The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “Did your father put you up to the cello?” he’d asked.

  “No. Well, sort of.”

  “It must be difficult—the expectations people have.”

  Jane had stabbed at a pea with her fork and missed, and the tine had made a scraping noise on the plate; she’d checked to see if William noticed. “We don’t see him much, unless he has a concert in London. Right now he’s back in France.” She heard herself say “back in France” and liked how important it sounded, liked how it made her father a busy man, famous, foreign.

  On her second day minding Lily, when she’d started to look more closely around William’s house, she’d rifled through the music collection and saw that he had Henri’s Liszt recording and Paganini caprices, which were her favourite. There was a strange electric pleasure in seeing her father’s image on the CD cover in William’s house—it was a still from one of his Berlin concerts, the violin tucked under his chin, his black hair just long enough to toss back with effect and an expression she sometimes thought of as rage on his face.

  “I’ve never seen him play—” William began, stopping when he saw Lily tugging at Jane’s wrist. He reached across the table and gently grabbed her hand. “Lily, stop that.”

  “It’s fine.” Jane smiled at William and loosened the strands of the ribbon until she could loop the whole thing off her wrist. “You can play with it. Just don’t lose it.” She handed Lily the key and the girl lit up, started spinning it. Jane glanced at William, hoping she’d done the right thing, that he’d think she was a good minder, that he’d go back to asking her questions about her life. Hoping, too, that this wanting to get to know her meant something, that it was a kind of affection.

  William spent most of the walk taking samples and photographs and jotting plant names on a map of the trail. He’d walk ahead and wave at Jane before rounding corners, a signal that he was going farther along, that he wasn’t scrambling down toward the lake or up toward the pasture, that he was only around the bend. Lily, bored, pulled the ribbon around her neck taut and held the key out in front of her chest, making up a singsong—up, down, up, down. She flicked the key again and again with her index finger while Jane stood in the middle of the path waiting for her: a five-year-old trundling along at her own pace.

  Because Lily was dawdling, Jane tried to think of a game. If she thought up a game, Lily would forget the key and it would be easier to get it back from her. So Jane looked at the elm and sycamore, then over to the slope of meadow grass and ivy that rolled down to the ravine bottom, and then back to the trail. Every fifty feet or so on the edge of the path there were short brown posts with numbers painted in green on top. They lined the edge of the woods on the pasture and lakesides, marking the various bushes and shrubs George Farrington had brought back from his plant-hunting expeditions in Burma, China and Tibet. At the start of the trail, when William had told Jane and Lily about the botanist, he’d shown them Paeonia suffruticosa and Viburnum farrington. The Viburnum shrub was sweet-smelling with sprays of white flowers. Jane had picked a few of the buds when William wasn’t looking, dropping them into her pocket so she could touch the petals with her fingertips while she walked.

  The next post, Jane saw, bore the number 8. There was a tall, rubbery-looking bush behind it. She said, “Let’s play a game, Lily,” and the girl beamed up at her, expectant, her light-brown pigtails bobbing. “Every time you see a post like this”—she took Lily’s hand in hers and led her over to the side of the trail—“you have to tell me the number on it. If you get it right, we’ll both shout hooray.”

  Lily nodded and then stood there, waiting.

  “Okay, we’ll start at the next post. Ready. Set. Go.”

  Lily broke into a little-girl run, elbows out, fists pumping furiously. She sped headlong up the trail and along the verge to search for the next post. Jane watched her dart ahead and then let her eyes drift up the trail to where William might be. Behind her she heard the sound of someone’s footfalls, then a blonde woman in jeans and trainers passed her, nodding as she went, an old border collie trotting alongside her.

  After a minute, Lily found a post and grabbed its top, which came up to her waist; she smiled so hard her eyes squinched shut. “Nine,” she said triumphantly. She was right, so she and Jane both shouted hooray. Then Lily skipped back onto the path to find the next post and the one after that. She was always right about the numbers, and she and Jane always shouted hooray.

  When Jane tried to shout William’s name, her voice came out too quietly, too unsteadily, like the kind of voice you use to tell someone a secret. She wanted to make it loud, to scream, but nothing came. When his name finally did emerge it was jagged, in pulses, “Wil-li-am,” like a faltering heartbeat. She yelled it twice, three times, all the while turning circles and looking for Lily. He came slowly at first, then seeing Jane standing in the middle of the path alone, he started to run. Without asking what was wrong he began calling for Lily, and when she didn’t appear he turned to Jane, his voice constricted. “Where is she? Where did you see her last?”

  Jane sputtered, “I don’t know, she was just here.” She pointed toward the bend he had just come from, to the post on the pasture side, and William took off, running up the slope, scrambling between the thin rails of the alder. When he came back down, flushed and angry, Jane said again, “She was just here,” and her chest heaved into sobs. She wanted him to understand that it had happened quickly, that Lily had found the post and then run ahead to look for the next one, and that when Jane rounded the bend in the path after her, Lily was gone.

  “Lily!” William turned away from Jane and shouted into the trees on the lake side of the trail. Jane tried to find her voice but when she called “Lily” it broke and fell because everything had suddenly gone wrong, and even if it turned out okay, even if Lily appeared magically exactly where she ought to be, Jane had messed up and William had seen that she wasn’t a good sitter, that she had let him down.

  “Lily!” William shouted again, starting down the slope to the lake, losing his footing and sliding a few feet. He picked himself up and ripped off his jacket, untied the canvas bags from his waist, tossing them up toward Jane, moving down along the bramble recklessly, panic in his voice, shouting, “Lily!” again and again, tripping in the underbrush, losing and regaining his footing. Then suddenly he was shouting, “Come out now!”—angry, as if this were a game Lily was playing, hiding somewhere close, crouching down in a patch of sage and staying very still. He was gone whole minutes, his shouts coming up over the verge to where Jane stood.

  When his calls grew distant, Jane walked toward the trail edge, picked up his jacket and gripped it in her hands. The bird sounds were louder, William’s voice barely audible, coming from back toward the lake. And then, there was nothing. It was there, in that span of time, that Jane allowed herself to imagine that he’d found her, that Lily was standing at the edge of the trail next to some post they’d already passed, that he was scooping her up in his arms that very instant and that she was saying the number, smiling fiercely at him and telling him to shout hooray.

  Up ahead the woman with the collie reappeared. She’d turned around, and her dog was limping. A breeze sifted between them off the lake and lifted Jane’s hair ever so slightly; she felt it brush against her skin just as she heard William’s voice again, his distant shouts drifting up toward the spot on the path where she stood. The woman heard them too and began to walk quickly toward Jane, a look of concern on her face. William’s voice coming closer and closer, Lily’s name arcing through the boughs of the trees.

  4

  The tea set that Jane thought about first thing this morning when the shop’s alarm was blaring is sitting on a trolley beside her worktable. Gareth had stopped by right after she arrived to ask if she’d completed the exit forms, and Jane had lifted the Grainger file off the stack on her desk to show him that she was working on it. The set, one of the museum’s most beautiful, consists of twenty-one pieces of china. The teapo
t and matching cups and saucers are a light green with gold leaf, each with an ivy band painted so precisely that it’s hard for Jane to look at the set without imagining the delicate wrist and steady hand of the artist. The Grainger, like the rest of the ceramic collection, was auctioned off last week, and Jane is supposed to have its deaccession complete so that the conservation department can pack it for shipping. But even now, lifting a teacup off its padding to check its catalogue number, she feels reluctant. She wonders if this is what it’s like to lose the things you love in a burglary or house fire, is grateful that she’s allowed to touch everything one last time.

  Given the tastes of the day the Grainger tea set is relatively plain. It once belonged to a Duchess who was quite active in the Victorian land preservation movement, who liked to call herself a friend to nature. She didn’t mind when the rose bushes grew too close to the windows, tolerated her husband’s hound under the table, accepted his penchant for stag-horn furniture. Before washdays, she often let her girls run from the grounds into the house without taking their boots off, though she sometimes complained in her diaries about the mess. She had both a rigorous mind and a self-effacing quality that Jane finds refreshing.

  The Grainger set was donated by one of the Duchess’s granddaughters. Its supplementary information file consists of the original bill of sale, transfer of title, notices on two royal inventories and a roughly drawn place setting for an afternoon tea given in honour of the Duke’s return from India—complete with a small crown designating the chair for the Queen. There is also a letter from the Duchess to her cousin B—— written on a thin blue sheaf of paper and dated 11 May 1884 … The weather has turned for the better though the wind is bothering my hat. At present Minnie is skittering about by the gazebo waiting to take the tea service away. I fear I won’t have so much as a teacup to hold on to should someone come across the lawn …

  The phone on the desk rings and Jane glances at it. It has been ringing all morning: other archivists sending their condolences; Jane’s brother, Lewis, calling to ask if she’s okay. Angling the teacup she’s holding to copy the number inked on its base, Jane turns toward the phone as the long beep of the answering machine goes off.

  “Janey, c’est moi,” her father says, his voice filling the airless room. And then, as if catching himself, he switches to English. “Pick up if you are there.”

  There’s a small click as the teacup hits the base of the desk lamp, a sound so delicate it’s like a pebble being tossed against a stone. Stunned, Jane looks at her open hand and then at the four pieces of china settling next to the ledger in front of her. In the white noise of Henri’s silence on the other end of the line she can hear her father’s steady breathing.

  “Janey?” He sounds annoyed, as if he is trying to decide whether she’s there, staring at the answering machine. Jane hears a nasally exhalation and then the sound of him taking a drag of his cigarette before he begins speaking quickly. “Listen, Lewis telephoned. I know about tonight. I can fly in next week if you need me to. It would just be for a few days. Inga and I are in Vienna.” He’s using the same tone she’s heard him use with waitresses and drivers and lazy violinists. For a second there’s the muffled noise of him speaking to someone else. Jane can make out semaine and mettre au point. She wonders briefly if he is going to say something real, say William’s name, or Everything will be okay, or I’m sorry I haven’t called in so long, but when his voice returns, he adds, “Lewis has the number of the hôtel,” and then there’s the old-fashioned clatter of a phone being hung on its cradle.

  In the quiet that follows, Jane takes off her cotton glove, reaches down and picks up the largest piece of the teacup, the section with the scroll handle still attached. This is her first accident in the eight years she’s been at the Chester. It is as if she’s seeing the shard from a distance, as if the floor of her office has gone slant. When she finds her breath she sets the piece on her palm to inspect it, the handle suddenly absurd—its bone-china ear attached to a wedge that can hold nothing.

  We did not break the teacup. When the phone on the desk rang, most of us were crowded into the office, standing or sitting against the walls, some of us with our invisible chins cupped in our invisible hands, the children stirring tufts of dust along the baseboard even though we’d told them repeatedly to stop. If one of us had broken it, there would have been a ripple of tension in the throng. Such overt acts—touching the hair of those sleeping, opening doors, turning pages or knocking things over, even lifting the drooping heads of flowers in their vases—are forbidden. When they do happen, by mistake, out of rage or hope or despair at the constant watching and wishing, the reverberation is called “fluttering.” We have only fluttered Jane once—when she stood on the bottom step in front of a house we wanted her to enter, all of us wishing her forward as a gust of wind.

  Jane puts the piece with the handle down and smooths her skirt. She is thinking, If the museum wasn’t closing, I’d be sacked; and Queen Victoria has probably held this teacup; and I’ve just cost the museum three thousand pounds. Jane cares about the Duchess and her tea set, but we do not. The Duchess’s life is well researched; her portrait has been painted, and her peach-skinned likeness hangs in the imagination because of it. Even Jane, when she was copying the milk jug’s catalogue number onto the bill of sale, conjured her correctly: a plump woman in a wide-brimmed hat and striped dress sitting in the middle of a manicured lawn trying to stretch the act of sipping tea across the hours. What we care about is Jane. Jane who has the ability to show us back to ourselves, to bring our own faces and clothes and jaunty hats out of the past, to place us on lawns and in gardens and on the porches of houses, an apron of sun before us.

  The last time Jane spoke to her father was three years ago; he’d come to London and they’d met at a sleek new bar on the Strand. He’d suggested it, explaining that it was near his hotel. She remembers how the maître d’ and bar manager deferred to Henri, how this made it obvious that he’d been in town for a good few days. He was hungry even though it was late, so he ordered a cut of steak that came to the table so rare Jane couldn’t look at it. She kept to martinis, because Claire had liked martinis and she was somehow trying to conjure the presence of her mother even then. It was almost ten at night by the time they met, and earlier Jane had gone to Harrods to buy a new dress for the occasion. She’d ended up with an expensive green silk scoop-necked piece with pearl buttons up the back—a dress that made her feel self-conscious, as if she were trying too hard to impress him. She remembers now that the conversation was lopsided, the news all his, as if she were interviewing him for some lifestyle article and he felt obliged to speak overlong on every topic. He’d mentioned “Inga” twice in relation to his tour of Croatia, and it had made sense at first because Inga was his management team’s tour organizer, an athletic-looking Swede only a few years older than Jane who had Henri’s whole world on speed-dial. But the third time her name was mentioned it was out of context—she’d joined him on a side trip to Hungary where he’d been commissioned to work with a young composer—and Jane realized Henri was trying to tell her that he was with Inga, officially, outwardly, in the way Jane’s mother had suspected a whole decade before.

  At the end of the night Henri waited outside with Jane for her taxi. He kissed her forehead, and in that brief press, standing between the warmth of his lips and the palm of his hand cupping the back of her head, she was happy. As the late-night crowd dwindled behind them, the last of the men and women heading out through the glass door of the bar had looked twice at Henri, because even though he was nearing sixty and dressed casually in black jeans and an old sweater, he was still a commanding figure.

  As usual, Jane thinks now, there’s a kind of arrogance behind his phone call: the assumption that he can sail back into her life, after years of dashed-off postcards, and help her; as if what happened between her and William, what happened to Lily, somehow involved him; as if he’d risen to the occasion for her back then, when she was
fifteen and needed him.

  Flexing her neck, Jane tries to slow her breath, get her thoughts together. She picks up a thin shard of porcelain and touches the nib of its ivy to her wrist, the point lightly pricking her. She calculates, numbly, that the teacup is one hundred and twenty-seven years old, imagines all the clumsy maids and careless children, the repeated washings it has endured—not to mention being packed up and carted across the country numerous times before and after the war. A delicate slip of a teacup that has survived all this, but, Jane realizes with a start, has not survived her.

  Gareth knocks on Jane’s office door and then, as he has done since the day he hired her, immediately walks in. She’s still testing the point of the teacup against her wrist when he steps toward the desk.

  “Busy?” He rubs his thumb under the bristle of his moustache and eyes the teacup.

  “Not really.”

  “Is that the Grainger?”