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

Her head bends as he unbuttons her collar.

The weight of her head in the hollow under his collarbone is making his arm numb but he doesn’t want her to move. She probably knows, he thinks, how much the human head weighs. She has probably lifted a human brain with her own hands and placed it on a scale. Before the wedding, there were jokes that were not jokes about how at least a doctor would know what to expect, at least he’d be able to get down to business on the wedding night without first having to explain what goes where. Almost, said his junior George, draining his fourth pint, as if you were to have all the advantages of marrying a widow and all the advantages—Charlie took him outside and when they came back in George apologised. George means no harm, can’t hold his drink and doesn’t think before he opens his mouth, but Tom hadn’t been that close to hitting someone since his schooldays.

She moves her head onto the pillow and lifts her sticky hand from his belly to his chest. He strokes her hipbone, the curve of her waist. Her hair has come down on one side and there is a scatter of black hairpins across the sheet behind her.

‘I forgot to tell you.’ He picks up some of the pins. ‘De Rivers has asked us to dinner.’

She raises her head, the expression of satisfaction he was enjoying gone as if wiped with a cloth. ‘De Rivers? The big house at the top of the High Street?’

‘Ludgate House. He said he wanted to welcome you to Falmouth.’

She sits up, sees his glance and hugs her knees to cover her breasts. ‘Why would he feel a need to do that?’

‘Maybe he’s proud to have a prize-winning young doctor in town.’

She shakes her head. ‘How on earth would he know about my prize? And why would he care anyway?’

He folds his hands behind his head. The crack in the ceiling probably isn’t really any bigger than it was last time he saw it. ‘He’d know because I told him. And it was in the Times, remember. Anyway, I accepted. For Thursday.’

But married men, he recalls too late, say that they must consult their wives. He has assumed both her availability and her consent. An oversight, he is sure, but he has heard her and Annie speak of men whose sympathy for women’s suffrage lasts only until they find themselves obliged to pour their own tea. Perhaps he has not inspired trust enough to overlook such errors, perhaps she will fear that this is the first sign of his intention to dominate. If so, he supposes, he can only try to explain: it is not that I thought myself entitled to consent on your behalf but that—well—but that I forgot that I am now a married man. I forgot you. He waits. These sunny days have run golden lights through her sparrow-brown hair.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘I must air my grey dress. It will be something to tell Annie and Aunt Mary in my next letters.’

He reaches out to run his fingers down the fine carving of her vertebrae.

T

HE

I

NVERSE OF

N

OAH’S

A

RK

The sun goes down behind the town, sunset hidden on the western side of the Lizard Peninsula. But over the estuary the hill above Flushing glows with refracted pink light. The masts around the harbour are cradled by a kaleidoscope of land and sky reflected in the waves, and there are two great ships winging around Pendennis Head, their sails slackening as they pass the castle at St Mawes and enter the shelter of the land. It is not very long until he will be going the other way, watching the sails belly as the ropes tauten and thrum and the ship leans on the wind. The sea will expand around him as Falmouth, Pendennis, the Lizard, Cornwall, diminish to the north-east; the stones beneath his feet, the gardens and trees, replaced by the slap and foam of waves on the hull. And then some weeks later, he will arrive in Japan. He tucks Ally’s arm more tightly against his ribs.

‘We should have a fine view from the dining room,’ she says. ‘I went along the quay yesterday to admire it from below.’

‘Penvenick tells me it is a remarkable house, and apparently De Rivers is something of a collector. You will enjoy seeing fine pictures again.’

Her uncle’s house was crowded with paintings and sculpture. He had never before seen a full-sized marble figure in a private house, and now he has brought her to a cottage most of whose walls would be too damp and uneven for pictures even if he owned any.

She rubs her cheek on his shoulder. ‘I cannot say I have missed them. And somehow it seems unlikely that I will share Mr. De Rivers’ taste.’

Taste. There are worlds in her mind that he cannot enter, ways of categorising people and their possessions that are foreign to him.

‘Ally?’ he says. ‘Ally, on Saturday, would you take me around the Art Gallery?’

The Gallery has been open all the time he has lived here. It is one of the Yarrow family’s gifts to the town, municipal culture to improve the minds of sailors and tradesmen, and he has set foot in it only once, to deliver a public lecture on new developments in lighthouse design. There are also concerts he does not attend.

She looks at his face. ‘Of course, with pleasure. They have a few interesting things. But I do not know that I can tell you much.’

‘More than I know now.’

Her hand slides down his arm and takes his. She likes the insides of his wrists, not a part of his anatomy to which he had given a moment’s thought until after the wedding.

‘And you like to learn. Tell me, my love, shall I show you around the nervous system and the skeleton also?’

‘Why not,’ he says. ‘A