The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Norvill had only been away at university a year when George wrote to tell him about being offered a place on a botanical expedition to the Himalayas. He would be gone eight months and Norvill would need to stay the term in Inglewood to manage the house and property and look after their mother, who had begun to suffer from nerves again. Their father, he wrote, was required too often in the city to make lodging in the country house a reasonable option for him.

  We know it was in that year, as George dispatched letters from canvas tents perched on cliffsides—the hands of the porters who delivered them to British ships so dirty the envelopes arrived at Inglewood with a crust of earth—that Norvill began to imagine his brother dead. Their mother read the missives to herself at the breakfast table, the hand holding the paper visibly trembling, the other flat on her neck. As he watched her lips move silently, Norvill invented a catalogue of misfortunes: cholera one day, rockslide the next, a parasite or botched robbery in a village on another. His mother would smooth the spotless white table linen in front of her when she was done, and Norvill would glower at his grizzled bacon, shoving his fork into the pale flesh of the melon brought into the village by cart, fantasizing that George was, at that very minute, expiring on a gravelly hillside. His mother, her face lit up, asking once, “Whatever, darling, are you smiling at?”

  Neither George nor Norvill had children, and after Prudence died the estate fell into the hands of her nephew Archie, the only son of her younger brother. He had the house emptied and the household dismissed almost immediately but held on to the property. During the bombing in the Second World War, Inglewood House was used to lodge schoolchildren from the south, as was the nearby Whitmore. The estate’s gardens were already ruined by then, according to the local historian, and further demolished when volunteers dug up some of the plots near the house to plant vegetables.

  After the war Inglewood House sat empty. Then, in the 1960s, long after anyone had set foot in it, Archie’s daughter listed the house with a property agent in London along with the furniture Archie had kept, and a good portion of what, by then, had become “unfashionable” art, as well as the books, the textiles and the moth-eaten menagerie of stuffed mammals that had been stowed in their coastal attic. The property was advertised for ten years before a group of investors from the Inglewood area managed to form a Trust and purchase it, hoping to find the capital to restore the gardens as a means of bringing tourists into the village. By the time of the book’s writing in 1976, the estate was falling apart, though the author felt sure—in the way hopeful local historians tended to—that the estate would “soon be returned to its former glory so that it can take its place as a unique representative of the houses of its age.”

  When Maureen comes out to clear Jane’s plate, Jane says, “Thanks,” then “Sorry,” because she can tell from the dwindling sounds of the washing-up on the other side of the swinging kitchen door that she is the last of the five guests to have come down for breakfast and that Maureen has been waiting for her to finish up.

  “We make the rooms up between noon and two,” Maureen says, the red apron she was wearing over her blouse replaced by a simple grey jacket, a pink shimmer on her lips as if she’s going out. She collects the cutlery and then angles the Inglewood book on the table so that she can see it better. On the cover there’s a black-and-white photograph of the estate house from the turn of the century, the Doric columns of the front portico looming over a half-dozen gardeners in white shirts and waistcoats clipping hedges or hand-mowing a lawn that seems to sprawl endlessly in front of them. “My grandfather was a delivery boy there,” Maureen says. “Never once set foot in the place.” She pauses. “Do you need anything else?”

  “No thanks.”

  She bends sideways to get a better look out the window behind Jane. “It’s nice weather for your walk to the caves.”

  “I might go over to Inglewood House, actually.”

  As Maureen heads toward the kitchen, she says over her shoulder, “It’s not open to the public, I’m afraid. They’ve been doing some work there on the weekdays, taking up half the village parking.”

  To get a better look at the estate Jane puts her hands up onto the mossy ledge of the stone wall that runs along the field, its flattened top lined with a carpet of lichen that furzes under her fingers. With the toe of her left shoe jammed into a crevice, she tries to haul herself up. On her third go she gets high enough to rest her torso on the ledge, the flat width of stone pushing into her abdomen, her legs dangling and Sam barking and turning circles below. From up here she can see the back of the manor: a row of floor-to-ceiling windows that look onto the gardens, four narrow balconies spaced evenly above those, and then the roof, gabling up to its six chimneys. There are ceramic pots of juniper on the patio stones clustered next to a dozen bags of fertilizer and a wheelbarrow; the air is claggy with the smell of manure and mulch.

  When she drops back down onto the grass near Sam, he jumps up on her, his paws dirtying her jeans, tail wagging madly. For a second or two she thinks she will carry on with their walk as planned, but then the image of Leeson and Herschel meeting Farrington in a parlour on the other side of the stone wall pulls at her. This is followed by thoughts of N, by what it might mean—at a time when everything else in her life is going so badly—to find her.

  “Right, then, Mr. Coleridge”—she claps, bending down to Sam and hooking one arm under his forelegs and the other under his bum—“you wait up on top. Do you hear me? Wait!” And once up, having pushed himself off her chest with his back legs, he does wait, all two and a half stone of him balanced sideways on the flat top of the wall, inching down into a sit while Jane hauls herself up again.

  Inglewood House, when Jane peers into its windows, is in a strange state, as if mid-restoration. Looking through the tall windows that line what was once a library Jane can discern a half-dozen pieces of furniture covered in dustsheets and stacks of boxes lined up on either side of a large marble fireplace. The far wall of the room is completely taken up with empty bookshelves of gleaming wood. Heavy silk curtains hang on either side of the windows, gold tassels banding the cloth; the ceiling has an ornate set of panels with motifs from the Orient. The library is uncarpeted except for ratty grey runners laid over the hardwood—the kind movers set down at every venue.

  Sam whines and Jane glances over to find him sniffing along the flagstone by what would have been the servants’ entrance, beside a trap door for deliveries. The delivery door is flapped open on one side and Sam wags madly as he tracks someone’s coming and going. “I don’t think so, bub,” Jane laughs, pressing her face back to the library window. When she turns to him again a minute later, he has toddled down two stairs and his back end is sticking up out of the entrance. “Sam! Get out of there!”

  The steps Sam is sniffing around on are worn in the middle from over a century and a half of use. Crouching down Jane can see that they lead into what looks to be the washing-up part of the kitchen. The open access is a permission she doesn’t think too long about. As a precaution Jane calls, “Hello?”—and taking this as a kind of consent, Sam bounds all the way into the kitchen and around the corner and out of view.

  The washing-up area is spare, block-walled except for the plastered area near the pipes, most of which are post-war add-ons that terminate, open-mouthed, near the corner. There are two large metal basins along the far wall, old 1930s things, with wood counters on either side. A plastic Tesco bag is sitting on one of them. Jane goes over and opens it gingerly to find a freshly wrapped sandwich, a bottle of water, a bag of crisps and an apple. Hearing the plastic rustle, Sam trots back from the other part of the kitchen and wags his tail against the metal legs of the basin.

  “Shhh,” Jane whispers.

  As Jane wanders from room to room, she muses that Inglewood House seems just like any old house that a new owner is moving into—boxes and crates everywhere, workboot prints on the hardwood, cans of paint and drop cloths, a battery-operated radio on the floor of th
e main hall next to a dustpan and broom. The look and feel of the place is still mid to late Victorian: the rooms dark wood and richly painted, the details around the archways intact, the Gothic embellishments on the banister handrails just as the Farringtons would have had them. The library Jane had surveyed from the window is dark blue, the carved armchairs under the sheets probably Chippendales. Opposite the fireplace Jane lifts a sheet and finds a satinwood cabinet with Wedgwood plaques depicting hunting scenes on its doors. The dining room adjacent still has what looks to be its original wallpaper—a faded grey Asian print sprigged with cherry blossoms. In the study that she imagines would have been George’s, Jane lifts a sheet’s corner to find a dark-red scroll-armed sofa, threadbare where one might have rested one’s arm, and then a mahogany secretary and a worn black leather armchair. Under a sheet stamped with the name of a turn-of-the-century hotel she finds a cabinet filled with glasses and decanters. The boxes and crates in each room bear inventory stickers—ovals stamped FT and bearing a London address, their designations handwritten in marker underneath: GFS 60-122, GFS 123-140. The system reminds Jane of the work she should be going back to, although what’s here is infinitely more appealing because it seems to be about re-creating, not dispersing, a world.

  Walking past marble pillars and carpets wrapped in plastic, Jane thinks how strange it is that she has tried and failed to properly imagine this place. She recalls what she knows of George and Prudence, of Norvill, and can’t even decide if the waist-high pillar in front of her would have hosted the sculpted head of a beautiful girl or Theseus slaying the Minotaur. At the end of the hall she opens a heavy wood door and is shocked to find a deteriorating wall-to-wall animal mural in what must have been the nursery or schoolroom. Ten wild animals are arranged around its perimeter: a shaggy lion in full-toothed roar, an elephant with his trunk trumpeting toward the ceiling. There’s a sanguine giraffe drawn out of proportion, a gorilla in a top hat and a mean-looking tiger so faded from the sunlight streaming through the window that he looks as if he’s receding into a far-off dream. Jane thinks about the young George Farrington as William had described him in the last chapter of his book: a self-conscious child, singular in his focus, constantly at his mother’s knee. And Norvill as a boy? Nothing that she has read would say. Charlotte’s diaries stick mostly to the details surrounding his visits to the museum or to the house to see Edmund, with little reference to what kind of man he was, let alone what kind of child. The Chester archives and Edmund’s accounts state when Norvill did and did not appear for meetings at the museum, what contributions he made by way of geological specimens, but offer nothing about what it might mean to spend formative days surrounded by tribes of wild animals—the painted ones in the schoolroom or the stuffed ones under plastic in the main hall.

  When she finds the parlour near the front of the house, Jane lifts the sheet off the horsehair sofa and sits. The black leather is split on the curve of the arm so that she can slip her fingers into its seam and feel the bristled fibres. There are a half-dozen inventoried boxes along the wall of the parlour and a stuffed grouse shrouded in clear wrapping, a mahogany longcase clock beside it. The ceiling is lower than she expected, and the wall where she imagined a set of watercolours hanging from ribbons is bare. The view from the window is of the great expanse of the front lawn. This room, or perhaps George’s study next door, would have been lit up on the night of N’s disappearance—would have cast the light Leeson and Herschel and N were drawn toward after their long walk from the Whitmore.

  Some of us have been in Inglewood House before, can conjure the objects that lined the shelves and cupboards, the pastoral oils that hung from the walls, embellishments we once touched or were responsible for. The plate was kept here, this book cabinet was locked, flowers were to be placed on this mantel, an armoire was located in this nook, the gun room was down that hall, this was the larder, the scullery; the laundry was pushed down this chute to be collected in the morning. We are like inventors, staring at a machine that isn’t there, that we seem to make exist out of the whirl of our own ardour. This, after all, is what we have been after—bits and pieces of stories we’ve lived, images that sail back to us as we enter a room, even if what we glean is the kind of knowledge that comes from village gossip—how one year the season’s bag of pheasants exceeded three hundred and George complained that it was more trouble to find mouths willing to eat so much bird than it was to go out on horseback and procure it. And so we see him here in this room, greeting a visitor or hastily reading a letter; or we glimpse Prudence upstairs in her cotton nightdress with her hair braided—recall how, in her last years, she insisted on starting each morning with three tinctures, how watching her open her mouth to receive them was like watching a baby bird.

  You might ask what it’s like to conjure such moments, to say that Herschel once sat where Jane is sitting and that Leeson stood in this very room and bowed for Prudence with a Romantic flourish she secretly liked. To suggest that the three clocks plunged on with their awkward ticking, each half-second announced like some fissure in physics the idiot thinks we can slip into. To remember N at the door watching the footman, then darting away when he went to find Farrington. To know that Farrington, assessing the situation quickly, took over before the footman realized that the number of the party had changed.

  “Twoo,” one of us says, and Cat sighs and air-kisses a circle around all of us.

  The poet wanders off to the study, the theologian stares at the grouse, and the one with the soft voice sings a song that must be what the living call a lullaby.

  Is what we are conjuring guesswork? Or a kind of love? We know that Norvill once stood in the door to his childhood nursery, his face clouding over as he read a letter from Charlotte. We know that he crumpled the note and threw it against the wall, and that he was made desperate because of it. Admittedly some of our knowledge is conjecture, but some is fact gained by access and some is understanding human nature, our dispositions imposing themselves on the maps made by others.

  And, too, one of us happened to pass him in the doorway in the way that people constantly pass by each other: the seen and the unseen, the preoccupied and the perceptive. The body is a miraculous thing: an assemblage of struts and muscles and nerves; two hundred and six bones placed exactly under a corset of muscle and ligament; and eyes to see, ears to hear. The hand that curls around a leaf of scented paper is a marvel to watch, and so too is the arrangement and rearrangement of lines on a face marred with unhappy thoughts.

  18

  When the young man who has been working in the gardens walks down the servants’ steps and into the kitchen of Inglewood House, Jane is thumbing gently through a box of books in the library. She doesn’t hear him, but Sam cocks his head and turns toward the sound, then trots across the main hall to the top of the stairs. They’ve been in the house nearly two hours. After the first fifteen or twenty minutes Jane had relaxed, realizing they weren’t going to trip any alarm wires or walk into a security guard; the house is clearly in a state of suspension, the Trust probably local enough to live up to its name.

  Jane notices Sam’s agitation and thinks he might need to go out to pee. She takes a last look around the library and follows him down the stairwell. When she gets to the bottom step she sees a young man, in a T-shirt and dark trousers, standing at the sink with his back to her. He’s rinsing his hands with water from a plastic bottle. Jane can make out the fuzzy interference of music playing in his earbuds. Stuck on the bottom step, she glances at Sam, who is standing ten feet behind the stranger, undecided whether she should sneak across the kitchen to the exit or go back upstairs until he’s gone. She’s about to step down and cross between the built-in pantry and the sinks when he turns around.

  “Whoa, Jesus!” He plucks out his earbuds and says, more politely, “Sorry, you scared me.”

  Jane smiles. He’s eighteen, maybe nineteen, has a mop of dark hair and patches of stubble on his chin. She can see now that he’s wearing navy over
alls, the upper part cinched around his waist and the knees caked with dirt. She tries to sound casual. “I didn’t know anyone was working today or I would have said hello on my way in.”

  He looks her up and down quickly, the way boys his age tend to do—interested because she’s a woman, but vaguely dismissive because she’s older—and then he taps his thigh to call Sam over, and the dog bounds up to him without so much as a backward glance at Jane, leaning in with his full weight while the kid kneels down to pet him. The boy angles his head toward the back gardens, says, “We’re running a bit behind, and it’s my dad’s company, so two of us are doing weekends. I thought you lot weren’t coming back till Monday?” He reaches into his pocket to turn his music off and flinches when he catches the cut on his hand on the seam. He lifts up his hand to inspect it. There’s a smear of blood across his palm.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just nicked myself rewiring the trellis.”

  Jane slowly lets out the breath she’s been holding and steps toward him. “Let’s see.”

  He meets her halfway and shows her a three-inch cut between his thumb and index finger. It’s long and narrow, but not too deep.

  “It probably just needs a plaster.” Jane tries to sound apologetic and authoritative at the same time. “I don’t really have anything with me.”

  He shrugs and looks again at Jane; his eyes are glassy and bloodshot. Jane realizes with a start that he’s totally stoned.