The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  A week and a half later, at lunch in the pub in Inglewood, Lily had asked if they were going to see the caves at the end of the Farrington trail. This was partly because she’d liked the dioramas that day at the Natural History Museum—wax models of shaggy-haired hominids staged around a campfire—and partly because William and Jane had been talking about caves on the drive up. William had said that one of the reasons the Farrington trail was so popular was the caves at the end of it. The larger one was a draw for cavers and tourists, although most people only ventured a hundred feet in, to the railings that bordered the first chasm.

  Lily was in the back seat of the Saab dancing a pony on her knee but quietly listening; for the first part of their conversation William was using a tenor Jane had come to recognize, a pitch that meant he was speaking to both her and his daughter: simpler words, uncomplicated sentences. He mentioned the caves in Lascaux, moving the conversation tangentially to fill the space that Jane tended to leave open, and she told him that her father had taken her and Lewis to see their grandparents in Toulouse the previous summer and they’d made a day trip up to see the cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume. William, who’d been watching the road, the intermittent traffic, turned and looked at Jane in the way that always made her feel like he was considering her. She liked the heat of that kind of attention, how it demanded reciprocation, how it made her push through her uncertainties in order to find something to give him.

  The Dordogne was greener and lusher than the parts of France Jane had visited before. As they drove toward the caves in the early morning a mist was lifting off the fields, clouding the drowsy heads of the sunflowers, dissipating around the stocky bulls grazing in their pastures. It was the first time Henri had taken Jane and Lewis anywhere without Claire. She’d backed out of the trip at the last minute because of a deadline, saying she’d meet them in Paris, though by the time they’d packed their things in Toulouse even that was in doubt. Jane had overheard them having an argument on the phone the morning they left for the caves and Henri’s annoyance had been palpable for the first part of the drive, but by the time they exited the motorway and started heading west, wending through a series of compact villages and driving under the rocky overhang of the Dordogne’s cliffs, he’d softened. He began talking about his own childhood, how his father had brought him here when he was ten or so, just a little bit younger than Lewis.

  There were no tickets left for the English tours of the cave so Henri bought tickets for the French. Jane’s French was tolerable but Lewis’s was almost non-existent. Henri said he’d translate, and ruffled Jane’s hair as they walked toward the bridge where the tour started. “But Jane will understand everything perfectly, n’est-ce pas?”

  The tour guide was a man in his fifties in a baggy knit sweater. He introduced himself as Marc, and midway through his preamble he stopped and smiled at Lewis. “Anglais?” Lewis blushed, and Marc turned to a couple in blue rain slickers. “Et vous? Vous parlez français?”

  The man replied, “We are German.”

  “Okay.” Marc smiled. “I will try to do French and English if that is acceptable.” He surveyed the French speakers—a family of five and two young women with daypacks—to make sure they didn’t mind and then clapped his hands together. “Parfait.”

  Before he unlocked the iron door that led to the cave Marc explained the rules of the tour: no bags past the entry, no touching the walls, not even with shoulders; we move quickly and stay close because our time inside is limited. He looked at the German man and at Henri, and explained that there would be narrow passageways, and a Rubicon where it would be necessary to crouch down. “You see?” he said to the German in English. “Ducking?” And he bowed his head to make sure the man understood. Jane was closest to the large iron door that had been set into the cave wall, and as Marc took out his ring of keys to unlock the six bolts that crossed it he smiled at her. “Vous êtes prête, mademoiselle? You ready?”

  What struck Jane about the caves was how difficult it was to see anything at all on the walls until the marks were pointed out. The lighting was dim to preserve the paintings and her eyes were slow to adjust. At a short railing, Marc stopped the group and gestured overhead. “I will give you a moment,” he said. “See what you see.” Jane scanned the convex limestone above her, the layers of rock yellow at her height but a brighter eggshell white above. There was a pool of brown to her right, but no shape she could distinguish clearly. Marc lifted a laser pointer to the brown stain and he used its red beam to trace the head, hump and chine of a bison. “Look here.” He moved the pointer a foot to the right. “And here.” The French girl behind Jane, the one whose perfume smelled like sweets, gasped, and Jane understood—she, too, was startled. How suddenly clear they were: two bison face to face, their delicate heads and rust-coloured horns bowed in front of their thick brown bodies.

  “Look,” Marc said, running the pointer over the bison’s thin legs. “The artists are using perspective. Dimensionality, non? We had it and then we lost it.”

  When her eyes had adjusted more fully to the subdued light, Jane could see that the bison were both painted and carved. Their backs and bellies were incised, their eyes scored into the stone; pupils the size of tuning pegs seemed to follow her when she shifted back and forth.

  Marc smiled at her. “Yes, good. It is almost like it is moving. The whole herd is running. Imagine the flame of a torch as our ancestors passed through here.” He moved his hand back and forth under the curl of the bison’s stomach. “How it would catch the folds and curves of the cave wall. Undulating, non? They are alive, you see.”

  Marc stood back and let everyone take turns standing underneath the two bison. When Lewis, the last of the group, went up, Marc asked him, “How many do you see?” and Lewis glanced up the corbelled vault of the cave and answered, “Two? Maybe three?”

  “Come close, everyone.” Marc ushered the group together. “Look again,” he said, “regardez.” And he passed one of the floor lights over the upper reaches of the chamber to where a dozen bison grazed along a horizontal plane. “You were surrounded,” he said cheerfully, “this whole time.”

  After Jane had finished telling William about the cave she turned to him and saw that he was grinning. She’d been talking for ten minutes, maybe more; it was the most she’d ever said to him. She’d been trying to articulate a thought—about what it was like to be shown something, to have a person wave a red laser over a russet stain, trace the lines of a reindeer’s back until its thick black antlers and gentle face materialized. “In this one there is kissing,” Marc had said, and although he was joking he wasn’t exactly wrong. It was one of the clearer paintings: the incised tongue of the larger reindeer touching the head of the one with red horns kneeling before it.

  Shortly before they got to Inglewood, Lily spilled the last of her juice over the Saab’s back seat. She announced the accident and Jane unclipped her seat belt and turned around. She took the plastic cup from Lily’s hand and used a fistful of tissues from the box on the floor to dab the bib of Lily’s red overalls, mop up the puddle that had gathered around a button on the upholstery. She felt the car slowing down.

  “Do you want me to pull over?”

  “Nope, almost done.” She tapped Lily on the nose with her finger. “Better?”

  Lily lifted up her plastic pony; there were beads of apple juice in its glossy pink mane.

  William was still driving slowly. “I’d feel better if you were buckled up.”

  Jane dried the pony, wiped Lily’s booster seat around her legs, then swivelled back down onto the passenger seat. She lifted her hips to smooth the clump of her sundress and refastened her seat belt. When she glanced down to see if her hands were sticky she noticed that the front hem of her dress had settled a few inches above her knees, the half-moon scar she’d earned in a riding accident when she was seven noticeably white against her summer tan. She left the hem where it was and looked out the window at the patchwork of farmers’ fields. A test, sh
e thought. To see if what she wanted to happen, what she thought had happened the night William woke her on the sofa, was actually occurring.

  Jane rolled down the window when they exited the highway. At the first sign for Inglewood, William, his eyes on the road, asked, “How did you get that scar?”

  Jane told the story about the cave twice that day, first to William on the drive up and then, later, to Constable Mobbs. An hour before Jane’s grandparents were due to arrive, Mobbs reappeared, pulling a chair up to the desk where Jane was sitting. Mobbs’s face was red as if she’d been running and for a second Jane thought there might be some news.

  “You holding up okay?”

  Jane felt her chin wobble and her eyes begin to well so she turned back to the swinging spheres of the contraption on Holmes’s desk and knocked the end ball with her knuckle.

  “It’s called Newton’s Cradle,” Mobbs said. She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “I asked Oliver. Something about the transfer of energy.”

  Jane pulled back and released the first ball, and watched the last swing out. The three balls in the middle didn’t move.

  “Right then.” Mobbs patted her cheeks with her hands as if she were aware of how flushed they were. “Listen, I need to ask you again if you can think of anything else that might be of use, not just what you saw or didn’t see—” She ducked her head lower to get Jane’s attention. “But anything that you and Lily talked about on the trail, anything she said. If Lily’s wandered off”—Mobbs pursed her lips and glanced across the room to where William had been sitting before going back out with one of the search parties—“you’re the only one who can help us understand what she might have been thinking. Okay? Can you do that?”

  Jane nodded and Mobbs pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. And for the next half hour Jane recounted the story of the cave at Fontde-Gaume, telling Mobbs how Lily had been listening to her describe it to William, and how later, when Lily had to pee and she and Jane discovered the grotto, Lily had mistaken it for a cave. She’d thought they could go inside it, that they’d find painted bison and mammoths and oxen and horses. “She kept going on about the reindeer,” Jane said, because the kissing reindeer was the part of the story Lily had liked best, that and the part at the end about the domed cavity at the back of the narrowest tunnel, the wall that was marked, almost like a finger-painting, with the splayed fingers and narrow palms of human hands.

  23

  The archivist helping Jane is called Freddy. He’s a paunchy and bald middle-aged man who spends the first hour of the morning moving fussily around the local records office reshelving books and indices from a squeaky trolley. When Jane walks over to his desk to request a biography of George Farrington, he produces a slip of paper from under a stapler and flusters, “Miranda left a note for you. Sorry, I forgot it was here. She thought you might like to look at Lucian Palmer’s journals. Do you want me to call them up?”

  “Sorry, who is Lucian Palmer?”

  Freddy lifts the piece of paper to indicate he’s told her everything he knows.

  “Why not?” she says. “Thanks.”

  Palmer, Jane discovers, is Dr. Lucian Palmer, and his medical journals—two deteriorating calfskin booklets with marbled endpapers—show that he was a village doctor who was occasionally engaged as a Visiting Physician at the Whitmore. His notebooks list his patients by a coded system that includes their initials, the location where they were tended to, their symptoms, treatments and outcomes. Some entries reference hospital visits and certificates he’s signed: B for births, D for deaths, and S for statements made on behalf of those committed. Jane leafs through a hundred yellowing pages of tight, almost illegible handwriting looking for capital Ws, for Whitmore, which Palmer tended to mark with a flourish.

  The seventh reference to the Whitmore says Whitmore patient where the deceased’s initials usually go, and INGWD for the location. Jane checks the page twice. She’s been connecting the two places in her mind for so long that it is strange to see proof of it. A short paragraph follows in which Jane can only glean called upon and G.F. and “death by—” She tries a few more times to make out Palmer’s microscopic cursive, then takes the journal up to Freddy. But after several minutes with a magnifying glass he can only add carriage to—.

  “May I get a copy of this?”

  Freddy examines the delicate binding. “What pages?”

  “Just that one for now. Is the other archivist—”

  “Miranda.”

  “Is Miranda coming in today?”

  “At noon.”

  There is nothing else in Dr. Palmer’s journals that references both Inglewood and the Whitmore, and the best that Jane can discern, after she comes back from a quick and early lunch in the parking lot with Sam, is that the coded entries take place in or around 1877, the year N disappeared. She wades back into the birth and death records in the Farrington folder, but finds nothing related to 1877 there. George died in Tibet in 1881, and Norvill in Scarborough in 1890. Prudence lasted until 1912, still tucked in at Inglewood House, and died at the ripe old age of ninety from pneumonia.

  Jane scans the material she has amassed on the table and picks up the Biographical Sketch of George Farrington, Esquire, by S.B. Atkinson, which Freddy had dropped off last: an exaggerated turn-of-the-century account that hadn’t seemed credible when Jane glanced through it. She places it on the book support, gently opens its flagging millboard and skims the contents again. It is the kind of biography that was typical of its day—embellished and flattering, with enough anecdotes of a personal nature to cement the authority of the writer. Some of the details she recognizes from the chapter in William’s book on George and from his lecture at the Chester: George’s birth at Buxton House, his father Hugh’s rise through government, the move to Inglewood, Hugh’s death in India, George’s growing renown as an importer of rare species. She turns to the last few paragraphs of the book—a book that she now knows William must have read—and tries not to picture him in this very same room with George’s death unfolding in eloquent detail before him, his thumb on the corner of the nicked page the same way hers is now.

  In The Lost Gardens of England William describes George’s death in what was then a closed-off region of Tibet. William’s version is less florid than the Victorian biographer’s. Unlike the drama posited by S.B. Atkinson—brimming with details he’d likely never have had access to—William is matter-of-fact: George was climbing along a steep crevasse where he’d heard there was an unusual strain of poppy. His Sherpa, moving up ahead, came into some kind of difficulty and George misstepped in his rush to reach him. He fell some distance down a cleft in the rock. The Sherpa survived, though he was days getting off the mountain, and two weeks later returned with ropes and men from his village to retrieve George’s body. George was given a sky burial in the Buddhist tradition, as he’d instructed—his corpse left to the vultures—though his Sherpa honoured his request that a lock of his hair be sent home to Prudence.

  When Miranda comes in and settles behind the desk to relieve Freddy, Jane walks over with Lucian Palmer’s journals and asks what made her recommend them. She knows an archivist can’t reveal information about other patrons, but she asks anyway—was this one of William Eliot’s sources? The gentleman who was up from London?

  “I really can’t say if the gentleman read it during the course of his research. Was it of any use?” She smiles, and her arched eyebrows give her away.

  “Yes, it was helpful, thanks.”

  Jane moves slowly to her table and sets Palmer’s journal on top of the stacks of material she still has to read through. Her hands are trembling. Sitting down she tries to sort out what exactly is unsettling her—it’s more than the way that William’s name recalls the scene she caused at the museum; it’s more than just the hazy sense of his presence here with her again as she’s going over the Farrington material. Jane smooths her hands over her hair and takes a deep breath. No, it’s more like anger; anger at the possibility that
even here, doing the only piece of research she’s ever chosen wholly for herself, she’s following in his tracks again: William up ahead in the woods, William ducking in and out of view, William turning the corner. What if Jane doesn’t find N? What if William has already found her?

  The old pay phone in the hall takes credit cards. Jane nestles her notebook between her knees and swipes hers before she loses her nerve. When the operator answers, Jane asks for the Natural History Museum number. “The botanical division if you can find it.”

  The phone at the museum rings three times, and when a woman answers Jane’s chest hitches with relief. “Hello, sorry, I’m looking for William Eliot’s number.”

  “I can transfer you. Who’s calling?”

  Jane pictures the woman in the blazer at the information desk who’d called upstairs when she was fifteen, a public relations smile on her face. “Helen, Helen Swindon.”

  It takes two tries for the transfer to go through and both times as the phone rings Jane can feel her stomach churn.

  “William Eliot.” His voice is brusque.

  Jane glances at her watch: it’s quarter past twelve so he’s either just back from lunch or trying to head out.

  “Hello, Dr. Eliot, my name is Helen Swindon. I’m with the Inglewood Trust Restoration Project—” Her voice goes up airily at the end as if she’s asking a question. “I know you’ve recently written on the Farringtons and I’m wondering if I can ask you a few questions.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  Jane doesn’t know how to respond, wonders, irrationally, if he recognizes her voice, wants to know where she is so he can ring the police, have her arrested for assault.

  “Are you here in London?”