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

has housed a fourteen-year-old, sixteen is the usual minimum. Her navy skirt is streaked with it and her hands are dry and gritty. How can a locked room where no-one sets foot from one week to the next accumulate so much dust? Sunshine forms and strengthens in the high window, making banners of dancing grey motes. She should hurry; she will be wanted on the ward and is far from sure that what she is doing here can be reckoned part of the treatment of patients. Three more boxes only, or her curiosity will have to await another opportunity.

It is in the second box. Clare Ashton, previously Clare Constance, aged 31 on the summer day of her admission. Facts Indicating Insanity observed by the doctor in Redruth: patient claims to see and converse with the dead and has caused considerable distress to grieving townspeople by insisting that she has ‘messages’ for them. Inappropriate conduct in church. Patient given to wandering the streets at night in an agitated state. Husband wishes her admission. Family circumstances: patient’s two brothers disappeared together aged 10 and 12, believed to have fallen over the cliffs while truanting from school. Patient’s mother never believed that they were dead. Patient appeared to recover from this loss as a girl but the present disorder began after a stillbirth in the first year of her marriage. Facts Indicating Insanity observed by Dr. Crosswyn: patient appears agitated, speech fast and loud, insists that she sees people in the room where there are none and cannot bear to be contradicted. And then there is the standard form completed by Mr. Ashton, asking to be notified in the event of his wife’s death.

Ally finds that there are tears in her eyes. Patient’s mother never believed that they were dead. At least she and Mamma and Papa had May’s body, the rain-scoured funeral, the mourning clothes, and even so she can still hear May’s voice. Who among us is not haunted? Who does not walk in the shadow of those who are not here? Our dead are always with us and yet always lost. Only those who die young, she thinks, will not be inhabited by dead voices, by shadowy glimpses of figures long fallen to dust. Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past. There is no clear border between insanity and grief, no basis for a limit to the permissible time of mourning. A time to reap, a time to sow, she thinks. Mrs. Ashton is caught in the season of grief. Time passes, but there are many purposes under heaven that find no season here.

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There,’ says Makoto. ‘You can see it now.’

They have been coming down the mountainside for an hour, and as far as Tom can see there is nothing visible now that was not apparent some time ago. It is like the Alps, he has been thinking, although he has not himself seen the Alps. The clustered hamlets, where two-storey houses lean in over cobbled alleys, are like Cornish fishing villages, like St Mawes or Marazion. If he were from Canada, or Egypt or the Sudan, he would still find likenesses. The mind reaches for similitude, making the new in the image of the familiar. He wonders again what Makoto saw in England. He thinks again of the lighthouses, of the lights, calling across the world’s waters. Europe, America, Australia, Asia: reflection and refraction, towers and lenses. Not words.

‘Which one?’ he asks.

Makoto tests his grip on the rocky path and stops, one foot shored on protruding roots and the other in a rock’s crevice. He points into the huddle of roofs along the track below.

‘The last one on the right. With three maple trees in the garden.’

An ornamental garden for a farm? The maple trees are like red flags between the grey roofs.

Makoto sets off again, sure-footed along the path that Tom is finding troublesome. There is scrub on the hillside, enough to arrest a tumbling man. It is his dignity and not his limbs at stake.

‘My grandfather planted the trees. He made a walking garden, after my father took over the farm.’

‘A walking garden?’ He wishes Makoto would slow down. But it is natural, to hurry home.

‘For walking around. There are paths.’

Tom steals a glance away from his feet and the path, down into the valley, but dare not spare enough attention to pick out a particular garden. He will address the matter of Japanese horticulture later.

‘You grandfather is still—still with you?’

Makoto scrambles down a section of loose stones, for once using a branch as a hand-hold. ‘The last time I returned was for his funeral. You will meet my grandmother. And of course my mother and father.’

Makoto waits for him as he steps carefully as a girl, not letting go of one branch until the next is within reach.

‘Do you have a brother?’ Tom asks, reaching firmer ground. The oldest son, presumably, inherits the farm.

‘No. A sister, but she is married and lives in another village.’ Makoto holds aside a long branch for Tom, pauses. ‘And you, you have brothers, sisters?’

How, Tom wonders, have they not already exchanged such information, how after so many weeks do he and Makoto not possess these basic schoolboy facts about each other?

‘No. My father died when I was an infant.’

He hears Makoto’s inhalation, almost skids as Makoto stops and turns to bow. ‘So. I am sorry.’

Tom shakes his head. ‘I don’t remember him.’ He can always hear the other person’s unvoiced response to this: but you grew up without a father. But it is a greater loss not to know the dimensions of what you have lost.

They set off again, almost side by side.

‘It is hard for your mother, then,’ says Makoto. ‘To have her only child so far away.’

‘She is accustomed to my absence. I have not lived with her since I left school.’

He tries to think what else Makoto should know, what his acquaintances and workmates in England know