The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  The weekend had been Norvill’s idea. One night at the club Edmund had mentioned that he was travelling up to Keighley to look at a small cotton mill, and Norvill had suggested that Charlotte take the journey with him; they’d be welcome to stop up at Inglewood and stay with George. George, sensing an opportunity, had then invited the Suttons. Roger Sutton owned a successful ironworks business and his wife came from plantation money; they’d helped support one of George’s first trips to the Himalayas and always enjoyed a bit of society. They, too, had heard of Edmund’s growing collection and thought the idea of his museum “quaint.” Once Sutton and his wife had accepted, Norvill decided he’d rather not be left out, after which Charlotte asked permission to bring the children. That settled, Norvill presented himself at Kings Cross station on the appointed morning and he, Edmund, Charlotte, the children and their governess caught the first train to Leeds. The plan was to alight there and to lunch at a hotel along the river that George had recommended and then to take the branch line on to Moorgate, and a carriage from there.

  The hotel in Leeds turned out to be quite popular. It was bustling and bright with round, linen-clothed tables and high-backed chairs dotting the main room, and white wicker chairs and low tables set up in the conservatory. The waiters carried their silver trays at such a height one could see oneself reflected on the polished bottoms. By the time they had set their napkins down and Charlotte and the children had rustled off to peruse the sweet shop little Celia had noticed on the high street, Norvill had confirmed that things were progressing exactly as he’d hoped: Charlotte was, once again, responding positively and almost openly to his gestures of affection while Edmund, distracted by the prospect of investing in a new mill, seemed completely unaware of where and how his wife was bestowing her attentions.

  Earlier, sitting across from her in the train carriage, his knees inches from her skirts, Norvill had at first sensed nothing. Charlotte was tolerating him as if he were a stranger, as if the fervid kiss in the museum months before, as if two years of stolen moments—moments that both exhilarated and humiliated him—had never occurred. And so, to distract himself, he’d spent an hour trying to engage young Thomas with lessons on the formation of mountains and valleys, only half attending to the boy’s questions and therefore unsure whether or not the principles of lateral continuity and vulcanism were being properly grasped. He’d quoted parts of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, pointing out the window at the sloping valleys, and had stared overlong at Charlotte over Thomas’s head, raising an eyebrow at her when she turned from the window to chide Celia and Ned for jostling each other for the better view. To his mind he was demonstrating a kind of paternal attention toward Edmund and Charlotte’s eldest, though truth be told he preferred the younger children. There was a clamminess about Thomas, a veneer of constant effort, as if even the simple act of getting his brain to properly register the age of the earth involved expending a prodigious amount of energy. When they came to the topic of the transporting power of running water Norvill almost imagined he could see turbines start to spin under the glistening furrow of the boy’s brow.

  A half hour before they alighted, the issue of sub-marine forests behind him, Norvill began to talk himself out of furthering his relationship with Charlotte; he decided to imagine that he had misread her intentions, or that it was possible he had not been clear in his. During an overdue conversation with Edmund about implementing a board of trustees at the Chester he even began to feel a fissure of guilt, a creeping nausea from the idea of what the break in faith might do to Edmund. The thought of putting Charlotte in such a predicament unnerved him too, though every time he imagined having her to himself, doing certain things to her, these thoughts abated.

  They were almost at Inglewood—Norvill gazing out at the cottage houses and trying to imagine what being liberated from his obsession might mean—when Charlotte leaned across the carriage, dropped her gloved hand onto his knee and brushed away a feather that had flitted down from her hat. Norvill looked at his knee and then up at her face, watched as her gaze dropped lightly onto his. A darting glance confirmed that Edmund was deep into his papers beside her, the children following a story the governess was reading dully. Every muscle of Norvill’s body was held in check against his desire to grasp Charlotte’s pearl-buttoned wrist, to fasten her hand with his. Charlotte watched his face studiously, as if to measure her effect. And so he held her gaze as if from a dare, moved his neck against his starched collar, remembering the nick he’d suffered that morning at the end of his razor, willing himself not to reach up to check it for blood.

  William, in his lecture, did not mention Charlotte by name. Some of us were ogling the canapés, and some of us were studying the guests, but we all noticed the omission. Those of us closest to Jane were marvelling at how she inserted her own version of events into William’s, how when he said “they travelled by train on the Friday,” Jane immediately placed Charlotte across from Norvill in the coach, and anticipated how the presence of Edmund and the children would force them to behave a certain way. Even then, after the lecture, as we struggled to untie William’s banal account from Jane’s embellishments, and both their versions from the hazy dream that is our own, we were conflicted. There are truths and there are the stories one wants to hear, though we crave both—share a desperate need to locate ourselves in a place, to understand why William’s lecture could so vividly evoke a row of chestnut trees or a bedroom mirror or the view over the lawns from George Farrington’s private library. One of us is convinced that he was once a guest there. Some of us knew only the woods, how the edge of the Farrington property ran right up to the asylum, Farrington’s trees waving their arms at us over a stone wall while we walked in circles over the viewing mound.

  The way that William’s words turned into images reminded us that once, at the Whitmore, there had been a magic show. The preparation took weeks, with various permissions needed in order for the inmates to perform certain tricks. There was to be no sawing of anyone in a box, no escape from shackles, though Professor Wick was allowed to rehearse privately with his own top hat and one of the farm rabbits. The best deception was the sleight of hand, when Hopper made billfolds, pipes and a pocket watch disappear, only to have them turn up in the hands of his assistant. This is what it was like for us at the lecture: it was as if we were a magic show audience asked to pay attention, every ounce of energy we had expended in concentration. But a pocket watch is easier to follow than a story; it has a chain one can see as it slips into the magician’s sleeve.

  We know that it was Norvill who suggested that photographs should be taken, souvenirs of the weekend compliments of the Farringtons, who had, once or twice a year for the last six years, employed a photographer from a nearby village to take portraits of the family and once, the previous summer, a postcard of the house and gardens. We suspect that the Chester children were allowed to play by the lakeside that afternoon because there is a photograph of them in that year in the archives at the Chester Museum: a small ambrotype of the children in flouncy swimming costumes, their arms roped loosely around each other’s waists, Celia’s hair wet and plaited under her bonnet, its ribbons untied.

  The photographer’s name was Thwaite and we can envision him appearing just after lunch on the trail side of the lake, hailing the party self-consciously and waving his hat back and forth to garner attention. Norvill and Rai would have rowed over to assist him with his tent and equipment while Charlotte, artfully arranged in a blue dress under the uplifted arms of a hazelnut tree, might have called the children out of the water and instructed them to dry off as best they could. The photograph of the children is the only one that Jane has seen, although some of us know that Thwaite also took the obligatory group photos under the long face of the cliff, the gentlemen standing, George with a rifle over one shoulder, Rai behind him staring out of the shadows and Cato sprawled in front of the blankets. In one of them, Charlotte’s hand is a blur on the dog’s neck as if she was petting him, and
Norvill is beside her, his gaze meeting the camera but his body oriented in Charlotte’s direction as if they had been conversing and, on being called to pose, he simply turned his head. In what would have been the last photograph of the day, taken after Thwaite had returned to the trail side of the lake, the group appears small, as if forgotten, as if glanced at over one’s shoulder when one is already too far away to discern faces and relations. In that photograph the rock face above them is an almost sheer sheet of limestone already bearing traces of the plants George had brought back as seeds the previous winter: alpine anemones set against his prized mosses, the tiny white stars of the tubergeniana gawping beautifully out of their crevices.

  Once Thwaite had departed, George, in the role of congenial host, turned his attention to Charlotte. She was sitting on the blanket nearest the water, the skirts of her dress spread flatly around her from the lack of crinoline or bustle, which she had been told to leave off if she desired to venture into the cave at the end of the walk. All morning George had been noticing his brother’s darting looks in Mrs. Chester’s direction, but rather than judge him, or the two of them, he decided to walk over and see for himself what the fascination was.

  Charlotte smiled up at him as he approached, and when he stood in front of her she tilted her head in inquiry. Up close he could see that she was lovely in a young motherly sort of way, with the slightly frazzled look of one who doesn’t rely on her lady’s maid. Her bodice was overly snug as if she’d recently put on weight, and her breasts bulged slightly above her neckline because of it. She had a mole—as perfectly circular as the brown centre of a calderiana he’d once seen blooming in Bhutan—that peeked out beside the gauzy frill of her vest, and George, surprised at himself, had to fight the urge to touch it. Her conversation thus far had been expected and conventional: the positive qualities of vernacular architecture, the value of schooling the poor and the merits of an icehouse. Earlier she had also started to engage the Suttons on the politics of sugar but one look from Edmund had put a stop to that. For the past hour she’d been working idly at a sketch, and George’s shadow fell over it as he studied the quick strokes she was making with her gloveless hand.

  “May I?”

  “Of course.” She handed her papers up to him.

  He smiled politely at her landscape and then turned the page to a fresh sheet.

  “I did tell you this was a shooting party, did I not?”

  “I believe you called it an exploring party, Mr. Farrington. You indicated we were to take a long walk, a cave was promised and some of your—” She searched for the words he’d used and then settled for “alpine gardens.”

  “Have you travelled much, Mrs. Chester?” He sat down beside her and glanced around for Norvill.

  “If you are asking me if I’m worldly, Mr. Farrington, I couldn’t say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m unsure of the categories or means by which you’d gauge it.”

  George smiled thinly at her. He liked her calling him Mr. Farrington because he knew that is what she would call Norvill when they were not alone, which meant that in some small cleft of her thinking he and his brother might be interchangeable, even fleetingly the same.

  “Allow me to explain.” He smoothed a clean cream page with his hand. “By shooting, I meant, of course, pheasants, but I also meant seeds. By projecting the seeds from the shotgun into the rock face I have discovered a means by which to better integrate my alpine species into the landscape.” He dipped the nib of the pen she’d been using into its inkpot and then dashed out a few black lines to form a cliff and a lake. “In Wallanchoon,” he continued, “the natural order of things is to see flowering plants like the Rhododendron and yellow rose thriving on the lower part of the pass while the heartier tenants take up residence in amongst the lichen and sedge.”

  Charlotte watched studiously as the cliff he’d outlined was endowed with inky smudges and crevices.

  “At first I attempted to plant my seeds here in a similar fashion, in two bands on the mid and upper ledges of the cliff, but few of the plants took and it cost me three-quarters of my supply. Last summer, I had a better idea.” He set the sketchbook down, leaned back on his palms, and looked over his right shoulder at the Suttons, who were craning their necks up at the rock face above them. “Rather than climb it again, scattering the seeds as I went, it occurred to me that shooting the seeds toward the cliff might better mimic the dispersal of the wind.”

  Charlotte tilted her head, trying to picture George climbing the cliff, imagining him first in some sort of harness, and then climbing a laddered rope, though attached to what she couldn’t say.

  Returning to the paper in front of him, George drew, in five sure lines, a rowboat, then added a dashed-off human form and a shotgun from which ten lines of India ink sprang. “Shall I demonstrate?” he asked, leaning intimately over Charlotte’s lap to set the sketchbook down beside her.

  “Please do,” she replied with a teasing expression that seemed to indicate that she knew exactly what George was doing and why.

  George stood and called for Rai, and then, bowing, swung a last look at Charlotte Chester, thinking that he would have pursued her too if she was to his taste, if he wanted a woman at all.

  • • •

  George went over to the rowboat and Rai followed, carrying two of the shotguns they’d brought for the pheasants and a sack of seeds. The valet hiked his tunic up as he manoeuvred the back end of the boat into the lake. Cato ambled after him to the waterline and then barked when Rai, without a backward glance, stepped into the water and hopped on board. Edmund and Sutton, long engaged in a discussion about efficiency in manufacturing, moved toward the rocky outcrop that jutted into the closed end of the lake for a better view, their forms blackening against a stand of fir trees. Charlotte turned back to her sketch and frowned, thinking it flat somehow. She remembered a criticism of Turner she’d read once, the critic arguing that without the human form, no landscape could ever be sublime.

  Balancing her sketch pad on her knee she thought to try a bird, a swan perhaps, but when she glanced up for a model there were no swans in view, only the boat cutting across the lake, its oars knitting the water. Gathering resolve, Charlotte dipped her nib into the inkpot and attempted to add her husband and the insufferable Sutton into the scene. She would have liked to draw Celia, but the children, bored with the protracted nature of the photographic exercise, had taken off “on an expedition.” Bess, their governess, had been sick all morning, Charlotte feared to think with what, which meant that one of the Farrington maids had been charged with minding them. The girl was bright enough, and pleasing to little Celia because she’d taken her to investigate the chest of toys in the old schoolroom after they’d first arrived. When Charlotte had last seen them, Thomas was constructing a catapult out of a Y of wood and one of Celia’s ribbons. Charlotte had told him to stay close if they were going into the woods and to watch his younger brother and sister. She’d also allowed the maid, whose shoes were too soft-soled for the forest, to stay within earshot of them near the first clump of trees. This, Charlotte confirmed, was where she was presently stationed.

  Before George’s first shot, Charlotte stood with her sketch pad and moved toward a flat-topped rock jutting out between the limestone crag and the picnic spot, trying to subdue the annoyance she felt at Mirabelle Sutton, who had hefted herself up to join their husbands, thus ruining the integrity of Charlotte’s composition. Norvill, seeing that Rai hadn’t done it, had taken it upon himself to pack up the lamb and was bent over his work a few feet away. He’d been growing restless since lunch, swatting at flies one minute and then brushing off the tufts of dog fur that had fastened to his trouser legs the next. His jerky gaze finally moved from his leg and boot to the cut of lamb that was drawing the insects, then on to the wicker basket where the food belonged. The maid, standing stupidly by the trees, appeared to be of no use, and his mother, reclining on a chaise a few feet away, was seemingly
oblivious. Charlotte alone was following his actions, observing him in a way he could feel, so he turned to her and gazed brazenly at her figure, bound as it was in a dress he’d once said was becoming, a pleated and vested thing that was too heavy for the afternoon, her chest flushed and splotchy because of it.

  Prudence Farrington coughed politely and Norvill swung around. He glanced at the needlework on her lap to assess the extent of her occupation. “Is anything the matter, Mother?”

  “Of course not, darling.” She peered at him from under the straw of her hat and then gently tapped her chest under the pleated bow of her striped walking dress. “Do I seem unwell?”

  “You appear both perfect and content.”

  Prudence smiled up at him in the same polite way she probably smiled in rooms with no one else in them, the corners of her lips lifted tightly in feigned tolerance. Together they watched as a fly of considerable size landed on her skirt and began to inch over the silk of her knee, Norvill admiring its daring, its proximity and permission, envying it almost, until his mother adjusted her position on the folding chair to gain a more direct view of the rowboat and it flew off. Prudence would be fifty-five this year but she had kept both her figure and her quick turn to temper. As a boy, Norvill had never been sure what would set her off, though he was usually quite certain it was a direct consequence of an act that emanated from him. She’d been in great spirits, however, since the guests arrived—thinner and frailer than when he’d come at the start of summer, but more congenial.