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

enough, there’s no-one coming tonight and a relief after last week I can tell you. Fourteen to dinner on Wednesday! I could see in Cook’s eyes she was thinking of giving notice but you know how James loves to entertain. The boys will be so happy to see you. And Annie’s home for Christmas, did her letter reach you? You’d maybe rather consult her than Dr. Stratton.’

Salt butter, bitter marmalade, crisp toast flood Ally’s tongue and the coffee seems to enter her bloodstream. Aunt Mary stands by the window. Her hair has greyed since the summer, but she is wearing a new dress in royal blue damask trimmed with silver braid. Aunt Mary’s love of clothes has always been somehow cheering, an assertion of the value of aesthetic pleasure that has little to do with personal vanity. Her dresses are flags for beauty.

‘That’s it, darling. You’ll soon feel better for some nice food. You didn’t eat at all yesterday?’

Ally tries to remember. Yesterday. She lit the kitchen range but she doesn’t remember eating anything herself. ‘I don’t think so.’

Aunt Mary nods. ‘You’ve got very thin. I never understood why Elizabeth doesn’t waste away. Alfred of course takes his meals elsewhere now?’

Ally bits her lips. ‘Mm.’

‘Poor Ally. I’ll stop talking to you about it. Finish your toast, darling. More coffee?’

Aunt Mary stays until Ally has eaten all that is comfortable, and then takes the tray herself. Ally lolls against the pillows, tries not to hear Mamma. Sating yourself in idle luxury when there is such suffering as even you would be ashamed to behold not five minutes from where you lie lazing.

The fire crackles and there are hoof beats down the street, getting louder. The cart rattles past and then fades. A man’s voice in the hall—George—and the front door opens and closes. Her neck is stiff and she adjusts the pillow. How long since she was ill, since she lay in bed excused from ordinary life? This day only, she thinks, it would be too easy to become an invalid, to lie here and perhaps pass the days with novels or a little fancy-work. Mamma is quite right, ladies take to the sofa as gentlemen to the club, because it is a place where nothing is asked, where we are fed and coddled like babies at the breast and allowed to slide unknowing into damnation. Like some babies at the breast, some fortunate few. She remembers having measles as a child, before she and May started school. There is nothing wrong with Alethea except that she would rather mope by the fire than learn her lessons. If you are unwell, Alethea, please go to your room; you are scarcely a fit sight for the drawing room with those eruptions on your face. You vomited because you took too much water; did I not tell you that moderation is particularly important in cases of fever? And then one night Mamma came to her with a covered bowl, an egg custard made by her own hand. Here, Alethea, now that the fever is passed you should take some food. You must get strong and fit again.

And she has seen Mamma at other bedsides, tending to women in the acute abdominal pain that characterises the progress of certain inflammations to which prostitution makes them especially prone, sitting up at night with a girl brought in from the street in the late stages of both tuberculosis and pregnancy. Mamma will sooner read the Bible to someone in pain than administer analgesia, but she chooses genuinely consoling passages, and as far as Ally can tell Mamma believes them. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Sleep now in peace, Mamma murmured, did not our Lord himself take Mary Magdalene into his keeping? Mamma is not wicked, or without love. Only without love for Ally. Ally finds herself crying again.

A light tread on the stairs, Aunt Mary coming back. She taps on the door as she opens it, and comes in with her workbox in her hands.

‘Poor Ally. Do you want to tell me all about it, or not yet?’

She shakes her head. ‘Not yet, Aunt Mary. But thank you, truly thank you, for taking me in like this.’

‘Nonsense, darling. It is what any aunt, any friend would do.’

Aunt Mary settles herself in the rocking chair with her box on the occasional table. Ally, who has no interest in fancy-work or embroidery, has always admired the workbox for its miniature drawers and folding trays, the neatness of the shiny wood and silver fittings. There are holes for thimbles to nest and a needle holder in the shape of furled umbrella. Aunt Mary takes out a piece of cross-stitch in a circular wooden frame and wets a length of red silk in her mouth.

‘Lie down, Ally. Try to sleep. You can rest now. I’ve told the servants that no-one is to be admitted and that I am not at home to anyone at all.’

Ally pulls the pillows down into the bed and curls up. Refuge, she thinks. Asylum.

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He is woken by bells. No, by one bell, one sound. The note reverberates through the wooden walls and the floor, through the thin futon and around his ribs, his sternum. He rolls onto his back and waits for the next one. There. The echoes hum through the ground, through his shoulder blades and spine, and then the voices come, a low chant. A temple, he thinks, or a shrine, because there is meant to be a difference, now, between Shinto and Buddhism. Divide and conquer, probably. Didn’t lots of samurai retire to monasteries?

Once again, the room lies calm and empty around him. He puts his hands behind his head and opens out his shoulders. It is perfectly possible to sleep very well