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

for a cup of tea and a bun. Uncle James is too kind, she says, but unless he himself has a particular wish for a tea room she would rather go home. But the cold, he says. But he would like to give her tea. She does not say that he will be giving her the tea wherever she has it, that her food and drink and shelter come from him as they did for many years. She would like to take tea with Aunt Mary, she says. She bites her lip.

He glances down. ‘Of course, Ally. I dare say you will want to talk to her about your sister.’ He squeezes her arm. ‘I should have thought of it that way. And I will take you both to tea another day, perhaps when you go to the sales.’

She has no intention of going to the sales. Unless, of course, Aunt Mary should want a companion; with no work to do, she has no longer any reason to avoid such outings.

‘Thank you, Uncle James.’

‘Nonsense, my dear. Let’s take you home.’

Uncle James, who rarely takes tea himself, sees her in through the front door and then leaves for his club. As if she were a child, as if she had not for many years lived in this house and made her own way to the hospital and around London at all seasons and hours. After all, she still has her door key. Aunt Mary tries to help Ally take off her coat and bustles her back to the fireside. Here again, the same velvet under her behind, her feet in the same place on the carpet. Her fingers begin to tingle in the warmth. She needs to go somewhere, do something. She does not know how Aunt Mary bears her narrow round, the endless ceremonies of meals and dressing and passing the time in between. She has forgotten how to tolerate kindness, she thinks. Only cruelty feels real. Aunt Mary crosses her feet on her footstool and takes up her embroidery.

‘And so you saw the painting?’

Ally nods. ‘I had seen it before. I’d forgotten. It’s very beautiful. An excellent composition.’

Aunt Mary looks up from her stitching. ‘Oh yes, I dare say.’ The needle begins to flash again, etching a green line in the space between her lap and her face. ‘And the subject?’

Ally looks away, not into the flames in the grate but out of the window, where the fog may be thinning a little and a cart rumbles in the street. ‘The subject is sleeping. She could be anyone, any girl with hair to match the sofa.’

The thread tautens, dives, tautens. ‘Is that how it was, Ally? Hair to match the sofa?’

Ally shrugs. ‘We knew that, Aunt Mary. We lent our bodies to Papa and Aubrey as others lent props and costume. That was all.’

But we did not choose it, she thinks. Our bodies, our images, were taken because we were in no position to give, because children do not, in the end, own themselves. We were posing for Papa and Aubrey almost before we understood how to keep still. How to obey, how to hold our limbs as we were asked to do, how to see our bodies as if we did not inhabit them.

‘I understand he has a new model now. Mr. Casey’s daughter. Rebecca, I think. I hear he takes her to tea every Wednesday.’

There is a slight sound as the needle punctures the stretched canvas, as the thread glides through the hole.

Ally swallows. ‘He used to take May to tea. Well, and me.’ Until I got too old, she thinks. Until I was becoming a woman. And when May was becoming a woman, when he didn’t want to paint her or take her clothes off and photograph her any more, he sent her off to drown in Scotland. No, this is not fair. Aubrey’s last painting of May shows some teasing appreciation of her maturing body, of the curve of her behind and the rounding of her thighs, and no-one could have known how the Scottish journey would end. It was an accident. Blaming Aubrey is a way of making meaning, of believing that May died because someone intended it rather than because people die at all times for no reason. May died because a storm came up and she was there, as many have before her and will again. And Aubrey gave May an extraordinary silk shawl on her last night at home, a wildly extravagant present to a young girl. He had not lost interest in her.

Aunt Mary holds her embroidery to the fading light from the window. ‘I dare say it is all quite harmless.’

It is a question. The fog dims against the glass; soon the lamp-lighters will come and Fanny will close the curtains and light the gas before she brings the tea-tray. A coal falls in the fire.

‘I cannot say, Aunt Mary.’

There was harm. Harm was done. She leans forward to hold her chilled hands to the fire, to feel the blood bloom against constricted vessels.

A K

NIFE

L

IKE A

S

HARD OF

L

IGHT

He dreams again of falling. He leans as he has often done on the parapet, taking pleasure in the explosion of waves against the stone tower a hundred feet below. The Atlantic hammers on the granite blocks and foam leaps high, but under his feet the structure stands firm. He looks down and then something happens, something breaks, and there is time to feel falling, to know his own end, to regret, before—

He wakes always now a few minutes before the gong sounds and the chanting begins. He lies breathless, sweaty, but knows that in a moment his bones will ring in darkness with the morning prayer. He remembers the foxes again; a more superstitious person, a Japanese person, might imagine that they haunted him, that they had crept along in his shadow, when his clumsy foreign gaze was distracted, and glided now low through the house by night, shaping his dreams.