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

and maybe also to Annie, to whom she could perhaps confide something of her troubles, of the way Mamma’s voice always in her head becomes louder and angrier now she is so much alone. Enough. She will not think of Mamma now, with shadows coalescing around buildings and plants under her very eyes as the sun strengthens, with the tide so high against Flushing pier that the passengers leaving the ferry can step down onto the dock and now with the waves beginning to sparkle. The fields have been ploughed, and the great beech and oak trees above Flushing beach are turning. Autumn is here, the northern hemisphere leaning away from the sun, the first season of Tom’s absence, and when those fields are harvested again he will be home. To every thing there is a season, she thinks. Ecclesiastes was not one of Mamma’s preferred books, but even so Ally’s mind supplies more of the verse: A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which has been planted . . . He hath made everything beautiful in his time. And although she stopped attending church after May died, there is consolation in the words. Here is beauty in time, in the turning of the trees, the rising and falling of the water, in the slow breathing of this land.

She did not bother to unfasten her hair and brush it all out yesterday. It is not as if anyone sees her on her day off. And now, watching the sweeps of her brush in the mirror, she cannot quite recall why it is necessary to primp oneself before visiting the asylum. The patients, in their arbitrary dress and sewn-up hair, will hardly observe a dishevelled chignon. The nurses’ objections to her presence go far beyond any niceties of presentation. Perhaps, she finds herself thinking, the asylum may be a rare place where a person’s physical appearance, even a woman’s plainness, is truly of no moment. A place where only the mind matters. She shakes her head, and then catches herself in the mirror, head waggling, mouth crammed with hairpins, alone in a silent house and reflecting that a lunatic asylum might offer forms of sanity missing from the wider world. It is not an impossible idea, certainly not an impossible ambition; one might even argue that since the wider world drives some of its citizens to madness, an asylum for their cure should by definition be run on healthier lines than the rest of society. Even so, she thinks, even so. Usually she would make a plait and then tie knots with it until the knobble of hair is short enough to pin up. Her fingers hesitate. No. Today, for the asylum, for the patients, she will do it properly, as Annie taught her.

The post has not yet come. She will still catch her train if she leaves in five minutes, if, for example, she sweeps the kitchen floor now rather than leaving it for her return. If she puts that stocking into the mending basket, and shakes the dust out of Tom’s knitted blanket covering the landlord’s garish armchair in the sitting room. She takes the blanket out into the garden, an armful of dusty wool that she should have noticed earlier. The mizzle has come back, but between the houses she can still see across the water. Only the Flushing ferry is moving. The sailing boats hang broken-winged on the flat sea. There are many reasons, of course, why a letter would be delayed. She unfurls the blanket, thousands of stitches representing hundreds of hours of Tom’s mother’s time. It is probable that she thought of all of those reasons the year May died.

‘Let me take your brolly, Doctor,’ says William. ‘We’ve maybe had the last of the sunshine now. Be like this till spring.’

Ally shakes her umbrella—Tom’s umbrella—over the doorstep before furling it. ‘But it’s warm enough for the time of year.’ Soon be Christmas, she thinks. What on earth will she do for Christmas? Perhaps she will offer to join the patients for dinner. It will be a hard day, for those who remember.

‘And your basket, Doctor?’

‘Thank you, William, but I’ll keep that.’ She is suddenly embarrassed. Perhaps this was a foolish idea.

He smiles at her. ‘Just so you’ve not got the keys in it, Doctor.’

She rattles her skirt. ‘In my pocket as always.’

All the nurses and even Dr. Crosswyn carry keys on a chain around their necks, like some kind of primitive jewellery or medal, a heavy badge of sanity. If Ally were a patient, she thinks, she would not like to speak with people who were forever jangling the keys of her confinement on their bosoms.

She starts with Ward Two, saving Four for later. Mary Vincent, the nurse says, weeps frequently, for no apparent reason. She ate nothing until she was told she must be force-fed and saw another patient undergo the procedure, and now it requires only a reminder of that sight to persuade her to take nourishment. Ally frowns; it is true that there are a very few patients who would apparently starve to death without such treatment, but she sees no one here in any danger of such an end. What’s more of a problem, says the nurse, is that Mary Vincent touches herself, and not only in bed at night either. And her so young! It doesn’t help that Mrs. Minhinnet talks as she does, the filthiest things the nurse has heard yet and she’s been here ten years. God knows where she learnt such things.

‘I expect someone taught her. Made her do them, or watch them.’

Ally and the nurse look round. A woman of perhaps forty-five, solidly built, greying hair trying to wave above the sewn-up plait. There are no private conversations on the ward, but most of the patients even here preserve the fiction that what medical staff say to each other is mysteriously incomprehensible or inaudible to those without training.

‘Well, really, Margaret. Eavesdropping!