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

caked. Mamma considered pastry unwholesome, especially for young girls, and it was never made at home, but Tom likes it. And there will be no pies for him in Japan.

She tries to smile for him but her eyes fill. Here it is, the beginning of their last evening. From this moment, the minutes will slip away like stitches dropped from a knitting needle. Unravelling, irrecoverable.

‘If you are content to dine at a positively dissipated hour, Mr. Cavendish. The book says that pastry may profitably be left to rest in the pantry.’

He holds out his hand. ‘Did you not marry me in hopes of dissipated habits? Come, I have been pent in the office all day and there is a fine fresh wind off the sea.’

She sinks her hands in the basin of cold water, scratches the butter from under each nail, shakes them dry to save having to wash the towel. If she splashes her face too, he will see that she is upset.

‘Your apron?’

How could she care about an apron? She makes her mouth smile. ‘You don’t consider it suitable garb for an evening of gay abandon? Perhaps you are right.’

They take the high path, up the stone stairs from the cottage to Penwerris Terrace where there is another row of sea-captains’ houses. The sun is still high and the white stucco fronts are as bright as sheets drying in the sun. Seagulls on ridgepoles and chimneys announce Tom and Ally’s progress, the cries circling them from above, and below them the town curls around its slopes, poor people in grey stone at the bottom and rich in white paint at the top. Along here, ornate cast-iron fences restrain bushes of pink-starred fuchsia and tendrils of wisteria from which purple flowers drip like bunches of grapes. Through a window, she glimpses the autumn wallpaper which for a long time she thought Papa had made only for the drawing room at home.

‘Ally?’

She turns, startled. When he proposed marriage his voice did not sound so serious. Perhaps, at this very last moment, he is going to say it. Come too. I cannot bear to leave you. Whatever the cost to your career, come with me. I can’t, she would say. And yes. Yes.

‘I hope—’ He stops. ‘You know—Ally, I am sure the time will pass quickly once we are accustomed to it. At least we both knew from the beginning that this separation was to come. And you will have your work, it is not as if you will need to seek distraction. Letters take only a few weeks now, did you know that? We will perhaps re-read our letters in fifty years and remember—’ His hand tightens on hers. ‘Remember all of those years together.’

Her skirt swings over her shoes, over the paving stones, as each foot reaches forward. There are fewer minutes left now than when they left the house, than when they crossed the road. She should say something back, embellish his vignette of their old age.

There is nothing to say. They walk on, above the library and gallery now, and she follows him down the cobbled lane where the men outside the pub watch them pass. One says something about her and the others laugh. Her skirt, she thinks, her skirt made in London for a prosperous professional woman, is too narrow here. They will think it not decent. Or her hair is coming down, or has a seagull soiled her clothes? Tom is waiting at the bottom, his elbow crooked for her hand.

‘I’m sorry, Ally, I thought you were with me.’

She takes his arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am.’

For this evening, for this one night. The fresh wind he wanted soothes her face like a cold cloth.

‘We’ll go up the hill?’

They are heading as usual for Gyllingvase, where he likes to see the ships coming in from the Atlantic. Going blue water, she’s heard people say here, going far away, as if the coastal waters were not blue.

‘I can climb Jacob’s Ladder. It is possible in a skirt.’

The first time he brought her here was a hot afternoon and she remarked that climbing one hundred and twelve stone steps from the town square was an inelegant proceeding and that she liked to see the trees growing on the road up to the Observatory instead. But he enjoys Jacob’s Ladder partly because it is wholly unnecessary, an egregious feat of engineering like that of a small boy playing with wooden blocks.

‘Very well. We will ascend together.’

There are children playing marbles at the top, and as Ally and Tom reach the group a glass ball comes rolling, dropping, bouncing like a body over a cliff. She hears herself exclaim. It will smash, splinter into tiny shards and its heart of blue will be exposed and broken. The boys stand to watch. There are holes in their trousers and their bare feet are dirty, their hair long and unkempt. The smallest one’s mouth hangs open.

‘It’s too steep, don’t try to chase it,’ says Tom. ‘Here, this should buy you another. Whose is it?’

The child takes the penny but the marble has reached the bottom intact. Spheres, she remembers him saying, are the strongest shape. Joins and edges are always points of weakness.

They come over the brow of the hill to the villas of Florence Terrace, and at last see out over the Atlantic as well as up the estuary’s intimate curves. The grand estates, newer than the captains’ houses, spread down the hill to the sea, their velvet lawns embroidered with palm trees and flowering bushes. Beyond them are bath chairs and perambulators drawn as if by clockwork along the paved promenade, and beyond that, waves in dark blue and white leaping and reaching, and right at the edge, just where sea at last becomes sky, gathering and hurling themselves into the Manacles. It is a clear day, when you can see the Manacles. Her hand tightens on Tom’s sleeve, and suddenly her drowned sister is there in