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

juice drips from Mrs. Elsfield’s face onto the bodice of the dress, already less colourfully stained.

‘Stop that now.’ The nurse tries to grab Mrs. Elsfield’s hands. ‘I told you to stop it.’

‘Greed,’ says Mrs. Middleton. ‘Gluttony and greed.’

But even as she is restrained, Mrs. Elsfield reaches for another handful, and when the nurse grasps her wrist she squeezes the berries, the berries Ally picked, so that pips and juice extrude between her swollen knuckles and drop to the floor.

The nurse looks up and meets Ally’s gaze. ‘There. I told you there’d be trouble. Stirring things up like that.’

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Autumn has come, waves of bronze and red sweeping the wooded hills like a rising tide. It is like wearing tinted spectacles, seeing trees and the carpet of leaves in unnatural shades. He finds himself reaching out to finger individual leaves in colours he has not thought of, crimson and orange, the five-fingered lace of maples. Watching the land from the sea, from the end of the rocky peninsula where he’s spent the last three days, Tom has to remind himself that he too, is liable to the changing seasons, that his foreigner’s immunity to conversation, to manners and cuisine and laughter, does not extend to the body itself. Japanese rain wets his English skin and Japanese winds chill his English blood.

Makoto pours tea. Curls of steam twine away from the translucent curve of the tea-bowl and rise in a different shape. Temmoku, Tom thinks, that kind of pottery with the glassy spots is called temmoku. He will take some home to Ally, although just now he craves a mug, a great workman’s mug, full of milky, sugary tea to warm his bones. And a handful of the bannocks Douglass’s cook used to make, spread with salt butter and sometimes indented with currants. Makoto offers him a green sweet that will be made of slimy rice dough and sweetened beans.

‘Makoto, what did you miss most when you were in Britain?’

Makoto sips his tea, his tapering fingers holding the bowl as if it were an injured bird. ‘I was happy to be there.’

Tom bites the sweet, and then remembers that it is a breach of etiquette to bite things this size. Or perhaps that is only sushi; the whole sweet would be quite a mouthful.

‘Of course. I mean, I am glad to hear that. As I am to be here. But perhaps after a time you began to wish for rice instead of bread, or fish in place of all our butcher’s meat, or your back ached from sitting always in chairs?’

He finds it hard to imagine how anyone’s body could find ease in Japanese deportment, and in fact most of the Japanese objections to European furniture seem to pertain to its being immorally comfortable and softening to the Japanese character rather than any claim to convenience.

Makoto gazes at the opening in the shoji screen, through which they can see a stripe of glowing forest and sunset sky. ‘Miso soup,’ he says. ‘And of course the baths. We can buy bread for you, you know, once we return to the city. And beef. There are even restaurants.’

But there was nowhere in Aberdeen, Tom thinks, nor even in London, where Makoto and his colleagues could have found miso soup, or taken off their shoes and sat on the floor to drink green tea out of a bowl. He eats the other half of his sweet.

‘I like rice and fish,’ he says. ‘And I’ll miss the baths too, when I go home.’

‘We’ll bathe before dinner? There are separate facilities for ladies here.’

‘Of course. I was only surprised, last time.’

One would think—Tom thought—that a people as concerned by modesty and humility as the Japanese would have a strong regard for decency. One would be wrong. Tom knew from his reading that the Japanese bathe communally but he had not, somehow, expected that he himself would arrive at the bath in the last inn to find a naked woman in it, her bundled hair uncurling down her spine. He backed away and did not wash. Things are changing, Makoto says, and now it is rare even in the countryside to find such an arrangement. It was unfortunate, and he hoped that Tom would forgive the offence. Tom was left feeling dirty-minded, and apologetic. It’s not, he wants to protest, that women’s bodies upset him. It’s not that he thinks badly of people whose ideas about modesty and shame are different from those to which he is accustomed. It’s not that he doubts his own control (although the possibility of a physical—no, a physiological—reaction did cross his mind, as he stood there with only a towel to protect his own—his own conventions). He was just surprised, that’s all.

Makoto is already sitting on a wooden stool, scrubbing himself with the seriousness of someone caulking a boat, as if any missed spot would make him sink. Tom takes the next place. There is no-one else present, but a line of wet footprints whose maker is now in the outdoor bath and was probably asking Makoto about the red-haired foreigner. Tom takes the bag of rice bran and begins to scrub as Makoto taught him, some thirty years after he thought he had learnt to wash himself. He is thinner than when he first came to Japan, softened by weeks as a passenger on the boat, and for the first time in his life he is glad to be short, but apart from his stature he is about as different from Makoto as a man might be. He recalls the array of human skulls he and Ally saw in the Natural History Museum in London: Negro, Asiatic, Caucasian, American Indian, Eskimo. The differences between races, Ally said, are no greater than the variations within each race, but they don’t show those. Perhaps because of the difficulties of acquisition, he suggested. He wants her. He wants to talk to his wife.

Makoto rinses off his seat and replaces it for