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

‘Which one is it? Which painting?’

Uncle James takes more rice. ‘Aubade in Yellow. 1873.’

‘Oh.’

May was twelve. Ally was busy with her schoolwork, still, then hoping to go to Edinburgh, because the Edinburgh Seven were working their way through the medical syllabus there and the university had not yet moved to close the loophole that had allowed women to take examinations. It was the worst year for her attacks of hysteria, and also therefore the worst year for Mamma’s attempts to cure her of nervous weakness by blistering, early rising and constant domestic chores. Hysteria, Alethea, is an outward symptom of under-occupation and unfettered self-regard. She was not even sharing May’s room for much of the year, since Mamma feared that Ally’s bad dreams and early rising would disturb her sister’s rest. May was always good at spending a great deal of time at the houses of other girls from the school, and often managed to elicit Papa’s permission for outings with Aubrey without seeming to consult Mamma at all; it is not entirely surprising that Ally has only a vague memory of this painting. Aubade, dawn. Did May spend a night with Aubrey?

Fanny comes to clear the plates. ‘You’re finished, Miss Ally?’

She’s given up trying to devise something for Fanny to call her. ‘Yes, thank you, Fanny.’

Aunt Mary shakes her head. ‘You must try to eat more, darling. Or at this rate we’ll have to have all your dresses altered and Tom will come home and find you quite wasted away.’

He wants her strong. Really, Alethea, says Mamma in her head. If you had wished to honour your sister you would have fulfilled your obligations to her Welfare Centre; this gadding around to see paintings is mere self-indulgence, luxuriating in your own sorrow and the attention it brings you.

Stop it. Stop it. She must stop allowing Mamma to live in her head.

‘Yes, please. I would like to see the painting.’

There is apple snow to follow the chicken, and then Uncle James toys with the end of the Christmas stilton and water biscuits. The cheese is crumbling on its special plate, the edges turning brown as if it were a dying leaf, and the heat of the fire crackling behind Aunt Mary’s chair lifts the smell across the room, somehow familiar but associated with work, with the Women’s Hospital. Decomposition, she thinks. It smells of mortality.

‘Would you excuse me, Aunt Mary.’

They look up as she hurries from the room. They will think her flighty, unstable. Perhaps that she should not see the painting after all. She stops in the hall, where the draught creeping under the front door brings chill and the grey breath of the fog that presses against the glass panels and the fanlight. She wants to stay in her white room in the attic, safe with her rocking chair and her books. She stands at the bottom of the stairs. Apart from a couple of walks in the park, she has barely left the house since she arrived from Manchester. Regardless of Aubrey’s picture, she thinks, she should accompany Uncle James for the air and exercise. Or perhaps Mamma’s voice is right, perhaps the wish to go out is a foolish yearning for diversion and distraction, for the attention of others. Ally catches sight of herself in the mirror, pale and wide-eyed. Stop this. The question of whether to walk out this afternoon does not merit such alarm. Why don’t you just do what you wish to do, enquires May’s voice. It will be much simpler that way and actually, Al, nobody else cares. Study when you get back. Or not; it’s not as if you have more examinations. Or even as if you haven’t read that book before. In fact, it’s not really studying at all, is it, Al?

The eyes in the mirror dilate. All that is required is the strength of mind not to listen, to remember that May is dead and Mamma far away and that their voices are phantasms. But there is no arguing with the distant and the dead, she thinks. There is no possibility of winning. One must live with their voices.

* * *

Aubrey used to like fog. And rain, so long as he could sit somewhere dry to paint, and snow. Twilight and candlelight. There would probably have been more aubades if he had been less certain that early rising was a bourgeois habit. Are there more paintings of sunset than sunrise because painters disdain the early hours of office workers and professional men? This fog is still so thick that she can see it stroking the pillars of next door’s portico, rubbing against the gaslamps and trailing along the iron railings of the square’s garden. Uncle James crooks his elbow and she takes it. She has not walked on a man’s arm since Tom left.

‘You are sure you are up to the walk on such a day? We could find a cab.’

There are tiny beads of water forming on the fibres of her wool coat, miniature as insects.

‘I doubt we could, Uncle James. But in any case I like to walk, and I have been too much indoors.’

‘You must tell me the moment you begin to tire, or to chill.’

If she had been Uncle James’s daughter, if she could have had Aunt Mary for her mother and grown up here—

‘You are too kind to me.’

‘Nonsense, my dear. I should say rather that others have not been kind enough.’

He squeezes her hand. It is, she is fairly sure, the first time he has spoken even implicitly of Mamma and Papa to her. He cannot have met them above two or three times. Uncle James grew up in Kent, where his parents died within a month of each other a few years ago. Mother did not want to go on without my father, Uncle James said. She died of grief.

The carriages have their lamps lit, but even so she can hear the horses