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

and the butter yellowed and cheesy; Mamma says it is her habit to take only rusks in the morning and that Papa does Ally a rare honour in breakfasting at home. There are no eggs, and no milk with which to make porridge, and no, Mamma does not wish the range to be lit; it is a wasteful practice when all three of them will be out all day. Mamma has said that Ally will be at the clinic by half-past eight.

Papa comes down while Ally is setting the table in the dining room with tarnished silver. She will clean the silver this evening, she thinks, there is something satisfying about cleaning silver and perhaps once Mamma has seen the difference she will remember how much pleasanter it is, to be clean. Papa is wearing a blue silk scarf over a crimson velvet dressing gown and blowing on his hands.

‘Good morning, Ally. You slept well?’

‘Good morning, Papa. You come splendid to the breakfast table.’

He touches the scarf. ‘Oh, a painting prop. It’s really Desdemona’s but she doesn’t grudge it, not in a house where it’s a mortal sin to light a fire in the morning. Do you want to bring a tray up to the studio? I’ve buckets of coal up there.’

Ally shakes her head. ‘We’ll eat together.’

‘As you like, your first day home. You’re looking pretty, Princess Al. The low hair suits you and that’s a nice dress.’

Mamma comes in. ‘Anyone would look pretty, as you call it, got up in such an outfit after hours primping her hair before the mirror. Such tight lacing will make you ill, Alethea.’

Ally sits down. She remembers the clothes she had when she first went to London, the clothes she wore for the first autumn at medical school, until Aunt Mary intervened. ‘I do not think I spend five minutes on my hair, Mamma. And I am afraid that it is still most important for a professional woman to appear smart and prosperous. We are very often taunted with ugliness and unnatural inclinations as it is.’

Mamma shakes her head and pours herself a glass of water. ‘And do you think Our Lord did not have to bear worse jibes and insults in His work? Do you think that your poorest patients will think your appeasement of such men worth the money with which they could feed their children for many weeks? You should care more for your soul and less for the opinions of the world, Alethea.’

Our Lord, Ally thinks, was dead by the time he was not much older than I am, and no woman will earn a living by disdaining the opinions of the world. The butter crumbles under her knife and she glances down. Does she look too tightly laced? In fact her stays are, as always, scarcely pulled and gently tied, but she has always been slim and perhaps the effect suggests tight lacing. She has let down her bustle, which was in any case slight, a mere nod to fashion, and the bodice is adorned only by black binding on the grey wool, but maybe the nurses will indeed see a fine lady. She is not sure the brown skirt and coat would be any better and the blue dress is too long to wear in a clinic, especially without a bustle to raise it.

‘This is what I have, Mamma. I am sorry if it is unsuitable.’

‘I am surprised that you consider such dress a good use of your husband’s money, that is all. It is unexpected.’

Papa pushes back his chair. He has taken only one bite of the bread and butter. ‘It is pretty. I am out this evening, Elizabeth, and will probably sleep at the office.’ He bends to kiss Ally’s hair. ‘I have an apartment there now, you know. With Jenny gone, Mamma did not like to entertain at home.’

‘Goodbye, Papa.’

His footsteps hurry up the stairs and then not into Mamma and Papa’s bedroom but to the studio, where he must be sleeping and dressing as well as painting. Ally feels a sudden desire to creep in while he is out, to rifle through the stacked paintings, warm her hands at the ghost of his coal fire and sit in his velvet armchair breathing the smell of oil paint and pipe smoke. The sound of Mamma crunching her rusks rings in the cold air.

‘We will need to leave in fifteen minutes, Alethea. Cold water will suffice to wash these plates.’

There is a queue outside the May Moberley Mother and Infant Welfare Centre when Ally and Mamma arrive. Ally catches her breath at May’s name carved into the stone plaque; it must be a long time since she has seen it written down, seen the material sign of May. The red-brick walls are already grimed with soot. The breath of the mothers and infants hangs visible around their faces, although there are bare feet on the pavement and bare heads bobbing at their mothers’ sides. It is not that there is not poverty like this in Falmouth, but there is not—so far—such cold.

‘They need to be warm,’ Ally says. ‘Whatever else ails them, we must warm them. There is a stove within?’

‘But not always fuel,’ Mamma says. ‘We find our donors more generous around Christmas than in the autumn. And by Christmas it is too late for some of the infants.’

Ally nods. Across all classes, it is safer to be born like the animals in spring, but the seasonal variations in infant mortality are especially stark for the urban poor. Most of the babies now in arms along this pavement will be buried before their first birthdays. Nothing Ally can do within the walls of the May Moberley Welfare Centre will make much difference to this fact. The children need fuel, food and sanitation; those dying for simple lack of medical care are statistically insignificant. And yet the only ones for whom she works. Mamma’s is the more useful life, for even if a