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

won’t wake Ally and sets the kettle to boil. She baked bread on Saturday, and there are eggs in the pantry and the special India smoked tea that was one of her Aunt Mary’s lesser wedding gifts, just a small token, she said, a little luxury for the first days of their married life. They have no tray but a baking dish will do the job; he will make breakfast in bed for his wife. For his bride. On the way up the stairs he pauses, balances the tray while he opens the front door and invites the day to come in.

The kitchen floor is washed, properly scrubbed as well as mopped. She has washed Tom’s clothes for the first time, watching his sleeves and the legs of his drawers swim and entwine themselves with her shifts and blouses. Please, Tom said, I did not marry a doctor to have her wring my shirts. It is beneath your dignity, he says. Send it out, Al. He has always done so. What, she said, so I can sit idle as a fine lady while some other woman toils? Can you imagine what Mamma would say? She has rinsed everything, but Tom has no mangle. It is a bright day. The neighbour’s housekeeper has given her some fixed wooden pegs, discarded now Mrs. Trevethan has at last persuaded her employer to let her buy the new ones with metal springs, and Ally has rigged a line between the holly tree and the fence. There is no reason why she should not sit down, even in the leaf-dappled garden, and re-read Professor Browne’s book about asylums. Housework is never exactly done, for one might always wash the curtains or dust something, but her new status as a wife must not be allowed to prevent her real work. Idleness, says Mamma’s voice in her mind, frittering away the afternoon in self-indulgence when there is misery and despair on your very doorstep. The voice has reason: there are back lanes in Falmouth as infernal as anywhere in Manchester, where Mamma labours day after day, month after month, teaching illiterate women to feed their children, clean their houses and wash their clothes for little thanks, showing despoiled girls and diseased prostitutes that there are still other ways for them to live. Here there are open sewers running down to the sea and malnourished children begging outside the baker’s shop. Women in limp finery greet the arrival of every ship and frequent the bars around the harbour. Ally could be working like Mamma to save bodies and souls this very minute instead of arranging cushions for herself on the stone steps beside the camellia. She could be soliciting subscribers for a reformatory for those women, or at the very least offering medical care to them and their children. She remembers her eighteen-year-old self telling the inmates of Mamma’s Home that when she qualified, she would attend women who had nowhere else to go, who could not pay doctors’ fees and so died with their children for lack of the most elementary care. And now, when so many of her acquaintance have given so much to help her, she devotes herself to the study of chimerical disorders of the mind, to the least respectable branch of medicine. From three hundred miles away, she can feel Mamma’s disappointment. May, for all her frivolity, for all her pleasure in dress and in pleasing Papa and his painter friends, took the better path. She opens the book.

The history of mental disease, writes Browne, reveals some awful truths. And one of these is that the mind may be trained to insanity, to destroy itself. It is the beginning of an essentially optimistic argument: if the mind may be led or pushed to insanity, if it is possible for a sane person to be driven mad, then the process must be reversible. There is no reason why anyone who has once been in full possession of his intellects should not be restored to that state. Browne commends ‘the well-regulated efforts, the virtuous contentment, the settled principles, of a highly educated mind.’ A seagull screams over Ally’s head. The leaves of the camellia are almost as dark as the holly’s prickles, and both gleam white in the sun. It is not her experience, not the experience of any woman she knows, that a highly educated mind brings either virtuous contentment or settled principles. A trained intelligence, she would go so far as to suggest, is likely to unsettle the virtuous contentment of its female possessor, and indeed the unsettling of contentment should be an object of women’s education. Browne, naturally enough, concerns himself with the masculine mind.

She reads on: ‘he who devotes himself to the care of the insane . . . must live among them; he must be their domestic associate; he ought to join in their pursuits and pastimes; he ought to engage them in conversation during the day, and listen to their soliloquies in the retirement of their cells; he must watch, analyze, grapple with insanity among the insane, and seek for his weapons of aggression in the constitution and dispositions of each individual, and not in general rules or universal specifics.’ Well, it is only in the discovery of general rules and universal specifics that the profession of the mad-doctor will come of age, but even so, she thinks, yes. Each mind has its own story, its own road to perdition, and perhaps that story, once imagined, can be retraced. The difficulty, as she and Browne well know, is to order asylums in such a way as to make this possible. The difficulty is to find space among the multiplying madnesses for a narrative of any kind. She finds herself rising to check that the laundry is drying, as if it might be doing anything else.

‘Will your great work wait while we take a walk, Dr. Moberley Cavendish?’ Her hands are gritty with flour and butter, her fingernails unpleasantly