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

probably made from rice like everything else. He waits for it to dry, runs his hands over the nearest crate as if they might palpate or somehow intuit the contents. White butterflies on blue silk, each life-sized wing supplied by life-sized veins in cobweb grey. Pink cherry blossoms only just visible, barely suggested, on a pale ground, their brown branches a geometric counterpoint to the froth of flowers. There is a saucer of ink and a finer brush on the tray: Thomas Cavendish, c/o Penvenick & Co., Falmouth.

There. His knees are stiff and he stands up. The screens are open a few inches, admitting a bar of sunlight in which the rough fibres of the tatami mat stand out. He holds his hand in the beam, feeling the sun’s warmth and watching his shadow fingers. There have been days lately when it would have been little surprise to find that he no longer cast a shadow, when he could have questioned his own existence. He sees his own spirit haunting the little house, a shadeless and silent presence here long after he has crossed the seas and embraced his wife once more. His own trunks sit on the other side of the room, already locked and corded. A few trinkets as gifts, a kimono for Ally that he realised later might remind her too much of one of her father’s designs (but the colours are hers and the shop, beside the new hospital, made him impatient to show her the juxtaposition of ancient and modern). No chrysalis here, only what any man, any man of modest means and limited interest in such things, might bring. He rubs his knees. He may as well go out, not a last walk because he has still two days, two days of living from his valise and trying not to hear the clock’s tick in every step he takes, but perhaps the first of the last walks. He is already a ghost, a man in the act of leaving. He sits on the wooden ledge in the earth-floored entrance and puts on his shoes, slides open the street door and bolts it behind him. In three days’ time, these small acts will be memories. The stones under his feet now, the shuttered windows of this alley, the forested hills rising at the end of the street, will be only in his mind.

He does not want to go home.

He keeps walking, down the street, past the pickle shop and the sweet shop whose owner returns his bow, along the canal with a wooden bridge for each house. Cherry trees make an avenue down to the river, not yet blossoming but in tight-fingered green bud. Small birds flutter in their branches.

He does not want to go home. He does not know his wife, not really, not any more. He remembers her breasts in his hands and the smoothness of her back, remembers the satisfaction of entering her at last and then again and again those weeks after the wedding, but any woman has breasts and a back and a place to enter. Makiko, for example, under her obi and her kimono. The woman passing him right now, with the shuffling gait as if her legs could hardly part and blue-black hair bound up as if it could never fall between naked shoulder blades. Horrible, he thinks, it is a horrible thought to find in his head. He remembers Ally talking about medicine and poverty, about the injustices of women’s lives. He remembers her cooking in his kitchen. He does not quite remember why they are married.

He comes to the river and turns upstream, past the boats where the fishermen’s cormorants wait tethered and on to where the willows trailing idle fingers in the stream are green again. He will continue up the hillside, under the red torii arches to the temple where he will stay awhile, watch the shadows move in the priests’ garden and the reflections of trees ripple and blur on the water as if perception itself were to waver.

B

URNING

B

OATS

Dr. Crosswyn has advertised for a matron-housekeeper, but until she is appointed Ally has agreed to sleep at Rose Tree House, taking the opportunity to have the white cottage replastered and repainted. She has chosen an attic room for herself, smaller than those shared by the parlour boarders, from which she can see through the treetops to the sea.

She went to bed leaving the curtains open, for the pleasure of knowing that the moon shone on the waves and the stars circled the sky while she slept. Her hair has come loose in the night and tangled itself at the back of her neck. She sits up and scoops it out of the way. The first grey threads are appearing; if Tom were not already on his way back he might return to find her visibly older. A woman of a certain age. She may very well be half-way through her life, and to what end? What account can she give, what has been learnt? Behind the headland at St Mawes, the sun is rising, the eastern sky flaming and the path of open water, the Carrick Roads, printed with reflected hill and dawn. Red sky in the morning.

There is that of which a reasonable person might be proud. It is not nothing, it cannot be dismissed as hysteria or nervous imagining, to pass the examinations and qualify as a doctor. It is not nothing to win the prize, to graduate top in the year. It is not nothing for a woman to publish a paper in the British Journal of Asylum Medicine. She kneels up and leans over the window sill, inhaling the March breeze coming through the trees. There is still a faint odour of paint. The rooks are on the wing, swirling like leaves around their tree. And what then? Is it enough for a life, to pass examinations, to win a prize? To assist in the saving of a few lives,