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

man cannot have too much knowledge. Or, of course, a woman. Perhaps the human spine offers a model for an aseismic lighthouse.’

‘It is a weak point, the spine. And from what you have told me, perhaps prone to the same difficulties of physics as other columns.’

He kisses her hand.

They ascend the steps and he rings the bell.

She was right about the view. Mr. De Rivers, a man who looks so much like a frog that it is almost a surprise to see him walk up the stairs, shows them all over the house before allowing them to sit. Dark oak panelling makes the square hall and shallow stairs cavernous, so the windows over the sea seem as radiant as the Canalettos she used to admire in the Manchester City Art Gallery. The bannisters are carved into barleycorns. The floorboards, bare ships’ timbers as in all the buildings in this town, creak as they pass. The house was built, Mr. De Rivers says, more than two hundred and fifty years ago. Mr. De Rivers puts his hand on her elbow, bared by the grey dress’s short sleeves, as if to guide her around the turn of the stairs. His hand is damp and she resists the urge to shake him off. Nine generations of births and deaths here, she thinks. His thumb presses against her triceps muscle. It may well be the oldest building in which she has set foot. Nonetheless, it feels familiar. She moves away from Mr. De Rivers, across the landing. Papa’s house was newly built for him and Mamma, with modern decorative brick coursing and bay windows, but like Papa’s, Ludgate House is designed for display, to impress. Six people could come down the staircase abreast. The timber in the panelling would build a ship to cross the seven seas, the marble in the fireplaces suffice to memorialise a platoon of much-loved sons. Ally peers at a small glass dome on a side table and suppresses a gasp when there is something inside peering back. It is too dim to see clearly; a small mammal with a pointed nose and grey fur, frozen as it ducks under a stripped branch. Tom takes her hand. There are potted palms reaching from behind occasional tables and more of those glass cases, shiny in dark corners. An antlered head protrudes from the wall over the fireplace, as if on a pike. She doubts, somehow, that De Rivers personally oversaw these animals’ deaths.

‘My Central America case,’ De Rivers says. They gather and peer. He reaches for her arm again but Ally sees his hand rising and moves to Tom’s other side, as if for a better view. The birds inside are not bird-coloured but turquoise, violet, scarlet and so small it is hard to imagine how they were killed. They are not big enough for a bullet. Chloroform, probably, after catching them in a net. The panicky wing-beats would slow, and then stop, the heads drooping as the eyes filmed. The birds’ hearts must be smaller than Ally’s little finger-nail, must beat faster than one could count.

‘You have been in Central America?’ asks Tom.

Mr. De Rivers inflates himself a little. Ally’s fingers find the inside of Tom’s wrist, above the pulse point where she can feel the muscle rising under tender white skin. She likes these places in him, the junctions of softness with strength alien to the female body. De Rivers is saying something. ‘Oh, I have no time to gad around the globe. The mine does not run itself. But it is easy, here, when one knows the right people, to have almost anything brought from anywhere in the world. Why, Captain Polwarth has shrunken heads from Africa in his cabinet!’

‘Human heads?’

‘Forgive me, Mrs. Cavendish. It is not a subject for ladies. Here, let me show you my Chinese fans instead. Are they not exquisite? It is hard to conceive how such carving is done, is it not?’

In a carved cedar chest are silks from China, painted with dragons and tigers. The light is too dim to see colour properly but he encourages Ally to touch, pours them into her hands while he watches her face. She looks away from him and wonders about the hands that made these. Papa would like them. There is a glass cabinet crowded with porcelain figures and—De Rivers winks at Tom—more put by that are not quite the thing for public display. There is another chest made by having Chinese carved screens cut up and rearranged by a Cornish carpenter. The waste-paper baskets are made from elephants’ feet and the candlesticks carved in ivory. It is a mausoleum, it is the inverse of Noah’s Ark. She imagines the noise if all these eviscerated animals came to life, if in the depths of a winter’s night their spirits returned fluttering bellowing squealing, oak panels splintering and bannisters broken off like trees in a storm—

When they reach the dining room, there is a woman bending over an embroidery frame in an armchair by the fireplace, set in the darkest corner of the room. The woman stands up, holding her work as if it were a handkerchief and she about to weep. She is taller than Ally, older, and wearing a limp rabbit-coloured evening gown that makes her the same sepia tint from fascinator to shoes and must pass barely half an inch above her nipples. Ally finds her gaze dropping as if to protect a patient’s modesty; even she knows that such décolletage requires firmer upholstery beneath.

‘My sister. Deborah, Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish. Mrs. Cavendish, Miss De Rivers.’

Dr. Moberley Cavendish, Ally thinks, but in the three months since graduation she has already understood that there are situations, many situations, in which there is nothing to be gained by saying this.

She holds out her hand. ‘How do you do.’

‘Mrs. Cavendish. How do you find Falmouth?’

Mr. De Rivers has placed his dining table, an expanse of mahogany with a surface area probably greater than