Signs for Lost Children

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Have a pleasant evening, Tom.’

  He nods. ‘And you, Professor.’

  He stays at the railing until nightfall is complete and a piano and a woman’s voice join the hubbub from the dining room below. They must have passed a headland, for the ship begins to lift and sway under him. He plants his feet a little further apart and finds the rhythm. Ah, there. It is like breathing. He feels his body calm and settle to the motion, which will carry him, now, all the way home. Back to Ally, to his marriage bed. Away from here. Light flares as the door behind him opens and he turns to see a man helping a woman—a lady—over the mantel.

  ‘Good evening,’ Tom says.

  She clings to her companion’s arm as if at risk of blowing away. ‘Oh, see all the stars! Starlight on the sea—who could object to the motion when there is such a sight?’

  There may be six weeks of this, six weeks stuck on a ship of fools returning him inexorably to a country he no longer likes and a marriage he cannot quite remember. Tom tips his hat and retires to his cabin.

  He is too hungry to sleep deeply, but lies feeling the ship’s movement, the Pacific Ocean’s movement, in his body, feeling his blood rise and fall with the sea, his muscles and bones and brain rocked on the surface of the water. The berth is too narrow for him to stretch out his arms as he has become accustomed to do on a futon, so he lies on his back, hands folded behind his head. How many other human souls, he wonders, are now afloat on this ocean, between eastern Asia and the west coasts of the Americas? On the other side of this sea there is daylight and somewhere in the middle, sunrise. Passenger ships, fishing vessels, traders. Canoes with outriggers around the islands, Chinese junks, the coastal bark boats of American Indians. Thousands. Tens of thousands, rocked by the same water. He turns over. At any given moment, what proportion of humanity is at sea? They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. How does it go? They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man. He always used to like that bit, that drunk men haven’t changed in however many thousand years. He bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm. He wonders, again, how intelligent adults, informed by experience as well as education, manage to believe these pleasant words. As late as the last century, some people argued that building lighthouses was an offence against divine providence, that it was impertinent to attempt to forestall the will of God as revealed by wind and weather. As, indeed, those of similar mind have argued against the development of abdominal surgery: if the Lord has seen fit to place a tumour in a belly, what right have doctors to interfere? He must remember to tell Ally this connection in his next letter, something they have in common. He sleeps, rousing through the night to breathe an unfamiliar air and see an unfamiliar darkness, to the insistence of hunger, to the waves whose mood will one moment change.

  In the morning, Japan is still on the horizon, a low bulk that on a duller day could be taken for cloud. A fleet of white birds darts over the waves and out of sight. The sea moves slowly, as if gelatinous. And there is the smell of bread. He has not smelt baking bread for months. He remembers the ambassador’s wife’s performance of despair: they brew beer, she said, so they can’t pretend not to know about yeast. I had my maid show him with her own hands but they’re all the same, aren’t they, they just don’t want to learn. He follows the scent along the deck. The sails are barely holding their shapes, but it is, after all, only just after sunrise. And anyway, he reminds himself, impatience is even more pointless than usual on a long sea voyage. Wind and weather, time and tide. They that do business in great waters. It is for the captain to decide when to use the engine, and meanwhile Tom will enjoy the quiet and the clean air. Baking would be undetectable with a coal-fired engine roaring. He peers into the galley, where a cook whose appearance does not belie his rumoured Frenchness is stirring a pot and two Chinese boys are chopping things with big knives. It is true that he never quite came to terms with the Japanese breakfast, with soup and rice and salt fish on a parched morning tongue, even if it is no different from coffee and salt bacon. Toast, he thinks. And just possibly butter? Marmalade, anyway. He should have provisioned himself better for this voyage. Pickled plums, or something. Japanese cuisine offers little but dried fish to the traveller. Perhaps he should not have scorned the European offerings of the shops in Yokohama, the imported beef extract, cocoa and condensed milk. Perhaps, indeed, such things should be part of Japanese modernisation. Tools of empire: it’s much harder to outwit invaders who bring their own supplies. He checks his watch and wanders back along the deck. He’s not used to having nothing to do.

  He waits four minutes after half-past seven, not wishing to behave like a dog waiting for the butcher’s door to open. There’s a seating plan at the door, and someone already at his table, sitting with her back to the room where she can see out of the window. A perfectly straight back, dropped shoulders and a swirl of black hair piled on the back of her head, making her neck look almost too thin for its function. And she’s wearing deep mourning. Doubtless certain conventions should obtain, but he’s too hungry to reflect on the etiquette of breakfasting alone with an unknown young lady; if she doesn’t want to be alone with a man she shouldn’t have come to breakfast without a companion. He bows and wishes her a good morning before taking a seat on the other side of the table. Steam rises from her coffee cup.

  ‘Good morning. Coffee?’

  He nods and then rises to help her because she’s using both hands to lift the coffee pot and he can see the tendons standing out in her wrists.

  ‘Please don’t trouble.’

  He pours himself coffee, allows her to pass the cream jug. She looks up as if she expects him to say something.

  ‘It’s good to smell coffee again,’ he says, although it isn’t, particularly, and he likes Japanese tea.

  She looks down at her hands. No rings: she must have lost a parent rather than a husband, and anyway looks barely old enough to be married. ‘We were able to buy it quite easily in Kobe.’

  Now what? ‘You were living there?’ he ventures.

  ‘Indeed so.’

  He looks around for the waiter, who can hardly be unduly occupied. Her rudeness, he thinks, or at least her evident desire not to talk to him, excuses further effort. He smells bacon. The ship has begun to sway along again, and outside the waves are lifting. She is saying something.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She sighs, as if he should have been listening better. ‘You have been in Yokohama?’ She looks him up and down. ‘Some kind of trade?’

  He raises a hand to the waiter standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Engineer. And I was travelling around.’

  The waiter is coming over.

  ‘You were not at table yesterday.’

  ‘I was on deck and missed dinner.’

  The waiter hands Tom a menu.

  ‘Porridge, please,’ he says. ‘And then toast and eggs. Scrambled, if I may.’

  He should, of course, have made sure that the lady had placed her order first. He looks at her.

  ‘Fruit, please.’

  The waiter bows and leaves.

  ‘You are sensible to take fruit now,’ he says. ‘I daresay we will be longing for fresh food before Singapore.’

  She shrugs. ‘It is my habit. I cannot bear a heavy breakfast.’

  I cannot bear a snob, he thinks, and sees with relief an older woman making her way to the table. He will be eating with these people three times a day for several weeks.

  BIRDS AND BUTTERFLIES

  The cottage will soon look better. She of all people should know that one cannot make a thing more beautiful without damaging it. Dust-blankets shroud the furniture, piled in the centre of the room, and the workmen have left the prints of their boots on the floor. She touches the wall where she has painted squares of possible colours, a daffodil-yellow that is probably too bright and a blue that is too cold. She
can’t hear Papa’s voice in her head the way she hears Mamma’s, which means that she can’t imagine what he might approve. Dark colours. Murk. Tangled foliage, as if the only mode for the mind’s eye were botanical. What if there were an anatomical wallpaper, a design of capillaries and veins, the blue-white curve of tendons and the bloom of red muscle? Her fingertips come dusty from the wall. White, she will have it all painted white, and if Tom has a fancy for something else, paint is cheap enough.

  She goes upstairs, glances into Tom’s study which she is keeping just as he left it, and stands in his bedroom. In their bedroom. There is still a faint smell of damp, and the swollen sash squawks as she wrestles it up an inch or two. There are daffodils bobbing under the apple tree in the top garden and a fuzz of new green things that are probably weeds. She turns back the blanket and feels the sheet for damp. She remembers her nightgown tossed to the floor here, his hands on her body in this bed, but the memory is not quite real, has been worn out by reiteration. She and Tom will do that again, here. If he has a safe passage home. And if not, well, if not things will change less. She was feeling better, she thinks, at Rose Tree House, and now she is back in Tom’s cottage anxiety rises again in her chest. It is not fair to blame Tom. A domestic environment is uneasy for many women. She should leave a note for the painter and get back to Rose Tree House, where she has promised to oversee the setting up of the sewing machine which arrived yesterday. Not that she has ever used a sewing machine.

  They open the boxes in the room Ally had imagined being used as a drawing room, for reading and talking and taking tea around the fire.

  ‘We’ll need space for piecing, you see doctor. Most use a table but I’ve always found the floor’s easier, specially with dresses and such, just so’s you don’t mind crawling around a bit but I don’t think any of us’ll be choosy.’

  Miss Gunner laughs. ‘What, stand on our dignity?’

  Ally remembers herself crouching on Mamma’s kitchen floor. ‘You have it back,’ she says. ‘Your dignity. You can piece on the dining table if you like. Or I dare say we could find another table to put in here.’

  The machine came in a wooden crate, from which Mrs. Rudge has levered the nails. Miss Gunner and Miss Trennick hold the crate while Ally and Mrs. Rudge ease the contraption forward and stand it on the floor. It looks like part of a train, Ally thinks, or like a spare bit of the ornate ironwork that anchors the roof of Euston station, and she likes its shiny blackness, likes the fact that although it is made for women to use it has been decorated with gold scrolls and curlicues instead of coloured flowers. Its ebony cogs mesh, dangerous to fingers, and the needle gleams under the coil of hooks and spindles. The turning handle is cold to the touch.

  ‘May I open it?’ Mrs. Rudge has reached into the crate and is holding a green box. ‘I think it has extra parts.’

  ‘Of course.’

  There are implements Ally couldn’t name, whose purpose she can’t guess, precisely made in bright steel.

  ‘Look, for shirring. And this is for piping, so we can make it to match. And this must be for smocking. I’ve never seen one before. Well, I suppose I wouldn’t have done, would I, if they’re new.’

  Mrs. Henning excuses herself and slips away.

  What else, Ally wonders, have they missed? She should order back numbers of the Quarterly Review and the Englishwoman’s Journal, perhaps also the Gentleman’s Magazine. Wars have begun and ended. The Married Women’s Property Act has come into being, the age of consent changed.

  ‘Do you know how to do that?’ Miss Trennick asks. ‘How to make piping with a machine?’

  Mrs. Rudge shrugs. ‘I used to. Used to work for Miss Whitney in Redruth. Before—’ she stops.

  Before. The women will need words for this, ways of bridging the lost years.

  ‘Before you were unwell,’ Ally says.

  Mrs. Rudge meets her gaze. ‘Yes. Before I was—unwell. Before I was unwell I worked for a dressmaker. And I made piping.’

  ‘Did you enjoy the work?’ Ally asks.

  Mrs. Rudge reaches out to stroke the sewing machine, tests the point of the needle with her fingertip. She doesn’t look up. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I did.’

  Mrs. Henning returns carrying folded off-white cotton. ‘Here, Margaret. Try it out on this.’

  ‘Your petticoat?’

  ‘That big packet yesterday was from my husband. New clothes. Well, old clothes, but ones I haven’t been wearing. Not since. Take it, I won’t wear it again.’

  Since you were unwell, Ally thinks. Let us make this an illness, from which you have recovered. Mrs. Rudge shakes out the petticoat and they see faded stains, a rent and worn seams. Ally’s own underclothes have always tended towards this state—what is the point in concerning oneself with garments by definition unseen?—but she can imagine the pleasure with which another woman, a more particular woman, might dispose of such a thing. She brings a chair so Mrs. Rudge can sit up to the machine. Miss Trennick produces red thread from one of the workboxes provided by the matron of the asylum and they all gather around to watch Mrs. Rudge wrap the thread around loops and spindles, whirl the handle to wind a spool that fits under the needle and then begin to sew. She makes fine tucks and then shirring around the petticoat’s soiled hem, narrow stitches and broad. She embroiders Charlotte Henning’s name across the front breadth in a looping script and then snips the threads and begins an area of cross-hatching that turns into smocking when she pulls the stitches. She holds it out, laughing.

  ‘There. You could still wear it if you want, only you’d know you had all sorts going on underneath. Anyone else?’

  There’s a silence. Miss Trennick looks up. ‘Could you do a butterfly? I mean, if we’re allowed?’

  They glance at Ally. Are they behaving like sane people, is this acceptable? Women who for several years have taken clothes from a communal pile once week. Why should they be ordinary?

  ‘Or birds,’ Ally suggests. ‘The outlines are quite easy. Though maybe not freehand with a sewing machine.’

  ‘Reckon I can do it,’ Mrs. Rudge says. And she can: by teatime all the petticoats have red letters and flowers, birds and butterflies and for Ally a cylinder meant to represent her stethoscope and an attempt at a doctor’s bag. It occurs to Ally only as she folds the petticoat back into her drawer to wonder what Tom will think.

  A GENTLEMAN’S TASTE

  He finds a book on Japanese folklore in the library, on a shelf otherwise crowded with the pious hopes and more pious memories of English missionaries to various parts of East Asia. He wonders if there is any propensity for reciprocal journeys, if there are villages in India where people sell home-made sweets and chutneys to raise money to send priests to Europe in order to save other people from the delusions of Christianity. What would have happened if he had sought enlightenment at the temple with the gongs, if he had knelt at the curtained altar? He flips through A Light in the East and Three Years Among the Ainu Heathen and decides that whatever he might learn about Japan from a more attentive reading would be too dearly bought. He signs out the folklore book and takes it up to the deck, where the wind is a little fresh for comfort and the waves are cresting white.

  There is a whole chapter about fox possession and fox worship. There is a new asylum in Tokyo, the author says, where more than half the patients believe themselves possessed and a good number of the others imagine themselves gifted with magical powers of exorcism. It is not a situation calculated to result in the cure of either group. The author himself has witnessed a village woman in the grip of such a delusion, who after many days of sitting silently with her face to the wall, refusing to respond even to the approaches of her own children, turned one day in rage and attacked her mother-in-law, only to allege the next day that it was not she but a demon fox in her form guilty of the assault. More commonly, however, foxes take human form to waylay solitary travellers, or sometimes to call la
te at night on those who live alone. One of the author’s village acquaintances, a man who had attended college in the city, once answered the door to a man asking help for his companion taken sick on the road. The friend followed his visitor by moonlight through the woods to where a man lay moaning and half-conscious at the roadside. Between them, they brought the man back to the village and settled him on a futon at the fireside. The writer’s friend cared for his guests and did not himself retire to bed until sunrise, but when he woke a couple of hours later there was nobody there but a single gold coin on the futon where the sick man had slept. So the friend returned to the roadside where he found only the prints of foxes, and knew that he had entertained the fox gods unaware. And then there is another story from the same village . . . The light is bright on Tom’s face and he wrinkles his eyes to scan the horizon, to see the ship still at the centre of the circle of sea and sky and the sun half-way between zenith and the edge of the ocean. Almost four o’clock, almost time for tea; one eats, on a ship, to mark the passing of time, because there is no place to go or from which to return and each transit of the cream jug, each turn of the cake-stand, is a step in the dance of the long afternoon.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Cavendish.’

  The black-haired Louisa Davis under a black straw hat, her freckles her only colour against white skin and black dress. He puts down the book and pushes himself out of the low deckchair. ‘Miss Davis.’

  ‘You have found something to read? I thought the library unlikely to suit a gentleman’s taste.’