Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  Dearest Ally, says Aunt Mary, it is sad that you who brave such opposition from the most powerful men in your profession yet quail at Elizabeth’s reproaches. Can you find no strength to brook her, darling? Are you yet so frightened?

  There is ringing in her ears, like the reverberation of a distant bell. Like an alarm.

  Gracious me, Al, says May, you’re such a coward. Just tell her she can’t have a prize-winning doctor clean her pantry on Christmas Day and go do something else. Eat something. You’re being ridiculous, no wonder she calls you crazy. It’s a game you play, both of you, following your own mad rules. You let her hurt you, Al. You like it. You keep coming back.

  As if not inheriting those rules, not playing that game, did May any good in the end.

  The bell is louder, filling her head, an emergency behind her eyes and in her mouth and ears and nose.

  * * *

  She finds herself upstairs, pushing a few clothes and her medical books into Tom’s valise, and then creeping down again, past the closed door behind which Papa reads in bed and the closed door behind which Mamma writes her letters. She finds herself easing the handle of the front door and then leaving it ajar because that way there is no sound and by the time they realise she’s left the door open she won’t be there any more. She finds herself balancing on the edge of the bottom step to make a long stretch to the flowerbed, swinging the valise to help her leap over the gravel to the soil. The gap in the hedge is visible from the drawing room and she stands on the flowerbed for a while. If Mamma sees her now, sees her running away, if Mamma chases her and catches her—she cannot stand here in the soil.

  You are being ridiculous. What extraordinary conduct is this, Alethea? Where, pray, do you think you are going? Today of all days?

  She’s not the police, Al, and you’ve committed no crime. She doesn’t own you, you know.

  You know you will always have a home here in London with us, Ally. I know something of what it must be like to be brought up by Elizabeth. We shared a room, you know, until she married.

  She begins to shake. She has left her gloves hanging from the rack over the range, where Mamma will see that they have silk linings and were expensive. But there is Tom’s letter in her pocket. Dearest Ally, it sometimes seems that I miss you more every day because there is so much here that would interest you and that we would enjoy discussing. Mamma will be looking at her letters, not out of the window, and the winter jasmine is growing up over the window sill anyway. She ducks and runs, banging the valise on her leg.

  Her breathing is loud in her head. There’s no-one else out, no traffic or footfalls and she would be easily seen, easily found. She takes the first turning, to get off Mamma and Papa’s road, to be out of sight of anyone standing at the gate. Her skirt tangles around her legs, catches around her knees. The beech trees stand bare overhead.

  The park, they won’t look in the park and there are places to hide. But she should get away, she should go as far and as fast as she can. And not be seen.

  The park is locked. Not back past the house, go the other way.

  The other way leads to the shops, the church and the library, where there will be people who will see her.

  No, not today. Today the people are all in their houses.

  Keep moving, she thinks, go somewhere, you are not five minutes from the house and they may come looking any moment.

  She hurries again, away from the park and away from the house. She feels like a mouse crossing a road, like a goldfish beside whose pond a heron has just landed. The main road, silent and bare. As if everyone has died instead of someone being born.

  She crosses it to be under the trees on the other side.

  She crosses back to avoid passing a bay window where people sit around a candle-lit table.

  What are Mamma and Papa doing now? She left the puddings steaming, the pan will steam dry and burn. If she went back now, could she get into the house, back to the kitchen, without them knowing that she had left?

  But she has not cleaned the pantry. Mamma will be angry, angrier than she can bear. She has never hidden before, never fled.

  She trips on the valise and almost falls.

  Quick now, hurry.

  I cannot believe that you are too scared even to run away, says May. Honestly, you and Mamma almost deserve each other sometimes.

  She has nowhere to go.

  As the sun goes down, she finds herself around the back of the station. Her skirt is wet to the knees, Tom’s valise spattered with mud. She draws into the corner as the lamplighter comes by, the first person she has noticed in some hours.

  If the station is lit, there may be a train.

  If the station is lit, they will look for her there.

  And what of it, says May, they cannot arrest you, a respectable married woman, for leaving your parents’ house.

  They can call me mad, Ally replies, they can have me committed to the asylum.

  The patient, who has a long history of hysteria perhaps exacerbated by an unfortunate attempt at higher education, appeared disordered in her dress and manner and displayed symptoms of great confusion and distress. Her parents, both well-known and respected citizens of Manchester, attested that she had given up a position in Cornwall because of nervous trouble but had not made the recovery hoped for while in their care.

  You will always have a home with us, says Aunt Mary again. We will keep your room just as it has been these last years.

  She turns back down a side street where there are no lights and checks all around before kneeling on the pavement to open the valise. She takes out a black silk scarf meant for Mamma’s Christmas present.

  Alethea, it troubles me that you waste your money on such fripperies in my name; you could surely have guessed that I would rather, far rather, you gave what you deign to spare from the purchase of your own finery to feed those who starve at our very door.

  She pushes back her hood and arranges the scarf over her hat, as a veil. As long as they are not already waiting for her at the ticket office, as long as there is a train—any train, the milk train—the station master will remember only a woman in scrabbled together mourning who had been urgently summoned even as the pudding was lit.

  UNTO US A BOY IS BORN

  He would have liked to travel yesterday. It is not that he longed, as some of Mrs. Senhouse’s other guests obviously did, for an English Christmas. It is not that he felt the tug of home any more that day than any other, for he and Ally have not yet had a Christmas together and there have been many years when it has not been practical for him to return to Harrogate for the day. Mother will go to the neighbours with whom she often takes Sunday dinner and Ally, he fears, has returned to her parents in Manchester. So it is not as if there is anything to miss, as if he is aware of an empty place at a table on the other side of the globe. Even so, since there is not Christmas here and since he is not among friends, it would have been more seemly to continue with life as usual, to take trains and fulfil professional appointments and postpone celebration for the Japanese feast days, of which there is hardly a shortage. There is something pathetic in the childlike craving for presents and sweets, in the drunken singing of songs about the holly and the ivy and the ox and the ass. He saw the pity in Makoto’s eyes when the Japanese guests joined them for English tea and crumbling slabs of plum cake. He would have preferred to have been spared the occasion.

  He has a copy of The Times from six weeks ago, pressed on him by Senhouse this morning. Take it, Cavendish, for the Ambassador promised me first read of his next copy. We need to try to stay up to date, you know. Believe me it’s a frightful shock when you get home if you haven’t. It doesn’t do, you know, to let oneself lose interest. At the Royal Albert Hall the Choral Society performed Judas Maccabeus, the orchestra being swelled for the occasion by the band of the Coldstream Guards. On Regent Street there was a zither concert by
the zitherist to HRH the Princess of Wales. The London Orphan Asylum must urgently plead for help in maintaining the 550 orphans currently in their care. On the 29th of October, at Langham Lodge, Barnes, the wife of Rev. Henry Hayman, prematurely of a daughter, who survived her birth but a short time. They are leaving Osaka and there is snow on the ground, at first only a sifting, stones dark through grains of ice, and then more, a covering moulding itself to the shape of the land as a sheet rests over a body. Each tree bears its own ghost in snow, and the blades of Japanese flora, of bamboo and reeds, etch themselves black and vertical. On the 5th of Sept, at Rosslyn House, Double Bay, Sydney, NSW, the wife of Charles Telford, of a boy. Unto us a boy is born, he thinks, nearly three months ago. A letter from Australia to London, the printing of The Times, the diplomatic bag from London to Tokyo and the child already smiling, grasping. Charles Telford proud in the knowledge that his name and the way his hair grows over his ears will stay in the world when he is dead and buried. His iniquities, Tom thinks, passed down unto the third and fourth generation. Ally does not want a family. One child, she said, if you wish it very much; I would not deny you fatherhood. But not until we can keep a nurse. At first he thought she feared to give birth, had seen too many women die in the course of delivery to approach such an event herself, but it’s not that. It’s something to do with his mother-in-law, whom he has not met, who opposed their marriage, and with whom his wife is now living. Mamma is a difficult woman, she said when he pressed her. I cannot be certain that I would make a better mother than I have had. Mrs. Dunne took him aside one day; Tom, no good comes of interfering relatives, but I have warned you about my sister. She is but it is not good for Ally, perhaps they are not good for each other, and you should keep her away. He shakes his head at the Christmas snow. He liked to think of Ally in Falmouth.

  He opens the newspaper. Liverpool to Bombay via the canal, first class steamers fitted expressly for the trade, surgeon and stewardesses carried. The New Zealand Shipping Company will dispatch the following ships for Auckland, Canterbury, Otago and Wellington. Those wishing to take passage should address themselves immediately to the Company’s offices. He should book his own passage home. Change at Singapore for Falmouth, and one day he will come on deck to see the Wolf Rock light and then, if the morning is clear, the Lizard peninsula rising over the horizon grey and veiled in mist. There will be bluebells under the oak trees on Pendennis Head and the gorse flaming yellow across the peninsula, wild garlic along the hedgerows and cow parsley bobbing amid long grass. No. It is like trying to raise an appetite when suffering sea-sickness, or trying—he recalls one night in Aberdeen, the only such occasion—to raise desire when there is only shame and distaste. He does not want daffodils and lambs. He wants to be here as spring turns to summer, wants to see the rice paddies green and growing, the orchids creeping in the woods as rain falls and the sun strengthens week by week. He wouldn’t mind seeing the cherry blossom, and especially seeing the people seeing the cherry blossom. He folds up The Times and leaves it on the seat beside him. Let it ride the rails; it is a waste to spend in reading any time that could be used in committing to memory the mountains of Japan.

  Snow has been swept from the platform, but more is falling outside the canopy, flakes drifting to the ground like leaves. He feels rising excitement: a new place, new snow, new work. The porters are unloading luggage from the last van and he takes his wooden token and Makoto’s note from his pocket. Show this paper to anyone in a railway uniform, Makoto said, and he will explain to the jinrikisha man. I trust you will find your lodging satisfactory. Professor Baxter asked me to retain Tatsuo as your guide; he will come and find you in the morning. Tom nods, bows his thanks for the return of his trunk and holds out Makoto’s note. It is like being the hero of a fairy tale, travelling alone in Japan. When you meet a man in a peaked cap, give him this paper and you will be conducted to a place where you may pass the night. Give him this carved wooden amulet and he will give you your books.

  Darkness is falling as they leave the station, Tom in one jinrikisha and his trunk in another. Red lanterns float under the awnings of shops and restaurants and the streets are busy with men and umbrellas. There are fewer European suits than in Osaka and Tokyo, and less noise. He feels as if he’s inside one of De Rivers’ glass domes, inside a snow globe, where banners with Japanese lettering hang over the silent streets and figures enfolded in silk glide across small stone bridges. He doesn’t want it to end.

  ASYLUM

  Condensation drips from the wooden handle at the end of the lavatory chain, carved to the likeness of a pine cone and once compared by Freddie to something more obviously relevant to its purpose. Her knees rise from water turned green by Aunt Mary’s bath salts, and she inhales lime-scented steam. She tips back her head and feels the heat reaching through her skull and her ears. Her arms float. She could dissolve into this water, dissolve and wash away. Cleanse us of our sins, we beseech thee. There would be nothing left.

  ‘Ally? You haven’t fainted in there?’

  ‘I’m here, Aunt Mary. I’m sorry, of course the rest of you need the bathroom. I’ll be out in a moment.’

  She sits up and everything drains black. Postural drop caused by lack of food and exacerbated by the vasodilation consequent upon a hot bath. She leans her head forward between her knees so her forehead and hair dip again.

  ‘No-one needs anything and if they do they can use the downstairs lavatory. But you should take some food. There’s a tray in your room.’

  She sits up again, more carefully. Her ears ring but in a moment she can try to stand. ‘You’re too kind, Aunt Mary. I don’t need a tray. Really. Please, don’t go to any trouble for me. I don’t need it.’

  She hears Aunt Mary sniff. ‘Less trouble than having you faint in the drawing room, my dear. I’m leaving a dressing gown outside the door and we’ll give that dress to Fanny to be washed.’

  No, she thinks, no, no-one is to do anything for me. I cannot bear it, you must not treat me so. Hysteria. Eat and rest first. Why did you come here, if not to be cared for, to be fed and bathed and clothed like an infant? Weak, you are weak and useless as a little child. She stands on the bath mat. She has indeed lost flesh, the bones in her feet clear to see. The towel lies over the mahogany rail. Take it and dry yourself, she thinks. Come now, dry your body. Another drip falls from the pine cone. Dry yourself.

  ‘Gracious me, Ally, I thought you had gone up to bed. What are you doing here, darling?’

  She is standing on the upstairs landing, beside the bathroom door, because it is the height of laziness and self-indulgence for a healthy woman to take to her bed in the middle of the day, because she is plainly assuming illness as a means of securing to herself that attention for which she appears to feel an incessant craving, and because at the same time she cannot go into the drawing room in a dressing gown several inches too short and in any case if she is going to be unwell it is better to take quietly to her bed rather than displaying herself on the sofa in a blatant bid for sympathy and concern.

  ‘Come, let me take you to your bed. I must cable to Elizabeth and Alfred, darling, just to let them know where you are. And then I think I will call Dr. Stratton.’

  Ally looks at Aunt Mary. Elizabeth and Alfred, Mamma and Papa. She finds herself weeping. ‘No, Aunt Mary, please. Don’t tell Mamma. Please. She will be so angry. You can’t think how angry. Please, I can’t bear it.’ Fool. Weak-willed, hysterical fool. She swallows. ‘And not Dr. Stratton. Aunt Mary, I’m so ashamed. I could never practice again.’

  Aunt Mary puts her arms around Ally. Ally is stiff. ‘Perhaps it is better if she doesn’t see you today. Promise me that you will eat and rest, and I won’t call her until tomorrow. But darling, I must tell Elizabeth that you are safe. They must be in great distress. You left no note, no explanation?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It wasn’t—I didn’t plan to leave. I just couldn’t clean the pantry. I couldn’t
move. I couldn’t do it.’

  Aunt Mary strokes her wet hair, which is dripping into the frills of the dressing gown. She wants Tom, wants him to hold her.

  No, he must not see her like this, must not know that he is married to such a worthless thing.

  ‘Shh, Ally. Shh. Very well. What if I cable to Mrs. Lewis and have her send a message to say that she has heard that you are safely lodged?’

  Then Mrs. Lewis will know what has happened, and Professor Lewis will know that she is weak and foolish, that she cannot even cover part of a practice for a few measly weeks.

  ‘No. I don’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘They may have called the police. And what if your Papa should appear at the door looking for you?’

  ‘No. No. I don’t know what to do.’

  Aunt Mary begins to lead her down the hall. ‘Well, I do, my dear, and so you must allow me to do it.’

  Aunt Mary takes her up the stairs to her own room, where she lived for all the time she was becoming a doctor. Years that now seem to have peeled away, to have been erased by Mamma. Years that she has allowed Mamma to erase. The room smells as it always did of the jasmine-scented soap on the washstand and the coal fire burning in the grate. Aunt Mary draws down the sheets for her. Outside, behind the bare plane trees, the sky is dull and heavy with rain.

  ‘I don’t need a fire, Aunt Mary. Don’t waste the coal.’

  ‘Shh. Get into bed, Ally. Or I must call Dr. Stratton.’

  Ally obeys. Aunt Mary beats the pillows and props them against the headboard.

  ‘Now, sit up and eat your breakfast.’ Aunt Mary places the tray on the bedside table and removes its silver dome. The smell of bacon mingles with the jasmine, and there is a pot of coffee. Ally remembers the bread and water at Mamma’s house. She does not deserve this, the fine china and linen napkin, the white toast in a silver toast rack and the butter pat and marmalade bowl. She looks up at Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary meets her eyes, and then begins to spread butter for her, to pour coffee and cream.