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

before the lights come through the fog. She thinks of the ships in the estuary at home, creeping upriver with ears strained for all the notes in the symphony: ships’ bells and foghorns, waves on the rocks and further inland the rustle of trees or church bells chiming the hour. She remembers saying to Tom that in some ways Japan looks like Britain on a map, both archipelagic nations off the northern coasts of their continents, both moated by intricate coastlines and rocky seas. There will be fogs there too, and peril for those who go down to the sea in ships. When he leaves, there will still be weeks and oceans to cross, fogs and storms and the rocky shores of three continents. She shivers.

* * *

There is a fire in the stone hearth in the hall of Uncle James’s office, sending a flickering orange light across the marble chessboard floor. One of RDS’s paintings hangs over the mantel, from what Papa used to call his Tennyson phase, all long-haired maidens and knights on horseback. Papa used to tease RDS about the weight of the armour in relation to the size of the horses.

‘May I take your coat, or will you keep it on while you warm up?’

She feels as if she’ll never warm up, as if the fog has got into her blood and bones. She should have walked faster. She should not have allowed herself to lose the habit of outdoor exercise. Somewhere in this building, behind one of these doors, is May’s face. Uncle James stands back, gestures for her to precede him into his office and it’s there, on the easel. She hears her own intake of breath.

But of course it’s not May’s face, not the face she can no longer recall. And she has seen the painting before, in Aubrey’s studio at one of the last parties she attended there. The dawn light streams through a bay window she doesn’t recognise, not Aubrey’s rooms or her parents’ house, onto a daffodil-yellow sofa where a young girl lies asleep, her blonde hair tumbled across a pale green cushion and her bare arms and legs flung out from under a yellow drape. The swirl of sunlight and hair are roughly painted, and the painter has given his exact attention not to the girl’s sleeping face but to the white straps crossing her collarbones and bisecting the shadowed curve of her shoulders. He’s made the viewer want to push the straps off.

‘Where was it painted?’ she demands.

‘I don’t know. I can write to West and ask. Or of course you could.’

She last wrote to thank him for his wedding present, an exquisitely framed design for a fan that showed the beginning of Aubrey’s interest in Japanese objects but also invoked the submarine shapes of waves, weeds and shells in a way that Ally found hard to forgive. It is in a chest in the attic in Cornwall, well wrapped but inevitably not fully protected from the damp. She does not want to write to him again, especially not to suggest the old tenderness about him and May.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Papa would say, the painting is an object of beauty. It is about lines and curves, light and dark, colour. Just think about colour, Ally! Only the philistine mind goes running to names and places. She looks again, notices the way the damask pattern on the window’s curtains changes where the sunlight grazes it, notices the daring composition in which the curtains, the sofa and the window frame a sky which occupies half the picture but is empty and pale, only the source of the light flowing into the painted room. Papa is right; May is only part of the furniture here, another object on which light falls. She cannot remember ever seeing a painting of a sleeping man.

‘Would you like to see the others?’ asks Uncle James. ‘There are two more recent ones.’

No, she thinks. But Uncle James is already lifting the Aubade off the easel and uncovering another of the paintings stacked against the wall.

‘There.’ He whisks off the blanket with a flourish. ‘Harmony in Red. Isn’t it extraordinary?’

It’s the same sofa. The same yellow. Despite the title, there’s little red. And the girl is about the same age, but this time she lies propped against the sofa’s arm, her head back to expose a slim white throat and raised collarbones, one arm lying along the sofa’s back and the other hanging at her side, as if she’s sated and tumbled. Dark hair is falling out of a low chignon, and she seems to be wearing a nightdress or dressing gown, some pale froth of skirt thrown back over her legs and apparently held down by a swathe of red silk. A red fan lies discarded by her feet, and there appear to be items of clothing scattered on the floor. The light is dim; evening or lamplight.

‘Beautiful. He’s going from strength to strength at the moment. Astonishing work. And beginning to find favour, you know. He’ll get a lot for this.’

Ally swallows. ‘Who is she?’

‘Who? Oh, the model? Someone’s daughter. He’s very taken with her. She’s the subject of the other one as well. But look at the composition, the shape of the skirts and the sofa.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They are very striking.’

Uncle James wants to take her to a tea room on the way home. Aunt Mary will like it, he says, to think that she has had a treat, and she still looks cold; he is worried that she will take a chill if she does not have something hot before they walk back. She remembers tea rooms with Aubrey, his manifest pleasure in icing and whipped cream and the ceremonies of teapots, cake stands and doilies. She does not want to go back, to cross the carpet under the gaze of ladies in hats, to sit stiff-backed awaiting the services of thin girls in black dresses and lace aprons all