Signs for Lost Children

PROLOGUE

HOME

There is a boy.

Through the leaves, the sun shines copper on his hair. He doesn’t hear the sea meeting the shore behind the trees as he doesn’t hear the wingbeat in the chambers of his heart. The trees make oxygen and the boy’s lungs expand, his ribs rise, blood reddens in his arteries. There is a boy.

There is a bird near the boy. The bird is as big as the boy’s hand and it’s not brown but the colour of wet straw and its speckles look like indentations and there are two charcoal stripes on each wing, as if the bird has been drawn fast in oil pastel, and the boy has been still for so long that the bird doesn’t know there is a boy.

The boy is waiting.

The red maple leaves are bright as blood against the greens of a Cornish garden. The rabbits don’t take cover there, as if they know what’s foreign. Sparrows and blue tits don’t gather in the black bamboo. No fox footprints mar the ribbing of raked gravel, nor is a heron reflected beside the stepping stones leading only to the middle of the moon-watching pond. Sometimes, at night, the owl lands on the roof of the tea-house and turns its head, looking for mice by moonlight.

Twigs break and a rustle comes through the leaves. Papa, humming. Then t’worms’ll coom and eat ’ee oop. Not in front of the patients, please, my loves, says Mamma. Or at least not with such gusto. Later, there will be proper tea in the house with the patients and Mamma at the head of the table, potted meat sandwiches, salad from the garden, a sponge cake made with eggs Laurence carried from the henhouse before he went to school this morning. Later there will be piano practice, arithmetic, hair-washing. Papa sits down on the edge of the veranda to take off his shoes. He has darned his socks with the wrong colour.

They can’t always get green tea but Papa has brought a new package from Bates across the water. A ship came in, he says. Papa kneels on the floor to lift the lid of the shiny wooden box of utensils Makoto sent him from Tokyo. He sets up the primus to boil water. He arranges the cups and the teapot, rough and heavy as grey pebbles, on a black tray that shines like ice and has gold birds painted on it. Laurence squats on the veranda and watches. Papa’s trousers strain. Laurence can kneel like that, with his heels under his bottom, but his feet get squashed and he doesn’t see why he should.

‘A story?’ Papa asks. ‘The badgers and the bag of gold? The traveller and the fox cubs?’

Laurence smiles at Papa and shakes his head.

‘The cat and the moon-watching pond?’

Papa likes to tell Japanese stories in which animals change shape and speak.

‘Tell me how you made our house. Tell me about the garden.’

Papa smiles at him. ‘Let me make the tea first. Gather my thoughts.’

PART ONE

LONDON, SUMMER 1878

WHERE THINGS COME FROM

Tom walks onto the platform. No, he thinks, I ascend the podium. I am The Speaker. His notes dampen in his fingers; well, it is warm in here. Silence spreads like smoke through his audience, faces turn. He takes a breath, offers a reassuring smile over the lectern, and begins.

He knows these audiences. It is where he himself began, slipping into the gallery of the Workers’ Education Society Hall in Harrogate for the evening lecture series, sitting among men whose hands told their trades. Thick fingers calloused and scarred, engrained with iron or brick dust or oil, the minerals that fuel the Empire making their way through layers of skin and into the blood of England’s working men. Aye lad, they said, sit and hear if you will, just so’s you’re quiet, start young and you’ll make something of yourself yet. It was his mother’s greatest, perhaps sole, ambition, that he should make something of himself, and here he is. The Speaker.

Later, he will give them the geometry, the trigonometry, the calculation of the reflection and refraction of light. At the beginning, it is not how but why. Because, he says, lighthouses are the beacons of progress. Lighthouses illuminate the advance of civilisations. Like any form of civil engineering, lighthouses allow those who build and maintain them to save the lives of others or to walk the world with deaths on their consciences, but that is not really what they are for, not why governments spend thousands of pounds. Sailors’ lives are important but you who work in the mills and factories, who spend your lives in this city, know that history is not made by the lives and deaths of individuals. Lighthouses are important because without them, there cannot be intercontinental trade. Because only explorers will chance a ship approaching an unknown coast after nightfall or in fog; no cargo captain in his right mind would hazard such a thing. The tea you drink, he tells his audience, the calico your wives wear, the raisins in your pudding, come to us across the seas by grace of lighthouses. Where there are no lighthouses, there are no ships, and where there are no ships, there is no trade. It follows that where there are no lighthouses there may be great resources untapped and much wealth to be made and shared. Who knows what riches lie behind unlit harbours, behind sandbars and cliffs, down inlets where darkness and fog have rested unbroken since the beginning of the world? Make no mistake, gentlemen, our knowledge of the world, our conversations with those in far places, begin with the building of lighthouses.

Ah, he has them now. They are city-dwellers, men whose lives pass in the shadows of buildings, whose lungs are silted with coalsmoke, and few will ever cross the sea. But they know their river and the great ships creeping up it on the tide; they know the sharp scent of new calico and the musky sweetness of a dried raisin or fig. They know where things come from. Now we can talk about how.

He finishes. There is applause. This, always, is the point at which he feels foolish: what is a man supposed to do with his face, with his hands, while a hundred other men face him and clap? He smiles and bows, or at least, ducks his head. A different kind of man would have practised before the mirror. He ducks again and goes down the three steps to the main body of the hall. Descends the podium.

The boy has been waiting for him outside the door, apparently oblivious to the rain beginning to fall. Tom, still warm as if he has been rowing or running, raises his face to the wet wind. A posh boy, you can tell from his clothes and something about the way he stands, about the angle of shoulders and neck, but all boys want to run away to sea.

‘Excuse me, Mr. Cavendish? Could you spare me a moment? Your lecture was fascinating, sir.’

Fascinating. No, not from around here, nor anywhere Tom’s been.

‘I am glad you enjoyed it,’ he says.

The boy nods. ‘I’m interested in the lenses.’

‘Go on.’

He has underestimated the boy. Of course he wants to sail the high seas and build towers that will shine out across the waves for years to come, but he has also been learning, somewhere, from someone, about the latest experiments, the new kinds of glass. Tom finds himself leaning against the wall, waving his notes around, forgetting his thirst and the rain on his wool coat. Would you, says the boy, do you think you might possibly, I mean, would you consider maybe coming to dinner, at my house?

ROCKS AT SEA

Ally tips her rocking chair forwards, plants her feet on the pale carpet, leafs back through the pages she has just scanned. She cannot find the chapter she remembers. On the ward they have a fever patient causing concern, and she has a hunch that the fever is incidental to the real problem, that the tremors are not rigor but some disorder of the motor functions. She was sure there was something in Hanson’s Disorders of the Nervous System . Here, perhaps.

There are footsteps coming up the stairs, someone faster and heavier than Fanny, and then a pause. She puts down her book and goes to the door.

‘George?’

‘Cousin Ally. Are you very busy?’ He looks uncomfortable, as if his collar pinches. She can’t remember the last time he came up here to find her. Some concern about his health, or the changes of adolescence? He is, after all, well into the awkward age.

She smiles at him and holds the door open. ‘Not so very busy. Come in?’

He nods, comes to a standstill in the middle of the rug, suddenly bulkier and darker among the embroidered whitenesses of her room, a figure in oils superimposed on a watercolour interior. She pulls forward the bow-legged tapestry stool from her dressing table and sits on it.

‘Have the rocker. Is something troubling you, George?’

The rocker tips him backward. He’s begun to sit like a man, legs thrown wide as if his manhood requires a seat of its own. She remembers how he used to leap into the air from the garden wall, from inside the carriage and from far too far up the stairs, confiding himself to the air like a gull. If she were a painter, she would have tried to paint him so, in that moment of rising, before the fall begins.

Frowning, he rolls the edging of a cushion-cover between his fingers. ‘I went to a lecture. Three lectures.’

She nods, waits. Lectures on prostitution? On spiritualism? There are flyers, she recalls, advertising talks about gold-mining in Australia, and George is just the person, just the age, to be seized by the idea of a long voyage and a treasure-trove under a hot sun.

He looks up. ‘About engineering. Lighthouses. He, the lecturer, he works for the Penvenicks.’

Not, then, a discussion of physiology or the joys of married love. ‘The Penvenicks?’

‘It’s a Cornish firm. They build lighthouses. Richard Penvenick used to work for the Stevensons.’

Her gaze wanders towards her medical book.

‘And Richard Penvenick gave the lecture?’

He looks shocked, as if she’s asked if St Peter gave last Sunday’s sermon. She has not been to church for some weeks.

‘Oh, no. Not himself. No, an assistant. He’s called Tom Cavendish. He worked on the Wolf Rock!’

‘The Wolf Rock?’

He nods, smiling, as if at the mention of some Oriental paradise of silk-clad harems and the whisper of scented trees.

‘It’s a rock off the Scilly Isles. Thousands—well, hundreds—of ships wrecked there. Some of them had come all the way from Australia, all those weeks, just to smash at the very entrance to the Channel.’

Bodies washing on the waves, hair floating out from drowned heads. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Her sister May. She shivers.

‘Oh my word, Cousin Ally, I forgot. I mean, not forgot, of course. I’m so sorry.’

He squirms, five years younger than when he sat down.

‘Never mind, George. You didn’t know her well. Keep telling me about the lecture.’

She wants to say that it’s what my sister would have wanted, for your life to unroll as if she had never been, but she doesn’t know. There was no reason to discuss forgetting. And what May might or might not have wanted is now quite irrelevant.

He swallows. ‘All right. Sorry. Anyway, so they built a lighthouse. The Stevensons. And Tom Cavendish worked on it. They were there every day, just out on the rock. They couldn’t even build a cabin, they had to go out every morning, whatever the weather. They shaped every stone, interlocking all the way up. I’ll show you the designs, Aunt Ally, it’s an amazing thing. Amazing that you can do it. You can’t imagine the waves it withstands. I mean—sorry.’

‘Go on, George. I know that the sea is still there. Am I to take it that you want to be a lighthouse builder?’

He looks up, older again. ‘It’s all I want to do. I can do it. I’ve always liked math. And I’m strong, you know that, I’m never ill.’

‘What does your Papa say?’

He looks down. ‘That’s the thing. He says it’s probably just a fad and last year I wanted to join the Navy and anyway I can do it after Cambridge if I still want to. But I can’t. Cambridge would just waste three years and then I’d be too old for an apprenticeship. And I could study engineering here or in Edinburgh or Aberdeen and actually learn something useful. He says Engineering isn’t a scholarly subject and I would regret Cambridge all my life, but I wouldn’t. He means he would have regretted Cambridge if he hadn’t gone. But honestly, Aunt Al, I’ve never been much interested in art, and I’m no good at Latin and all that. I mean, I can get by, but you know I’ve always liked real things more than books. It’s my life, not his.’

Ally nods. Either of them may be right, as far as she can see, but people learn more from their own mistakes than those of others.

‘You know I can’t interfere between you and your father. What does your Mamma say?’

His face brightens. ‘Let the dear child be happy, mostly. Like the ending of a romantic novel.’

They both smile. Aunt Mary’s novel habit has spread into a second bookcase.

He sits forward, coming to the crux. ‘I just thought, you know what it’s like to have—well, a calling. Because you wanted to be a doctor when you were young, didn’t you? And that must have been much harder than me wanting to be an engineer.’

‘Not, though, as hard as if I’d wanted to be an engineer,’ she points out. ‘And you know that there are girls who would give everything for the choice between Cambridge and engineering?’

‘I know. Really, Aunt Ally, I do. Anyway, the thing is, I invited him, Tom Cavendish, to dinner. I mean, I asked Mamma first, if I might. And I thought maybe, please, you might join us? I said Thursday because that’s your day off at the moment, isn’t it? I checked with Fanny.’

Dear George. She remembers herself at fifteen, the strength of her longings and the dread of the god-like powers of the grown-ups. George, plainly, has no idea how much easier these things are for him than for a girl with similar ambitions, but he has, still, his own passion and fear.

‘Very well, George. My day off is in no way guaranteed, but if I can I will come to your dinner, and meet this Mr. Cavendish, and if he asks me I’ll tell Uncle James that work one loves is a rare gift not to be lightly discarded. Though I think he knows that, I doubt his own parents particularly wished him to become an art dealer. But I ask you something in return.’

‘Anything you like, Aunt Ally.’

‘Promise me that you will indeed remember that there are girls all over Britain with just such capacities and ambition as yours, who might, given the opportunity, design just such buildings as you marvel over. Promise me that however far you travel and however high you climb, you will keep these wasted intellects and forbidden dreams in your mind.’

He sighs. He has heard it before. But he promises. She wishes she could make every professional man in Britain make the same promise, add it to the articles signed at matriculation to the great universities.

YOU ARE NOT RICH

He cannot remember why he agreed to come. It is not as if the boy recalled to mind his younger self, or as if he particularly believes that the sons of houses such as these require encouragement. All the porticos are freshly painted white, with the house-numbers in the same black italic hand on the pillars. All the front steps—sandstone, it will wear over the years—and even the identical boot-scrapers to the left of each front door, are clean. He pushes his finger through a hole in his glove; it is not that he is incapable of mending it, not that his mother didn’t teach him to thread a needle. Only the doors themselves show a limited variety: pillar-box red, black, or bottle green. He is here, he supposes, because he has not passed through such a door since his professor used to give suppers for his favoured students in Aberdeen. Because he has spent enough evenings among the other lodgers making the best of his landlady’s cooking in the front room thick with the smell of decades of gravy and pipe-smoke. Soon, he promises himself, back to Falmouth, to the sound of the sea and the sight of hedgerows in their midwinter plainness. It is not that he dislikes London, but as in any city, you cannot forget that you are not rich. And so here he is, visiting the rich in their own quarters. Number 67, a black front door. He checks the soles of his boots, adjusts his jacket, before he climbs the steps.

HER SILVER SNAKE SCISSORS

Aunt Mary does not usually withdraw to leave Uncle James to his port unless there is a formal dinner party, for he likes to say that unlike most men, he prefers his wife’s company to that of the bottle and expects his friends to do the same. Aunt Mary, catching Ally’s eye as Fanny removes the dessert, makes an unannounced exception for Mr. Cavendish. The men rise as they leave the room.

In the drawing room, the fire crackling, the winter curtains drawn against the cold pressing itself to the windows, Ally takes the blue armchair. ‘I feel as if we have thrown Mr. Cavendish to the lions.’

Aunt Mary picks up her cross-stitch. It has crossed Ally’s mind that Aunt Mary, like May, does cross-stitch as a private snub to Mamma and indeed to Grandmamma. Devoting time and money to mere adornment, expenditure and effort with no rational end or measurable result. She wonders what happened to her sister May’s unfinished embroidery, presumably left on the island when May set out to sea.

‘I thought the point about throwing people to the lions was that other people stayed to watch. Anyway, James won’t devour him. But he certainly won’t trust him until they have talked it through.’

‘Man to man,’ says Ally. She doesn’t want to do cross-stitch, but she does, sometimes, see the point of having something to do with your hands.

‘Man to man.’ The needle flashes across Aunt Mary’s lap. ‘I like him. He was polite to Fanny.’

There was trouble, a few weeks ago, when one of Uncle James’s clients took too much wine and followed Fanny onto the back stairs where he was impolite.

‘I had the impression he is unaccustomed to servants.’

Mr. Cavendish’s father, he told them in response to Uncle James’s not especially subtle enquiries, died when Mr. Cavendish was a child. His mother has not remarried, and assists a friend with a dress shop in Harrogate. It seems a long time since she last heard her own northern vowels on another person’s tongue.

Aunt Mary holds her cross-stitch away to see the effect of the new colour. She ought to have spectacles. You can’t judge colour by lamplight anyway. ‘I don’t know. I dare say his mother cannot keep much of a house but he handled the silver with perfect aplomb.’

‘Oh, Aunt Mary.’

She looks up, innocent. ‘What?’

‘I wondered why the fish-forks and grape-scissors. You were testing him.’

‘I? No such thing. Anyway, if I were, he would have passed. But my dear, whatever one’s children may choose or find themselves obliged to do in later life, you must see that training them for the best company opens the way for any ambition they may hold. Even Grandmamma taught us to behave before she sent us into the slums with our Bibles and her good intentions. And George is still very young; naturally I don’t wish to send him into rough company. Especially not when it’s plain that he worships the man. Do you know, in some ways it was much less worrying when they were small and one’s greatest anxieties concerned chicken-pox and whether they would eat their meat?’

Ally crosses her feet. Her new shoes hurt. ‘Chicken pox can be a very real anxiety. They are both strong, fine boys, Aunt Mary.’

‘I know, my dear. I am unfairly blessed. Your poor Mamma.’

The dining room door opens, but only one set of footsteps crosses the hall. George stands in the doorway. He seems, Ally thinks, to stand in doorways rather a lot at the moment.

‘Did they send you away?’ asks Aunt Mary. What is it in Aunt Mary’s life that has given her such placidity? Not anything that Mamma shared.

‘Papa said one glass of port was more than enough and run along now. Don’t you like Mr. Cavendish, Mamma? The story about St. Antony Head?’

‘He is not a natural storyteller.’ Aunt Mary peels a scarlet thread from her basket, snips it with her silver snake-scissors, wets the end in her mouth and re-threads the needle. George’s face falls. ‘And so one believes what he says. My dear, he seems perfectly pleasant and personable. Perhaps a little too inclined to speak of his calling but that is most excusable in one of his age.’

George leans on the doorframe. ‘You see why I want to work with him?’

The red begins to make its trail across the canvas. ‘Dear boy. Yes, I see why you want to go off to wild places and build towers on the waves. And I see why Mr. Cavendish’s enthusiasm is contagious. I also see why your Papa will say that this new vocation must stand the test of a little time before we change our plans for you.’

‘But, Mamma—’

‘I know. You want it now. But you are barely sixteen and it is our role, darling, to prevent you from making hasty decisions now that curtail your future in ways you will regret when it is too late.’

George looks at Ally. ‘You chose medicine, didn’t you, when you were younger than I am.’

The fire pops, sending a cinder onto the hearth. Yes, she did. Or had it chosen for her. Aunt Mary has stopped stitching.

‘I chose to study more seriously than other girls. And I chose to attend extension lectures as well as my school lessons. It is not as if I had the opportunities open to you, George. We were not even sure it would be possible for a woman to graduate when I was sixteen.’ She looks at Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary who has not only housed and fed but also cosseted her these five years, whom she will not betray now. ‘And remember also all the men and boys for whom university is only a painful longing. You are prosperous and male, George. The world is yours. Don’t waste your choices by acting like someone who doesn’t have them.’

Aunt Mary nods, sends Ally a quick smile, and bends to her work. What she has said is not untrue, and after all if George really has found his vocation nothing his cousin has to say will turn him from it, and—at least as long as he refrains from marrying—nothing likely to happen in the next few years will prevent him returning to engineering after Cambridge. Papa and Aubrey developed their practice as artists while taking degrees. The dining room door opens again and the two men come through, laughing together.

HIS TEA-CUP

Mr. Cavendish calls again, once while Ally is out, when, George says, he and Uncle James had a long conversation about Mr. Turner’s shipwreck paintings, and then one day when Ally returns from the hospital at tea-time, having been there since eight o’clock the previous evening. She walks home through a slow winter sunset, the bare branches of the plane trees black against a glowing sky. She and Dr. Stratton lost the patient, a maternity case who haemorrhaged after a long breech labour. The baby lives, for the moment, as, it turns out, do three of its siblings, now in all probability cases for the Children’s Home. She drops her shoulders, allows her arms to swing a little as she walks, and draws deep breaths of the cold. Good doctors can set aside both triumph and defeat. It took her half an hour to coax a cry from the baby and she is far from sure that her work was in its best interest.

She hears his voice in the drawing room as she closes the front door, and almost decides to slip straight to the kitchen and coax tea and toast from the new cook, who shows signs of being impressed by her work where the others have tended to see a poor relation. She can’t hear the words, but Mr. Cavendish is speaking fast, energetically, the way Papa and Aubrey used to talk about painting and design. The way people talk about work when it’s going well. She finds herself walking, not creeping, up the stairs.

He’s sitting on the Ottoman in the bay window, his red hair extravagantly back-lit by the pink sky. Horizontal sunbeams pick out each droplet in the steam twisting from his tea-cup.

He stands up, holds out his hand. ‘Miss Moberley! Mrs. Dunne told me you were at the hospital.’

Ally hopes he doesn’t have damp palms. She dislikes shaking hands. ‘I was at the hospital.’ He doesn’t. ‘I stayed on to see through a maternity case.’

‘A happy ending?’

‘No.’ She sits down. By this time of day, she usually prefers to keep going until after dinner following a night’s work, but she’s too tired now. She must sleep very soon. Aunt Mary pours a cup of tea for her. ‘People say working women give birth easily, that it’s the rich who make a fuss, but it’s not true. Poor diet and overwork make nothing easier.’

‘Ally,’ murmurs Aunt Mary.

Ally frowns. Is there blood on her skirt, is her collar awry?

‘Oh. Forgive me, Mr. Cavendish. I spend too much time at the hospital and forget what subjects are considered proper for polite conversation. It is a very pretty sunset, is it not?’

He sits forward. ‘Indeed, Miss Moberley, it would be better for all of us were there more overlap between what is correct and what is important. Do you find that maternity cases do better in the hospital than at home?’

She sips her tea, comforting and too hot, glances at Aunt Mary.

‘Go ahead, my dear. Consider me your antediluvian aunt.’

‘The charity cases do, of course. At the very least we offer rest and cleanliness. Otherwise, the mother and infant may share a bed with other children from almost the very moment of birth. And where it is necessary, we can make a case to the Foundling Hospital for infants who would in all probability face a brief and uncomfortable future.’

‘Really, Ally.’

She sits back. ‘I am sure Mr. Cavendish knows that babies are not found under gooseberry bushes, Aunt Mary.’

Amusement plays about his eyes. ‘I believe I do, yes. And that they do not always appear at correct moments, or indeed in correct arms. George tells me you have contributed also to rescue work, Miss Moberley?’

‘Ally, what have you told the boy?’

Ally tries to remember. ‘Very little, Aunt Mary. But he hears things at school and he is at an age to be curious. I told him to ask Uncle James. It is my mother’s work, Mr. Cavendish. I do not try to combine medicine with any other calling. And you? Surely your work leaves little time for charitable concerns?’

‘Little time for organised philanthropy. I try to be mindful of the needs around me, and mindful also that my mindfulness does not in itself help anyone and indeed denies me the excuse of ignorance for my inaction.’

They smile at each other.

‘Ally, have a sandwich,’ says Aunt Mary. ‘I am sure you did not eat lunch.’

TIDES ARE ALWAYS IN MOTION

It is, she has found, possible to mistake other men for him. He has a type, a genus, that makes it hard to be sure until she can see his face that the compact body, red hair, and bobbing stride are Tom. Half the men in London, this part of London, carry a briefcase and wear a black coat and hat. He is, as ever, exactly to time; crowds dissolve before the omnibuses Tom rides, shoe-laces untangle themselves, verbose suppliers remember important appointments. If a thing won’t work, he says—keys, the lid of Aunt Mary’s sewing box—there is a reason, and then it is his practice to find the reason and resolve the difficulty. In most cases, things do work for him, not only the tools and machines that realise his calling but the small intricacies of daily life. His clothes do not get lost at the laundry, his letters do not miss the post. Dear Miss Moberley, I hope to call on you this afternoon and thought that as the sun seems likely to shine you might enjoy a walk in the park. He takes the weather seriously. She moves back, behind the curtain, just as he glances up before stepping under the portico and onto the step. She pauses before the mirror as the doorbell rings, pushes strands of hair back into her chignon and tugs her waistband smooth, merely ritual adjustments that undo themselves as she walks through the room.

He offers his elbow as they cross the road, where the first open carriages of the season jostle among the hansom cabs and carts. She finds that she has taken his arm, and also that she feels no objection when he does not release her as they enter the park. The plane trees have come into full leaf since she last thought about them, a rich blue-green too dense to paint in water-colour, and ducklings hurry behind their mothers around the fountains in the square pond.

He tucks her hand against his coat. ‘This time last year, I was holding onto the rocks to stop myself blowing into the North Sea. I suppose there were tulips here then too.’

She tries to remember. April. The fever ward. ‘I cannot say. I am sure I did go outdoors by daylight but the experience has left no impression.’

He does not reply. Perhaps she sounded repressive. ‘You were building a lighthouse?’ she asks.

His hair is even brighter in the sun, a metallic, inorganic colour. Copper, she thinks, more than bronze. ‘Unbuilding, this time. A strange place. The sea is in retreat, and the land so low that the channels shift from one year to the next. There had been a tower there for three hundred years, perhaps as much of a mark for those travelling by land as by sea, for in those parts the fields are flatter than the water. But there was a navigable channel when Richard Penvenick was first commissioned to put in a new light twenty years ago, and two years after that there was a great storm. Even the greatest towers, you know, can be moved by the waves, but on this occasion it was not the building but the water that moved. On the morning after the storm, the channel was no more than a trickle through the sand, something a boy could cross without wetting his short trousers. We waited, of course, to see if the whim that moved the water would return it, but after maintaining a redundant light for eighteen years Mr. Penvennick sent me to remove the mechanism and lens.’

A child in a blue dress and white pinafore runs across their path, pursued by a smaller child in a sailor suit much impeded by a fit of giggles.

‘I have always thought of the coast as static. As it is on a map. But of course it is not.’

‘No. Quite apart from the movement of the land, the falls of the cliffs on the south coast and the shifting sands to the east, the tides are always in motion. I should say that the nation gains and loses some dozens of square miles of sand and rock with each revolution of the planet.’

Her steps check, as though dizzied by his extra-terrestrial vantage-point. She sees the Earth in its stately waltz through dark and light, each landmass expanding and contracting as though breathing.

‘But your lighthouses stand firm.’

He turns to smile, a slight pressure on her arm. ‘We hope so. It is my job, our jobs, to make sure that they do. But it is a constant battle against wind and sea, fought at least as much by mathematics and physics at Mr. Penvenick’s desk in Falmouth as by stone and mortar on the shore. We do not always win. Mr. Penvenick encourages us to believe that failure is as useful to our science as success, but that is an old man’s philosophy.’ He frowns, looses her arm. ‘I cannot say that I have learnt to love my mistakes.’

She wants to take off her gloves, feel his tweed sleeve under her bare hands. ‘The same is said of surgery. And that most of those who die on the operating table are saved from a slower and more painful end. But there are lives in our hands. As in yours.’

More lives, in some ways, in his, since ships carry many hundreds of souls. She sees again May’s hair rippling like weeds in the water. Her hair would have come unpinned, surely, in the waves.

His other hand pats hers. ‘We are too solemn for this bright day. Tell me, Miss Moberley, shall you take a holiday this summer? Celebrate your graduation? Or will you be returning to your family?’

The cold breath of the hall at home yawns around her. ‘I hope to find work, and will go where it takes me. It is still difficult for a woman, you know, in private practice, and few hospitals welcome us. There may be an opening here. I am not eager to return to my parents.’

She thinks of her best friend, her only friend, Annie, who wants to go on living with her cheerful family in their cheerful home. She chose long ago to love Annie too much to be envious; different people have different paths through life, that’s all. Ally feels, when she thinks of the summer, of the future opening before her, like a fledgling. After a certain age, most of them can land well enough. It is taking off again that is the problem. She pauses.

‘I will be returning to Cornwall,’ he says. ‘Mr. Penvenick has just won a new colonial contract. He did not communicate the details but he wants me to assist him with a new set of designs. I have hopes—well, he is sixty-five. And his son is a railway engineer who shows no interest in the lights.’

‘Oh.’ Something else that is changing. She should not have allowed herself to come to depend on his calls, which have bejewelled her winter’s work. He comes, probably, mostly for George’s sake.

‘But I do not leave for another month. So we must make the most of the springtime, must we not?’

He meets her gaze. She blushes, and then blushes again for the blushing of a spinster and a professional woman, a woman who made an open-eyed decision to have a career, to be unentangled, single in vision. He nods, and looks charitably at the river, at the fat stone colonnades on the bridge where two small boys sit precariously fishing.

THE SPLASH AND A CRY

Doctor!’ Nurse Johnson’s voice is high and sharp.

Dr. Stratton puts down her needle. ‘Please excuse us one moment. Miss Moberley?’

Ally hands the patient a pad of gauze. ‘Hold this firmly on your arm. We will be back very soon, but please ring this bell for a nurse if you are concerned or feel unwell.’

The woman, who has said nothing, not even explained what appears to be a knife-wound on her arm, nods, her gaze not quite focussed.

‘Good.’ Is it good? She hurries after Dr. Stratton.

There’s a policeman whose uniform is dripping onto the floor, muddy smears and footprints across the tiles, as if someone has dragged a bag of earth through the room. A crowd