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

Before she knows what she is doing she finds herself at the stove, her sleeve rolled back as Mamma once rolled it for her. She lifts one of the lids. She extends her arm. She watches the skin turn red and then white. There is a faint odour of roast meat.

There is not enough pain.

She wants the end now.

She is too old for this.

T

HE

L

ENGTH OF A

D

INNER

P

ARTY

It is probably as well that he can see only his head and shoulders in the mirror. He suspects that the rest of him looks ridiculous to eyes accustomed to the kosode and hakama, to the fall of woven cloth cut to the neatness of the male form. He loosens his tie, a garment with no purpose whatsoever. When did British men start to wear bows around their necks?

There is a murmur from the bottom of the stairs where the Senhouses are already waiting for him, he in a black evening suit so much like Tom’s that they could have been cut and sewn at the same time from the same cloth. Every man there will be wearing the same thing. She wears a gown with large yellow flowers on a white ground, one of those puffs over her behind and her breasts cantilevered up and pushed together to make a line of cleavage above the tasselled yellow trim around the edge of her bodice. A length of yellow silk lies across the back of the skirt, looped around her elbows as if it had slipped from her shoulders. Her hair, a paler blonde than Ally’s, is braided and twisted around her head and small white flowers nestle in the swirls. She’s pretty enough, but most of all she looks uncomfortable, artificial.

‘You are looking very beautiful this evening, Mrs. Senhouse. Your shawl is of local manufacture?’

There are white chrysanthemums embroidered on the silk. Ally might like such a thing, in grey or a light blue.

‘Indeed so, Mr. Cavendish. There are now several shops where they understand the requirements of European dress.’

Senhouse holds his wife’s evening cloak for her. ‘Come, Cavendish. The Ambassador values punctuality.’

He is pleased to see that there are no jinrikishas at the gate. He would have thought the evening too cold for Mrs. Senhouse to walk, certainly in her finery, but her heeled silk slippers tap a staccato rhythm to her conversation with her husband. He walks behind them. The sky is clear and the stars winter-bright. The stars must have different names here, and maybe the constellations themselves are differently ordered, taking the form of flowers or temples rather than agricultural implements and animals. Until recently, Makoto told him, there was no word for ‘animal’ in Japanese; living things were divided into categories of movement. There were creeping things—lizards, woodlice, some small mammals—and flying things, which included butterflies and bats as well as birds. Things that leap and run, and also a category of furred beasts. There is nothing natural, nothing innate, about taxonomies. He wonders what other aspects of being in the world might be wholly different in Japanese. There are, plainly, men and women, but it is less clear that the categories of children and adults are as distinct as at home. Japanese medicine is different and perhaps the very definition of health is questionable. The quick and the dead, ghosts. There are samurai and farmers, a distinction at least until recently much more rigid than its British equivalent. There are fox owners. He thinks of the jinrikisha men, beasts of burden, and the shape-shifting foxes. If the idea of animals is recent, what about the idea of humans?

He almost treads on Mrs. Senhouse’s skirt. Her face turns to him, white under the hood of her cape.

‘And what do you think, Mr. Cavendish?’

The pavement is wide enough now for him to walk beside them.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Ah, you were thinking of home, I dare say. We were discussing the possibility of having a Christmas tree, and perhaps giving a dinner. There are several bachelors here, you know, and I do not like to think of them gathering only in some bar or club to mark the birth of Christ.’

‘Mrs. Senhouse comes of a large family,’ says Mr. Senhouse. ‘She always feels the need for a crowd at Christmastime.’

Christmas. He had forgotten about Christmas. There are—he counts—five weeks yet. Almost six. With a little luck, time for the post. Silk shawls, he thinks, for Ally and Mother, easy to wrap and hard to damage on the way. Perhaps also for Mrs. Dunne, since they are likely cheap enough.

‘Mrs. Senhouse, before I leave for Kyoto could you be so kind as to find a moment to show me the shops of which you spoke? You remind me that I have been remiss in my shopping.’

Her laughter tinkles in the quiet street. They will hear her behind the paper screens, around the firepits and the red lanterns. Foreign laughter.

‘You need a gift for your wife. Of course, Mr. Cavendish, it will be my pleasure. Tell me, what is her taste, her favourite colours, her complexion?’

The double doors of the ambassador’s residence are wide open, and lanterns hanging in the porch send a dancing light down the stone steps. The ambassador is an aficionado of Japanese gardens and has had the box hedges and lavender taken out and replaced with black bamboo which waves and rustles by the path. Tom remembers the temple on the island, and the unseen bear. He remembers his lights, shining out now over dark waters. He follows Mrs. Senhouse’s cloak up the steps, its beads glistening like raindrops in the lamplight.

There are place cards. Mrs. Senhouse says that the ambassador’s wife, who is much younger than the ambassador, spends days before each party working on precedent and placement, her task infinitely complicated by the changes of the last twenty years. Sometimes she will be entertaining a prince in whose youth streets were closed so that the populace might not glimpse