The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

“It is.” She clears her throat. “Was.”

  He pulls his spectacles out of his pocket and leans in, the white tufts of hair on either side of his bald spot falling forward. When he straightens up he smooths them back with his palms. “Listen, I rang Oliver at the V&A about you. He says they’ll put you on their inventory list so that if something short-term comes up—”

  “Lovely. Thanks. But don’t go to any trouble.” Jane musters a smile, clasping her palms in front of her the way the girls who come through the museum on school tours do when they are corralled into queues and told to behave.

  The state of Jane’s office hasn’t changed much in the six weeks since the news about the closure came down, and Jane can tell that Gareth, leaning sideways to look at the stack of solander boxes lined up under her worktable, is registering that fact for the first time. The oak file cabinets have yet to be emptied, a tray piled with books and papers is mushrooming on a swivel chair in the corner, the glass storage case that runs along the side wall is still filled with objects waiting for their archives to be compiled and packed—parts of the Hendry shell collection on the upper shelf, Glauber’s seventeenth-century mammal compendium beside it and a variety of anatomical specimens below. Gareth walks over to get a better look. He slides the glass door back and lifts one of the spirit jars off the shelf and up to the overhead light. Inside, a hairless cat with a bony spine and thin tail floats in formalin; its eyes are stitched into slits, its ears curled forward and as long as a rabbit’s.

  “Ah, the feliform hare—I wondered where this had got to. I might keep this chap.”

  Jane doesn’t say anything, and so Gareth sets the jar back on the shelf and turns to face her. His right eyelid is sagging slightly, which always happens when he’s overworked. “Listen, Jane, I know the last few weeks have been difficult for you—for all of us—but you’ll find something.” He drops a paternal hand onto her shoulder as he moves past her. “Failing that, at least be reasonable and hold off doing away with yourself until there’s room to cart a body out.” In the doorway Gareth puts his hand in his jacket pocket and rattles his keys, a habit that Jane realizes she’ll miss terribly. “And don’t worry about the Grainger,” he adds. “See what Paulo can do with it, and then let me know and I’ll call the buyer. Things break, Jane, you ought to know that by now.”

  Jane first met Gareth when she was twenty-six years old. It was the first time any of us had stepped foot inside the Chester. She’d graduated the year before with a Masters in archives and records management and had been recommended to him by the senior archivist at the special collections library where she’d interned. Gareth agreed to interview her even though the vacancy was for a short-term position and he knew people who could fill it. It was winter and crowds were milling around the natural history hall in squeaky boots and woolly sweaters; the cloakroom beside the small museum shop was packed with puffy coats. Jane was early for her interview, and nervous, so she wandered across the hall and down a row of display cabinets, stopping when she reached a large glass case on thick oak feet. It contained a series of criss-crossed branches upon which Nathanial Hartford, Esquire, had supervised the wire mounting of two hundred and four hummingbirds in an attempt to display all the colours and designs of the species. The birds were caught in various stages of rest or flight, their wings closed or spread out like the slats of a fan. Most people paused here briefly, if they stopped at all, but Jane studied each bird in turn, the dark beads of their eyes, their long bills, flamboyant gorgets. Those of us who had followed her into the museum studied the birds too, and watched her, the care she gave each individual thing.

  “When is a bird no longer a bird?” one of us asked.

  The question was soft, hung in the air like dust in a shaft of light. We turned toward the woman’s voice and could see some semblance of form, as if a stranger had arrived and was standing on the far side of a crown-glass window.

  “Hello?” another of us called, and the one with the soft voice said “Hello” back.

  In those days we didn’t speak; some of us didn’t even know we could. Instead we moved around Jane, around the city and the country the way the living sometimes do, heads bowed, caught up in our own half-formed preoccupations. But when this thought came out, it was voiced and heard, so we moved closer together and closer to Jane, suddenly aware of each other the way a group of strangers roused by a near-accident or noise on the street might look up from the pavement to discover they are not alone.

  Before Jane, before the Chester Museum, there had been a long period of silence. It hung like a pendle on a chandelier, a heavy glass tear. Some of us woke in the woods to William shouting for Lily, others to the search party that followed, to men and women crashing through the forest, their flashlights arcing across the places where we’d been sleeping. Others of us woke years later to Jane’s footsteps in the asylum wards when she visited the Whitmore as a graduate student, her heels clipping down a long corridor.

  It was, for all of us, like waking from a long and fevered sleep, the nature of the self we woke to slowly taking shape. One of us said he looked for his hands but couldn’t see them; another said that she moved toward a door that was nailed shut. What sense can be made of such a world, emptied of everything that was once familiar? When those of us who were in the woods saw Jane standing there in a panic we went forward to comfort her; when those of us who were at the Whitmore found her moving through the wards, we followed her from room to room. We did not say a word, did not even know there were others like us there; each of us was wholly alone in the whirl of our own uncertainty. In the gutted hall of what was once the Whitmore’s women’s gallery, Jane stopped and dropped her satchel on the floor, and so we stopped with her, watched her pry a wood board off the old window and peer out across the lawn toward the woods. There was a notebook sitting in the open mouth of her bag and she pulled it out and then rummaged around for a pen. On the top line of a fresh sheet of paper she wrote the word Whitmore—a blue scrawl we all moved toward.

  How, you might ask, do we see ourselves? How have we come to understand our predicament? Look around you: everywhere life forces wanting to get out, things unintentionally contained, baskets of energy. One of us believes we are like atoms with no centre; the one who likes clocks says we are lost time. Another believes we are poems, another thinks we are dreams meant to sort useless information, another thinks we are like sheets set out on the summer line, holding fists of air. We all believe we are Here. Here the same way a street lamp exists in the useless hours of daylight, here the way the codes scrolling across Lewis’s laboratory computers equal a bird’s DNA. Here like the blue-plumed kingfisher when Lewis touched the screen and announced the bird’s name.

  Over the past eight years we have come to know each other the way Sam knows the other dogs who traverse the green—as members of some disparate, unarticulated society, a loosely affiliated fraternity that never stays exactly the same. But those days are waning. We have become obsessed with fixity: we now do daily counts, march out for rounds, try to ferret out who came when; who amongst us might have shared histories. But accountability is a dangerous game. It demands fidelity—to the possibility of less-than-illustrious histories; to whom, exactly, we might have been.

  Jane plays the message from her father again and fights the urge to call him. She wants to tell him to come, but the nuances of what she is feeling about seeing William would be beyond his grasp, and in any case he’s too far away—as always—to make a difference tonight. Her eyes drift up to the black dress hanging on the back of the door, and then to the clock that’s counting down the hours to William’s lecture.

  It was a month ago that the Board of Trustees announced William Eliot as this year’s recipient of the Chester-Wood Book Prize. Jane was sitting against the back wall of the meeting room on a rickety Queen Anne chair that had once belonged to Mrs. Charlotte Chester, wife of the museum’s founder. She was waiting to make a short presentation on the deaccession process, had been only h
alf listening to Gareth going over the final budget.

  “The prize money, of course, will be deducted—” he’d said, and one of the board members—a woman who’d come from the art history department of a small university—interjected to ask if they knew who the recipient was. Gareth didn’t even glance up, his ruddy face bent close to his papers. “William Eliot for that book on Victorian plant hunters.” He flipped a page of the report and the rest of the board members followed.

  Jane felt as if the room’s temperature had dropped ten degrees. She leaned forward, thinking for a second that she might be sick. The art historian glanced over at her quizzically, but then turned her attention back to Gareth. Sometime between discussion of the gift shop’s sales figures and admission revenues Jane stood up and inched along the wall toward the door, squeezing behind the chair of one of the more portly members. Gareth blinked up at her, then went back to his report.

  A few days after that, Jane began to see William’s name everywhere—in book reviews in the papers, in a short article in the Sunday magazine, on posters in the Chester gift shop, on books propped up in shop windows, the image on the back showing him greying at the temples and soft-jawed but otherwise almost the same. It took her a week to summon the courage to pick the book up in her hands, and another week to buy it, sliding it across the shop counter uncertainly, as if it were a gift for someone who was almost a stranger, someone whose tastes she didn’t know.

  There is some debate amongst us as to how best to understand the trajectory of a life—ours, or that of another. We understand that most people fail to recognize patterns, get caught up in new details, in allowing familiar situations to assume new guises. We can be guilty of this too. Those of us who have been with Jane the longest feel a constant swell of hope and a recurring ebb of doubt about what she can do for us and why we’re here. Some of us believe that one day she’ll open a file, or read a document or a book, and some particular scrap of information will fall out and the door of the cage that we imagine we’re in will swing open. Most days we want this, but once in a while we hesitate, worry about what will happen when we know ourselves, whether we will Cease. Besides, we have come to know Jane, so much so that for some of us it is unclear where she begins and we end. William is part of that—because he is important to Jane he has come to matter to us too.

  Jane leaves her office with her lunch bag and heads into the thrum and busyness of the natural history hall. Sometimes it’s like stepping onto a fairground—people moving in all directions, small crowds gathered around the various cases and cabinets oohing and aahing, expressions of pleasure or surprise on their faces. On good weather days Jane tends to take her lunch break across the street in the park. There’s a low wood bench that’s angled toward the grey facade of the Chester—its proper columns, plain pediment, notched cornices. Jane likes watching the visitors heading in and out of the main doors, strangers whose body language she can try to read. Sometimes it surprises her—who bands together and who moves off alone, like a planet slipping out of its expected orbit. Once she saw a boy of nine or ten standing on the steps and nervously glancing around, his hands twisting the straps of his backpack. When his mother came out and found him she went to hug him, but he pushed her away, wanting, Jane imagined, to have outgrown her concern, or ashamed of his own.

  As Jane heads past the Vlasak cabinet and toward the front doors she’s thinking about that boy, and then she’s thinking—her hand on the brass plate that pushes the door out and into the world—that soon William will be on the other side of this very door, about to come through it toward her.

  5

  The doors of the Chester Museum first opened in the spring of 1868. The day was so stormy that the windows were lashed with rain and the street outside the museum was clogged with carriages whose horses had lost sight of the cobblestones beneath them. There was knock after knock on Edmund Chester’s door as the foyer of the house on Brompton Road slowly filled with members of the scientific community, men who arrived in sopping top hats, soaked overcoats and trousers with wet hems. Edmund’s first exhibit consisted of a selection of fossils, beetles, shell and bird specimens informally displayed in his home on that blustery Thursday. Stones and mineral shards and passerines covered his dining room table—the most striking of which was a mounted bowerbird that Edmund had positioned strategically next to a lamp, its bright-yellow cap and wings gleaming.

  He opened the meeting with a round of sherry and a short explication of the beetle collection. The Society members stood alongside the mahogany table while Edmund passed some of his samples around on cuts of paper. The men brought the specimens close to their faces for inspection, or moved the beetles up and down on their palms as if testing whether an insect’s heft might further reveal its aspect.

  “This one is from southeast Africa, from the family Scarabaeidae,” Edmund said, holding up a large beetle with a glossy emerald-coloured shell. “It’s known to feed on flowers.” He handed the specimen to Norvill Farrington who had come to stand beside him. He saw now that Norvill was taller than him by six or seven inches, and dressed more formally than the evening demanded, as if he’d come from somewhere other than his own house.

  Norvill took the beetle from Edmund. “That one was brought back by Nicholson last month,” Edmund added. “He has about twenty of them.”

  “I’ve seen one of his already,” Norvill replied, turning back to the table. “He brought it to lunch in a snuff box.” Norvill angled the cut of paper toward the lamplight to better gauge the beetle’s luminescence. “This one’s antennae are quite distinct—”

  The door at the back of the parlour swung open and Norvill paused as Mrs. Chester strode toward the gathering in a bustled blue dress. She was carrying her hat in a gloved hand as if she’d just returned home, and her dark hair glossed in the candlelight. Edmund kissed his young wife’s cheek, and then responded to Norvill’s comment about the antennae. “They’re allegedly for fighting over the females.”

  Charlotte nodded at the assembled men, taking in each of their faces quickly; she knew all but one of them. “Gentlemen,” she said as she curtseyed. She squeezed Edmund’s arm. “I’ve come to say good night.” Norvill stepped back to let her by and she glanced down at the beetle in his hand, said, “It’s a pity it’s so delicate; it would make a very interesting piece of jewellery.”

  In the end it was Norvill who remembered Charlotte’s comment about the beetle and who, three years later when the collections were first opened to the public, suggested that Edmund commemorate the event by presenting his wife with a bracelet featuring the glass-encased scarab. Charlotte mentioned this in her diary—her surprise that Norvill would have paid such attention to a trifling comment on the night they first met.

  It is just past one o’clock when Jane comes back from lunch. She is thinking about Charlotte’s bracelet as she crosses the marble floor of the natural history hall, and we traipse behind her through the crowds who’ve come for the last day of public exhibition: a woman in a beaded shirt shaking her son’s arm for rapping the shell of the giant tortoise, a young couple peering into a cabinet of sea stars. When Jane reaches the wrought-iron stairwell that curves up to the first-floor gallery she takes the steps two at a time, then follows the narrow spiral up again to the galleries on the second floor, thinking about Gareth’s earlier words. Sitting on the bench outside the Chester, they had come back to her—his comment about the feliform hare, the cat–rabbit hybrid that was part of a collection of early Victorian hoaxes, an anatomical impossibility stitched together by a taxidermist and passed off for almost a year as a new species. She saw Gareth holding it in its spirit jar and saying, “I might keep this chap” as the cat spun slowly around. It hadn’t occurred to Jane when he said it, or in the stress of the weeks before, that certain things might not go to auction, those bits and pieces of a collection with less determinable value. Packing the containers of her lunch bag back up it had come to her with a jolt: the Chester family archives and t
he dozen or so personal objects associated with Edmund and Charlotte would be exactly the type to fall through the cracks. If Edmund Chester’s museum—his life’s work—was no longer supportable, who would care about his walking stick and ivory letter opener, Charlotte’s pearl hair combs or her scarab bracelet?

  Charlotte’s bracelet is on display in a small room that was once their maid’s quarters. There are five galleries on the second floor: the zoological specimens are in the centre gallery, with the scientific, botanical, ceramic and print galleries in satellite rooms. The Chester cabinet is in an alcove off the print gallery. When Jane walks through the main archway she finds a half-dozen people looking at the wall of early Victorian photographs and a man studying the explorer Fitzgerald’s hand-drawn map of the Kalahari Basin but no one at the Chester cabinet, so she takes out her key and unlocks its glass door.

  The Chester family collection wasn’t properly archived when Jane was hired, even though Gareth had been wanting a display for years and had been setting aside any relevant documents or artifacts he’d come across since he was brought on as the museum’s director. The cabinet now contains some five shelves of the family’s belongings including a handwritten copy of one of Edmund’s Society speeches, his open ledger, an invitation to the museum’s first public exhibit, yellowed newspaper clippings and old photographs of early displays. On the middle shelf are two facsimile pages of Charlotte’s diary in which she describes the delivery of a pair of mammoth tusks, as well as a sketch she made of the natural history hall in the 1880s and a caricature of Edmund carrying a whale on his back. Her hand-held mirror and pearl hair combs are nestled on the lowest shelf next to a square of needlework, two smelling-salts bottles, a jet brooch and the scarab bracelet—the beetle mounted in an overlarge bauble of glass and braced like a cameo on a wide velvet band.