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

at work. There. He steps towards her, offers his hand. Her hair is slipping from its knot, the colour of raw oak, and his fingers would like to push it back for her, tuck it behind her ear, under the tilted straw hat. No, she is not like a man, not at all like a man, only not like any other woman he has ever met.

‘Mr. Cavendish. I hope I have not kept you waiting?’

No, he says, not at all, only his first appointment left him time to walk a little around the museum. The cast gallery, he says, hoping she will not expect him to hold informed opinions, most interesting. And the Dutch still lives, you can see the fruits of a great trading empire in those paintings. Would she perhaps like a cup of coffee? He has heard that the tea-room is one of the glories of the museum.

She smiles at him. It is indeed, although she would not like her Papa to hear her say so; he would have liked that commission himself and therefore cannot entirely approve of Morris’s work, and yes, they serve excellent coffee.

Somewhere behind her eyes he knows she is laughing at him, with his tradesman’s eye on the paintings and his preference for coffee over the admiration of stained glass. He does not mind.

A R

IVERINE

O

DOUR

She returns with the glories of the museum still buoyant in her mind, and the solidity of Tom’s muscled arm under her gloved hand. She has dreamt of Tom, dark, tumbling dreams for which she has a perfectly adequate vocabulary. The freckles on his wrists probably extend across his back and shoulders, the firmness of his arms means a taut belly and open chest. She sees that chest, those shoulders, moving over her own and catches her breath right there in the corridor. You would think that knowing the human body as she does, knowing the layers of skin, fat, muscle and bone, the pathways of blood, mucus, urine and feces, would diminish enchantment. Apparently it does not, and considering the numbers of married doctors and, come to that, nurses, this should be less surprising than she finds it. Of all the forms of learning, this should have protected her. And has not. She shakes her head, as if lust could be swatted like a fly.

The east-facing ward darkens early. The gas has not been lit, although dusk softens the lines of the metal beds and high walls. She passes her days, she thinks for the first time, in geometric spaces, her learning cradled by the perpendicular. Remembers again Tom’s vertiginous perspective. May’s mind must have been changed by the shape of her island, the sheerness of cliffs and the sweeps of hills. There are, surely, hills in that place?

The patient appears not to have moved. Catatonia, the first time she has seen it. She approaches the nurse first; the patient wet her bed but has not soiled herself. She has not responded to any approach. She has not taken food or drink, even when Nurse Selwyn tried spoon-feeding. Dr. Stratton instructed them not to hold her nose, a technique occasionally used—not by Ally—to medicate children and the delirious. There has been some coughing, to which the patient appeared oblivious. The nurse turns to light the lamps as Ally walks back down the ward. The earth turns, the lights come on. Soon it will be bedtime.

She draws the chair forward again, seats herself. Of course the patient has been washed, but she wonders if there is a riverine odour, a ghost of water-weed and bubbles. Good night, sweet ladies. The patient’s pulse is strong and regular, her breathing slow.

‘You see, I have come back. I will be here, in the hospital, for the rest of the night and I’ll ask the nurses to call me if you want to say anything, if you begin to respond. We are able to keep you safe here. We will keep you warm and clean even if you don’t acknowledge us.’

She wants to go on and say that the patient can stay here for as long as she likes and that no-one will force anything on her, but it isn’t true. The patient cannot be allowed to endanger herself by starvation. The hospital is not an asylum: once it is clear that the physical after-effects of her drowning have resolved, they will need to consider the girl’s sanity. It is beyond doubt that she has committed the crime of attempting self-murder, witnessed by a police constable, and unless the police decide to pretend that she fell in while carrying stones for some other reason, there is no protection from the consequences of that crime. At the very least, enquiries will have to be made so that her relatives can be contacted or the appropriate parish billed for her admission to the lunatic asylum. Very soon, there will be considerable pressure, probably some coercion, to respond.

It is a quieter night. The crisis of a patient on the fever ward: there is nothing she can do that would not be better done by the nurses, but she stands, anyway, at the foot of the bed, watching and waiting until the woman’s temperature turns, her muttering quiets and she falls into a natural sleep. A surgical patient wakes sobbing with pain: laudanum, and a more authoritative reassurance than the same words uttered by a nurse. Back to bed, pacing the corridors that will confine her dreams for years, through a building that will stand longer in her mind than on the ground. She will, she thinks, look in on the drowning girl. What is unspeakable by day can often find utterance now, in the hours of darkness and the place of sickness, both more and less real than the ordinary world.

She can see from the door that the patient has moved, and as she walks down the ward the nurse comes to meet her. The catatonia must have broken; now, then, the story can be