The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Aislinn Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, in 2014.

  Excerpt from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1943 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Aislinn, 1969–

  The world before us: a novel / Aislinn Hunter.—First United States edition.

  pages; cm

  I. Title.

  PR9199.4.H86W67 2014

  813’.6—dc23 2014024331

  ISBN 978-0-553-41852-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-41853-8

  Jacket design by Christopher Brand

  Jacket photographs: (landscape) Hilxia Szabo/Gallery Stock; (girl)

  Emily Nathan/Gallery Stock; (ornament) Carpet Museum Archive, Kidderminster, UK © The Carpet Museum Trust/Bridgeman Images

  v3.1

  For Robert Cowtan, Esq.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgements

  The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.

  —JOHN BERGER

  Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

  —GEORGE ELIOT

  It awes me when I think of it, that there was a time when you and I were not … But now there can never come a time when you and I shall not be.

  —ANNA ROBERTSON BROWN

  I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

  And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

  —T.S. ELIOT

  How many ways to begin?

  Near infinite.

  Don’t ask us what we think, none of us agree on anything. Start with the woods, says one. Start with the sky, says another, with the birds falling out of it, their bodies sent like arrows to the earth. No, begin with the great lawns and the peacocks and the sound the males’ tail feathers make in their unfolding. Start with a kiss, with the teacup and its curl of painted ivy. Start with the afternoon the sky ripped open and a month’s worth of rain poured through the gap—the whole city lifting trouser and skirt hems.

  Start with Jane, says one, it’s where we always begin—crowded around her bed watching the clock blink toward morning. Start with Jane because our stories are tied to hers and everything depends on what she does with them. But it is early, only four a.m., and Jane is sleeping, the curtains billowing out from the window, the moon tucked behind the clouds.

  So start with the door she is dreaming about—its slant and chance opening. Yes, the door: what slips through, what goes missing.

  1

  The Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics sat along a carriage track most people travelled only once. Imagine late summer: sunlight splayed over the rutted road and the copper peaks of the buildings, its warmth nested in the crowns of the trees and sinking into the bright-green lawn of the viewing mound. Because the inclement weather of the past month had finally ceased, the Matron was organizing a picnic. The patients, lined up inside the galleries, pressed their faces to the windows and watched as she marched past the fountain in a trim black dress, two attendants with wicker baskets walking smartly behind her. The inmates Leeson and Herschel were in the gallery of the men’s ward nearest the door. The girl was inside the women’s gallery, at the front of the shuffling crowd, her attention on the attendant who was unfurling a cut of cloth over by the rose bushes, how the sheet lolled briefly on a pocket of air before being snapped into place on the asylum grounds.

  It was the 2nd of August 1877. We know this because Jane has read accounts of the day and we have stood over her shoulder and read alongside her. One hundred and six souls were in residence that summer, most in the main wards, five or so in refractory care. We know that two of the attendants were off work with fever and that the Superintendent was in the city applying for a permit to extend the farmyard so as to better accommodate the new litter of pigs. A litter that Sir Thom, the hospital tabby, was attempting to avoid by slinking along the stone wall at the edge of the property.

  Leeson and Herschel studied the cat from the men’s ward window—a distant spot of ginger against the press of the woods. By the time the matron’s attendants had brought out the next round of hampers, the animal’s progress had been stalled by a cleft in the stone wall, a V-shaped opening that Sir Thom surveyed briefly, and then leapt into. Leeson turned to Herschel just as a whiff of fresh air, of drying earth and dilly grass, gusted into the corridor. Surprised, the two men looked to its source: a gap between the ward door and its frame.

  What happened next set everything in motion: Herschel opened the old matchboard door—opened it as if he were allowed, as if he were back home on his farm in P——on an ordinary morning, lifting his own door latch and unceremoniously starting out. The other inmates watched him turn onto the path that led to the gatehouse, the big man in full stride, his grey painting smock giving his form a ghostly shapelessness, his legs bare and hairy down to his boots.

  The attendants on duty did not notice Herschel. Two of them had gone back inside to fetch hampers from the kitchen and the third, a lanky blond, was lingering near the door to the laundry flirting with the sisters who worked there. The Matron was alone on the grounds, kneeling by the fountain, smoothing out the large staff blanket and setting out the silver. When she finished she sat up, and Herschel, registering her broad back and the whorl of her red hair, veered away, moving steadily toward the wrought-iron gates. By the time he was pottering toward the woods and the collapsed section of the stone wall, she was folding the table napkins.

  A flurry of cheers went up in the men’s gallery when he made it to the stone wall. The other patients watched as the farmer lifted one leg and then the other over the rubble at the base of the cleft. For a split second Herschel seemed to waver there and then whoosh, he was gone, his whole frame swallowed by the trees.

  Leeson blinked, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, worried that a hole or pit had been dug at the edge of the woods an
d that Herschel had lumbered into it. He pressed his hand against the glass, unsure of what to do, though he felt he ought to do something. From behind him came the sound of scuffling feet; he could hear Wick begin to titter. Feigning indifference, he studied the slot between the door and its support, the bare patch of stone floor that, minutes ago, had held conference with his friend. He hesitated a second, then dropped his hand onto the door handle. This agitated the men in the ward corridor further. Greevy, his grey hair wild, came forward to waggle a finger in front of Leeson’s face, and with that gesture the newest inmate, Hopper, started on the window, his forehead bump, bump, bumping against the glass—a rhythm that inspired the musician to clap his hands, which in turn roused the poet.

  “A Brisk Composition in Honour of the Occasion!” the poet shouted, and Hopper stopped. The commotion subsided. “Unchain me!” the poet began, his voice filling the length of the gallery. “Unchain me, unchain me, lest the hour’s dark horses come.”

  Slowly, so as not to set the group off again, Leeson inched the door open. A slat of sunlight fell onto the floor at his feet, brighter and more concentrated than what filtered through the quarrelled windows. He stared at it as if it were an accident, wondered if perhaps it had spilled out of a box, one that he had been entrusted with, one bearing a gift not intended for him. He waited to be called out and chastised, but nothing happened and no one came, and thinking only of Herschel, who might himself be in peril, Leeson stepped across the mat of honeyed light and scuttled out the door.

  By the time he neared the fountain he was moving at a decent pace—just ahead of him were the Matron, the gatehouse and the belt of trees that Herschel had slipped into. Wisely, he gave the Matron a wide berth, treading as lightly as he could over the grass. Just as he moved past her, she straightened her back and turned toward the ward windows, a bowl of boiled eggs in her hand. Two dozen faces stared out at her, pale as dinner plates. Amused, she tsk-tsked under her breath and set the bowl back in the place she’d just moved it from.

  Where Noble, the hall porter, had gone off to remains a matter of debate. He was still on poor terms with the Superintendent for falling asleep on watch and for glomming about near the windows while the female patients were jarring preserves in the kitchen. The asylum logbook for the 2nd of August states only that the event occurred around noon and that Noble saw nothing. The patients, once they were let out for lunch, did not raise the alarm, although a few of them, Hopper in particular, refused to settle down on a blanket, which prevented the head count from being taken for some time.

  The girl, according to Leeson’s later statements to Dr. Thorpe, caught up with him and Herschel in a clearing in the woods—the three of them tromping wordlessly along a muddy path and besting a modest hill before they came upon a narrow carriage track that led to town.

  These are the woods of Jane’s dream and we are sometimes the figures who pass through them. We watch the dream unfold the way Jane watches a film, as if it were something we might try to press a finger against, try to pause, as if that would allow us to rest beside a nearby elm, to point down different pathways. The thing about Jane is that even though she often dreams about these woods, she gets only some of it right. This is the problem with imagination: it is prone to filling in gaps, takes what it knows from one set of experiences and sinks them into another to create some semblance of truth, bridge time.

  In fact, Jane has been to that part of the country only twice, once when she was fifteen and William Eliot drove her up from London, and again when she was twenty-five and writing her MA dissertation on archival practices in rural nineteenth-century asylums. This is useful but it is not enough. When Jane imagines the north she thinks of the country freshness of the air—of honeysuckle and meadow grass—and of driving down the paved lane that led to the Whitmore, which was by then a shell of its former selves—asylum, hospital, school—empty and boarded up for decades. She doesn’t think of legs not used to walking long distances or shoes that slip, bedbug bites, paths that dissipate into thistle or bodies scoured raw from the morning bath. She doesn’t think of what it means to walk out of a door and know that you have changed the course of your life.

  The door is the part of the story some of us like best. It was dull on the outside from years of weather; it was the colour of weak tea. You could run your fingers along the brace and over the stiles and not meet a splinter. It had a cast-iron lock with a small mouth meant to swallow a skeleton key. Lean close and sometimes there was the sound of the wind chattering in its teeth. And it was usually reliable: kept people and things in their proper places, made a clop-clonk sound when the mechanism was released all those times Noble unlocked it.

  You might wonder what a door knows of time. About as much as we do. We know doors are meant to be passive: people come and go, move through them, think nothing of the crossing, come out somewhere expected. It is different for us; for us time is knotted. A door can open in the flare of the imagination and a century can reel across the threshold. One minute we might be with Jane in her London flat, appliances humming in the kitchen, and the next we could be back in those woods, couch grass whisking our legs.

  Yes, we know there are Wheres and Whens but we have lost much of the distinction. We do not always know “after” from “before,” or either of those from “now.” We do not know our own names, or the cities or towns we came from, the cottages or houses we called home. For us there is waiting and there is sleeping and there is the dull sense that we are doing both—sleepwalking down a long hall, waking in unexpected rooms.

  This is why we need Jane. Her world is fixed, measurable: she turns on her laptop and there’s a date in stern black type in the top right-hand corner of the screen; the pears she buys at the market, once composed in their bowl, convey the passage of time by the dwindling of their number and the mottling of their skin. We know that Herschel opened the Whitmore hospital door that afternoon in Yorkshire because Jane read that he did in Leeson’s asylum casebook. We know from her copy of Dr. Thorpe’s report to the Commissioners that Herschel’s outdoor privileges had, a fortnight before, been revoked. We also know that there had been a month of rain—that the fountain was clogged with a thatch of green leaves shaken loose in a storm, that there were twenty small plots of earth waiting to be turned into gardens. And we know those woods. We know that on the 2nd of August, they carried the smell of wet must and the bright tang of decay. We know this because some of us were there.

  According to Leeson’s statement it took an hour of steady walking along the carriage track to reach the first junction. While he and Herschel and the girl stood to consider directions, a brougham with horses travelling at a good clip came up the road. It slowed and passed directly in front of Herschel, and hints of the city—leather and polish, a waft of snuff—cut through the mineral scent of the woods. The lone gentleman passenger tilted his top hat with the nub of his walking stick and glanced out the window, surveying the trio briefly before he tapped for the driver to hurry on.

  Herschel watched the carriage depart and scratched his thigh, which was prickly from wading through some kind of nettle. He’d abandoned his trousers earlier that day on the way out of painting class because he’d dropped his brush on them and found the dash of crimson above the knee troubling. No trousers, he’d decided, was better than stained trousers, because trousers once stained would always be so even when the mark was gone. All he’d have to do was steer clear of the attendants, and he’d be at liberty to dress as sparingly as he pleased.

  When the brougham was out of sight, Herschel turned to Leeson in the hope that his companion would decide on a direction and lead the way. But Leeson just stood there and stared into the distance, his dark trousers as spotless as his white-collared shirt and loose jacket, though his toe-capped shoes were muddy, as were the girl’s flat-heeled boots and the hem of her brown dress. She’d come out, Herschel suddenly realized, without a shawl, and so was standing in a slip of sun, crossing her arms and rubbing them to keep
warm.

  Wordlessly they decided on a path that angled east, Herschel spotting the back end of a hare flashing through the woods and following it. Their pace was slow and all three were quiet, though Herschel cawed a few times at the sheep mulching along a ridge of heather, something he was prone to do, having once, in better times, conducted a study of local birdcall.

  The girl, all of eighteen, was especially quiet, though she did say thank you in a soft voice when Leeson extended his hand to guide her over a fallen oak. He would maintain later on that he didn’t remember much of her, would only offer that she was given, throughout the afternoon, to biting her bottom lip and staring at her feet when there was cause to stop and assess a choice in direction. Leeson was caught up in his own concerns as he trod along: his knees past achy, his lungs on fire, though in the back of his mind, in the part filled with motherly advice and wifely admonishments to get outdoors, he was certain the pure air must be doing him some good. And he felt a kind of clarity, the near-joy of being unencumbered, of swinging one’s arms and breathing deeply. Words he’d once used in his life as a solicitor started to come back to him: consign, evince, bequeath. He raised his eyes to the stitch of sky between the trees and the word provision sprang to mind; he opened his palms, flexed his fingers and the word collation formed in his head; he tightened his fingers into fists, thought, Extremis.

  Blinking into the leafy canopy Leeson tried to sort out what each word denoted. In a copse fragrant with meadowsweet he remembered what it meant to bequeath something: personal property, business stock, land. He conjured the countenances of old clients: the pug-face of a blacksmith willing his smithy to his nephew, signing the document Leeson had drawn up for him with such trepidation that his signature seemed to slip reluctantly out of the nib of his pen. There was also the widow from L——who had fifty acres, a woman so pale her veins gave her temples a blue hue. Words that had sometimes mired themselves in Leeson’s thinking, that had sat on his lunch plate like clumps of unrecognizable meat, suddenly attached themselves to lived circumstances. He thought, intestate, codicil, and saw an office in a dimly lit loft, a pocket watch that said it was early morning, then a drawer made of redwood that, when opened, revealed a thin stack of cream-coloured paper he’d cut into sheets himself. On the desktop there was a neat arrangement of stamps and wax, a taper on a brass holder. Just as he was about to inspect the post, his wife, Emily, appeared on the stairs to his office in her grey day dress, small pink flowers that seemed almost real stitched along her sleeve. Her smile was not as effortless as he would have liked, and there were dark circles under her eyes even though the baby had been born a month before and the doctor said Emily was fully recovered. Her pace was slow, one hand gripping the banister as she pulled herself closer. A fear rose in him, as he stood at his desk to greet her, that she was dragging a shackle behind her, that she would reach the top stair and the lead weight of the chain would snatch her backward, send her plummeting to the landing. He sensed it even then—some yoke, some umbilicus pulling her away from him. Emily lifting her chin when she reached the top step, a tendril of blonde hair dampened against her forehead as she stepped toward him, opened her arms and said, “Good afternoon, Charles.”