The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  “Spit on it,” he says.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’ll help clean it.” He grins at her.

  “Listen—”

  “Blake.”

  “Listen, Blake, I’m just finishing up, but I think that cut needs to be cleaned properly, so maybe you ought to dash over to the pharmacy.”

  The kid narrows his eyes. He can tell that she’s speaking to him differently now. “I’m not as high as you think.”

  “Right. Well, I’m just going to check off a few more boxes—” Jane jabs a thumb toward the stairs to the main floor and clears her throat. “You should really clean that up.”

  He nods but stands there, and Jane feels sure he’s going to call her bluff. Does she have enough on him that he will be less likely to out her? Maybe he’s just stoned—hardly a serious offence—but he’s probably the one who left the delivery door open, so why would he want to attract attention to that fact by claiming he happened upon a break and enter? Besides, she hasn’t taken anything, doesn’t have a stack of books or a vase under her arm.

  “It’s Helen, by the way.” She sticks out her hand to break the silence.

  He offers Jane the hand with the cut, and when she doesn’t shake it because it’s still bleeding, they stand there awkwardly.

  “Brilliant,” he says, “see you around, then, Helen.” He presses his earbuds back in, gives Sam another head scratch, and walks up the steps, throwing one last look at Jane before he’s gone.

  Back at the inn, Jane runs into Maureen re-stacking magazines and travel guides in the lounge and asks about the restoration work at the house.

  “I think the Trust got some last-ditch money from an investor in London to redo the house and gardens as Farrington left them, though there’s talk that the investor plans to turn the upper floors into some kind of swanky hotel.” Maureen straightens her back, clearly stressed at the thought of competition, and drops a guide to Five Best Local Walks on top of a pile of brochures. “You hear a different plan every week. If you ask at the pub, Lucy will tell you—she’s one of the local Trustees. Everything all right with your room?”

  “Yes, great.”

  Maureen picks up the remote control and turns on the television in the corner. It’s an older model that flares before the picture of an outdoor concert takes shape. Jane recognizes the orchestra playing in the summer performance series, the stage lit up with blue and white lights, Battersby conducting. Reflexively, Jane scans the string section for people she might know.

  “You like classical music?” Maureen’s tone makes this more a statement than a question.

  “My dad plays.”

  “Oh, what’s his name?”

  “Henri Braud.” Henri’s name is out of her mouth before she realizes what she’s done, but Maureen doesn’t seem to recognize it and she’s already moved on to tucking the throw cushions on the sofa back into their appointed corners.

  “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “No thanks.” Jane lifts the plastic bag in her hand. “I forgot to pack a hairbrush or moisturizer, went out for supplies.”

  Maureen takes a last look around the lounge and turns to go. “Right then, see you in the morning, Helen. I’ve a roast to see to now.” She looks down at Sam. “Good night, Chase.”

  Climbing the steps to her room Jane tries to sort out what she’s doing. She’s running away, exactly like she did when she was twelve and her mother rang up to say she wasn’t coming down to South Kensington to fetch her for the summer holiday. Furious because her bags were by the door and she’d already spent hours waiting for Claire to pull up outside her grandparents’ sitting room window, Jane took off. It was a ridiculous effort. She made four cheese-and-chutney sandwiches and took the tube to Leicester Square, ending up in a five-screen cinema where she spent the last of the birthday money Henri had sent from Prague watching one film after another, movies she didn’t even want to see. Her grandfather had raised his hand in a solemn salute when she returned at midnight, then picked up the phone in the hall to call Claire and report that Jane was fine, all without a reprimand.

  Jane knows she is repeating herself, hiding again. Not only because Maureen and her husband are of an age that means they might once have helped search for Lily, might still remember Jane’s name, but also because she might really want to escape this time, fall off the map for good.

  The Whitmore’s concert announcements and entertainment programmes are spread out on the floor of Jane’s room where she left them last night. After the run-in with the kid at Inglewood House she’d been too wound up to come directly back here, so she’d driven to Moorgate—the largest hub in the area—and she and Sam had window-shopped the chain stores on the high street because it was Sunday and almost everything was closed. Tomorrow she’ll drive over there again to go to the local records office, where she had done some of her dissertation research. The original Whitmore ball invitation should still be there and she’ll be able to check the exact date. The office will likely have some of the Farrington estate archives as well, if they haven’t ended up in a private collection or with Prudence’s side of the family.

  Outside Jane’s window dusk is falling. The street lamps blink on although they’re not yet needed. Across the river a group of hikers is traipsing back into the village, their heavy outer layers tucked under their arms or strapped to their packs. They pass a spry-looking gentleman in a tweed cap tossing crumbs to the ducks, and Jane watches them laugh at the brown-and-white-speckled forms congregating below him. There are a dozen cars situated around the church up the road, and when Jane presses her face to the window she can see that the clock tower reads half past five. After a minute she turns back to the Whitmore box, picks up the page of notes she made last night, puzzles over it again. She can see no patterns or leads in what she’s written; N is not mentioned, a hole in the middle of everything.

  Jane had told Maureen yesterday that she would stay until Wednesday—three days away. Three days isn’t a lot of time, but it isn’t unreasonable. She decides that if on Wednesday she has no solid lead as to who N was or what happened to her, she’ll give up, head to the Lakes as Lewis expected her to, call Gareth and explain herself. She’ll clear out the cottage to sell it, and sift through the last of her mother’s things.

  Out of habit we tilt our heads. We consider Jane’s predicament, how hard she is being on herself. We are sympathetic, but even our sympathy is outweighed by our determination to keep hold of the larger truths we are learning.

  “What about the Whitmore?” we ask. Inglewood House is all well and good but some of us have never been there. As we walked through its rooms with Jane some of us felt as if we were dropping in on strangers with whom we had only one tenuous connection.

  “We have until Wednesday,” John says, watching Jane rummage through the bag of clothes she’d packed hurriedly in London.

  “How much time is that?” asks the boy.

  “Arpeggio,” answers the musician.

  “Not enough,” the theologian snaps, preoccupied with what pressed on him in the small parlour at the manor, a word or a set of words, a circumstance on the tip of his tongue.

  Jane is changing to go out for dinner, and as she pulls a thin blue angora sweater over her head, we bristle because the cloud of it begs for touching and because we don’t want her to stop what she’s doing when there are still files to go through. Thinking about the ball gave some of us a semblance of self, the tour of Inglewood House did the same for others, and we are all craving to feel that way again. But Jane has turned away from the Whitmore box. She straightens her skirt and dabs her lipstick, and the cluster that is us rises to follow her out the door.

  “I’m going for a walk,” the theologian says irritably.

  “Don’t,” Cat replies. “You’re the one who’s always saying ‘stay together.’ ”

  “Perhaps I overestimated the company.”

  “There’s no need for—” John begins, but before he can finish the th
eologian has slipped out the door.

  There is always a sense of gloom when one of us leaves. Few who wander off come back. For this reason, for a very long time in our first years of solidarity, hardly any of us went off on our own unless absolutely necessary. We don’t know what happens to those who disappear. Maybe they get better leads and head off to follow them; maybe they learn things they want or don’t want to know and, full to bursting with the knowledge, close their eyes and Cease.

  “What now?” asks Cat.

  “Dinner,” says the musician, and he raises his arms to conduct us, whistling as he ghosts through the door.

  The idiot once told a bedtime story to the children that began with a great black sea that doubled as an ink-dark sky. When you looked, it was filled with stars and seashells lined up together.

  “Stars and seashells?” the girl had squealed.

  “Absolutely,” the idiot confirmed. “Caught in the great net of time.”

  “Where are we?” she asked, hoping we were the fishermen.

  “Where do you think we are?”

  “On the water?”

  “No.”

  “In the moon?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She smacked her lips. “A spaceship!”

  “No, we’re the house the sea-sky lives in. It’s in our heads twirling around; a spiral galaxy that’s shaped like a snail.”

  “Ewww.”

  “Why not?” He laughed. “Think of the breakfasts the mind can eat: Sands of time! Acres of now! Parcels of eternity! Tasty stuff.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” the theologian said, calling out from the wingback chair under Jane’s sitting room window. “The sky is the sky, and the sea is the sea, end of discussion.”

  But it was too late. We’d all listened to the idiot’s story and something in what he said as he carried on shaped how we started to think of ourselves, led to a sense that we were stuck together in something that could not be flattened out in ways that would otherwise be perfectly sensible. It was as if we were knots in a net that could take different shapes at different times. As if we might, one day, loop back on ourselves, come so close to the past we’d be able to taste the dust of our history in our mouths.

  The pub at dinnertime is packed and smells of spilled beer and curry. Jane has avoided coming here until now because she doesn’t want to have the you’re-not-from-around-here conversation. She takes a seat at a low round table. A waitress comes over and drops a plastic menu in front of her, asks what Jane would like to drink.

  “White wine, thanks.”

  The girl taps the wine list and Jane scans it.

  “The Chenin.”

  “Small or large?”

  Jane glances at the two tables nearest to her: plates of fish and chips, roast and potato, pints, a couple sharing a bottle of Malbec. “Large, thanks.”

  The pub is almost exactly as she remembers from twenty years ago. The red-and-gold-medallioned carpets are the same, the leather stools and wood-backed booths, the belled lamps over the dining area tables. But there is a row of coin-operated games along the far wall now, flat-screen televisions recapping the day in rugby, a snooker table that may or may not have been there before. The customers are a mix of locals and tourists: a group of men in heavy boots and jeans at the bar, a few couples out on the smoking patio, the shop cashier from yesterday chatting up two girlfriends over by the far window and hikers tucking into dinner, their Gore-Tex jackets hanging off a nearby coat rack. At the far end of the bar there’s a cluster of twenty-year-olds standing around a high table, the kid from Inglewood House amongst them.

  Jane watches him, curious in spite of herself. His back is mostly to her but sometimes he shifts around the table to talk to the girl in the miniskirt on his right or the guy in the hoodie on his left. There are at least two rounds of drink in front of them, a mix of pint and shot glasses. One of the three girls, the one with the dancer’s posture, who Jane thinks is the prettiest, is already swaying, her cheeks flushed and her gestures theatrical. The girl next to Blake, the loud one in the spangled silver top and large hoop earrings, leans sideways to say something in Blake’s ear and then turns her head, narrows her eyes at Jane. This reminds Jane of the young girl at the Chester, glaring at her from under the bones of the whale.

  • • •

  “Helen?”

  Jane looks up from her almost empty glass of wine to see Blake holding a pint glass, a smart-ass expression on his face that she’d like to wipe off. This is what kids do, she thinks, when they get bored of their village bollocks. If, as teenagers, she and Lewis had stayed in the Lakes they’d have found whole new ways to push the envelope too. She smiles up at Blake, probably unconvincingly.

  “How’s the hand?”

  He pulls it out of his jeans pocket and displays the plaster. “Saved.”

  Jane glances back at his table of mates, sees the girl in the silver top seething. “I think you’re wanted.”

  He pulls a stool out with the toe of his boot and straddles it, places his pint on the table.

  “I meant elsewhere,” says Jane.

  “They’ll live.”

  Jane leans back and before she can say anything more he has leapt up to the bar and is getting her another drink. One of the workmen asks him a question and pats him on the back, and Jane hates herself for noticing how attractive he is. He’s wearing black jeans and a white long-sleeve shirt. She glances down at her own clothes—a black A-line paired with a light blue sweater. Ben used to call it her librarian-wear.

  “So where are you from?” Blake swings a leg back over the stool and slides a glass of wine toward her. It is so topped up he must have told the barman he was trying to get her drunk. “London?”

  Jane raises her eyebrows in a noncommittal fashion before realizing this probably looks like flirting. “Why do you want to know? So you can send birthday cards?” She can hear herself trying to sound tolerant, trying to sound like someone engaging in playful banter because it is the polite thing to do.

  Blake spins the pint in his hand and looks over at his friends as if gauging whether or not he should pack it up and go back. “Listen, Helen, you have beautiful lips. I mean, the bottom one especially, there’s a kind of”—he narrows his eyes—“luscious thing happening there, and I am completely fucking horny and a little bit drunk, but I am also a nice guy and a good conversationalist. I like music, I like books, I read the paper daily, I can name, I don’t know, like fifty varieties of roses, and animals like me. My mates over there are talking about a YouTube video that shows two yobs eating their own feces—” He takes a breath. “So I’m asking you to save me.”

  Jane glances around the room. She feels like she’s part of a spectacle, but no one other than the spangled girl is watching them.

  She looks at him again. “How old are you, Blake?”

  He grins. “You remember my name.” He pushes her wineglass closer with the tips of his fingers. “Nineteen. Why? How old are you?”

  She debates how to handle this. “The proverbial too-old-to-behaving-this-conversation?”

  He shifts forward and his knees touch hers under the table. “I’d like the record to show that you just called this a conversation.”

  “My mistake. Clearly.”

  “So, Helen,” Blake drums his fingers on the table, a chuffed expression on his face as if the lads he was sitting with bet him that he wouldn’t make it past two minutes. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Hmm, this is a serious question?”

  “I have to say that you strike me as a very serious woman. So, yes.”

  Jane thinks about this. She wants to come up with an answer that is pithy or maybe even a little bit honest; she wants, almost, to say her name is actually Jane. But what wells up in her instead is something she can’t quite articulate. It has to do with the fifteen-year-old version of herself that she can see across the room in the booth that she shared with William and Lily, a girl in black shoes th
at are too fancy, a girl whose ankles are crossed under the table, whose knees sometimes glance William’s.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  Blake blinks at her. The question is unexpected. “Well, Helen”—he pauses and picks up a coaster, taps it on the table—“assuming you are engaging in a real conversation, I will answer you honestly. I have never been in love.” When Jane doesn’t say anything, he cocks his head. “Is this a real conversation?”

  “Three times for me,” Jane says. “Different kinds of love.”

  He nods. “That’s a respectable number.”

  For the next half hour we sit in the pub with Jane and some of us pace the room and eavesdrop, and some try to remember if we know this place, try to fathom how long it has been here, wonder if the man at the bar is the son of the son of the son of a man or woman we once knew. Those of us who have been with Jane the longest want to whisper to her, Look how that boy is seeing you. To show her how open he is to the possibility of who she might be, how attenuated to her gaps and omissions. Ben was never like that; he held his ideas of Jane up in the air between thoughts of himself, of the wife he’d left for her, of the woman he wanted her to be. When they made love Jane closed her eyes and Ben looked at his own flexed arms as he propped himself above her. Even when she was in charge he thought, I’m fucking her, and “her” was always the girl he saw at the Portrait Gallery in a Prada dress, the daughter of Henri Braud and granddaughter of the renowned Standens.

  “And then what happened?” Blake is leaning forward, laughing the way you do when a story has turned so tragic it’s funny.

  “She hung herself.”

  “Jesus.”

  “From the top step above her desk. A neighbour found her. Mrs. Greeves.”

  “Grieves? Like grieving? You’re kidding.”

  “No, Greeves with two e’s; I never thought of that, actually.”

  Blake shakes his head. “My mum is one of those boring-but-nice mums. There’s four of us and we’re all little bastards, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if she did something crazy one day: drowned the cat, set fire to the house.” He shifts his position and his leg falls against hers more deliberately.