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

has written only once since May’s funeral, sends a framed design for a fan, a drowned fan. Seaweed creeps and reaches. And of her bones are coral made.

H

IS

I

MPORTANCE TO

H

ER

Aunt Mary will not countenance Tom staying at the house the night before the wedding, but she divorces tradition so far as to invite him to dinner. A cold collation, she says, the kind of dinner one might expect in a house whose daughter marries in the morning. He arrives earlier than expected, and leaves Fanny protesting in his wake as he runs up the stairs. Ally and Aunt Mary, hands full of tissue paper and underwear, hear his steps and stop as if they are about to be photographed. What if she doesn’t like him any more, what if the man to whom she has been writing all summer is not quite the same as the man about to come through the door? She bites her lip. Aunt Mary folds the paper around Ally’s drawers and goes to the door.

‘My dear Tom.’ She takes his hands. ‘And so you could not wait to see your bride! Shall we go downstairs?’

Ally drops the petticoat she is folding. Why, anyway, are they trying to protect hidden garments from creasing? No-one will know if her chemise shows folds. His hair is bright even here, in the dusk of the attic corridor. He looks tired, travel-stained. And he is indeed himself, no figment of paper and imagination but bone, flesh, skin, freckles.

‘Ally.’ With a glance towards Aunt Mary, he kisses her cheek, stands back.

‘Did you—’ Ally clears her throat. ‘Did you have a good journey?’

‘No. But it doesn’t matter. You are well?’ He looks her up and down, as if her grey skirt and untidy hair will tell him any of the things she is failing to say.

‘Nervous. But well.’

Should she enquire reciprocally after his health, as if they have only just met, as if they will not in the morning promise to love and cherish each other until death and in the evening… become intimate? She feels a prickle of defensiveness, as if they are two cats in one room, opposing magnets attempting to touch.

He looks up. ‘I missed you. I am happy to be here.’

Aunt Mary coughs. ‘Oh, very well. I will expect you both in the drawing room for tea in ten minutes.’

Her skirts flow down the stairs behind her, like water over stones. Everything pauses.

‘Yes,’ says Ally. Downstairs, the drawing room door closes. ‘I also.’

She swallows. ‘I had a letter. Yesterday. From Dr. Selby. He says I will be welcome to study with him. He appears to have no objection to women doctors.’

Tom reaches towards her, touches her hair. And then changes his mind and drops his hand. ‘I am so glad. I have been speaking to the people at the cottage hospital for you, but that will be much better. And they have often need of an extra pair of hands if you should find yourself at a loose end. At liberty.’

‘Or if we should need the income. Thank you, Tom. You will not object, then, if I do not earn at the beginning? While I study?’

‘My dear. I thought we had established this. If you do not object to cooking for yourself, to living in a small cottage and keeping no conveyance, how could I object to your studying? And perhaps one day, you will be a famous physician and I content to entertain your aristocratic patients and fend off elegant ladies who would demand your attentions and waste your time.’

‘Ah, but you forget. It is the women accused of wasting time in whom I interest myself. Invalids and nervous cases.’

‘Then perhaps I shall fend off gentlemen with broken backs. In any case, I promise again: I would no more prevent you following your calling than you would have me resign from this journey. And I have been told, by the way, to prepare for a temperate climate not unlike our own.’

‘Canada?’ she asks. The west coast, they have thought, from where a Trinity House Committee has recently returned with a set of recommendations that someone will need to implement.

‘Perhaps. But then what need for secrecy? And anyway, in some regards the Canadians are in our vanguard in lighthouse improvements.’

They reflect again, standing at the top of the attic stairs in Bloomsbury, on the globe, the spread of pink across the map. The Chinese treaty ports can surely not be described as temperate. The Stevensons are already at work in India. No-one would try to survey the Canadian east coast in autumn and winter. Australia, especially in this season, is hot. New Zealand?

Tom shrugs, looking at her, still, as if she might be about to do something, as if she has omitted some necessary act. Even here, in the dimness at the top of the stairs, his copper hair seems to shine. You will have red-headed babies, Annie has said. No.

‘We should go downstairs,’ she says. ‘Aunt Mary—’

‘Aunt Mary fears that we will offend the proprieties. Or perhaps only that we will offend the proprieties in her house. Just tell me, Ally—you are happy? You look forward to tomorrow?’

Her shoes are scuffed, must be polished before tomorrow. Her mind stretches towards the words he asks to hear, towards the speaking of affection and desire. If she did not know better, she would say that there was a physical change in her, that her heart rests more comfortably under her breastbone for his faith. She would like to tell him that she sleeps more easily and wakes without the life-long start of dread at another day. That his importance to her is frightening. Without looking at him, she nods.

D

R.

F

ORREST AND

D

R.

M

OBERLEY

C

AVENDISH

Annie arrives while they are still at breakfast, accompanied by a maid who carries a rustling dress bag over her arms as if about to present it at the altar. Uncle James and the boys half-rise, a kind of reverse bow.

‘Good morning! Eggs, Ally? You are not too nervous, too refined,