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

hill and the building rises before her, square and solid as it has always been. Behind those highest windows, she thinks, tucked under that roof. The back wards. Contained in a space that is only, after all, air and stone. It is not there where she will find the future occupants of Rose Tree House, and she does the women of that place no particular service merely by remembering them. Better, perhaps, to forget, better to be forgotten than to exist only as the epitome of degradation in the minds of others. Nonetheless, she remembers. Mary Vincent.

She is breathing high in her chest with the climb, the unaccustomed muscles in her thighs complaining. The exercise will do her nothing but good, but even so she pauses and turns to look back. The gorse burns again with yellow, and in the fields the gashes of winter’s mud are healing. She watches the shadow of a cloud approach across the hillside and stands under the momentary dimming. A few breaths, a few heartbeats, and the sun brightens again on her face as the shadow drifts on, over the field and down towards the town. Out to sea too there is a slow turning of the sky, white clouds trailing shadows of dullness over bright water and the wind following in rushes and sudden darts, stroking the wrong way. In the hedge there is rustling and then birdsong near at hand. Come, she thinks. It is time.

William comes out from behind his table to shake her hand, holding it in both of his. He has aged over the winter, is beginning to lose height. A whole life here. A childhood in which he did not know what was waiting. The familiar smell drifts down the stairs and the tiles spread again at her feet.

‘I am glad to be back, William. It is good to see you again too.’

He pats her hand. ‘They’re waiting for you. We’ve put you in the parlour for today. And you’re to join Dr. Crosswyn for coffee at eleven. Cook’s made biscuits special.’

She would have liked a freer hand, but the committee has drawn up a list of patients for her to interview. Rose Tree House will take three ‘parlour boarders’, whose expenses are partially or wholly met by their families, and three ‘kitchen boarders’ who will work for food, board and—at Ally’s urgent representation—a sum of money sufficient to allow them to dress themselves and purchase an occasional ribbon or picture paper. It would be cheaper to clothe them from the asylum, said Trelennick. It would be cheaper, Ally said, if they learnt to dress respectably and did not return to the asylum. Dr. Crosswyn coughed: I think that what Dr. Moberley Cavendish means is that the patients are to be taught prudence and thrift in the management of small sums, to prove themselves able to master the weakness for finery that can take such outlandish forms when the female mind is unsettled. I think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is of the view that we cannot confidently say that a woman is sane until we have seen the dress of her choice. He stopped her later: I am sorry, my dear, I hope you can forgive me. But you know that a certain guile is required for committee-work, that it is better to have the committee make the right decision than trouble ourselves with their reasons for deciding. She did not remind him that she has heard him say the same thing about the management of patients.

There are at this moment 408 female inmates in the asylum, sixteen of them awaiting her judgement. Not those who have already passed the discharge board, because it would be challenging the judgement of the committee to admit them to Rose Tree House. Not those who have been readmitted more than once, whose troubles are categorised as ‘chronic.’ She is to interview women who have recently failed a discharge hearing for reasons that the committee believes likely to be addressed by a period of residence at Rose Tree House. The committee does not note its reasons for this or, as far as Ally can tell, any other decision it makes. Do not question them, says Dr. Crosswyn. There are other ways, my dear, when there is something in which one believes very much, and if you are to make the splendid career I hope for you then you must allow me to show you some of them. It is enough, for now, that we have Rose Tree House and that the principle of your involvement in admissions has been accepted; let us prove it a success and then we may begin to seek more influence over the selection of inmates. I beg your pardon, of boarders. She knew, of course, that Mary Vincent’s name would not be on the list, but at least Margaret Rudge is there.

She has passed through the parlour only once before, when she first looked around the asylum. It is a bigger room than a person can comfortably occupy, the size of two of the wards above, and tiled like the hall in a chequerboard pattern with a border in encaustic. They have lit a fire under the granite hearth, but it does not reach half way up the fireplace and dwindles in the sunlight coming through the tall windows. Still, it is a token of goodwill, of generosity, to give her a fire in March. They have set a heavy table before the fire, the sort of table on which one might confidently put to sea, and an armchair for her and what looks like a piano stool for the patient. A hard-backed chair near the door for a nurse. Ally checks the clock on the mantelpiece; she has five minutes yet. She cannot move the table but she pulls the chair out from behind it and carries the stool across so that they can sit together at the fireside. After all, she is meant to be testing