Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘I expect someone taught her. Made her do them, or watch them.’

  Ally and the nurse look round. A woman of perhaps forty-five, solidly built, greying hair trying to wave above the sewn-up plait. There are no private conversations on the ward, but most of the patients even here preserve the fiction that what medical staff say to each other is mysteriously incomprehensible or inaudible to those without training.

  ‘Well, really, Margaret. Eavesdropping! I’m sorry, doctor. I’ll put her in the corner till we’re done. Interrupting like that.’

  Ally touches the nurse’s arm. ‘No. There is no need.’

  She turns to the patient. To Margaret. ‘Good morning. I am Dr. Moberley Cavendish. You are right, of course.’

  Margaret holds out her hand, as if they were meeting at a coffee morning. ‘Margaret Rudge.’

  Not looking at the nurse, Ally shakes hands. ‘You know Mrs. Minhinnet well?’

  Patients’ disorders feed on each other but they also adapt to each other, creating an ecology of madness all too easily upset by arrivals and departures.

  ‘We’ve been on the same ward six months. Can’t help but get to know people.’

  And in your view, she wants to ask, is Mrs. Minhinnet mad or only damaged? Is she, in fact, telling truths that no one wants to hear? Because if, she sometimes thinks, if all the women in here who speak of indecent things, who recount endlessly obscene acts and unnatural couplings, are speaking from unhappy experience, then their madness may be perfectly reasonable. May be the inevitable response of a healthy mind to things that should not happen. And if that is the case, then the primary problem is not so much with the minds of some women as with the acts of some men. Older men, almost invariably. Men with power.

  ‘And you think someone has hurt her?’

  Margaret Rudge shrugs. ‘I think someone’s hurt all of us, doctor. But not everyone ends up in here.’

  Ally eyes Margaret Rudge. She doesn’t have time, not today. She’ll come back and hear some more.

  She suggests keeping the two women as much apart as possible. There is no space to move one of them unless Dr. Crosswyn agrees to move someone else, a game of chess that invariably ends by causing at least as much trouble as it solves. As in other branches of medicine, despite one’s instincts and best intentions it is often best to do nothing. Perhaps some gentle occupation for Mary Vincent, she suggests, not the laundry and obviously not the kitchen but a little dusting, something to occupy her hands and allow her to feel useful. For Mrs. Minhinnet, she thinks, she will ask Dr. Crosswyn if there might be a women’s garden work group. The farm labour is another matter, but there is surely sufficient precedent for women’s cultivation of flowers? She examines a patient with a cough, declines to prescribe for the abdominal pains of a woman who has believed herself in an advanced state of pregnancy for some years, and makes her way up the stairs.

  Mrs. Ashton is standing in the window, fingering the bars. She turns.

  ‘She is still with you,’ she says, her eyes fixed on a point behind Ally. ‘She has words for you and she’ll follow you until you hear her.’

  She is always with me and always gone, Ally thinks. As are all the dead. One does not need to see ghosts, to know that people are haunted.

  Mrs. Middleton stops rocking on her bed and looks straight at Mrs. Ashton. ‘You are an evil, wicked woman and the flames of Hell will take you and burn you for all eternity.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Ally says. ‘Mrs. Elsfield, look, I brought some blackberries for you all. I gathered them on Pendennis Head.’

  There is silence. Even Mrs. Curnow looks up.

  The nurse coughs. ‘You’ve brought a basket of blackberries onto the ward?’

  She has made a mistake. She should have checked with Dr. Crosswyn, and she should have known it was a mistake because she didn’t want him to know.

  Ally bites her lip. ‘I gathered more than I could eat myself. I thought you would all enjoy some fresh food.’

  But it is not her job, not a doctor’s job, personally to remedy weaknesses in the asylum’s commissariat. Next she will be bringing in pillows and new dresses.

  ‘Very kind of you, Mrs. Cavendish, I’m sure.’ The nurse doesn’t look at her. ‘Thank Mrs. Cavendish, ladies. I suppose I’d better go find a dish. Only we’ll have to take them down to tea, Mrs. Cavendish, I can’t be serving out fruit up here, and then the other wards’ll be wondering why they haven’t got blackberries and before you know it—well. You mean well, I dare say.’

  The road to Hell, Ally thinks.

  ‘It’s a good year, then, for blackberries?’ asks Mrs. Elsfield. ‘Time was, we’d be out after school picking and picking any fine day and the nettles and prickles on our hands. Ate a few, of course, but there were seven of us and never too much to go around, we’d get a proper slap if Mother thought we’d been greedy. Damsons, too, and rosehips to make a jelly for winter coughs. I didn’t like the work then but I’d be glad enough to be out in the fields now. Rain and all.’

  Mrs. Ashton has turned back to window. ‘You’ll not see another autumn,’ she says. ‘You’ll not leave here but feet first in a wooden box, and that before another harvest’s in.’

  Stop it, Ally wants to say. Shut up, you vile witch.

  ‘Mrs. Elsfield’s in fine health.’ She puts the basket down on the nurse’s table. ‘And maybe you will be back home next year, Mrs. Elsfield, who knows.’

  The nurse, returning, shakes her head. ‘Best not, Mrs. Cavendish,’ she murmurs. ‘They sometimes remember things we say, you know.’

  Mrs. Elsfield comes over to the table. The dress she has this week is cut so wide on the shoulders that the neckline sags open, showing breasts flat as empty socks lying on her ribs. She has to gather the skirt in her hands to walk. Hogarth, thinks Ally, the end of A Harlot’s Progress when the daring finery falls to rags, the manifest disjunction between a person’s appearance and her idea of herself. The clothes make Mrs. Elsfield look mad. Mrs. Elsfield removes Ally’s blue and white gingham cloth from the basket and then takes a handful of blackberries and pushes them all into her mouth. One rolls to the floor where Mrs. Middleton stamps on it. Purple juice drips from Mrs. Elsfield’s face onto the bodice of the dress, already less colourfully stained.

  ‘Stop that now.’ The nurse tries to grab Mrs. Elsfield’s hands. ‘I told you to stop it.’

  ‘Greed,’ says Mrs. Middleton. ‘Gluttony and greed.’

  But even as she is restrained, Mrs. Elsfield reaches for another handful, and when the nurse grasps her wrist she squeezes the berries, the berries Ally picked, so that pips and juice extrude between her swollen knuckles and drop to the floor.

  The nurse looks up and meets Ally’s gaze. ‘There. I told you there’d be trouble. Stirring things up like that.’

  A MAN WITH WHOM YOU’RE SHARING A BATHTUB

  Autumn has come, waves of bronze and red sweeping the wooded hills like a rising tide. It is like wearing tinted spectacles, seeing trees and the carpet of leaves in unnatural shades. He finds himself reaching out to finger individual leaves in colours he has not thought of, crimson and orange, the five-fingered lace of maples. Watching the land from the sea, from the end of the rocky peninsula where he’s spent the last three days, Tom has to remind himself that he too, is liable to the changing seasons, that his foreigner’s immunity to conversation, to manners and cuisine and laughter, does not extend to the body itself. Japanese rain wets his English skin and Japanese winds chill his English blood.

  Makoto pours tea. Curls of steam twine away from the translucent curve of the tea-bowl and rise in a different shape. Temmoku, Tom thinks, that kind of pottery with the glassy spots is called temmoku. He will take some home to Ally, although just now he craves a mug, a great workman’s mug, full of milky, sugary tea to warm his bones. And a handful of the bannocks Douglass’s cook used to make, spread with salt but
ter and sometimes indented with currants. Makoto offers him a green sweet that will be made of slimy rice dough and sweetened beans.

  ‘Makoto, what did you miss most when you were in Britain?’

  Makoto sips his tea, his tapering fingers holding the bowl as if it were an injured bird. ‘I was happy to be there.’

  Tom bites the sweet, and then remembers that it is a breach of etiquette to bite things this size. Or perhaps that is only sushi; the whole sweet would be quite a mouthful.

  ‘Of course. I mean, I am glad to hear that. As I am to be here. But perhaps after a time you began to wish for rice instead of bread, or fish in place of all our butcher’s meat, or your back ached from sitting always in chairs?’

  He finds it hard to imagine how anyone’s body could find ease in Japanese deportment, and in fact most of the Japanese objections to European furniture seem to pertain to its being immorally comfortable and softening to the Japanese character rather than any claim to convenience.

  Makoto gazes at the opening in the shoji screen, through which they can see a stripe of glowing forest and sunset sky. ‘Miso soup,’ he says. ‘And of course the baths. We can buy bread for you, you know, once we return to the city. And beef. There are even restaurants.’

  But there was nowhere in Aberdeen, Tom thinks, nor even in London, where Makoto and his colleagues could have found miso soup, or taken off their shoes and sat on the floor to drink green tea out of a bowl. He eats the other half of his sweet.

  ‘I like rice and fish,’ he says. ‘And I’ll miss the baths too, when I go home.’

  ‘We’ll bathe before dinner? There are separate facilities for ladies here.’

  ‘Of course. I was only surprised, last time.’

  One would think—Tom thought—that a people as concerned by modesty and humility as the Japanese would have a strong regard for decency. One would be wrong. Tom knew from his reading that the Japanese bathe communally but he had not, somehow, expected that he himself would arrive at the bath in the last inn to find a naked woman in it, her bundled hair uncurling down her spine. He backed away and did not wash. Things are changing, Makoto says, and now it is rare even in the countryside to find such an arrangement. It was unfortunate, and he hoped that Tom would forgive the offence. Tom was left feeling dirty-minded, and apologetic. It’s not, he wants to protest, that women’s bodies upset him. It’s not that he thinks badly of people whose ideas about modesty and shame are different from those to which he is accustomed. It’s not that he doubts his own control (although the possibility of a physical—no, a physiological—reaction did cross his mind, as he stood there with only a towel to protect his own—his own conventions). He was just surprised, that’s all.

  Makoto is already sitting on a wooden stool, scrubbing himself with the seriousness of someone caulking a boat, as if any missed spot would make him sink. Tom takes the next place. There is no-one else present, but a line of wet footprints whose maker is now in the outdoor bath and was probably asking Makoto about the red-haired foreigner. Tom takes the bag of rice bran and begins to scrub as Makoto taught him, some thirty years after he thought he had learnt to wash himself. He is thinner than when he first came to Japan, softened by weeks as a passenger on the boat, and for the first time in his life he is glad to be short, but apart from his stature he is about as different from Makoto as a man might be. He recalls the array of human skulls he and Ally saw in the Natural History Museum in London: Negro, Asiatic, Caucasian, American Indian, Eskimo. The differences between races, Ally said, are no greater than the variations within each race, but they don’t show those. Perhaps because of the difficulties of acquisition, he suggested. He wants her. He wants to talk to his wife.

  Makoto rinses off his seat and replaces it for the next person. Tom empties a final bucket over his head and follows him outdoors, almost pleased to be so violently recalled to here and now by the cold wind over his wet skin. His feet cringe from the stone steps. Lanterns hung around the bath show two dark heads in the steam, but Tom’s need for the water’s warmth is far greater than his self-consciousness. For a moment his shocked feet don’t recognise heat, and then they tingle and burn. Sitting on the stone edge, he lowers himself in, thighs, buttocks, belly and chest softening, melting into the water. His ribs open, pulling steam and mountain air deep into him, and his arms float in the warmth, fingers opening, breathing, like sea anemones.

  He opens his eyes to find Makoto looking at him, at his ginger-furred white torso and his freckles. ‘It’s good for you? The baths?’

  He looks back at Makoto, whose slender shoulders rise from the water, who is somehow clothed in self-possession. ‘Very pleasant, thank you.’

  The two other faces turn towards them, and one of the men speaks to Makoto. Makoto makes a small bow as part of his response. Imagine bowing, Tom thinks, to a man with whom you’re sharing a bathtub. He imagines Makoto, naked, waving his hand, scraping his foot, making a Renaissance courtier’s obeisance. The story of the Emperor’s new clothes comes to mind; Japanese dignity is so profound that every aspect of business could probably be conducted in the state of nature without anyone betraying a flicker of dismay. He has not, he realises, heard any Japanese jokes. Or at least has not recognised any Japanese jokes. He himself has not laughed in many weeks.

  ‘He asks if you are Dutch,’ Makoto says through the steam. ‘And he says it is an honour to meet you.’

  Tom raises his head, which he has been resting against the side of the bath. Teak, he thinks, but possibly dark bamboo. ‘Please tell him I am honoured to be here. Or whatever is appropriate.’

  There is more talking and bowing and then the other men leave. They are made like boys, Tom thinks, and move as if their very bones were lighter than those of Europeans. He averts his gaze as they pass, genitals bobbing at eye-height, and then stretches out his legs into the middle of the bath. The water feels chalky, perhaps even oily, between his fingers and toes.

  Makoto leans back, looking up to the stars. Their feet touch each other and glide away like fish. In the lamplight, Tom can see the steam curving around Makoto’s head and face, haunting the shape of his skull and the hair beginning to fall down over his ears and brow.

  ‘I am due some vacation,’ Makoto says. ‘Some holiday.’

  ‘You have worked many days without one.’ So, Tom supposes, has he, but the idea of being without occupation is not appealing. It would not be easy, to be here and not getting things done.

  ‘My parents live not so very far from here. On the way back to the city.’

  Tom raises his head, pulls his arms back into his body, a more conventional pose. ‘You wish to visit them. Of course. I am sure I can return alone.’

  Probably. If Makoto hands him over to someone reliable with clear instructions about when and where he is to be delivered.

  ‘I would make every arrangement. Or, if you wish, we would be most honoured to receive you as our guest. My parents are mere farmers and it is not a fine establishment, but if it would please or interest you to visit they would be very happy. They have a room that is sometimes used for travellers.’

  It is almost impossible, Tom has read, for a foreigner to be invited into a Japanese house. To a restaurant, yes, or even a theatre, but it is not the Japanese way to entertain at home. He finds himself lumbering to his feet to bow properly, face down until his hair dips into the bath. Idiot, he thinks, hippopotamus. Makoto smiles, nods, satisfied if also amused.

  ‘Makoto, I thank you. I am greatly—’ the word honoured is exhausted—‘greatly privileged, greatly moved. Of course, I am delighted to accept.’

  He is not sure that the books, proclaiming the impossibility of such an occasion, offer any guidance to its etiquette. He must take a gift, of course, surely an instinctive and universal response, and he knows more about the deployment of footgear and chopsticks than he did. All his speech must go through Makoto in any case, and Mako
to is doubtless making translations of intent and convention as well as mere words. He will not be allowed to offend through utterance. But how long, he wonders. Makoto may be owed holiday but Tom is here to work, and the sooner he finishes, the sooner he can return to Ally. Once he has bought De Rivers’ paintings.

  ‘A few days only,’ says Makoto. ‘And it is barely a diversion from the road back.’

  A DOCTOR DOES NOT WEEP

  Ally was woken in the night by an angry wind hurling rain against the window, and this morning the boats are toppling and jerking on their anchors, their masts scribbling at the air. There is no point in taking an umbrella because even if she could hold it in the wind, the rain is horizontal, blowing across the lawn into the limestone wall. As she stoops to lace her boots she sees that the damp patch under the window has metastasized along the skirting board and up the wall, stretching out to join the water seeping under the cornice. One day, she thinks, the whole house will dissolve around her, the granite blocks settling back into the earth from which they came as cement and plaster trickle milkily down the hill to the sea. She doesn’t go down to the kitchen, where this process is relatively advanced; Dr. Crosswyn will give her coffee and biscuits later and it is not worth the effort and fuel to light the range when she will be out all day.

  There are two letters on the mat, the Japanese ink from Tom’s pen already blurred and spattered with Cornish rain. She scrabbles for her pocket, crushes them in. The other is not Aunt Mary’s stationery; probably from Annie who is staying with a sister about to have a baby. Even in the high-walled garden, she has trouble closing the front door against the wind, and her skirts whirl up around her knees as she wrestles with it. She could stay at home today. It is not as if she were being paid to attend to the asylum. But they will be expecting her, Mrs. Middleton and Mrs. Elsfield and Mary Vincent, and the state of her clothes when she arrives will be of no moment to them whatsoever. Besides, the nurses need no additional ammunition for accusations of flightiness and unprofessional behaviour. She sees herself at home all day, watching the progress of the damp and trying to study against the sound of wind and rain. She pulls her scarf up over her hat, a pointless gesture towards conventional concerns.