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

you and that we would enjoy discussing. Mamma will be looking at her letters, not out of the window, and the winter jasmine is growing up over the window sill anyway. She ducks and runs, banging the valise on her leg.

Her breathing is loud in her head. There’s no-one else out, no traffic or footfalls and she would be easily seen, easily found. She takes the first turning, to get off Mamma and Papa’s road, to be out of sight of anyone standing at the gate. Her skirt tangles around her legs, catches around her knees. The beech trees stand bare overhead.

The park, they won’t look in the park and there are places to hide. But she should get away, she should go as far and as fast as she can. And not be seen.

The park is locked. Not back past the house, go the other way.

The other way leads to the shops, the church and the library, where there will be people who will see her.

No, not today. Today the people are all in their houses.

Keep moving, she thinks, go somewhere, you are not five minutes from the house and they may come looking any moment.

She hurries again, away from the park and away from the house. She feels like a mouse crossing a road, like a goldfish beside whose pond a heron has just landed. The main road, silent and bare. As if everyone has died instead of someone being born.

She crosses it to be under the trees on the other side.

She crosses back to avoid passing a bay window where people sit around a candle-lit table.

What are Mamma and Papa doing now? She left the puddings steaming, the pan will steam dry and burn. If she went back now, could she get into the house, back to the kitchen, without them knowing that she had left?

But she has not cleaned the pantry. Mamma will be angry, angrier than she can bear. She has never hidden before, never fled.

She trips on the valise and almost falls.

Quick now, hurry.

I cannot believe that you are too scared even to run away, says May. Honestly, you and Mamma almost deserve each other sometimes.

She has nowhere to go.

As the sun goes down, she finds herself around the back of the station. Her skirt is wet to the knees, Tom’s valise spattered with mud. She draws into the corner as the lamplighter comes by, the first person she has noticed in some hours.

If the station is lit, there may be a train.

If the station is lit, they will look for her there.

And what of it, says May, they cannot arrest you, a respectable married woman, for leaving your parents’ house.

They can call me mad, Ally replies, they can have me committed to the asylum.

The patient, who has a long history of hysteria perhaps exacerbated by an unfortunate attempt at higher education, appeared disordered in her dress and manner and displayed symptoms of great confusion and distress. Her parents, both well-known and respected citizens of Manchester, attested that she had given up a position in Cornwall because of nervous trouble but had not made the recovery hoped for while in their care.

You will always have a home with us, says Aunt Mary again. We will keep your room just as it has been these last years.

She turns back down a side street where there are no lights and checks all around before kneeling on the pavement to open the valise. She takes out a black silk scarf meant for Mamma’s Christmas present.

Alethea, it troubles me that you waste your money on such fripperies in my name; you could surely have guessed that I would rather, far rather, you gave what you deign to spare from the purchase of your own finery to feed those who starve at our very door.

She pushes back her hood and arranges the scarf over her hat, as a veil. As long as they are not already waiting for her at the ticket office, as long as there is a train—any train, the milk train—the station master will remember only a woman in scrabbled together mourning who had been urgently summoned even as the pudding was lit.

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He would have liked to travel yesterday. It is not that he longed, as some of Mrs. Senhouse’s other guests obviously did, for an English Christmas. It is not that he felt the tug of home any more that day than any other, for he and Ally have not yet had a Christmas together and there have been many years when it has not been practical for him to return to Harrogate for the day. Mother will go to the neighbours with whom she often takes Sunday dinner and Ally, he fears, has returned to her parents in Manchester. So it is not as if there is anything to miss, as if he is aware of an empty place at a table on the other side of the globe. Even so, since there is not Christmas here and since he is not among friends, it would have been more seemly to continue with life as usual, to take trains and fulfil professional appointments and postpone celebration for the Japanese feast days, of which there is hardly a shortage. There is something pathetic in the childlike craving for presents and sweets, in the drunken singing of songs about the holly and the ivy and the ox and the ass. He saw the pity in Makoto’s eyes when the Japanese guests joined them for English tea and crumbling slabs of plum cake. He would have preferred to have been spared the occasion.

He has a copy of The Times from six weeks ago, pressed on him by Senhouse this morning. Take it, Cavendish, for the Ambassador promised me first read of his next copy. We need to try to stay up to date, you know. Believe me it’s a frightful shock when you get home if you haven’t. It doesn’t do, you know, to