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

about him. ‘I married only six weeks before leaving England. I rent a small house in a Cornish port called Falmouth. I attended the grammar school in Harrogate, as a scholarship boy, and then took an Engineering degree in Aberdeen. I worked for Mr. Douglass for five years and then for Mr. Penvenick.’

He glances up. Makoto is smiling, as he has not seen him smile before.

‘What is your wife’s name, please?’

‘Ally,’ says Tom. ‘Alethea. Dr. Alethea Moberley Cavendish.’

It is the first time he has spoken her name aloud since he had dinner with the attaché in Singapore, the first time, he thinks, she has been named in Japan. It is late at night in England and she will be going to bed, climbing under his blankets with her legs bare under the white nightgown that has the buttons down the front.

‘Alethea,’ says Makoto. It is not an easy name for a Japanese tongue. ‘Doctor Alethea. So women become doctors now?’

He nods. ‘Not many. There will be more.’

And you, he wants to say, tell me who you are. But he is learning to tread carefully, to be indirect and trust what is not said. It is probable that he and Makoto have an understanding.

T

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Trouble again,’ says William, helping her off with her coat. ‘Women’s side.’

She takes off her scarf. ‘Nurse Miller’s back?’

‘Not yet. Slow-growing collarbone, that one. No, Mary Vincent. Did herself some proper damage, from what I hear.’

Ally’s patient. Ally will be responsible if—‘She’s not—?’

‘No. Sick ward, though. A lot of stitches. Got hold of a knife.’

‘I’ll go and see Dr. Crosswyn straight away.’

William hangs up her scarf and straightens its folds. ‘Might be best, Doctor. He’s been running about all morning, trying to get to the bottom of it.’

She finds Dr. Crosswyn in the kitchens, interviewing the cooks in turn to find out how Mary got the knife. He looks as if he was summoned from his bed, threw on some clothes and has not glanced in the mirror since. The cooks are also trying to prepare the patients’ midday dinner, which appears to involve a great many turnips and therefore knives.

‘Do you, or do you not, recognise this one?’ He holds up a knife that still bears smears of blood. The kitchen maid recoils, glances about her.

‘No, sir. That’s to say, they’re all somewhat the same, sir.’

‘But you think it comes from this kitchen?’

The kitchen maid folds her hands over her apron, drops her gaze to the floor. Ally hopes she isn’t an ex-patient, or there may be readmissions soon.

‘I couldn’t say, sir. It’s like ours.’

‘Which are kept always under lock and key?’

Her hands clench and her eyes slide round towards the Assistant Cook. ‘Without we have to use them, sir.’

Dr. Crosswyn tips his head back and sighs. ‘So you are telling me it may or may not be a knife from this kitchen, and such knives may or may not be locked up at any given moment?’

‘I—I couldn’t say, sir. Please sir.’

‘Go.’

‘Dr. Crosswyn,’ says Ally. ‘William told me there has been an incident. Perhaps we might—?’

He nods. ‘I am getting nowhere here. Come.’

You know they cannot cook without using knives, she wants to say. You know that blades and fires and needles, irons and bleach and caustic soda, are the fabric of working women’s lives?

He hurries ahead of her, forgetting his usual ballet of holding open for her all the doors that must be unlocked and locked again, to his office, where Agatha has left a tray of cooling coffee and biscuits on the table by the fire.

‘Please,’ he says. ‘Sit.’

Dr. Crosswyn stands at the window. ‘We will have to notify the committee and make an official enquiry.’ He does not look at her. He needs a bath, a shave and a comb. ‘I hope to God it was no negligence on our part. The committee’s views, you know—well, Trelennick’s views—are conservative. All patients are lunatics and really I think he believes the safest course would be to keep all of them permanently in straitjackets. I have never known him vote to release anyone.’

‘Then they might as well be dead,’ Ally hears herself say. But it is true; she has tried not to ask herself whether she would prefer death or the certainty of permanent confinement in the asylum even without a straitjacket. ‘And the others must be more reasonable, since we do discharge people.’

He nods. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t call Trelennick unreasonable. Doubt anyone round here would dare, anyway. Traditional. Speaks his mind. Anyway, he won’t like it if Mary Vincent got hold of that knife by—well, by any of the means I can think of, frankly.’

Ally sits forward and pours coffee. Trelennick owns several mines out in West Penwith and finds time also to act as a Justice of the Peace, chairman of Penzance town council and director of the Penzance Hospital Committee as well as of the asylum. Somewhere high up in the building, Mary Vincent’s pain throbs and burns. There is no-one more pitiful, more abject, than the failed suicide.

She holds out the biscuits to Dr. Crosswyn. ‘How is Mary?’

He motions them away. ‘The patient?’

She nods.

‘I put sixty-eight stitches in her at five o’clock this morning. She missed her femoral artery by a rat’s whisker and hit a tendon in the wrist. Should have trouble holding a knife next time.’

‘Femoral?’

‘She went for the—er—genital region. Among others.’ He takes his coffee. ‘The committee will say she should have been on the back wards. After all, she was admitted suicidal. You interviewed her, didn’t you?’

Ally puts down her coffee, untasted. The cup rattles. ‘Weeks ago. She was withdrawn.’

‘But she’d had a knife, hadn’t she? That was why they brought her in. And then we had to force-feed her. All the signs were there, that’s what they’ll say. It was a matter of when, not if.’

Ally feels nauseous. ‘From the history I could piece together, it seemed she might have been holding the knife in self-defence. She had touched her neck with it but the injury