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

does a garden make, to the progress of humanity? Since he is here, since the day is lost, he will write to Penvenick. Work of a kind. And to Ally. He will bring his letter case out here, to the summer house, where he will be neither a nuisance nor a curiosity to the daily household routine.

The air warms as the morning wears on until Tom, sitting in the sun on the steps of the summer house, takes off his jacket and tilts his face to the sky, eyes closed. The sun shines through his blood like last night’s flames through the paper lanterns, but there is still an edge in the breeze carrying the dusty scent of falling leaves.

‘Cavendish?’

He starts. Makoto. Damn it, they can creep up on a man sitting on a gravel path.

Makoto bows. ‘Sorry. I started you. I apologise I was not here when you arose.’

‘Startled. You startled me. Not at all. I am sorry I overslept.’

‘Startled,’ Makoto repeats. Another difficult word. ‘I am glad you slept comfortably. I had to pay a visit. You have enjoyed the garden?’

‘Very much.’

Makoto bows again. ‘You would like to take some luncheon now? And then my mother wishes that I accompany her to the temple. Perhaps it would interest you? It is not far.’

‘Of course,’ Tom says. ‘Thank you.’ Because he is not, here, an engineer, an expert, but a child, to go where he is taken.

The grandmother is kneeling on the veranda with three small human heads on the boards in front of her. Tom stops.

‘She makes dolls,’ says Makoto at his elbow. ‘An old tradition. Would you like to see?’

They are not the kind of dolls one could give to a child, or at least not to an English child. The heads are bone-white, with an eggshell texture. Their eye sockets remind him of something. He fumbles. Of holes, of fretwork. Of the holes on either side of a violin’s strings.

‘Will they have eyes?’ he asks, suddenly afraid that there are blinded creatures out there, that Japanese children play with eyeless homunculi.

Makoto glances at him. The grandmother goes on scraping at a teaspoon-sized wooden paddle with what looks like a razor blade. There are tiny feet in an open-mouthed bag beside her.

‘Of course. And hair. There is a man in the village who makes very small hair ornaments for her.’

‘Miniature,’ Tom suggests.

‘Miniature. And my grandmother sews clothes for them, kimono and obi.’

Fingers begin to take shape under the blade. Long fingers.

‘It is exacting work,’ says Tom. ‘She is most skilful.’

Makoto says something to the old lady, who folds her scalpel in her hands to bow to Tom. He wonders if De Rivers would like one of the dolls, but he has no idea how he would enquire about making a purchase, and anyway he does not want to return to the city carrying one on his back.

He follows the back of Makoto’s mother’s red kimono away from the village, along a track between the rice fields. There is sun in the trees again, and on the shoulders of his tweed jacket. He expects another temple like the one he found in the hills, stone gods congregating in a forest clearing.

Where the track enters the woods, there is another of the great wooden pi, this time painted red, and then, leading through the trees, another and another, only a few inches above Makoto’s head. It is like walking under dancers’ raised hands in Oranges and Lemons. Fallen leaves, maple and yellow elongated triangles he doesn’t recognise, form a tessellated pattern on the path’s blue-grey stones. Tom touches one of the uprights as he passes, but of course it is only painted wood. Makoto looks back.

‘They are torii gates,’ he says. ‘Families give them in thanks, or sometimes in memory of the dead.’

Tom nods. Like stained glass windows at home, although there is no sign, yet, of the thing to which these arches are given. To the woods, or the path. Makoto’s mother speaks and Makoto replies, nothing Makoto feels any need to translate for Tom. The path becomes cobbled, in readiness, and they go on into the expected clearing. Sunbeams drip through the gaps where leaves have fallen.

‘Oh.’ There is a flight of stone steps leading up to a wooden building whose openings are screened with latticework. Red banners with black writing on them hang from poles like the state flags of visiting dignitaries. A pair of stone foxes guards the steps. Water trickles into a stone trough under a wooden roof; it must be piped from a spring further up the hill. Tom hangs back while Makoto and his mother rinse their hands and mouths, spitting onto the copper and gold leaves drifting around the sacred clearing.

‘May I?’ he asks.

Makoto nods. ‘Please. If you like it.’

The water is tepid, pleasant on his hands damp from walking under the sun in a tweed jacket. It tastes of nothing. He follows mother and son up the steps and copies them as they clap three times to summon the gods. He asks for Ally to be well and happy, and for a safe return to her. He stands aside, waiting, with the feeling that asking strange gods for these things may have removed them from the realm of workday probability into the category of impossible magic, desperate measures.

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The fields lie bare to the plough now, and in the hedges the berries shrivel and drop, mouldering under the rotting fingers of hawthorn leaves and dead grass. Rain drifts around the peninsula. It is not cold, not cold enough to light a fire for one person, but the nights lengthen and the rain drips day by day. It is a preparation for the spring, Ally reminds herself. There will be wild flowers, violets and bluebells, that she will take to the asylum whatever the nurses say, and the white cottage will be bright in the sun, but meanwhile there is water seeping from the earth and running down the wall in