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

on a futon but some postures result in stiffness; one should learn to lie straight. There is one banner showing four Japanese characters hanging on the wall in the alcove, with one green vase containing one sprig of bamboo beneath it. His trunk is downstairs, because he saw no reason to try to wrestle it up the narrow open-tread staircase, and his clothes are downstairs also, beside the wooden bathtub which he found last night full of boiling hot water and covered with a wooden lid. He had to leave it to cool while he ate the tray of food he found on the low table in the main room, accompanied by green tea from a lidded jug which was also disconcertingly hot, the person who made it surely still close at hand. It is like coming to the little house in the fairy-tale forest and finding supper steaming on the table and candles lit, as if sometime this morning he should expect a visit from his fairy godmother. Or someone else, the rightful owner.

He sits up and tugs on the shutters, which were already closed when he arrived. They slide back to show paper screens set with small glass panels at the eye height of a person sitting on the floor, but there are outer shutters which are also closed. Three layers: why not just build a wall? But he knows why not. It is so that in summer one can open the whole building and live almost outdoors, using the shoji screens for shade or to keep out insects, or using the inner shutters for darkness without stuffiness and then the outer ones only to secure the house at need and for winter insulation. He tries to imagine Cornish houses so arranged, how different things would be. There must be some essential difference about the Japanese mind, or at least some moment very early in the human story, thousands of years ago, when what seems obvious to the rest of the world became strange and barbaric here. And vice versa.

Cold air, smelling of the snow outside, seeps around the outer shutter. The urge to lie down again and wrap the quilt around his shoulders wrestles with his curiosity about the world out there, a new city waiting behind the shutters to be explored. Besides, he does not know when the provider of hot baths and meals on trays will return. He takes a deep breath of winter morning, pushes the quilt onto the floor and climbs gingerly down the dim stairs.

The stove has been lit. There is a folded blue quilt beside it that was not there last night, and in the bathroom his clothes have also been folded—perfectly folded, along the seams and then at exact right-angles—and left in a stack on a wooden ledge low in the wall. Someone has been handling his drawers, his undershirt. Shivering in his pyjamas, he walks the house. It’s among the smallest self-contained dwellings he’s seen and no-one could possibly be concealed here, not even a tiny Japanese fairy godmother, but even so he pushes back the screen separating the four-mat room from the entrance way and checks the cupboard in the wall between the bathroom and the main room and then, idiotically, behind the bath and behind the curtain screening the street door. There’s no-one here, unless he’s missing something obvious, some door that looks like a wall (the sliding bookcase, he thinks, the fake panelling and the hidden trap door). Some of the more important Japanese houses, Professor Baxter told him, do have secret rooms, bare so that there are no hiding places for eavesdroppers or assassins, and positioned to make spying or ambush almost impossible. Tom grins to himself, remembering a complicated game he used to play with William Vickers who lived down the road and shared his taste for the cheaper and more exciting kind of boys’ stories. Perhaps presently he will be summoned to the secret chamber and entrusted with his quest. Meanwhile, he will dress by the stove and see if anyone brings him breakfast, and then if Mr. Tatsuo appears to take him out.

A

UNT

M

ARY

R

INGS THE

B

ELL FOR

T

EA

For perhaps the first time in her life, Ally has nothing to do. After breakfast, Uncle James leaves for the office. No rest for the wicked, he says, kissing Aunt Mary, and he will be home for afternoon tea, but it is perfectly plain that after three days of Christmas there is a lift in his step as he sets off. Dear James, says Aunt Mary, he does love to entertain but he has always less stamina for company than he expects. Don’t be silly, darling, you’re not company, we’ve both missed you these last six months. But I can’t stay, Ally thinks, this isn’t a permanent arrangement. I can’t sit by your fire and eat your delicacies until Tom comes home. George goes out to walk with a college friend living nearby—a glorious day, Mamma, and we’ve hardly left the house since Midnight Mass, sure you won’t come, Cousin Al? She’s not going anywhere, said Aunt Mary, not yet. Anyway, Annie’s coming later. Ally can go into the gardens with Annie if she feels like it. And then Aunt Mary herself went down to the kitchen for her daily confabulations with the cook.

Ally, left in the morning room, wanders into the bay and stands in the window. There are new drapes since the summer, thick velvet that will be troublesome to keep clean, in the shade of kingfisher blue that Aunt Mary loves to have in her clothes, and behind them swags of white muslin that will probably need laundering every week in winter with the fire burning all day and the fogs outside. Next door’s housemaid is scrubbing the steps of their porch, steam wavering above her bucket of water and rising from her breath as she works. A carriage passes, and two men in dark suits walk briskly towards the station. Across the road, the