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

mansions above it from here, but not the building itself. There is no reason why anything should have gone wrong, no reason why her lateness should cause any distress. She has half an hour, now, before the next ferry. She finds herself turning aside into the Prince Albert Garden, her feet following the path around the palm trees and the pink-flowering cactus, down the slimy stone steps to the beach. She’s visible from across the estuary here, from Flushing, but it’s also a place of concealment, under the old stone groyne. There is sea-glass among the pebbles, bits of broken china worn smooth as stone, and beer bottles and fishing-line more recently given to the sea. She sits on a rock and looks down the Carrick Roads, out to the open sea. Tom is there, somewhere, perhaps already in the Mediterranean, passing the sands of the Holy Land, maybe with Cyprus a shadow on the horizon. The path of Odysseus, the wine-dark sea. Papa had wanted to name her after Penelope but Mamma was right, if not accurate, in objecting that there are more uses for a woman’s life than undoing her knitting. There is not, Ally thinks, a great deal of difference between Sisyphus’ curse and Penelope’s salvation, only that what is torture for a man is meant to be fulfilment for a woman. She sees a small white form among the wet stones by her feet and stoops to pick it up. A china figurine, a female shape that has lost its arms and had the detail of its garb and facial features worn away by sands and sea. The curls of hair gathered high on the head are still visible, and the line of a tunic across the breast, a costume such as Ally once wore to model for Papa’s Proserpina. She dusts off the sand with her fingertips and slips the figure into her pocket. Across the water, the ferry is leaving Flushing. She makes her way back up the steps towards the quay.

T

HINGS

H

E

C

AN

B

ARELY

N

AME

He stands at the rail again, staring at the horizon which is still empty. He woke early and lay sweating under the sheets until the weight of inactivity became impossible. The brief flurry of dressing over, he paced the deck until he could no longer pretend not to know every knot in every plank. He toyed with breakfast, the eggs now pallid and tasteless, the sun already too hot for coffee to have any appeal and Louisa Davis as usual absent from the table. There is nothing to do. The women, he thinks, are accustomed to it; they sew, read, walk the deck, write letters, attend the meals served with the regularity and ceremony of monastic offices. They dress for dinner, spend time arranging their hair. It does not appear very different from their routines on land, Ally’s Aunt Mary and Mrs. Senhouse and doubtless English gentlewomen across India all keeping to the same timetable. Or perhaps more of them than one thinks are like Louisa, bored and angry and prowling. Their eyes have not met, they have scarcely spoken at the table, for the last two days.

Waves slap lazily against the hull below his feet. There must be life down there, something happening, a submarine world of fish and weed, a landscape of rock and valley. But for a man used to working, to looking back on a day or an hour and seeing what he has done, a passenger’s life is vexatious. To sit, to be served, to read books that would be pleasurable as an evening’s recreation but cannot substitute for the satisfactions of hard work done well: he is no fine gentleman to tolerate such weeks. To reflect on what has been done, and what should not have been done. It is not as if he planned what has happened, not as if he intended to do wrong. He paces. He tries not to count the days until they will probably reach harbour, wind and weather permitting. He wonders why he, who passed the voyage out contentedly enough in reading about Japan, watching the sea and conversing with others eastward bound for similar reasons, should suffer such discontent now. Perhaps the presences that dogged his final days in Kyoto are with him still, provoking unease and a state of pointless yearning. For the marriage he left, for Japan, for birds and flowers and fruit more beautiful than the real thing, for things he can barely name and certainly cannot have. For Louisa, or for Ally. He shakes his head, as if yearning were an insect whining around his ears, and then he hears whimpering and snuffling, a sound that reminds him of puppies. There is no dog on board, surely.

He turns around and squints along the ship, up into the sun. Not a dog, but on the deck above, up under the mast, a sailor—a boy scarcely old enough to be a sailor—sits rocking with his head on his knees.

‘Hey,’ Tom calls. ‘Hey, are you ill? You need help?’

He remembers the stories the sailors in Scotland used to tell about young boys on ships, the acts they must suffer. The boy rocks and keens. There is no passenger access to that deck. Tom glances around, gets a foot onto the handle of the door into the corridor and pulls himself up by the railing above. Sweat pulses as he catches his breath. It is the most exercise he has had in days. The boy looks up as Tom moves towards him. Dark hair, too long and falling into his eyes, pale face. He rubs his nose from side to side on the back of his hand.

‘What? What do you want?’

At least he speaks English. An accent Tom hasn’t heard before, southern.

‘Are you hurt?’ Tom asks. ‘Can I help you?’

The boy grins. There are still tears on his face. He pushes back his hair and then holds out his other arm for Tom to see.

‘Knew it’d hurt. See?’

On the back