The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Eliza had watched them all assemble, peering down at the heavy bone handle of the knife at her throat, laughing as if she’d been enlisted in a pantomime. Bream barely had his hands on Hale when Eliza wrested herself from the musician’s grip, turning to kiss her assailant on the cheek. He was bundled off with his hands behind his back and not seen by any of the other patients for a week.

  In the aftermath of the attack Herschel was chastised and censured. Superintendent Thorpe retracted a number of privileges, reading them off a list as Herschel sat in the doctor’s damp office with his mouth open. “No garden plot for you,” Thorpe said, “and no walking party. And no escorted rambles in the bloody woods.” The sound of the pencil whisking across the paper, striking off one form of contentment after another, was almost more than Herschel could bear. “You may have drawn Bream’s attention,” Thorpe snapped, “but I have witnesses that saw you lure her over.” He leaned forward in his chair and Herschel flinched. “She could have been killed, you know.”

  It was the woods that had made the confinement during the weeks of rain bearable for Herschel. If he stood under the lip of the hospital roof in the airing court he could still see the trees bristling wetly beyond the stone walls, hear the proo-proo and brrrk of the birds in their shelters. A desire rose in him to see the birds and confirm that they were real; also a desire to make himself known to them, to consolidate some sense of community. A week before the rain started Herschel had been given spadework in the potato beds, only to be reassigned to art class when Bream found him at dinner tending to a shirt-pocket full of worms. In art class the patients were encouraged to suggest assignments: paint a tree, attempt a portrait, replicate an aspect of hospital architecture. When it was the poet’s turn he said that everyone had to paint an image caught in the eye of an animal. He requested it in verse and then bowed deeply at Herschel. During the day in the woods with Leeson and the girl, Herschel was still seething at the rights and privileges Thorpe had taken away, but he was also looking for that stillness: a dunnock or a resting tit, a crow on a low branch who might cast back his likeness.

  At first Herschel had been unhappy when Leeson joined him in the woods, had watched with dismay as he came briskly through a clearing and flailed a hand overhead. The two men were friends because of the nature of their circumstances and the proximity of their ward beds, but, Herschel felt, Leeson did not understand him. By the time the girl joined them, he had reconciled himself to the fact of company, though it was the poet he would have preferred to be with.

  As Charles and the girl walked ahead, Herschel busied himself tracking the patter of the birds as they took to their shrubs and branches, their own poems arcing out of the flutes of their throats. Theirs was a language he could speak, their twittering complaints and warbled praise braided with his own twiney thinking. Herschel understood that he did not see the world as others saw it. He saw himself as being like the poet in this regard, although the poet had a means to speak of his purgatorial travels whereas Herschel did not. In the weeks before the walk his problem had been getting worse. He would recover his voice in therapy only to lose it again, and because of this he had started to pluck grievances from grounds where there were none, to revel in bitterness. He could savour the weight of his silence only when he was amongst the others, and so he started to take the most prominent seat in the games room or in the ward in order to perch there, his face slack and his mouth gaping open like a purse.

  We know that when Jane read Herschel’s casebook she was able to see how his progress varied. One week there would be talk of his release, and the next there would be a threat of removal to one of the stricter asylums. He oscillated from improving to having fits to privileges returned within three hastily written lines. What Jane doesn’t understand is that this is only part of the story, gleaned as the hospital staff tracked patients over the course of a day or two and jotted down exaggerated acts or volatile aspects. The hours of selfhood between fits in the bath or dining hall rebellions went mostly unrecorded, and no one but Dr. Thorpe was tasked with asking “How do you feel?” or “What are you thinking?” No one but Thorpe was willing to read Herschel’s body language, watch him flit his hands and arms as if they could speak for him on the days his voice failed.

  The lack of a proper voice, the silence, wasn’t Herschel’s choice. A trap door had closed in his throat one morning and refused to open again. He’d been walking the cornfields of his farm, watching the crows settle between the stalks. He had opened his mouth, intending to disperse them, but instead of a human word a serrated sound came out. He squawked at himself with surprise. That night under the rough blankets of his bed he could feel a tingling in one arm; then, days later, he felt a prickliness in the other. The soles of his feet became itchy and his clothes nettled his skin. His body grew strange and worked against him—his arms so heavy that although he became fascinated with the contours of his own limp sex he stopped being able to touch it. He walked purposefully into town but when the chemist asked him to describe what salve he sought, a guttural sound emerged. When he tried to modify it, it assumed the whoot of an owl. At first he recoiled from his disability, hid in out-of-the-way places when his woman came around—on the sloped roof of his barn, on the guttered lip of his neighbour’s house. But then he realized what was happening: it wasn’t that he couldn’t speak; rather, he was acquiring a new language, and his physical discomfort was part of the required change. Some days, if he concentrated, he believed he could feel his metamorphosis—his vocal fold closing and his esophagus opening into a swelling crop, the crop opening onto a blooming gizzard.

  It suited Herschel that the physician called to the farm to assess him believed he was an imbecile.

  When asked by the young doctor if he was a danger to others, the woman who claimed she was Herschel’s wife—but who did not, in reality, live with him—gazed at Herschel with hooded lids and said, “Yes.” She sat primly in the front room when the second doctor came and testified that she lived in constant fear of her husband’s self-harm, pointing to the grey space of the adjacent kitchen where she said duty had required her to lock up the knives. Herschel cawed in reply. He knew there would be some other man in his bed before he exited the carriage at the hospital. Still, even in his fledgling state, Herschel knew that, no matter the cost, he wanted other than what he had. He was tired of meagreness and petty ways of thinking; he wanted a larger view of the world, wanted to get out of the poverty of his own life, out of the insularity of the village he had been brought up in. The second doctor, at least, had studied him with a certain degree of open-minded patience, as if he discerned a mind at work under Herschel’s feathered thinking.

  If Thorpe had asked Herschel what he remembered about that day in the woods, and if Herschel could have voiced it, he might have said the cast light of the forest, the sun broken by branches as if by the struts of a window, the dew palpable and settling. The poet’s words covered everything he saw like a gauzy web: recitations netted over the spindling trees, crawling over the thick veins of the leaves like a caterpillar. Caught in gusted exaltation! / Tooth-tipped we slip / under the grazed skin of the mottling ground. The green noise of the poems and the woods surrounded Herschel: leaf-mouths and nattering grasses, the low hum of the pan of moss he put his ear against. The throstle in the forest understorey saying hello in its tweep and burble; the poet singing, Come under, come under and know you are not alone.

  In the latter part of the day, Leeson and the girl started to trail Herschel at a distance. From time to time, Herschel would turn and glance around for them, sure that they’d become separated. His own face was slick with sweat from the exertion of the walk and he resented his companions when they caught up to him because they did not appear to be suffering as he was. Leeson had been distant earlier, in the hour when they’d walked three abreast, absent-mindedly gravitating toward even the faintest tread of a path as if he needed to course a route others had forged before him. Herschel had been mulling over a stanza
the poet had composed weeks ago in the potting shed while observing turnip roots dangling over the edge of the work surface like little phalluses: All our ghosted pities/all our sorrowed births/bursting like seeds/in the blackened womb of earth. Herschel had never seen before that the earth was like a womb and he did not like to think of it. It changed the entryway of a woman’s sex into a door to an incomprehensible chamber, and it turned the place where the horizon met his farm’s fields into a fertile slit. And so the Whitmore girl’s sex was a fact he was aware of as they entered a stand of oak. Leeson walked between him and the girl as if he were a partition. As if he thought Herschel were some kind of animal, catching whiff of his prey.

  Later, what Herschel would remember most clearly about the girl was her absence—how after the three of them had passed through a clearing bobbed with flowers, Herschel had lost her. He’d wanted to communicate his happiness at the good weather, had wanted to try a word, to say “open” or “yes” or “glad,” to point to the lifting arms of the shaggy trees, but when he turned he saw nothing but bird-flit and the scrabbling of a small mammal in the root-hem of an alder. Suddenly lonely, he’d doubled back in the direction from which he’d come, finding the girl and Leeson in a sunlit sward at the edge of a clearing. The girl was sitting on Leeson’s jacket, resting against a tree. He’d watched them for a minute, then chirped, and both of them glanced in his direction. The solicitor offered the girl his hand so that he might help her up, holding it in his as he led her over a fallen oak. It was a trifling gesture that Herschel knew he ought to ignore, even as he felt petty jealousy take root.

  In the week after his return from the woods Herschel had not been subject to the same degree of interrogation as Leeson. The solicitor had been ushered in and out of Thorpe’s office at least once a day until the matter seemed miraculously resolved, like a cloth wiping away all trace of a stain. By then, Herschel mostly recalled the Farrington paintings—a variety of landscapes inside of a landscape broken up by walls—and the roe deer they’d happened upon in the copse wood, how it matched and did not match the one whose head dipped down from an oak board in George Farrington’s parlour.

  Eventually he went back to painting class and to listening to the poet’s words and to his own tongue’s chirruping indecision. Words or no words? Sound or silence? He wondered what he would want to say in a human language if he recovered the tools with which to engage in it. His thoughts becoming more birdlike every day: tree, roost, lift, flight.

  There is a photograph of Herschel on a card tucked into the back of his casebook. When Jane discovered it yesterday she set it aside on the table at the records office while she continued to work. The photograph is one of forty studies made by a physiognomist called Merrifield who had sought to prove that muscular and cranial indicators could be used for diagnostic means. Herschel appears in the painting smock he was most fond of, his dark hair messy, eyes pouched with exhaustion, nostrils flared.

  When Jane first saw it, the one who never speaks whistled, and understanding that he meant Look, we gathered around him. We felt one thing slide into the other: Herschel’s knowledge of himself alongside our knowledge of him as he was before and as he has been with us. Our growing knowledge of Eliza Woodward and Alfred Hale and John Hopper is almost the same even if it isn’t captured in a photograph: “That’s me!” Cat had said when she saw herself in the dining hall, when together we remembered our old mischief. And the musician standing beside her had faltered, and John had gone to stand beside him so he would feel less alone in his shame. A sheet of sums that seemed to add up perfectly.

  There is a trick to looking at an image. Jane may have seen Herschel’s unblinking eyes and twisted mouth but she was still not seeing him as we do. We see him as if he is passing through the photograph: a man who was escorted to the stool and who sat on it, who arranged his features into a question. We see the farmer who was permitted to leave after the work of the dark hump behind the drop cloth was done. We understand how that particular afternoon unfolded into days and weeks and months and a year or more of thoughts and deeds and reveries. It doesn’t matter that memories can sometimes be misshapen, that there are a hundred ways to fix or lose a sense of self.

  When Herschel bristled at his photo we turned to him and said, “Yes, but that is not who you were; that is not all of it.” Cat air-kissed him and we made an effort to think of her as Eliza; John looked at the clock on the wall of the reading room and we remembered with him that time was once his life’s work. That afternoon at the records office is the kind of time that we exist for: one in which we are brought back to some semblance of self. Jane only had the photo, while suddenly some of us could remember Herschel lumbering in to dinner in a top hat, making wood benches in the workshop, marvelling at lantern slides, offering Greevy his allotment of meat. A few of us saw Herschel in his best suit on Visitors’ Day, greeting the poet’s wife and pretending through mimicry to be the poet while the wordsmith hid behind a high-backed wicker seat and snickered at the Countess’s annoyance. One of us saw him as he stood in the woods in a stream of light, cupping his hands under it. As if light might pool there, containing a world of wonders, the kind most people never see.

  A fortnight after the trio’s escape a bout of cholera erupted in the village, and shortly after that the hospital logbook states that two attendants and fourteen patients, including Alfred Hale, became ill.

  In those weeks of fever and quarantine, we longed for the kinds of distraction that had come with the summer ball: for music and movement, the declarations of the poet, a sip of ginger beer or elder wine. It was suggested by some that it was more pleasant to be at ease in the world than to rail against it, and so a number of patients gave up trying to make themselves well.

  When the worst wave of fever pressed through the wards some of us believed the building was on fire. Those who had glimpsed the river through the iron bars of the infirmary gate dreamed of it constantly. Whether ill or not we all thought about the gardens we had missed, what it would be like to ride to Inglewood in an omnibus, to walk the trails with the fresh afternoon air swaddling our faces. Sometimes lying in our beds we thought of N, believing as Leeson had that she might still be out there, lost in the gathering night. Though it is difficult, even now as we stand at the hip of the woods waiting for Jane to leave Blake and walk back to the inn, to remember what night meant to us. Not night the way Jane knows it, with its electricity, street lamps and neon shop signs, the ambient glow of distant cities; but night as we knew it then: its bale unfurled overhead. Hours so dark and moonless not even the needle holes in the sky could guide you home.

  21

  Blake promises to walk Jane back, but says he wants to show her something first. And even though she feels self-conscious about what has passed between them, Jane agrees to go with him, caught up in his infectious happiness as he takes her hand and pulls her under the hoops of light cast by the street lamps and toward the start of the trail. When they reach the gate he stops and kisses her, pressing her back against the wood stiles as if he wants to start all over again. She pushes him away, laughing, and he carries on through the gate, doing a slow jog backward down the trail, cocky and enjoying himself. It’s only when she insists on knowing where they’re going—uncomfortable because he is pulling her into the dark, past the short, numbered posts and the moon-glossed plants that she and William and Lily had once passed—that he turns to look at her fully, aware of the tug of resistance in her hand.

  “The grotto.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see. It’s just a little farther along.”

  Those of us who had stayed with Jane follow her and Blake down the trail. Our attention is divided between them and the woods because that’s where Cat took the children when Jane’s sweater came off, and they have yet to return. They were playing a game as they wandered across the waving field, Cat asking, “What sounds do you hear?” and the girl answering, “Crickets.” A dog had barked in the distance, and then the boy
said, “Dock.” And the theologian had called after them that they shouldn’t wander too far.

  If Jane remembers correctly the grotto is about a ten-minute walk along the trail past the last ledge of the upper pastures. You have to cut up through the woods to get to it. It isn’t impressive: just a small recession under a curve of limestone with cobbled stones mortared around its edges. It had been tall enough for Jane to stand up in when she was fifteen, though it arched down from its apex so sharply that only a few people could take shelter if it started to rain.

  When Blake says that he is taking her there, she remembers that in its centre two decades ago there was a stone plinth displaying a weathered marble bust. Jane had assumed, walking up to it with Lily, that it would be a sculpture of George Farrington, but when they got close they saw it was a woman’s head—a Greek sculpture of a girl with ringlets in her hair and drapery across her shoulder, stains from lichen and moss mottling the folds.

  Now Jane passes the spot along the trail that leads down to the lake and the rock where she had sat three days ago, but Blake doesn’t stop. His hand is warm around hers as he pulls her gently forward, singing an old Oasis song about all the things he would like to say to her even though he doesn’t know how. He grins at Jane as he launches into the chorus, a daft and off-key nineteen-year-old doing whatever he can to keep the night going.

  In the darkness Blake overshoots the narrow path that forks up from the main trail and they have to go back for it, using the light of his phone to find the tread where the two paths intersect. Jane remembers how Lily had announced that she needed to go to the bathroom at this point in their walk, and Jane, not sure what she should do because William was still ahead of them, took Lily up the narrow trail to quickly pee in the woods, thinking that it would alarm William if they turned around and headed all the way back to the village. Back then Jane hadn’t anticipated the grotto or the limestone cliff above it. Lily had seemed surprised too, though it was the sculpture that excited her the most. The trek up the trail was, in Lily’s mind, a diversion that she had caused, which meant that their discovery—a classical bust appearing miraculously in the midst of the monotonous woods—was also hers.