When William takes the stage, the applause peaks and then subsides. He adjusts the microphone and places his book and lecture notes on the podium; he pushes the bridge of his glasses up with a finger. “Thank you, Gareth, for that wonderful reminder of the value of museums like this one, and for the warm introduction. I must confess to feeling a bit intimidated. I see so many colleagues here, so many people doing wonderful work in museum science. To have a book—especially one that started out as so much scribbling—be so well received is, frankly, unexpected.”
He pauses and takes a sip of water and his hand trembles as he puts the glass down. “When Gareth first called me about the award, he very clearly stipulated that new work was expected in terms of the lecture. I happily accepted because there was a thread of information, a tiny confluence, if you will, that I had uncovered during my research, but which had no place in the final book. This has to do, of course, with the wonderful museum we are privileged to be sitting in tonight. Many of you may not be familiar with the name Norvill Farrington, but hopefully by the end of this talk you will be. He was an important reformer of museum science in the Victorian era, a geologist of some note, an early supporter of the Chester and friend to its founder, Edmund. He also happens to have been brother to George Farrington of Inglewood—the Victorian plant hunter who features in the last chapter of my book.”
While William pulls his lecture notes out from under his book, we turn to Jane. Her face is impassive save for two red blooms on her cheeks. We know that she is wishing to be elsewhere even as she is relieved to be here; that she is trying, as she has always tried, to put the idea of William into an equation so that she can say “he is X” or “we owe each other Y” and leave it at that. Instead, the idea of him slips constantly out of every box she tries to put him in. We sense her anger welling too—because William has announced that he is going to be talking about Norvill. Norvill, whom Jane knows through her work on the Chester family archives. Norvill, who she irrationally thinks is hers.
“Norvill Farrington was born in London in 1843,” William begins. “By the time Norvill was twenty he’d become acquainted with Edmund Chester through a mutual friend, the collector Roger Cain who was also a member of the Royal Society …”
The details in the first part of the lecture are all facts that Jane knows, information gleaned during the months it took her to organize the Chester display upstairs, months spent going through the museum’s records and the trunks of material she found when Gareth sent her to Edmund’s great-granddaughter’s house on the coast, boxes of ledgers and letters pulled out of her attic along with Charlotte Chester’s diaries, writing desk, hair combs and scarab bracelet.
At first, listening to William speak, Jane feels strange. It’s uncanny, this doubling: Jane’s knowledge of the Chester family set against his, the confluence of their interests and thinking. Even the steady rhythm of his voice is unsettling, although there’s a wooing quality to it too, as if he’s reading a bedtime story, as if at the end something will be said, a moral tale delivered that will make the world more coherent, easier to live in.
Jane leans against the marble pillar and its coolness kisses the space between her shoulder blades. Listening to William, she can feel longing seep over her. She registers it as if from a distance, thinks how the feeling is like being overtired as a child—thinks of Claire eight months pregnant with Lewis and hauling a two-year-old Jane across the university quad, trying to find some secretary of undergraduate services or assistant to the assistant registrar who’d watch her just for a few hours. Jane had wanted that too—a large office chair in some out-of-the-way corner, a place she could curl up in.
William may be right about Norvill and Edmund’s friendship, and about the two occasions in the 1870s when the Farrington and Chester families met, but gradually Jane registers that he’s skipping over other key facts entirely, and as she follows the thread of his lecture she tries to guess if he’s overlooking them on purpose. What about the details in Charlotte Chester’s letters and diary, details that Jane had noted: brief remarks in a feminine hand that read “N.F. for dinner,” “N.F. for tea,” “discussed contemporary novels with Norvill”—Norvill’s name scrolled over the pages even as the names of other guests, ones noted in Edmund’s own daybook, were overlooked? William hasn’t mentioned Charlotte by name at all. He is focusing instead on how Edmund Chester helped secure funding for one of George Farrington’s Himalayan plant expeditions, how Edmund himself funded George’s last trip to Tibet—an agreement that was reached after a weekend shooting party at Inglewood. An event that Jane has seen referenced in the archive.
When he is finished and the applause subsides, William slips into the crowd and Gareth gently ushers him down the centre aisle to the book-signing table at the back of the hall. A dozen people are already holding books for William to sign. It is obvious that William is new at this; he is overly formal with the first few people who press their copies into his hands—Hamish Andrews, a senior member of the board who congratulates him heartily, and a botanist maybe five years older than William who inquires amiably about his research sources for the chapter on the Madras shipwreck. William glances up at his publicist, a woman in bright-red lipstick and a metallic dress who is monitoring the process, as if checking to see whether discussion is allowed.
Jane stands by the hummingbirds, not sure what she’s waiting for. Her black dress, reflected back at her in the cabinet’s glass, suddenly seems like something one would wear to a funeral. Her thoughts are muddy: she looks from bird to bird and can’t separate the impact of seeing William from the contents of his lecture or the fact of the Chester’s closure. One moment of clarity emerges: William, at least, is making use of the things he knows—things she knows.
To Jane’s left, reflected in the glass, a girl in a white gossamer blouse and long blue skirt appears. She is coming over to look at the hummingbirds, and the effect of these two images blended—the semblance of the girl and the nimble hover of birds—is so beautiful and unexpected that Jane can’t bring herself to turn around.
“Mina?” A blonde woman in a green strapless dress appears in the reflection behind the child. “Where are you going, darling?”
Mina turns around and says something too quiet for Jane to hear.
“Yes, they are. All right then, a quick look, hurry up.” She smiles at Jane in the reflected glass—two women of childbearing age catching each other’s gaze and therefore complicit, sharing what it is to have children, or what it must be like.
Mina walks toward the cabinet and the woman takes a mobile phone out of her beaded clutch purse. She checks its little rectangle of light and then turns away from the ruckus of the main hall, presses some keys and puts it against her ear.
Jane looks down at Mina and makes a silly face. The girl is eight, maybe nine; she has the kind of mousey-brown hair that gets blonder in the summer, a heart-shaped face, a chicken pox scar on her brow just above the bridge of her perky nose. Because she has manners and because her mum has let her come over, she mouths, Hi to Jane and then she turns and studies the hummingbirds, counting them under her breath.
“Mina?” It’s a man’s voice this time.
Mina glances over her shoulder at William, and Jane watches as he comes toward them, touching the blonde woman’s waist as he moves past her, the mobile phone still pressed against her ear.
“Sweetie, it’s time to go, it’s past your bedtime.” He reaches down for Mina’s hand and she threads her fingers through his. Then William stands there for a few seconds registering what she’s looking at—something Henri or Claire would never have done for Jane—taking it in as if it matters. “That one’s lovely,” he says, and he points a fraction of an inch off the glass at one of the birds on the middle branch, a broadbill with a blue throat and green chest. He doesn’t look at Jane.
“I like this one.” Mina identifies a grey bird with splayed wings and a ruff of purple feathers around its neck, her finger pressing against the
glass so that for an instant after she moves her hand away, there’s a faint round print there.
William turns to Jane and his eyes flick up into hers. The small red centre of pressure that has been in her chest all night balloons and moves up to her throat.
“Sorry to interrupt.” He smiles at Jane and places his hands on Mina’s shoulders to steer the girl, who Jane can now see resembles Lily, toward the woman who is putting the phone back into her bag.
“Sorry—” Jane turns toward William and tries to steady her voice. “Have we met before?”
It’s obvious she’s speaking to William, but instead of replying he turns first to his wife so that she can register his confusion, see that despite what these sorts of things sometimes look like, there’s been a mistake. Then he turns and looks directly at Jane.
“I don’t believe so.” His voice is even, but his brow is creased and his lips are pinched in a vaguely baffled expression. He is looking at Jane—Jane, who everyone says hasn’t changed a bit in all these years, who in all the essential ways still resembles that Jane—and he doesn’t know her.
How ridiculous it suddenly seems—the monastic life she’d imagined for him, the amount of space she’d believed she occupied in his everyday existence, an expanse she’d thought would equal the space he and Lily consumed in her. Jane can feel herself begin to shake, William staring at her blankly now, a stupid passive expression on his aging face.
“Will?” his wife asks, standing behind Mina and moving her arm protectively over her daughter’s chest.
It isn’t even a thought. It takes Jane two steps to reach him, to place her left hand gently against his cheek and slap him sharply with the right.
10
September had swept in, and Inglewood House, when Norvill Farrington arrived, was colder than he’d expected. He stood morosely in his old childhood room—a panelled suite that felt claustrophobic compared to his own bright and well-appointed accommodations in London—and rang impatiently for the footman. There was, he saw now, something too rural about the house: its dark, stocky furniture, grey flagstones, thick wood-beam ceilings, heavy curtains and mahogany shelves; the tiger and deer skins in his room becoming more motley every year. It had been a shooting lodge before his parents purchased it in 1847, and in the intervening thirty years the only substantial improvements seemed to have been made to George’s gardens. When Norvill was young, the house had fascinated him; he’d grown up with dead pheasants displayed in terrariums, stag and fox heads mounted along the hall outside his room, a stuffed bear in the entry near the stairwell. He’d spent whole hours contemplating the animals’ wet-seeming noses, the muzzle of white fur around the roe deer’s snout, the fox’s yellowed canines. But now it all seemed oppressive and disingenuous and cold—the wildebeest, cheetah and buffalo heads imported, fixtures that, like the brass telescope on his desk and the globes on his bookshelf, seemed to say the real world is elsewhere.
In Norvill’s absence a large mirror had been hung to the left of his bed, its frame a Baroque monstrosity. He recognized it from the room of his mother, Prudence, and imagined it had been moved because of the patina that had developed on its reflective surface—or perhaps because replacing things and shuttling objects around the house were two of Prudence’s abiding pleasures. Norvill took off his hat, jacket and shirt to change for George’s reception and surveyed himself briefly in the marred mirror. He almost didn’t recognize the figure blinking back at him: his face was more sun-kissed than expected, his cheeks ruddier, moustache thinner. There were patches in his sideburns and on his chest that, upon close inspection, were flinted with strands of white. Standing there, the brown and amber hues of the room cloaking him, he felt as if he were a stranger, or if not a stranger, a kind of double: a brother to himself, a “George” observing his sibling’s return to the nest, his awkward attempts to settle into it.
Norvill mentioned the mirror in a letter he wrote that night to Charlotte Chester—secreted to her through his footman and the lady’s maid Prudence had assigned to her. He felt a frisson of excitement over the daring of the note, its physicality and possible interception, in the downstairs gossip he knew its passage would elicit. The letter was written on George’s monogrammed house stationery, and the envelope bore the inky scratch of Charlotte’s given name. The top slip of paper inquired after her quarters: were she and Edmund happy with their rooms? Was the fire sufficient or would they require extra bedding? The second slip confided that although the prospect of her company made the journey north desirable he felt a growing agitation at finding himself back in Inglewood, his countenance reflected in the obscenity of his mother’s mirror in a room and a house that were resolutely his, but wholly belonged to George.
William Eliot’s lecture at the Chester—his references to Norvill and Inglewood, to the gardens of the estate—had helped us conjure an image of life there. Some of us remembered the great lawns and the elaborate flowerbeds, glass hothouses and peacocks; some of us remembered a mirror and Norvill’s description of how he felt looking into it. The mirror was larger than the room’s windows, its frame a sea of gold waves, though up close you could discern carved sprays of laurel and Acanthus, bevelled curves where the dust always settled. One of us remembered the feel of the frame under her hand, could see herself running a cloth over its furrows, too busy with work to study her own reflection.
What we liked most about William’s lecture was how the simple act of making a statement allowed us access to an image. When he said “Inglewood” and “lake,” some of us could see a boat tethered to a rock by a fraying length of rope; when he said “manor,” one of us saw a library of windows to wash and drawers of cutlery to polish. A vision of Prudence Farrington appeared vividly to some of us at the mere mention of her name—one of us saw a stern and stubbornly uncorseted woman with streaks of grey ribboning her brown hair, another pictured her striding along an Indian carpet in a yellow-striped walking dress she’d had made for the shooting party, her pursed mouth relaxing enough to form a series of words that took the guise of a favour, though such appeals were usually closeted demands. The morning’s work put away because of this request, and the pattern of the day unexpectedly changed.
When the party reached the lake it was announced that Norvill would row the guests to the picnic spot on the opposite shore in two groups—announced by George on the grounds that he himself would then be able to identify points of interest in the dale, although Norvill believed it was simply a matter of George not wanting to pick up the oars. George had taken to calling their excursion an “exploring party,” and as such wanted to be at the front of the group at all times in order to draw their attention to various flora on the trail and to regale them with stories from his last plant-hunting expedition in the Orient.
There were six in the first group: Edmund and Charlotte Chester, their three children and one of George’s housemaids—a milk-faced girl whose name Norvill had already forgotten; and five in the second group: the Suttons of Helton Hall sitting stiffly on the bench in front of Norvill, George and Prudence behind, the Hindu and George’s prize lurcher Cato at the stern, the hound leaning into the wind and working his nose in the direction of the swans. The Hindu, Rai, had ostensibly been brought along to haul the hampers and carry the guns, although Norvill suspected that George preferred his valet’s company to anyone else’s. As much as their mother enjoined her elder son to the role of congenial host, and as much as George embraced it, Norvill knew that his brother would, in every instance, rather be scampering up the ledge of some Yangma rock face beside his former porter than leading a group of bustled women across the estate’s grounds. Rai, wedged behind the hampers, was apparently of the same mindset: his brown face was impassive above his light-wool gho and his eyes stared drearily at the approaching shore. Loading the boat he’d said nothing, as usual, though when pushing off he’d levelled instructions at the dog in his native tongue—the velvet lilt of his voice causing the Suttons to sit even straighter.
Norvill leaned sideways to press the right oar into service and the prow angled toward the sandy ledge of the shore. Really, when he thought about it, George ought to be rowing. After all, the exploring party was a means of getting everyone outdoors so that George might show off some of his recent plantings, an entertainment wed to his desire to procure expedition funding from the Suttons and his need to appear to all as a man to whom things came easily, a man who could make an afternoon tea worthy of a monarch appear by a lake without so much as a hint of sweat above his scarred and bristle-covered lip. But, Norvill had to admit, it suited him, this delegation of duties. He had rowed briefly at university, and still had some trace of an athlete’s physique. The rowing required him to remove his jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves. He felt himself wholly present in that, at least, in the act of moving things forward by will, stroke after stroke across the waveless water.
The World Before Us Page 11
