Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  There are only two other people in their carriage, one asleep with his head lolling against the window and the other reading at the far end. Tom waits while the train pulls out and the town buildings give way to more forest. Makoto, in the window seat, appears intent on the passage of trees.

  Tom clears his throat. ‘Makoto? I have been thinking about the foxes. I am puzzled.’

  Makoto does not look at him. ‘Please, do not trouble yourself. It is a foolish tale. Not worthy of the attention of an educated man.’

  There is a house in a clearing, where they must hear the approach and passage of every train loud as thunder.

  ‘But I don’t understand. If people worship the fox gods in shrines, why is it an accusation to say that someone is a fox owner?’

  ‘As I said, it is foolishness. Superstition.’

  ‘I am interested, even so.’

  ‘Then you should consult someone who has made a study of such things. I will try to arrange an introduction.’

  Makoto takes a book from his bag, not the one he was reading before. Tom gazes out of the window, feeling bruised, remembering the garden in the rain. It is not as if he had asked Makoto to speak of foxes, as if he had behaved like a nosy foreigner. He would never have known about the superstition if Makoto had not volunteered information.

  Most of the railway buildings look European, as if a giant little boy from Hamburg or Edinburgh had laid out his train set around the hills and plains of Japan. The porters wear braided jackets and peaked caps as they stand before relief Corinthian columns and arched windows. The engine whistles and blows the same tune as at home, but the street-sellers carry bamboo baskets containing artful arrangements of rice and vegetation and the women shuffle in geta and kimono, as if the little boy’s sister has added a scattering of dolls from a very different game. Green hills and rice paddies gave way to huddled wooden houses a while ago. Tom wants to turn back,

  Makoto lowers his book. ‘I will take you to your residence, or you would like to eat first?’

  ‘My residence? I am not returning to the guest house?’

  He had been looking forward to it, now he knows how to behave. A little more about how to behave. He wanted to see the woman’s kimono approaching below the curtains, and glimpse the courtyard through the paper screens.

  Makoto makes eye contact for the first time since Tom came down to breakfast in his tweed suit. ‘To stay several weeks? No. Mr. Senhouse offered an apartment in his house. You will have a bed, tables and chairs. More comfortable.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Tom. And then, ‘Thank you.’

  Makoto ducks his head. ‘It was nothing. I hope you will be content there.’

  ‘Of course. I thank you.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  It is as if they have gone right back to the beginning. Perhaps it is rude, to present a man in the morning with what he said the night before. He does not see, anyway, why Makoto should regret merely asking a question of his parents, asking permission, for how else is one to obtain an answer? (Perhaps not, perhaps in Japan there are ways of knowing how a question will be answered before it is asked, in which case the question is merely ritual, though it is increasingly clear that Japanese ritual is not mere.) Are fox owners a caste or was the status acquired, and if so, when and by whom? Why did they send you away? Who will inherit the farm, if you stay in the city? He has tried, holding Brunton’s book on his lap and gazing out of the window, to think of an English equivalent. One might not wish to marry into a family showing hereditary insanity, but that is a practical concern about the health of resulting children, well supported by science and probably obtaining also in Japan. Most families prefer alliances within their own class but there is no magic involved, no supernatural element. A Catholic, he thinks, marrying a Protestant, an English girl with an Indian man, but it is not the same thing. The shapeshifters and witches left Britain long ago.

  The train is slowing, but Makoto has gone back to his book. Tom clears his throat. ‘Makoto? Who is Mr. Senhouse?’

  Makoto’s glance slides across Tom to the window. ‘A teacher. At the new business college. He is here with his wife and they have a large house. They had a railway engineer, last year.’

  Makoto pushes his book into his bag, begins to fasten his coat and scarf. Tom stands up, his breakfast soup and rice still curdled in his stomach. A teacher and his family, he himself the next in a sequence of visiting engineers. He wishes there were a way for Makoto to say what he has done wrong, to say Tom, I think we are good enough friends for me to tell you that I would not have been so confidential without the shochu and that I hope we need never refer to it again. Or Tom, old chap, I know you meant no harm but the way you said goodbye to my family was not quite right. Maybe, it occurs to him, Makoto is saying such things in some way that Tom is unable to intuit. It is not fair, he thinks. He has intended no wrong, no insult.

  He thinks hard about his tone of voice, about the rhythm of what he is about to say. ‘I enjoyed the guesthouse. It would seem less strange now.’

  Makoto stands back to let Tom walk first to the door. ‘You will want a place to work. A desk and chair. It is not the custom to spend more than two or three days in such an inn.’

  But I want to, he thinks. But the Japanese have been working without desks and chairs since the dawn of time, since Izanagi and Izanami came to a world without form and void. But I will be back to feather-beds and stuffed armchairs, to meat pies and suet puddings, soon enough and for the rest of my life.

  There is a sound like horses crossing a bridge as all the clog-wearers on the train walk along the platform. Tom waits for Makoto to join him. He has seen some Europeans’ houses that look as if they were imported, foundation to ridgepole, from suburban London. ‘Mr. Senhouse has a Japanese house?’

  ‘The arrangement is made by the Ministry. As the Minister judges best. There is a restaurant near here, if you would like to eat. And then this afternoon I must return to the department.’

  ‘But are you hungry, Makoto?’

  ‘You would like to eat lunch?’

  ‘As you prefer.’

  Checkmate, Tom thinks. Tag. You’re it.

  They end up in a noodle place, where Makoto allows his gaze to linger just a moment on the spots of soup that soon fleck Tom’s shirt.

  They’re crossing the bridge, heading up towards the European quarter which is to become Tom’s rightful home, when he sees the obelisk set beside the river, a great stone like the ones raised across Yorkshire by ancient Britons. A flood marker? Some remnant of the people who farmed and fished here never imagining that one day the emperor would bring his court to Tokyo and the city swell around it? He leans forward to ask the jinrikisha man to stop. Makoto in his own jinrikisha may keep going if he wishes. The man drops the traces and watches as Tom clambers awkwardly down. The stone is darker than he has seen here, cut as smoothly as wood, with a script that seems curvier than Japanese swooping down each side. People have stuck pieces of paper in slots on its sides. Wishes, probably, or prayers, like the notes stuck up around altars on street corners as if the gods could read and would engage in correspondence. He touches the stone.

  Makoto joins him, does not meet his gaze. ‘The stone interests you? They are notes for missing children.’

  Tom can feel the relief on his face, relief that Makoto is again sufficiently well disposed to volunteer information. There is, he knows, a Japanese god especially concerned with infants. ‘Prayers?’

  ‘No. If you seek a child, or sometimes any person, you leave a letter here, on this side. If you find a lost child, you leave a note here, so the seeker can find. The lost can be returned.’

  ‘Do many children get lost?’

  He counts the papers, more for the lost than the found. Ten, fifteen.

  ‘The city is growing week by week. If they leave their own neighbourhood, who would know them?’r />
  ‘Who cares for the children in the meanwhile?’

  Makoto shrugs. ‘The finder, perhaps. Or there are special places now.’

  Tom remembers the street children in parts of London. Not lost, so far as he knew. Not visibly distressed. Someone probably knew where they were, more or less. No-one, Ally said, was looking for them, nor, very often, looking after them. It is a national sin, she said, that there are children there for anyone’s taking, for anyone’s pleasure or pain. The dogs of England, she said, are better protected in law than the wives and children. And yet she has married him. Become his wife. She may bear his child. He imagines being a child in limbo, missing and not missed, found and not sought. He lifts his hand again to the stone marker, as if by touch he will learn more than by gazing on what he cannot read.

  Makoto touches his arm, friendship—somehow, perhaps—re-established. ‘Come. Mr. Senhouse expects you, and I must return to the office. But later, if you like, we can take a walk around here. It is a traditional neighbourhood.’

  Tom watches Makoto’s jinrikisha bowl away. He cranes forward to see past the oiled paper hood and then thinks that any movement on the passenger’s part must affect the runner’s work. It is probably better to sit back, to tilt the yoke upwards. Unless one is going downhill. Between the hood and the man’s back, beginning to sweat through his tunic even in today’s cold, Tom can see glimpses of the city, the Imperial Gardens where the leaves have fallen since he was last here, wooden houses with their shutters closed to the cobbled streets, and steam, now, rising from some of the street-sellers’ carts. He wants the mountains, the murmuring forest. He thinks maybe he understands why Makoto needs to know that the place is waiting for him in the end. He, too, wants Makoto’s grandfather’s strolling garden, and he does not want to spend the winter doing a rich man’s shopping.

  The road ahead slopes upwards, lined on each side by shops where women throng with baskets. There is a lane leading to a temple where red and white banners flutter, and then a wall topped by a tiled roof over which twisted trees reach black fingers. He thinks he may be approaching the European quarter, where there is a church that seems to have come on a magic carpet from Bavaria and a range of architectural follies that must give the people of Tokyo strange ideas about European buildings. They scribble in stone in Europe, like children drawing fancy chimneys and extra staircases because they can. Europeans mistake quantity for quality, filling great rooms with useless objects as if the accumulation of possessions is an object in itself. European acquisitiveness is a compulsion, a disease. He remembers De Rivers’ house and shudders; it is not silks and teapots the English should be importing from Japan but houses. Architects, if not engineers. Missionaries, perhaps, to teach us what is worthy of veneration. The Japanese have known for generations to pipe water through cities in a way that keeps sewage apart from drinking water; it is London, the centre of the civilised world, that is rife with typhoid and cholera.

  The jinrikisha turns down a lane where wooden houses jostle, and then down another where there is only a high stone wall. There is a gateway, and they stop.

  THE MAY MOBERLEY MOTHER

  AND INFANT WELFARE CENTRE

  Ally wakes. The gaslight from the road creeps under the curtains as it always did, and across the bare boards. Mamma has removed the carpet on which she and May used to pretend to fly around the world. The blankets pulled around her face smell musty and the sheets are worn so thin that she can feel the coarse wool through them on her arms and feet. She is cold. She feels sticky between her legs and under her arms, still gritty from the journey. It’s too late, said Mamma, to be fussing with the range and the copper at this time of night. Cold water is healthful, especially for nervous complaints. Goodnight, Alethea. I am glad to see you home and ready to devote yourself to truly necessary work. But I do not have a nervous complaint, Ally thinks. Not exactly. She straightens her legs and then curls up again when she finds the cold at the bottom of the bed. Mamma is glad to see her. She would not have said that, before. Perhaps it was safe to come home after all. To come to her parents’ house.

  She pulls the covers up around her shoulders. Next winter, she supposes, she and Tom will be able to curl around each other when the nights are cold. But she does not believe it. Tom is so far away, and their weeks together now so much shorter than their separation, that he begins to feel like a fiction, their marriage only a story she has told herself to ward off the truth of her failure. He will not come back. Perhaps he never existed, perhaps the truth is that she has been here, asleep among Briar Rose’s thorns with the biblical admonition over her head, all along. May’s bed lies flat in the darkness and Ally, who thought her grieving for May was long finished, who knew anyway that Mamma was right to say that mourning is a form of self-indulgence which can do nothing for the departed and dishonours their memory by using it as an excuse for morbid idleness, finds herself weeping a little for May.

  When she wakes again there is muffled grey light around the window and a cart passing along the road. She has become unused to street noise, in the white cottage where she is woken by seagulls and sometimes by the bells and horns of ships feeling their way by dawn or fog. The house will be colder and damper for her absence, with no-one to watch the spread of cracks in the plaster. What if the ceiling falls while she is so far away? She should not have left it, her house and Tom’s and all Tom’s things, his books and blankets and clothes, his pots and pans, all their wedding presents from Aunt Mary and Annie and Tom’s mother and the framed engravings from Penvenick himself, all succumbing to the creeping damp. She should not have come here. She stands up, bare feet on the bare boards, the cold air from the window and the fireplace and the gaps in the floor reaching up under her nightdress, snatching at her thighs and waist. There is no pot under the bed, so she creeps down the stairs, across the hall where there is mud and grit under her feet and into the lavatory. There is a bad smell that was not there yesterday, and no paper.

  Ally prepares breakfast. Mamma goes through the morning’s post at the kitchen table. The bread is stale and the butter yellowed and cheesy; Mamma says it is her habit to take only rusks in the morning and that Papa does Ally a rare honour in breakfasting at home. There are no eggs, and no milk with which to make porridge, and no, Mamma does not wish the range to be lit; it is a wasteful practice when all three of them will be out all day. Mamma has said that Ally will be at the clinic by half-past eight.

  Papa comes down while Ally is setting the table in the dining room with tarnished silver. She will clean the silver this evening, she thinks, there is something satisfying about cleaning silver and perhaps once Mamma has seen the difference she will remember how much pleasanter it is, to be clean. Papa is wearing a blue silk scarf over a crimson velvet dressing gown and blowing on his hands.

  ‘Good morning, Ally. You slept well?’

  ‘Good morning, Papa. You come splendid to the breakfast table.’

  He touches the scarf. ‘Oh, a painting prop. It’s really Desdemona’s but she doesn’t grudge it, not in a house where it’s a mortal sin to light a fire in the morning. Do you want to bring a tray up to the studio? I’ve buckets of coal up there.’

  Ally shakes her head. ‘We’ll eat together.’

  ‘As you like, your first day home. You’re looking pretty, Princess Al. The low hair suits you and that’s a nice dress.’

  Mamma comes in. ‘Anyone would look pretty, as you call it, got up in such an outfit after hours primping her hair before the mirror. Such tight lacing will make you ill, Alethea.’

  Ally sits down. She remembers the clothes she had when she first went to London, the clothes she wore for the first autumn at medical school, until Aunt Mary intervened. ‘I do not think I spend five minutes on my hair, Mamma. And I am afraid that it is still most important for a professional woman to appear smart and prosperous. We are very often taunted with ugliness and unnatural inclinations as it is.’
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  Mamma shakes her head and pours herself a glass of water. ‘And do you think Our Lord did not have to bear worse jibes and insults in His work? Do you think that your poorest patients will think your appeasement of such men worth the money with which they could feed their children for many weeks? You should care more for your soul and less for the opinions of the world, Alethea.’

  Our Lord, Ally thinks, was dead by the time he was not much older than I am, and no woman will earn a living by disdaining the opinions of the world. The butter crumbles under her knife and she glances down. Does she look too tightly laced? In fact her stays are, as always, scarcely pulled and gently tied, but she has always been slim and perhaps the effect suggests tight lacing. She has let down her bustle, which was in any case slight, a mere nod to fashion, and the bodice is adorned only by black binding on the grey wool, but maybe the nurses will indeed see a fine lady. She is not sure the brown skirt and coat would be any better and the blue dress is too long to wear in a clinic, especially without a bustle to raise it.

  ‘This is what I have, Mamma. I am sorry if it is unsuitable.’

  ‘I am surprised that you consider such dress a good use of your husband’s money, that is all. It is unexpected.’

  Papa pushes back his chair. He has taken only one bite of the bread and butter. ‘It is pretty. I am out this evening, Elizabeth, and will probably sleep at the office.’ He bends to kiss Ally’s hair. ‘I have an apartment there now, you know. With Jenny gone, Mamma did not like to entertain at home.’

  ‘Goodbye, Papa.’

  His footsteps hurry up the stairs and then not into Mamma and Papa’s bedroom but to the studio, where he must be sleeping and dressing as well as painting. Ally feels a sudden desire to creep in while he is out, to rifle through the stacked paintings, warm her hands at the ghost of his coal fire and sit in his velvet armchair breathing the smell of oil paint and pipe smoke. The sound of Mamma crunching her rusks rings in the cold air.