The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  There is no official history of the Chester Museum, but Jane, as the compiler of the Chester family’s archives, has sifted through a number of descriptions of the museum’s early years. Most of the details come from Edmund’s letters, although Charlotte’s diaries and various Society announcements have added to his account, and objects in the collection—like the presentation notes Edmund wrote up on cards for that first night’s exhibit—have added to Jane’s sense of how those early evenings unfolded, the men usually staying late for a round of drinks and cigars that Edmund gamely provided.

  In the eight months it took Jane to catalogue Edmund’s letters and ledgers she came to imagine him clearly, and often it was the ephemera that revealed him to her the most: the arrangement of objects for his first exhibit hastily drawn on the back of his wife’s note to the maid about cleaning the wainscotting; the names of those he’d invited in his daybook, each attendee ticked off diligently in a firm hand or crossed off in bold strokes. This is one of the marvels of existence, Jane thinks, as she takes the bracelet off its support and lays it gently over her own wrist: that so much can be recreated; that all the bits and snippets—the receipts for roses, inventories tucked into books, even sherry glasses or cigar boxes or the worn clasp on a velvet band—are enough to conjure whole lives.

  Three years after Edmund Chester’s first exhibition in the parlour of his home, his “museum”—a roped-off arrangement of three rooms on the lower floor of the house—was opened to the public. Visitors could come weekdays from noon until two and all day Saturday with tickets at a half-shilling. Thursday evenings the house was open from six until eight for gentlemen members of the various societies, and once a month, on the last Friday, it was open to those gentlemen and their wives—though the florid regrets tucked into Edmund’s daybook indicate that the wives rarely visited a second time. The lower rooms of the house had, by then, started to take on a distinctive fetor from exhibits that were not always properly preserved, and from the constant traipsing in and out of what Charlotte called “the rabble”—men on their half-day off, reeking of the pubs, or women carting their children and market purchases. Even the padded chairs in the breakfast room adjacent to the display suites had started to emit a fusty smell, despite Charlotte’s weekly airing of the house and her attempts to beat the cushions into scentless submission. By the end of the museum’s first year Charlotte gave up, and she, Edmund and their young children removed themselves to the upper floors, resettling the “step girl” in the almost uninhabitable attic.

  Charlotte was interested in details. She wrote eloquently in her diary about the minutiae of the collections, about arguments and making up, about Edmund’s ridiculousness and his quiet, attentive virtue. If Jane ever needs to know how to remove grease stains from hardwood or how to pin the femur of a Loris skeleton onto its pelvic bone, Charlotte’s diaries can tell her. It is, Jane knows, one of the reasons she is drawn to the bracelet: Charlotte’s ability to tell a story; the woman’s side of a man’s world, glimpsed in an age of exclusion. Charlotte’s caricature of Edmund carrying the whale on his back was drawn on the bottom of a letter to her sister, a letter in which Charlotte recounted an overture made by Edmund one evening after a glass of brandy with a professor of zoology from Brest. He’d pulled up a chair beside their bed after the professor had left and broached the possibility of purchasing a bowhead skeleton. Charlotte sat up against the pillows and stared at him blankly. “A bowhead skeleton?”

  “Hilaire has one,” Edmund said. “It won’t cost much.”

  Jane has always liked to imagine this scene and so we see it in the same way she does: Edmund would take Charlotte’s hand in his and kiss her palm, revelling in the lilt of lavender or lilac on her wrist after the fug of the cigars downstairs. Buoyed by expectations, he would glance up at her smart, pretty face only to be surprised at the tightening of her jaw. In circumstances such as these it was his strategy to bide his time, to drop the matter and ask again after the next success: a write-up in the paper, a visit from someone notable. He would demur, say, “We can talk about it later. I shouldn’t have woken you.” Then he would set her hand down on the quilt and drop his own over it.

  “Recklessness doesn’t suit you, Neddy.” We can see Charlotte saying this firmly while extracting her hand. Can imagine her yanking the sheets made in Edmund’s textile factory up around her neck as she turns to the wall and demands a proper house in which children can be raised without being subject to fantastical sea creatures and pickaxes. Charlotte informing Edmund, finally, that she refuses to speak to him again until he puts in an offer on the terraced house next door—an offer that, we know, would have demanded considerably more than he could afford.

  Edmund Chester did well in manufacturing. His company’s linens, at the end of the nineteenth century, could be found in one out of every eight respectable English houses. At the end of his life he wrote that he had only one real regret—that he would’ve liked to travel more, to have been a man of adventure himself. In the Chester’s early years he’d confessed to Charlotte that he sensed it wasn’t the museum, but his engagement with, and support of, a particular breed of gentlemen that would be his legacy. He believed things ought to be remembered as attached to the people who held them in their hands. “What we pay attention to defines us,” he wrote in a letter to his son, when Thomas was twenty and preparing to enter law school. Edmund Chester paid attention to what the men and women of his time thought mattered, to what they carried back with them from their forays into Africa, Asia, the Arctic, Europe and the Middle East. What they brought back in sacks, caught in traps, nets, cut with chisels, fashioned with their own hands.

  He wanted, in those years, to do more than make sheets on looms; he wanted to capture the fantastic and strange, to live a life in the zealous pursuit of knowledge. I did not collect to own, he wrote in one of his last letters. I collected to create a discourse between the men of my day, and the larger world. “For it is not only people that constitute a society,” he’d said in one of his early Thursday evening lectures, “but also places and things, and this museum will explore the relationship between them.”

  Edmund did eventually purchase the house next door so that the original site could be renovated and used wholly for displays. Walking through the front doors of the museum today one first enters the high-ceilinged natural history hall, the room’s outer walls rimmed by display cabinets, its centre bare save for the shadow cast by the long sought-after bowhead skeleton, which hangs on near-invisible wires from the second-storey ceiling. The first floor was opened up at the turn of the century to form a gallery around the whale, and today a dozen curiosity-style cabinets dot its walkways. The whale’s phalanges swim so close to the east and west railings that people sometimes lean out and try to touch the nub of the bones with their fingers, a small stitch of space that cannot be bridged.

  The sound of a little girl’s shoes clapping across the hardwood floor of the print gallery rouses us. This is the nature of the dream: one minute we are in the world and the next we are Elsewhere trying to understand who and what we see. It is Friday, we remind ourselves, it is Friday, and today the museum is closing. Jane takes a last look at the bracelet, placing it hesitantly back on its stand, and then she locks the cabinet and turns to go downstairs. Our attention is divided, and so some of us start to wander off on our own, to move toward the longcase clock, the Victorian photographs, the Bedford cabinet.

  “Stay together!” one of us snaps.

  “This way,” demands another.

  We try to get our bearings, find each other, round up the stragglers.

  “Where’s the girl?” Cat asks.

  “Here I am!” the girl calls from somewhere near the botanical gallery.

  “I’ll get her,” the poet says, heading off in the girl’s direction—bowing at the stuffed cassowary when he passes it, and lifting a hand in benediction at the stacked bones of the moa.

  Those of us who turn to follow Jane stop when the
boy cuts across our path. “Aaarrrrrrr, aarrrrrrgh,” he moans, waggling his arms over his head, because last month he wandered down into the cinema and a film about zombies—and now he thinks it’s fun to pretend he’s dead.

  The staff room across from Jane’s office is an aggrandized cubby with a kettle, fridge and a microwave. When Jane sticks her head in to look for Gareth she finds Duncan sitting on the counter next to the sink eating takeaway noodles with her chopsticks. He’d been packing the Murchison trilobites all morning, so knee-deep in crates that his sandy hair and T-shirt are covered in bits of cardboard. Duncan is Australian, and although he’s been interning at the Chester for six months he still looks like he wandered in off the beach.

  “Have you seen Gareth?”

  “Nope, I’ve been with the creepy crawlies all day.”

  “Where’s the Murch going again?”

  “Auction. It’ll probably end up in a law office in Japan.”

  “Do you know anything about the stuff that isn’t going to auction?”

  Duncan shrugs. “I dunno—eBay?” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, slides off the counter and leans in to Jane. “You still the only one with no job to go to?”

  “Har har.” She pokes his chest with her finger. When he gets to the doorway Jane says, “I broke a teacup—” and a sense of relief from the admission washes over her.

  “Which one?”

  “A Grainger.”

  Duncan lets out a low whistle. “Well, better you than me. Let’s raid the bar at the lecture to commiserate.”

  Those of us who are in the room stop skimming the newspaper on the counter, stop staring at the blinking lights on the microwave. We turn to see if she’ll confirm whether or not she’s going to the lecture. All morning we’ve sensed flight in her, a waver she pushes down by thinking about the tasks at hand: after the tea set there’s the Bedford collection, then a group of astronomical drawings to prepare, Lord Dutton’s Italian glass, a set of French and German clocks going to a buyer in India. In storage there’s a crate containing the hunting weapons and personal effects of the last of Louis the XIV’s menagerie keepers, which Gareth had asked her to re-inventory weeks ago.

  “You in there?” Duncan waves his hand in front of Jane’s face.

  “Yes. Barely.”

  “Chin up, it’ll work out.”

  “What will?”

  “Whatever it is you’re mulling over.” He pecks her on the cheek and she can smell the tang of soy sauce on his breath.

  “Hey, start washing my chopsticks or get your own.”

  Duncan glances over to the sink where he’s dropped them. “The museum’s closing, Jane, it’s not like I’ll need them again.”

  Heading back to her office Jane thinks about the day Gareth hired her, how he’d asked her to come in to sign some papers, suggesting they meet in his office at six p.m. when things wouldn’t be so busy. When all the paperwork was done he’d taken her on a tour around the museum. By then there was only a cleaning staff of two and a security guard in the building. He’d already arranged for a temporary pass and let her swipe into the old elevator at the back of the natural history hall. When the door opened on the second floor he’d handed her a pair of cotton gloves. “I’ve got all the keys and codes,” he said. “Tell me what you want to look at and we can take it out.” Over the next hour she held the claw of a Tyrannosaurus, a pine cone that Darwin had brought back on the Beagle, a pocket compass that had belonged to Franklin and an original folio of one of Marlowe’s abandoned plays. “Edmund collected everything,” Gareth laughed. “There was no subject—no aspect of science or art—that didn’t interest him.”

  In the science gallery next to a brass model of the solar system, Gareth had explained to Jane that the intention behind the design of the museum was to evoke the warm and cluttered feel of the parlour where Edmund had first exhibited his collection, to display the objects in the same half-light to which the men who first studied them would have been subject. He pointed to an ornate wall lamp and added, “There was overhead track lighting put in during the seventies but I had it taken out.” He leaned in to examine the drawer of beetle specimens, saying, “There’s something to it, isn’t there.”

  And Jane had agreed there was, though she didn’t mean the lucent quality of the beetle shells under the gauzy circle of lamplight, or the metronome of the grandfather clock in the corner. In that after-hours visit, she had felt something else, felt that she was in someone’s home—that any minute its occupants might clamber up the stairs and find her gawking at their things, find her somewhere she didn’t belong.

  6

  The electric shock machine sits in the middle of the science gallery in a room that was once Edmund and Charlotte Chester’s bedroom. The wallpaper, a hunter green with narrow beige stripes, is faded where the back of a wardrobe once rested against it, and the dark hardwood floors are worn in a line from the doorway to the wall where the dressing table once sat, and in a halo in the alcove near the window. Visitors today are guided around the room by narrow carpets that wind past the outer wall cabinets before angling toward the two vitrines in the room’s centre: one containing eight astrolabes collected by the astronomer Jacottet and the other a display of nineteenth-century medical implements belonging to Ambrose Bedford.

  In her dissertation work on rural asylums Jane had come across Bedford’s name a few times, twice in relation to the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics. A relatively minor figure in Victorian medical history, he was known mostly as an innovator of galvanizing, or “electrotherapy,” machines, though his practitioner’s licence was revoked after the deaths of two of his patients. His surgical implements and three of his electro-medical prototypes had been willed to the hospital nearest his estate after his death at the turn of the century. The collection, some twenty items all together, included three galvanizing machines, two trephines to bore into the skull, a hysterotome, various saws with tiny pointed teeth, a half-dozen mouth gags and two sets of restraining straps—one made of cloth and the other of leather. They’d arrived at the hospital in a large wooden crate and were promptly relegated to storage. In 2005, when a new administrator discovered them wedged behind an old X-ray machine in a corner of the basement, she’d contacted a handful of curators at some of the larger museums. No one was interested. Eventually a local archivist who’d done her MA degree with Jane directed the administrator to the Chester, and the Bedford collection became Jane’s first acquisition.

  We know that Charles Leeson was introduced to the electric shock machine a week before his escape into the woods. He turned forty-three years old the day it happened. If the Whitmore staff had consulted his casebook they would have noted that the day’s date, the 26th of July, corresponded to the anniversary of his birth, which would have explained his boisterous behaviour in the day room and insistence at breakfast that he be given a collop of bacon off everyone’s plate.

  A month after Leeson began his tenancy at the Whitmore, it had been reported that he was improving, and his brother had come up to see him, arriving in a hack and presenting Leeson with a paper bundle of cured meats and ripe cheeses. That appearance had not been repeated for a number of months, although Leeson had taken special care to strike off the days as late July approached in the hope that another such visit would occur on the occasion of his anniversary. He had spent the better part of a week imagining it in vivid detail: Richard appearing in the day room in his smart hat and gloves, carrying a parcel bound in twine and stepping aside gallantly to present Emily. But this was where the daydream fell apart, because try as Charles might to change it, Emily’s expression always crumbled when she caught sight of her husband: a gaunt-faced man folding and unfolding his hands, his eyes darting around the room even as he attempted to fix them. In this reverie, the gift Richard pressed into Charles’s arms was heavier than expected, as if it were a whole rump or shank of ham. When Leeson dropped his nose toward it, something inside it gave a kick and the parcel m
oved, causing him to search his brother’s needle-like face for an explanation. None was offered, so Charles turned back toward Emily, only to find her over by the games table stroking Wick’s cheek with a palm leaf and laughing at his pursed lips and upturned chin. Then the rain came, falling inside the day room, and Richard spoke between clenched teeth, glancing Charles with spittle, saying, “The dark forces are upon you—” saying, “The Lord giveth—” saying, “The country will rally against—” saying, “At a fixed rate of two percent interest—” saying, “You will never see her again.”

  This was how the daydream always ended, although Leeson tried, day after day, from the windows that faced the front lawn, to imagine Richard arriving all over again: Richard in his smart hat and gloves carrying a parcel bound in twine, stepping aside to present Emily. The idea of Emily was the one surety he depended on, though it became looser around the edges as the weeks passed by. In truth, Leeson knew that he could do without his brother, could live complete even if he never set eyes on his sour face again. Richard’s arrival in the dream was a formality, a tic he needed to move past, some mental obstacle that blocked the real thing.

  The dimmest of the hospital attendants during Leeson’s stay was a thicknecked man called Bream. His features were contradictory—eyes small but heavily lashed, nose pocked but noble, the lips under his patchy moustache plump. Because of this he appeared both dainty and brutish, the latter quality inevitably winning out when he opened his mouth to speak. Perhaps this was why it came as a surprise to Leeson that Bream, of all people, would have been aware of his anniversary, entering Leeson’s ward as he did, carrying a mahogany box on a silver tray. And perhaps it was because Bream was smiling that Leeson believed he was being brought tea—not tea slopped from a pot into a cup as usual, but tea displayed in a proper tea box, one that, when opened, would reveal rows of canisters containing a variety of imported leaves. Never mind that the gesture did not make sense after Bream’s behaviour following breakfast: the big man had chased Leeson around the day room for upending the card table, had crossed his arms over Leeson’s so that he couldn’t move, had walked Leeson back toward his bed step by step, as if they were a four-legged monster in a sensation play.