The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  At four o’clock, Jacek, the museum’s security guard, places a wrought-iron stand with a Closed sign outside the front door, and the last patrons, a group of well-heeled elderly ladies and an American family carrying shopping bags, begin circulating quickly through the collections. An hour later the caterers come in through the loading bay and begin setting up in the corner of the natural history hall. By the time the final visitor, a Japanese girl picking through the discount postcards in the gift shop, has made her way out, a long table draped in linen has been set up and a raised stage and podium erected at the back of the room.

  Jane comes out of her office just as the musicians arrive. They set down their instrument cases to rearrange the chairs and music stands placed on the dais, one of the young men bumping into the tortoise display behind him when he bends to pick up his violin.

  The main hall is the kind of impressive room Edmund Chester dreamed about: his whale skeleton is suspended between four marble columns and the ceiling is painted blue above it, so that looking up at its bowed jaw and notched spine you can almost imagine it whole, see it steering itself across the ocean. The cabinets and long-cases that line the west wall are accordingly nautical in theme: turtle collections, navigational instruments, a display of fossils brought back on the Beagle. The cabinets on the opposite wall contain flora and fauna. The largest, the Vlasak cabinet, is an old oak hutch filled with a variety of plant models made entirely from glass: moss, fern leaves, pine and cypress cones, lace vine, a rose replete with thorns, a sprig of wild strawberry.

  When we gather back together as a group we find Jane in front of this cabinet. She is wearing the dress her mother, Claire, wore the night she met Henri, a cap-sleeved Chanel from the 1950s with a ribbon-cinched waist and bell-shaped skirt. A photo exists of Claire in this dress, taken on the deck of a friend’s boat as it puttered on the Seine: the occasion was an evening party, a group of the nearly-famous holding martinis in their hands. Claire, seventeen but passing for older, was standing next to Henri, to whom she had yet to be introduced, and Henri was staring at the photographer, a woman he was dating at the time. The group’s faces were brightly overexposed as if they’d been caught out at something, Claire’s hand on the rail near Henri’s, the lights of the city bleary dots between them.

  Jane is looking partly at the cabinet display and partly at her reflection in the glass. All day she has been trying to remember something her therapist had once said about how one defines oneself, about the power of intention. She was twenty and wanted to give up the cello. “Why?” the therapist, Clive, had asked, and Jane shrugged. She could have said “to spite myself” or “to spite my father,” but by then she was tired of the rawness of trying to communicate everything, of feeling like every failure or step forward had to be brought back to what had happened in the woods when she was fifteen. So she gestured at the cello case propped in the corner of the room and said, “You try lugging it everywhere.”

  Behind Jane the musicians start to tune their instruments. The caterers set silver platters down on the long table, unwrap the canapés. We hear the ting, ting of glass touching glass as a waistcoated server stacks the stemware into triangles, as if the world is stable and nothing or no one can knock things over.

  “She’s going to leave,” one of us sighs.

  “No, she’s not,” says the idiot.

  “Ttthhhhhtttt,” says the one who sucks on his teeth.

  We look at Jane’s reflection in the cabinet glass to gauge her mood and see the aching space of our absence. Twenty-five rows of chairs are cast back at us, along with the lectern where William will stand and a tall ceramic vase stuffed with oriental flowers.

  “I’ll wager you,” says the musician.

  “Wager us what exactly?”

  “She took a diazepam in the bathroom,” the theologian says, “while you were all out here gaping at the quiche.”

  “Our mouths divined with heaven,” intones the poet.

  “Vrrrooooooom,” drones the boy, as if he’s a jet fighter.

  “Shhh, everyone, give her a bit,” the one with the soft voice says, watching Jane study the glass-blown rose, the wilted edges of its thin petals.

  What Jane remembers most vividly about the last time she saw William was the constable’s desk where she was told to sit and wait. It was in the part of the police station she had never imagined—a brown-panelled backroom area where the officers piled their everyday coats on racks and kept outdated family photos on their desk, where coffee mugs emblazoned with phrases like “World’s Best Dad” were clustered on a card table next to a well-used coffee maker. The nameplate at the desk said Shaun Holmes in brass, and this made her think of the Sherlock books that her brother, Lewis, liked, and so, to distract herself, she tried to remember if Sherlock was the character’s real first name, the one his mother gave him when he was born, or some kind of nickname. Shaun Holmes had a frame on his desk with a photo of an Alsatian that Jane thought probably came from a calendar of dogs. Maybe October was Alsatian month, and if she opened the frame and peeked at the back of the image she’d find the squares of September with notes like Sara’s birthday or dinner at K’s written in the boxes. But then Jane rationalized that if “Sara” or her birthday mattered to Shaun Holmes, he’d have a photo of her in the frame instead. Constable Margaret Mobbs, the woman who’d brought Jane to the desk after her statement on the trail, after it became clear that Jane couldn’t stop crying, came by after a while with a book for twelve-year-olds, milky tea from a vending machine and a packet of plain crisps. She stood there a moment and then touched Jane’s head, said, “I’ll leave you to it?” Instead of replying, Jane reached out her finger and tapped the last silver ball of a set that hung from strings on a stupid contraption on Constable Holmes’s desk. The ball clicked with a light tock into the next ball, which tocked its neighbour in turn, the effect diminishing as it moved along.

  “Newtonian,” Mobbs said. She wiped what appeared to be a line of dirt off her sun-baked cheek and a strand of dull-brown hair slipped out of its ponytail. “Inertia.”

  Jane had to concentrate to remember what that was, because she knew that she knew it, but didn’t right then. What it meant then was that Lily was out in the woods and Shaun Holmes and everyone from everywhere was looking for her, and that one click could lead to another and at the end everything would be okay.

  “Or cause and effect,” Mobbs added, then shrugged. “Actually, I’m more of a history of the ancient world kind of girl.”

  Hours later, long enough that Jane’s grandparents would have arrived if they’d driven straight up from London, if they’d been home to take the call and not out at the ballet and having a drink after with the director of the symphony orchestra, Jane looked up from the Alsatian—who was a real dog after all—and saw William. He was hunched in his jacket behind a desk on the other side of the room, a survey map open in front of him, a Styrofoam cup that was still steaming placed on top. His gaze was directed down at the cup, and it stayed there for a long time, and Jane both wanted and did not want him to look up at her.

  To test the sound, the cellist with the cropped red hair begins to play from the music sheet in front of her. The guests will start arriving soon and the musicians have yet to check the acoustics properly. The violinist, a gangly man with a boyish expression, folds his legs under his chair and joins in. Jane recognizes the piece: a Dvořák quartet her father had encouraged her to practise, suggesting once that if she got good enough at it they might try to play it together. And it’s this—the memory of her father’s dissatisfaction, and the aching swell of the notes the cellist is playing so beautifully—that makes her start toward the front door of the Chester. If she failed at Dvořák and at the cello, and if what happened with Lily made her a disappointment to her father and to her mother, why should things be any different now, with William? That day in the police station, William had known that Jane was sitting across the room, and for more than an hour he refused to glance up at her.
By the time her grandparents arrived, the room was so full of volunteer search-party members being handed maps, flashlights and headlamps that Jane hadn’t known if he was still there. Besides, she reasons now as she puts her hand out to the door, if she were meant to see William it would have happened—there have been conferences and lectures, probably a hundred near misses. In the years before her grandmother died Jane was in his end of the city every Sunday, two blocks down the road. Jane grabs the handle and opens the door onto the street. If Gareth sees her now, or Duncan or Paulo, she’ll say she’s just stepping out, going for a walk before the party.

  As we move to go outside a second violinist picks up the thread of music and the movement swells.

  “I know this piece!” the musician amongst us exclaims, and he begins to nod along. After a few bars he hums loudly, matching the violinist note for note, and even though the cellist has stopped to adjust her music stand he keeps singing and whirling around. We get like this sometimes, when what is happening to Jane becomes less important than what we can learn about ourselves. “It’s number twelve! Listen, listen!”

  Outside, the evening air is surprisingly cool. Jane stands on the pavement, lifts her chin and watches as the clouds pull their veils over the city. Rain, she thinks, and squints skyward. Unsure of what she’ll do, a few of us start to worry, and we argue about fluttering her again. Then the one singing Dvořák picks up the melody, his voice swaying loudly as if he’s remembering the best piece of music on earth.

  “Shut it!” the theologian shouts.

  “Leave him be,” says the idiot.

  “I can’t think with the distraction,” the theologian seethes.

  “Folly,” says the poet, “on the hill behind the seat.”

  The theologian exhales, and Cat says chirpily, “Right. I’m going to go back in and poke my fingers into the sweets.”

  The girl amongst us whispers, “Wait,” with little-girl urgency. She turns to Jane and tries to wish her back inside, but Jane stays where she is, and what we know of the girl—her brightness, the soft plane of her presence—turns to us for help. When we don’t do anything, she takes Jane’s hand, flutters her own fingers over the open curve of Jane’s palm, tracing and retracing the same path with such focus we can almost see her bent into her work.

  “What are you writing?” we ask.

  Jane lifts her hands and rubs them together.

  “Is it a letter?”

  “No.” The girl sighs, and when Jane drops her hands back to her sides the girl returns to what she was doing.

  “Is it a word?”

  “No.”

  “What is it?”

  Two months after she stopped playing the cello Jane told her therapist that she was thinking of a career in museums. And to Clive’s credit, even with everything he knew about William’s job, he didn’t say a word, just cocked an eyebrow and scribbled something into her folder. Then he closed it and set it down on the table.

  Less than a year later, when Jane was reading the casebook of an asylum patient for a class assignment, the image of Clive’s blue folder, with its two-dozen sheaves of paper, dropped so casually onto his side table, came back to haunt her. What if those documents—the details of what had happened to her and how she’d struggled after Lily disappeared—might one day be all that was left, the one bit of evidence that defined who she was? Jane’s mother, if she spoke about Lily at all, always referred to “that thing that happened”—as if Lily’s disappearance were an altercation Jane had had in the schoolyard or some childhood accident and not the defining before and after of her life. This was partly why Jane took to studying asylum archives for her dissertation, why she later took to N—she was drawn to the idea of what falls off the side of the page, what goes missing.

  Jane was thirty years old when she finally stopped seeing Clive. She’d been skipping sessions now and then and not saying much when she did go. She’d started sleeping around a bit before she and Ben got serious, and with no other fodder—no recently dead mothers or on-again, off-again father complaints—Clive had begun to make an issue of the promiscuity.

  “Absolutely,” he said when she told him she was done. “Terms of service—the client decides when they’ve had enough.”

  She remembers how he shrugged, and that the shrug stung. Then he picked up the stress ball on his side table, sinking into his chair in that slouchy fat-gut way she hated. He was still tossing the ball back and forth from one hand to the other when she lifted her scarf and coat off the rack in the corner.

  “So, we’re done then?” he asked as if expecting a summary statement or some expression of thanks.

  “It’s not a divorce, Clive, and neither of us is dying.”

  “Right then, best of luck.” He stood up and shook her hand in that hearty well-done-us way that reminded her of politicians on the telly after a particularly depressing summit. Then he sat down and watched her open the door. “Small everyday acts of bravery, Jane”—she could hear the ball softly hitting his palm behind her—“small everyday acts.”

  When Jane opens the door and steps back inside the Chester, we breathe a sigh of relief even though we’re unsure what turn of thought has led her back in. While we were outside someone adjusted the lighting, and now the hall is glowing in lamplight, the marble floors gleaming, the bowhead fixed above us like a celestial being. The hummingbirds, the tortoise, the sixteen cabinets are all where we left them—our eyes settle on each display as if we are passengers on a train compulsively counting our bags to confirm that all our belongings are here. The girl is still beside Jane.

  “What did you draw?” we ask her.

  She shakes her head as if it’s a secret.

  “A picture?”

  “No.”

  “An arrow?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Invisible cities,” says the girl.

  8

  It’s almost seven o’clock when Jane gathers enough nerve to leave her office and enter the natural history hall. There are already a hundred people milling about, and the crowd is so noisy that the sprightly notes of the quartet’s Vivaldi are almost lost under the chatter. Jane’s mother liked to call rooms like this, filled with wealthy arts patrons, “philanthropic rooms”—said disdainfully, because to Claire forging a career as an academic or a musician was something one did, whereas having money was something that happened to you. Claire came from old money, but after she met Henri she sidled out of it, acted as if every success, every honour she earned, was achieved despite some vaguely difficult upbringing. At parties or conferences when people asked if she was Andrew Standen’s daughter, she would say, “the cabinet minister?”—then light up a cigarette and laugh bitterly as if the suggestion were ridiculous. It was the same for Jane except that Jane couldn’t escape her lineage: at university she was Claire Standen’s daughter, at social and charitable events she was Andrew Standen’s grandchild and for the eighteen years she studied cello she was Henri Braud’s offspring—even though her father had toured through most of her childhood and then left for good when Jane was sixteen.

  Jane’s mother had visited the Chester only once—three years after Jane started working there as the full-time archivist, and four or five months before Claire died. From where she’s standing by the glass wall of the gift shop, Jane can almost track Claire’s movements in the natural history hall that day. By then Claire had lost over a stone and had cropped her hair into a pixie cut so that its loss wouldn’t be so noticeable. “Look, I’m Twiggy,” she’d said, twirling around by the Nelson cabinet. Claire had loved unexpected parts of the collection: common seashells, flints, a Royal Worcester vase in over-bright colours, the Canopic jars secreted back from Egypt. She’d stopped at the mounted aardvark and touched his bristly snout, looking straight into his glass-bead eyes. The prognosis by then wasn’t good—a few months, the doctors said, a year at the outside—and Claire had retreated, as she always did, into her intellect, filtering everything
through irony and her sense of the absurd.

  Duncan, scrubbed clean of cardboard dust and wearing a tuxedo, sidles up to Jane. She’s already on her second glass of Chardonnay.

  “Break anything this afternoon, Janey?”

  Jane rolls her eyes at him even though she wants, irrationally, to unbutton his black jacket and bury her face against his chest, hide in the space between his lapels. It occurs to her, as she leans into him and he casually drapes his arm over her shoulder, that it was ridiculous not to take Lewis up on his offer to be here with her. A month ago when they’d met up at The Lamb and Lewis suggested he’d come to the lecture, she had said, “No, no, I’ll be all right, I can handle it.” No one at the Chester knows about Lily, and that’s probably why she told Lewis she’d be fine—she didn’t want anyone watching her, watching her and William.

  “Big crowd for a book about gardens.” Duncan takes a sip of wine and surveys the audience, most of them standing and socializing around the empty seats. When he spots a pretty twenty-something in a black cocktail dress he lifts his arm off Jane’s shoulder and straightens his bow tie. “You ever heard of this guy?” His eyes follow the girl until he loses her.

  “The author?” Jane stalls. To her relief, Duncan doesn’t notice.

  “That Judith’s a bit of a ball-breaker, isn’t she?”

  “Sorry?”

  Duncan glances at Jane. “The conservation supervisor. I saw her come out of Gare’s office and the look on his face—I swear I thought he’d had a stroke.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Duncan turns and gives Jane his full attention, leaning his right shoulder against the glass of the gift shop wall. “You okay? You’re acting a bit odd.” When Jane doesn’t reply, his gaze drifts down to take in her dress and the heels she’s wearing. When his eyes come back up they stop overlong at her chest. “You look great, by the way. Your—”