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

the suitability of these patients for reintroduction to domestic life. She dusts down the armchair and arranges herself in a posture neither too officious nor too casual. She must avoid any appearance of anxiety.

When the fourth candidate and her escorting nurse leave, the clock shows ten to eleven. It is reasonable, then, not to see another woman before coffee. She looks round the door and tells the nurse watching the patients who have spent their morning sitting in the corridor that she will see the next one in forty minutes. You might take them into the garden for an airing, Nurse. It is a fresh spring day. She knows that the nurse will do no such thing. Closing the door behind her, she tries not to know that the nurse will be wondering what she is doing alone in here, that the nurse will be counting each moment of her empty solitude and holding it against her. Other people, other doctors, would not be feeling the pressure of the nurse’s thoughts through the wall. She has only recently been able to put into words the observation that people who grew up in households without fear lack awareness of others’ feelings, and that this lack makes their lives easier. More sane. She pokes the fire. But her ability to hear other people’s feelings is one of her strengths as a doctor, another incidental advantage of Mamma’s training. She wanders to the window and leans into its recess. Rooks wheel from the bare elms, white sunlight on their black wings, and the hedges around the formal garden flinch from a gust of wind. The necessary questions were plain by the time she addressed the second woman, Charlotte something. A pale and almost unnaturally pointed face under dark hair streaked with grey, admitted two years ago for melancholia and suicidal intentions following the death of a young son. After she failed three discharge boards her husband, a local solicitor, began to make a nuisance of himself. Do you wish to move to a convalescent home, Ally asked. What would you yourself do to promote your recovery? Do you wish to return to your home and family? Charlotte’s answers were not convincing, but Ally has at least understood what she needs to know. Not only, do you want to leave the asylum but do you want to get better and if so, how? It was not evident during her hospital training but it is plain in other kinds of practice: one should not take it for granted that the patient longs for what others consider perfect health. She will not use one of her precious places merely to placate someone’s husband. Dr. Crosswyn is right, they must begin with patients who will bring success. It is time for coffee.

His office is unchanged, even the pile of books on the desk exactly as it was four months ago. Agatha is unchanged, wearing the same black dress and white apron and carrying the same tray with the same air of alarm. The caraway seed biscuits could have come from the same baking as those she was offered in November. Time runs differently in closed institutions. She thinks about all the different times in the heads of the patients and the staff, those who live partly in some half-imagined era of childhood or early marriage and also in the repetitive present of the asylum. Those caught in a past moment of loss, obliged to encounter again the fresh agony of grief with every waking. Those whose memories themselves are lost, and live in an unnavigable present without the stars of fear and hope. She does not know how the Medical Director might order the passage of time at Rose Tree House, but it will be important that there is enough routine that no-one needs to devote thought to when to eat breakfast but not so much that the days become interchangeable. Sanity, she thinks, may be partly the ability to tolerate the passage of time.

He is speaking of the winter, of the coal used and the incidence of bronchial illness.

‘What became of Mary Vincent, Dr. Crosswyn?’

He stops. Looks at her.

‘I’m sorry. She has been on my mind.’

‘Evidently so. Still on the back ward, I’m afraid. I did pay a visit a couple of weeks back. She’s deteriorated. Episodes of mania, a lot of raving, obscene allegations. In and out of seclusion. Most unlikely to come back down, I’d say.’

Ally puts down her cup. Coffee splashes into the saucer. ‘No-one ever does, do they? Come back down?’

Stop, she thinks. There are limits to what can be done, who can be helped, and she is not behaving well. Not behaving professionally, not like a medical man.

‘It is very rare.’

Has there been a single case, she wants to ask. Has it ever happened that a person has been allowed to return to wards with lavatories, with sheets and pillows, to enter the dining room rather than having buckets of congealed stew or porridge carried up the stairs when the kitchen maids find time? Has this institution ever returned an inmate’s humanity after taking it away? She takes a bite of the biscuit balanced on the edge of her saucer and says nothing.

A M

AN IN THE

A

CT OF

L

EAVING

They have come already packed into wooden crates, nailed shut to exclude fingers eager for the touch of silk, a face that wants the soft shining colours lifted to the cheek. Even the inro and the netsuke come in boxes stitched into wadded cotton swaddling, cocooned against gaze and touch. He would like at least to see the treasures while they are in his possession, to greet them one by one and say goodbye. It will be like travelling with eggs or seeds, or perhaps with a pregnant woman, knowing that there is something deep inside capable of changing everything.

He kneels beside the crates with luggage labels and a pot of paste and brush that Makiko brought without being asked. He sniffs at the paste,