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

and I must return to the office. But later, if you like, we can take a walk around here. It is a traditional neighbourhood.’

Tom watches Makoto’s jinrikisha bowl away. He cranes forward to see past the oiled paper hood and then thinks that any movement on the passenger’s part must affect the runner’s work. It is probably better to sit back, to tilt the yoke upwards. Unless one is going downhill. Between the hood and the man’s back, beginning to sweat through his tunic even in today’s cold, Tom can see glimpses of the city, the Imperial Gardens where the leaves have fallen since he was last here, wooden houses with their shutters closed to the cobbled streets, and steam, now, rising from some of the street-sellers’ carts. He wants the mountains, the murmuring forest. He thinks maybe he understands why Makoto needs to know that the place is waiting for him in the end. He, too, wants Makoto’s grandfather’s strolling garden, and he does not want to spend the winter doing a rich man’s shopping.

The road ahead slopes upwards, lined on each side by shops where women throng with baskets. There is a lane leading to a temple where red and white banners flutter, and then a wall topped by a tiled roof over which twisted trees reach black fingers. He thinks he may be approaching the European quarter, where there is a church that seems to have come on a magic carpet from Bavaria and a range of architectural follies that must give the people of Tokyo strange ideas about European buildings. They scribble in stone in Europe, like children drawing fancy chimneys and extra staircases because they can. Europeans mistake quantity for quality, filling great rooms with useless objects as if the accumulation of possessions is an object in itself. European acquisitiveness is a compulsion, a disease. He remembers De Rivers’ house and shudders; it is not silks and teapots the English should be importing from Japan but houses. Architects, if not engineers. Missionaries, perhaps, to teach us what is worthy of veneration. The Japanese have known for generations to pipe water through cities in a way that keeps sewage apart from drinking water; it is London, the centre of the civilised world, that is rife with typhoid and cholera.

The jinrikisha turns down a lane where wooden houses jostle, and then down another where there is only a high stone wall. There is a gateway, and they stop.

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Ally wakes. The gaslight from the road creeps under the curtains as it always did, and across the bare boards. Mamma has removed the carpet on which she and May used to pretend to fly around the world. The blankets pulled around her face smell musty and the sheets are worn so thin that she can feel the coarse wool through them on her arms and feet. She is cold. She feels sticky between her legs and under her arms, still gritty from the journey. It’s too late, said Mamma, to be fussing with the range and the copper at this time of night. Cold water is healthful, especially for nervous complaints. Goodnight, Alethea. I am glad to see you home and ready to devote yourself to truly necessary work. But I do not have a nervous complaint, Ally thinks. Not exactly. She straightens her legs and then curls up again when she finds the cold at the bottom of the bed. Mamma is glad to see her. She would not have said that, before. Perhaps it was safe to come home after all. To come to her parents’ house.

She pulls the covers up around her shoulders. Next winter, she supposes, she and Tom will be able to curl around each other when the nights are cold. But she does not believe it. Tom is so far away, and their weeks together now so much shorter than their separation, that he begins to feel like a fiction, their marriage only a story she has told herself to ward off the truth of her failure. He will not come back. Perhaps he never existed, perhaps the truth is that she has been here, asleep among Briar Rose’s thorns with the biblical admonition over her head, all along. May’s bed lies flat in the darkness and Ally, who thought her grieving for May was long finished, who knew anyway that Mamma was right to say that mourning is a form of self-indulgence which can do nothing for the departed and dishonours their memory by using it as an excuse for morbid idleness, finds herself weeping a little for May.

When she wakes again there is muffled grey light around the window and a cart passing along the road. She has become unused to street noise, in the white cottage where she is woken by seagulls and sometimes by the bells and horns of ships feeling their way by dawn or fog. The house will be colder and damper for her absence, with no-one to watch the spread of cracks in the plaster. What if the ceiling falls while she is so far away? She should not have left it, her house and Tom’s and all Tom’s things, his books and blankets and clothes, his pots and pans, all their wedding presents from Aunt Mary and Annie and Tom’s mother and the framed engravings from Penvenick himself, all succumbing to the creeping damp. She should not have come here. She stands up, bare feet on the bare boards, the cold air from the window and the fireplace and the gaps in the floor reaching up under her nightdress, snatching at her thighs and waist. There is no pot under the bed, so she creeps down the stairs, across the hall where there is mud and grit under her feet and into the lavatory. There is a bad smell that was not there yesterday, and no paper.

Ally prepares breakfast. Mamma goes through the morning’s post at the kitchen table. The bread is stale