The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” Jane tugged a few napkins out of the dispenser to wipe up the spill, and then, without looking up, added, “He’s giving this year’s lecture at the Chester.”

  “Oh. I see.” Lewis tilted his head to try to catch her eye; it reminded her of when she’d go to his house for curry night, how she’d notice him trying to calculate whether she was on her third or fourth glass of wine. “You want to talk about it?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll say, ‘Heya,’ there’ll be a load of Rhododendron prattle, that kind of thing.”

  “Naturally.” And that’s when Lewis asked if he should come, and Jane said she’d be okay without him.

  “Mostly it’s just got me thinking,” she said. “I’ve got all that research on rural asylums—you know that paper I was working on? Maybe I could write a book.”

  “A book?”

  “On the Whitmore and the mystery of N. You know, the problem of the historical record.”

  Lewis placed his head in his hands. As if he was tired, as if he had been listening to her make things up for a hundred years, as if he was bored of watching her try to copy everyone else, as if she’d never find something of her own.

  “I could do it,” she said.

  Lewis drained his pint and then patted his jacket pockets to locate his keys. He said, quietly, “I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

  We remember the exact moment Jane brought up the idea of the book. We remember it because we thought it would change things.

  “Did you hear that?” John asked.

  And those of us who’d wandered away from the snug turned our attention back to the conversation. We had been distracted by a couple at the bar having a row about where they wanted to holiday and if they could afford a five-star. The boy, who was fluttering the specks of salt on the table, stopped when the theologian stood over him.

  “Hear what?” we asked, some of us still weighing the pros and cons of a beach hotel in a country whose name sounded like white sand.

  “She was talking about the Whitmore; she said she might write about it.”

  “How long ago was the Whitmore?” Cat asked, trying to splay time into a chronology. “And what came first?”

  “A waterfall,” the boy said.

  “Tweep tweep,” called a voice from the other side of the room.

  “Magpie!” shouted the musician.

  The theologian interjected. “I think the woods were first.”

  “Was it a hundred years ago?” we asked, because we easily forget numbers.

  “Once again, time is relative,” the idiot said, and the theologian grunted.

  “The dates are in Jane’s book,” the one with the soft voice said, and then Lewis stood up and we stopped our bickering.

  “I wish,” Cat said, looking at the receipt Lewis had left on the table, “that we could write things down like people do. I forget sometimes what matters to me and what matters to everyone else. How can we figure anything out if we all start thinking we like stout, or—” She gestured to the girl, who’d wandered off toward the bright flickering keno lights. “That we like bedtime stories, or—” She lifted her hand toward the boy kneeling on the bench near the window.

  “Dogs. I like dogs.”

  “Exactly.” She sighed. “See? I think I like dogs too.”

  “Maybe you do,” John said, “maybe we all do. Suppose it’s the why that matters.”

  “Why I like dogs?”

  “Yes. Why.”

  “Terriers,” the boy said, staring out at the playing field through a pane of yellow stained glass, “I like terriers.” He turned toward us. “Have I said terriers before? Or just dogs?”

  “Terriers,” we all replied.

  “Which is why we have Jane,” John said, watching her as she shrugged on her cardigan. “Even if we could write ‘terrier’ down on a notepad we’d probably forget we’d done it or where it got put.”

  “Writing is against the rules,” the theologian intoned.

  “Na-na-na-na,” the musician chided before drifting over to the dartboards.

  “In the meantime—” Cat reached her arm out toward the boy, who was watching two teenagers kick a ball back and forth over the green. “In the meantime,” she repeated, when he didn’t feel her shape trying to touch his, trying to show him that everyone was going, “we will all try to remind you every day—okay, everyone? Terriers.”

  “One terrier,” he said, as the teenagers, in their brightly numbered jerseys, moved farther into the field. “Dock.” He turned to us as he said the name.

  “Dock?” we asked. “Is that the dog’s name or what they called you?”

  “Dock,” he repeated. “Dock,” saying it quietly. “The dog’s, maybe? I’m not sure.”

  Lewis put on his jacket, pocketed his wallet and said, “Walk you to the tube?”

  Jane slipped her arm through his and squeezed tightly. We could tell she was relieved to have told someone about William, even if the conversation hadn’t gone the way she’d wanted.

  We turned to leave. If we lost track of Jane we’d have to make our way back to her flat on our own, which meant there was a chance we might get lost, spend hours or days making mistakes in direction. The boy suddenly called out, “It was the dog’s name! He was brown and white and he liked crusts of bread and I named him.”

  So out we went, giddy from our progress, the boy imploring from the back of the group, “Can we please, please, please try not to forget.”

  We haven’t forgotten the dog. And we haven’t forgotten what Jane said about writing a book. But things are different now. We bristle when the subject comes up. The night a few weeks ago when she pushed her Whitmore files under the bed, some of us stormed out, and some of us stood over her while she was sleeping and called her a liar. So now, when Gareth steps onto the stage to place a jug of water and a glass on the low table beside the lectern, and Jane goes up on her toes to see if William is standing in the crowd nearby, some of us are wishing her well and some of us are just wanting the production over with. The boy, full of pent-up energy, is zooming around, while the girl walks in circles around Jane the way children sometimes do, running their fingers around the bell of a skirt or along the silky waves of a curtain.

  “Come here, sweetie,” the one with the soft voice says, and the girl wanders back to us.

  “Who’s that?” the girl asks when she’s back in the fold, and we turn to where she’s pointing, to the marble bust of the museum founder sitting on its pillar at the far side of the stage.

  “That’s Mr. Chester. Edmund Chester,” we say, and his name feels good coming out of our mouths, the sure shape of it.

  This is the wonder of names. Like the press of a footprint in the snow: proof that someone has been there.

  9

  There is a scattering of applause during Gareth’s introductory speech when he mentions that the Chester Museum has been exhibiting the work of individual collectors for one hundred and forty-two years. He waits until the applause subsides, nods to acknowledge it, and then continues. “Edmund Chester was a man of his time, of the Industrial era, in that he valued and upheld the two most prevalent ideals of his age: progress and mastery. For Edmund, society’s ability to move forward and look back simultaneously was a wonder. The men that he admired, those he surrounded himself with, strove to understand the world in new ways, to mechanize it, simplify it and coordinate it, while also preserving and revelling in the past and in the fortitude of the elements. Men of his generation didn’t rest on their inheritances; they used their money and titles to ferret out new possibilities, business models, technologies, remedies and inventions, formulae that could be shared amongst all kinds and classes of people, that could affect how all members of society lived their lives. The associations to which Edmund belonged, the fraternity to whom we—as inheritors of this collection—owe a debt of gratitude, believed that they had come of age in an era of optimism and vitality, one that was a me
ans to a new kind of power, a power that was not exempt from accountability. Those who didn’t invest in factories or inventions supported local homes, schools and civic institutions. Like Edmund they believed that knowledge mattered, that our history, values and society were reflected in how we regarded and understood the material world—a material world that wasn’t limited to the creatures and specimens found in nature but one that extended to those things we made ourselves.”

  Jane can detect a hint of anger in Gareth’s voice, a gruffness that she’s only heard a few times, most distinctly when he announced the museum’s closure. He has been the director and head curator at the Chester for almost thirty years, and he helped vote in the very government that is cutting museum funding. Jane knows that when Gareth was a young boy his mother brought him here once a summer, packing sandwiches and a canister of tea. After they wandered through the museum they’d lunch in the park across the street because it wasn’t gated then and anyone could use it. Seeing his interest in the diorama of exotic animals—the mounted wolf and the moose whose great antlers had been hung with pondweed—his mother bought him a book on mammals. In the year that followed, whenever he was stuck inside the house because of pollen counts and the cotton that seemed to puff up in his chest, she’d give him quizzes on the mammals’ Latin names, on their subspecies, diets and habitats.

  Gareth had told all this to the Minister when he’d invited him to tour the museum a month ago. As Jane trailed behind them, she heard Gareth explain that he knew what it was like to visit a museum and carry the experience back into the world. Even back then, Gareth said, he knew that the scientific instruments and plant models he saw in those cabinets had applications and counterparts in the landscape he walked through every day to school. The Minister seemed to see it otherwise: he thought of museums like the Chester as a series of dimly lit rooms where things that were interesting but no longer relevant were shelved. He barely glanced at the displays, seemed to take more interest in the walkway carpet. “Cutting the museum’s funding is a mistake,” Gareth had said. Jane knew he thought it was a poorly conceived cost-cutting measure by a government that specialized in being shortsighted, that was ignorant about the finite nature of resources, whether natural, manmade or ephemeral. Gareth understood the black-and-white economics, but not the sense of it. He had done his best to appeal the decision, but no one in power had budged.

  What, Jane wonders now, would Edmund Chester make of the museum’s closing? Of the longcase clock auctioned off to a private buyer in the south for a coastal home he’d hardly set foot in, of the birds going to a lawyer, the Darwin collection to a bank executive, of the whale bones being shipped to a failing aquarium halfway around the globe? Even the specimen jars that were part of the original collection had been packed into padded cases and would soon be driven down the road to the Natural History Museum, where they’d be left in storage because that museum did not have room to display them.

  Edmund had not been ashamed to admit that he loved things. In his letters and journals he praised everything from a piston to a pendulum, a cluster of mushrooms in the woods to his factory—a place he loved for the way it expressed a working order, a procedural seamlessness, though he also knew from his own encounters with misfortune that order was an illusion. Jane thinks that the museum was his refuge in this way—a perfect expression of the largely mysterious world, of the gaps in mankind’s knowledge, of the delight of the newly discovered, all under the shelter of one roof. For Edmund, the collection must have been like a giant puzzle, and he’d occupied himself with fitting one piece into the next, whole years spent expanding the imagined frame. The museum was his way of capturing the accomplishments and wonder of men’s lives in rooms that testified to their efforts and erudition—men like Arthur Nicholson and Perry Humphrey, men like Norvill Farrington, who, in those early years, held up the scarab beetle on its card of paper and explained to those gathered how the wings made a chirring sound, a mode of vibration that caused the body to sing.

  What would Edmund Chester have said he’d accomplished, if he’d had time to say so on his last day on earth? Jane thinks of him as a man of science. His pleasure was in the “how” of the world, its palpability, its reverberations. Even when lifting Charlotte’s chin with his hand in the happy years of their marriage he had probably marvelled at how her eyelids lowered the slightest bit; how her lips parted in anticipation. His life was one of constant study: measuring inches of cloth by hours, assembling fossils bone by articulated bone, weighing his grief against his joys, his discoveries against his losses. In the end perhaps he would have said he had offered people a glimpse of the wonder of the world; he’d helped expose its mysterious workings.

  A year or so before his death, Edmund wrote a letter to his son about what he called a series of “disagreements” with the house clock. This letter is one of Jane’s favourites. Sitting on the landing, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the guts of the old longcase clock on the floor around him, its pendulum stilled, he found himself thinking, This is the symbol of the age: the world’s workings laid out before us, and those of us with the patience to sort through the intricacies casting about its parts. He admitted that on some nights he’d wake with a start and hold his breath until he could make out the clock at the base of the stairs ticking. How even though the maid wiped its brass bezel and glass regularly, he often took a cloth to it himself because it gave him pleasure that the cut of cloth he used came from his own factory, and that the clock face was aging as he aged, that it too needed tending.

  Edmund also liked a good gathering. If he were here tonight to see his museum closing, the collection dispersed, Jane thinks he might have been pragmatic enough to enjoy the champagne, to take his wife’s gloved hand in his and say, Let’s begin again. He might have reinvented himself, bolstered himself by dwelling on what was possible. Jane is under no such delusion about herself. She took up the cello and then gave up the cello; she went to university to study archive and records management and then came to the Chester to work. Standing in a hall full of people bursting with enthusiasm about their own careers she finds herself with no secret or special skills, no hidden reserve of optimism and little imagination for reinvention. Instead she has a paralyzing numbness, a sense that whatever she gets close to dissipates or breaks. What Edmund Chester touched made him feel alive; what Jane touches makes her feel absent, as if there’s a life force in everything but her, as if she’s on the outside of a world twitching with possibility.

  As Gareth nears the end of his speech, he directs his gaze to the front row, a few seats in from the end. From where Jane is positioned along the side wall she can make out the back of a man’s head: short, sandy-coloured hair, William’s long neck and narrow shoulders. “We all live in history,” Gareth concludes, “because it is history that shapes us.”

  While the audience claps—some of the staff members from other museums standing up in a show of solidarity—Jane moves slowly along the wall toward the first row. She stops beside a marble column where she has a good view of William—out of his line of sight because he’s watching Gareth, but able to observe how his eye-glasses are now thick brown frames instead of the wire-rimmed ones he used to wear, how his face is softer, his lips thinner. Jane feels a twinge, a mix of sadness and surprise, that she remembers his lips, her fifteen-year-old desire to kiss them.

  What she thinks will happen, what she wants to happen, is for William to read and for the lecture to end and for him to turn at some late point in the evening when the room has thinned, and see her talking with Gareth a short distance away, and to come over. When Gareth introduces them, William might smile and shake her hand. And maybe Gareth will say, by way of context, that Jane is a good archivist, and they’ll talk about his lecture or Jane’s work on the Whitmore archive, and it will be okay that everything that matters between them goes unsaid.

  After she bought The Lost Gardens of England Jane had thought about not reading it. She returned to her flat, set
the book on the side table and stared at the cover—a Marianne North painting from nineteenth-century Jamaica with a green assemblage of cabbage palm, breadfruit, cocoa and coral trees. It was as if she was waiting for the book to do something. Then, two weeks ago when she finally did set herself down on the sofa and pick it up in her hands, she read the whole thing in one sitting. But she didn’t follow the stories—the steamship sinking off the coast of Madras with a whole cache of specimens collected in Ceylon, the murders of two Scottish plant exporters along the Yangtze—so much as imagine William doing his research, working on the problem of the missing specimens he described, the lost lives. She convinced herself that she was reading the book with an archivist’s eye for how one uncovers and arranges historical events, for the ways in which what one knows and doesn’t know can be shuttled between the struts of fact and extrapolation. But she knew she was lying to herself, and the farther into the book she read, the more exposed she felt. By the time she finished the last page describing George Farrington’s legacy—his alpine and Rhododendron plantings in the woods at Inglewood, the very woods where Lily, and N too, were lost—she was shaking. She closed the book, pulled a wool throw across her lap, turned her face into the sofa cushion and cried like she hadn’t since she was a child.

  When she woke up the next morning she thought about calling her therapist, but didn’t. Instead she remembered how Clive had suggested, during one of their last appointments, that Jane had to let go of the idea of William. He’d said, “Grief is different for everyone.” Later he amended the statement: “Actually, what you have is not grief, it’s more like sorrow. You’re sorry that this happened to Lily, and sorry that it happened to you. Grief can be shared,” he said gently. “What you have in common with Mr. Eliot is more like guilt. And that is always individual.”

  What little we know about ourselves we know because of Jane. Our task as we see it is to wait: wait through those weeks and months when her thoughts have nothing to do with us, days when we have to force ourselves not to make ripples in the living world to gain her attention. Days we have almost risked Ceasing to be able to work a keyboard, switch on the History Channel, put a fist through a wall. We have, in our own way, been waiting for William too, for something to be repaired or unconditionally broken.