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

that you believe in my good will—even I have little reason for it—because if you do not believe me good-willed you continue to know me mad and bad). It is hopeless. There are things that should be said, but no way of saying them, no form of words that does not require, or even contain, instant contradiction. No form of words that does not say that Ally is deranged or dishonest or both. The train whistles, shrieks and halts on Platform Four at Exeter.

It is the next few miles Ally likes best, where the line runs under the red cliffs and sometimes waves breaking against the sea-wall send spray splattering against the carriage windows. The sea, again, at last. The waves are brisk and white, sparkling under the sun, the water a rough tumbled blue, and out to sea a backwards-leaning ship scrawls a horizontal line of smoke across the spring sky. Despite her brief intimation of May’s hair drifting on the water as her body sinks, despite the way May’s skirts and petticoats swell and rise about her dead face in Ally’s mind, she feels herself steady at the sight of the open sea like a bird settling onto a current of air, gliding open-winged at last between water and sky.

The branch line train is waiting at Truro and she crosses the platform with everyone else, glancing down the line to the guard’s van to make sure her trunk is being moved. She unwinds the scarf she tied as the train stopped, her body schooled to expect outside to be cold. It’s not cold. Even the wind has spring on its breath, green growth and soft rain. She draws a deep breath before climbing into the Falmouth train.

From the window she sees the cattle-market, and behind it the hill leading to the asylum. In a few days she will go back there, up the lane and along the drive to the portico, to the double front door and the tiled hall, greeting William, who has seen madness and sanity and treated them just the same. She will go back to Ward Four, and see if Mrs. Elsfield has made it through the winter. Could Dr. Crosswyn be persuaded to regard Mrs. Elsfield as curable? (Is it possible, or desirable, to cure Mrs. Elsfield of the asylum, and is it necessary to count her invisible companions manifestations of madness?) Smoke rising from the great tower at Bissoe mine, and the land scarred and scoured orange and brown, tunnelled and churned and flooded with strange green water, and then the Methodist church at Perranwell, its spire reaching as if to exceed the enfolding valley. Gorse in yellow bloom. Kissing’s in fashion, Tom liked to say, when the gorse is in bloom. Perranwell Station, and a large woman with a basket waiting under the clock, the station-master in piped jacket and peaked cap straight-backed as if on parade. The train jerks, and is off again. Open fields, woodland—daffodils—and then the viaduct above Penryn, the road and the grand stone buildings cascading down to the estuary. Blue water again, the tide so high that the boats moored to the groyne at Flushing are almost at the windows of their owners’ houses.

Here, then, and now: homecoming. The lightening of her very bones, the slowing of her dancing heart as the air of this place fills her lungs and her blood. The wind off the sea, the watery colours of a summer night in the far west where nightfall is postponed almost until morning. It is home, she thinks. This is where all shall be well, although she knows it is not true, that there is no such place on earth and that particular difficulties await her in this return. She arranges for the trunk to be delivered, calm as if she is just an off-season visitor, here for a week’s sea air or sketching while the hotels are cheap. She walks, not the shortest route but the one that takes her down Killigrew Street, past Jacob’s Ladder and home along Dunstanville where the ships rest at their buoys with folded sails and the water mirrors the hillside, the rocks and trees. The Greenbank Hotel, last and first night’s rest on land, in England, for professional men going blue water, to America and Australia, to Jamaica and Ceylon and Singapore. There are daffodils under the monkey puzzle tree in the captain’s garden, tulips growing out of the stone urns by the neighbour’s wrought iron gate. And the turn up the stone-flagged ope, under the limestone archway to the white cottage, the air now heavy with falling dusk and the house waiting, behind the pink-blooming camellia bushes and the ancient holly tree. The key in her coat pocket, where it has been all winter.

A H

OLE IN THE

W

ALL

The dreams came again. A shipwreck, this time, and Tom guilty of leaving before the end, taking a place in a lifeboat while there were still passengers, women, screaming on the deck. Cold water smacked his head, filled his ear, and he struggled and clung, seeing from the peaks of the waves the masts broken off like fallen trees, knowing the depth under his senseless feet, knowing how far there is to sink. He wakes in darkness, before the chanting and the gong, and lies in the silence, feeling the house too small around him. In England it will be lunchtime, broad daylight and time to get back to work for the afternoon. In England Ally will be sitting over the end of lunch with Aunt Mary, the end of last night’s pudding—apple pie, perhaps, or marmalade dumpling—still on the table while Aunt Mary speaks of the last concert or party and Ally thinks about the frailties of the human mind or the limits of charity. It is no longer terribly cold. He pushes back the quilt and walks through the dark to the top of the stairs, finds the first polished wooden step with his foot and the