The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “I’d rather—” Leeson had entreated before sensing the futility of his overture. Still, a few scuffled steps later, Bream, sensing Leeson’s resignation, had relaxed his grip and the solicitor had wriggled free, marching quickly toward his ward unescorted.

  A short time later, Dr. Thorpe strolled into the ward. He conferred with a tall, sallow-looking gentleman with reddish hair and a trimmed beard. Leeson grinned, delighted at the possibility of a party in his honour.

  “Leeson,” Thorpe began, slowly and clearly, “this is Dr. Bedford. He is going to help ease your agitation.” Having announced this, Thorpe turned to Bedford and began to reiterate in low tones his patient’s predicament, listing off the symptoms he’d later record in his report: increased anxiety, troubled sleep, fleeting moments of clarity as to the exact nature of the harm he’d caused and demands at odd hours to see a commissioner who could release him to Emily so that he might plead forgiveness for his error.

  After this, Bedford sat stiffly on the edge of the mattress and repositioned the box Bream had set on the side table. He made a few notes about his perception of the patient—an amiable-seeming man who smiled up at him with pleasure, an expression that was both unexpected and welcome. Bedford had thus far taken his galvanizing machine to three asylums and his patients had ranged from wary to hysterical. The last patient here at the Whitmore, Hopper, had gone so far as to wrap his hands around Bedford’s neck, reddening the medical electrician’s skin before the attendants managed to free him.

  Now, with the air of a man about to conduct a chamber orchestra, Bedford extended his arms, lifted the lid on the box and pulled out the wires. The door on the far side of the ward creaked open and Herschel came in to sit on his own bed behind Leeson’s.

  “What age is he?” Bedford asked Dr. Thorpe.

  “Forty-three,” Leeson answered, tilting his head to get a better look at the selection of tea. Bedford pulled the electrodes from their case just then and drew the wire transmitters toward Leeson’s hands, nodding for Bream to fasten his wrists so that the transmitters could be applied to the base of each palm. The attendant’s hand descended just as Leeson jerked his own away.

  “Easy now,” Bedford said, smiling reassuringly.

  Suddenly aware of what was coming, and unsure how to stop it, Leeson opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the words that would rectify the misunderstanding. Bedford leaned close, whispered, Shhh as one might to a child. Bream, taking two strips of cotton from the doctor’s black bag, bound Leeson’s wrists to the bed frame and then stood back while Bedford made a few more adjustments to the dials on the front of the machine. Herschel, in the whitewash of the room, began to hiccup.

  “Ready?” Bedford pursed his lips, then nodded at Super intendent Thorpe as if to allay the doubts Thorpe had expressed that very morning. It was a nod intended to communicate that they were alike: two men in a world of imbeciles. He turned back to the machine and flicked a small brass lever ever so gently with his knuckle. Leeson looked at his arm as the electric charge scurried up it and a wave of nausea rolled down his throat; a hundred points of light prickled his eyes. His bowels loosened and he had to clench his buttocks for fear of what might come out. Bedford’s face appeared then in the air above him, a finger and thumb forcing his eye open.

  “The jarring disrupts the electrical patterns in the brain,” Bedford announced to the room as he checked Leeson’s eyes. He pulled out his pocket watch. “It is a process that is best carried out gradually and not in one instant. We will administer two treatments today, two tomorrow, and then evaluate his progress.” He stood and turned to Thorpe. “You will see results, sir, believe me.”

  Leeson closed his eyes. Emily was in the room then—or so he thought—her gentle face a few inches above his.

  When Leeson opened his eyes after his second fit, the doctor’s hawk-like nose and tobacco-coloured moustache came into focus. Then a hand appeared, its fingers snapping over Leeson’s forehead, and Bedford, speaking slowly as if through molasses, asked, “Can you say your name, sir?”

  Leeson steered his gaze away. Over the doctor’s shoulder he saw Herschel, mouth ajar, hovering near the back wall of the room, his fat hands in his black hair. He sensed someone else observing but couldn’t lift his head to see whom.

  Ockley, the attendant who had replaced Bream for the afternoon session, shook Leeson’s arm. “Give ’em yer name.”

  “Charles,” Leeson said, his eyes darting across the room to meet Herschel’s.

  “Excellent.” Bedford clapped his hands and then rubbed them together. “It’s too soon, of course, to see the results, but we ought to press on. I’d like to do another round tomorrow.”

  Jane has procured support material for the Bedford collection that includes a transcript of Bedford’s one surviving journal, case reports, personal letters and his final medical censure. Leeson’s full name is nowhere to be found in these documents, though there are records of patients from around the date of the Whitmore visit, patients referred to as “JH” and “CL.” Superintendent Thorpe, probably regretting his association with Bedford as well as his own brief susceptibility to a programme he sensed was dangerous, seems to have expunged Bedford from many of the Whitmore’s records. Still, we believe the electro-shock machine tells its own story, the strap that the doctor would have carried it by worn to dullness even as the box’s wood remains polished, as if it were oiled regularly and stored with great care. Some of us are fascinated by it and others are averse, giving it a wide berth when we come upstairs with Jane to watch her dismantle the collection. One of us gently clearing his throat as if he can feel his air holes stoppered, just as we imagine Leeson did.

  Bedford’s letters and his journal also say a lot. From them we know that in the early years of his practice the good doctor often relied on analogy. In his journal he recorded an exchange with a patient, “MP,” who’d come to see him in his home against her husband’s wishes. He recounted his suggestion to her that electro-shock therapy was “simply a matter of relighting the lamp of the brain,” noting how she’d turned to the lamp on the table beside him, considering it from under the brim of her hat. “More accurately,” he added, “it is a way not only of relighting the lamp, but also of refining the wick to effect maximal illumination.” She’d smiled at that—the word refine.

  Bedford’s surviving letters to prospective patients make it clear that he honed this writerly skill over the years, describing treatment variously as a renewing bath, a match strike, a dusting off and reordering of prized books on a shelf. These ideas, he acknowledged in his journal, were inaccurate, but he believed they had proved serviceable to those who were not able to grasp the complexities of the matter.

  What words, we wonder now as we look at Jane setting the galvanizing machine onto a trolley, would Bedford have used on Leeson? What might he have suggested to usher him toward acceptance? What within the world of that northern asylum might bring the most pleasure? Afternoons in the airing courts? Feminine company? Perhaps to be told of an arrival, a long-awaited visit? Yes, that would be it—to convince Leeson that the treatment would be like opening a door to the person in the world he most wanted to see.

  7

  Because the upper galleries will be roped off during William Eliot’s lecture this evening, some of the second-floor cabinets are being disassembled already. Earlier, Gareth had asked Jane to show two contract-based conservators around, and they’d jumped right into the work. It had surprised Jane to learn that there were companies you could hire to assist with this, specialists who came in at the end to help pack things up. The supervisor, Judith, was efficient to the point of brusque, which was fine with Jane, but her assistant, Thad, was overly chipper. Discussing the Hoffmann fossil cabinet, he’d said “brilliant” so many times in a row that Jane had considered wrenching the clipboard out of his hands and swatting him over the head with it.

  By mid-afternoon two of the cabinets in the botanical gallery have been emptied, and there
are notable holes in the science and ceramic collections. Each unoccupied space has been endowed with a small place card that reads: Sorry, this item is currently on loan to another museum, or Sorry, this item is currently undergoing restoration—because there are no signs that read, Sorry, this museum is closing. When Jane had gone upstairs a few minutes ago to see if the conservators had everything they needed, Judith was taking the Neanderthal skull and pelvis to the lift on a trolley and Thad was trotting behind her so determinedly it looked as if he were afraid she might try to lose him. Gareth had told Jane that another half-dozen contract workers were scheduled to come in on Monday to work alongside the staff for the two weeks he expected the dismantling to take. Getting up from his desk he said, “Don’t worry, Jane, they’ll stay out of your way,” waving his hand like someone who could make a whole group of people disappear with the flick of a wrist. Still, it was deflating. Watching Judith and Thad wheel away the anatomist’s collection Jane is reminded of those people in Hazmat suits contracted to clean up after pensioner deaths or murder scenes—someone entering your world and taking it in hand even though they’d had nothing to do with it when it was vital.

  Jane stops on the landing on her way back to her office and surveys the mix of locals and tourists who are wandering around the natural history hall below. She spots a clutch of girls in navy kilts and monogrammed blazers staring up at the whale skeleton while their teacher explains something about it. Another group from the same school is standing in a cluster near the Darwin cabinet. The girls’ kilts are hemmed above the knee, their long hair is thickly fringed and there’s a tight, self-conscious look on most of their made-up faces. Jane knows that Lily would be in her early twenties now, but always imagines her stuck at the age of these petulant girls—fourteen, fifteen—on that precipice between childhood and adulthood.

  In the years after Lily disappeared, Jane imagined that William must have believed he’d see his daughter again the same way that Jane, after her mother died, still expected her to be at her desk under the stairs of the cottage, or to pull up outside Jane’s flat and tap the car horn. But such belief dissipates. In the beginning William must have thought he would spend the rest of his life imagining his daughter rounding a corner and appearing before his eyes: Lily at six, at seven, at eight. He must have looked for her in the parks he walked past, in the crowds of children on tours at the Natural History Museum where he worked—fifty faces staring up at the giant woolly mammoth—and he would have glanced at each one of the girls as he passed by. But then slowly his grip on her must have loosened; he would have questioned whether or not he would know the shape of her face, the exact shade of her light-brown curls. At some point he probably stopped calculating her age. He would pack up his day’s work in the herbarium, then stop to stare out at the inner courtyard and down toward the ferns. He would be forced to work it out and hate himself for it: she was five when she disappeared, it was 1991 … what year is it now? And he’d have to look at his desk calendar or picture himself dating a letter to ground himself: the exact date difficult to determine because it fell into a larger swell of time without purpose, and his head was filled with catalogues, inventories, procedural systems. His life one of habits—habits that dictated when to wake up, when to eat, at what hour to switch on the telly, when to go to bed, what list from the collections to mentally flip through in the half hour between getting under the covers and falling sleep.

  The research probably saved him. When Jane saw The Lost Gardens of England on the shelf in the museum shop she imagined the writing of it would have been a kind of solace. There’d have been little room for Lily in a book on plant hunters of the nineteenth century, in the classifications of species, in letters and dispatches from Ningpo or the Casiquiare River, the descriptions of Amaryllis and Lobelia shipped back from the Cape. So she had conceived of the book as a kind of escape for him—until two weeks ago when she read it and got to the last chapter on George Farrington and the alpine gardens he’d planted up north, and realized that to write that chapter William must have had to visit the estate again, to drive up from London on the same road he and she and Lily had taken together and to canvass the trail at Inglewood much as he’d been doing when Lily disappeared.

  Jane puts her hands on the railing to steady herself, and one of the schoolgirls below, a blonde with pencilled eyebrows and a long aristocratic nose whom Jane has been absent-mindedly staring at, gives her the two-fingered salute and then stalks off toward the Nelson cabinet. In a few hours she and all the other visitors will be gone, and Jane will be standing in a black dress by the door, greeting guests, greeting William. For years she has imagined his life, how it must have changed, what it must be like now: the compactness of it, the self-imposed isolation—like the shells in the Moore collection, something small and hard a body could curl into. A lump rises in her throat when, descending the stairs, she realizes that it’s not really his life she’s been imagining, but her own.

  From a distance, patterns are easy to discern and people are predictable. Most have a habit of circling back to what they know, to places that feel safe and familiar. Over the past eight years we’ve come to know what Jane will pay attention to when she walks through the museum: which cabinets she will ignore, which ones she’ll gaze at, which she’ll open. But the past six weeks have changed everything. Her movements and intentions are affected by collections going up for auction, by the need to assemble documents according to other people’s schedules, by the fact that William Eliot will be here giving a talk about his book. Jane is thinking less about us, and more about him because of this.

  Until the announcement of the museum’s closure, our lives followed patterns of their own. We acknowledged each other as fellow passengers might do, like commuters on a train. We took up watch over Jane in shifts, sailing past each other almost wordlessly. This was partly because it’s easier to keep track of each other when there are only four or five of us in a room, but also because watching Jane isn’t easy. When Jane drops honey into her tea, some of us gaze at the spoon and yearn to taste what it carries; when she puts her hands over her mouth and begins to cry, there are those of us who ache to comfort her. Watching her work has always been best—there is possibility in it, in hovering around her, hanging over our own hoped-for histories like question marks. Keep going, we’d say. Open that file; look there. Sometimes we thought she heard us. Especially on those days when she turned her attention back to N and the Whitmore, when she sent out inquiries, dug into the archives, asked the right questions, when she gazed, as she did this morning, at the galvanizing machine and thought about Leeson, or dreamed of the woods—instances that allow us to say, Yes, that is close to what happened. But sometimes her papers got shuffled around or were crumpled into the wastebasket; sometimes days went by without Jane giving a thought to us, and so we’d grow restless, argue about what we were doing here and if we should leave, as if what concerned one of us concerned us all.

  Even though it is not allowed, we know that we can flutter Jane, that there are ways we can effect change. A month ago, when she heard that William had won the Chester-Wood Prize and would be reading at the award ceremony, she spent a whole night staring through the dark at the ceiling. At half-five in the morning she got out of bed, threw on jeans and a jumper and took the tube to William’s house with the idea that seeing him beforehand was the only reasonable solution. She stood at the bottom of the walk for half an hour, thinking he’d step out to go to work, or that he’d notice her from the front window, be the one to come outside, that he’d know what to do. But then an upstairs light came on, and Jane lost her nerve. So we started wishing her up the steps, willing her toward the pearly circle of his door chime.

  Morality is not solely the terrain of the living—we argued about what we were doing as it was happening, unsure if what was good for us was good for Jane. Still, we wanted her done with it, we wanted her attention back on us, so we gathered together in the blue curl of morning, put our hands out and thou
ght Jane forward as hard as we could. There were whole seconds when it seemed she might go, when she lifted her foot onto the next step, reached out her hand.

  “This is it,” we said. And in our excitement we lost our concentration, saw her shake her head and turn around. Watched the wrought-iron gate swing closed behind her.

  Sometimes when we are brooding, when our own progress seems blocked, we turn our backs on Jane and her work, on the museum things we’ve come to love, and look for distraction. We sprawl on the roped-off furniture in the upper galleries, watch people pee in the loo, follow random strangers, wander outside the building. Some of us have braved travel and left the city, some have even given up—were here one day and then wavered like light on water and vanished the next. On the bad days we leave Jane to her work, drift aimlessly past cabinets and museum visitors or wander up to the second-storey gallery windows. Once there, we stare out at the brusque efficiency of a city going about its business—the awnings rolling up and down over the shops near the corner, umbrellas opening and closing, people’s clothing changing weight and shape with the season—so that when we shake our heads to clear the dream, we sometimes find weeks have gone by in a flickering instant. We have come to think of time the way we think about the museum: that being inside it is like inhabiting the past, the present and the future simultaneously. This is why we have to stay awake, be vigilant: we need to believe that we, like the museum objects around us, bear time with equal complexity, that eventually we might discover who we have been, what purpose we serve and what use we might one day be.