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

will go to Scilly. He puts his hand to the copper again. The water is warm enough now.

The tall servant opens the door wider this time, and takes Tom’s coat, hat and umbrella. Mr. De Rivers is expecting him this evening, she says pointedly. The candles in the hall have not been lit, but in the drawing room the lamps are bright and there is still enough light reflecting off the sea for Tom to see the newspaper held before De Rivers’ face. And that there are no Japanese hangings on the walls.

De Rivers lowers the paper but he does not get up. ‘Tom Cavendish. Well, well. Here you are. Please, sit down.’

Tom sits, and then finds that he is low in a delicate little chair. A woman’s chair.

‘I’ll ring for some supper for you.’

He is, then, to be fed like an indigent, as if he had come in search of a free meal. ‘Please don’t trouble. Unless you are taking something yourself.’

De Rivers leans forward and touches the bell. ‘No trouble. Not to me. I told them you’d want something. Just dined, myself.’

Tom glances around the room. It may be a new glass case, in the dimness beside the door, but the embroideries, the kimono, the three great vases, are certainly not here, and there is not room in the case for one quarter of what he brought. The maid opens the door and is told to bring a tray for our visitor. Not the lacquerwork persimmons, he thinks, let them not be putting hot dishes on the golden fruit. Although much of the point of lacquer is its strength; he himself was encouraged to scratch and bang. But did not.

‘Now then, Tom. I hope things are settling down, now you’re home? Back at work, and so on?’

Tom nods. ‘Thank you, yes. I believe I was able to do useful work in Japan. Although I had hoped to see an earthquake—just a small one, of course, but sufficient to test the apparatus. It is an interesting challenge.’

‘And Mrs. Cavendish? I hear that she has not been idle in your absence. A new madhouse in Flushing, of all places. Ruffled some feathers, I can tell you that.’

Tom feels himself flush again. Makoto should come, he thinks, and teach etiquette. ‘It is a convalescent home. The residents are not mad.’

De Rivers sniffs. ‘Mad enough to have been confined in the asylum. It’s news to me a person can be madder than that. Anyway, your wife’s well?’

Although Tom has never known Ally to be ill, she seems, he realises, in better health than he has seen her before. In her acceptance of their separation she has achieved something, a new bearing or manner.

‘She is, yes.’ He looks around again. ‘The embroideries—the silk hangings—’

‘Just what I wanted,’ says De Rivers. ‘I told you so. And you accepted your fee.’

Tom leans forward, his face hot. ‘No. It’s not that. Not the money.’

‘No? Because I think anyone would agree that I have been generous.’

Tom wishes he could throw handfuls of notes onto the floor. Take it, he thinks, take the money. Ally doesn’t want a house anyway. ‘Indeed so. But you do not display the objects? You do not wish them constantly before your eyes?’

De Rivers sits back. ‘I cannot display everything, Tom. Even in such a house as this. Everything you brought me has been added to my collection, I assure you. Properly stored. I take care of my things, I promise you that. Properly catalogued as well, and not every collector does that, not by a long chalk.’

There are footsteps, and the maid knocks and backs through the door, the tray in her hands. Tom rises and takes it from her. In the glass cases, false eyes glimmer with candlelight and dark fur merges with the dusk. Of course a man who likes the company of dead animals will not value the work of Japanese craftsmen. Tom feels sick. There is a small tureen of soup on the tray, with a ladle and a white bowl with a red and gold rim, and something under a white cloth. He returns to De Rivers. There is nowhere to put a tray. He stands.

‘Well, put it down, Tom. Here.’

De Rivers throws yesterday’s Times on the floor and pushes the occasional table with his foot. The tray sticks precariously over both ends. Tom centres the tureen, to make it more stable. He serves himself soup, and the smell rises in the cold room like the smell of seasickness on a ship’s deck. He pushes the spoon around.

‘So they are in boxes still? The fans, the tea set. The netsuke? They are very small, surely easy to display. Although of course they should not be parted from the inro.’

De Rivers frowns. ‘Eat up, it will get cold. You mean those toggle things? Charming little objects, aren’t they. Hard to imagine grown men going round with toys hanging round their waists. All quite safe in my storerooms. I didn’t get where I am by carelessness, I assure you.’

‘No,’ Tom says. ‘Naturally not.’

He cannot eat the soup. Across the water, the harbour lights at St Mawes flicker and take hold of the darkness, and the first flashes from St Anthony Head scythe the dusk.

She has brought him low, he thinks. There is nothing left. He will cross the water to Rose Tree House and ask her to start again from the beginning. Ally, his wife.

A L

IFE’S

W

ORK

Although it is the middle of the afternoon, equidistant from the daily offices of lunch and tea, Ally leaves the women in the house and garden and makes her way through the trees to the beach. Tom is gone from her now, she thinks. He has not come to find her, has not objected to her leaving, and there is a pain, a hollowness, in her chest. A pain, she thinks, caused by metaphor, since the correct understanding of anatomy would suggest that sadness should make its bodily manifestations in the head, in