The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  By the time Jane sat up, she was already unsure if it had happened. She remembers trying to clear her head, trying to formulate a question. William seemed in a hurry to get her home.

  “Ready?” He folded the throw she’d been using in quarters and dropped it over the back of the couch.

  “Yeah.” Jane stood up, trying to shake the fog of sleep. She glanced around for her bag, conscious that her eyes were welling up.

  “You all right?”

  “I can’t remember where I left my bag.” She wiped her eyes and walked into the kitchen, only to remember that she’d dropped it by the front door when she came in. It was lying next to her cello at the foot of the stairs, and when she bent down to pick both up, William reached in, saying, “I’ll get this,” his hand around the cello-case handle before she could even think to say no. He walked her the two blocks to her grandparents’ house in a light rain without a word and handed her the cello at the gate, waiting at the end of the walk to make sure she was safely in before raising his hand to say good night.

  By the following Monday evening Jane was convinced she’d made everything up. William had acted normal that morning when she’d appeared at the door, and when he’d come home from work he was harried as usual—running late because he’d been trying to get support letters for his grant and had accidentally left the office without the files on Inglewood in his briefcase and had to go back for them. During the first week Jane wouldn’t have minded, but now Lily was starting to act up. She was smart enough to sense that Jane would let her get away with a lot more than Luisa did.

  That summer Lily was interested in fish, and William had gamely gone out and bought her an aquarium with two blue dolphin cichlids and a scuba diver figurine whose chest of buried treasure contained part of the water filtration system. He’d also helped her cut a dozen pictures of fish from a National Geographic, awkward frontal photographs and cropped images that she later sellotaped onto the headboard of her bed. Lily had given them all names—“Rusty” and “Lucy” and “Misty” and “Fritz”—names William said she’d imported from last year’s fascination with ponies, the spirit of “Fritz” the Shetland pony somehow reincarnating into a photograph of a blue tetra. He’d explained this to Jane while rifling through Lily’s dresser drawer after work one day, searching for a favourite purple T-shirt Lily wanted to wear to bed. Jane was looking in the closet under the folded pile of clothes the cleaning lady had left in the basket.

  “Did you tell Jane about the Gourami?” William asked.

  Lily put her thumb in her mouth and shook her head no.

  “Hey,” he said, tapping her fist, “what did we say about that?” He put his hands on his hips and turned to Jane. “Any luck?”

  “Nope.” Jane pointed toward the top shelf of the closet where a row of stuffed animals was lined up. “Could it be up there?”

  William came and stood beside her and started pulling the soft toys down two at a time. Lily grabbed the donkey she liked before it hit the floor, and he glanced down as she caught it. “Show Jane the Gourami, Lil. She’ll like it.”

  Lily climbed up onto her bed and pressed a finger against the cut-out of a spotted orange fish with a black stripe down its side, the back end of its body almost translucent and flaring like a veil.

  “It’s called ‘Jane’ now,” William said. “What was it called before, Lil?”

  Lily made a squirting sound with her mouth and then laughed and hid her face behind the donkey, peeking over its head to say, “Luisa.”

  On the trail that day in the woods, Lily had made a dozen fish faces, sometimes just with her lips, sometimes by opening her mouth and hanging out her tongue, and once, probably imitating something William had shown her, by putting her hands next to her ears and swishing them back and forth like fins. Jane thought, during the whole of that walk, of almost nothing but William, of how she must have imagined that he’d touched her that way—imagined it because it was something she thought she wanted, because a touch like that would mean he saw her differently: the way she thought she wanted to be seen.

  13

  On the walk back to the village, Jane runs the tips of her fingers lightly over the shrubs that border the pathway, thinking about the flower petals she plucked at the start of the trail two decades ago, how they were in her pocket all those long hours at the police station when William had gone back out to search and night was falling and she’d sat at a stranger’s desk. Jane had touched those petals again and again, saying each time her finger felt their crushed silk, Please find her, please find her; offering all kinds of behaviours, all manner of pacts—If they find her I will always … or If they find her I promise to never …—to whichever god might be listening.

  Turning toward the church it occurs to Jane that coming up to Inglewood is the most intentional thing she’s done in a long time. Even the split from Ben four years ago had been ambiguous, almost an accident—a fight over nothing that ended with him moving out. They had been at his brother’s art opening in Chelsea, and Jane had reached out to straighten Ben’s already straight tie and he’d swatted her hand away. Ten minutes later they were out on the fire escape having a go at each other—“You always—” and “You never—” and “If you’d just—” And Ben had shouted, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with you.” Without a word Jane slipped the ring he’d given her for her thirtieth birthday off her finger, tucked it into his jacket pocket and turned toward the railing. There was a streak of orange left in the sky, the outline of the buildings across the river uneven against it. She counted the seconds in her head: one thousand and one, one thousand and two. By one thousand and five he was gone.

  What surprises her now about what happened with William last night isn’t that she’d run, but that running away also feels like running toward. Neither her mother nor her therapist, nor Lewis for that matter, thought she should come back here. But returning to these woods—not just for herself or for Lily, but to sort through the story she has started to piece together about N—seems exactly right. Files, books and computer searches are all well and good, but these are the actual woods that N walked through, this is the village she must have come upon the day her new life began.

  The church where Jane left the car sits at the top of the main road. Its crenellated tower is from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but the rest of it is early Victorian, probably rebuilt in the throes of the Industrial Revolution when most of the nearby cottages went up, or a few years later when the Farringtons first moved to Inglewood, taking up residence in the house and bringing their money with them. There is a cemetery plot on the west side of the church, its old stones jutting at angles, and on the far side of the parking lot is the field that acts as a brace between George Farrington’s botanical trail and the walled estate with its surrounding woods. Jane skims along the grassy sway with Sam in tow, thinking about the Whitmore trio and how they might have passed under the church tower on their walk to or from the Farringtons’. And then it occurs to her that the Chesters would have passed this way too, only a little later, on the weekend William lectured about. Edmund, Charlotte, the three children and the governess they’d brought on the train with them. Passing under the thumb of the church tower’s shadow, Jane has to work at imagining this. Despite all her reading, until William’s lecture she had never pictured the Chesters outside the museum or the city, never imagined Charlotte bounding energetically across the hump of a field or stopping, as William said they did, at a riverside hotel for lunch, the world around them noisy, bustling and brightly lit.

  As she crosses the parking lot back to the Mercedes, Jane cycles through the facts: William said that the Farringtons and Chesters had met twice at Inglewood House: in September of 1877 for the shooting party; and in the summer of 1879, after Norvill’s return from the coast, when Edmund had made enough money with the mill to fund a substantial part of what would become George’s last plant-hunting expedition. Sitting in the car with her hands on the steering wheel it
comes to Jane that there is something too tidy about that fact, about their paths crossing here at Inglewood twice—as if the research William had done could summarily limit the extent of their interactions, as if he’d perused all the relevant documents and could say without reservation that those were the only instances upon which the two families properly met at the estate. It seems unlikely to Jane that the Chesters wouldn’t have been at least occasional visitors, especially if Norvill and Charlotte had the kind of relationship that Charlotte’s diaries suggest they did.

  Jane starts the car and puts it into reverse. Whether William is right or wrong, it is the certainty with which he made the statement that they’d met twice that’s bothersome. Perhaps the same could be said for Jane’s assumptions about N? Perhaps her disappearance into the trees at Inglewood wasn’t an isolated incident based on a chance encounter but part of a series of connected events. Perhaps Jane’s mistake all these years as she picked up and put down the Whitmore story has been the same one William may have made about the Chesters and the Farringtons in his lecture: presuming that there were few previously existing ties between those gathered at Inglewood House for the weekend; presuming that people’s lives—even those of the Whitmore patients—are ever simple or small, that there is no traffic of the heart or transit between one kind of place and another.

  The doorbell at the village inn is answered by a woman in a long burgundy cardigan and jeans, her dark hair lit with grey. She glances down at Sam but Jane can’t tell if the glance means no dogs allowed or dogs welcome.

  “I’m hoping for a room. Just a single.”

  The woman opens the door and Jane and Sam follow her into the reception area, the smell of sausage and eggs drifting out of the nearby breakfast room. “How many nights?” As the woman pulls a ledger out from under the counter, the silver bracelets she’s wearing jingle and she pushes them farther up her arm so they stop.

  “Dogs are all right?”

  The woman tilts her head as if to say depends on the dog, or you tell me. “He’s an extra five.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Right, fill this out. It’s seventy a night unless you stay for five nights. Then it goes down to sixty-five.”

  “Five nights is perfect.” Jane glances over the form: name, address, licence or passport, contact number, credit card.

  The woman comes around the counter and pets Sam’s head the way he hates, small taps with flat fingers. “What’s his name?”

  Jane hesitates for a second, and then without knowing why exactly, she lies: “Chase.”

  “Hiya, Chase, hi there.”

  Jane surveys the registration form again, taps the pen against the paper. “Do you have any information on the caves?”

  The woman roots around behind the counter but comes up empty-handed. “Let me have a look in the sitting room.” She swings her curtain of hair over her shoulder and pushes open the nearest door and the voice of a BBC radio host—“Up next we’ve got one hour of back-to-back”—floats through from the other room.

  For “Name” Jane writes Helen Swindon. Helen was a girl she’d gone to university with and Swindon was the last name of a short-term boyfriend in the last orchestra she’d played with, an oboe player she’d broken up with when she gave up the cello. She scribbles down a fake address, a made-up driver’s licence and a mobile phone number that’s close to hers but with a different digit at the end; she has a pile of crisp bank-machine notes on the counter by the time the woman bustles out of the sitting room.

  “Right.” The woman drops a stack of pamphlets on the counter. “Here’s a brochure on the caves, one on the trail and a map of the village.” She picks up Jane’s form, flicks her eyes over it and then hands it back to Jane, tapping a finger next to a line that asks for her signature. “What brings you up this way?”

  “Just a holiday.” Jane signs Helen Swindon quickly, in a dense cursive, and is surprised by how legitimate the signature looks.

  “I’ll just take two nights now, you can pay the rest later.” The woman counts out the required number of notes and slides the remainder across the counter toward Jane. “Do you need help with your bags?”

  “No.”

  “Car?”

  “Yes.”

  She hands Jane a parking disk and her room key, and then slips Jane’s form into the ledger and puts it back under the counter. “The car park is at the side of the building. Breakfast is seven till eight through those doors—if you’d leave the dog in the room. Public lounge is just through there, though it’s usually quiet. Shower’s tricky—you need to give the tap a good heave to get it open. I’m Maureen, my husband’s Andy. Just ring the buzzer by the front door if you need one of us. And help yourself to a cereal bowl in the breakfast room if you want to leave water out for the dog.” She tugs her cardigan closed and then rubs the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “You all right, Helen?”

  “Yes, fine.” Jane perks up. “Just tired from the drive.”

  Jane pulls her bag and the box of files about the Whitmore out of the car. Her room on the second floor is larger than she expects, with modern wallpaper in green and tan stripes, and a view of the river that cuts through the centre of the village and the grey stone houses on its far side. There’s a trestle desk in the corner and a small stand on which sit a kettle and packets of ginger biscuits. On the bed there’s a plush robe folded into a neat square and tied with a thick yellow ribbon.

  Sam noses the empty rubbish bin, the bathroom tile, the area under the window, drinks loudly from the water bowl and then settles down on the mat just inside the door to scratch his ear with his hind leg.

  “I know you’re hungry, pal, but let me just get two hours of sleep, okay?” Jane sets the alarm beside the bed, changes out of her damp clothes and slips under the thick white duvet, the Whitmore box next to the desk in her direct line of sight. Sam takes up watch from his mat on the floor.

  Because it is day and because we do not trust ourselves to rest, we gather around and watch as Jane settles into sleep. That we once took sleep for granted! That we dropped onto our own beds or cots or idled langorously on our sofas and didn’t savour the escape! How the body unflexes itself into a state of compliance, frees the mind to travel.

  “I miss beds,” Cat says. “I think I had a white ceiling. I can almost picture waking up and looking at it; it had decorated squares—”

  “Coffers,” the idiot offers.

  “Decorated squares with an oval in the room’s centre and a hanging gas lamp—”

  “That’s the Whitmore,” John says. “The ceiling in the men’s ward looked the same.”

  “Hark the soft pillow of her hallowed mount,” the poet says. “There is no greater pleasure than falling asleep on top of a woman.”

  “There are children present,” the one with the soft voice says, and the one who rarely speaks snickers. We turn our attention back to Jane.

  Under the plush duvet of the inn Jane is dreaming nonsense. So we sift through the flickering residue of her day: Sam running out of sight, the hours of driving, the mobile on her kitchen table blinking Gareth’s name. After an hour or so she works her way back to the knot that is William. She sees him and Mina at the hummingbird cabinet, their faces reflected in the glass. But then the dream shifts and the birds twitch to life. Some flit up off their mounts, some get caught in their wiring. After a minute all two hundred and four of them are flapping wildly, trapped in the case like a swarm.

  “Do something,” the girl says, turning from the dream and imploring us.

  “We can’t,” the theologian replies.

  “Why not?” John asks.

  Those of us who were drifting off into our corners come forward, ready to take sides if we have to.

  The birds knock against the glass.

  “Help,” the girl says again. “I mean it.”

  “Let’s try,” the one with the soft voice says. “It’s only a dream. They hardly ever make sense anyway.”

  In th
e dream the hummingbirds are dying; they crest and fall with broken necks, the flurry of one colliding with the arc of another. Jane does not know how to break the case, she cannot move to save her soul, and William and Mina are oblivious, the little girl saying, “I like this one” and tracking a hummingbird as it flits into the glass. In the end it is N who hands Jane the key, who loops it off the ring in her pocket and presses it into her palm. Jane standing back as the birds pour out of the opened panel in a fluster of sound.

  “Thank you,” the girl says quietly, and someone claps from the far side of the room.

  “Who’s that?” the theologian snaps, not recognizing the figure.

  Some of us leave the dream then, and some of us stay, watch Jane touch the bodies of the birds that litter the case, her fingers stroking their ruffed feathers, righting their bent wings.

  Once, when we were at a play with Jane and Ben, we debated the validity of Ceasing. The theologian liked to tell us that death was the end for everyone and that all of our flapping about wouldn’t change the fact that we would eventually stop Being.

  The argument started at the end of the fourth act when the actress playing the mad woman climbed a stepladder in a gauzy white dress and hanged herself by the neck. Blue floodlights made fake river water below her and all of us turned to Jane, who had clenched her eyes shut. The rope went taut as the lights dropped to black, then blazed back on to reveal an empty stage.