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

And what when your parents die, Ally thinks. What when there is no longer anyone to look after you, to see to the laundry and the cooking, the cleaning and the chimney-sweeping and the paying of bills so that you can attend the rich of West London in their pleasant homes and go to the opera in the evenings? But then Annie, probably, will move in with her sister and brother-in-law and be welcome there. Envy is corrosive. Annie is her friend. And Annie has chosen—several times—not to marry, to remain unentangled, to depend as she so easily does upon her family and her friends for company and affection. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. We make our choices and then we live with them, but nothing that we can choose exonerates us from the need for kindness. Ally draws a deep breath.

‘I’m very happy for you,’ she says. ‘It is just right. A perfect plan. Your Papa must be delighted.’

Annie sits back, nods. ‘He is pleased. And Mamma is glad that she will not lose all her daughters. Well, I mean—’

Annie has remembered May, the other kind of loss.

‘I know, Annie. It’s all right. She deserves contentment, your Mamma.’

‘Don’t think like that. Deserving. No-one deserves loss. It’s a kind of religious melancholy, Ally, can’t you see it? You believe yourself damned, and you despair, and then you chastise yourself for despairing and sink further. And if you feel a little better you condemn yourself for pride and luxury. A classic case. You’ll never win.’

She can hear Aunt Mary on the stairs. Religious melancholy. Patients who swing from believing themselves unpardonable, which is the sin of despair and leads to eternal damnation, to believing themselves saved, which is the sin of pride and leads to eternal damnation. Then they despair again because they are damned again. Annie has said this, things like this, to her before but for the first time Ally thinks she understands. We cannot achieve justification by works. We cannot earn our lives, our place on the green earth. Life is a gift and not a contract. According to Annie.

Aunt Mary puts her head around the door. ‘Annie, I hope you will stay to dinner? There’s no-one coming, we don’t dress.’

Annie stands up. ‘I would be delighted, but Mamma is expecting me. She has guests and I promised to help. Thank you for the lovely tea.’

Ally helps Annie to put on her coat, watches Annie’s face in the mirror as she wraps her scarf and pins her hat. For the first time, Ally returns Annie’s embrace as she leaves, and the two women hold each other in the hall, Annie’s hat brushing Ally’s cheek, as in the fanlight the clouds drift past the moon.

G

OLD

F

LAKES

F

LOAT IN

L

ACQUER

His hand reaches towards the box. The silk wrapping-cloth, the furoshiki, has fallen back like a discarded gown around the gleaming curves.

The man bows and lifts the box to his touch. Only Tom’s fingertips graze the lacquer, the gold. It is as if one could touch warm ice. In the grey winter light filtering through the paper screens, the golden leaves, the freckled fruits and the plump birds, pheasants or partridges, seem lit from within, glow like candle flames. On the fifth day of Christmas. The black background gleams deep as a winter lake.

‘Kodaiji maki-e,’ murmurs Tatsuo at his elbow. ‘Nashiji. Apple—no—pear skin. Gold flakes float in lacquer. I think the fruit is called persimmon?’

Tom withdraws his hand. ‘Suspended,’ he says. ‘Suspended in the lacquer.’

Tatsuo bows. ‘Is two hundred years old. Very beautiful.’

Tom cannot take his gaze from it, the bronze speckles in the golden persimmons, the way the birds’ breasts and necks echo the curves of the fruit and then the contrast between the trailing away of the feathered tails and the firmness of heads and wings, all shining gold. He imagines Ally’s face if he were to bring her such a thing, undress it on the table in the white cottage’s window.

The shopkeeper lifts the lid, disclosing a lacquered interior fitted out as if by a fine ship’s carpenter with fretwork and tiny drawers. A workbox, Tom wonders, a jewellery case? A toolbox for some exquisite and miniature craft? But one would not want to store blades and points under such a finish. The man speaks and Tatsuo translates.

‘For scent. And the paint of a woman, her face.’ He mimes someone painting eyebrows on a shaven forehead and a layer of white on Asian skin.

Tom nods. ‘But not for use, surely?’

Tatsuo shrugs. ‘Two hundred years past, perhaps.’

‘Where does it come from?’ It is not a question he likes to ask. He would prefer these objects anonymous, unencumbered by past lives.

Tatsuo speaks again with the shopkeeper and then turns to Tom. ‘As usual. There are debts. Money owing, and misfortune. They must sell some things. Old things.’

There is no good reason, Tom has decided, why these stories should be sad. Let the old order, feudalism founded as always on violence, pass away. What rational British man could mourn the end of the samurais’ absolute regime, especially given the largely peaceful end of a three-hundred-year reign of terror? If it is now possible for men like Makoto and Tatsuo to learn English, to stand in the presence of their hereditary oppressors and gain power and wealth through knowledge and intelligent work, who could argue that the aristocrats’ fall is any loss at all to Japan? And if those who once throve on the labour of others are now reduced to selling their gold lacquer cosmetics boxes to buy rice, who should grieve? Let them learn to labour like other men. Let them learn from their artisans to take pride in good work well done. He remembers a painter saying when Tom looked for his signature that either the quality of the work tells the artist’s name or he should be ashamed to associate himself with it. Wolf Rock, he thinks, Skerryvore. No-one needs to