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

was superficial. There was a suggestion that her employer interfered with her. And she wasn’t force-fed, she just saw it happen to someone else and started eating. Which seems rather sane, to me.’

He swallows half the coffee at once. ‘Tell that to the committee. As no doubt you will find yourself obliged to do. I hope the knife was clean, that’s all. Maybe we should make a new rule, if you’re going to leave weapons lying around where patients can get at them, at least sterilise them first.’

‘May I go see her? Mary?’

‘Go where you like. But you know her temperature will be normal now, even if there is an infection. It’s only been six hours.’

She leaves Dr. Crosswyn’s office and leans against the wall. She has made a mistake. She has made a mistake and now Mary Vincent lies lacerated in the sick ward, losing the use of a hand and facing sepsis. If the committee hold her responsible, she will never work again. Her degree and her prize will count for nothing if she cannot be relied upon to keep healthy patients alive. She will be used as proof that women should not be doctors, that women’s sympathies override whatever capacity for judgement they may possess. She should have sent Mary straight to the back wards, the back wards that Ally lacks the nerve even to visit. She sets off, unseeing, along the corridor. Did Mamma raise her to flinch from reality, to put her own fine sensibilities before the needs of others? Did Mamma turn away from the girls bound and filthy in the police cells in Paris, from the suppurating wounds of prostitutes injured, sometimes inventively, by their clients? And yet Ally has spent her time picking blackberries and listening to idle talk about spirits while the women on the back corridor plumb new depths of degradation and misery. She does not send patients there because she has been allowing herself to pretend that it does not exist, as prosperous families pretend that their comfort is not underwritten by the misery and hunger of the poor. No-one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment. The truth, she thinks, the painful, unpalatable truth, is that Mamma is right. Knowledge of the human condition is not compatible with happiness, and the weak choose to be happy. She locks the door of the sick ward behind her and hangs the keys around her neck.

Ally goes from Mary’s bedside straight up the stairs to the back ward. She stands under the dormer window at the top of the stairs, trying key after key because this door has two locks and naturally the keys are not labelled. The stairs are too steep for infirm or elderly patients, she thinks, but the patients do not use the stairs because they do not leave the corridor. In a fire—There is a rattling of metal behind the door and a key strikes hers from the other side. The door opens a few inches and a nurse peers around, her face dour. She’s taller than Ally.

‘Yes?’

Ally straightens her shoulders. ‘Good morning, Nurse. I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m Doctor Moberley Cavendish.’

She holds out her hand and the nurse pulls the door a little wider.

‘I’ve heard about you. Lady doctors, I don’t know. I suppose you want to come in, nose around?’

Ally has to sidle around the door, crushing her skirt against the frame. ‘I would like—I will visit the ward, yes.’

There are lady nurses, she thinks, or at least female nurses. There is an odour, and somewhere down the corridor someone shouting and banging. The floorboards are thick with grime.

‘We don’t allow visitors, see. Not even the Committee come here.’ She slams the door behind Ally and begins to lock it again. ‘’S only patients, here.’

Ally stands tall. Abductors and pimps of young girls tried to set Josephine Butler’s clothes on fire and did not succeed in frightening her away from her work; Mamma has endured calumny and innumerable threats without turning from her righteous vocation. The Edinburgh Seven, the first women to achieve medical qualifications in Britain, were assaulted and menaced by their own colleagues and teachers. She will not be threatened by a nurse. Doubtless, says Mamma’s voice, the woman is underpaid, overworked and wholly uneducated. Do not fancy yourself better than her because you have had such indulgence and opportunity as she cannot imagine.

‘I am a doctor,’ Ally says again.

‘So you say.’ The nurse moves off. The corridor’s windows are widely spaced and between them it is dim. The shouting stops but the banging goes on. Ally follows her.

A

SKING

S

TRANGE

G

ODS

A ‘walking garden’ is simply a garden around which one walks, like a maze without the deceit. A gravel path, bordered by moss and lumps of granite, winds from the veranda around a variety of pine and maple trees towards a summer house half-hidden from the main building by foliage. Makoto’s grandfather channelled a stream to loop through his garden and dammed it to make a pond over which a willow weeps. There are stepping stones across the pond and two bamboo bridges where the path crosses the stream. Tom guesses he understands how the young Makoto developed an interest in engineering. He makes his way back to the veranda, noticing how the light on the mountains is beginning to change as the afternoon goes on. He is, after all, on almost the same latitude as home.

The screens are pushed back so that the house is part of the garden and the last of the day’s sunshine bathes the tatami mats. Makoto kneels beside his grandmother, who is sewing something small and red. For the first time, Makoto is wearing Japanese clothes, something like a scaled-down kimono with matching trousers in blue and grey stripes. A man who was not trying to appreciate Japanese culture might be reminded of an English prison uniform. Tom approaches, sits on the edge of