, she thinks, I am neither a child nor a patient. And also wrap me, warm me, feed me. Her skirt begins to steam in the fire’s heat.

Dr. Crosswyn rings the bell for Agatha. ‘I will have them bring you some soup. I don’t know what we should do about your clothes. Perhaps one of the nurses?’

‘I am almost dry already. And I cannot take soup at this hour. Truly, a cup of coffee is all I could want.’ She hears herself, bordering on hysteria. She is a fool. And she is hungry.

‘You like to be hardy, I see.’

‘A certain hardiness is a necessity of our training, is it not?’

A necessity met by Mamma’s regime long before Ally arrived in London. A necessity that has left her unable to say, I am hungry, or I am cold, left her without the first utterances of a child.

There is a soft tap on the door and Agatha edges around it. She looks up at Ally, startled, and then gazes steadfastly at the edge of Dr. Crosswyn’s fringed rug.

‘Agatha. Good morning.’ It is Dr. Crosswyn’s habit, or perhaps gift, to give the impression that every encounter with a patient brightens his day. ‘Very well, Dr. Moberley Cavendish. We will have coffee, please Agatha. You won’t take a little sponge cake, doctor? No special pleading at all?’

Ally’s stomach rumbles. She hears herself speak. ‘I thank you, no.’

Ally doesn’t want to see Mrs. Ashton, doesn’t want to hear any more about the cold spirit at her side. She doesn’t much want to see Ward Four’s nurse. Mary Vincent has managed to give herself a mild concussion running her head into the wall so there is an excuse to start on Two. Although self-indulgence even in such small matters is habit-forming. Ally goes upstairs towards Four, the coffee sour in her stomach, tendrils of newly-dry hair waving about her ears. Tom’s letter crackles in her pocket. At least she has it, and him. Even if she does spend the winter with Mamma, in spring Tom will come home and they will live together again. What Mamma calls ‘going home’ will not be a return to past years. Not least, Ally thinks, because May is gone, and although May has been dead nine years suddenly there is a weight in her throat and heat behind her eyes. A doctor does not weep on the central staircase of the Truro Asylum. Quickly, before a nurse comes and sees her changing her mind between landings, Ally turns back towards Ward Two. It would be helpful to nobody for Mrs. Ashton to see what is in Ally’s eyes.

T

HE

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OLVES OF

J

APAN

They climb through the woods. From the top of the pass, says Makoto, you will see that the first snow has come on the mountains, and then we will take the old road down onto the plateau. My parents’ valley is broad, good soil, but the hills are high and when winter comes it is hard to travel. Leaves fall around them as they walk, Makoto first with a bell to warn bears of their presence. A dinner bell, Tom thinks, but Makoto would not see the joke.

Tom has travelled enough mountain roads here to know that in some districts every house is a farm, and also that all farms are arable. Even so, he finds himself imagining some kind of Japanese barn, probably with ornate gables and—what is he thinking—sliding doors for the animals. A farmyard with hens, for in the absence of meat and milk the Japanese do eat eggs and presumably, though he has not been offered it, chicken. Haystacks, he thinks, the autumn smell of ploughed fields, damp and rich on the cooling air. He and his mother used often to walk out of Harrogate on Sunday afternoons, past hedgerows where hips and berries began to brighten around fields of wheat ruffling like lakes in the wind, and later in the year, after the harvest, he would carry a basket for her and reach high for damsons and crab apples. It is time he wrote to her again.

Makoto has turned to wait for him.

‘There is a tea-house on the other side,’ he says. ‘We can rest a while there.’

Tom stops beside him. There is birdsong, a woodpecker nearby, small creatures busy in the undergrowth. Dead vines drip from a tree sparkling with golden leaves. It is the first time he has been so far inland, so far from the way home. ‘I am not tired. I found myself thinking of home.’

Makoto sets off again. The path winds up through the trees with no summit in sight.

‘It is an interesting tea-house. Very old.’

Not the tea ceremony.