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

and in her foolishness she has brought no other nightdress. But she will cut off the lace at the hem and neck this day, and save it for the women at Rose Tree House. Mrs. Rudge will find a use for it. She plucks at the frilled wrists and feels her stomach curl with embarrassment. Pride and self-flattery bring their own certain punishment. The house does not feel as if there is another person in it, but even so she closes the bedroom door and moves fast in case he should come up the stairs and catch her undressed, the sternal bones where a cleavage should be and her pelvis sharp where true women have soft roundedness. She pulls on her drawers under the nightgown and casts it off only when her chemise is laid out ready on the bed. Corset, petticoat, stockings, blouse, skirt, jacket. It is hard to raise her arms in the jacket but she doesn’t brush her hair until she’s fully dressed, armoured. A woman reaches an age when her aspiration in dressing should be only to look respectable. At least she has still her work. She hopes all is well at Rose Tree House, that Miss Trennick has been spared further nightmares and especially that Mrs. Curnow, who is still very easily alarmed, is finding it easier to make small daily decisions. She hopes the seeds are still growing and that there have been no further difficulties with the sewing machine. She should be there, she thinks. The new housekeeper is a kind and sensible woman, in whom Ally senses some past experience of the unsettled mind, but Dr. Crosswyn has lent his senior nurse for the week and she is unaccustomed, probably unsympathetic, to the newly-formed ways of Rose Tree. She won’t care for the women, Ally thinks, she won’t help them to care for themselves, she will speak harshly and weeks of their work will be undone. She pins up her hair and goes downstairs.

Tom is not there, and last night’s dishes still where he insisted that she leave them on the table. At least, then, it is clear what to do first. She sets water to heat while she goes down the garden path. The floor is not as clean as it might be, especially around the stove; she will wash it when she has done the dishes, and she will sweep the grate and perhaps also clean the bannisters, which are sticky to the touch. The fear has come back, she thinks. She is behaving as if Tom were Mamma, and she longs to return to the madwomen who do not judge and find her wanting, or even to Annie and Aunt Mary. She does not want to be married, not like this. She does not want to be a wife.

Although as far as she can tell he ate no breakfast, he seems to have little interest in the potted shrimps. She toasted the bread laboriously as a gesture towards cooking, towards an effort to please, but he has let it go cold.

‘Would you like something else? I’m afraid there’s not much choice but I can maybe go down to the farm.’

He pushes his plate away. ‘No, Ally. I’m not fussy, you know that.’

She toys with her own lunch. She is hungry and the shrimps are a treat, but it seems uncouth or even heartless to tuck in while he denies himself.

‘You are perhaps still missing the Japanese food?’ He says he liked it, that he came to understand subtleties of texture that simply don’t appear in English cooking, although nothing about his descriptions makes it sound appetising. Raw fish and cold rice and a broth made from fermented beans, how does a race subsist on that? And how should she, should England, compete with what does not appear in English cooking? He does not wish to be here either, she thinks. We have made a mistake.

She stands up. ‘Tea, then. I’ll boil the kettle.’

He looks up. ‘I can do it. Finish your lunch.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

When she comes back he has picked up the newspaper he bought in Penzance yesterday.

She looks at her shrimps. ‘Is there bad news?’

He stays behind the paper. ‘Isn’t there always?’

The wind rushes over the grass outside. A seagull ululates, a chorus repeated from overhead. He puts down the paper, as if lowering a standard, begins to speak and stops.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘The news seems so provincial. As if no-one here knows that there are oceans and continents and other ways of understanding everything.’

‘You are reading the Western Morning Herald,’ she points out. ‘But I think we do know those things, Tom. Especially here. I hear more languages on the streets of Falmouth than I did in London. It’s just that those aren’t truths you can live with, really, the suffering and conflict of all the beings everywhere on earth. You can’t—you can’t hold everyone in your mind at once, it’s too much. Like the idea of death. It silences thought.’

Mamma cannot for a moment forget the suffering of the world and since she cannot solve it, she cannot have peace. And at the asylum, she wants to say, at the asylum I knew people who saw the skull in every face and the approach of darkness in every heartbeat and they weren’t wrong but they weren’t well. But he doesn’t want to know about the madwomen and she doesn’t want him to think she’s suggesting that his thoughts are like madness.

‘It’s more like the idea of life,’ he says. ‘There is so much to learn.’

But not here, she thinks. Not in the life together that they are supposed to be resurrecting. ‘The water must be boiling by now. I’ll make the tea.’

He says there is a path around the headland to Prussia Cove. He says he likes to feel the rain on his face. He says Prussia Cove is the scene of a dramatic wreck, and that for a long time a family