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

him of the Falmouth oyster boats, the crowd of shapes on the pale water like moths on a paper lantern. The hall of display, Tatsuo says, is right beside the Imperial Palace, on ground where until very recently it had been unthinkable that a foreign foot, or even a Japanese commoner’s foot, should tread. It is one of the changes, now the Imperial Court is gone to Edo. After one thousand years.

‘That sounds sad,’ says Tom. He wonders how long it will take him, when he goes home, to resume the habit of asking direct questions. Tatsuo does not reply.

The imperial trees are visible long before the Imperial Palace, their bare limbs reaching into the sky, breaking and smudging the grid of streets and walls, and then in the distance, scored across the end of the road he sees a high wall confining the Imperial Park. The walled garden, hortus conclusus. For the last millennium people must have been walking past that wall and imagining on the other side rare flowers and scented paths, fluting streams and still waters, and sometimes the passage of a holy being. A thousand years of violence and oppression, he reminds himself. A thousand years of ignorance and poverty for the many and the constant presence of swords for the few.

Tatsuo’s feet pause as they pass through the great gate, as if his muscles and bones recognise the enormity of his transgression. Like passing behind the altar of a cathedral, Tom wonders, or handling the crown of the England, but he can quite easily imagine himself doing either of these things given an unobserved opportunity. Where are England’s sacred places? Tatsuo fixes his gaze on the ground, avoiding the sight of a park that wouldn’t, really, be out of place in London. The broad gravel paths are not unlike the Rotten Row. There are mown lawns, green again, and beds of rich earth around towering trees. The two men come out at a broad arc of white gravel surrounding a slanting stone wall, and only the swooping red roofs announce that this is Japan. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens: potentates and rulers, parks and palaces. Tatsuo, face averted, sheers right down a narrower path between the trees, and leads Tom through wooden palings to a long low building whose great roof seems to crush it almost into the earth. There is no-one in what appears to be a sentry-box below the veranda, no intimation of eyes watching from the peep-holes on the first floor.

‘This is it? The exhibition hall?’

Tatsuo nods, gestures him on. ‘Please.’

And there are people inside, small clusters of them murmuring reverentially and pausing as if making the tour of a cathedral, as if at the crusader’s tattered banner, the bishop and his wimpled wife in recumbent effigy. But they are not worshipping stone. All the screens dividing this mansion house have been pushed back, making a great hall whose diffuse light and panelled floor remind Tom of a barn or a water tower, some structure meant more as a container than a dwelling. Spaced at intervals along the wall like the Stations of the Cross are what he takes at first for unframed paintings, perhaps scrolls, depicting the usual Japanese landscapes, mountains without perspective and waterfalls and figures in kimono on hump-backed bridges. He already has a dozen such things for De Rivers. And then he sees the cranes, first as five white shapes glowing like moons in the dim and filtered daylight. He approaches and finds himself before some kind of painting or drawing of five long-legged birds wading under overhanging wisteria. He has seen flowers like that, dripping the full height of the trees in a mountain forest, and he has seen cranes dancing and dipping, their white wings raised like the arms of a dancer about to begin. The five cranes are sociable, like a Japanese family preening and teasing in the bath. One is drawn up to its full height to peer down at the others busy at their toilette, and another leans in, neck outstretched so that the black markings on its silver plumage draw Tom’s gaze across the darkness at the picture’s centre and towards the arched breasts and glossy wings of its companions. Behind them, the wisteria blossoms fall like streams of water and it’s not paint, he realises, but silk, the filament of each feather drawn in stitches smaller than a mouse’s hair.

The craftsmen see the world differently, see the shapes of flowers and feathers and blades of grass built up from the tiniest elements—flickers— of light and colour. Such a mind must look at a bowl of tea, and see not only each brushstroke on the bowl’s glaze but the fall of light on each rising particle of steam. Not only each brick in a bridge or lighthouse but the speckles of grit in the clay, almost the currents of pressure and gravity coursing through each grain of cement. How could one endure a world seen in such detail, how could a mind hold the flight path of each mote of dust? He steps nearer to marvel at the stitching, at the eyes and fingers of the makers, the shading finer and more subtle than that of any bird, the light in the silk more mineral than animal. He had not thought that art could exceed its own subject. He wants to tell Ally, to hear her healer’s voice reply that there is no point in any other kind.

G

ORSE

B

URNS

A

GAIN

She is not, she reminds herself, the first person to come back, to climb this hill knowing what waits at the top. She has been studying the numbers: it is very rare for a patient to be discharged well and to proceed to a life of good health and domestic or financial sufficiency. Approximately half of inmates will die without ever leaving the asylum, and of the other half many will return within three years of discharge.

She is almost at the top of the