The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Aware that his gaze was still on her, Prudence shifted again and stared sternly back at her son, puffing up slightly in her chair. The gesture reminded Norvill of George’s description of a hooded snake he’d once encountered in India; how it seemed to sit up and waver at its intruders, widen its body.

  “Would you bring me some lemonade, Norvill?”

  “Of course.” He poured and handed her a half glass and the tips of their fingers met briefly.

  She took a drink from it and returned it to him. “It’s good to have you both home at once,” she said finally, but her eyes were on the boat by then, on George, as they’d always been.

  Seeing that George was almost in position to shoot at the upper ledges of the rock face, Norvill crossed the divide to fetch Charlotte. She was well out of danger but it was within the realm of possibility that small stones or rubble could skitter down and reach her. He picked up the lap blanket she’d dropped earlier and placed it on the rock next to her, then, with more urgency than he intended, he said, “You should come back to the picnic area where it’s safe.”

  “Am I in peril?”

  He winced, unsure of the possible allusions. “It’s not for me to say.”

  Charlotte breathed deeply, gave him a bemused expression, and returned to her sketch. Norvill remained where he was at her shoulder, taking in her scent under the pretense of admiring her drawing. In the dark coil of her hair he believed he could detect the same lavender notes he remembered finding on her pillow in the early years of the Chester when the house doubled as a museum and, sent on an errand for Edmund, he’d happened past their bedroom.

  “The sketch is charming,” he said, leaning closer.

  “It’s tedious,” she chided. “The lake is wanting, and there are no swans to fill the space.”

  “Why not draw the boat?”

  Charlotte flipped the page to show Norvill George’s caricature of a man with a shotgun in a skiff. “It’s already been drawn.”

  “Are you afraid of repetition?”

  Repositioning the inkwell she’d set beside her, Charlotte returned to her sketch. “One always ought to be wary of being unoriginal.”

  Norvill studied the perfect line of untouched skin that marked the part in her hair; hair that, in this light, was the colour of the Arabian mare George had shipped from Spain last year. “Does my admiration for your accomplishments offend you?”

  Charlotte laughed, perhaps at the huskiness of his voice—a mocking laugh that made his skin prickle. “And if I gave the sketch to you?” she asked, smiling clearly and easily up at him, “what would you do with it?”

  “Have it mounted,” he said, anger welling in his throat.

  11

  After the first hour of driving, the motorway is mostly empty. It’s pitchblack outside and other than the ambient light from the dashboard we are tunnelling through darkness. Jane has yet to relax her grip on the steering wheel and she’s shivering, though we’re unsure whether that’s because she’s using the cold to stay awake, or because Lewis has yet to fix the Mercedes’ heater like he’d promised. Our thoughts are scattered; we retrace William’s lecture one minute, then circle back to our concern for Jane the next. Her thinking has been hard to follow—there’s a prickliness about her, a distance. She switches lanes to pass a car numbly thinking, Indicate, accelerate, then Breathe, slow down.

  A taxi had dropped Jane off at Lewis’s house just before midnight. She’d thought about knocking on the door but hadn’t wanted him to see that she was upset, so she’d jotted down a note about taking the car on the back of a receipt folded up in her wallet and slipped it through his post box. When she got back to her flat she parked her grandparents’ old Mercedes in a No Stopping zone and put the hazard lights on. Inside the flat she threw a handful of clothes into an overnight bag, left her mobile phone with its four missed calls from Gareth on the kitchen table, changed out of her dress and collected Sam, remembering to leave a note for Dora, who lived in a flat upstairs, saying that she wouldn’t need to walk the dog. She had her seat belt on before it occurred to her to go back for the box of files—pulling the Whitmore research out from under the bed and stuffing it into the boot next to a fuzzy grey jumper that probably belonged to Natalie or one of the girls.

  Those of us who were there, who had followed her when she ran out of the Chester, tried to sort out what she was doing; we broached whether one of us should stay in the flat and wait for the others to return.

  “Attendance!” shouted the theologian, but everything was moving too fast for voices to be sorted.

  By the time the Mercedes surged onto the motorway headed north, we were divided, at odds about what to do, unsure where we were going.

  After she slapped him, after the conversations in the radius around William and Jane stalled, everyone had turned and stared at her. This is the scene she keeps trying to suppress while she’s driving: the publicist rushing over and putting her hand on William’s arm, saying, “Mr. Eliot? Is everything all right?” and William just standing there, rubbing his cheek and staring at Jane with a shocked expression that either meant he’d finally recognized her or that he was baffled at the seemingly random act of a stranger. And so she had run—pushing through a group of six or seven people holding wineglasses, and past Jacek, the security guard, who she was sure would reach out and stop her, force her to turn around. An expression of concern clouded his face; perhaps he’d assumed she’d had a row with a date and was rushing out to get some air.

  No one was on the street when Jane burst through the door, and not knowing where to go she’d slipped into the park across the road, ducking behind the boxwood and moving along the hedge, her heels spiking the grass. There was a bench in an unlit corner along the far side of the green and so Jane made her way there, her hand on her mouth to keep the sound in her throat from escaping, though it came out anyway, a yelp she didn’t recognize as hers, a sound like the one Sam sometimes made in the middle of the night, his back legs scrabbling the floor.

  City sounds travel differently at night, and sitting on the park bench Jane became as aware of the din as we often are: the whoosh of the nearby traffic drifting over the park only to slide back down over the sloping roofs of the terrace houses; the weight of her own ragged breath rising in the air and then cascading around her. Sound becoming like movement or waves of light—which is how we sometimes see it, as if the human cacophony is a spectrum of colour: Jane’s jagged breathing an ice blue; the woodsy thrum of the string quartet, who had picked up their instruments again on the other side of the Chester’s windows, a burnished yellow-brown.

  Hearing the music start up again, Jane had turned toward the park gate and dared to imagine that the space she and William had occupied, the stillness and silence that had followed the slap, might somehow be blotted out by guests moving toward each other and rejoining their conversations, by the quartet taking up their instruments and playing again as if nothing had happened between movements. But then, on the other side of the boxwood, she heard a car stop in front of the museum, its tires slick on the pavement. A few seconds later a man’s muffled voice stated a destination and the driver replied, “No problem.”

  Jane could have peered around the edge of the shrub to confirm that it was William and his family getting into a taxi. She could have stepped out and tried to explain herself, tried to justify in some semi-coherent formulation what had just occurred, but she didn’t. The taxi doors opened and people got in, and the driver sped away.

  • • •

  When she gets tired of driving, of the quiet of the near-empty roads, Jane switches on the radio. The music is so loud we’re barely able to converse, to confirm who is with us and who is missing. The theologian shouts at us to stay awake, to focus, because this is one of the ways he believes you can Cease—by being lulled into the complacency that comes with travel. So the musician hums along to Ravel, and the idiot watches for cars sweeping by in the opposite direction, christening each set of ghosting he
adlamps with a name: “Electron,” “Proton,” “Neutron,” “Nucleus.” Cat asks repeatedly, “Who is missing?” and John shouts, “Stop asking that!” even as he tries to ferret out who got left behind. There is something strange yet ordinary about it all, as if we are a family heading out on holiday—our excitement almost frantic, the lot of us talking over each other and then sulking in silence.

  By the time we pass the exit that leads to the family cottage at the Lakes we decide that Jane must have known where she was headed from the moment she left the city. Most of us assumed that she would do what she’d mentioned to Lewis in The Lamb weeks ago—hole up and regroup, go through the last of Claire’s things. But we are wrong. Instead, Jane takes the exit toward Inglewood. She is focusing on the notes of the final movement of Brahms’s fourth symphony as she turns, and then she follows the broadcaster’s voice as he relays the news: austerity measures abroad, the high street in peril, monks setting themselves on fire, the miners still trapped underground. Jane thinking, Boccherini String Quintet in E Major when the music starts playing, thinking that by the time the rescuers drill an air hole down far enough the miners will all be dead.

  As she drives into Inglewood village Jane is strategizing about where to leave the car so that it won’t be conspicuous. The locals probably expect a few unfamiliar vehicles parked around the inn, whereas a car left by the trailhead in the early hours of the morning might raise questions. Jane knows that there’s been a volunteer search-and-rescue group working in the area since well before Lily went missing, a handful of residents who can be called out to assist climbers or cavers lost or in trouble in the caves at the far end of the botanical trail—people who might take seriously a car sitting in the hikers’ parking lot at five a.m.

  The last time she’d come here with William and Lily they’d parked down the road from the pub along the narrow river that forms a channel through the centre of town. The limestone cottages lined up on either side of the water are grey and nearly identical, as if the whole village had been built in a fit of industrial prosperity. Inglewood had been pleasant that day, the sun out and the main street in bloom. Ceramic pots bursting with pansies were lodged outside the shops next to welcome mats and boot scrapers; bells rang above the doorways when people walked through.

  This morning, the sky is a dusky grey as Jane drives down the street. The porch lights on most of the houses hunkered along the river have yet to be turned on. At the top of the street Jane sees a church, its tower lit by a dozen spotlights hidden in the shrubbery. There’s a parking lot at the rear with two cars already in it, so Jane pulls up next to the one closest to the road—an old Vauxhall with a layer of leaves matted against its windscreen. She cuts the engine, gets out and opens the back door for Sam.

  The rumble of the waterfall that winds down from the lake on the botanical trail is audible from the parking lot, which means that Jane has guessed correctly and the start of the woods is a short walk around the corner. Opening the boot of the car she unzips her bag and roots around for her jumper, while behind her Sam spins in a circle and barks as if he is expecting a ball. Jane shows him her empty hands, says, “Quiet,” and he diligently studies both palms before trotting across the road and into a grassy field, where he lifts his leg beside a boulder.

  Jane steps onto the road and her eyes adjust to the landscape, to how the early dawn light gives the asphalt a slick hue and the field across from her a denser texture; to how the woods on either side of the field bristle against the heavy grey drift of the clouds. If she turns right she knows that she will come to a stone bridge flanking the falls. Lily had insisted they stop there, and William had lifted her up carefully, holding her tightly by the waist so that she could throw leaves into the cuff of frothing water at the bottom of the twenty-foot drop. George Farrington, William had explained, had engineered the whole system in the late 1860s—narrowing the river in parts, damming the valley to form the lake, carving out the falls with the idea that they could eventually provide power for turbines that would serve the village. Jane remembers William marvelling over it, how one man’s desires could control so many things.

  It’s only when Sam wanders farther into the field across from the church and Jane moves to follow him that she realizes she is standing between the woods where N went missing and the trail where Lily disappeared. The chimneystacks, hipped roof and lead dome of Inglewood House are silhouetted to her left above the row of chestnut trees that divides the estate grounds and the field; the Whitmore would be a ten- or eleven-mile walk west beyond that. She calculates that if she turns right and walks twenty minutes in the opposite direction to the Whitmore, past the waterfall and along the Farrington trail, she’ll be at the spot where Lily was lost. And it’s this knitted thought—of Lily lost and N missing—that startles her. All of her adult life she’s used the word lost for Lily and missing for people like N. As if Lily’s accident, death or kidnapping was an act of negligence on her part, and hers alone, one that William, the police, the man or woman who may or may not have snatched her—that Lily herself—had nothing to do with. Lost, like one loses a mitten, a book or a key, something entrusted to you and lost through a lack of attention.

  Jane turns toward the botanical trail and walks quickly. Her nose is dripping. She wipes it on the sleeve of her jumper, shocked that she has just blamed a five-year-old girl for messing around and running in and out of eyesight in perfectly ordinary woods on what should have been a perfectly common day.

  Even in the wooded dusk it takes Jane only fifteen minutes to get from the gate to the place where the woods open onto the lake. On that day with Lily, with the slow progress they’d made, it had seemed to take hours. But Jane is walking quickly because even though the sky is slowly steeped with blue, the woods are rustling, and the shapes of the bushes and beech trees change as she gets close to them. There’s a push and pull to what she’s doing. On the one hand she’s acting purposefully for the first time in almost twenty years; on the other hand, she’s afraid of what she’s moving toward. Lily’s disappearance taught her that there is malevolence in the world, and that it can come at you unexpectedly, pass its hand over your body like a magician: abracadabra, you’re gone.

  Walking along the trail behind Jane the theologian does a roll call, though it takes some time to sort out whose voice says, “Here.” John uses his name and is smug about it, and Cat says, “Meow,” and the one with the soft voice calls, “Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming, and I have the girl.” The musician, the poet and the idiot raise various kinds of cheers, and the boy vroooms, and the one who rarely speaks hoots softly like an owl.

  “The old man?” the theologian asks, and no sound follows.

  The poet makes the slurping sound of someone sucking on his teeth but fashions it into a question.

  “Also gone,” the theologian says.

  Our rank is depleted, but even as we try to identify the others we’d felt travelling with us over the past few years—those stragglers who seemed like a caste of distant relations—we are at a loss as to how to describe them. The shape of our group is new again, its edges uncertain. This reminds some of us of what happened at the Whitmore: most days the breakfast tables would be lined with familiar faces; then suddenly, two or three would be gone and a stranger would appear out of nowhere—though looking up from your plate you couldn’t always say who was new and who was missing.

  When we arrive at the part of the trail where Lily disappeared, it is the blue hour, the trees soaked in stillness, the lake as slick as a lacquered plate. Some of us are sure that we know this place—and not just from the images William’s lecture inspired, from his talk of shooting parties and garden plantings, but because some of us have stood here before, can remember Jane, fifteen and terrified, rooted near the very spot where she is currently standing.

  “Once there were peacocks here,” the theologian says. He turns from Jane and looks up the trail. “They’d wander off the estate grounds and into the nearby grotto. There’s a path
off that way that leads to the largest of the caves.”

  We watch him move along the trail to where he thinks the path begins, but a few minutes later he is back, deflated. Either he is wrong, or the path is gone—the intervening century hiding it under a wood-fall of twigs and leaves.

  Jane edges her way down the slope that leads to the lake just as she’d watched William do that day on the trail. Her right foot slips on her first step and she has to grab the branch of a tree, move down in increments. When she gets to the shoreline she finds a flat rock that juts out of the bank above the water and sits on it, wiping her face with the heel of her palm.

  “Is she crying?” the musician asks. And those of us who have already made it down the slope sit beside her and study her face.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Cat asks.

  “Hardly,” he replies—though we can all hear the tenderness in his voice.

  The lake, to Jane’s surprise, is beautiful: the line of pink sky ribboning the gap between the trees at its far end mirrored on the water, the cliff gazing down at its own bleary reflection. She always thought this landscape would be instantly recognizable, fixed in her brain, but now she finds she can’t be sure if William came from the part of the trail that runs up above where she’s sitting, or if everything happened farther along. A laugh bubbles up in her throat: where everything happened? She sounds like her mother—always referring to Lily’s disappearance as if it were a natural disaster involving citizens in a country difficult to pinpoint on a map. Sometimes Jane would count the weeks or months between any references to it at all, as if it weren’t a weight she was living with daily, as if, in those first few years, she wasn’t startled every time by the phone ringing in the cottage or in her grandparents’ entry hall, as if one call couldn’t change everything. For years, Jane believed that some trifling piece of information—the physique of a stranger, a colour or gesture, a sound or a word—might stretch the frame of that day, bring a barely glimpsed hiker to mind, reveal an image of Lily orienting her body back toward the gate or to the lake. But her memory of what happened is always the same: she is half watching Lily, half peering up ahead for William; the game continues and Lily has missed a post, so Jane stops beside it and, after a minute, calls for Lily to come back around the bend, smoothing the petals in her pocket while she waits.