The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Jane gets back into bed and turns off the lamp, sure now of her conclusion. George Farrington knew the Whitmore—he must have been familiar with it; he stated in his letter that it was a long walk to his estate. And if Herschel, Leeson and N had found their way to one of the most famous residents in the area, maybe that resident had also, at some point, made his way to the Whitmore—as a member of the public invited to the summer ball some two months before N went missing.

  “Lancers!” shouts Cat, “and galops. I think she’s on to something now!”

  The musician turns to Cat and slides his right hand out in front of himself, making a buzzing sound with his lips and then the waa-waaa of a brass instrument.

  “Is it what you expected, Mr. Farrington?” the poet demurs, mimicking a woman’s haughty tone.

  “Who said that?” Cat asks, and the poet clacks his teeth like a wild animal.

  “Punch,” the musician shouts again, “in crystal glasses,” and some of us can taste it: the pleasant fizz of soda and the tang of fruit, bits of apple settling lightly on our tongues.

  After a short debate, we decide that Jane was right about the orchestra and Cat was correct about the dances. While Jane sleeps we imagine ideal versions of possible selves: hair coiffed and held perfectly in place, an evening so cool we did not feel the sweat pooling under our shirts. All of us so hungry for memory we will take it any way it comes, even see it as Jane envisions it: the papier-mâché banners and profusion of candles, the wood floors gleaming. Those images are set against the fragments we think we can remember—bits and pieces we puzzle over as we move into the long night ahead. The boy says, “I’ve never been to a ball,” and the girl whispers, “Me neither,” and Cat air-kisses their heads and says, “But it is such a lot of fun!” She whisks around the room so they can sense her dancing while Sam sits up to oouuff at us in the dark.

  15

  In the summer of 1877 the orchestra was more spirited than it had been the year before, in part because it was made up of more patients—Alfred Hale amongst them, wearing a large paper collar and playing an admirable trombone. There had been the usual round of dance lessons in the weeks preceding the ball for those who were untrained or who lacked confidence. The men and women had been allowed to practise together in the final week after instruction in their own gendered wards. Now, let loose under the high-ceilinged, rose-festooned room on the actual evening, there was some confusion about roles—some women taking the lead as some men rested their arms lightly on top of their partner’s. The warders in their dark-blue uniforms stepping in to send overenthused gentlemen on their way, intent that no advantages be taken. Noble separated us when it suited him. Bream was tolerant, going so far as to join in for a spin when the fancy took him, though he gripped so tightly on the turns with his sausage fingers some of us worried he’d leave behind a row of bruises lined up like the keys of a flute.

  Before he took the quadrille with Sallie Herring—who had plucked out so much of her hair she’d been given a bright yellow felt cap to wear—Superintendent Thorpe had been stationed at the head of the receiving line. Leeson had stood beside him briefly, bowing and shaking hands with the first few guests and introducing himself as a commissioner, winking hopefully at the Superintendent as if it were all in shared fun. He was quickly relieved of this assumption. Shortly thereafter, a dapper gentleman in a frock coat with a velvet collar and a bright yellow boutonnière came in through the double doors. By the time he and the older woman accompanying him reached Thorpe and the Matron, Leeson was hiding farther down the queue, the superintendent having stuffed a cigar into his pocket in exchange for better behaviour. Leeson bowed at the woman, who was ahead of the gentleman in the processional, and she nodded her head hastily in his direction, the peacock feathers nestled in her hair arcing toward Leeson so that he had to restrain himself from reaching up to bat them away.

  Ask us what we remember of a night like this and the women will tell you about the feel of gloves on their arms again, about the shift of a corseted dress, the weight of the bustle, about how the men’s starched collars lifted their chins so that they seemed to be looking down their noses at you when they presented themselves for a dance. The men remember how the candy colour of a dress hung in their eyes, how there was a promise of brandy, how the true choreography of the evening lay in trying to arrange a secret meeting with the woman of their choice.

  By nine Hopper had started to follow Eliza Woodward, eventually stealing a kiss from her behind a potted fern, the pillow of her lips a pleasant surprise. Hale was less lucky: he spilled his punch on Sallie’s skirt and Sallie pulled his ear in return. The night was a mix of distractions: the fit of new shoes, the increasing warmth of the room as the dancing continued, squares of cool air radiating off the glass panes of the windows along with our reflections. The room casting us back in our best suits and dresses, colouring the body back in.

  Sitting on the floor beside Jane’s bed, head bent in concentration, Cat can see herself in sea-green satin, can remember her lips on John Hopper’s in an alcove behind the fern. John, sitting beside her, is aware suddenly of his own former body: his hair stubbly but growing back after another enforced shaving. The two of them side by side as Jane goes on dreaming and we go on remembering the ball. The shape that is Cat whispers to the shape that is John, “How did you guess your name?”

  We gather that we knew some of the guests personally, and others by reputation: the Magistrate and Commissioners existing in name only, as was the case with most of the local businessmen and their wives. The poet knew George Farrington because the week before the ball the Superintendent had placed a slim red volume of Farrington’s poetry into his hands, suggesting that he might find it interesting. “The book,” the Superintendent had said earnestly, sliding it across his desk, “exudes a quality of liminal thought of the sort presently admired in literary circles …” This statement was, of course, pure condescension—the Superintendent thoughtlessly implying that due to his incarceration, the poet had no access to the pulse of current conventions. Sensing his mistake, he tried again. “It’s simply that as a fellow wordsmith I thought you might feel a kinship with the man and his work.” The poet, however, found Farrington’s work banal, bordering on trifling, and he barely gave it a second read, though he prided himself on being open-minded. His own offerings had, in their infancy, been widely misunderstood and even mocked in the pages of some of the better magazines. When he’d still been free—which was how the poet termed the period of time before his marriage to the succubus—he’d often been chastised by his friends for continuing to write when the evidence against his having talent weighed so plentifully against him.

  It was The B——, an upstart magazine favoured by the new generation of writers, that changed the course of things. Upon the publication of his second book the editors of the magazine had sought out and reviewed his first, which most of their brethren had blighted. It was found, in the eyes of the new reviewer, to be “a marvel,” “a heralding cry of the new age.” Suddenly the poet was lauded, and just as suddenly he was married to a woman of society who had tricked him into the union through false claims of pregnancy. Within weeks he stopped being able to write at home, and then, after months in a pensione in a country he remembers only as ripe with oranges that bled when you ate them and with women whose nipples were dark as mud, he stopped being able to write at all.

  Standing by the window in Jane’s room as the ball unfolds around us, the poet remembers his wife articulating the situation to the Superintendent on the day he was committed: “Imagine, sir, that there are strings that connect us to the world. It’s as if my husband’s are slowly being plucked away.”

  When the ball was formally underway, George Farrington asked the Superintendent about the poet. They were standing at the far end of the room near the French balcony doors, George stroking with one finger the arc of a scar hidden by his moustache.

  “I have some interest in poetry,” George explained, and the
Superintendent smiled.

  “My wife and I are familiar with your work, Mr. Farrington—botanical and poetical—though I fear I am not qualified to discuss either. I enjoyed the lake sonnets tremendously.”

  “Has he continued to write?” Farrington asked, glancing around the room as if he expected to recognize the poet’s visage.

  “He engages in the odd recitation, and occasionally we find a stanza or two pencilled on paper in the art room. Sometimes there are snatches of verse in the letters he sends to his sister.”

  “And is he much recovered?”

  “He is improving, though he still has the habit of sitting for hours staring at objects, at blades of grass or pieces of fluff cast off by the hens. He fancies that he has an army that inhabits an underground city. A city he spends, I dare say, much of his time ‘visiting.’ ”

  “And his wife, the Countess? How does she fare?”

  “She comes once a month to visit. You’ll see her there by the tall windows in the crimson dress. He wants nothing to do with her.”

  Farrington found the poet’s wife staring out the window at the airing courts. He bowed as she glanced over her shoulder at him—a quick flash of dark eyes and high cheekbones, a slight equatorial earthiness to her skin.

  “The poet’s wife as an object worthy of attention?” she asked. “It will get you no closer to him, Mr. Farrington. I have, you see, no access.”

  George tilted his head. “I beg your pardon. Are we acquainted?”

  “The world feels oppressively small some days, does it not?” She faced him directly, gave him a formal curtsey and then glanced around the room. “Is it what you expected, Mr. Farrington? The madhouse?”

  “I came without presumptions.”

  She put her arm through his and turned him toward the crowd. A gentleman in a double-breasted green jacket and a woman with thick lace cuffs and a wide collar waltzed by. They were followed by a dapper gentleman with long side-whiskers and a white cravat, and a plump woman in a tulle gown. “One of those two men jumped off a bridge and one of the women set fire to her house. The other man is the local draper and the other woman is the Superintendent’s niece. Dare I ask whom you perceive to be whom?”

  George shifted uncomfortably and tried to retract his arm without revealing his distaste to anyone who might be watching. “I just wanted to say how much I admire your husband’s poetry.” He disengaged his arm stiffly and bowed again.

  “As a poet yourself?”

  George hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Do you know what they say in here, Mr. Farrington?” She levelled her eyes at him and he stepped back, ready to take his leave.

  “I do not.”

  “That we’re the mad ones—the ones outside. That it’s our actions, our slights, strategies and resentments that are so unreasonable.”

  “And is that what you believe, Countess?”

  She smiled at him for the first time, but the expression dropped away as quickly as it had taken shape. “He’s over by the pianoforte. He was here skulking around the curtains when you first presented yourself.” She lifted her wrist and her fingers fell in the direction of a short, balding man in a cream-coloured jacket standing in front of the piano and within hearing range. “He’s in a mood. Mind he doesn’t bite.”

  By the time the windows were opened a little while later to let in some air, Leeson was waltzing with a commissioner’s wife and Hale had put away his trombone to stand at the punch bowl next to the red-haired girl from the laundry who had stolen into the chapel with him once for a lusty half hour. Herschel had excused himself to one of the chairs along the wall and was seething at a perceived slight—a glare—received at quite some distance from the Matron. N was fiddling with the ribbons she’d braided into her hair, feeling common compared to the wives of the local businessmen, the robust sisters of the wealthier patients, the pink-cheeked daughters of lawyers and doctors and bankers. She’d been asked to dance numerous times, and had laughed through a catastrophic quadrille with Herschel, only to be told by the Superintendent as they partnered for the schottische that she danced quite commendably. For that she tripped purposefully and stepped on his toe. When they were finished he escorted her off the floor, only to find Farrington waiting for him.

  “Superintendent Thorpe.” Farrington bowed at the girl and just as quickly dismissed her. “I beg your pardon, there’s a matter that I believe might merit your attention.”

  “Of course.”

  Farrington bowed again at the girl, this time regarding her more fully, her face uncomplicated in its youth, pleasing and open. He gestured toward the back of the hall and said to the Superintendent, “Please, this way.”

  Farrington led Dr. Thorpe along the wall. With the slightest nod of his head the Superintendent soon brought Bream and Ockley into step behind him; he would need their assistance if anything unsuitable was occurring. He had his list of suspects already, and as he strode through the ballroom he mentally noted those of the troublemakers he could and couldn’t see present: Hopper was by the grated fire, Hale by the punch bowl, Leeson sniffing around a woman in a blue-ribboned dress, albeit at an acceptable distance, Greevy sprawled miserably in a chair. He couldn’t see Herschel anywhere.

  “Through here.” Farrington opened the panelled door to the patients’ library and together he and the Superintendent entered the room, along with Bream, Ockley and, because she’d tacked on behind them, N. The library was dark save for the corner, which was lit by a short candelabrum gripped firmly in Herschel’s hand. The poet stood behind Herschel, his eyes closed as if in a trance, in mid-recitation: “… and enter the ground/to find ourselves/dwelling in the city beneath it,/our bodies bald, backs clean/wings grown within us …”

  Gathered in the room were seven or eight individuals, including Commissioner Mullan and his wife. The Countess was standing behind Mrs. Mullan in the shadows.

  “And feign again/the kiss of sun,/and wander farther from it …”

  In the candlelight the poet appeared as little more than a soft-lit face with half-moons under his eyes and a waxy sheen on his forehead, but his voice and the words were magnetic, some thoughts solidly said and others whispered as if secreted from his mouth to the ears of those closest. Those listening were mesmerized, and even Herschel, who normally could not keep still, was standing fixedly beside the poet, his fist gripping the centre of the candelabrum, though his eyes darted from face to face as if he expected an attack.

  The poem, dark and otherworldly, made only a kind of half-sense—talking rats, kings who ate shoes, flowers that bloomed only when you looked away from them—but as those present allowed the words to wash over them, the work started to take on a fuller meaning. It was like listening to the most dysfunctional of the patients: their words took on weight if you dropped your notions of what was acceptable or logical.

  Just when the poem was about to reach its peak, just when the gates between the upper garden and the underworld had been bashed by those above in order to bind the two worlds forever, Ockley coughed noisily into his hand—perhaps out of spite. The poet opened his eyes, saw that he was not alone, and stopped speaking. For a second or two his gaze settled on the face of each person present, as if to see with whom he’d been intimate, and then without a word he fled past all of them out of the room.

  His words, as some of us remember them—and as the poet standing watch beside Jane’s bed recites them—seemed like a dark art. For some of us, listening to him was like being pricked repeatedly with a pin—the sensation a discomfort radiating out from its point of entry. A poem of nerve ends, of images that stitched you up in a zigzag pattern and then scissored you open again.

  If George Farrington had been less obsessed with the scraps of the poet’s new work, he might have remembered N standing behind him in the library, remembered that he and she had danced in the same quadrille earlier in the evening, and that during the course of the dance he’d had cause to move past her a few times, her gloved hand settling
briefly in his, the delicate bones of her fingers palpable under his thumb.

  Instead he was preoccupied with whether or not the poet had set his work down on paper, and if he had, how it might be recovered and sent to a publisher, previewed perhaps in a magazine, delivered to readers who had been waiting for a new title to appear. As he discussed these matters with Thorpe, Farrington became aware of the Countess’s eyes on him, how she was glaring at him from her place at the window with a gaze so unrelenting that he eventually begged his mother to go over and distract her.

  The limits of our attention being what they are, only small strains of the evening remain with us: Herschel obsessing about the Matron, who was watching Hale—puffed up at being in the orchestra—to make sure he didn’t harass the red-haired girl from the laundry. Leeson at the long drinks table watching the Commissioners from a distance; Wick obsessing over who had been rifling through his personal things: someone had taken two cigars from a mahogany box under his bed and his book on The Systems of Chemical Philosophy. Old man Greevy watching Leeson stare idly as the gentleman with the boutonnière, who was a head taller than any other man in the room, walked over to join in the Commissioners’ conversation. The old man mumbling, “That one is master of the estate at Inglewood, I’ve a nephew works for him.” A room that is filled with people stuck in the web of their own complicated narratives: Leeson turning his attention to N as she wavered there, to the shine of her ribbons as she left the drinks table for a chair, catching glimpses of her between other bodies as she slipped her feet out of her shoes to flex them under the blossom-pink folds of her skirt.