Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  William comes out from behind his table to shake her hand, holding it in both of his. He has aged over the winter, is beginning to lose height. A whole life here. A childhood in which he did not know what was waiting. The familiar smell drifts down the stairs and the tiles spread again at her feet.

  ‘I am glad to be back, William. It is good to see you again too.’

  He pats her hand. ‘They’re waiting for you. We’ve put you in the parlour for today. And you’re to join Dr. Crosswyn for coffee at eleven. Cook’s made biscuits special.’

  She would have liked a freer hand, but the committee has drawn up a list of patients for her to interview. Rose Tree House will take three ‘parlour boarders’, whose expenses are partially or wholly met by their families, and three ‘kitchen boarders’ who will work for food, board and—at Ally’s urgent representation—a sum of money sufficient to allow them to dress themselves and purchase an occasional ribbon or picture paper. It would be cheaper to clothe them from the asylum, said Trelennick. It would be cheaper, Ally said, if they learnt to dress respectably and did not return to the asylum. Dr. Crosswyn coughed: I think that what Dr. Moberley Cavendish means is that the patients are to be taught prudence and thrift in the management of small sums, to prove themselves able to master the weakness for finery that can take such outlandish forms when the female mind is unsettled. I think Dr. Moberley Cavendish is of the view that we cannot confidently say that a woman is sane until we have seen the dress of her choice. He stopped her later: I am sorry, my dear, I hope you can forgive me. But you know that a certain guile is required for committee-work, that it is better to have the committee make the right decision than trouble ourselves with their reasons for deciding. She did not remind him that she has heard him say the same thing about the management of patients.

  There are at this moment 408 female inmates in the asylum, sixteen of them awaiting her judgement. Not those who have already passed the discharge board, because it would be challenging the judgement of the committee to admit them to Rose Tree House. Not those who have been readmitted more than once, whose troubles are categorised as ‘chronic.’ She is to interview women who have recently failed a discharge hearing for reasons that the committee believes likely to be addressed by a period of residence at Rose Tree House. The committee does not note its reasons for this or, as far as Ally can tell, any other decision it makes. Do not question them, says Dr. Crosswyn. There are other ways, my dear, when there is something in which one believes very much, and if you are to make the splendid career I hope for you then you must allow me to show you some of them. It is enough, for now, that we have Rose Tree House and that the principle of your involvement in admissions has been accepted; let us prove it a success and then we may begin to seek more influence over the selection of inmates. I beg your pardon, of boarders. She knew, of course, that Mary Vincent’s name would not be on the list, but at least Margaret Rudge is there.

  She has passed through the parlour only once before, when she first looked around the asylum. It is a bigger room than a person can comfortably occupy, the size of two of the wards above, and tiled like the hall in a chequerboard pattern with a border in encaustic. They have lit a fire under the granite hearth, but it does not reach half way up the fireplace and dwindles in the sunlight coming through the tall windows. Still, it is a token of goodwill, of generosity, to give her a fire in March. They have set a heavy table before the fire, the sort of table on which one might confidently put to sea, and an armchair for her and what looks like a piano stool for the patient. A hard-backed chair near the door for a nurse. Ally checks the clock on the mantelpiece; she has five minutes yet. She cannot move the table but she pulls the chair out from behind it and carries the stool across so that they can sit together at the fireside. After all, she is meant to be testing the suitability of these patients for reintroduction to domestic life. She dusts down the armchair and arranges herself in a posture neither too officious nor too casual. She must avoid any appearance of anxiety.

  When the fourth candidate and her escorting nurse leave, the clock shows ten to eleven. It is reasonable, then, not to see another woman before coffee. She looks round the door and tells the nurse watching the patients who have spent their morning sitting in the corridor that she will see the next one in forty minutes. You might take them into the garden for an airing, Nurse. It is a fresh spring day. She knows that the nurse will do no such thing. Closing the door behind her, she tries not to know that the nurse will be wondering what she is doing alone in here, that the nurse will be counting each moment of her empty solitude and holding it against her. Other people, other doctors, would not be feeling the pressure of the nurse’s thoughts through the wall. She has only recently been able to put into words the observation that people who grew up in households without fear lack awareness of others’ feelings, and that this lack makes their lives easier. More sane. She pokes the fire. But her ability to hear other people’s feelings is one of her strengths as a doctor, another incidental advantage of Mamma’s training. She wanders to the window and leans into its recess. Rooks wheel from the bare elms, white sunlight on their black wings, and the hedges around the formal garden flinch from a gust of wind. The necessary questions were plain by the time she addressed the second woman, Charlotte something. A pale and almost unnaturally pointed face under dark hair streaked with grey, admitted two years ago for melancholia and suicidal intentions following the death of a young son. After she failed three discharge boards her husband, a local solicitor, began to make a nuisance of himself. Do you wish to move to a convalescent home, Ally asked. What would you yourself do to promote your recovery? Do you wish to return to your home and family? Charlotte’s answers were not convincing, but Ally has at least understood what she needs to know. Not only, do you want to leave the asylum but do you want to get better and if so, how? It was not evident during her hospital training but it is plain in other kinds of practice: one should not take it for granted that the patient longs for what others consider perfect health. She will not use one of her precious places merely to placate someone’s husband. Dr. Crosswyn is right, they must begin with patients who will bring success. It is time for coffee.

  His office is unchanged, even the pile of books on the desk exactly as it was four months ago. Agatha is unchanged, wearing the same black dress and white apron and carrying the same tray with the same air of alarm. The caraway seed biscuits could have come from the same baking as those she was offered in November. Time runs differently in closed institutions. She thinks about all the different times in the heads of the patients and the staff, those who live partly in some half-imagined era of childhood or early marriage and also in the repetitive present of the asylum. Those caught in a past moment of loss, obliged to encounter again the fresh agony of grief with every waking. Those whose memories themselves are lost, and live in an unnavigable present without the stars of fear and hope. She does not know how the Medical Director might order the passage of time at Rose Tree House, but it will be important that there is enough routine that no-one needs to devote thought to when to eat breakfast but not so much that the days become interchangeable. Sanity, she thinks, may be partly the ability to tolerate the passage of time.

  He is speaking of the winter, of the coal used and the incidence of bronchial illness.

  ‘What became of Mary Vincent, Dr. Crosswyn?’

  He stops. Looks at her.

  ‘I’m sorry. She has been on my mind.’

  ‘Evidently so. Still on the back ward, I’m afraid. I did pay a visit a couple of weeks back. She’s deteriorated. Episodes of mania, a lot of raving, obscene allegations. In and out of seclusion. Most unlikely to come back down, I’d say.’

  Ally puts down her cup. Coffee splashes into the saucer. ‘No-one ever does, do they? Come back down?’

  Stop, she thinks. There are limits to what can be done, who can be helped, and she is not behaving well. Not behaving professionally, not lik
e a medical man.

  ‘It is very rare.’

  Has there been a single case, she wants to ask. Has it ever happened that a person has been allowed to return to wards with lavatories, with sheets and pillows, to enter the dining room rather than having buckets of congealed stew or porridge carried up the stairs when the kitchen maids find time? Has this institution ever returned an inmate’s humanity after taking it away? She takes a bite of the biscuit balanced on the edge of her saucer and says nothing.

  A MAN IN THE ACT OF LEAVING

  They have come already packed into wooden crates, nailed shut to exclude fingers eager for the touch of silk, a face that wants the soft shining colours lifted to the cheek. Even the inro and the netsuke come in boxes stitched into wadded cotton swaddling, cocooned against gaze and touch. He would like at least to see the treasures while they are in his possession, to greet them one by one and say goodbye. It will be like travelling with eggs or seeds, or perhaps with a pregnant woman, knowing that there is something deep inside capable of changing everything.

  He kneels beside the crates with luggage labels and a pot of paste and brush that Makiko brought without being asked. He sniffs at the paste, probably made from rice like everything else. He waits for it to dry, runs his hands over the nearest crate as if they might palpate or somehow intuit the contents. White butterflies on blue silk, each life-sized wing supplied by life-sized veins in cobweb grey. Pink cherry blossoms only just visible, barely suggested, on a pale ground, their brown branches a geometric counterpoint to the froth of flowers. There is a saucer of ink and a finer brush on the tray: Thomas Cavendish, c/o Penvenick & Co., Falmouth.

  There. His knees are stiff and he stands up. The screens are open a few inches, admitting a bar of sunlight in which the rough fibres of the tatami mat stand out. He holds his hand in the beam, feeling the sun’s warmth and watching his shadow fingers. There have been days lately when it would have been little surprise to find that he no longer cast a shadow, when he could have questioned his own existence. He sees his own spirit haunting the little house, a shadeless and silent presence here long after he has crossed the seas and embraced his wife once more. His own trunks sit on the other side of the room, already locked and corded. A few trinkets as gifts, a kimono for Ally that he realised later might remind her too much of one of her father’s designs (but the colours are hers and the shop, beside the new hospital, made him impatient to show her the juxtaposition of ancient and modern). No chrysalis here, only what any man, any man of modest means and limited interest in such things, might bring. He rubs his knees. He may as well go out, not a last walk because he has still two days, two days of living from his valise and trying not to hear the clock’s tick in every step he takes, but perhaps the first of the last walks. He is already a ghost, a man in the act of leaving. He sits on the wooden ledge in the earth-floored entrance and puts on his shoes, slides open the street door and bolts it behind him. In three days’ time, these small acts will be memories. The stones under his feet now, the shuttered windows of this alley, the forested hills rising at the end of the street, will be only in his mind.

  He does not want to go home.

  He keeps walking, down the street, past the pickle shop and the sweet shop whose owner returns his bow, along the canal with a wooden bridge for each house. Cherry trees make an avenue down to the river, not yet blossoming but in tight-fingered green bud. Small birds flutter in their branches.

  He does not want to go home. He does not know his wife, not really, not any more. He remembers her breasts in his hands and the smoothness of her back, remembers the satisfaction of entering her at last and then again and again those weeks after the wedding, but any woman has breasts and a back and a place to enter. Makiko, for example, under her obi and her kimono. The woman passing him right now, with the shuffling gait as if her legs could hardly part and blue-black hair bound up as if it could never fall between naked shoulder blades. Horrible, he thinks, it is a horrible thought to find in his head. He remembers Ally talking about medicine and poverty, about the injustices of women’s lives. He remembers her cooking in his kitchen. He does not quite remember why they are married.

  He comes to the river and turns upstream, past the boats where the fishermen’s cormorants wait tethered and on to where the willows trailing idle fingers in the stream are green again. He will continue up the hillside, under the red torii arches to the temple where he will stay awhile, watch the shadows move in the priests’ garden and the reflections of trees ripple and blur on the water as if perception itself were to waver.

  BURNING BOATS

  Dr. Crosswyn has advertised for a matron-housekeeper, but until she is appointed Ally has agreed to sleep at Rose Tree House, taking the opportunity to have the white cottage replastered and repainted. She has chosen an attic room for herself, smaller than those shared by the parlour boarders, from which she can see through the treetops to the sea.

  She went to bed leaving the curtains open, for the pleasure of knowing that the moon shone on the waves and the stars circled the sky while she slept. Her hair has come loose in the night and tangled itself at the back of her neck. She sits up and scoops it out of the way. The first grey threads are appearing; if Tom were not already on his way back he might return to find her visibly older. A woman of a certain age. She may very well be half-way through her life, and to what end? What account can she give, what has been learnt? Behind the headland at St Mawes, the sun is rising, the eastern sky flaming and the path of open water, the Carrick Roads, printed with reflected hill and dawn. Red sky in the morning.

  There is that of which a reasonable person might be proud. It is not nothing, it cannot be dismissed as hysteria or nervous imagining, to pass the examinations and qualify as a doctor. It is not nothing to win the prize, to graduate top in the year. It is not nothing for a woman to publish a paper in the British Journal of Asylum Medicine. She kneels up and leans over the window sill, inhaling the March breeze coming through the trees. There is still a faint odour of paint. The rooks are on the wing, swirling like leaves around their tree. And what then? Is it enough for a life, to pass examinations, to win a prize? To assist in the saving of a few lives, and perhaps in the loss of others? To discover kindness, to discover that kindness is the only thing that matters. A late discovery, but then she grew up in a house without it. No, for Aubrey was kind. With whatever motivation, he was kind, to her and to May. We are not judged by the sum of our life’s work, she thinks, as if we were hands in a factory valued only for what we produce. Our labour and our moral worth are not the same thing, for what price kindness? Charity, caritas. A word for caring, not for the payment of a tax or tithe. It is, she thinks, from Aunt Mary that she learnt caritas, Aunt Mary and Uncle James and Annie and Annie’s family, all of whom dress in silks and keep a good table. Not all the words belong to Mamma. It will not matter, in the end, whether she has discharged Mamma’s voice from her head or not, whether she has been freed from those who haunt her or goes to her death still shadowed. It will matter that she has been kind, and that she has done the work to which she is called and trained. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, I am nothing. St Paul, no friend to women. A spectre from the past, or a corrective to Mamma, who despite a life devoted to charitable work has not charity in this sense? One can have charity with voices still in one’s head. The things that matter in the end do not depend on a healthy mind or a healthy body, neither on faith or nor on hope. Goodness, she thinks, is not denied to the mad.

  The first ship of the morning is rounding Pendennis Point, leaning on the wind as it enters home water. All our ghosts, Ally thinks, could pass the other way across the waves, all the voices that torment us here could gather and take wing out to sea. She sees them in her mind’s eye, a host of angry spirits crossing the water and dissolving in the light of the rising sun, Mamma and May evaporating like the dew on the grass be
low to trouble her no more.

  She had thought to be up first, to take her ease in the garden for a quarter of an hour before supervising the preparation of breakfast, but the key is already in the front door. It took some time to persuade Dr. Crosswyn to support her over this: naturally the doors must be locked at night, but she wants the patients to know that it is ingress, not egress, that is prevented. That they are safe from intruders and may leave at will or on a whim. They have been locked up long enough. And what do I say to the committee when someone goes missing, or worse, he said. It was not easy, you know, to persuade everyone of the need for Rose Tree House. It is a significant expense. It has been said that even if you are able to discharge everyone permanently cured after three months it will be no cheaper than keeping them in asylum for the term of their natural lives. Then we can tell them, Ally said, that it will be cheaper still if the patients disappear; tell them that we keep the key by the door at night for fear of fire. The newspapers of the last week have been full of the inquests consequent upon a midnight fire at an asylum in Staffordshire, where all the internal as well as external doors were locked.

  She should have put on a coat, but it is such a pleasure to be outside without being muffled and fastened into thick layers that the chill is not unpleasant. And the day will warm as the sun rises. The garden is still in shade but the top of the house is patterned with tree-shadows. Ally closes her eyes and takes a slow breath: sea, dew, the smell of new growth in the earth.

  ‘Doctor?’