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

speaking of writing a paper, perhaps something for the new British Journal of Asylum Medicine, but the truth is that so far she has not even a title, only the vague idea that there is a widely recognised category of patients who appear to pass their entire adult lives recovering when confined and relapsing upon release. She wonders if anyone has tried to invent at least a temporary refuge from both the madhouse and the mad home, a compromise between an institution and a family. A place where people chose to be, not a place of confinement. A convent, an Oxford college, only with a less formal hierarchy, without vows. A place of healing, for those who know where to go afterwards, but perhaps also a permanent abode without the stigma of an asylum for those whose need for a sanctuary will not pass. And if asylum medicine is beginning to concern itself with treatment as well as containment, it is time to learn what makes people sane as well as what makes them mad. Mad-doctors must question their assumption that sanity is obvious, requiring no study. There are few settings less appropriate for scientific experiment than a county asylum, where the variables are beyond anyone’s control, but a smaller setting, with a few carefully selected patients . . . An institution where the damage of homes, of domestic life, can be undone, or at least healed. A place where the shape of sanity might emerge. It’s an idea, not an essay, and claiming to be thinking about writing hardly qualifies as work. She needs a job, a position with set hours and a salary. She needs time to pass without having to push every minute up a hill.

Really, Alethea, you dare to complain of inactivity when you know the deadly overwork of your fellow beings, treated as no more than beasts of burden to keep the looms and spinners working? You who have witnessed children sick and dying because their fathers have no work can yet bemoan your own boredom?

Oh, stop. Go away. She finds herself sometimes wishing Mamma dead, going even so far as to imagine poison or, more satisfactorily, a knife to the heart, blood spreading like spilt milk across the floor, but increasingly she is just tired of Mamma. Bored by her. Tom’s latest letter says that Japanese peasants believe that the symptoms of madness result from possession by demonic foxes. It is in some ways an appealing idea, to blame the foxes, to imagine demons in one’s head. But she must not make Mamma into a demon, nor allow herself to fall prey to any form of superstition. The clock downstairs whirs as it does before striking. It is almost time for tea.

She opens the door to hear laughter from the drawing room, and to see Annie’s coat and hat on the stand. Annie must be back from Bath, where she has been covering the absence of another doctor at the Lying-In Hospital. Annie has always liked the slow chattiness of Obstetrics, the narratives sustained over weeks and months and the frequent happy endings. Annie doesn’t worry that female obstetricians are just glorified midwives, their acceptance a way of making sure that women doctors don’t threaten the central expertise of men. Naturally a woman doctor will be especially suited to the crises of women’s lives, Annie says, and anyway if one obtains a family’s trust at the birth of the first child one is almost guaranteed the role of their primary physician; it is an excellent beginning to a practice of one’s own. But Annie does not seem to want a practice.

Ally hangs up her coat beside Annie’s and rubs her cold hands.

‘Ally?’ calls Aunt Mary.

The door opens and there is Annie, all shiny hair and blue gown and skin that looks powdered whether it is or not. She kisses Ally’s cheek; the drift of floral scent and the brush of warm lips on a cold face.

‘Ally! How are you?’

Annie stands back and looks Ally up and down, sees her three-year-old skirt and jacket showing signs of wear, her blouse with its dated frilled collar.

‘I’m well, Annie. And you?’

‘Tired. I don’t wonder Dr. Kerry went away for a month. But there were some good cases. Triplets, Al, can you believe? The smallest one a good four pounds, and all doing well.’

She’s studying Ally as she speaks.

‘The poor mother,’ Ally says.

Annie holds out her hand, inviting Ally in. ‘She came through it nicely. The tea’s just made. And there are crumpets.’

Aunt Mary, nursing a cup of tea on a saucer in her lap, a gilt-edged plate holding a slice of sponge cake on the occasional table beside her chair, smiles up at Ally. ‘There you are. A nice walk? It’s getting chilly out there.’

Ally sometimes thinks Aunt Mary and Annie would get along beautifully without her. Buttered crumpets to ward off an early nightfall.

She sits down. ‘There are snowdrops. In the square.’

Annie pours a cup of tea and hands it to her, remembering lemon-not-milk and no sugar. ‘They were out in Brighton. And there are palm trees! From certain angles one could think oneself in France.’

Annie and her family have been to France several times, to the Normandy coast in summer and once to Paris, where Annie’s father offered each of his daughters an evening gown from an atelier of which even Ally has heard.

‘There are palm trees in Falmouth,’ Ally says. She cups her hands around the porcelain tea cup and lets the heat sear her fingers. ‘I think I know what you mean, Annie. It doesn’t feel quite like England either, not until you notice the red-brick houses behind the bougainvillea. And it’s so far away. Further than France.’

She remembers flowers like scarlet irises that grow in the corner of the stone wall and the garden path, the profusion of the fuchsia’s magenta bells cascading through cast-iron fences along the terraces high on the hill, and beyond the town gorse flaming along the cliff tops