Signs for Lost Children Sarah Moss (best way to read books .TXT) 📖

where he found only the prints of foxes, and knew that he had entertained the fox gods unaware. And then there is another story from the same village . . . The light is bright on Tom’s face and he wrinkles his eyes to scan the horizon, to see the ship still at the centre of the circle of sea and sky and the sun half-way between zenith and the edge of the ocean. Almost four o’clock, almost time for tea; one eats, on a ship, to mark the passing of time, because there is no place to go or from which to return and each transit of the cream jug, each turn of the cake-stand, is a step in the dance of the long afternoon.

‘Good afternoon, Mr. Cavendish.’

The black-haired Louisa Davis under a black straw hat, her freckles her only colour against white skin and black dress. He puts down the book and pushes himself out of the low deckchair. ‘Miss Davis.’

‘You have found something to read? I thought the library unlikely to suit a gentleman’s taste.’

‘I doubt that I have a gentleman’s taste, Miss Davis.’

She picks up his book. ‘Ah, yes. Mr. Marston. He relied, you know, much more than he admits upon a translator whose English was far from perfect. And you know how these people will invent something rather than say that they do not know.’

‘These people, Miss Davis?’

She opens the book. ‘Translators. Guides. Native informants. Of course in Japanese there are ways of communicating ignorance without saying “I do not know” but in English it invariably sounds like lying.’

Her skirt balloons in a gust of wind but she does not clutch as another woman would.

‘You speak Japanese, then?’

She flicks through the book. ‘Well enough.’ She glances up. ‘You are surprised?’

He shrugs. Miss Davis’s father was a missionary and the family have been in Japan for three years. They are now, according to her mother, returning to England more or less destitute to live with Mrs. Davis’s brother. It is not Tom’s understanding of destitution that travels on such a liner.

‘Envious, perhaps.’

‘I had no special teaching. I learnt as anyone might learn, by persistent application.’

‘I congratulate you.’

She closes the book. ‘I was able to help my father. It is hard for a foreign man to address Japanese women.’

‘But you were able to do it? To preach in Japanese?’

He imagines her, white-skinned and blue-eyed, on a podium before an audience of women kneeling in kimono. Why would they come?

‘When I was called. Yes.’

From the dining room, the gong sounds.

‘I suppose you do not take tea?’ she asks. Most days, he doesn’t.

‘I think I will.’

He does not offer his arm, but holds doors. Mrs. Davis smiles up at him as he pulls back Miss Davis’s chair. There are three tiers on the cake-stand: sandwiches, scones and fruit cake, piled on doilies that remind him of Ally’s Aunt Mary.

‘There you are, Louisa. It was not too windy, then, out there?’

Miss Davis turns her tea cup so that the handle points the correct way. ‘No, Mamma.’

Silence falls. There are chairs at the table for an American man who has been teaching at a business college and his English wife, and for a Japanese man who says little and appears to find the food unappealing, but it is unlikely that they will come now.

Mrs. Davis pours tea for Tom and her daughter. Miss Davis takes a sandwich. There is silence. She takes a neat bite. Her mother wields a cake-fork. He shifts in his chair. More silence. He will make them speak, he thinks, he will go on talking until Miss Davis’s self-containment is breached.

‘I saw some dolphins earlier,’ Tom says. ‘Playing in the bow wave.’

Miss Davis sips her tea, holding the cup the Japanese way, in both hands.

Mrs. Davis is gazing out of the window.

‘Only a small school. I always like to see dolphins. To be reminded that the water is full of life.’

Miss Davis takes another bite of her sandwich.

‘And that we find the same creatures the world over. That voyaging is not merely an unnatural human propensity. Who knows how far a whale might travel?’

Mrs. Davis slowly turns her head, as if hearing a faint sound from far away. He will keep going, he thinks, until one of them says something. He will see how inane they allow him to become before they are shamed into speech.

‘It is surprising, isn’t it, that in the art of such a seafaring nation as Japan marine life is so little represented. Considering the attention paid to all kinds of foliage. I have seen even mushrooms most precisely represented.’ His lips tighten to stop himself smiling as this monologue drifts towards nonsense. Miss Davis touches her fingertips to her napkin. He remembers finding bits of a tea-set along the beach at Porth Leven the week after a bad storm, picking up a blue-and-white cup missing only a part of the handle and turning it over to read Atlantic Line Sophia painted on the bottom. ‘Although I do have among my collection a netsuke in the form of a dolphin. Made of walnut wood, I believe.’

Miss Davis sets down her cup. ‘You have been making a collection, then, of Japanese art work?’

She sounds disbelieving, as if he’s claiming to be a circus acrobat or a dress designer.

‘Fulfilling a commission only. I do not claim to be a connoisseur, but I have enjoyed what little I have been able to learn.’

‘Really.’ She splits her scone. ‘And what did you buy, Mr. Cavendish, for this commission?’

He thinks about the treasures in their crates somewhere below his feet, about the netsuke curled and sleeping, the pale green bowls in their nests of straw, the furled silks. He chooses the one whose untimely exposure he minds least, the selection of which he is most certain. Anything sold at the Annual Exhibition is an unquestionable choice.

‘There is a silk hanging. Representing deer in an autumn wood. I suppose you had many opportunities to admire the changing trees, but I