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

doctor saves an individual child, the child will continue to live in misery and hunger. It is not primarily medical care that is lacking but the most basic elements of public health. If Ally truly wished her work, her life itself, to be beneficial, she would have taken a different path.

‘Besides, Alethea, you surely have the sense to see that sitting them by the fire even for the whole morning serves only to weaken their constitutions. Come, I will introduce you to the nurses.’

Papa, Ally sees immediately, has not been involved in the architecture or interior design of the Centre. The floor is tiled, a chequerboard of black and red, and the windows set so high that only grey sky is visible from the floor. The hall reminds Ally of a municipal bath house, as if one could turn a tap somewhere and fill it with water. A municipal bath house might go some way towards fulfilling the aims of the Centre. Mamma strides ahead of Ally, through the hall and into a corridor painted the same shade of pale green as parts of the asylum and indeed the London Women’s Hospital.

‘Come along, Alethea. I have a committee meeting in Hulme at ten. Ah, Miss Eastman. I have brought you my daughter. Dr. Moberley.’

Moberley Cavendish. She wishes she had simply taken Tom’s name, separated herself from Mamma and Papa. Miss Eastman holds herself tall and meets Ally’s gaze, a wholly different manner from the asylum nurses. Even Ally recognises the expensive simplicity of Miss Eastman’s attire.

‘How do you do, Dr. Moberley. We are glad of your presence.’

‘I am glad to be of service, Miss Eastman.’

Mamma nods. ‘If you are done with the civilities, I must make haste. Alethea, if you will want a meal this evening you will perhaps find time to stop at Evans on your way home? I expect to be late.’

One cannot in conscience look at that line of people outside and then blame Mamma for not keeping a servant. Although some of them would doubtless be most grateful for such a position. ‘Yes, Mamma.’

‘No extravagance, please. I am not your Aunt Mary.’

‘No, Mamma.’

Mamma’s men’s boots are usually quiet enough, but her retreating tread echoes and then fades between the tiled floor and the bare walls. There is more space in Ally’s ribcage when Mamma is not there.

‘Your Mamma is a tireless worker.’ Miss Eastman cocks her head, evaluating Ally. A charitable gentlewoman, Ally thinks, doubtless volunteering her time, and her accent more ladylike than Ally’s, the consonants precise and the vowels southern soft.

‘She has always been so. Will you show me the consulting rooms?’

There is a clatter from the hall as the doors are opening, and then a scuffle of feet and voices as not water but sound rises up the walls.

‘They can hardly be so called. This way, please, Miss Moberley.’ She glances to the side. ‘That is, Doctor.’

A T

RUSTED

A

GENT

Mrs. Senhouse apologises again for the dinner. It is so hard to explain to Japanese servants what is required.

Tom sets down his fork. The food indeed requires apology. ‘Perhaps a Japanese cook would be more competent in preparing Japanese food?’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘It is the slimy things one cannot abide. Rice, of course, and clear soup, but I cannot expect Mr. Senhouse to do a day’s work on such pauper food.’

He thinks of the jinrikisha men, and the men who carried stones up the rocks for the lighthouses, and the men on the mountain farms.

Senhouse is also giving up on what is probably tinned ham cooked in salty brown sauce with some inexplicably gluey vegetable admixture. ‘The Japanese constitution is a mystery. Maybe it should be tried in our slums, Cavendish, the rice and pickle diet. Cheap enough.’

‘Rice is not so very cheap, at home,’ Tom says. ‘And the difficulty is often not so much the ingredients as the fuel over which they are to be cooked. It is why the poor do not eat bean soup, as everlastingly suggested by the rich.’ Who do not eat it either, Ally likes to point out.

Mrs. Senhouse, also, stops toying with the mess on her plate. ‘Gracious, Mr. Cavendish, you seem to have made quite a study of the subject.’

Outside, beyond the white tablecloth and the placemats and napkins and candelabra, beyond the cushions and antimacassars on the chaise longue blocking the glass panels that replace the old shoji screens, the last leaf waltzes from the maple tree into the pond, leaving the outline of branches beautiful against the winter sky. At least the Senhouses will not be here long enough to plant roses. At least they may not replace the stepping stones with a spouting dolphin or a pissing child. He remembers the leaves floating on dark water in Makoto’s grandfather’s walking garden.

Back in his room, he sits at the foot of the armchair, on a tatami mat, to re-read the letter from De Rivers that awaited him at the post office. I don’t like to use that lamp, Mrs. Senhouse said, because it seems nothing more than kindling wrapped around a flame. And then to set it on a straw mat! You will be most careful, Mr. Cavendish?

De Rivers has at last deigned to be more specific about Tom’s commission, has been corresponding with ‘an expert collector recently returned’. There is a part of Kyoto, he writes, devoted since time immemorial to the fabrication of painted and embroidered silks, where it is possible to acquire pieces of extraordinary splendour for remarkably little outlay. De Rivers gathers that the craze in Japan is all now for modern goods and that noble families and even temples are selling off priceless antiquities. It is a moment to delight any speculator, and how much more exciting to one, like himself, who unites the availability of ready money with the opportunity of a trusted agent on the ground and the taste to appreciate such objects. Trusted is underlined. Tom is to use the sum at his disposal to purchase