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

table and the smell of fish and soy on the air. Tom’s throat closes and he swallows hard. Makoto doesn’t translate his greeting and apologies. He had better wait, he thinks, to ask about the foxes.

F

OUR

D

ARK

T

WIGS

She leans her head on the window, lets the train shake her skull, as it pulls her across England. Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire. It is all the same, all rolling pasture scattered with trees and clumps of stone houses. There is more or less grey cloud and the water flowing through England, hills to coast to cloud and round again, runs in larger or smaller channels. Sometimes someone comes to sit in her compartment and she pulls her wrap up around her face, shakes her head when a woman with knitting asks where she is going and a man with a newspaper flaps and folds it and asks if he can bring her anything from the tea room at Salisbury station. As there are clothes for mourning, so there should be clothes for failure, clothes that mark the wearer’s degradation. Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire. The tracks run along a canal plucked by raindrops. A man and a boy work a lock with sacks wrapped over their heads while a horse grazes at worn grass. Birmingham begins, smoke and red brick. Where money is made, Alethea, there is always misery and suffering beyond the imaginations of so-called respectable citizens. The carriage fills up and she turns in her seat towards the window. The light has dimmed and the brickwork outside is stained with soot and smoke. Staffordshire, where patches of pastoral England pretend to outwear brick chimneys and gouged hillsides. Workers in the Potteries die of the poison glazes they handle for a livelihood. But you have not the excuse of ignorance, Alethea. When you devote yourself to trivial matters instead of saving those who have no other help, you cannot say that you know not what you do. More canals, and ragged children walking beside the horses in the rain. The mortality rate for canal children is relatively low, probably because there is less overcrowding on boats than in the rooms of the urban working class and better sanitation. And because they are not left unattended in infancy while their parents work, although on the other hand they presumably remain uneducated. Mamma is right, England is not a civilised country.

The hills of Derbyshire rise, and in the distance she sees the village where Papa and Aubrey took her and May one summer. She remembers climbing a hill, May and Aubrey jumping from tussock to tussock across a bog, and later herself reading Virgil under a willow tree, refusing ham and plums at lunch because Mamma doubted her self-discipline. In the valley bottoms where rivers fall, grey mills rise like cliffs. Like the asylum. She closes her eyes. In the mills, machinery bangs and roars. Children pull carts of babies through the streets, taking them to be fed by mothers who sacrifice their own moment to eat in doing so. The weight of outrage and unmet need presses down on this country like wet cloud. Burn it all down, wash England away into the sea, and start again.

Stockport, the brick viaduct slashing the valley like oil paint thrown on a watercolour. Rows of terraced houses plough the hillsides and smoke hangs above their tiled roofs, waiting for the rain to wipe it down into the roads and backyards. Nausea thickens at the back of Ally’s throat: not long now.

She has to put the trunk down on the wet pavement three times between the omnibus and the front gate. She has hooked Tom’s small valise over her forearm. Other families, other parents, would have come to meet her at the station. There is no point in such thoughts. The trunk bangs against her leg as she sets it down to open the gate. The black paint is peeling and the hedge is overgrown. There are weeds in the gravel path and green stains under the gutters on the white sections of half-timbering. Ally looks up to the window of the attic, where she slept the year Mamma said her nightmares were disturbing May, and to Papa’s north-facing studio, where he has had larger windows made and a balcony put in over the porch. She stops, her hand on the gate. Even now, she could turn away. And show Mamma a new kind of failure and weakness. She lifts the trunk onto the gravel and closes the gate behind her. It may be different, this time. It is three years since she was last here. Mamma wrote, did she not, that she is sorry to hear of Ally’s difficulties at the asylum, that she looks forward to seeing Ally happier in more useful work. She herself is changed. She is a doctor. She lifts the trunk for the last time and approaches the porch.

It is Papa who answers her third ring on the bell, when she is peering through the stained glass of the sidelight and thinking that if there is no-one in, if despite her letter there is no-one in, she will go and sit at the back door to avoid the ignominy of waiting like a stray dog on the front step, in view of the street. He looks through the fanlight before he opens the door, as if he doesn’t know who might be there.

‘Ally. Darling girl. I didn’t know you were coming today. Come in.’

He’s wearing his painting smock. It can’t be same one, but the ochre smear on the left sleeve looks familiar. She humps the trunk over the step.

‘Oh, remember the parquet. Scratches if you breathe on it.’

Ally bows her head. ‘Sorry, Papa. We have only painted boards in Cornwall.’

He watches her taking off her coat. Mamma won’t like it, and won’t like her bustled skirt. Papa is greyer than last time, and his eyebrows have begun to sprout white hairs, but he still carries himself upright and his face is unlined.