The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Leeson let out a whoop that rounded out into the woods so joyfully he almost didn’t believe it had come from him. He glanced up at Herschel’s broad back and stooped shoulders, then back at the rosy face of the girl. It didn’t matter that they ignored him; his mind was racing, so much so that he failed to notice they’d come to a worn path bordered by pollarded oaks. He looked at the oak closest to him and it wavered, became one of the trees that bracketed the park in his city, the park where he’d sometimes gone for midday walks, watched the brown backs of the ducks shining as they waddled out of the pond.

  Up ahead Herschel trudged on, his boot heels clomping down with every step, mud from the last ravine they’d crossed spackled across the backs of his legs. Leeson wanted to call out to him but didn’t, wanted to ask if the farmer could see the same apparition that he was seeing: a bench in a clearing, a high gate with curled finials and a woman with a parasol walking through it.

  An hour or more passed and the trees overhead became fuller, knitted themselves into rafters, growing as dark and sooty as a ceiling. Leeson’s stomach grumbled and instinctively he reached a hand toward his pocket watch to check the time, only to discover that he was wearing a plain shirt and no waistcoat. The sky had become so dusky it was difficult to keep to the path, to squint past the trunks of the trees for the dining room table, blue-medallion wallpaper and brass lamps he expected to appear in the thicket. His right foot struck a root, sending him onto his hands and knees. It was only then, as he found his feet and brushed himself off, that he recalled he was in the country, near the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and remembered how he came to be there.

  By the time Herschel stumbled out of the grove and happened upon the estate house, the sky had gone the blue-black of a rook—a bird that he preferred over jackdaws or magpies, not just for its shag feathers, but for the kaarg call it made when roosting at dusk, a throatier, more satisfying sound than the pruc-pruc of the raven. On the walk so far he had counted eleven different birdcalls, though in some cases he had not seen the bird, which he knew Dr. Thorpe would say left open the possibility that, like certain human voices, those birdsongs might be constructed—be things one wants to hear. But the country house, Herschel decided, was not imagined. From the end of its great lawn he could make out the protrusion of an arcaded portico and two storeys of darkened windows that flanked off in either direction. The house sat mutely save for one slit-eye casting lamplight between its heavy curtains and tufts of smoke drifting out of the chimneys. Instinctively Herschel ran through a list of the kinds of nests one might find up there, bird names flitting through his head like a host of sparrows. He was fond of roofs, had been known to set his body down on ledges, window peaks or near chimney stacks—good spots to rest after hours of flapping along.

  When Leeson and the girl caught up to him, they too took in the house hunkered in the distance. From the edge of the lawn it appeared as if some large and ornate stone had been dropped from the sky into an impossibly manicured setting. The scent of burning wood in the air lent itself to the idea of warmth, a place to sit down, something to drink—tea perhaps, or a cup of water.

  Leeson turned to Herschel and swung out his arm as if clearing the way of obstructions, and the farmer’s round face filled with delight, though he didn’t move. In the end it was Leeson who rapped the lion’s-head door knocker against its plate, adjusting his cuffs while he listened over the chirr of crickets for the sound of footsteps. A minute later the door opened and a young footman with a centre part and a thin moustache appeared; he cleared his throat and moved his neck from side to side as if just settling into his collar.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  Leeson recognized the man’s enunciation; it was the kind developed through practice. In better days he had heard the same forced diction from a variety of servants employed in the houses he visited for work. “Yes, you may,” he replied. He brought his heels together in an effort to stand taller. “Is the Master of the estate at home?”

  The footman furrowed his brow and peered over Leeson’s shoulder at the others. “Might I ask who is calling?”

  “Indeed.” Leeson smiled back at his companions, fighting the urge to explain Herschel’s lack of trousers or to flatten his own hair where the grey bits always stuck out from the brown. He turned again to the footman. Behind him he could make out a columned entry hall, a modest candle chandelier, a thick Turkish rug and a mahogany table set against the back wall holding five or six leather-bound volumes stacked on their sides. He caught a glimpse of a large mounted bear, its open maw and the spread of its brown claws, before he shifted his gaze back to the books. There was a time in his life when he’d spent whole days poring over tomes such as these, some of them half the size of his desk, all of them embossed and bound in similarly dyed leathers.

  “Sir?”

  Leeson sighed. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to be a probate solicitor here, but the footman expected something. He glanced over the footman’s shoulder again, wishing a glass of claret might appear to relieve him of his thirst. “Please say that Mr. Charles Leeson is calling.”

  “Mr. Leeson, is it?”

  “Yes, and company—” He gestured vaguely behind him.

  “And might I tell Mr. Farrington your business?”

  “You may. I am here regarding a bequest.”

  The footman furrowed his brow again, an expression that had annoyed Leeson the first time.

  “Yes, a bequest,” Leeson repeated, savouring the shape of the word in his mouth, “of books. I regret I do not have my card.” He patted down the front of his shirt as if it might sprout a pocket.

  “Books?” the footman repeated somewhat dubiously.

  “Yes. I am here in my capacity as—” and here he paused, considered a variety of overtures, and then said “—the Assistant Librarian of the British Museum,” hastening to add, lest the footman turn them away, “London.”

  In the end they stayed only briefly. George Farrington allowed his visitors to rest in the small parlour while he sent the maid for refreshments. Herschel plopped himself down on the horsehair sofa, which meant that Leeson had to take the wingback that was situated farther away from the fire. The room was full of the sound of ticking clocks: a pillared carriage clock on the mantel, an ornate brass skeleton model with an ebony face on the tallest of the bookshelves and an old mahogany longcase on the opposite wall wedged between a stuffed grouse and a mounted fox. Two of the clocks were out of sync, so that every second had two beats, the confidently announced tick of the larger clock’s brass hand followed by a faint echo from the bookshelf. Farrington did not seem to notice. His hospitality extended to a series of questions: Which way had they come to Inglewood? Were they expected elsewhere? And, less pointedly, what particular flora or fauna might they have noted on the way? These questions were followed by a brief declamation on the state of the surrounding countryside, after which the maid intervened with tea. It arrived on a gleaming silver platter that she set down on a table with claw feet carved so realistically that Leeson believed they were gripping the rug. George Farrington’s mother, Prudence, joined them shortly thereafter, though she stopped upon entering the room, a strained expression on her long face as if she had suddenly come into contact with music she didn’t care for. It was only when George greeted her with a warm “Mother” that her beauty became apparent: the thin petals of her mouth relaxing into a pleasing fullness, her chin lifting to reveal the elegant length of her neck. She extended her hands and moved toward her son, and the pleated hemline of her mauve dinner dress shushed over the carpets behind her. Leeson bowed deeply as she approached, but Herschel remained seated, his head cocked to study the intricately fastened brown nest of her hair.

  Once Mrs. Farrington had settled in a high-backed chair near a corner of the room, Leeson returned to the task of explaining his charge—which he did rather unconvincingly between bites of oatcake. It was only upon reaching for his second oatcake—glancing around to menta
lly divide the number of cakes by the number of those in the room—that he noticed the girl who’d come with them was missing. He craned his neck toward the entryway, trying to recollect if she’d followed them in through the door.

  “Of course I am quite familiar with the museum library,” George Farrington was asserting. “Two of my own books reside there—one botanical, the other verse. Though I am,” he confessed, prodding the dwindling fire with a poker, “serious about one art and a dabbler in the other.”

  Leeson glanced at Herschel, who had become wholly distracted, first by the rash on his thigh and then by the half-dozen or so watercolour landscapes that hung in gold frames on the wall behind him. The farmer swivelled and rose on the sofa to get a better look, his smock lifting slightly as he did so.

  “Those were painted by my uncle Reginald,” Farrington said, a hint of reprimand in his voice.

  Herschel turned and sat back down, unsure of what exactly he’d done. He looked to Leeson, but Leeson was studying Farrington. The solicitor recognized his host now. It was the defect around his mouth that gave him away: an arced scar that tracked through one side of his dark-brown moustache and down onto his bare chin. A climbing accident, Leeson remembered the Superintendent saying, leaning sideways toward the Matron at the Whitmore. Burma, I believe. And Leeson, who had been standing nearby, had stepped forward to see whom they were discussing, and there was a gentleman—Farrington—in a top hat and bright blue waistcoat coming down the reception line at the Whitmore Ball, his boutonnière an exotic yellow bud with orange tips quite unlike any Leeson had ever seen.

  It stood to reason, then, that if this was the celebrated botanist from the ball—and Leeson was fairly certain it was—he and Herschel were currently some ten or eleven miles from the Whitmore in the country house of the Farringtons, to whom much of the land they had traversed belonged.

  Leeson stifled a yawn, realizing with a start that his host was speaking to him, saying something about the landscape the watercolours had been painted in. Obligingly he stood up to inspect the paintings, all the while wondering where the girl had gone off to, and whether or not some sort of sustenance beyond the oatcakes he’d already consumed might arrive. It did. His gaze had only just fallen into a rippled blue lake and the droopy willow that tickled it when the Farringtons’ maid re-entered the room. She curtseyed quickly, keeping her chin down while her eyes darted to further survey the guests. Wordlessly she handed a cloth sack to Mrs. Farrington, who with one hand whisked the maid back through the door and into the hall. So it was that a mere quarter-hour after they had entered the house, they were sent on their way again, Mrs. Farrington ensuring they had the sack of ham and butter sandwiches in hand.

  It was near midnight when Herschel climbed back over the stone wall, and he and Leeson trudged across the lawn and into their beds. The main building was dark save for a row of candles placed along one of the gallery’s ledges.

  The following morning a letter arrived at the Whitmore, delivered to the hospital clerk by a scrawny young man on a dun pony. It read:

  Mr. George Farrington presents his compliments to the Governor of Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and requests him to be so kind as to take precautions that his patients should not pay visits at Inglewood, as two did yesterday (one describing himself as an assistant librarian of the British Museum).

  Mr. Farrington is very glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here, and hopes that they did not suffer from their long walk.

  George Farrington did not mention the girl in his note. And we know from the asylum casebook that in Leeson’s interview with the Superintendent the next morning, he said he hadn’t seen her after the walk up to Farrington’s door, though he did comment on her absence and on the changing weather and on Herschel’s discovery of a roe deer bedded down in a whorl of grass. Numerous times in his description of events Leeson used words like intestate and disinherit; he also talked of returning to work in law. He said, “You cannot disinherit a ham, nor can you disinherit roast beef pie.”

  Dr. Thorpe wrote appears to be suffering from delusions twice in the transcript margins, and five times wrote tangent … before the description of “Activities Occurring on 2 August 1877” was returned to and set down.

  The hospital logbook that Jane first examined when she was writing her dissertation detailed almost nothing of the inmates’ escape. It noted that on the 2nd of August the laundry had been collected at eight, that the new hen had not lain. In hasty black ink underneath that someone had written Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley and girl N—— missing, and then, in another hand, there was an added note: Patient Hopper restrained at 2 p.m. Finally, scribbled in handwriting so tight and angular Jane had to read it with a magnifying glass: Mstrs H. Morley and C. Leeson returned. On the 3rd of August the first entry states: Letter from G. Farrington received. This was followed by the domestics of the institution: a list of objects needing mending, a detailed order of supplies and foodstuff requisitioned from Morrington, a change in staff schedules.

  No further mention of N——was to be found.

  2

  Jane wakes to the whooping sound of the corner shop’s alarm. The shop recently hired a new assistant and the alarm has gone off at six a.m. three days in a row. Jane knows that if she sticks her head out the window the shop assistant will be on his mobile phone shouting in Punjabi and waving one hand toward the security gate. It usually takes five to ten minutes for the alarm to stop, so Jane presses her pillow over her face to muffle the sound, the metallic tang of last night’s sleeping pill still on her tongue.

  It comes back to her then—the dream about the woods and the Whitmore, the dream about the girl she only knows as “N.” Jane is glad to be thinking about her again, but there’s guilt in the thought too. For the last six weeks, she’s been too busy with work at the Chester Museum to spend any time on the Whitmore; all the research she’d been doing was stuffed reluctantly into a box and shoved under her bed. What Jane wonders, tracing her way around the edges of the dream, is how N got out of the hospital—not the act, the hand that lifts the latch, opens the door, but rather what wells up in a person so that one day they do the unexpected. She would like to know this because there’s something welling inside her too, although she doesn’t see it as clearly as we do.

  The sound of a steel gate being kicked repeatedly clangs into the room from down the street and Jane groans into her pillow then slides it off her face. Those of us who were in other rooms come in and gather around her, our presence as invisible as the chutes of air drifting under the cracked-open window.

  After a minute the alarm stops and London begins to rouse itself: delivery vans rattle down the road, taxis ferry people to their jobs and businesses, the man in the brown corduroy jacket trots his beagle out to the adjacent green—doing so with such dependability we could set our watches by him if we had a need for watches. Across the street, morning light sifts through the clouds to give back the terraced row houses their eggshell colour; the neon signs on the chip and curry shops down the road buzz and flicker. Jane pushes the covers away and thinks about the tea set sitting beside her desk at work, the one that Gareth, the Chester’s director and curator, said he wanted shipped a week ago. And for a minute, caught up in the idea of simple tasks, caught up in the drift of the Whitmore and N, she doesn’t remember what day it is or what will happen by the end of it; she simply thinks work and puts her hand out for her spaniel, Sam, who trots over to have his ears rubbed. Then it’s there, in her waking brain: the fact that the museum is closing, that she will be unemployed in two weeks and that tonight she is going to see William Eliot.

  The woods dreams are the ones Jane has most often, though in the past few months there have also been the usual sort about missed recitals and failed exams, about something bad happening to the dog, about her brother, Lewis, turning into a robot. And there have been dreams set in the museum where she works—though these are mostly about lost objects that turn up in the wrong cabin
ets or collections. We have our preferences, can behave like a pack of critics, sigh, “Not that one again” when the dream about Jane’s mother losing her in Marks and Spencer starts up, or turn away when the narratives become too strange, when they dwell too long on death or dying.

  Sometimes when that happens we play a game. It’s a child’s game, but some of us are children. Besides, we know all games have a purpose: they prepare you for the world you are about to enter, inform the character of the person you are to become. We call this game “Where Is It?” and we start by taking turns. One voice calls out a question: “What’s my name?” or “Where was I born?” or “How far have I travelled?” or “What age do you think I am?” And those of us in the room begin to look for the answer in the things around us. We look on the spines of books; we look in Jane’s picture frames, in the water glass on the bedside table. We look in the closet, in her yawning handbags, in the hollows of her pencil skirts and dresses. We skim the empty music stand, peer down the sound holes of the cello, repeat the question into the black slot of its S then wait to see if it will send back an answer. We finger the knotted ends of the blue rug, gaze out the window that looks over the city street. When we get bored, the one who asked the question will coax us on by repeating the question—“Where is it?”—and we’ll move into the living room and run our eyes over the potted fig, the wingback chair, trace the swirling limestone fossil Jane’s brother gave her one Christmas. Then we’ll look in the gap between the sofa and its cushions, peer into the rubbish bin. “This is easier in the museum,” we’ll say, but shrug and keep going: inspect the Dutch jug from the market, the bird’s nest Sam sniffed out in the park, the soft folds of the curtains. We’ll stare into the blank screen of the telly, at the mirror above the dining room table, look into the rounds of the spoons in the drying rack—but we’ll see and find nothing.