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

Let them practice grape-scissors and egg-spoons, the correct number of minutes to converse while wearing a hat. Some are to be returned to the world as ladies and others as servants. Dr. Crosswyn is unmarried; it begins to seem possible that his ideas about the lives of women are uncertain. ‘I am sure something of the kind would be helpful,’ she says.

The drive ends in a gravel circle overgrown with moss, with a broken stone urn in its centre. Trees press in, screening the sea which flickers between trunks and through branches.

‘Here. What do you think?’

The house is modern, no more than fifty years old, but quite free of its neighbours’ pretentions. Whitewashed, square, two-storied, sash windows flanking a brick porch. It looks like a transplanted vicarage, like the house of a country professional man, a village doctor or small-town lawyer. Comfortable and sufficient. And for all the garden could belong to Sleeping Beauty, the whitewash is new and the white paint fresh on the window frames and front door.

‘It looks neat and comfortable.’

Show me inside, she thinks, give me the keys.

The front door grounds on a bristly new doormat in the hall. The wooden floor is newly polished, the smell hanging in the air with new paint and soap. The walls are distempered the colour of cheese or clotted cream. Primrose, Papa would say. The rooms are empty, volatile with possibility. Ally peers into the reception rooms each side of the front door and passes down the hall, past the stairs and into the kitchen. A white-tiled floor (anything dropped will shatter), white-painted cupboards, a double Belfast sink almost big enough to bathe in. She remembers the operating theatre, the women draped and recumbent on the table like artists’ models. She remembers the spread legs, the blood.

She swallows. ‘Perhaps a picture or two in here? Or some colour on the walls?’

He looks surprised. ‘I read that white was preferable for kitchens. Easier to clean.’

Ally moves to the window. The back garden is an overgrown clearing, a tangle of tall grass and brambles into which the woods lean. ‘Yes. But women spend a great many hours in the kitchen.’

‘Just as you say. We thought, the committee thought, we would grant you a certain sum to spend as you think best. There is furniture already on order, and pots and pans and so on. Household linen. Matron saw to it.’

I could have done that, Ally thinks. But Dr. Crosswyn, the committee, have remembered that she is here as a doctor and not as a woman. ‘Thank you.’

There is moss growing over the slate path from the back door into the clearing, and some kind of fruit tree smothered by thorns and ivy.

‘Dr. Crosswyn? Do you think we might have gardening tools for the women? The exercise and fresh air, you know.’ And perhaps a sense of efficacy, the simple reward of seeing that the work of one’s hands makes change.

His eyebrows rise. ‘It is usually the men who do such work. At the asylum.’

‘But many of the women—some of them, anyway—will be accustomed to farm work, will they not? And others perhaps to flower-gardens.’ A crowd of rooks rises from one of the taller trees. ‘Besides, the outdoor work—the outdoor exercise—would perhaps counteract the tendency to agoraphobia so often found.’

Besides, there is nothing about the possession of breasts and a womb that changes a person’s interest in trees and sky.

‘I think we will begin in a more traditional manner. We are seeking to return the patients to ordinary life, Dr. Moberley Cavendish, not to send them out discontented with their lot.’

But what if it is a choice between discontent and madness? What when discontent is the sane response to one’s ordinary life?

‘Of course, Dr. Crosswyn. As the committee wishes.’

Only part of the money for this house comes from the asylum, the rest being raised by private subscription. And it is unlikely, most unlikely, that the rural gentry and mining magnates who contribute to such schemes will wish to think of women digging the land, unearthing their dissatisfaction.

‘We will send in a working party. Before the women arrive. I do not say that once the ground is dug and planted there is any reason why they should not tend some flowers. Roses, perhaps. Next year, spring bulbs. And matron has ordered two sewing machines and I believe some supplies for knitting and such.’

Let them work, she thinks, let them learn. There are machines now and factories for the manufacture of dresses and stockings; let women employ their brains rather than frittering their time in the painstaking making of objects of inferior quality and superior cost to those that can be purchased by the gross. She says nothing.

‘Many of them will be accustomed to such work, my dear. They will take comfort in it. They are not scholars and do not wish to be, and nor would such a wish profit them or their families.’

She hears what he tells her: your own solution to the problem of female discontent is the height of idiosyncrasy and it is the test of your professionalism that you recognise your patients’ difference from yourself. A doctor must not make her patients in her own image just as she must not come to see them as her negative. It is what Mamma could not do, to understand that each person’s head contains a world as convincing and probably as verifiable as her own. Who am I, she thinks, to take away the embroidery frames and paintbrushes of women who have already lost what cannot be enumerated? Who am I, to appoint myself the arbiter of reality?

She bows her head. ‘You are right, Dr. Crosswyn. I thank you.’

H

ORTUS

C

ONCLUSUS

They walk down the wide street that runs beside the river, a straight line ruled against the water’s curves. The snow has melted from the hills to the east, but the trees are still bare, the temple roofs stark on the mountainside. The school of small boats under the bridge reminds