The Trust’s plan, according to Gwen, is to open the grounds in the coming summer, to have the gardens trained and in full bloom by then, the alpine beds exactly as George had planted them. There will be teahouse seating just outside the library windows and a kitchen downstairs that will serve soups and sandwiches—the basics. The Farrington archives will be relocated to the old study and a small research library on Victorian plant hunting will be established. The main floor of the house will eventually be open to the public for admission. “A kind of museum,” Gwen had said, “mostly botanically themed,” and Jane had smiled politely, not wanting to say that these were difficult times for museums, that people seemed more content with looking at a jpeg of a glass-blown iris or a scarab bracelet, and less concerned with seeing the fragility and wear, the poignancy, of real things.
“We’re planning on having a concert on the grounds on opening day,” Gwen had added. “You know, get a big name to headline, make it a black tie and white gloves kind of do.” She smiled over at Jane warmly, as if they were friends. “I’m sure the Eliots will drive up for it. You should come too.”
When Gwen returns, Jane resumes making her way through Prudence’s narrative. In her diary entry on the 29th of August 1877, Prudence notes that the housekeeper has taken on a new girl who has come without references but is well educated. A few entries later, in blotchy ink that was probably the result of a change of pen, Prudence writes that Dr. Thorpe has paid a visit. He arrived at three and took tea, after which the men retired to the library. Thorpe gifted George with a handwritten copy of one of Mr. Samuel Murray’s unpublished verses—which I have yet to read. It was agreed that Nora would be allowed to stay on.
Jane stares down at the open diary for a full minute. Unlike with Dr. Palmer’s journals, where the writing was so tight, so nearly illegible that Jane was worried she was drawing a connection between the Whitmore and Inglewood House because it was something she wanted to see, Prudence’s writing is Spencer-perfect. Dr. Thorpe’s name isn’t a question; his involvement in Nora’s employment is clear.
Prudence’s subsequent entries mention fittings for dresses, the modification of old bonnets, and the mending of nightwear and undergarments, as if Nora was the first seamstress Prudence had had in her regular employ. There are notes as to who should receive the embroidered workbags Nora is making for Christmas—a thrift that might explain Nora’s value in a household whose finances were waning. As she reads through each entry, inching closer to the week of the picnic and the shooting, it dawns on Jane that William had either not read Prudence’s diaries carefully, or he’d misrepresented their contents in his lecture, stating dismissively that they didn’t have much to say about the Chester–Farrington picnic. That week, after the initial details of preparation—the airing of the rooms and the orders for lobster and exotic fruits to be sent up from London—there are a number of cryptic notes. On the day of the shooting, Prudence wrote: The children have been confined to the nursery, C—— did not come down for dinner, tincture brought up to my room. This was followed by Norvill returned to consult the men, and extra room arranged—which could mean, Jane surmised, that Prudence had wondered if the constable they’d sent for might need to stay over.
The last note on the page is in looser writing, as if she’d woken up in the night or taken up her pen after a few glasses of sherry. It reads simply, Poor George.
Two weeks later, in a short entry, Prudence notes that Norvill is leaving for the coast. She carefully lists the departure time of his train and all of the stops along his way, as if tracking his journey from Inglewood to Scarborough, trying to imagine him arriving. A week after that she writes, Thwaite’s photographs have been delivered. They are of good composition though memories of the day itself are wrenching.
“Gwendolyn?”
She raises her eyes but keeps typing. She’s been transcribing a local history of the estate for almost an hour.
“Are there any photographs? Prudence is talking about a Thwaite? He came up and photographed the gardens.”
“There are, but they haven’t been sorted yet. That’s my assistant’s job. She’s actually a volunteer so it’s slow going. They should be in the lower drawer over there—” Gwen points over her laptop at the file cabinet and then glances at the time on her computer screen. “It’s almost four, so can we say another hour? I have to head down to London tomorrow so there won’t be anyone here to help you. You can come back on Monday if you’d like.”
Jane finds three squat boxes of photographs neatly stacked in the file drawer but when she opens them the mix of originals, copies and photocopies is disheartening. She’s already anxious someone will find out she’s here, that Maureen will have called the police, or that Blake will see her through the window and tell Gwen that she’s been lying about her name, lying about her connection with William.
At first glance there’s nothing that seems to distinguish one box from the other. Jane can’t discern any system or rationale but surmises, once she’s rummaged through a handful of photos on the top of each pile, that the boxes might be organized roughly by era. She starts with one where the clothes in the photos match the 1870s and ’80s, and leafs through the images, waiting for something she recognizes to present itself.
George Farrington appears in about a third of the photographs Jane is working through. He strikes Jane as far more handsome in these candid shots than in his formal studio-based portraits, where he stands stiffly with a top hat in one hand and a book in the other. The studio portraits are the ones that crop up in the books Jane’s been reading. One of them, a static image of Farrington in front of an urn, is familiar from William’s last chapter in The Lost Gardens of England, and for a second Jane remembers how she felt when she arrived at the start of that chapter, how she read every word that William had written, looking for some trace, some thought of her.
Norvill is less expected. In one photo where he is in his early twenties, he is standing without a jacket in front of a scarp of rock, holding a length of rope. He has a gentle face, fair hair with sun-kissed streaks in it, and an athlete’s body. His steady gaze makes him appear both arrogant and honest. It has always struck Jane as odd that he would have been a climber, in the footsteps of his famous brother; it occurs to her now, studying him, that maybe he had been the climber first, because he was studying geology, and it was George who followed.
The majority of the photographs are of the gardens, albumen prints from glass negatives that have browned over the century, the trees dark and shadowy behind the bright patches of light flowers, their pinwheel shapes, the closed fists of the roses, captured crisply. The close-ups of the gardens seem to have been copied multiple times, and as Jane sorts through the duplicates it occurs to her that the gardening company outside had probably used the images to ascertain what was planted where. These detailed images would fill in the blanks in the Farrington gardeners’ notebooks, in George Farrington’s own garden journals.
In a packet of cartes de visite and personal photos, there is an image of Charlotte Chester in a paisley dress. The image has been cut in a circle, as if placed in a small bedside frame or carried inside a pocket watch. It shocks Jane to see her in this context, to see her here at Inglewood, pared off from Edmund and the children.
The rest of the figures in the packet are strangers: a man in a hack, another in a hammock, an Indian who must be George’s valet standing by the stables with a seed bag in his hand, surrounded by peacocks. Jane’s gaze slides quickly over the theologian because she does not know him—although he, now standing at her shoulder, recognizes himself: a man invited to pose against a stone wall in order to establish scale, a trivial embellishment in an image intended to show off the first blooms of the spring garden, the lilting magnolias.
The photograph of the Farrington household is near the bottom of the second box. It is from a later period than interests Jane: the small day-hats and high collars on the female servants suggest the mid-1880s. It was taken on the fro
nt lawn between two spheres of ornamental shrubbery, and the group is arranged around Prudence, who stands solemnly beside Norvill in her black mourning dress. She is plump and soft-chinned, her arm looped under her son’s. Cato—the lurcher who’d featured in almost every image of George—is gone, replaced by a terrier curled up next to a Doric column, a young boy’s hand on the dog’s head.
We watch Jane study each face the way she first studied the hummingbirds: one after the other, equal weight and consideration given to every person. There is the stable boy, the under butler, a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat who must be the head gardener; here is an aging footman with a side parting. Jane moves her eyes over their features and at the end of the second row she sees the smiling face of a young woman in a housemaid’s uniform, a simple black dress with lace cuffs. She is in her mid-twenties here, her expression less wistful than when Jane first saw her photo in the records office, but Jane remembers her exactly—the gloss of dark hair, the narrow shoulders and bright complexion of the girl with the sewing basket sitting on the lawn of the Whitmore.
Jane asks Gwen if she might borrow a piece of unlined white paper from the photocopier. Gwen says, “Go ahead,” and watches as Jane draws circles on it that correspond to the positions of the staff in the household photograph. She writes Prudence Farrington’s name in the middle circle and Norvill Farrington’s beside it, and in the place of the housemaid in the second row she writes: Nora Hayling.
And because Gwen is an archivist, and knows that every scrap of information can carry within it tremendous value, she smiles at Jane over her laptop and says, “Well done, you.”
29
As she looks at the photograph of herself on the lawn at Inglewood House, the one with the soft voice feels the doubling that comes with the bowed gift of time; it is a doubling that she feels again as she looks at Jane packing up her notebook and pencils to walk out with Gwen.
I have to do something, she had thought once, when she had a body, when she had a name, when Herschel and Leeson trudged across the lawn and no one, not even the Matron, saw them. Nora had slipped out through the kitchen to go after them, thinking that she might be able to convince them to return, that if they came back quickly no one would know they’d left the picnic. But the day was beautiful and the trees were fluttering their leaves at the sun, and the ground was drying beneath her. After a while, she stopped plotting her arguments. By the time she caught up with Herschel and Leeson in a clearing, the distance between her and the Whitmore felt good.
For two weeks she’d been keeping her head down, organizing her workday in ways that would allow her to avoid Bream. After he cornered her in the storeroom and forced her up against the shelves, she told the Superintendent that she had a fever and Thorpe allowed her to take the hospital mending up to her room. For three days she barricaded the door with her wobbly dresser, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall. It wasn’t that Thorpe wouldn’t believe her, if she told. It was just that he was a man, and not wanting to think that it had happened as she said, he might try to find some fault in her.
In the middle of the whisking woods, Herschel and Leeson ahead of her, Nora lifted her head and thought, This is what my life could be. It didn’t bother her that the idea came without a corresponding image or a clear notion. It was enough that it suggested something else, a different way of relating to the world, another mode of being.
When they arrived at the foot of the Inglewood estate lawn, Nora thought about all the turns they’d made in the woods, the seemingly endless circles, the three times they’d realized they’d doubled back on themselves, and she laughed. How comical it was that they would arrive here—at the house of the botanist she had danced a quadrille with at the ball, the one whose face she’d studied while Samuel Murray recited his poem, who’d turned his fleeting attention on her later, taking the exotic flower from his lapel and placing it gently behind her ear. It seems that you are one of the only ladies at the ball without a flower.
The footman who went to fetch George Farrington barely glanced at her—and she realized she had no desire to be seen, or to be caught up in the extradition that would likely follow. She saw that Herschel and Leeson would be fine, that the footman would indeed bring the congenial Farrington to meet them.
She stepped off the gravel path and disappeared into the trees.
The police station in Moorgate is the same one where Jane had waited all those hours during the search for Lily. It is remarkably unchanged—grey-green walls, chipped paint, a stack of thumbed-through nature magazines strewn over a square table, institutional waiting-room chairs. She walks over to the woman at the intake desk and she asks for Constable Avison, handing her the card he left with Blake.
The woman, her hair in a tight ponytail, her uniform perfectly pressed, leads Jane to the back of the station, and as Jane walks beside her she notices a butterfly tattoo peeking out from under the cuff of her sleeve. The interview room where she leads Jane is just like the one from twenty years before, a concrete square with one-way glass, though the formerly grey walls have been repainted a baby blue.
Avison plods in, wipes his hand across his face and sits down heavily. He thumbs open a file and slides a piece of paper across the table between them. It is a pixelated version of Jane’s own face, from a photo Lewis had taken at one of the girls’ birthday parties. The word Missing is in capital letters above it. Jane touches the page carefully with the tip of her finger, positions it on the desk so that it’s sitting straight in front of her, so that she can read the bare essentials of who she is: height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, no distinguishing features. She begins to make an awkward apology, tries to explain that there was some confusion about where she was going, that she’d forgotten her mobile.
Avison isn’t listening; he’s riffling through the forms he’s brought, and a few of them slide off the table onto the floor. Coming up for air, he finds the one he wants and fills out the top few lines in scraggly masculine writing.
“Am I in trouble?” Jane asks, not sure if this is just about disappearing, or if William has pressed charges.
“I suppose that depends.” Avison turns the form to Jane with an X marked next to the line that reads “under his/her own volition.” “But if I were you I would call your brother before you leave here.”
Jane signs her name and Avison takes the paper back. He indicates that Jane should follow him out. He drops the form onto a plastic tray at an empty desk and then makes a shoo gesture with his hand.
“Does a Constable Holmes still work here?” Jane asks. She points to where a trolley loaded with AV equipment is sitting. “He had a desk in that corner.”
“Chief Holmes?” Avison crosses his arms, looking at Jane differently. “You know him? He’s in his office.”
Jane shakes her head and pulls her bag over her shoulder. She just wants to know that someone here might remember what it was like then, that if she needed to talk about that time in her life, what she felt and went through, she could.
When she calls Lewis from the station, he is livid. But his voice also wavers with relief. “You didn’t answer your mobile and didn’t show up at the lake, so we called the police. Dad’s flown in and he’s up at the cottage, Gareth is calling every twelve hours, we had people handing out posters … What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”
“Did Gareth tell you what happened?”
“Of course. Why do you think we were so bloody worried?”
Jane clears her throat. “Is William going to press charges?”
Lewis doesn’t say anything at first, and Jane closes her eyes, thinking that whatever happens she deserves it.
“He’s called twice to see if we’ve found you. He didn’t recognize you, Jane.”
What we remember, as Jane walks back to the car thinking about William, are those stretches of time when we believed we could no longer bear watching her. How during those weeks and months when Jane’s thoughts had little to do with us, we felt like
we were dying all over again. The hardest part, of course, was feeling that the world was moving on without us—the shift of Jane’s arm as she opened a cabinet, the wind lifting the long grass in the park, Sam nosing his empty bowl across the floor—agency in every corner. Our glimpsed memories were tactile then: a body in bed with the weight of a book, a child’s breath against the side of one’s neck, the cool circle of a pearl button under one’s fingers. One of us remembered a parcel of plum taken between teeth, another waking to a lover’s face, Herschel remembered waking to birdcall, to the sheen of a winter sun shawled by clouds—experiences that we would never be able to replicate. In our grief the memory of touch was everywhere: common touch, accidental touch, unexpected touch—a man dipping a woman’s cuffs into water to rinse them clean.
But now we have, we suppose, what Jane has as she drives back into Inglewood: a mix of joys and misgivings, a sense that maybe the narratives we have been trying to build our lives on are less fixed than we ever imagined, or peripheral to something else. In a way it’s like remembering the exact weight of the weather in the instant you knew yourself loved, even as you feel that weather changing.
What the one with the soft voice, what Nora remembers, is how, in the aftermath of the shooting, her hands raw from scrubbing the blood from her cuffs, Norvill came into the house and shouted her name. She remembers being shocked that he knew it. He had burst in through the garden, startling Mrs. Sutton, who had stepped out to get some air, and was standing in the library when Nora reached him, his clothes speckled with blood, his chest heaving.
“Mr. Farrington wants you there when the authorities arrive, to testify to the man’s—” And he paused, subduing his expression. “To testify,” he repeated more evenly, meeting Nora’s gaze, “to the poor man’s condition.” He cleared his throat and steadied himself by gripping the back of a nearby chair. “You won’t have to discredit him. We simply need you to testify to the fact that he is a patient at the Whitmore.”
The World Before Us Page 32