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

time she comes back. From behind the split curtain hanging in the doorway, feet and the bottom half of a yellow kimono approach, and then the curtain in his own room’s entrance flutters blue and white. He wonders what she has been doing while he read. She carries a tray, black lacquer on the inside with tongue-and-groove boxed corners in polished bamboo on the outside, and in it there are upturned cups and bowls. She sinks to her knees and the tray remains horizontal. She positions it on the table from which he hastily removes Fulham. She speaks, gestures towards the door. There are two empty bowls, or handle-less cups. Makoto?

To Tom’s relief, Makoto is wearing a suit, with a bowler hat over his short hair, and as Tom scrambles to his feet Makoto holds out his hand to shake.

‘Mr. Cavendish. How do you do.’

Makoto bows as they shake, his grasp firm.

‘How do you do. Mr. Makoto?’

Is Makoto a Christian or surname?

‘How was your voyage?’

Just as if we were meeting in London, Tom thinks. Makoto’s English has odd stresses and elisions, as if he were singing the words of one song to the tune of another, but it is entirely orthodox.

‘I enjoyed it. You are recently returned from England yourself?’

Makoto bows again. ‘From Scotland. Ah, you are reading Fulham? I was honoured to meet him.’

Foolish to be startled. He knew that Makoto had been in Britain to study.

‘He taught me. We correspond. He advised me to come here.’

‘He is a great man. I was most honoured.’

Honoured, Tom thinks, a word he encounters repeatedly in all he has read about Japan. Does it always translate the same Japanese words, or do the Japanese have as many refinements of obligation as the Arctic peoples proverbially do of snow? The woman, who has stood like a servant in the corner, steps forward, bows and speaks, and this time Tom knows that he is being asked to sit down and take tea.

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From the bottom of the drive, the Truro Asylum looks almost like one of the larger country residences of English gentlemen. There is a central block with a pillared portico, a wing on each side, and grounds spreading around it down the hill. It is only as she approaches that the bars on the upper windows and then the absence of curtains and drapes begin to suggest that this is not a place of comfort. The front door is not used except when the Inspectors and the Committee are expected. She continues on the gravel path towards the porter at the back. The sky is lowering and she slows down, wanting the rain on her skin and in her clothes before she goes into those halls. Inside, the air is worse than the Chelsea Asylum where she worked as a Visitor after her examinations. Dr. Crosswyn says that he stopped noticing the odour a long time ago, but it still assaults her every time. Any of us, all of us, would smell so were we without the means of bathing, too alienated from our own bodies and their needs to anticipate the filling of bladder and bowels and without sufficient attendants to supply clean linen when required. Would you have turned your face from Christ himself, Mamma used to say, as he came from the wilderness mired and sick? Are you such a fine lady that you see your Maker’s image only in fresh clothes and perfumed bodies? Mamma could bathe the feet of destitute fallen women and dress the sores of street children but not stroke the hair or kiss the cheeks of her own daughters. And Mamma had no charity for the mad, for those incapable of striving for betterment or profiting from her advice.

The rain begins, a fine drizzle only just heavy enough to fall. Mizzle, Tom called it, and said he’d rather have real rain less often, actual precipitation or a dry day, but Ally likes the way the droplets settle and cling to leaves, grass and hair, as if water were forming there rather than falling from the sky, and she likes the way the mizzle veils this thin slip of land between two coasts. Here, the crest of the hill, is one of the places from which one can see both. She slows more. The porter will see her dawdling here and think her—well, will think her without sense to come in from the rain.

There are too many voices in the asylum. Listen to their soliloquies, says Browne, but to do that she would have to be able to give each an audience and a stage. It is not an original thought that the overall effect of the asylum is maddening, that the insane compound each other’s insanity. And this, after all, is why her new profession beckons: how might one devise a regime to cure the mind? It is not the taxonomy of madness that intrigues her but the possibility of individual salvation. If some situations are maddening, others must be—ought to be—sanitary. But probably not for two thousand people in the same way at the same time. She sees that the porter is indeed looking out at her and waves instead of ringing the bell.

‘Morning, Doctor.’ William is one of those people who enjoys calling her ‘Doctor.’ ‘Nice weather for the time of year.’

‘The garden needs the rain,’ she says. They smile at each other. William is an ex-patient, a man who had nowhere to go after ten years’ incarceration, and he is, in Ally’s professional opinion, the sanest person on the premises.

He closes the door behind her and selects the largest key from the chain around his neck. ‘We had a spot of bother in the night.’

‘Oh yes?’

William’s ‘spot of bother’ could mean an attempt at suicide—or murder—or just a bad fit on the epilepsy ward.

‘Women’s side. Ward Four. Well, I wouldn’t be telling you else, would I? Mrs. Middleton in a taking again, threw herself down the stairs while they were moving