by Sarah Moss
ANYTHING THAT MATTERS
At sea he woke early for solitude, to have the deck and sometimes the library to himself for an hour or so before the other passengers appeared. And because twice, after she’d stopped speaking to him at the table, Louisa Davis came to find him there. Now he wakes, he thinks, because of the dawn, because of the seagulls, because while he is asleep he does not know where he is. The west-facing bedroom is still dim, full up with a submarine light strained by curtains whose green he didn’t notice last night. The wall a foot from his face is roughly painted, uneven as the face of the moon. He lies still so she doesn’t sense his consciousness, tries to breathe slowly so his body, his heartbeat and the growth of his hair, doesn’t signal to hers that there’s somebody here now. She does not love him, he thinks. It is all gone, whatever it was, and he cannot tell her anything that matters. Would it help, he wonders, could he get back to where they were last year, if he turned now, if he reached over her sleeping shoulder to unbutton the nightdress, if with his foot he pushed up its frilled hem until his hand could touch her thigh? If he rolled her over and before she was fully awake, before she could object, held her wrists and silenced her mouth with kisses? Would it be a relief to her simply to capitulate, is it the courtesies of negotiation and not the act itself of which they are no longer capable? He remembers Louisa, whose white flesh was indeed tender as ripe fruit, who dropped one layer of black clothing after another to the floor of his cabin and rejoiced when at last he understood his role, when he was not gentle. He remembers her.
He reaches around to touch the fox under his nightshirt. He has not told Ally about his tattoo. He had thought that she would find it, and he would explain. He had imagined her fingers and her mouth travelling over it, and himself telling the story of the dancing dog fox and the blue-skinned betto and the boy on the ship. And not telling another tale, which she does not need to know. Naturally there is awkwardness after so many months apart. Naturally they must learn to be together again. They have both been busy, absorbed in their work, both solitary and free. It is not as if she has spent the time embroidering handkerchiefs and ticking off the days of his absence.
She does not love him.
His shoes sit neatly together beside the bed, and on the chair his clothes lie folded.
He edges from under the sheets, not to cause a draft or a chill to disturb her. He does not know these floorboards, sidles tentatively as a man fearing quicksand. By the door he looks back. She is on her side, just as she went to sleep, with her arms pressed over her breast and her hands tucked under her chin, her knees raised so that her feet and her behind form one rise of the blankets. She’s pulled the sheets tight around her shoulders. He can’t really see her face, but her hair has spread across the pillow again. He bites his lip and goes downstairs, treading on the outsides of the steps where creaks are least likely.
He opens the curtains. The room smells of woodsmoke and the grate is full of ash, will have to be swept before another fire can be lit. He will need to bring in more logs. One thing at a time, and the day will pass, and then another day and at last they will return to Falmouth and the daily distractions of work. He should have taken his clothes from the chair upstairs. He puts his coat over his pyjamas, unlocks the door and steps out barefoot into the morning. Wet grass closes around his ankles.
The sky is hanging low over the peninsula, the horizon that called to him yesterday absent as the sun behind the clouds. They will have to go out and walk anyway, he thinks, they cannot pass the day in that house. He should have brought some work, the journals he missed in Japan, the beginnings of a paper he might deliver to the Polytechnic Institute and then perhaps the Society of Engineers. He had imagined, somehow, that being here, being with Ally, would constitute occupation. He cannot now recall how he thought they would pass so many hours. He crosses the grass, treading dandelions underfoot, and picks his way along the track to the beach. He will walk on the sand, let the waves come from Africa wash his earthbound feet, but when he comes to the bluff he sees that the tide is so high that there is no beach and the sand is under a man’s height of water and sullen grey waves. He clambers across the rocks and sits there, listening to the crash and hiss, trying to remember if it sounds the same as in Japan. There was sand the colour of a white man’s skin and palm trees black against the sky. His pyjamas cling around his ankles. It does not matter what he has done.
She does not love him.
THERE ARE NO BIRDS
She does not know what has woken her. It must be late, she should not have slept so long, he will think she is in the habit of lying long in bed. She turns to find herself alone, because she has overslept, because hardworking people began the day hours ago. He should have woken her. Before he went away he woke her with his hands and his lips half an hour before his alarm clock rang. She pushes back the blankets and swings her feet to the cold floor. The chill reaches up under the flimsy lace-trimmed nightgown she bought with her first month’s salary. Flaunting yourself, she thinks, aping the younger and prettier woman you never were. She cannot do this. She can work, she thinks, she can be a doctor, she can write articles and perhaps eventually a monograph, but she cannot be someone’s wife, not anymore. She has made herself ridiculous, a woman with bony feet and greying hair got up like a young bride, and in her foolishness she has brought no other nightdress. But she will cut off the lace at the hem and neck this day, and save it for the women at Rose Tree House. Mrs. Rudge will find a use for it. She plucks at the frilled wrists and feels her stomach curl with embarrassment. Pride and self-flattery bring their own certain punishment. The house does not feel as if there is another person in it, but even so she closes the bedroom door and moves fast in case he should come up the stairs and catch her undressed, the sternal bones where a cleavage should be and her pelvis sharp where true women have soft roundedness. She pulls on her drawers under the nightgown and casts it off only when her chemise is laid out ready on the bed. Corset, petticoat, stockings, blouse, skirt, jacket. It is hard to raise her arms in the jacket but she doesn’t brush her hair until she’s fully dressed, armoured. A woman reaches an age when her aspiration in dressing should be only to look respectable. At least she has still her work. She hopes all is well at Rose Tree House, that Miss Trennick has been spared further nightmares and especially that Mrs. Curnow, who is still very easily alarmed, is finding it easier to make small daily decisions. She hopes the seeds are still growing and that there have been no further difficulties with the sewing machine. She should be there, she thinks. The new housekeeper is a kind and sensible woman, in whom Ally senses some past experience of the unsettled mind, but Dr. Crosswyn has lent his senior nurse for the week and she is unaccustomed, probably unsympathetic, to the newly-formed ways of Rose Tree. She won’t care for the women, Ally thinks, she won’t help them to care for themselves, she will speak harshly and weeks of their work will be undone. She pins up her hair and goes downstairs.
Tom is not there, and last night’s dishes still where he insisted that she leave them on the table. At least, then, it is clear what to do first. She sets water to heat while she goes down the garden path. The floor is not as clean as it might be, especially around the stove; she will wash it when she has done the dishes, and she will sweep the grate and perhaps also clean the bannisters, which are sticky to the touch. The fear has come back, she thinks. She is behaving as if Tom were Mamma, and she longs to return to the madwomen who do not judge and find her wanting, or even to Annie and Aunt Mary. She does not want to be married, not like this. She does not want to be a wife.
Although as far as she can tell he ate no breakfast, he seems to have little interest in the potted shrimps. She toasted the bread laboriously as a gesture towards cooking, towards an effort to please, but he has let it go cold.
‘Would you like something else? I’m afraid there’s not much choice but I can maybe go down to the farm.’
He pushes his plate away. ‘No, Ally
. I’m not fussy, you know that.’
She toys with her own lunch. She is hungry and the shrimps are a treat, but it seems uncouth or even heartless to tuck in while he denies himself.
‘You are perhaps still missing the Japanese food?’ He says he liked it, that he came to understand subtleties of texture that simply don’t appear in English cooking, although nothing about his descriptions makes it sound appetising. Raw fish and cold rice and a broth made from fermented beans, how does a race subsist on that? And how should she, should England, compete with what does not appear in English cooking? He does not wish to be here either, she thinks. We have made a mistake.
She stands up. ‘Tea, then. I’ll boil the kettle.’
He looks up. ‘I can do it. Finish your lunch.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
When she comes back he has picked up the newspaper he bought in Penzance yesterday.
She looks at her shrimps. ‘Is there bad news?’
He stays behind the paper. ‘Isn’t there always?’
The wind rushes over the grass outside. A seagull ululates, a chorus repeated from overhead. He puts down the paper, as if lowering a standard, begins to speak and stops.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘The news seems so provincial. As if no-one here knows that there are oceans and continents and other ways of understanding everything.’
‘You are reading the Western Morning Herald,’ she points out. ‘But I think we do know those things, Tom. Especially here. I hear more languages on the streets of Falmouth than I did in London. It’s just that those aren’t truths you can live with, really, the suffering and conflict of all the beings everywhere on earth. You can’t—you can’t hold everyone in your mind at once, it’s too much. Like the idea of death. It silences thought.’
Mamma cannot for a moment forget the suffering of the world and since she cannot solve it, she cannot have peace. And at the asylum, she wants to say, at the asylum I knew people who saw the skull in every face and the approach of darkness in every heartbeat and they weren’t wrong but they weren’t well. But he doesn’t want to know about the madwomen and she doesn’t want him to think she’s suggesting that his thoughts are like madness.
‘It’s more like the idea of life,’ he says. ‘There is so much to learn.’
But not here, she thinks. Not in the life together that they are supposed to be resurrecting. ‘The water must be boiling by now. I’ll make the tea.’
He says there is a path around the headland to Prussia Cove. He says he likes to feel the rain on his face. He says Prussia Cove is the scene of a dramatic wreck, and that for a long time a family of smugglers held the village as a private fiefdom. She looks at him pacing the floor as she has not seen him pace before; he is different now.
She swallows. She must not insinuate herself where she is not wanted, must not cling and clutch a man who wishes to be free, but nor must she give him to believe that she does not wish for his company, that she prefers a warm fireside to her husband’s conversation. ‘I could come too. If you like. But of course if you wish to be alone I understand, I have letters to write.’
He turns back towards the staircase. ‘Come if you want to, Alethea. Just as you prefer.’
No, she wants to say, as you prefer; I have still dignity enough to want only where I am wanted. He is not Mamma. She steels herself. ‘I prefer to be with you. As long as I do not intrude.’
He stops. ‘Good. Come too. But you’ll get wet.’
She shrugs. ‘My skin is no more permeable than yours. As long as we keep moving we’ll keep warm.’
He does not want her, she thinks. He would, on balance, rather she were not there.
At first they follow the track between the fields. The rain is only mizzle, just heavy enough to fall, beading the leaves in the hedge and the taller grasses with drops too small to run. Gorse flowers seem to glow, almost to pulsate, against the grey and green of land and sky, and on her right the sea and clouds merge. There is no birdsong, but the hawk hovers again on the hill. Before they have passed the beach he is walking ten paces ahead, although she has no difficulty keeping up. She has angered him somehow, has done something to annoy: perhaps he did not want her to come, or objects to her late rising or to the meagre lunch. He did not like to come back and find her washing the floor, he has never liked to see housework. There is no shame, she thinks, in any task done well, and does not he himself insist on cleaning his own shoes and emptying the pot under the bed? Perhaps he will like the slices of plum cake she has brought to eat at Prussia Cove. She must think of something to ask him, something he will like to talk about. She hurries to catch up. Her skirt is already mired and clinging about her ankles. It is too late. What marriage, what friendship, was ever saved by small talk?
She reaches to take his arm and thinks better of it. Don’t cling, don’t need. ‘Tom? What was your favourite of the things you brought back?’
He has spoken much of the places, of houses without walls and gardens without flowerbeds, but very little about his acquisitions.
He checks his pace and glances back at her. ‘For De Rivers, you mean? Or my own things?’
She just wants him to talk to her. ‘Either. The object you liked best.’
He walks on. They climb a stone stile and the path, free now of the fields, slopes down towards a deep inlet. He is not going to answer her.
‘I tried not to like them. Or at least only to admire, because I knew they were not mine. It’s a different thing, buying for another person. I did not much like that aspect of it. I had not thought, you see, that buying such things—well, works of art, I suppose one should call them—would be so unlike buying bricks or steel.’
She nods. ‘Uncle James says most people buy art the way they choose a wife.’ Without thinking, Uncle James adds, but she does not say that.
‘Perhaps it felt a little like choosing another man’s wife. There were so many beautiful things.’
In the inlet, below the short cliffs, waves buckle and swish, unable to run and break between the narrow walls.
‘So there was not one in particular, one more memorable beauty?’ She should stop. She knows that he does not want to answer.
He looks out to sea. There are folded seagulls bobbing on the waves. ‘Yes. There was one.’
She says nothing. Behind him, where he can’t see, she pulls up her skirts to climb over a rock. The path ahead rises now, up onto the headland. He is saying something but he’s several paces ahead and facing out into the wind. Something about the Imperial Palace. She catches up.
‘A kind of trade fair, with stalls. Someone from Nakayama. They’re famous, they made the hangings for the new palace in Tokyo. They were all extraordinary but there was one—cranes, and wisteria. You can’t imagine the fineness of the embroidery. Inconceivable, that someone would spend such time and energy sewing a feather.’
He is an engineer, she thinks. It is the process that fascinates him.
‘And it was beautiful?’
He walks on, ahead again. ‘Of course.’
‘And De Rivers appreciates it?’
‘I didn’t buy it, Al. I told myself it was too big, and so costly I dare not spend another man’s money so.’
‘But?’
He looks back at her. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It was very expensive. If De Rivers hadn’t wanted it I doubt it could have been sold here for more than I would have paid. But I didn’t want him to have it, I think. It belonged in Japan.’
It feels like a confession. The one that mattered belongs in Japan, and is still there, and also here in his mind. They reach the top of the headland, from which St Michael’s Mount is just visible through the rain, disembodied and floating above the bay. And she understands that there will be no outing there, no basket unpacked onto a gingham cloth under the trees. They will not sit together on the grass and
see their shadows lengthen and merge in the afternoon sun until the tide turns and it is time to go home. They will not find each other at last in the whitewashed room when darkness has fallen. Not this time.
THE TENDER SLOWNESS OF A NORTHERN DUSK
The tide is coming up the estuary. Moored boats lift and bump as their keels feel water once more around them, and the light in the air shifts as waves cover the mud. The groynes at Flushing stand bare, the stonework of Dutch hands three hundred years dead exhibited for admiration. The seagull on the wall outside Tom’s window looks around, makes one tart remark and takes wing. Soon the fishing boats will be in.
