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

There are more people, and then more again, and they turn a corner and the street ends in stairs running up to a great gateway, its canopy seeming heavier than the wooden poles could support. Those immense roofs are hollow, he knows, and lighter than they look, but even so in an earthquake one would not want—

‘Through here, please,’ says Tatsuo.

‘Here? Isn’t this a temple?’

Tatsuo bows. ‘Buddhist temple. Yes. This way, please.’

Everyone is going this way. Tom joins the crowd, behind a family with an infant riding in a pouch on the mother’s back and two older children walking either side of their father, holding the man’s hands and looking up into his face as he speaks to them. He does not remember his own father, cannot conjure a memory even when his mother insists that he must recall the stories his father used to tell him and the songs his father taught him to sing. His mother does not speak of his father’s death. It was quick, she said once. He went fast. Tom has always assumed, been allowed to assume, that it was an illness, a fever, that took his father. The Japanese father rests his hand on his son’s head as they walk.

The gravelled courtyard between the gateway and the temple building is filled with canopied stalls, around which people cluster like rooks to trees. Tom turns to Tatsuo. The moneylenders in the temple, he thinks. Are Buddhist monks not sworn to poverty? Stones that are probably statues loom over the throng from square plinths.

‘This way, please. There is someone you meet.’

He glimpses pots set out on the tables, tea sets and sake cups. Above another stall, a purple kimono patterned with silver fish is raised in the sunshine and a blue one lies at its feet. There are painted scrolls, a mass of the indecipherable, and then what he triumphantly identifies as hair ornaments, the sort that waver like antenna above the lacquered perfection of blue-black hair. Absolutely not a gift for Ally, whose soft mouse hair is forever slipping over her neck and ears, escaping her plait and spreading across her pillow as she sleeps. He remembers it in his fingers, the warmth of her head in its roughness. He remembers lifting it to bring his lips to her neck. He will write to her about the hair ornaments. Light flashes from another stall, straight lines of iron and steel. Blades; swords and knives. He pauses, his gaze drawn to the edges in the cold sun. Wasn’t it only samurai who were allowed swords? He wonders where these have been, what hands wielded them. So sharp, Professor Baxter said, that you’d never know your head had been cut off. So sharp it wouldn’t hurt until later. A shiver traces his spine; bring on the modern age, he thinks. Hail progress.

Tatsuo is waiting for him. ‘All right? Here. Look. Kiyumizu ware. Very beautiful.’

Tom approaches. Rice bowls, if they are meant for any purpose, although it is hard to imagine anything so delicate subject to heat and spoons and chopsticks. A leaf pattern reminds him of the crimson and gold on the floor of the mountain forest, winter bamboo is almost black against the bone-white china, the blossoms’ pink is so pale that at first he does not see it. A seasonal set.

‘These,’ Tatsuo says.

Not the rice bowls, obviously, on reflection, too useful for De Rivers’ interest, but a teapot and a set of bowls, thin as snail shells, grass-green and gilt. He bends to look: overlapping green bamboo, jewelled with bright birds and butterflies barely the size of a raindrop. The paintbrush must comprise no more than half a dozen bristles.

The stallholder says something. ‘You may touch.’

They don’t invite touch. It is their fragility that is remarkable, the evidence that something so brittle and thin, so fine in its miniaturism, remains capable of physical integrity from one hour to the next. He buys them, for De Rivers, and has them sent to the house. He buys three fans, and a parasol on which chrysanthemums seem to have fallen like rain. A lacquer tray, deep and shiny as still water, across which golden birds fly, and a matching box with tiny drawers that would hold stamps or, just about, cuff links. Then he goes back to the sword-seller and buys a knife, probably for himself, a knife like a shard of light against his thumb.

T

HE

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ILIES OF THE

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IELD

The first snowdrops are in bud in the Square’s garden, a cluster sheltered in the rockery on a south-facing rise. There are leaf-buds swelling on twigs and birdsong in the air. In Cornwall, probably, there are already camellias and even the first daffodils, and still Ally is in London. Still she has done nothing. Aunt Mary does not understand, even Annie does not understand, that there is nothing restful in idleness. She reads, calling it ‘work,’ and she walks, calling it ‘exercise.’ She reads badly, distracted by the flight of a bird past the window, by the wind in the trees, the passage of carts and carriages, and when she looks back at the book she cannot remember the last five pages. The hours pass more and more slowly and the days faster and faster. Life could slip away, she thinks. In a few weeks there will be bluebells under these trees. She could find herself forty and then fifty, hiding between her qualifications the truth that she is no more than any other superfluous woman eating at the table and lodging under the roof of whichever man finds himself burdened by family obligation to support her. Ally closes her eyes and tries to draw a deep breath of the air, to catch, despite the smoke of a million coal fires, the exhalation of things growing and stirring in the earth. Tom will be home before they die again.

She turns back towards the house. She must do something, get something done. She has been