Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

Author:Sarah Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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