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

the veranda to unfasten his boots, and then pauses. He can’t imagine what the old lady, who lived most of her life in Samurai times, must feel about his presence. How would his mother react if he brought home an African savage with a bone in his nose?

Makoto looks up, switches languages and, somehow, indefinably, posture. ‘How do you find the garden?’

‘Beautiful,’ says Tom. ‘I do not think even the best British gardeners take such care for visual effect, for depth and detail. We do not understand gardening as a form of art.’ The delicacy of the red leaves with the mountain forest behind them, he thinks, the way the bushes are trimmed to echo the shapes of the hills as seen from the path. He is not sure he would have noticed such things two months ago.

Makoto nods. ‘It is perhaps different. I used to walk in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow.’ And long for the ones at home, he does not say. He speaks to his grandmother, who glances at Tom quickly, as if appraising something she is about to buy, and then bows her head to him.

‘I told her that you like it,’ Makoto says. ‘She is glad.’

As in Falmouth, the sun drops behind the hill long before nightfall. A servant girl comes out of the stone-floored kitchen that Tom glimpsed on the other side of the entrance hall and closes the screens, first the heavy wooden ones, dark with age, and then the shoji inside. Firelight blooms around the sand-filled pit in the middle of the floor, flickering over the iron pot hanging from a chain and the maid’s soft gown as she bustles around a low table. He finds himself wondering what women wear under their kimono, what a man would find if he unwrapped an obi. The girl stands back to check that everything is ready and then hurries back to the kitchen.

There is too much food. Clear soup, of course, and river fish curled in its batter as if it had leapt from the stream into the hot oil. Little bowls of brown cubes. Smaller bowls of wilted leaves and shoots, sitting in dark liquid and scattered with crunchy things. Bowls with upturned saucers over them, which will contain more substances unnameable in English or even Linnaean Latin. Tom folds himself onto the cushion indicated by Makoto and watches as the others settle. Here, it seems, women and men eat together. Makoto’s grandmother sinks to her knees as easily as a child at prayer. The firelight plays on the tortoiseshell hairpins rising from her grey chignon, carved into the shapes he has learnt to recognise as representative of cherry blossom to the Japanese mind. Perhaps Ally would like such a thing? But it would not combine well with a hat. Makoto’s father, fresh from his bath, has also changed from the working clothes in which he came from the field, and is now in the same striped uniform as Makoto. He bows across the table to Tom, who bows back. The maid comes to light the oil lamps, okiandon, flames flickering against the paper so that Tom looks around for water, and arranges them on the floor beside the table. Faces and fabrics blush in the wavering light, bodies fading into the gathering darkness around the fire. The music of voices speaking a language he still can’t follow, the purr and crackle of a wood fire, and somewhere, beyond the wooden walls, wind in the mountain forest where stone idols pass the night wide-eyed and the last wolves of Japan lurk in their dens.

In the morning, he walks in the garden again. He overslept, alone with the shutters closed in the one room at the top of the ladder, and when he came down the maid brought rice and soup for him alone. Makoto seems already to have left the house, and Tom, like a baby whose mother has gone out, has no way of understanding where he has gone or when he will return. The women, even the grandmother, seem to be occupied in the kitchen. He stands on the first stepping stone, seeing that the

mountain and the trees are reflected in the smooth water below the summer house. As the objects displayed in houses change with the seasons, so the composition of this garden will change with the inclination of the sun and the variation of the forest around. It is a space for contemplation, he thinks, intended to be conducive to meditation and perhaps even prayer, but Tom has nothing to discuss with the gods and his thoughts are not restful. Winter is coming, he can smell it on the cold morning air, and it is time he was back in the city, drawing up plans and ordering the new lenses so more lights can be built in the spring by Japanese engineers training now in the university in Tokyo. While he waits for shipments, he can execute De Rivers’ commission. He doesn’t know how long it might take to make what De Rivers wants, but the sooner the seamstresses start, the sooner they will finish and the sooner he can book his tickets home. It may have been a mistake, coming here, however interesting and atmospheric. Ally will be fine, of course, she is an independent professional woman and her letters show that she is busy enough at the asylum, but even so, he thinks, even so it is not as if she had any acquaintance in Falmouth. It is not as if she had the habit of taking care of herself. The cottage is undeniably damp even when fires are lit, and she may be huddling in that coarse shawl instead of paying for coal. It would have been better to leave her in London with her aunt and uncle, where he first found her. He paces back over the bridge, which seems now a foolish toy for the wasted hours of a grown man. What difference