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

her to the back wards. Mrs. Middleton’s all right, see, only Nurse Miller broke her collar bone trying to catch her. Bad business.’ He leans against his desk beside Ally.

Mrs. Middleton, like a good third of the women patients here, is R.M., religious melancholy. There is a much higher incidence, says Dr. Crosswyn, sipping his glass of wine at lunch, in those areas of the country where Methodism prevails. Temperance, too, seems to be a strong predictor, though more in men than women.

‘I can imagine. Where’s Nurse Miller now?’

‘On the sofa in Matron’s room. Dr. Crosswyn says she’s to go home to her mother soon as she can be moved and stay there till it’s quite healed. Full pay, too.’

Ally nods. ‘Naturally. A broken collar bone is very painful. But complications are rare. I would expect her to be back with us and fully recovered in six weeks.’

In six weeks Tom will have been in Japan for at least a fortnight. She has read about autumn in Japan, about how people travel to particular hillsides to see particular leaves redden and fall, the opposite of the cherry -blossom viewings in the spring. He will be there then too.

‘Yes, doctor. You’ll find Dr. Crosswyn in his office.’

* * *

There is the scent of coffee in the corridor, and she knocks quietly because Agatha tends to scream and drop trays at sudden noises. Agatha is also, in theory, an ex-patient, paid for her work as a parlour maid and sleeping in a room on the servants’ corridor, but she has not left the Aasylum grounds since she was admitted with mania and delusions as a young girl.

‘Ah, Dr. Moberley Cavendish. Just in time. Agatha brought a cup for you, didn’t you, Agatha? Sit down, won’t you.’

Ally takes the green chair to the left of the fireplace, where she can see out across the grounds. The mizzle has thickened and is blowing in sheets between the walled garden and the plum trees. There is no-one out there. Agatha, startled by her arrival, seems to have frozen beside Dr. Crosswyn’s desk.

‘I should think you might put the coffee on this table, Agatha,’ Ally says. ‘Then I can pour for Dr. Crosswyn while he finishes his letter.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. I mean Doctor, ma’am.’

‘Thank you, Agatha.’

Dr. Crosswyn thinks it likely that Nurse Miller’s deportment during last night’s incident was not as it would have been had he or Matron been present to witness her actions. It is not the first time Miller has been involved in scuffles with patients, often patients who seem to cause little trouble to other nurses. Since it is she and not the patient who was injured, there is no reason to begin a formal investigation, and in any case the taking of witness statements tends to be a demoralising and divisive process for all concerned, but he has made a note in her file and before Miller leaves, he will have a serious conversation. Mrs. Middleton’s case is not intractable, she has previously posed no risk to anyone but herself, and conditions in the back wards are likely to worsen her symptoms.

‘Does she regret her actions?’ Ally asks.

Dr. Crosswyn looks up at her over his coffee. ‘It had not occurred to me to ask. You consider it significant?’

‘If she is genuinely contrite it is because she knows that Nurse Miller’s experience is as real as her own. And that she herself is responsible for what she does and perhaps able at least to imagine herself doing otherwise. Although of course contrition is often taken to excess, especially in women.’ And self-awareness, she has often thought, is a marker of sanity but not of happiness.

He nods. ‘You had better go and talk to her.’

Ally swallows. In London, Dr. Camberwell simply refused her admission to the back wards. No, he said, it is no place, no sight, for a lady. But there are women there, she said. I doubt most of them even know they are women, he said. And I forbid it. Here, she has walked those corridors once. And does not want to do so again.

‘Where is Mrs. Middleton?’

He passes her a plate of biscuits, shortbread made by an inmate who used to run a tea-shop in Penzance. ‘Oh, I had them take her back to Four. I don’t think she knows what happened. They’re all in a bit of a fluster. I thought you might smooth some feathers?’

She wonders again: is this medicine? Should she not rather be conducting appendectomies, or at the very least attending women in childbirth, poor women who are otherwise left to the care of untrained neighbours and friends, or treated as teaching material for young men?

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And there are two new admissions, a farmer’s wife from the Tehidy estate and a young girl from Mylor. You could examine them?’

She goes up to the ward first, the smell intensifying as she climbs the stairs. The walls are painted the same shiny green as the London Women’s Hospital. A nurse passes in the corridor above her, and a moment later she hears the banging of pipes that the nurses think the doctors do not know is their code for warning each other that a doctor is coming. Dr. Crosswyn says they are not hiding anything very terrible, more probably some untidiness, perhaps tardiness in the making of beds, than any abuse of patients. The asylum is hardly a place to keep secrets. One of the disadvantages of all the locks and keys, in Ally’s view, is that their noise makes it impossible to surprise anyone. She opens the door to Ward Four.

As usual, half of the patients turn to stare at her and the other half continue to mutter or sing or stroke their hair as if there is no stir in the air around them, no change in the light. There is Miss Carpenter, who is sometimes Lady Clarinda, although in neither character does she seem to Ally to offer