by Sarah Moss
Ally straightens her shoulders. ‘Good morning, Nurse. I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m Doctor Moberley Cavendish.’
She holds out her hand and the nurse pulls the door a little wider.
‘I’ve heard about you. Lady doctors, I don’t know. I suppose you want to come in, nose around?’
Ally has to sidle around the door, crushing her skirt against the frame. ‘I would like—I will visit the ward, yes.’
There are lady nurses, she thinks, or at least female nurses. There is an odour, and somewhere down the corridor someone shouting and banging. The floorboards are thick with grime.
‘We don’t allow visitors, see. Not even the Committee come here.’ She slams the door behind Ally and begins to lock it again. ‘’S only patients, here.’
Ally stands tall. Abductors and pimps of young girls tried to set Josephine Butler’s clothes on fire and did not succeed in frightening her away from her work; Mamma has endured calumny and innumerable threats without turning from her righteous vocation. The Edinburgh Seven, the first women to achieve medical qualifications in Britain, were assaulted and menaced by their own colleagues and teachers. She will not be threatened by a nurse. Doubtless, says Mamma’s voice, the woman is underpaid, overworked and wholly uneducated. Do not fancy yourself better than her because you have had such indulgence and opportunity as she cannot imagine.
‘I am a doctor,’ Ally says again.
‘So you say.’ The nurse moves off. The corridor’s windows are widely spaced and between them it is dim. The shouting stops but the banging goes on. Ally follows her.
ASKING STRANGE GODS
A ‘walking garden’ is simply a garden around which one walks, like a maze without the deceit. A gravel path, bordered by moss and lumps of granite, winds from the veranda around a variety of pine and maple trees towards a summer house half-hidden from the main building by foliage. Makoto’s grandfather channelled a stream to loop through his garden and dammed it to make a pond over which a willow weeps. There are stepping stones across the pond and two bamboo bridges where the path crosses the stream. Tom guesses he understands how the young Makoto developed an interest in engineering. He makes his way back to the veranda, noticing how the light on the mountains is beginning to change as the afternoon goes on. He is, after all, on almost the same latitude as home.
The screens are pushed back so that the house is part of the garden and the last of the day’s sunshine bathes the tatami mats. Makoto kneels beside his grandmother, who is sewing something small and red. For the first time, Makoto is wearing Japanese clothes, something like a scaled-down kimono with matching trousers in blue and grey stripes. A man who was not trying to appreciate Japanese culture might be reminded of an English prison uniform. Tom approaches, sits on the edge of the veranda to unfasten his boots, and then pauses. He can’t imagine what the old lady, who lived most of her life in Samurai times, must feel about his presence. How would his mother react if he brought home an African savage with a bone in his nose?
Makoto looks up, switches languages and, somehow, indefinably, posture. ‘How do you find the garden?’
‘Beautiful,’ says Tom. ‘I do not think even the best British gardeners take such care for visual effect, for depth and detail. We do not understand gardening as a form of art.’ The delicacy of the red leaves with the mountain forest behind them, he thinks, the way the bushes are trimmed to echo the shapes of the hills as seen from the path. He is not sure he would have noticed such things two months ago.
Makoto nods. ‘It is perhaps different. I used to walk in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow.’ And long for the ones at home, he does not say. He speaks to his grandmother, who glances at Tom quickly, as if appraising something she is about to buy, and then bows her head to him.
‘I told her that you like it,’ Makoto says. ‘She is glad.’
As in Falmouth, the sun drops behind the hill long before nightfall. A servant girl comes out of the stone-floored kitchen that Tom glimpsed on the other side of the entrance hall and closes the screens, first the heavy wooden ones, dark with age, and then the shoji inside. Firelight blooms around the sand-filled pit in the middle of the floor, flickering over the iron pot hanging from a chain and the maid’s soft gown as she bustles around a low table. He finds himself wondering what women wear under their kimono, what a man would find if he unwrapped an obi. The girl stands back to check that everything is ready and then hurries back to the kitchen.
There is too much food. Clear soup, of course, and river fish curled in its batter as if it had leapt from the stream into the hot oil. Little bowls of brown cubes. Smaller bowls of wilted leaves and shoots, sitting in dark liquid and scattered with crunchy things. Bowls with upturned saucers over them, which will contain more substances unnameable in English or even Linnaean Latin. Tom folds himself onto the cushion indicated by Makoto and watches as the others settle. Here, it seems, women and men eat together. Makoto’s grandmother sinks to her knees as easily as a child at prayer. The firelight plays on the tortoiseshell hairpins rising from her grey chignon, carved into the shapes he has learnt to recognise as representative of cherry blossom to the Japanese mind. Perhaps Ally would like such a thing? But it would not combine well with a hat. Makoto’s father, fresh from his bath, has also changed from the working clothes in which he came from the field, and is now in the same striped uniform as Makoto. He bows across the table to Tom, who bows back. The maid comes to light the oil lamps, okiandon, flames flickering against the paper so that Tom looks around for water, and arranges them on the floor beside the table. Faces and fabrics blush in the wavering light, bodies fading into the gathering darkness around the fire. The music of voices speaking a language he still can’t follow, the purr and crackle of a wood fire, and somewhere, beyond the wooden walls, wind in the mountain forest where stone idols pass the night wide-eyed and the last wolves of Japan lurk in their dens.
In the morning, he walks in the garden again. He overslept, alone with the shutters closed in the one room at the top of the ladder, and when he came down the maid brought rice and soup for him alone. Makoto seems already to have left the house, and Tom, like a baby whose mother has gone out, has no way of understanding where he has gone or when he will return. The women, even the grandmother, seem to be occupied in the kitchen. He stands on the first stepping stone, seeing that the
mountain and the trees are reflected in the smooth water below the summer house. As the objects displayed in houses change with the seasons, so the composition of this garden will change with the inclination of the sun and the variation of the forest around. It is a space for contemplation, he thinks, intended to be conducive to meditation and perhaps even prayer, but Tom has nothing to discuss with the gods and his thoughts are not restful. Winter is coming, he can smell it on the cold morning air, and it is time he was back in the city, drawing up plans and ordering the new lenses so more lights can be built in the spring by Japanese engineers training now in the university in Tokyo. While he waits for shipments, he can execute De Rivers’ commission. He doesn’t know how long it might take to make what De Rivers wants, but the sooner the seamstresses start, the sooner they will finish and the sooner he can book his tickets home. It may have been a mistake, coming here, however interesting and atmospheric. Ally will be fine, of course, she is an independent professional woman and her letters show that she is busy enough at the asylum, but even so, he thinks, even so it is not as if she had any acquaintance in Falmouth. It is not as if she had the habit of taking care of herself. The cottage is undeniably damp even when fires are lit, and she may be huddling in that coarse shawl instead of paying for coal. It would have been better to leave her in London with her aunt and uncle, where he first found her. He paces back over the bridge, which seems now a foolish toy for the wasted hours of a grown man. What difference does a garden make, to the progress of humanity? Since he is here, since the day is lost, he will write to Penvenick.
Work of a kind. And to Ally. He will bring his letter case out here, to the summer house, where he will be neither a nuisance nor a curiosity to the daily household routine.
The air warms as the morning wears on until Tom, sitting in the sun on the steps of the summer house, takes off his jacket and tilts his face to the sky, eyes closed. The sun shines through his blood like last night’s flames through the paper lanterns, but there is still an edge in the breeze carrying the dusty scent of falling leaves.
‘Cavendish?’
He starts. Makoto. Damn it, they can creep up on a man sitting on a gravel path.
Makoto bows. ‘Sorry. I started you. I apologise I was not here when you arose.’
‘Startled. You startled me. Not at all. I am sorry I overslept.’
‘Startled,’ Makoto repeats. Another difficult word. ‘I am glad you slept comfortably. I had to pay a visit. You have enjoyed the garden?’
‘Very much.’
Makoto bows again. ‘You would like to take some luncheon now? And then my mother wishes that I accompany her to the temple. Perhaps it would interest you? It is not far.’
‘Of course,’ Tom says. ‘Thank you.’ Because he is not, here, an engineer, an expert, but a child, to go where he is taken.
The grandmother is kneeling on the veranda with three small human heads on the boards in front of her. Tom stops.
‘She makes dolls,’ says Makoto at his elbow. ‘An old tradition. Would you like to see?’
They are not the kind of dolls one could give to a child, or at least not to an English child. The heads are bone-white, with an eggshell texture. Their eye sockets remind him of something. He fumbles. Of holes, of fretwork. Of the holes on either side of a violin’s strings.
‘Will they have eyes?’ he asks, suddenly afraid that there are blinded creatures out there, that Japanese children play with eyeless homunculi.
Makoto glances at him. The grandmother goes on scraping at a teaspoon-sized wooden paddle with what looks like a razor blade. There are tiny feet in an open-mouthed bag beside her.
‘Of course. And hair. There is a man in the village who makes very small hair ornaments for her.’
‘Miniature,’ Tom suggests.
‘Miniature. And my grandmother sews clothes for them, kimono and obi.’
Fingers begin to take shape under the blade. Long fingers.
‘It is exacting work,’ says Tom. ‘She is most skilful.’
Makoto says something to the old lady, who folds her scalpel in her hands to bow to Tom. He wonders if De Rivers would like one of the dolls, but he has no idea how he would enquire about making a purchase, and anyway he does not want to return to the city carrying one on his back.
He follows the back of Makoto’s mother’s red kimono away from the village, along a track between the rice fields. There is sun in the trees again, and on the shoulders of his tweed jacket. He expects another temple like the one he found in the hills, stone gods congregating in a forest clearing.
Where the track enters the woods, there is another of the great wooden pi, this time painted red, and then, leading through the trees, another and another, only a few inches above Makoto’s head. It is like walking under dancers’ raised hands in Oranges and Lemons. Fallen leaves, maple and yellow elongated triangles he doesn’t recognise, form a tessellated pattern on the path’s blue-grey stones. Tom touches one of the uprights as he passes, but of course it is only painted wood. Makoto looks back.
‘They are torii gates,’ he says. ‘Families give them in thanks, or sometimes in memory of the dead.’
Tom nods. Like stained glass windows at home, although there is no sign, yet, of the thing to which these arches are given. To the woods, or the path. Makoto’s mother speaks and Makoto replies, nothing Makoto feels any need to translate for Tom. The path becomes cobbled, in readiness, and they go on into the expected clearing. Sunbeams drip through the gaps where leaves have fallen.
‘Oh.’ There is a flight of stone steps leading up to a wooden building whose openings are screened with latticework. Red banners with black writing on them hang from poles like the state flags of visiting dignitaries. A pair of stone foxes guards the steps. Water trickles into a stone trough under a wooden roof; it must be piped from a spring further up the hill. Tom hangs back while Makoto and his mother rinse their hands and mouths, spitting onto the copper and gold leaves drifting around the sacred clearing.
‘May I?’ he asks.
Makoto nods. ‘Please. If you like it.’
The water is tepid, pleasant on his hands damp from walking under the sun in a tweed jacket. It tastes of nothing. He follows mother and son up the steps and copies them as they clap three times to summon the gods. He asks for Ally to be well and happy, and for a safe return to her. He stands aside, waiting, with the feeling that asking strange gods for these things may have removed them from the realm of workday probability into the category of impossible magic, desperate measures.
SHE IS LIKE YOU
The fields lie bare to the plough now, and in the hedges the berries shrivel and drop, mouldering under the rotting fingers of hawthorn leaves and dead grass. Rain drifts around the peninsula. It is not cold, not cold enough to light a fire for one person, but the nights lengthen and the rain drips day by day. It is a preparation for the spring, Ally reminds herself. There will be wild flowers, violets and bluebells, that she will take to the asylum whatever the nurses say, and the white cottage will be bright in the sun, but meanwhile there is water seeping from the earth and running down the wall in the kitchen, and a musty smell in the cupboard in the other bedroom led her to find her blue wedding gown spotted with mildew. She can smell mould in the way the house exhales when she opens the door. It’s important to keep the windows open, Tom said, even when the fire’s lit, but for some days it has been no drier outside than in. One winter, she thinks, Cornwall will simply dissolve and slide back into the sea, perhaps leaving the jagged cliffs of the north coast as a memorial and a hazard to shipping. Probably Atlantis did exist until the north Atlantic rains washed it away. She will write to Annie, who enjoys such whimsy and has been fretting that Ally is falling prey to low spirits and nervous strain at the asylum.
The stationmaster at Perranwell has somehow managed to keep his roses blooming, although each flower hangs heavy with rain and the soil in the flowerbed glistens wet. There is no nightfall these days, only a gradual dimming. Ally gets off the train and feels the saturated sky press low over her head. She thinks of Aunt Mary in London and Annie further along the south coast. Somewhere out there, somewhere upcountry, there will be room to move and breathe between the earth and sky, perhaps even a line of sight to the stars and sun. The solar system is still there, beyond the clouds.
She hurries home, her skirts gathered in her hand away from puddles and mud. Up the hill to the main road, from which she can see the estuary and the boats rocking at anchor, and then down past the taverns of Killigrew Street, brightly lit and leaking music and talk. A door opens and a man comes out with a woman clinging to his arm. A ship must have come in. She turns along Dunstanville, past the captains’ houses, where lamplight and firelight glow like beacons in the great bay windows. The curtains have not yet been drawn, and she sees a family gathered around a table where a maid in a white apron brings food, and two doors down a woman stitching at an embroidery frame by the fire. They would not sit so cheerfully, she thinks, if they had seen the back wards. If they knew that tomorrow, Mary Vincent who is not stupid and understands perfectly well what is happening to her, is to be moved to a place where she will spend her days sitting with deranged and incontinent women whose only advantage is that most of them are—probably—too mad to know that they will be there until they die.
When she wakes, her linen pillowcase is soft with moisture and the outside sheet is clammy to the touch. She rests her hand in the dry hollow where she has lain all night and the
n on Tom’s side, chill and damp. She pushes back the covers and stands up, knowing even before drawing the curtains that Falmouth is still swathed in rain. Some drops bead the window and some roll slowly down the glass, drawing trails thin as the finest etching. She watches a droplet roll into another droplet and gather speed, finds herself tracing their progress with her finger on the glass. Come now, Ally tells herself. She makes the bed, entombing the warmth and dryness under heavy blankets, and puts on layers of clothes. Her stockings cling and wrinkle on her legs as if she had just had a bath. This evening, it may be time to light a fire, for the house and for Tom’s possessions if not for herself. She remembers the verse on the bedroom wall in Manchester: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt. Even so, even Mamma might agree that the balance between the wastefulness of lighting a fire for one person and the carelessness of allowing cloth to rot and books to moulder is beginning to tip. Or perhaps the books and clothes are merely a specious excuse for self-indulgence, perhaps she imagines their peril worse than it is because she wants a fire. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. There is no health in us. I do not believe, she thinks. I do not believe.
And at the top of the hill, the rain clears, and she can see that there is white sky raised high over the north coast. Ally pushes back her hood, her vision unblinkered for the first time in days, and feels the wind on her ears and neck. The asylum stands before her on the hill’s apex, looking like Janus in two directions. To the south, Truro disappears into the mizzle, the spire of the new cathedral haunting the cloud like pencil under watercolour.
She has spent most of her time on the back wards and not been to Ward Four for a few days. Dr. Crosswyn, summoned for a consultation at the hospital, has left a message saying that Mrs. Elsfield seems to be failing and Ally should examine her. A medical problem, at least. The kind of call any doctor would make. She makes her way slowly up the stairs, noticing how washed sunlight floods through the high window over the landing and down the wooden stairs. There is dust on the ends of each tread and inside the spindles, and she can see where a patch on the wall has been repainted a slightly different colour. Perhaps it will be a different nurse on duty, someone who hasn’t already concluded that Ally is incompetent.
