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

to eat at such a moment? Dear me, where are your bridal sensibilities?’

‘Somewhere in the schoolroom with my white veil and obedience,’ says Ally. ‘Have a sausage. Have two.’

Aunt Mary dabs her lips and folds her napkin. ‘Really, girls. Please. Fanny, another cup for Miss Forrest, please. And you might help—Jane, is it?—with the dress. Annie, would you care for some eggs?’

Fanny and Annie’s Jane murmur and Jane retreats, her tread heavy on the stairs. Annie sits down. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Dunne, but I have breakfasted. A cup of tea would be most welcome, if Ally is not in haste to dress.’

Ally butters toast. She will not play the blushing bride, will not slip into the role waiting at her feet like a hole in the road.

‘I do not see why it would take me longer to put on a dress today than any other day. George is the slow dresser in this house.’

George has recently progressed from combing his hair without being asked to using a pomade whose turpentine smell always flashes Papa’s studio into Ally’s mind. He checks his collar in the hall mirror before leaving the house and fusses over the crease in his trousers.

‘He’s started talking to girls,’ says Freddie.

‘Because it’s more interesting than talking to little boys who can’t open their mouths without trading insults.’

‘Stop it, boys. Today of all days.’

They stand together before the mirror, Annie in her copper-green evening dress, made suitable for a morning wedding by the addition of an embroidered velvet bolero, Ally in cloudy blue that will take her to Penvenick’s Christmas party or hospital dances in Cornwall. Annie has pinned Ally’s hair for her and secured a gravity-defying hat that Ally will never be able to pin properly when she wants to wear the outfit again. Annie has dabbed Ally’s nose with powder and her cheeks with rouge, instructed her to pout and then grimace while Annie paints her lips the colour they are anyway. Mamma would not approve. Masked, costumed: she does not look herself.

‘I feel like taking it all off,’ she says.

‘I am sure Tom would be delighted.’ Annie hands her her bouquet, irises and baby’s breath. ‘You are beautiful. Come along.’

She holds the flowers, from whose stamens Annie has thought to snip the egg-yolk pollen. Annie sweeps the door open before her, drops a mocking curtsey.

‘Hold up your skirt on the stairs,’ Annie says. ‘There will be a loop under the flounce.’

There is.

‘Annie,’ she asks. ‘Annie, do you think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is too much?’

They reach the landing. Annie dusts something from Ally’s shoulder.

‘I think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is splendid. And very pretty. Come.’ She crooks her elbow, and arm-in-arm Dr. Forrest and Dr. Moberley Cavendish proceed down the main staircase to the portico where their carriage awaits.

P

ART

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WO

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ORNWALL AND

J

APAN

A S

CATTER OF

B

LACK

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AIRPINS

The white cottage feels different in Ally’s absence. Like a factory with the machines lying idle, like a ship becalmed. The papers on his desk breathe as the breeze off the river passes over them and he moves his fingers in the sun to see his shadow-hand thicken and elongate on the half-written page. It is not a bad thing, for a house to lie at rest, for the hum of his thoughts and the scratch of his pen to be what happens. That was how it was before they married, before he brought her back here. With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. Shadows strengthen on the lawn as the cloud that has chilled the morning for the last few minutes passes across the sun and out over the water towards St. Mawes. He holds up his hand in light strong enough to glow through his fingertips, to pass through the edges of himself. He turns his wrist to see the webs between his fingers translucent. Birds’ feet, he thinks. Maybe he will bathe from the beach this afternoon. Can Ally swim, does she own a bathing dress? He imagines her wet, a brief gown clinging around her legs, her arms white against dark soaked cotton. Come now, if he is not going to work he might as well have accompanied her to the boats. He applies himself.

He is reading about the lighthouses of Japan. He rests the volume’s spine against the desk and leans back in his chair. A person would think that lighthouses must be particularly vulnerable to earthquakes. His mind’s eye sees a tower sway, sees cracks appearing in the brickwork as the structure twists like a wrung towel. Glass arches through the air, the reflector in perfect, glittering flight until it explodes on the rocks below as the tower shivers and falls, the land discarding buildings as a sleeper shrugs off a blanket. The waves below have turned around, running the wrong way because the Pacific Ocean itself is disturbed by upheavals in the ground on which it lies.

But a person would be wrong. If correctly built, tall, columnar structures can counteract seismic activity. Unlike the long, low buildings in which people tend to live, towers can be made to bend rather than break. It is already known, after all, that the best lighthouses are the more responsive to wind and waves. The base must move with the ground on which it stands, but with good masonry, the top, the light itself, can be a still point, axis and anchor.

The sun goes in again, and a seagull screams as if in protest. He closes The Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan. The writer of this article, a Scottish engineer, does not like the Japanese. They lie, he says, sometimes because it is the easiest way of getting what they want and sometimes for no discernible reason. They are characterised by ‘complete indifference to time and to the exigencies of circumstance.’ They imprison and enslave their women, and have no idea what to do with a cruet. He wonders if this man knew what to do with the Japanese equivalent, whatever it might be. However inscrutable