The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Blake leans in to say something, but hesitates as the waitress from last night appears. “Heya, Blake.” She smiles warmly at him and then flicks a quick slit-eyed look over toward Jane. “Can I get youse anything to eat?” She reaches across the table to take Jane’s empty glass and her long blonde hair swings forward and her midriff touches Blake’s arm. “Curry’s on special.”

  Jane shakes her head, smiling at the girl’s territorial exercise.

  Blake keeps his eyes on Jane. “No, we’re great, Katie, thanks.”

  Katie wends her way through the crowd back to the bar. Blake checks to make sure she’s gone and then turns back to Jane and says, “Sorry,” as if he owes Jane the apology, as if he is protecting her—as if he thinks something is happening between them.

  Around ten, Blake’s dad, who’s been up at the bar, walks past the table to say good night. He grins awkwardly at Jane and pats his son’s shoulder. By now Jane is used to the idea that everyone in the room seems to know Blake and is watching them, though when Blake explains to his father that she’s part of the restoration team from London, her lip twitches and she sits up straighter. Embedded in the lie is what happened less than a week ago with William, and a whole other world she is trying to ignore. Still, despite the lie, Jane finds to her surprise that there is a lot she can say to Blake: that she has an MA in archives and record management, that she used to play cello, that her father is a famous violinist, though she won’t give his name, that she has a brother who is a geneticist, and, when Blake presses her for details about her relationships, that she lived briefly with an architect.

  “That’s one,” he says.

  “One what?”

  “You said before that you’d been in love three times.”

  Jane laughs. “Well, the other two weren’t quite reciprocated, so they might not count.” She drinks the last of her pint and he watches her set it down as if calculating the likelihood of getting her to stay for another.

  “But you live alone now?”

  “I do. Well, me and the dog.”

  He is watching her mouth move and it makes her self-conscious—because she likes it and because it makes her feel like some twenty-year-old version of herself that she never got to be.

  “What about you? I’m guessing you live with your parents?”

  He stands up, takes their empties in his hand and put his lips to her ear. “If I lived on my own, do you think we’d still be here?”

  When they leave the pub Blake holds the door open and lets her go through first. Then he drops his hand to her waist to guide her to the right before she can say good night and head left toward the inn. He jerks his chin toward the church and the falls, says, “It’s nice out,” and just as Jane is about to say, I should probably go, it’s late, he threads his hand into hers and pulls her gently along. When they get to the field that divides the falls and the Farrington trail from the estate he takes the path up along the stone wall that runs beside Inglewood House.

  All night Blake has wanted to touch her. Jane sensed it, and she saw that his father noticed it and was uncomfortable with it, that Blake’s neighbours sitting next to them had picked up on it too. The woman had caught the clasp of her bracelet on Jane’s sweater when she rose tipsily from the bench and tried to move between the tables, had laughed nervously as she tried to release it. Jane blushed and looked at Blake and shook her head because she knew what his neighbours, what everyone, was thinking.

  Halfway up the path, near the spot where Jane had climbed the wall, with the sloped roof of Inglewood House’s stables silhouetted between oak trees, Blake stops and kisses her, his hands in her hair, body pressed against hers. She doesn’t pull away, and when he senses that she is letting it happen, when she kisses him back, he kisses her even harder.

  Jane closes her eyes, feels his warmth against her, tastes the tang of beer in his mouth. This is how it begins, she thinks: a door opens and you step in or out of it, or you stand still with a bar of unexpected light at your feet and you wait to see if the sun inching over your legs, your arms and your face, feels good; if it does, you go in.

  They end up on the grass. He moves on top of her for a second and then he pulls away, says, “Wait here.” He’s up and over the wall before she even knows what’s happening; when he comes back two long minutes later, he has a blanket from the stables.

  “Listen, Blake—” She stands, presses her fingers against her temples. It’s ridiculous: he is a kid, she is a grown-up, and when he cleared the wall she had a feeling he’d done this a dozen times before. That makes this encounter seem an even worse idea than it already is.

  He drops the blanket around the back of an oak whose low branches span the field on one side of the wall and the grounds behind the stables on the other. Then he stands ten feet away from her undoing the buttons of his shirt. Underneath his shirt he’s wearing a white T-shirt; a spiky black tattoo is banded around his left arm just above his elbow. He loops the T-shirt over his head and then unzips his trousers and when he is down to his underwear and socks he just stands there in the cold night air looking more grown-up than he should. When Jane doesn’t move closer or move away, he comes over to her and lifts her sweater over her head. He kisses the front of her neck and under her chin, traces her collarbones with his thumbs. Then he leads her over to the blanket, lifts her skirt and runs a track of kisses up her thigh, the woods pulsing around them, a salt taste on her lips from his skin. He has a condom in his wallet and that surprises her, but when it takes him a few tries to tear it open with his teeth, he says, “Go ahead and laugh,” and she does, and everything between them slows down, becomes more intentional.

  There are human experiences that we can remember, and sensations we can sometimes glean. We often lean toward or away from things because of a desire or unease.

  When Blake kneels in front of Jane and Jane puts her hands in his hair, one of us goes for a walk with the children, one of us wanders into the woods to be alone, and some of us stay to watch, the poet behaving rudely even as his voice lets slip a kind of grief. Those of us present are trying to remember our own wants and needs, the ways we were loved, what acts, or what kinds of touch shaped us.

  When they are finished, Blake leans over Jane to keep her warm, rubs her arm with his hand, stopping to trace her nipple with his finger. “I can get another blanket.”

  She kisses him because he is a good kisser, because he is sweet, because for the last hour she has only been here; and because he is a gentleman who wants to bring her another blanket that will smell of dust and old straw, who paid for their drinks with the only ten-pound note left in a wallet that had a strip of Velcro on it.

  “It’s okay, it’s late, and I have to get back to Sam.” Jane slips into her skirt. We watch her and think, Yes, it is late, late for us too. We also want release: we are tired of scattering ourselves into todays and yesterdays, tired of being in this woods now and a hundred or so years ago all at the same time. How long have we been trying to concentrate? For the last hour Jane has been aware of nothing but what it feels like when a finger trails down your spine, when a chest reverberates against yours with laughter, when a twitch turns into a tremor inside you. She has had what we want: to be wholly in one place with no thought outside of it. Though once, pushing into her, Blake called out “Helen,” and she quivered, put her mouth against his ear but remained silent.

  This, we thought, is how you reinvent yourself. This is how you disappear.

  20

  The summer of 1877 was the wettest anyone at the Whitmore could remember and the strain of the confinement was felt by everyone. In June the kitchens were low on meat one week and short of sugar the next. In July the Commissioners did not come by to register receipt of the patients’ complaints, and so a revolt against flock-picking ensued. The poet’s wife had visited to advise the poet that he would soon be released, and he’d upended a table, smashed a vase and was sent to the refractory ward for a week. Those who enjoyed his poetry brooded. All
summer there were rumours of cholera in the village, which meant that no escorted walks were permitted, although walks under parasols had been promised. The world was topsy-turvy: the countryside was soaking wet, yet the ferns in the Whitmore’s front gallery were dying of thirst. For a fortnight the patients lined the windows, quietly seething.

  In the middle of those weeks of endless rain, Superintendent Thorpe conceived of a competition that he hoped would enliven the general mood in the hospital and motivate the patients to behave. The idea was to create a series of pleasure gardens—twenty small plots to be assigned to selected patients who would be given sole care of their budding tenants. By early July the garroted vine had been dug out of the hillside by two perpetually soaked attendants, and by mid-month the plots were bordered with box and further divided by narrow gravel walkways, each gardener’s name to be painted on a zinc plate and hung from a wood post at the entrance.

  We know that the assignment of a plot was deemed a privilege because the patients had to apply for one and these applications were noted, and occasionally pasted, into the casebooks. To be granted a plot one had to be well into recovery, to have gone at least a month without incident, to have demonstrated the attainment of some skill—whether pillow-making, plain sewing or fancy work, shoe repair, clockwork or upholstery. Supplicants were also required to have eaten their meals without complaint and to have made a formal application in legible lettering. Those who were deemed suicidal were prohibited from applying because the gardens were outside the walls of the airing courts and beyond the gate that led to the infirmary. The farthest plot crested the top of a grassy rise that sloped down toward a shunting river, a river those in danger of self-harm were never allowed to see.

  A list of the first group of recipients was drawn up a week before Herschel slipped out of the door, followed by Leeson and N. The Superintendent had announced that the names of those selected would be posted in the day rooms of the men’s and women’s wards. This was his first mistake: the public nature of the act, the assumption that the success of the few would inspire the many.

  Alfred Hale was pretending to read a newspaper in a wingback chair when the men’s list arrived. The moment it was pegged up he moved toward it. Eliza Woodward was working on a sampler by the window. She stood when the Matron swished in, abandoning the last red stitch in the A of Amen.

  Both their names were on the list.

  That night, someone set fire to a curtain.

  Thorpe, having underestimated the strain the weeks of rain and detention had been causing, was forced to conceive of a second reward, an event that would include everyone. A second list was drawn up, dividing the patients’ names into groups of eight, and it promised a late-summer outing. Posted next to the garden plot awards, this larger notice announced “A Carriage Ride and Walking Party!” in a female attendant’s best calligraphy, under which Herschel had been requested to sketch a stand of trees in fine weather. “To exotic gardens in a magnificent wood!” the poster read. “To observe strange and wonderful plant species!” Under this last line Herschel had inexplicably drawn a toad, but by the time Thorpe saw it, the squat creature could not be removed. Three dates for the outings followed; they would go in two omnibuses lent by a friend of the Superintendent’s, so that the only cost would be for drivers. The names of the staff members assigned to lead the parties were noted in block print, though some reassignments were demanded. To quell the dissent over the garden plot allotments even further, the Superintendent consented to allow the genders to mix.

  Alfred Hale liked to refer to the Whitmore as a country house. He’d suffered from a blow to the head at the hands of a thief, and there were whole weeks during his confinement when he believed he was a guest at a grand estate; that he had been invited here to play the trombone with a renowned ensemble. Because of this he had a habit of entering every door as if it were the boundary between the outside world and a great hall: he doffed his hat constantly, looked searchingly for a doorman to take it, sought coat stands that did not exist. Once, he plopped his bowler on Noble’s head because the hall porter had the misfortune to be standing inside an entry. He behaved in a similar fashion when he returned to his ward at night, saying, “Good evening, it’s delightful to be here,” before engaging in a round of handshakes with those already turned in to their beds.

  Hale was now assigned to a walking party that consisted of so many names he became unsure as to who they were and how, with so many bodies, their instruments might be delivered to the estate. He took Bream aside and went over the list, asking, “Is that the French horn player?” “Is that the violinist?” Bream walked away, shaking his head, and Hale shouted after him, “Will the instruments precede us or follow on?” He wrote to the Commissioners about the injustice of being separated, even briefly, from his cases, but the Commissioners failed to respond. He spent the intervening days considering which of his “fellow musicians” might be left off the omnibus in order to make room for his trombone. According to the billet posted over the card table, his walking party was to consist of himself, old man Greevy, Professor Wick, Charles Leeson, three women he could not place, and the one called Eliza Woodward whom he’d seen kiss Hopper at the summer ball. He’d watched them dance afterward, noting that she had fine-looking lips but absolutely no sense of rhythm. The poet had snickered watching them, said that she had a habit of pretending to strike herself with a knife through the heart, but that due to her anatomical ignorance she always thumped her closed fist against her collarbone. And so, thinking only of a seat for his trombone and his need to have it with him, Hale got it in his mind that after an evening meal, as soon as was feasible, he would lure Eliza out of the women’s half of the dining hall to relieve her of her misinformation.

  Eliza Woodward’s casebook states that she had come to the Whitmore complaining of fatigue, an exhaustion that made the Whitmore’s usual constitutionals—the forced ingestion of meats, the rhubarb purgatives—feel like constant and torturous supplications when all she wanted to do was sleep. In late July of 1877 her casebook states, Does not seem to mind the rain, as if this were so anomalous it merited an attendant’s notation.

  There had been a time when she was well, and muzzily Eliza knew this. There was still colour in her cheeks when, during a lesson in comportment in the wood-panelled sitting room, the Matron produced a looking glass.

  “Who do you see?” the Matron cooed, smoothing Eliza’s hands so they did not grip each other so forcefully.

  Eliza peered closely but she did not understand the question. Instead of answering she touched her neck with her fingers, the delicate cording of it visible to her for the first time. The ligatures were akin to the strings of an instrument, and Eliza thought, as she considered them, of the ones belonging to the idiot Herschel, how they must have been nicked or severed.

  “I see a lovely young woman,” the Matron chirped. “Can you say her name?”

  Eliza stared at the Matron. She did not know if she should say her Christian name, or her pet name, or the one her father had thrown at her.

  “Eliza?” Her lip twitched. She wanted to get the answer right; if she did they wouldn’t take away her garden plot and when the rain stopped she would have an oval tag with her name on it above a bed of flowers.

  “Well done,” the Matron said, and she moved with her looking glass across the sitting room toward Sallie Herring, the mirror’s refracted light cleaving the walls and ceiling. When the Matron sat down, Sallie stopped pulling at her hair, sliding away the tuffet of strands that were already nested on the bench beside her.

  The night before Alfred Hale assaulted her, Eliza stole out of bed with a blanket and a pillow to lie down in the far corner of the women’s ward where there was space enough between the last cot and the wall to breathe. To help her sleep she sang a lullaby her sister, Julia, used to coddle her with: “Pussy, Pussy, where have you been today? In the meadow asleep in the hay.” When the widow in the cot beside her swatted her for singing, she prayed q
uietly for her sister and brother—whom she had loved, her father once said, to excess. When praying didn’t lull her she resorted, as she sometimes did, to whispering her own name. This was dangerous, because in the blackened room, the grey curtains blotting out even the moonlight, she could sometimes hear herself call back. The saying of her own name shifting from a query to a conversation; how in the gap between the pulse of saying it over and over again a transfer occurred, so that it was as if she were standing in her best dress on the far side of a seamless field, hearing someone at a distance—some lost version of herself—anxiously begging her home.

  No two people saw the August 1st event in the dining hall the same way. Hopper refused to be complicit, and so Alfred Hale enlisted Herschel, who, having finished his bowl of rabbit stew, waved at Eliza across the oak divider until he had her full attention. When the patients were all getting up to leave, she crossed the room toward the waist-high partition and Herschel and Hale approached her. Hale was hiding the knife he’d prised the evening before from the rump of ham sitting inside the kitchen on a sideboard.

  Greevy would say later that it was Herschel who had ruined the promise of the walking party. That had he and Leeson not gone off into the woods the morning after the event in the dining hall, the rights and privileges promised the patients, and the expedition to the gardens at Inglewood, would have been ensured. But in truth it was Hale who ruined things—who brought the knife to Eliza’s throat after she crossed the divide to greet him.

  What was lost that month was not only the promise of a walking party and the sight of exotic gardens whose plants had been transported from countries that sounded lush and mountain-crowned, but also an element of trust amongst the patients. Any sense they had of independence was gone, for suddenly in the wake of the various crises, it became clear that the actions of one impacted the others without any gaps or omissions. Hale had brought the blade up, Leeson had moved to intervene, and Herschel had clucked in excitement and drawn Bream’s attention.