The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “Do you like being a gardener?” Jane asks.

  “It’s all right. Do you like estate management, or renovation work or whatever it’s called?”

  “I do.” Jane smiles. “You know, it’s late. And I’ve got to let Sam out and I swear your girlfriend over there is going to come over and drive a fork through my throat, so I’m going to say good night.”

  Blake stands up and Jane stands too, and she says, “It was really nice chatting with you,” and is surprised by how much she means it.

  “Let me walk you out.”

  “Um, I think you need to get back to your mates.”

  “Helen, look at me.”

  She does. He is staring at her intently, one side of his mouth lifted in a nervous smile, a chop of hair hanging over his forehead in a way that probably drives his mother crazy. There is a thumbprint-sized patch of stubble on his jaw that he missed shaving, an acne scar on his chin. She can tell the ridge of his nose has been broken, probably in rugby. She wants to put her finger lightly on the bump of it.

  “I’d like to see you again.”

  Jane laughs. “That’s very flattering, and I mean it, but probably not a good idea.”

  19

  As the woman at the local records office in Moorgate enters Jane’s information into the computer, Jane has to fight her anxiety about using her real name—Helen Swindon doesn’t have a reader’s card but Jane does.

  “Right, here you are,” the woman says, squinting at what must be Jane’s particulars. “I just need to see two pieces of ID.” She glances down at Jane’s driver’s licence and bank card, says, “That’s fine,” and then slides a temporary pass across the counter. Jane slips it into her pocket and the woman goes back to the Sudoku puzzle she was working on. A few minutes later after Jane has emptied her things into one of the lockers in the cloak room and checked through a window to make sure the car is all right—Sam still sleeping off his morning run through the woods in the back seat—Jane walks past the woman again.

  “Don’t forget to sign in,” the woman says, tapping the metal part of a clipboard with her pencil.

  Jane writes her name illegibly, a false signature that feels like the physical form of a lie, and then she walks through the nearby door and into a bright but soulless reading room. Of the eight plywood tables lined up under the windows only two are occupied: one by a woman in a fleece jacket sifting through a folder of newspaper clippings, the other by an elderly gentleman reading what appears to be a turn-of-the-century will. The whirling progress of a microfiche on the other side of a short supporting wall and the peck-peck of the archivist’s typing are the only noises in the room. Jane pulls out a banquet chair with tatty upholstery, sets her notepad down on the empty table and then takes her reader’s card up to the archivist, a woman her own age with cropped blonde hair and a small diamond nose-ring.

  “How can I help?”

  “I’m looking for the index for the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics.”

  “Right. Have a seat and I’ll bring it over.”

  The Whitmore index is bigger than Jane remembers. The Whitmore was only one of five county asylums whose archives she’d surveyed when she was writing her dissertation. It hadn’t been until she found the hospital logbook and the startling reference to “girl N——, missing” that she’d properly paid attention back then, stopped seeing what she was reading as “types” and “categories” and instead saw a specific place and a particular person. Her eyes had jumped to the next line and the next to see if N had been found, stopping in shock at Letter from G. Farrington received—the name so immediately familiar from William’s tour-guiding on the day Lily went missing that she’d had to get up and leave the room, splash her face with cold water.

  By noon Jane has called up a dozen sets of files and boxes, has gone through the Commissioners’ reports, the admission books and the records of transfer for the years 1876–78. She can find no record of a woman patient at the Whitmore whose name started with the letter N, and no further references to the trio’s outing except for a cryptic set of recommendations from the Commissioners for stricter regulations in relation to supervised groundwork and permitted excursions outside the asylum’s gates. She spends the next two hours trying to decipher Medical Superintendent Thorpe’s angular scrawl and his shorthand for injuries (I), incidents of restraint (Res), or complaints by patients (Comp). She finds Herschel and Leeson noted briefly, Herschel complaining of Cons, remedied by Prs, and placed on short-term supervision; Leeson suffering from a bout of Ma—which Jane takes to be “mania”—in late July and placed under stricter observation. Bedford’s name and the electrotherapy treatments she believes he performed do not appear at all.

  Within an hour we are dizzy with Jane’s work, but we focus as best we can: sit on the table, lean over the books, read what we see aloud. The boy dive-bombs loudly around the older gentleman working on the far side of the room until the theologian demands he stop. There’s panic rising in us because Jane isn’t writing much down, because we suspect this stretch of days may be all we have, our last chance to see ourselves, our last chance to grasp the shape of who we have been before Jane gives up on N and on us, before she is forced to choose a new direction.

  Jane runs her finger down a list of patients attended to by the Visiting Physician and those of us who think we can imagine a sickroom, who might know what it was like to lie in a narrow cot behind gauzy curtains, scan the list, chant the names to see if the saying changes us: “Amelia Sowerby, Annie Witt, Matthew Tippings, Frederick Vine.” Most of us ignore the columns of symptoms and diseases, though Cat whispers them quietly. “Cholera, cholera, seizure, cholera, influenza.”

  In the afternoon, after Jane has taken Sam to the park and walked briskly along Moorgate’s high street to unknot her back, she opens the casebook records for 1877. When she’d come up from UCL to do her research on northern asylums she’d photocopied Leeson’s pages and a handful of others—of patients who were at the Whitmore around the time of the trio’s walk in the woods—but because she’d fallen behind in her dissertation, she hadn’t read the casebooks thoroughly.

  It happens now that as Jane reads through some of the casebooks she hadn’t photocopied she feels as if she is rereading them, as if they are stories about people she has come to know and can imagine, as if the jottings and spare details are the transcript of a dream. Samuel Murray, 40. Admitted: March 2, 1877. Cause of insanity: Overwork. Marital strain. She comes to the casebook of a Mr. H.J. Morley and realizes with a start that this is Herschel’s. She either hadn’t noticed it as a student, or hadn’t thought to copy it, had relied instead on the hospital logbook, Thorpe’s case report and Leeson’s more voluminous stack of notes to frame the events of the day. Now, suddenly, here he is in inky blue calligraphy: Age: 32. Admitted: May 17, 1877. Occupation: Farmer. Status: Unknown. Degree of Education: Unknown. And then in a different hand, under the notes of admission: Refuses to work farm equipment or tend field. Complains of pains in limbs, exhibits swollen digits and capillaries on face. Was found on roof of neighbouring cottage; refused to be brought down. Consistently mislays or removes various items of clothes. Claims that his wife is an impostor. Lets crops foul when they are the sole means of income. Believes he is losing power of tongue.

  The daily reports over the next three months are typically cryptic: agitated one day, compliant the next, morose, found naked by attendant in greenhouse, idle, behaviour improved, found picking at walls, refuses to speak, found with sewing scissors, found without shoes in garden, treated with cold bath, improving, wants to be read to, has difficulty sleeping, will not speak, gestures to throat repeatedly, admitted to hospital at B——, returned to W——, refuses meat, agitates fellow patients, broods.

  On the 1st of August Herschel is improving, and then there is a gap of six days that corresponds with the start of his walk to Inglewood.

  In Leeson’s casebook there were more notes than ever after his and Herschel’s return,
as if Thorpe wrote down everything Leeson had to say about their adventure. But there is nothing in Herschel’s—just a quarter page of white space, as if he’d said nothing at all.

  Despite her training, Jane is not an overly organized archivist. Gareth once said he couldn’t reconcile how good she was procedurally with the mess of her desk. “I have a system,” she’d scoffed, but she was lying—her system was more like a technique: tossing everything onto a table to see what overlapped, what connections might be made when the edges of two disparate pieces of paper met.

  There is a photograph in a plastic sleeve next to the Whitmore’s Servant Engagement and Discharge Book that Jane, busy in other ledgers, has yet to study. It shows thirty-six members of the Whitmore staff in a semicircle on the hospital grounds: the male attendants in stark uniforms with polished buttons, the women’s staff in black dresses and white aprons. The Matron is at the centre of the circle in a striped dress with puffed sleeves that all but obscure the assistants on either side of her; the Superintendent sports a bushy moustache that had already gone out of fashion.

  We know some of those faces, but not by name; we know, too, that these gatherings were rare, that the photo was taken in autumn because a number of the women wear shawls, that there would have been the fuggy smell of cigars weft into the Superintendent’s suit. We know that the men and women in the photograph were in some cases kind and in others insufferable. So we pause over the composed expressions of these figures, and wait for ambivalent or wishful feelings to flit over us. The man with the side-whiskers, we decide, is a bully; the woman in the plain apron must be the cook; this is a girl from the laundry, her stringy hair tied in a simple knot. We lean in to study a furtive-looking man in a bowler, and wonder suddenly if it’s Noble; we decide that the tall man with the clippers must be the gardener, sense that the dark-eyed woman with the chatelaine is a nurse. The seamstress is on the grass between them with a basket of needles and yarn resting beside her knee, as if she, along with everyone else, had been called out to the lawn in the middle of work.

  Before Jane finishes at the records office, she asks the archivist with the dyed blonde hair for the index binder for the Farrington family so that she can see how much material she’ll have to sift through to find any record of the night George Farrington met Leeson and Herschel. The family archive, when it arrives, is more substantial than she expects, and for a moment, flipping through the long list of the index binder, her resolution wavers. She knows it will take her weeks to sort through the relevant categories—the legal records, estate accounts, letters and household notebooks—if she’s to do a proper job.

  “Are there any diaries?” Jane asks when the archivist drops off the household ledgers she requested. “I thought Prudence Farrington kept one?”

  The woman glances at the clock to gauge how close they are to closing, then says, “I think there’s a separate index for Mrs. Farrington, but let me double-check.”

  The household account book for Inglewood that runs from mid 1876 to late 1877 is typical of its kind. There is a cramped signature across the top of the first yellowing page: Martha Stroud, housekeeper. This is followed by entries that reflect domestic commerce and concerns: twelve loaves of bread ordered from Hargraves, blankets aired, firewood delivered to the main house and cottages … There are inventories of kitchen pots, rotations for cleaning the silver plate, twenty-seven pages in which nothing unusual seems to have occurred. In September of 1877 there is a note about funerary costs but no mention of the person being buried, so Jane jots the date down so that she can compare it to the Farrington family death certificates when she looks at them tomorrow.

  Before she packs up, she leafs through the large red book dedicated to household staffing. Every staff member has their own page with the individual’s position, pay rate, advances made and a note as to whether or not board was included. There are addendums at the bottom of each, detailing when people resigned or were let go, and these are mostly in the housekeeper’s writing: Mary Margaret Teems removed 26 July for pilfering flour, no reference given; Wilson Penfeld retired with a gift of five pounds.

  Jane is startled when she finally looks up and finds the archivist standing beside her chair. The woman smiles as if she’s used to this, as if it’s one of the job’s small pleasures.

  “There’s a note on file that says Mrs. Farrington’s diaries are on loan to the Trust. I believe they have George’s Tibetan notebooks and sketches as well.” She lifts her shoulders apologetically and turns to go.

  “Sorry—” Jane interjects. “Do you mean the Trust that’s restoring the estate?”

  “Yes—the Farrington Trust in Inglewood. In all honesty, between them and that gentleman from London we’ve been moving those boxes up and down from storage a lot lately.”

  “Gentleman from London?” Jane can hear how thin her voice sounds, so she clears her throat, tries to sound assertive. “Do you remember his name? I think he might be a colleague.”

  The archivist purses her lips. “He was finishing a book—something about Victorian gardens? A nice man—bit posh—he was up here a lot in the spring and then again a month ago.” She juts her chin in the direction of the stack of material on Jane’s table. “Looking through most of the same things that you are.”

  Jane glances down at the archives she’s been working through: it’s all Whitmore material save for the Farrington household books and index binder. “Sorry, do you mean the Farringtons? Or the Whitmore?”

  “A bit of both, same as you.”

  To clear her head after she gets back to the inn, Jane takes Sam for a walk in the field that runs along Inglewood’s stone wall. On her way back she stops at the spot where the wall slumps a bit, the section she’d climbed over yesterday, and peers across the lawn to where the gardeners are working on a series of freshly dug beds. She has never liked the waste of large estate grounds, the kind that seem to exist solely for the purpose of having an expanse of lawn to gaze across, but she can appreciate the beauty of a good garden: the bright explosions of pink and white flowers the gardener in the wide-brimmed hat is carrying on a tray, the twitching green reeds around the pond she’d glimpsed earlier on the far side of the wisteria arcade.

  Without quite meaning to, Jane scans the pair of gardeners packing up by the stables to see if one of them is Blake. Eventually she spots him near the ivied enclosure off the back of the house just past the library, a gated space that would have been the family’s private garden. He turns toward the stables, stretching his back as he goes, and Jane ducks and heads for the road before he is close enough to see her.

  Turning back toward the inn, Jane whistles for Sam, who has been tearing around in the treeline, then she picks up a skinny branch and whisks it through the long grass in front of her, all the while trying to convince herself that the archivist in the records office must be mistaken about William looking through the Whitmore material. There’s something more than territorial about her discomfort, a resentment she can’t quite shake off. This feeling isn’t like the one she experienced listening to his talk on Norvill, her sense of that’s mine; this has more to do with the whole of her life, with feeling like a fake. She can still see Clive’s face when she said she was going to take an MA in Archives and Records Management at The University of London, how he held his pudgy features perfectly still as if he didn’t want to give away his belief that this was just another move in a series of moves that involved replicating the lives of others. Music because Henri did music, archives because William did archives. She’d seen the same tight-lipped expression on Lewis’s face at The Lamb when she said she might write about N and the Whitmore. As if she was trying to be Claire, as if getting her research published would somehow create a meaningful connection between them.

  Watching Sam zigzag across the field, Jane realizes that there is something else bothering her: the possibility that William has already made a connection between Inglewood and the Whitmore. Maybe George Farrington had business with the h
ospital? If Farrington attended the ball, as Jane suspects he did, in what capacity had he done so? Was he a patron? She circles back to her revelation from the first evening at the inn: his letter to the Superintendent said, Mr. Farrington is glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here—a courtesy, and an indicator that he was familiar with the hospital or at least sensitive to the kinds of patients who moved through there.

  Back in her room, Jane fills Sam’s water bowl and he drinks all of it, then flops down happily inside the door despite the mess of burrs in the white fur along his hocks and under his belly. Her new hairbrush is still in the shop bag so Jane takes it out and settles down beside him, stroking his ears and running her fingers through his soft curls before gently working the tangles out, one knot at a time.

  Later in the evening we go to the pub with Jane. Most of us like the closeness of a public room, the chatter of everyday conversations. We can tell, when Blake saunters in, that he is looking for “Helen.” He’s taken care with his clothes, is wearing a pressed shirt with a collar, black trousers and polished boots.

  He spies Jane reading at one of the low tables along the bench wall where they’d sat the night before. Her pint glass is empty so he heads straight to the bar to order her another one, striding past us and stirring up a waft of rosemary chicken from a nearby table.

  “I thought I’d catch you at the house today.” He puts a full pint down beside her empty one, avoiding her papers, and stands waiting for her to offer him a seat. When she doesn’t say anything, he straddles a low stool, tugs the corner of her pile of papers toward his side of the table and asks, “What’re you working on?”

  “Just some Farrington stuff.” She places the Whitmore papers on the bench beside her and then changes her mind and tucks them between the straps of her handbag under the table. “Thanks for the pint.”