The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  In the past few weeks we’ve begun looking under the far side of the bed at the box where Jane put her research papers, near the blanket the dog sleeps on. If we’re feeling really brave we stay there, let Sam stretch his neck, sniff the air in our direction, his spaniel’s face as white as a lamb’s, his brown eyes curiously discerning. Yesterday he gave a low growl and those of us who were studying the box gave up and moved slowly back to our corners. That’s when we saw Jane curled up and sleeping. “There it is!” we said. “In there!” Thinking, Of course! Finally! We knew the answers must be hiding somewhere.

  At seven o’clock Jane comes back from walking Sam around the green. She puts his leash on the kitchen counter for Dora, drops some food into his bowl and starts to get ready for work. Standing in front of her wardrobe, she tries to steady her thoughts, to focus on what she has to do in these next two weeks before the museum closes for good. Today is the last day of public admission, and tonight is the Chester’s official farewell party, a gala timed to coincide with the annual Chester-Wood Book Prize lecture and reception. A month ago, William Eliot, botanical keeper at the Natural History Museum, was announced as the recipient of this year’s prize for his non-fiction book The Lost Gardens of England. In less than twelve hours he will take the podium to deliver a lecture and talk about his work. Jane has not seen William since she was fifteen years old, and even though there is a part of her that wants to believe otherwise, she is certain he will not want to see her now.

  Pressing the pads of her fingers against the puffiness under her eyes, Jane steps back to check her appearance in the bathroom mirror. She is thirty-four. She is not vain but knows she is pretty enough. Her mother was stunning—which is how Jane grew into her own self-assurance: by basking in the attention spilled onto her by men caught up in her mother’s beauty. Tying her hair up, Jane thinks again about N, wonders if she was tall, if she was pale-skinned, if she had dark hair. In the dreams N always resembles her—not the girl Jane was at eighteen, but the woman she is now: high cheekbones, pert nose, a tendency to blush when self-conscious. Her former boyfriend Ben once remarked, just after he’d moved in with her, that Jane reminded him of a deer, all that nervous, pent-up energy. He was running a finger over her collarbone, imagined he could feel a tremor. She took his comment the wrong way, as she often did, swatted at his hand and got out of bed. She threw his trousers at him, forgetting that he lived with her now and had no apartment of his own to retreat to. He thought it was funny, tried pulling her back down, said, “Come on, I love deer. What’s not to love?”

  We know what Ben meant, have come across deer at the edges of woods, along thickets—the pulse visible in their necks. Animals that will either bolt when seen or stand so still they can be right in front of you and remain unnoticed.

  The morning unfolds like any other: we watch Jane get dressed, watch her eat toast and cheddar leaning against the counter in her yellow kitchen. Together we listen to the BBC news on the radio: flood warnings in the east, economic crisis in the west, a group of miners stranded underground in a country so distant some of us have never heard of it. “They have sent up a note,” the man being interviewed says. “We are drilling air holes, there is reason for hope.”

  Six weeks ago Gareth came back from his meeting with the Minister of Culture, called the senior staff into his office and announced that the museum would be closing. We turned to Jane to see what that might mean. Until that point, we believed we were still learning who we might be: following Jane like a pack of hounds, staring at the files she read, the objects she held, sometimes saying, “I know this!” Our days were spent huddling around astrolabes, stuffed tortoises, samplers, mustard pots, surgical tools, old diaries, photographs of estate lawns we might once have walked across. Some of us went back to the same objects again and again—a set of pearl hair combs, a galvanizing machine, the glass case of hummingbirds in the entry hall—stuttering toward our own names, sounds we thought might be familiar. But then Gareth gave everyone the news and a kind of panic set in.

  For years we had been trying to mimic what we had seen Jane do with the museum collections: to catalogue, list and cite ourselves. We endeavoured to keep track of each other, tried to pay attention to who thought what. Most days this proved difficult. We have little in common: some of us are old, some young; the places or times we lived in feel different. And since we have no names to go by, we resort to epithets: The One with the Soft Voice, The Poet, The Musician, The Theologian, The One Who Sucks on His Teeth, The One Who Never Speaks, The Boy, The Girl, Cat, The Idiot. And then there are the transients, the passersby and the passers-through.

  When remembering what documents or objects we’d circled or what things in the museum we’d returned to proved difficult, we braved philosophy. When that didn’t work, we began our interrogations, asking each other quick sets of questions to try to find even a stitch of memory to build on. What food did you like? What do you see when I say “green”? What clothes can you imagine yourself wearing? Who did you love? What noises surround you? What is your name? The answers, if they come at all, come slowly or in the form of further questions: progress in circles. We keep at it even though some of us are easily frustrated, some tired, sad or mean; even though some of us do nothing but run around the flat after Sam, barking like otherworldly animals.

  Still, for those of us who want to make sense of things, there is constant learning. Time may have swept past us but we are caught in its gusting: we read the papers, watch the telly, listen in on conversations in cafés and tube stations, stand outside strangers’ windows observing them as they eat alone in the quiet burrow of their thoughts. Some of us have even gone to school, studied particular jobs, ridden in ambulances; one spends nights following vagrants as they tread from the city’s edge into the local park. In this way we have learned new words and new ideas, although the knowledge we gain is sometimes woolly. One of us can describe the spark that lit the universe, another knows clock workings, another listens to opera, one loves cowboy films, another the art of flower arranging. We understand the principles of radio waves and motors and satellite relays, even if we cannot say exactly how such phenomena operate. Meanwhile our own knowledge is lost or buried, our hands emptied of their work; even the accents that once shaped our mouths have been smoothed like stones scuttled on the banks of a whisking river.

  We do not know what will happen when the Chester closes. Ask us what shape certainty takes and we will all point to a different corner of the museum: to the pendulum of the longcase clock, to the black stones of the birds’ eyes, to the teacups in the upper gallery, to books, locks of hair, dress silk, to the computer in Jane’s office, or the cabinet of milkweed and wild strawberry glass models made in a factory between wars. We do not know how to recover our histories, to identify what or whom we loved. We cannot see ourselves except as loose human forms—like those caught moving down the street in the museum’s early Victorian photographs, figures whose blurred shapes become clearer the longer you look at them. We only know that we are drawn to certain objects, places and people, and that we are bound to Jane like the Thale butterflies in the natural history hall—pinned to the boards in their long glass cases.

  The sun is out when Jane leaves the flat to walk the three blocks to the tube station. It glints off the stand of bicycles, glides over the pastry shop window. At the end of the street we turn and follow Jane down the steps of the Underground through the short stretch of semi-darkness that divides the daylight above and the fluorescent light below. We feel a sense of having done this before every time, though we are uncertain whether this sense comes from the repetition of the act itself or an echo from some other conveyance in our lives.

  Below ground the station is crowded, and wedged together we shuffle onto the train, using the doors because even though they are unnecessary to us, they are a convention we remember. Once settled, some of us read the papers over people’s shoulders, others watch the flares of tunnel light sweep past the windows. The bo
y amongst us flits the laces of a young girl’s shoe; the poet sways in the aisle, caught up in a daydream. All of us aware of each other the way you are after becoming accustomed to a dark room. After all, every presence has a kind of weight, something felt: moods and shifts and feelings, a steady pulse of being.

  Jane has found a seat in the middle of the carriage between a young man playing a game on his mobile and a tourist with a backpack wedged between his knees. There is a woman in front of them holding on to the rail, a plastic bag that smells of the apricots and peaches within it swinging from her wrist. We notice all of this but Jane does not. She is staring at the floor trying to imagine what exactly will happen when she and William meet.

  When she is quiet like this, when her thoughts are steady, we can follow them almost the same way we do when we will ourselves into her dreams. It’s like being in a valley in winter: the sound of a branch snapping, the shish of an icicle plummeting from a tree, amplified. This is why we’re here: because Jane thinks about us almost as much as she thinks about herself, because the distance between her life and ours is not as great as with others and because we are lost and Jane is the closest thing we’ve got to a map. And she is a good archivist, has a willingness to navigate history, to consider its blank pages. But history is tricky. Jane thinks it is a buffer, a static place that sits obediently between now and then—something she can pass through, the way people walk through the natural history hall or the upper galleries of the Chester Museum. But we know she is wrong, and we feel bad about that. History is shifty; it looks out for itself, moves when you least expect it.

  3

  The last time William Eliot touched Jane they were standing in a field in Yorkshire at a gate that marked the start of the Farrington botanical trail. He’d placed his left hand lightly on the back of her bare neck, an adult innocently guiding his daughter’s sitter through a passageway. It was 1991, and Jane was fifteen years old and wearing a blue fluted summer dress and new black ankle-strap shoes that she worried would be scuffed by the end of the walk. She was trying to catch a glimpse of the estate house that sat adjacent to the woods, craning her neck toward a gap in the hedge, when William said, “Come on, this way, we can walk by Inglewood House later,” his cool fingertips suddenly grazing her hot skin. She can still feel it sometimes: the light press of his thumb in her hairline, his body ghosting behind her.

  That morning she’d spent an hour in front of the bathroom mirror tying her hair up, then down, then up again, putting on lip colour she hoped her grandmother wouldn’t notice, changing her dress twice. When she was ready, she’d walked the two blocks between her grandparents’ South Kensington house and the Eliots’, trying not to bite her lip. William had answered the door in a collared shirt and beige trousers, a towel in his hand, his short brown hair still wet from the shower. He stood in the doorway longer than usual, as if over the span of a day and a half he’d forgotten what Jane looked like—her thick fringe and serious expression—and was trying to put her into context. Jane, flustered, had blushed. She’d wanted this exact kind of looking for the two weeks she’d been coming to babysit. Then he grinned at something, some private thought she sensed had nothing to do with her, and jutted his chin in the direction of the kitchen—“Your charge awaits, Miss Standen”—ruffling his hair with his towel and heading upstairs.

  Lily had glanced up when Jane came into the kitchen. The curtains on the French doors were tied back so the room was brighter than usual. The counters and sinks were spotless because it was Sunday and the cleaning lady William had hired while Lily’s nanny was in Spain had been coming in on Saturdays. Seeing it was just Jane, Lily went back to running her blue crayon over the side of the ceramic milk jug, her cereal bowl half full in front of her, a few slices of apple scattered around the placemat.

  “Need some help with your drawing?”

  The girl tilted her head as if she was still unsure how much authority Jane had or how useful she was. She inspected the crayons spread out around her juice box, rolled the red one Jane knew she liked best under her palm a few times and then said, “Okay.”

  “Hmm. How about we do it on paper? Then we can draw something for your dad.”

  Lily glanced toward the entry where she could see William. He was running up and down the stairs, dropping specimen bags and wellies by the door. The excursion was to be part fun, part field trip. William was finishing a research proposal on the Victorian plant hunter George Farrington and his estate gardens in Inglewood and wanted to take a last look at the original plantings along the old estate trail before he submitted the final application. He only had a week before the deadline and the drive was four-plus hours each way, so he’d invited Jane for a day in the country to help with Lily and to thank her for filling in for Luisa, who’d had a family emergency back in Spain.

  Jane tore a piece of paper off the scratch pad that Luisa kept in the oak sideboard and gave it to Lily. Then she pulled up a chair and watched as the five-year-old drew a red sun and then a blue flower and a blue whale swimming through puffy yellow clouds. Lily pushed the drawing toward Jane when she was done and then took it back at the last second, adding five blue squiggles in the top right-hand corner.

  “What are those?” Jane asked.

  “A secret.”

  “Oh. Can I guess?”

  Lily nodded.

  “Birds?”

  “No.”

  “Bumblebees?”

  “No.”

  “Airplanes?”

  “No.”

  “Drops of rain?”

  “No.”

  “Flying girls?”

  “No, no, no.” She smacked her lips, satisfied.

  “How about the flags of invisible cities?”

  Lily, liking that, giggled.

  When they first set out along the trail William stayed with Jane and Lily, pointing out various kinds of Rhododendron and Chimonanthus, cupping the glossy plant leaves in his hand and explaining that the shrubs liked acidic soil best, that they bloomed in winter and the flowers were pungent—“spicy smelling, actually; quite lovely”—which made Jane think of the cologne she’d found in William’s bathroom cabinet, its woodsy clove scent. He’d started to give a brief history of the estate and of the Farrington family—“George was a great botanist, his brother an amateur geologist”—trying, and failing, to make it interesting to Lily, who kept interrupting to complain that she was too warm or thirsty. After ten minutes of walking together, he pulled out his notebook and said he was going to get started, that he wouldn’t be far. Sometimes after that they’d round a corner and see him in the distance standing near a bed of fern, or just off the lake side of the footpath, a handsome thirty-five-year-old man in beige trousers and a navy jacket, two canvas specimen bags around his waist, wellies up to his knees in case he wanted to scramble down the verge, down the muddy ravine.

  The trail was narrow but flat. The Farrington estate had been in the hands of the local Trust for twenty-some years and over that time the path had become a popular walking trail, as much for the three caves at the end of it as for the rare alpine and Asian specimens George Farrington had brought back from the Himalayas and planted in the late 1870s. The farther in they walked, the cooler it became, though the temperature was changeable: one minute Jane and Lily would be walking in shade and Jane would get goose pimples, then a few minutes later they’d come to a section of clear sky where sunlight blanketed the trail. The stickiness of the drive up and the summer heat followed by the blue coolness of the woods reminded Jane of summers at her family’s cottage at the Lakes when their mum was between research posts or teaching semesters—summers full of walks and hill climbing. Jane had been twelve and Lewis ten and bratty the last time they’d gone up. Lewis’s favourite pastime that year was sailing through the main room of the cottage to thwap whatever book Jane was reading with his hand before presenting himself to their mum and stating, “Claire, we need milk,” or “Claire, I’d like a microscope.” And Claire would glance u
p from the clutter of papers on her desk under the open stairs and say, “Of course, Mr. Standen, whatever you want.”

  About twenty minutes into their walk, the trees to Jane and Lily’s left thinned, and Jane could make out the edge of a flat pasture at the top of a sloping rise, a ribbon of sun along its border. After a while a stone fence took its place, and every now and again one of the sheep in the upper field would baa and Lily would stop and stare at the ridge as if she expected to see a lamb standing there. William, by then, had gone even farther ahead, moving through the brome and couch grass, the troughs of fern. When he’d been gone for a while Lily started to pick up leaves and snatch bits of bushes, trying to imitate her father. Wiping her hands on her red dungarees and traipsing along beside Jane, she asked a litany of questions that all began with Why? or How come? or What if? Jane tried her best to answer, to explain why some animals had stripes and some spots, why leaves float and why if Luisa said that Lily’s mother was in heaven, then that was clearly where she was. Lily made a fish face at that and blew on the key that swung from a white ribbon around her neck. It was the key to Jane’s grandparents’ house. Lily had noticed it on the ribbon wound around Jane’s wrist during lunch at the pub in the village; she’d gently tried to tug it off while Jane was doing her best to sit up straight and have a grown-up conversation with William over soggy cod and chips.