by Sarah Moss
‘We will need to leave in fifteen minutes, Alethea. Cold water will suffice to wash these plates.’
There is a queue outside the May Moberley Mother and Infant Welfare Centre when Ally and Mamma arrive. Ally catches her breath at May’s name carved into the stone plaque; it must be a long time since she has seen it written down, seen the material sign of May. The red-brick walls are already grimed with soot. The breath of the mothers and infants hangs visible around their faces, although there are bare feet on the pavement and bare heads bobbing at their mothers’ sides. It is not that there is not poverty like this in Falmouth, but there is not—so far—such cold.
‘They need to be warm,’ Ally says. ‘Whatever else ails them, we must warm them. There is a stove within?’
‘But not always fuel,’ Mamma says. ‘We find our donors more generous around Christmas than in the autumn. And by Christmas it is too late for some of the infants.’
Ally nods. Across all classes, it is safer to be born like the animals in spring, but the seasonal variations in infant mortality are especially stark for the urban poor. Most of the babies now in arms along this pavement will be buried before their first birthdays. Nothing Ally can do within the walls of the May Moberley Welfare Centre will make much difference to this fact. The children need fuel, food and sanitation; those dying for simple lack of medical care are statistically insignificant. And yet the only ones for whom she works. Mamma’s is the more useful life, for even if a doctor saves an individual child, the child will continue to live in misery and hunger. It is not primarily medical care that is lacking but the most basic elements of public health. If Ally truly wished her work, her life itself, to be beneficial, she would have taken a different path.
‘Besides, Alethea, you surely have the sense to see that sitting them by the fire even for the whole morning serves only to weaken their constitutions. Come, I will introduce you to the nurses.’
Papa, Ally sees immediately, has not been involved in the architecture or interior design of the Centre. The floor is tiled, a chequerboard of black and red, and the windows set so high that only grey sky is visible from the floor. The hall reminds Ally of a municipal bath house, as if one could turn a tap somewhere and fill it with water. A municipal bath house might go some way towards fulfilling the aims of the Centre. Mamma strides ahead of Ally, through the hall and into a corridor painted the same shade of pale green as parts of the asylum and indeed the London Women’s Hospital.
‘Come along, Alethea. I have a committee meeting in Hulme at ten. Ah, Miss Eastman. I have brought you my daughter. Dr. Moberley.’
Moberley Cavendish. She wishes she had simply taken Tom’s name, separated herself from Mamma and Papa. Miss Eastman holds herself tall and meets Ally’s gaze, a wholly different manner from the asylum nurses. Even Ally recognises the expensive simplicity of Miss Eastman’s attire.
‘How do you do, Dr. Moberley. We are glad of your presence.’
‘I am glad to be of service, Miss Eastman.’
Mamma nods. ‘If you are done with the civilities, I must make haste. Alethea, if you will want a meal this evening you will perhaps find time to stop at Evans on your way home? I expect to be late.’
One cannot in conscience look at that line of people outside and then blame Mamma for not keeping a servant. Although some of them would doubtless be most grateful for such a position. ‘Yes, Mamma.’
‘No extravagance, please. I am not your Aunt Mary.’
‘No, Mamma.’
Mamma’s men’s boots are usually quiet enough, but her retreating tread echoes and then fades between the tiled floor and the bare walls. There is more space in Ally’s ribcage when Mamma is not there.
‘Your Mamma is a tireless worker.’ Miss Eastman cocks her head, evaluating Ally. A charitable gentlewoman, Ally thinks, doubtless volunteering her time, and her accent more ladylike than Ally’s, the consonants precise and the vowels southern soft.
‘She has always been so. Will you show me the consulting rooms?’
There is a clatter from the hall as the doors are opening, and then a scuffle of feet and voices as not water but sound rises up the walls.
‘They can hardly be so called. This way, please, Miss Moberley.’ She glances to the side. ‘That is, Doctor.’
A TRUSTED AGENT
Mrs. Senhouse apologises again for the dinner. It is so hard to explain to Japanese servants what is required.
Tom sets down his fork. The food indeed requires apology. ‘Perhaps a Japanese cook would be more competent in preparing Japanese food?’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘It is the slimy things one cannot abide. Rice, of course, and clear soup, but I cannot expect Mr. Senhouse to do a day’s work on such pauper food.’
He thinks of the jinrikisha men, and the men who carried stones up the rocks for the lighthouses, and the men on the mountain farms.
Senhouse is also giving up on what is probably tinned ham cooked in salty brown sauce with some inexplicably gluey vegetable admixture. ‘The Japanese constitution is a mystery. Maybe it should be tried in our slums, Cavendish, the rice and pickle diet. Cheap enough.’
‘Rice is not so very cheap, at home,’ Tom says. ‘And the difficulty is often not so much the ingredients as the fuel over which they are to be cooked. It is why the poor do not eat bean soup, as everlastingly suggested by the rich.’ Who do not eat it either, Ally likes to point out.
Mrs. Senhouse, also, stops toying with the mess on her plate. ‘Gracious, Mr. Cavendish, you seem to have made quite a study of the subject.’
Outside, beyond the white tablecloth and the placemats and napkins and candelabra, beyond the cushions and antimacassars on the chaise longue blocking the glass panels that replace the old shoji screens, the last leaf waltzes from the maple tree into the pond, leaving the outline of branches beautiful against the winter sky. At least the Senhouses will not be here long enough to plant roses. At least they may not replace the stepping stones with a spouting dolphin or a pissing child. He remembers the leaves floating on dark water in Makoto’s grandfather’s walking garden.
Back in his room, he sits at the foot of the armchair, on a tatami mat, to re-read the letter from De Rivers that awaited him at the post office. I don’t like to use that lamp, Mrs. Senhouse said, because it seems nothing more than kindling wrapped around a flame. And then to set it on a straw mat! You will be most careful, Mr. Cavendish?
De Rivers has at last deigned to be more specific about Tom’s commission, has been corresponding with ‘an expert collector recently returned’. There is a part of Kyoto, he writes, devoted since time immemorial to the fabrication of painted and embroidered silks, where it is possible to acquire pieces of extraordinary splendour for remarkably little outlay. De Rivers gathers that the craze in Japan is all now for modern goods and that noble families and even temples are selling off priceless antiquities. It is a moment to delight any speculator, and how much more exciting to one, like himself, who unites the availability of ready money with the opportunity of a trusted agent on the ground and the taste to appreciate such objects. Trusted is underlined. Tom is to use the sum at his disposal to purchase works in silk especially, but also whatever antique pieces in china, lacquerwork and carving may seem to him likely to constitute both a sound investment and a prized addition to the collection of a connoisseur. De Rivers is aware that these matters are hardly Tom’s field, but suggests first that he has been offered sufficient reason to inform himself on such subjects and second that the sum entrusted to Tom should surely suffice for the retention of a native guide, the competence of whom Tom must be capable of assessing.
Tom puts down the letter, De Rivers’ clumsy scrawl crawling black in the lamplight. Were it not for this, for his allowing himself to be bought by a rich man, and worse than that for his being swayed by the offer of money into agreeing to work for which he has no qualification or taste, he might eve
n now be writing up his reports, paying calls at the ministry, preparing his final lectures, buying only trinkets for friends and then returning to Falmouth happy in the knowledge that his proper work has been done and done well, that the lighthouses will stand beyond the natural term of anyone now living. He knows nothing about silk, or carving or—he looks at the letter again—lacquerwork. And he does not see why samurai heirlooms should cross oceans to take up residence in De Rivers’ mausoleum, alongside eviscerated hummingbirds and forms of statuary that are not quite the thing for public display. If indeed there are any samurai heirlooms, for as far as Tom can see, Japanese tastes are so utterly simple that the prizing of merely decorative objects seems improbable. Although he has not been in any samurai homes and seems most unlikely to do so; as he understands the situation, the samurai caste has been dispossessed by the modernising bureaucrats who are responsible for the presence of foreign engineers. Foreign engineers who now seek to take advantage of the fall of noble houses to buy cut-price family treasures. He thinks of Ally in the damp cottage, of what it would mean to her work if he were able to give her a more commodious house and employ a housekeeper to cook and clean for her, and of his mother who has risen early to wash and bake before going out to work in the shop all his life and still has little put by because she spent it all to send him to school. Ally’s and Mother’s welfare matter more, after all, than the movements of embroidered silk. And in any case, he has signed De Rivers’ agreement and must therefore carry out the commission to the best of his ability. It is too late, now, for these thoughts.
Painfully, he straightens his legs, and staggers as he stands up. The Senhouses find the Japanese bathroom in their house ‘indecent’ and instead have placed tin hip-baths in each room, but it is probably too late to ask the servants to bring hot water and in any case he does not see how a girl could carry sufficient water up the ladder stairs. He removes his tweed jacket, waistcoat, tie, collar and cuffs, shirt, underlinen and sponges himself down at the washstand with cold water and expensively imported coal tar soap. He can see his breath in the air. He puts on his pyjamas and, for the first time since setting foot on Japanese soil, climbs into bed. He thinks of Ally, also lying alone under cold sheets, although of course it is daytime in England. He thinks of the line of buttons on her nightdress, from the white cotton ruffle over the hollows in her collarbones down towards her belly, deep enough that he can push the fabric back over one but not both breasts, cup it in his hand and—He finds his hand cupped, his thumb moving over a nipple that is not there, the other hand reaching as if to gather up the skirts that swathe his wife’s legs on the other side of the world.
TWO WOMEN IN MIDDLE LIFE
Even in the consulting room, the windows are set so high in the walls that if Ally wanted to open one she would have to climb onto a chair. The room is narrower than it is tall, as if the walls are closing in from the sides. She can hear the prickle of rain on the glass but the clinic is—she calculates—at least a mile from the nearest tree so there is no sound of wind. She remembers Cornwall, and the view from the asylum to the north and south coasts, over fields and woods and villages to the edges of the sea. It is still there, she thinks. She will return, will walk again on the headlands above the waves, watching sea-birds dive and flicker among the rocks. She will see a pale sunlight over the water, as if shining through watered silk, and hear the lapping of the Fal at her feet as she looks across the river’s mouth to where the trees gather dark on the shore beyond Flushing. It is still there.
She is looking through yesterday’s notes. The patients’ troubles are much as one would expect: consumption; complications of pregnancy mostly associated with inadequate nutrition, overcrowding and overwork; parasites and fungal infections in the children. Coughs, croup and digestive disturbances. There are a few treatable conditions requiring medical rather than social attention, but for the most part these people need housing, sanitation, food and perhaps prophylactics far more than they need doctoring. I prescribe new pillows and blankets, Ally thinks. I prescribe new houses, with sound walls, proper drainage and tightly fitted windows. I prescribe creamy milk and new-laid eggs. I prescribe a long visit to Aunt Mary. She must cook again for Mamma tonight. She has not dared enquire what Mamma ate before Ally arrived, since it seems now rare indeed for Papa to dine at home. She has been cooking, not, she hopes, in an attempt to gain Mamma’s approbation, to curry favour, but simply to care for Mamma as it has occurred to Ally that no-one else does. To offer her a little comfort, a few minutes’ solace in a life from which joy was cast out many years ago.
The first night, Ally made a mutton hash. Returning from the clinic too late to make a stew, recalling that Mamma finds the smell of meat grilled or fried objectionable and recalling also Aunt Mary’s cook’s view that while one must trust one’s butcher only a fool buys mince, she bought end of neck. A cheap cut, safe from the imputation of extravagance, but including rather too much connective tissue to be appetising when rapidly cooked. A training in dissection, Ally thought, carrying the seeping paper package through the rainy evening in her string bag, must have uses beyond the operating theatre, although it turned out that Mamma’s kitchen knives were too blunt for any kind of surgery. She ended up pulling filaments of iridescent tendon out of the red muscle with her fingernails, surrounded by a litter of bloodied and discarded knives. But the dish ought to meet Mamma’s requirements: Mamma considers highly-seasoned foods to be an indulgence of the palate, but regards the purchase of more delicate meats as profligate. The smell of onions, she says, permeates the house, and she tolerates enough such odours in the course of her work to be spared them at home. Ally set some potatoes to boil when she cleaned the knives and the board, and then chopped all together and fried it with a little fresh butter. She cleaned some of the silver and set the table. An hour later, Mamma tasted a mouthful and grimaced; had Alethea imagined she was cooking for a family of miners? Quite apart from the excessive quantity, such greasy concoctions are indigestible and wholly unsuitable for two women in middle life, engaged really in the lightest of work. Alethea having lavished her money and Mamma’s fuel, Mamma would attempt to eat it, but please, Alethea, a little more thought next time. It is no wonder, Ally thought, that Papa has given up, that he has left Mamma to her adulterous passion for self-denial, but even so he should not have done so. Promises were made, to love and to honour. If years ago Papa had lit fires in the drawing room instead of in his studio, if he had brought home eggs and cream and ham instead of seeking out restaurants with his friends while Mamma and May and Ally shrove themselves on bean broth and rice pudding, perhaps Mamma could have been different. Perhaps they could all remember May differently, if Papa, if someone, had shown Mamma how to be kind.
The noise of rainfall is drowned by the rush of feet and voices in the atrium. Now, at least, there will be no more time to think until the end of the day. Although then she will need to find something else for Mamma’s supper. It is like a game they play, a guessing game, where Mamma must already know the answer to the riddle and teaches Ally by withholding it. What dish is quick to prepare, wholesome and cheap, not rich or greasy, unseasoned and mild to the palate? What garb is neat and respectable, durable and easy to wash, suggestive of professional competence but in no way extravagant or showy? What demeanour shows both respect and self-respect, strength of character and humility—Miss Eastman is at the door, with the first patient, and the beginning of a sequence of problems Ally is trained to address
She is listening to the crepitations in yet another child’s chest when Miss Eastman hurries in. She bends to her stethoscope. A student here would go a long time without hearing the chest sounds considered normal elsewhere in the country. The mother watches from across the room, afraid, uncomprehending. Ally offered to let her listen herself but she doesn’t want to touch the instrument. Doesn’t want to be here.
‘Doctor?’
Ally holds up her hand. Coarse rales. A low fever. The chil
d is emaciated, his skin patched with ringworm. Pus in one eye. He needs meat and fruit and sponge cakes made with fresh eggs, a warm bath, new clothes and weeks of careful nursing in a clean, dry room. For any real chance of reaching his fifth birthday, he needs, in fact, to be a lot less poor.
‘Doctor? You’re needed.’
No, she thinks, a revolution is needed. Bring Lord Salisbury in here and let him tell me to my face, to the face of this child’s mother, that the deserving poor have every opportunity to improve their lot.
‘One moment.’ What to tell the mother? He’s going to die. You’re going to lose another child, because you’re poor, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re poor. Sorry.
Miss Eastman stands tall. ‘No. Now, Doctor. In the waiting room.’
The girl’s been in labour three days. Her father and his friends have carried her through the streets on a door and the howls of her like something not human. She’s quiet enough now, but even through the ragged blanket over her distended body Ally can see the contractions grip and ripple. The girl moans, the low bovine noise of the second stage. Several waiting children peer.
‘Take her through, please.’
While they lift the door, Ally hurries to scrub her hands. The forceps in her bag, she’s thinking, are clean but not sterile. May have to suffice. How long has the girl been pushing? Is the child still alive? Miss Eastman helps the men move the patient onto the table.
‘Thank you,’ says Miss Eastman. ‘Thank you for bringing her. We will do all we can.’
So she, too, has assessed the situation. There is another moan. As the men leave, Miss Eastman pulls back the blanket and pauses.
