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

‘So. It stays to dry.’

Tom nods. There are several kimono in process here, brought as lengths—tatami-sized lengths, he thinks, as if one’s whole life is measured in the same units—from the weaving shop across the lane. Two garments hang from horizontal poles on the wall, as if crucified, finished and awaiting collection. Spring kimono, Tatsuo translated. Irises grow from a pool of purple at the hem of one, lilies from pale pink on the other. The kimono is an artist’s canvas, its uniformity of shape and size freeing the painter from any consideration of the wearer’s body. Woman as picture frame. Would Ally find it better or worse than the corset and bustle? He thinks of the paintings he saw in Alfred Moberley’s London exhibition, Ally and yet not Ally. It is odd to have a wife on whose undressed body any man may gaze on the walls of the Royal Academy. Perhaps she would like a kimono, not one of these which are far beyond his means and anyway intended to be worn by the richest of women on the rarest occasions, but one like his fairy godmother Makiko’s.

‘You wish to see the sewing? The—embroidery?’ A difficult word for the Japanese tongue.

‘Please.’ Tom bows.

He wants to see everything. He is a child at Christmas, wide-eyed and without discrimination. Tatsuo leads him up a wooden ladder so that his head emerges on the level of the floor where men sit on their folded legs around a kimono length stretched on a wooden frame. He tries to return their bows before he has found his feet and they regard him gravely for a moment before turning again to their stitching. One hand above the stretched silk, one below it, working together, the right knowing perfectly the actions of the left. The outlines of a pattern of butterflies and grasses are filling with silk in yellow, blue and green and the needles flutter above the work.

‘A special commission,’ Tatsuo murmurs. ‘A great geisha.’

Tom feels himself tensing. Geisha. Not exactly prostitutes, he’s heard. Hardly patrons of the arts. Although there are four men at work, there has been no visible expansion of the colours since he first looked.

‘How long does it take?’ he asks.

‘The whole or the—the embroidering?’

‘Say the whole.’

‘To spin, to weave, to dye, to embroider, to sew? Many months. Half a year.’

Good God. They need factories. Mechanised spinners and looms, sewing machines. Mass production. You could make hundreds in a couple of days. If they can build trains and lighthouses, why on earth do they still have old men working wooden looms with their hands and feet? It is medieval. And what does it cost, he thinks, what are these men paid and what is the price of the silk and what does the geisha pay at the end? He is here, after all, as a possible customer. There must be a way of asking. He has never bought a work of art before.

They retreat down the ladder, Tatsuo facing forward with one hand on the rails, Tom backwards, feeling with each foot for the step below and painfully aware of his large European behind progressing through the mid-air of the room beneath. The director, dressed in loose black trousers and tunic with white insignia on the shoulder and back, awaits Tom’s descent. As Tom adjusts his jacket and his dignity, the director bows and speaks. He is offering tea, Tom realises. He nods and bows back.

‘Arigato,’ he says. ‘Domo arigato.’ He can feel the grin spreading across his face.

The three men sit cross-legged around a black lacquer table facing the workshop’s courtyard garden. A piece of charcoal falls in the stove behind Tom and he can feel its heat in his back and shoulders; one advantage of sitting on the floor is that one is at the height of the fire. The screens are open far enough to show a stripe of snow on grey stones, the white shading to grey with the curve of each rock, and the black twigs of a pine tree also bearing their own ghosts in snow. Tom accepts a translucent bowl of green tea, noticing the single frond of pine painted grey on its ridged white side. The accompanying sweet, the same colour as the tea, echoes the shape of the cones on the tree.

‘Arigato,’ he says again. Thank you. He forgets about the transaction, about the shopping.

When they leave—arigato, sayonara—it is snowing again in the cobbled street, and the mountains have vanished behind the clouds. Two women walk under umbrellas, their geta silenced by the snow on the ground. The curved roofs are white, only their curved ridgepoles and gable ends dark against the paper sky, and the blue and white banners hang motionless in the still air. He finds himself holding his breath, as if to stop time, to make it forever now, here.

A

UBADE IN

Y

ELLOW

There is a fog outside, wrapped so thickly through the branches of the plane tree that she can’t see the ground or the people who are probably walking along the pavement, so thickly that she could be high in a tower, with many storeys of Aunt Mary’s carpets and hearths between her and the world. She has been rocking the chair as she reads and the blanket over her lap has slipped down; she pulls it back up to her waist, noticing the new silk edging. Ally is reading Browne again, reflecting on his suggestion that some ‘lunatics’ are simply not capable of functioning outside the asylum although apparently sane within it. The appearance of sanity in such cases, he argues, depends upon the protection afforded by the asylum and ends with that protection: these are the patients who relapse repeatedly on discharge, only to satisfy all conditions of release almost immediately on readmission. Browne does not suggest, nor, apparently, seek a solution to this conundrum. These patients are simply people who should live in lunatic asylums. But what, Ally thinks, if there is something in the