The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “No, I’m up in Inglewood.”

  “Sorry, I’m just finishing a meeting.” His voice is neutral, efficient.

  “If it’s a bad time—if I’m intruding …”

  “How pressing is it?”

  Before Jane can answer, William moves his mouth away from the phone and she can hear him say, “See you at three.” Then he comes back, says, “Sorry, that was the last interruption,” sounding more relaxed, like the William of twenty years ago.

  “I’ve really just one quick question, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Try me.”

  Jane presses her forehead against the hallway wall. “Well, the Trust, as you probably know, is currently researching the Farrington archives, and one area I’ve become interested in is the relationship between Inglewood House and the old Whitmore.”

  “The convalescent hospital?”

  “Yes. I think George Farrington visited there and had dealings with the Superintendent.”

  “It’s Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  William lets out a breath as if he’s trying to remember what he’s read. She can see him in his black leather chair exactly—although she’s picturing him at thirty, not fifty—a plate-sized fern fossil sitting on the corner of his desk with a framed photo of Lily beside it. “Are you asking about the monies Farrington left the hospital, or about something else?”

  Jane shifts her position and the notepad drops from between her knees. “There was an incident in 1877 involving three patients who showed up at Farrington’s estate. I’m wondering if you know of it.”

  “Not offhand, but I can see what I can locate—most of the material is indexed on my computer at home. What’s the number there?”

  Jane looks up at the hallway ceiling, realizing she’s stuck. “We’re in and out of the office mostly during the day. Would it be all right if I call you?”

  “Fine.” His voice is muffled and she can picture him tucking the phone under his ear. “What’s your e-mail in case something pops up?”

  Jane squeezes her eyes shut. “I’ll send it to you this afternoon.”

  “Right.”

  “Sorry—William?”

  For a few seconds he doesn’t say anything, and Jane realizes with a pang that she shouldn’t have used his first name, that whoever “Helen” is, she wouldn’t have.

  “What is it?” He sounds annoyed.

  “Do you know anything about a Whitmore patient who died at Inglewood? It’s referenced in Dr. Palmer’s notebook.”

  “Yes, that was the man caught trespassing. A Gleeson, I think, something like that. You’ll have to look yourself. The details are in Farrington’s private correspondence.”

  Jane parks the Mercedes on the pavement in front of the inn four hours later and sits in the car, resting her head on the steering wheel while Sam thumps his tail expectantly against the back seat. Even though she stopped at the pharmacy on the way back from the records office and downed two paracetamol and a bottle of water, her head is pounding. She’s stunned by the conversation with William and by his assertion that Leeson died at Inglewood. All afternoon, sifting through files and journals, she’d tried to sort out what she was feeling about it, about hearing William’s voice so privately in her ear and about his casual reference to Leeson and the story she was trying to unravel. This is the first time since leaving London that she feels a desperate need to self-medicate with more than wine.

  Upstairs in her room Jane finds an envelope addressed to “Helen” slipped under her door. She sits on the edge of the bed and opens it. On a scrap of ruled paper Blake has printed: Meet me at the pub at 8. And beneath that, underlined: please.

  We watch Jane fall back on the bed and put her hands over her face, and we debate whether she will meet him. After what happened with the boy we are under strict orders to stay together and that means we have to tag along with Jane. “No more lollygagging,” the theologian had snapped, as we crossed the parking lot outside the records office this morning. He turned to the girl, who was already lagging behind. “That means you, little miss.”

  When Jane gets up and starts her bath, we move to various corners of the room. Some of us drop our heads on our knees in an approximation of exhaustion. We have learned a lot today and are trying not to lose any of it. The idea that William has been thinking about us, that he might know something about the Whitmore, about the world we inhabited, feels as strange to us as it does to Jane, even if his interest in us is peripheral.

  Jane slides down into the tub and closes her eyes, trying to still her thinking, and in the calm that follows, the room becomes quiet enough for us to hear Sam’s easy, regular breathing and the lapping of the water as it fills the tub.

  Leeson, standing in a thicket near the lake, blinked dumbly at Celia Chester. He thought child and then soap, as if she belonged in one of those sudsy advertisements inked onto the back pages of magazines, a thought immediately succeeded by the knowledge that he should not be by the lake or out of the hospital, that he had no experience with children and could not be trusted. Still, he noted the pleasing pink blooms on the child’s cheeks, how her lashes flitted up when she saw him, though the soft expression on her face quickly rearranged itself into wide-eyed terror. Before he could even declare himself she emitted a high-pitched shriek. Leeson, stunned, put a hand out to calm her, but before he could reach her she dashed off into the bush. In the seconds that followed Leeson heard a commotion, heard Celia calling out and others calling back to her. He smoothed the front of his waistcoat, then tapped the flat of his hand to his head. Think, think, think, the hand said, as if he were late for an appointment and only had to remember where he ought to be going. He raised his chin in the direction of the voices—one shouted, “Present yourself!”; another cried, “Edmund!”—and took a few steps toward them. It was clear: there had been a mistake; the girl had been startled; he was to blame. He would make himself known so that he might clarify the situation.

  Within minutes the rustling on the other side of the bushes grew louder.

  “Show me where!” a man shouted.

  The man’s voice was the kind that Leeson imagined men in the military would have: brusque with resolution. Instinctively, he hunkered down beside the hazel thicket the girl had dashed around, debating whether or not he should raise an arm above the foliage or shout “Here!” Instead, overwhelmed by a vision of men in red tunics brandishing rifles, he slipped back into the welt of the marsh grass and moved through the loosestrife toward the mud bank of the lake. He had heard the group early on when he’d first lost his way, and drawn by the resonant voices of the men, the bubbling-up of a woman’s laughter, he’d tried to listen to their conversation through the trees, retreating when he heard a dog bark the way dogs do to announce a visitor who is not threatening. He’d wondered if the laughter was N’s, wondered if he’d remember what hers sounded like, if he had ever, in fact, heard it before.

  After the voices, and after the trampling steps of two men passed the glut of reed in which Leeson was hiding, he got up off his haunches and, stooping to keep his head below the level of the nearby bushes, moved toward the lakeside where the voices had originally come from. He calculated that if he was there and waiting, sitting calmly in the open, the conversation might be between gentlemen divested of the urge to shout.

  What he would always remember was the feel of the sun on his face when he came into the clearing and saw George Farrington, how surprised he was by its warmth after hours of walking through the spun nets of the trees. A summer sun in autumn—as if brought out for the tea, arranged by the host to please his guests. Leeson, never one to shy away from a direct gaze, peered up into the orb of it to assess whether it was the same sun as always or if its commission had made it perceptibly different. Its searing whiteness was so unlike the version in the watercolour Farrington had shown him a month before in the small parlour at Inglewood—a circle so theatrically delineated it failed to resemble anything other than a button of yellow
.

  The shot was a colour too—a bright burst that kissed his arms and chest and passed through the left lobe of his lung. His eyes were still speckled with sun but had cleared enough that he could see the shape of a man, of men, rushing toward him, even as the ground rose up to meet his back. A commotion of voices hovered over and around him while his own throat bubbled up a confused apology. He thought briefly that it was Bedford again looming over his face intimately, but Bedford proved to be George Farrington, his scarred lip giving him away. Things could, Leeson thought, be better. Thorpe would want an explanation; Leeson could imagine him in his dark-panelled office already—jotting details into his book.

  “Look at me!” George shouted, his face coming into focus, his hands on Charles, in Charles, pressing down. What to say to such an audience? That he had been wilfully detained these past months? That the stump of meat he received at lunch was often overcooked and that the kitchen staff did this to him intentionally? That sometimes the body is nothing at all and other times it is like the pulse of a frog’s throat: ghostly thin and vibrating? Ribbit, he wanted to say, or Pardon me for—but the botanist was shouting “What were you thinking?” over his shoulder at a man with long side-whiskers wearing a black hat. Bubble and spit came out of Charles’s mouth when he tried to speak of an old favourite hat of his own, a silk topper with a narrow brim that he had recently been missing because it fit him so perfectly. The botanist in a rage above him, while a cushion of some sort was placed under his head.

  And then she was there, wiping the mud off his cheeks with the corner of her shawl, her fingers in his short greying hair. “Shh,” she said, and he could see that she was crying. “Shh, Charles, I’m here.” He counted the number of times her lips opened and closed, tried to work one word apart from the other. One of the men pulled her away as she said, “But I know him, please, sir—” Charles’s attention wholly on the progression of each word: odd, even, odd, even, odd, even. Then everything thickened and went silent; Charles was both in and above himself, observing his form as indifferently as his doctors had done. N beside him on her knees, her hair duller than he remembered, though otherwise she was exactly the same.

  Jane stands up in the bathtub and reaches down to pull the plug. She watches the water swirl away until Sam pads into the bathroom and woofs lightly to gain her attention.

  Those of us who were waiting in the main room start toward her, but the theologian interrupts us, says, “I have a confession.”

  “Go on,” Cat chides.

  The theologian clears his throat and announces, “I realized something yesterday at the cottages. I think I know who I was.” He pauses and turns toward us, and we can feel the full force of his attention. “I believe I was the local headmaster.”

  What the theologian had remembered as he stood outside the long row of cottages by the falls was the sensation of being inside one of those rooms, of watching a grey wall of fog thickening outside his front window. He could imagine himself in a wingback chair with weak springs, the sitting room warm in the ambit of the fire. He recalled an evening that was over-quiet because the bird he’d kept had died—a linnet gifted to him by a former pupil. He’d considered, in that hour, in the form of his former body, the nature of fog—how quickly it can roll in and recede. He’d thought he ought to use the idea of fog in the lesson he’d planned for the next day’s class—a metaphor to illustrate what God does, and doesn’t, allow us to see. He was so deep in rehearsing his analogy that he didn’t hear the sound of a horse approaching until it stopped outside on the cobblestone street, and George Farrington appeared suddenly outside his window, as if he’d stepped through a curtain.

  When the theologian tells us that he was the local headmaster, we move toward him to ask if he remembers any of us, if he can see us as we once were.

  He says, “I think I remember the boy. He may have been a pupil. It seems to me that his brother might have worked for Farrington in the stables.”

  “Do you remember the ball?” Cat asks, because she has been obsessing about that event.

  “No.”

  “But you remember the picnic,” the one with the soft voice says. “The day Leeson died?”

  The theologian wavers and moves toward the room’s only chair. “I remember the fact of it, gossip, but I was not there.”

  “And your name?” John asks.

  “Bernard,” the theologian sighs. “Bernard Hibbitt.”

  We have always imagined that knowing who we once were would enact some kind of completion. The theologian’s revelation dissuades us of any such conviction.

  “Tweeet?” Herschel asks.

  “I don’t know,” John shrugs. “He’s still here.”

  “You thought I would Cease,” the theologian says.

  “Pretty much,” John replies. “I think we’ve all been expecting it. As if we only have to learn a certain amount about ourselves and then—”

  “Whoooo,” Herschel says.

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re not even a minister!” Cat exclaims, and she throws her arms up in the air.

  The theologian takes a deep breath. “So what then? I’m still here. As are you—” He waves his hand at us and says our names almost disdainfully: “Eliza, Alfred, Herschel—”

  “Samuel,” adds the poet, bowing. “Samuel Murray.”

  “Which means …?” the musician asks.

  “That we were wrong,” John surmises.

  “About Ceasing?” begs the girl.

  “About everything.”

  While Jane dries off and sorts through her limited wardrobe, we concentrate on what we know. We ask the theologian to tell us his story in the hope that he will be able to recount the details that matter, find intersections between his life and ours. We decide that we will call his story “Bernard,” because all of our stories get titles—words that we use as clues to help us remember.

  “Dock,” says the girl, before the theologian starts, because it is one of the words we have asked her to be responsible for.

  “Yes,” we say. “Good, the terrier,” and our hearts sink because we realize that she doesn’t fully understand that the boy is gone.

  “And roses,” she adds, and Cat remembers that in the button shop where she worked it was her job to put fresh flowers in the vases on either side of the doorway. When they started to wither she was allowed to take them home.

  “Stout!” the girl calls, and we turn and applaud her lightly, even though the one who loved stout is gone.

  “Ha … Haydn!” she says, and the musician starts humming.

  “Clocks!” she shouts enthusiastically, and we applaud again, and John says, “Thank you,” because that is his word.

  “And … Dock!” she repeats, enjoying being the centre of our attention.

  “You said that one already.”

  “Shoes of grief!”

  “Shewes,” the poet mutters, and we all laugh; we would ruffle her hair, swing her around if we could.

  “Evens!” she says. But we aren’t sure where the word comes from, and for a second we waver, the way a parent would if their child came home with a toy that did not belong to them.

  “Jane,” she says finally, breaking the spell, and she turns to where Sam is sleeping by the door and says as sweetly and studiously as any five-year-old would: “Sam! Good dog. Nice dog. Good Sam, stay.”

  Before she leaves for the pub—going early because she’s hungry now that her headache is gone, and because she’s not sure she wants to commit to meeting Blake—Jane sifts back through the Whitmore files and finds her copy of Leeson’s casebook. Despite what William told her on the phone, the casebook clearly states that he died at the Whitmore. She pulls the photocopy of Palmer’s notebook out of her bag and tries again to decipher his scrawl. She reads his scribble taking into account what William told her, and she thinks she can discern the word shot, thinks that the phrase death by may end in exsanguination.

  After she’d hung up with William, Freddy
had confirmed that George Farrington’s personal letters were in private hands—which means that William, in researching his book, had access to them, and, for this week anyway, Jane does not. It’s not that there are pieces missing, she thinks now; it’s that the lines between scattered bits of information have yet to be firmly drawn.

  By the time Jane closes the door of the inn behind her and turns toward the pub she has decided that the undertaker’s fees in the Inglewood household account book for 1877 must have been for Leeson, especially given William’s use of the word trespassing. It would make sense that if he died at Inglewood the fees would be modest, especially when compared to what the Farringtons had paid a year before to bury one of their retired butlers. The removal of a body would have cost less than a burial proper.

  If she’s right about that, Jane thinks as she opens the door to the pub, then the undertaker’s invoice puts Leeson’s death at just over a month after N went missing. Which fit with the theory she was developing: that Leeson had come back here to Inglewood, hoping to find N.

  24

  George Farrington momentarily saw the dead man as he’d appeared that night not so long ago in the parlour at Inglewood: overly mannered, twitchy, halting in conversation. The shot had made an impossible red flower out of the white shirt he was wearing and parts of the body that should not be seen were gawping out of his wound.

  “I’ve met this man before,” George said over his shoulder to Norvill. “He’s a patient at the convalescent hospital.”

  The group assembled around the body was transfixed, the situation so unreal that George could hardly believe it himself. One minute he’d been in the boat and the next the Chester girl was screaming and everyone on shore was racing around trying to find her. Celia’s chest was still heaving, although she was now firmly in her mother’s grip, Charlotte pressing the child’s shoulders against her abdomen as if she were trying to will her back into the womb. Edmund was staring wide-eyed at his wife. The boys, meanwhile, were less shocked than curious—oblivious, George thought, to their mother’s and sister’s roles in this.