The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “Where did she go?” the boy asked.

  “Trap door,” the idiot answered.

  “She was pretty,” said the girl. “I liked her hair. What’s a trap door?”

  “It’s a hole that opens in the floor,” the one with the soft voice said.

  “Is she stuck?” asked the girl.

  “Nope,” we said.

  “Actually it depends,” said the idiot. “It is, conceptually speaking, possible for matter to pass through matter, and therefore possible for matter to become stuck, one thing inside the other, the woman and the floor, for example, the surface of things being—”

  “Stop—” the theologian hissed.

  “—the surface of things being an illusion and the particulate nature of the universe such that gaps and fissures exist between all things. If we take molecular models—”

  The theologian cleared his throat.

  “—and apply probability, which granted precludes—”

  “Shut it,” said Cat, “or else.”

  The audience shuffled toward the bar.

  “Shall we?” the musician asked, and he stepped forward to conduct us up the aisle.

  At the bar the girl wanted to know, “If the white-dressed woman—”

  “Ophelia,” we said.

  “If O-felya isn’t trapped then is she Ceased?”

  “Define your terms,” said the idiot.

  “No one is talking to you,” Cat snapped.

  We turned our attention to the same place we always did.

  “Yes, she is Ceased”—the theologian flourished a wavery hand in the air—“for all intents and purposes.”

  “Excuse me,” someone said—a woman in a black turtleneck and tiger-print scarf—speaking to the queue of people in front of us at the bar. Because it was a weekday matinee the theatre had only opened one of its three lounges and it was packed. We always felt pinched in these situations so we moved out onto the balcony to stand beside the crowd of men in suit jackets and women in blousy dresses holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Through the glass doors we could see Jane and Ben still arguing about whether or not the performance was any good, Ben’s eyes flitting over Jane’s shoulder to the women walking in and out of the loo.

  “So is she stuck or is she Ceased?” the girl asked again, eyeing the cup of ice cream an elderly woman was handing to her husband, the side of it lightly shimmered with ice.

  “Not stuck,” we all say.

  “Again—” the idiot interjected, but we shushed him.

  “Ceased. We will all Cease eventually,” the theologian repeated, clearly annoyed by the topic.

  Bored, the boy made the Indian powwow call he’d been perfecting and circled a nearby couple.

  “We may Cease eventually, sweetie, but we are not Ceased yet,” Cat said. “At least, not exactly.”

  “And what’s griefes?” the girl asked.

  “Where did you hear that?” the one with the soft voice asked.

  “The man with the sword said it.”

  “Ka-pow, ka-pow!” shouted the boy as he fired a few shots and then turned on himself and released an arrow.

  “Formes, Moods, shewes of Griefe—” expounded the poet.

  Cat leaned toward the girl. “It’s a kind of sadness.”

  “—my inky cloak,” the poet sang, “trappings, suits of woe.”

  We think now that Ceasing might be as wrong as everything else. We entered Jane’s dream and changed things and nothing happened; John took a name and he is still here. Even fluttering, in the understated ways we have done it, has gone unpunished. When pressed it’s hard for us to remember where these rules came from, if they were something we were born with or if they came from the theologian.

  “There’s someone here,” the theologian says, and he looks from Jane’s bed toward the window. The rest of us, weary of his declarations, try to concentrate on what he’s perceiving, but we can see nothing but daylight streaming in through the window, the wind lifting the long grass that banks the river, and Sam, his paws twitching on the mat.

  Jane pushes off the duvet and Sam stands in the square of sun where he’d been lying, shakes his fur and stretches. It’s almost noon, so Jane slips into jeans and a sweater to head to the shops for something to eat and to buy a notebook and pens so she can start into the Whitmore box, see if there’s anything she overlooked when she dipped into it last.

  In the corner shop she grabs a sandwich, dry dog food for Sam, a cheap squeaky toy he’ll probably chew a hole in within minutes and some stationery. While she waits in the queue a young boy and his sister race up and down the candy aisle, and the flap of the boy’s jacket knocks a handful of chocolate bars onto the checkered floor.

  “Phillip!” The boy’s mother glares at him from the till where she’s paying for two juice cartons and a newspaper. “Put those back right now.” She smiles apologetically at Jane and says sorry to the cashier. Phillip puts the candy bars back, then falls in line behind his mother. As soon as he does so, the boy and the girl who are with us run up and down the aisles just as the other two had done. “Zoooooom,” airplanes the boy, and the girl races alongside him imitating his engine sound, the two of them zipping up and down the aisle so fast they flutter the chocolate bars the boy had put on the edge of the box back onto the floor. The clerk looks up when they fall, Jane glances over and the mother frowns. She walks over to put them back: a small everyday slippage of matter.

  Back at the inn Jane slides the Whitmore box over to the bed and sits on the carpet with her back against the wood frame and mattress. She pulls out the casebook pages she photocopied almost a decade ago when she was doing her MA. Riffling through them she decides to start with Leeson—her best source for what happened the night of the trio’s escape and visit to Inglewood House. Wanting, in more ways than one, to go back to the beginning.

  14

  The Whitmore patient casebooks always follow the same formula: basic statistics followed by descriptions of the individual’s symptoms upon committal to the asylum, and supporting statements from two doctors. Charles Leeson, age 42, solicitor, married. Jane sits against the wood frame of the bed in her room at the inn and rereads her copy of Leeson’s file, picturing him the way she always does, as the type of gentleman found in a crowd scene in a painting by Manet: his hair peppering into grey, his clothes fit and proper. Under “Symptoms” a doctor with spidery handwriting had penned: Believes he has murdered his infant and that he is to be put on trial. Hears animal noises at night. Is convinced creatures are trying to get into his house. Claims there is a man inside the statue in the city square watching him … And even though Leeson’s name is at the top of the page, some of us standing around Jane are confused, because it seems we both know and don’t know the man being described.

  This kind of information—clinical and without context—can be found in the other files Jane reads: Eliza Woodward, 22. Admitted: June 2, 1877. Occupation: Button seller. Status: Single. Whether first attack: No. Duration: 2 weeks. Cause of insanity: Unknown. Symptoms: Believes she was being held captive in her own home. Disobeys her father. Invents mischief. Claims that she has thrown candles at the minister during mass and set him on fire. Injures herself by hitting. Will go out without a bonnet. Unpicks fancy work she has just completed. Has fits of laughing, crying and kissing people.

  Alfred Hale, 36. Admitted: January 25, 1877. Occupation: Instrument repair. Status: Single. Whether first attack: Yes. Duration: 3 weeks. Cause of insanity: Blow to the head. Whether suicidal: No. Whether danger to others: Uncertain. Hallucinations: Believes himself to be a renowned composer. Maintains that he has performed for the Queen in her bedchamber. Claims to have powers in his hands and that it is dangerous for anyone to touch them.

  Jane stands up and puts on the kettle and Sam stretches his back.

  “What’s wrong with kissing?” Cat asks. She makes a loud mwah sound and then moves around the room—“Mwah, mwaaah, mwaaah”—pretending to kiss all of us
.

  When Jane sits back down to her files and notes, we gather around her again, though sometimes she reads too fast for us to follow because even a quick glance at a word like button seller can call to mind a shop with a wall of oak drawers along its length; the smell of the wood polish applied every morning before the doors were opened for business. We see teacher or joiner or clock repairer and suddenly some of us can feel the grit of chalk dust, or see holes bored into wood, hear a broken chime drag its heels across the hour—some version of our selves appearing in these notices, a hint of relation, though the details are so scant they don’t make room for the person we are starting to feel we were: someone who may have taken delight in snowfall or a child’s curtsey, the canter of a horse or the efficiency of stamps, or the rough ardour of a washerwoman. These files say nothing of generosity, playfulness, the wing-collared jacket one of us believes he preferred, the bowl of ripe fruit one of us remembers painting in art class, a fly sitting on the leaf of the strawberry.

  At the end of each casebook there is a square box for patient outcomes. Inside some are the phrases discharged cured or discharged uncured or died of illness; occasionally the note says transferred to—followed by the name of another institution. In John Hopper’s case there is a letter from the supervisor at a clockworks factory affixed between pages:… thought it prudent to appraise you of J. Hopper’s progress over these past two weeks. Overall he has shown a high degree of conscientiousness—both in work and personal command … Charles Leeson’s casebook has no such letter. Instead, in looping writing the last entry states: Died 5 September 1877. Then, in a hand that Jane thinks might be Superintendent Thorpe’s, the added words: at the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics.

  By the time Jane gets up to go out for dinner she is almost halfway through her Whitmore file box and has written two pages of notes that don’t connect the pieces of the story in any meaningful way. She has what she had a year ago—names and a web of relationships between the patients convalescing at the Whitmore in 1877, but no mention of any woman’s name that starts with N outside of the “missing” reference in the hospital logbook.

  Jane pulls her bag over her shoulder and Sam stands up and wags his tail. She leashes him and then stops to check her bag for her mobile, rooting around in it until she remembers that she left the phone on the kitchen table back in London, deliberately, so that no one would know where she was.

  The village fish and chip shop is lit yellow by dingy overhead lights and smells more like grease than the sea. Sam waits outside while Jane sits in a plastic chair listening to the deep fryer gurgle over her haddock and the kid behind the counter laughs at a video on a laptop screen.

  Jane takes a sip of her fizzy drink and then plays with the straw, poking it around the hole in the can while she tries to decide if she should call Lewis or Gareth, or both. It’s possible that Lewis still doesn’t know what happened and that Gareth has stopped calling. Maybe William explained how he knew her, or maybe Gareth decided it would be best to wait until Monday for Jane to explain herself—Gareth assuming that the workweek would start as usual and that Jane would simply show up.

  From the picnic table outside the inn, Jane can see down the road to the pub, its outside lamp hanging over a knot of Saturday-night drinkers. When a group goes back in and the conversations diminish, the village goes back to its humming: the sound of power lines and the steady drone of a generator out the back, the river shushing underneath it and, somewhere under that, the churning falls.

  Sam drops his chin on Jane’s knee and she feeds him one of her chips. “Because you’re on holiday,” she says, and he drops his chin again and blinks up at her. She glances down the road to the pub one more time, craving a glass of wine or an off-sale bottle she can bring back to her room—but it’s late and she decides it won’t kill her to go without, so she wipes her hands on a napkin and gathers her rubbish. Sam barks and, when Jane gives him a stern look, wags at his own audacity.

  “We’ll go exploring tomorrow, okay? Provided you can behave.” She rubs his ears, still as soft as when he was a puppy, and puts her head down, touching his cold wet nose to hers.

  By eleven Jane is in bed and we are settling into our corners, attending to how her thoughts move between the files she’s been reading and what she could have done differently with William. The best part of the evening, for us, was earlier when we watched her leaf through a file of programmes and invitations to various hospital entertainments. We crowded around the photocopies she’d made of the events that took place the summer N went missing: sheets of carefully inked names and intended performances, formal invitations to recitals and plays. Some of us could call up snatches of songs or forgotten faces as we looked at the handbills: “Mr. Tom Underwood playing street piano!” “Miss Florence Donlan singing ‘Now Ever’ by Mattei!” “A recitation of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ by Mr. Samuel Murray!” “An ensemble performance by the Whitmore Players of The Rosebud of Stinging Nettle Farm: A Melodramatic Pastoral in Fifteen Gasps!” “Dr. Thorpe and Matron Montgomery performing a duet by Mendelssohn!”

  “Oh God,” the musician groaned, “that woman couldn’t play pianoforte at all!”

  Memory being what it is, we sometimes remember backward, or sideways, or inside out. We will read the name of a song and instead of its melody some of us might experience a tightness around the ribs, a corseting. Or we might recall the notes but instead of seeing the musicians playing will picture the diamond pattern of a floor. Applause spilling out from an audience might equal heartache; a leaflet for the Fancy Fair might put the taste of toffee in our mouths. History is never perfectly framed, although the photographs in the museum may suggest otherwise. In Jane’s file tonight we saw the notice for Dr. Thorpe and Matron Montgomery performing a duet, and one of us felt the heat of a room and another felt a bump on his forehead and still another saw a man in a wooden chair tapping his hand on his leg out of rhythm with the song. We saw the Matron’s thick fingers fall clumsily on the keyboard a beat behind the doctor’s bowing, and it pleased us to believe that someone with keys to rooms we could not open could do something so poorly.

  An hour after Jane has switched off the light she sits up in bed and pulls the cord on the lamp. The bulb flickers back on. We rouse ourselves as quickly as children who have only been pretending to sleep. Jane gets out of bed and goes over to the file she left on top of the Whitmore box. She thumbs through it, not exactly sure what she’s looking for. Stops at one of the programmes she’d photocopied a decade ago when she was doing her dissertation, one for the Whitmore’s 1877 asylum ball.

  “Lancers,” Cat says, peering at it.

  “Punch,” says the musician.

  “The Captain is here,” trills the poet.

  Jane scans the programme, then leafs back through the file folder to see if she’d made a duplicate of the invitation. Near the bottom of the file she finds it—a grey-scale copy of an ornate and perfectly typeset card, more formal than the usual billets done by patients practising their calligraphy.

  THE WHITMORE HOSPITAL FOR CONVALESCENT LUNATICS

  RESPECTFULLY INVITES YOU

  TO OUR ANNUAL SUMMER FESTIVAL AND BALL

  ENTERTAINMENT & LIBATIONS PROVIDED

  GLEES BY THE SINGING CLUB BEGIN AT 3

  READINGS IN THE RECREATION HALL AT 4

  TEA ON THE GROUNDS WILL BE SERVED AT 5

  DANCING ON THE LAWNS COMMENCES AFTER

  THE FORMAL BALL OPENS AT 7

  CARRIAGES AVAILABLE FROM THE STATION

  Jane’s dissertation work had been a survey of the types of records and documents kept by rural asylums in the Victorian era. Although she’d written a chapter contextualizing the intended use and consequential applications of these documents, most of the work had been dull—about “kind” and “type” more than content. She’d categorized programmes and entertainment broadsheets as “ephemera” and hadn’t spent much time thinking about them. As she pulls out the invitation for a
closer look she finds she can’t say exactly what a ball at an asylum might look like, although she knows it was part of the enterprise of normalizing and reviving patients: to provide them with formal occasions where they could dress in their best suits and gowns and practise behaving the way society expected them to. Such rehearsal was especially important in a convalescent hospital like the Whitmore, where the patients were presumed to be curable and often enjoyed greater freedoms in anticipation of release.

  Jane reads the invitation again and tries to picture the hundred or so souls at the Whitmore spinning on the hardwood floors of the recreation hall she’d walked through all those years ago. Closing her eyes she adds papier-mâché streamers to the walls, delicate bouquets on thin-legged tables, candle chandeliers and music from a band made up of patients and staff. The patients who weren’t in refractory care, who weren’t, as she’d read earlier in a casebook, “banned from the ball and all other social engagements for a fortnight,” would have been present, wearing their best clothes and dancing with—. And that’s when it occurs to her: with the public. The invitation was an invitation to the public, not just family or friends, but members of society. Carriages available from the station. Asylums and convalescent hospitals, she knows, regularly invited the public to their institutions so they could see how well the patients were treated, recognize their progress and the value of the hospital’s work. Slowly, she reasons it out: if balls weren’t just for guests of the patients, if they were for members of the community, then George Farrington, who lived a mere ten miles away, would probably have been invited. As one of the wealthiest landowners in the area, he would have known the Superintendent, or at least have been familiar with him.

  Mr. Farrington hopes that they did not suffer from their long walk. The letter he wrote to the Whitmore after Leeson and Herschel showed up at the manor wasn’t warmly or personally addressed, but it seems to indicate that Farrington wasn’t a stranger. He mentioned Inglewood by name but didn’t feel the need to contextualize himself or his estate. Jane does a quick calculation: he was moderately renowned as a botanist in 1877, but not so famous that he might eschew the convention of declaring himself and his relationship to the Whitmore at the start of a letter if he were a stranger to those with whom he was corresponding. Instead he presents his compliments.