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

the natives, it is the sort of thing it ought to be possible to learn. The sort of thing he will try to learn.

He hears the front gate click, and stands, cranes forward, to see Ally cross the garden. She is foreshortened by the height of the house, abbreviated to hat, skirt and basket. The basket drags on her arm; the boats must have come in. A seagull, sentinel on the roof of Greenbank House, announces her return, and is answered from the chimney of Symond’s Hill and the ridgepole of Penwerris House. If he dies out there, he sometimes thinks, if his ship founders in the Bay of Biscay or off the Horn before he even glimpses the Inland Sea, the seagulls will cry his passing here weeks before the messenger comes up the path. The front door closes quietly. Trained in her father’s house, she is scrupulous not to disturb his work. He will go down to her; better to spend time with his new wife than in such morbid fantasies.

She can feel the heat of the flagstones through her shoes. All the captains’ houses along Dunstanville have their blinds down to bar the sun flickering from the estuary and flashing from the windows across the water in Flushing. The Flushing houses are patent follies, with turrets stuck on the corners, crenellations in unlikely places and outbreaks of Gothic stone like carbuncles in modern red-brick walls. Papa would find them personally offensive, but Ally doesn’t mind. Let rich men have their games: it is entertaining if not edifying for the rest of us to see how like the daydreams of little girls are the trappings of masculine wealth. The monkey-puzzle tree in front of a captain’s white bay window bows over the pavement, embossing its dark limbs on the stucco of the Greenbank Hotel. Captain Motton is said to have brought it back from Africa, along with a monkey which died and is now stuffed in a glass case on his sideboard. She likes Falmouth.

She shifts the basket onto the other arm, smiling at what her aunt in London would say about her, Dr. Moberley Cavendish, haggling over fish at the docks. This time of year, the neighbour’s housekeeper told her yesterday, the boats go out at dawn and they’re back by lunchtime, often enough. When the boat’s full, it’s full, and the quicker the catch is on the London train the better. If you want fish, you want to be there on the quay when they come in. Mrs. Trevethan herself gets fish from her cousin, most people round here know someone on the boats and that’s why there’s no fish-shop, see? But as long as hotels haven’t got there first, should be someone will sell her a couple of mackerel or a codling. Mrs. Trevethan did not tell her that the fishing quay is upriver of the Packet Quay, the fishing boats having a shallower draught than the ocean-going ships, but although she was late there were still great coffin-sized caskets of dead fish lying in the sun. Hundreds, she thought, maybe thousands, and even at the top a few tails still flicking and silver faces mouthing outrage into the hot air. Some of the fish are still alive, she wanted to say to the men heaving wet nets around the stones, there is a medical emergency here.

Ally tugs her hat forward to shade her face. She has not cooked fish before. Mamma did not serve it. Perhaps fish was unavailable in Manchester twenty years ago. She should, perhaps, have been less cavalier in dismissing Aunt Mary’s offer of lessons from her cook; it had not occurred to Ally that in rejecting the lessons she was condemning Tom to a domestic economy learnt from Mamma. But she has also learnt something from the years with Aunt Mary in London. She has not required Tom to choose between butter and marmalade at breakfast. She offers him cream in his coffee and sugar in his tea. And the cooking of fish cannot be especially complicated. It is necessary only to apply sufficient heat in one form or another to set the albumen, remaining mindful that boiled fish is inevitably abominable. Lighting the oven is difficult and anyway the warmth would be unwelcome in the house: let the soles, then, be fried. She enjoys the gleam and weight of her new copper pan. Boiled potatoes, with mint from the garden, and the rest of the plums for pudding. A meal of sorts. When he is gone—no, even in her own mind, even trying to make a thought about cooking, about how the cooking will be easier, she falters at those words. Time will pass, and he will leave. There will be endurance. There is always endurance as there is always air, because there is no alternative. She opens the gate. Now, anyway, she will put the fish in the pantry and write Annie a cheerful letter about sea-bathing and fishwives, reassure her friend that married life in Cornwall is not only exile from London work and London friends.

But Tom comes down, his tread heavy on the bare wooden staircase, puts his arms around her from behind as she transfers the fish to a plate. It has skin instead of scales, and the scar of an old wound below the dorsal fin. Its orange spots have dulled.

‘I thought you were working,’ she says.

‘I stopped.’ He kisses her neck above the high collar. ‘It ought to be our honeymoon.’

She leans against him for a moment, feels his breath in her hair. They have so short a time. ‘Yes. But it isn’t. Don’t make Mr. Penvenick angry. If you have work to do—’

His hand touches her breast through the grey cotton and a response flickers through her body. But Mr. Penvenick, she thinks, he will be annoyed if your report is not written, he will chide you, he will express disappointment when he has trusted you so far

He lifts her hair.