The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  When Jane gets back to the reading room she pulls out a chair and sets her pencils and notebook on the table in front of her. Then she studies William’s references more carefully. It is only on her second reading that she sees the name “Nora”: Nora has sent two notes to Mother and indicates that your spirits are improving. Jane’s eyes flick back to the name and she shivers. It feels so strange to come across a woman’s N name after years of searching, and even though there’s only a remote possibility that the woman George has mentioned is the same one who walked to Inglewood House from the Whitmore, Jane can’t help but follow up on the reference, so she opens the Farrington index and runs her finger down the list of the estate’s archives again.

  The Farrington index indicates that the records office holds two ledgers concerning Inglewood staff. One is an account book of taxes paid on servants and the other is the estate Register of Employment—a large red book she’d glanced through a few days ago. While Jane waits for the Register to be sent up from the stores, she sifts through the Farrington material she’d requested yesterday: a binder of mottling business letters in plastic sleeves, a box of invoices and receipts in ornate calligraphy. Most of it doesn’t concern the household staff. The majority—deposited by George’s executors—appears to relate to botanical work, expedition costs, investments and the daily—and diminishing—economies of the estate.

  When Freddy returns to his desk after delivering a microfiche to the gentleman working at the table behind Jane’s, she asks him about Prudence’s diaries: Does the Trust that is borrowing the diaries keep them in London, or are they here?

  Freddy frowns. Perhaps he assumed she’d know more about the work on the estate than she appears to. “No,” he says, “everything’s local. The Trust has an archivist named Gwendolyn. She was based here for a bit but now she’s working out of the Farrington House at Inglewood. The diaries are with her.”

  Two weather systems are converging overhead. If we look up and to the right of the parking lot where we are standing, clouds net the sky; to the left there’s a canopy of blue. Jane is waiting for Blake, who is already ten minutes late, and so we are waiting with her, the breeze lifting the ends of her hair as she looks down to check her watch. If she hadn’t left her mobile in London she would text him to say not to come or ask him to hold off until the Employee Register comes up from the stacks.

  While we wait for Blake, the idiot paces between the white lines of a parking space furthering his thesis on the nature of our being. “I’ve been thinking,” he says intently.

  “Don’t,” the theologian snaps.

  “Go ahead,” the one with the soft voice says, “I’m interested.”

  The idiot begins to circle Jane, the way a lecturer might move around a classroom. “First,” he says, “we must discern causality, actuality, and then interior versus exterior work. That which the atoms of the body exert upon each other, from that which arises from foreign influences to which the body may be exposed.”

  Cat groans and the musician makes a prattling noise that sounds like drums.

  “What I mean,” he says, “is a physical system that works on other such systems, a force acting across a distance.”

  The theologian raises his head. “Do you mean vis viva?” he asks. “A living force?”

  “Yes,” sighs the idiot, as if he’s come home from a long trip away, “I mean life. Our life, our living force.”

  For the next few minutes, we debate, in our own terms, what the idiot means. We watch a chocolate wrapper cartwheel across the pavement and try to apply his theories to it.

  “Do you mean fluttering?” Cat asks.

  “Yes,” the idiot says, “and no.”

  “Time?” John offers.

  “Yes.” The idiot nods enthusiastically. “And no.”

  The musician makes a tuba sound—“Pom pom pom poooom, pom pom pom pom”—and the idiot raises a hand in the air to signify that he’s thinking.

  “Good. Modulation. Energy as more than something contained or expelled. Energy as potential.”

  The theologian proposes an experiment. He suggests we try to move an object at a distance—the brown bag that’s fallen out of the rubbish bin at the edge of the parking lot or the bird’s nest in the crook of the closest tree.

  “But you said—” Cat states incredulously.

  The theologian replies quietly, “Things have changed.”

  “If we are energy—” the idiot continues, but he stops because like the rest of us he can sense something shift, a ripple in the group.

  We glance around. Everything we can see—the line of shrubs, the shop awning across the road, Jane’s skirt hem, the ruff of Sam’s fur, the early autumn leaves—is lifting or quivering.

  “Storm?” asks John. But that isn’t what’s different; it’s a presence like ours standing silently with us.

  “Who’s there?” the one with the soft voice asks, and we all crane our necks and peer around the parking lot the same way we did in the Chester when she asked when a bird was no longer a bird.

  “Whoot?” asks Herschel.

  And then, as if answering her own question, the one with the soft voice whispers, “Leeson?”

  The white Transit that turns into the parking lot has Metcalfe’s Garden Company embossed in large green letters on its panels and the proclamation Specialists in restoration and landscape work in brown underneath. Blake pulls up two feet from where Jane is standing and then jumps out to open the passenger-side door. We clamber in the back with Sam to sit amongst the sagging bags of fertilizer and the empty planters. By the time Blake pulls out of the parking lot we sense we are back to our usual number. “Attendance,” says the theologian, and one after another, starting with the girl, we all say, “Here.”

  There’s a plastic bag of picnic supplies in the well between the front seats. Jane rummages through it: overwrapped corner-shop sandwiches with wilted lettuce stuck to the sides, a bottle of wine that a week ago she would never have consented to drink, crisps and two glossy lemon puddings with sprinkles on the top.

  She drops the pudding back into the bag and asks, “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise.” Blake raises his eyebrows and smiles charmingly, as if he’s done something wonderful—and crowded in the back of the van we think that maybe he has. Time has taught us to appreciate the gesture.

  Blake parks on the side of the road across from the Whitmore’s main gate. He turns to Jane and says, “Shall we?”

  Jane leans forward in her seat. Through the wrought iron she can make out the faded brown brick of the gatehouse and, beyond that, the east wing of what was once the main building’s women’s ward. “What are we doing here?”

  Blake shrugs. “I saw all that stuff in your room. Thought it would be fun to break and enter.” He grabs the bag between the seats and then locks the van once Jane is out. “A bunch of us used to come out here when we were younger to mess around. We have to go in through the woods.”

  The brick of the Whitmore’s main buildings is the same umber we remember, though some of it is covered in graffiti. The slate roof of the administration block has collapsed in one corner and the windows of the long galleries—a quarrelled stretch of clouded glass—have been replaced with pressboard. The grass is weed-licked and long.

  Blake walks across the lawn, grinning at Jane, the plastic bag of picnic supplies swinging in his hand, Sam trotting happily beside him. At the greening fountain he drops his peacoat for Jane to sit on and then sprawls out on the grass; he is facing the ruin of the building, and she is facing the cleft in the woods they just came from.

  If we try, we can remember the fountain working. How bright and charming it was, its marble the white of the Greek temples Professor Wick once described at an afternoon lecture series given by the patients. The cherub at the centre of the fountain holding a jug that spouted the purest water—though the poet once shook his head and said that it was a pity to live in a world where the fountains did not pour wine.


  We lie on the grass with Jane and Blake, and drowsy tufts of cloud drift above us. We want to stay with Jane to see if she will talk about the Whitmore, but we feel a competing desire to explore the grounds, to wander through the emptied wards of the buildings. Pulses of lived experience are already lighting up the caverns of what we call memory, and for some of us, there is an easing, a sense of calm that comes in proximity to the idea of “home.” We know that on the other side of the Whitmore’s dim exterior, the galleries and day rooms, sickbeds and laundry, the rose-windowed chapel will have changed, that time and use will have altered them. Still we know that these rooms, even the shape and weight of them, can give us something Jane cannot: a folding-over of our lives, a direct way in.

  “Stay with Jane,” Cat says to the girl, and all of us wait until the child sits in the grass beside Sam.

  A hundred small fissures of time open as we walk toward the old wood door. One of us remembers a sickbed and being fed awkwardly with a spoon, the light tap of the metal on his front teeth. Another remembers feeling cold, as if all the blood had drained from his body, as if there couldn’t be blankets enough. Some of us remember the ball, some of us the airing courts, some of us singing in rehearsals for the talent show, the warble of our breath in our throats. And one of us remembers Christmas, everyone working in the kitchen to make sweetmeats and preserves for gifts. The tang of jam in our mouths—in what we remember of our mouths. A burst of raspberries, their small, flecked seeds on our tongues.

  27

  After lunch, when she returns to the records office, Jane discovers that the servant ledger nestled in the back of the bowed leather Register of Employment for Inglewood House lists a Nora Hayling in service, starting the 22nd of August 1877. Some of the other staff entries have end dates inked in a different hand, and notes about termination or retirement, but Nora does not. The only entry that coincides closely with the date Nora was hired is a reference to a Mary Margaret Teems, who was let go on the 26th of July that same year for pilfering flour and sugar.

  During her dissertation research years ago, when Jane first discovered N and the story of the trio’s long walk to Inglewood, she’d leafed through the Whitmore patient casebooks looking for an N name, though she hadn’t searched at that time for Eleanors or Honoras, names that could be shortened to Nora. So now she fills out a request slip for the Whitmore women’s book from 1877, prepared to start again, even though she is feeling dubious about the possibility of Nora from Inglewood being connected to N from the Whitmore. While Jane knows that patients at convalescent hospitals like the Whitmore could be a mix of professionals and paupers, the educated and the working class, it was unlikely a patient like N—especially because she was a woman—would be able to transition so quickly into a maid’s position. Though John Hopper, she suddenly remembers, was released that December and almost immediately went to work as an apprentice clockmaker.

  When the Whitmore’s women’s casebook disappoints—turning up nothing but Marthas, Frannies, Alices and Emmas—Jane decides to clear her head by taking Sam, who has been waiting patiently in the car, for a walk up the high street of one of the nearby villages. Even in those childhood summer months when she and Lewis would go and stay with Claire in the cottage at the Lakes she had never travelled far, and so she feels pleasure in the idea of an excursion, in driving for twenty minutes and arriving somewhere new.

  At the top of the main square in one of the Dales’ villages there is a cenotaph. It’s surrounded by the requisite gaggle of fifteen-year-olds dressed in heavy black boots and duffel coats. Jane parks the car and wanders past them toward an old-fashioned sandwich and pastry shop. It’s the sort meant to appeal to tourists, where the girls who work behind the counter are allowed to have nose rings and wear blue nail polish, but still have to tie their hair under white caps with lacy fringes and scoot around in long black dresses with floor-length aprons. There is an espresso machine in the window, the beautiful old-fashioned kind that makes great coffee, so Jane loops Sam’s leash around the empty bike stand out front and goes in to wait in the queue of locals on breaks from work and tourists with time on their hands.

  The girl who makes Jane’s coffee has a thick brown fringe and a pretty face, the idiosyncratic kind high-street clothing shops use in their adverts—naturally beautiful but with one flaw, a gap tooth or wide-set eyes, but always young. She smiles at Jane and asks if that’s her dog outside.

  “Yes, is he okay there?”

  “He’s all right. I just wondered if he needed some water; we usually have a bowl out.”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  The girl slips into the narrow sink area at the end of the counter. Jane watches her, thinking that she’s probably Blake’s age. She wonders briefly if they know each other, have some sort of history he’d call up if Jane described meeting her. She studies the girl, not jealously but curiously: watches her reach up over the metal sink by the dishwasher, grab a plastic bucket off the shelf of pots overhead and fill it with tap water. The girl’s dress is a mass-market version of what the female servants at Inglewood would have worn as they washed teacups and scrubbed pots in the deep sinks in the kitchen where she’d met Blake, girls who would have ascended the narrow stairwell that went up to the attic rooms at the end of very long days, who would have slept on the far side of a baize door that separated one world from another.

  On the drive back to the records office Jane is thinking about N, about how little time she has left to find her, about what Blake will say when she tells him she’s leaving, and about the girl in the servant’s dress with the brown hair, who she now, for whatever reason, imagines as the type of girl Blake should be with. Her thoughts swim in circles, and the same phrase, the one that always comes with thoughts of N, rises again: Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley, and girl N—— missing.

  Jane taps the car’s brakes without meaning to and her body jerks forward. Sam slides with a small thump into the back of her seat. She glances up at her rear-view mirror, thankful the woman in the VW wasn’t following too close behind. And girl N—— missing.

  N wasn’t a patient at the Whitmore; she worked there, was so expendable no one bothered to cite her full name. And she didn’t “escape” the women’s ward; she saw Herschel and Leeson take off, and took it upon herself to follow them.

  • • •

  Freddy brings the Whitmore Hospital’s Servant Engagement and Discharge Book back up from the basement and in its fusty pages Jane finds a Nora Hayling. She is fifteen years of age when she is hired in 1874 as a laundress. No previous engagements are cited, though unlike most servants of her class, she’d been educated at a local school. In 1876 she was promoted, with the strike of a pen, to assistant seamstress. Unlike the other women listed in the book—the assistant nurses, housemaids, and women’s attendants—there is no discharge note, no left to be married, no resigned or retired on pension, no died in hospital or death date. There are also no references to her or her position in the Whitmore’s logbooks, except ones that reference the seamstress proper—a woman called Humphreys; notes such as the seamstress requires and then an order for twenty yards of cotton or a reel of lace. The Engagement book reveals that Humphreys would already have been in her fifties when Nora was hired, which means she might have wanted to find someone to foist fine work on, a young girl with sharp eyes and nimble fingers, one who was educated to a reasonable standard, easy to work with, willing to learn.

  Jane draws a line down the centre of a clean page and writes Nora Hayling’s details from the Whitmore on one side, and from the Inglewood servants’ book on the other. She allows herself to imagine the possibility that Nora Hayling is N: that it is late August 1877, and N has been missing for more than a fortnight, and suddenly she is there at Inglewood, being hired as a housemaid. That she is working for the Farringtons at the time of the outing by the lake where Norvill and Charlotte are flirting and George is soliciting funds for his expedition, and Leeson is shot.

  But even wit
h all this, there is a gap: if she did not go up to the door that night of the escape from the Whitmore with Leeson and Herschel, as George’s letter suggests, then where did she go? And why did she make her way back to the estate?

  The number of cars parked around Inglewood House has increased since the Sunday four days ago when Jane climbed the stone wall and snuck into the house with Sam. The church parking lot is full, even though there’s no service, and the two gardening company Transits that usually sit at the mouth of the old servant’s tunnel are boxed in by a long moving truck stationed at the foot of the front lawn. Two movers in white coveralls heft a sideboard down its ramp.

  Jane hasn’t asked Blake anything about the Trust’s work because she is supposed to be involved in it. He’d asked her how long they thought the first stage would take and she’d said, “You know what these things are like …” fingering the dark fringe of his hair and ignoring his blank expression, the one that said, no, he didn’t.

  The movers toggle the sideboard back and forth, shifting the weight of its heavy pedestals between them, and Jane follows them up the walkway. Just before she reaches the front steps and the Doric columns that flank them, she hesitates, roots around in her bag for her notepad and pen, flipping the pages over until she comes to a sheet of writing with the word Farrington underlined at the top. If someone asks her what she’s doing on the property she can always pretend to be a grad student doing research. The movers in front of her have stopped at the open door to finesse the angle of the sideboard.

  “No, no. To your right,” the heavier-set of the two calls gruffly, and the sideboard shifts slightly.

  “Got it,” the lankier one replies, and with the sideboard’s tall back perched at a precarious angle they inch inside the door and disappear around the corner into the entry hall.