The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  Jane hesitates to follow them. She can hear the shuffle of their boots over the track of carpet laid down over the hardwood, the older of the two saying, “Easy, easy.” She can imagine the two of them tottering the sideboard past someone in the main hall whose job it is to check off all the chairs and desks and paintings; who would ensure that everything is deposited in the correct place. Someone who would know Jane has no right to be here. Her gaze drifts up to a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head—the very same one that Leeson would have rapped when the trio arrived here. This is where they stood, Jane thinks, this is the last place N was seen.

  Over the past few days the main floor of the house has been filled with twice the amount of furniture that was here when Jane last wandered through it. Enormous desks, high-backed chairs and tables of every size and composition peek out from under sheets, blankets and plastic wrap; a new row of boxes and crates lines the main hall. Jane peeks around the corner into the library and is almost run over by the two movers who, released of the burden of the sideboard, are heading out again, the lean one laughing at something the older one said. They stop when they see Jane, as if the joke is inappropriate.

  “Miss,” the lanky one says. He nods courteously as they pass through the entry, and then picks up the conversation again.

  The library is half assembled: the furniture still draped but put in place so that Jane can make out the arrangement of a long sofa, three high-backed chairs and a screen; the round reading table where the butler would have placed the morning paper near the window, a pianoforte in the corner along with a stool with leaf-scroll feet. One of the armchairs, a bird’s-eye maple with brocaded yellow upholstery, is uncovered as if someone has just been sitting there, its fabric worn gently from use. There’s a trace of perfume in the room, and although Jane knows it probably belongs to the archivist she’s looking for, it’s floral enough that she can imagine it belonging to Prudence or coming in gusts from the rose bushes outside.

  Another set of movers, younger this time, comes into the library. Each of them is carrying a wood-frame box, the kind you move paintings in. They set the boxes down gently in the corner, nod at Jane and then traipse out again, their voices, the easy chitchat of “Are you going to Jack’s after?” echoing down the hall. When they leave, Jane can hear the sound of someone typing. She follows it around the corner and through an open door into the old dining room where she finds a woman with dark hair cut into a fashionable bob sitting at a two-hundred-year-old table and pecking away on a laptop. When she glances up and sees Jane she jumps a bit, puts her hand over her chest and says, “Mother of God, you scared me.”

  It’s almost four p.m., and even though she’s finishing up for the day, Gwendolyn is friendly. The references that give Jane some semblance of authority—Miranda at the records office, and William Eliot in London, who Jane says “is helping me with some research”—immediately put Gwendolyn at ease. She unwinds the woolly pink scarf she’s been wearing to make up for the cold of the room and says, “Miranda’s a laugh, isn’t she?” as if she assumes Jane has spent time with the woman socially. It turns out that Gwen and Jane did their postgraduate studies at UCL two years apart and had a number of professors in common, though the ones Jane didn’t get on with Gwen liked, and one of those had recommended her for this job.

  The request to look at Prudence Farrington’s diaries is simple enough, and William Eliot’s name seems to carry some weight. Gwen says she’ll have to check with her supervisor—“liability and all that,”—but that it ought to be fine so long as Jane has an LRO card and works with the material here, supervised. When Jane first mentioned the “diaries” Gwen’s gaze had drifted over to a locked filing cabinet on the wall, an ugly metal thing wedged against the cherry blossom wallpaper beside two modern steel shelves crammed with cardboard boxes. “We’re not very organized yet, we just got electricity on Monday.” She points to the photocopier and fax machine sitting against a wall where the sideboard the movers carried in probably once stood. “I don’t think those have been plugged in yet. And we’re already two months behind. Anyway, do you want my mobile number or do you just want to stop in tomorrow to see if my supervisor at the Trust okays it?”

  “Stopping in is fine.”

  “Great, let’s say nine.”

  Undressing that night in her room at the inn, Blake watching from where he’s flopped on the bed, Jane remarks that she hadn’t seen him on the Inglewood grounds when she looked from the library window.

  Blake laughs. “I did go in. I was sent to the duck pond for fucking off, had to scrub my hands raw to get rid of the smell of Victorian goose shit.”

  Jane pulls back the duvet and slips in beside him. He leans over and kisses her. After a minute he sits up and raises his hands, pretending he’s filming her, mimicking the crank style of an old-fashioned camera, one eye squinched shut as if with the other he’s looking through a lens.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to remember this.” He keeps filming.

  “Remember what?”

  “You, you idiot.” He drops the imaginary camera and kisses her eyelids, moves down her neck whispering into her skin, “Record, record, record.”

  In the morning, just after eight, Jane slips out of bed to get something for breakfast—takeaway coffees, pastries. This is to avoid going through explanations again with Maureen: guests need to be booked in advance, paid for beforehand, their details taken so we know in an emergency who is staying in the rooms. Sam raises his head a few inches when she opens the door but he doesn’t get up, so she decides to leave him with Blake, who is snoring, slack-mouthed, into his pillow. She frames them there as she turns to go: Blake under the mountain of the duvet, Sam’s head pressed between his front paws at the foot of the bed, his white tail fanning out behind him.

  We rouse ourselves when Jane leaves the room but we don’t follow her out, and the girl asks why we aren’t going with her.

  “It’s just coffee,” the musician says, but we know he is lying. We have followed Jane out for coffee before, have followed her in restaurants from her table to the loo, moved in her flat from one side of the kitchen to the other in order to track her thinking.

  “She’ll be back,” Cat says chirpily, and the one with the soft voice bends down to the girl and says, “We’ll all go to Inglewood House with her later. It’ll be fun.”

  “Now then—” Cat says, as if there is some task we need to get up to, as if we haven’t all been subdued in the wake of our decision to follow Jane back from the Whitmore. We’d had a row at the gate as to whether those of us who belonged at the Whitmore should stay, whether knowing who we’d been and what we’d done was enough of an ending. It was the theologian who’d convinced us to get back in the van.

  “Not much doing here,” he said, slapping his hands together in a ghostly imitation of a clap. “Pretty desolate. And work that needs to be done.”

  “What work?” the musician asked quietly.

  “Songs to sing, poems to write, lessons to be planned.” The theologian stepped gaily over the road in an approximation of a dance and we stood back and angled our heads, trying to decide what might have taken possession of the man we thought we knew. “I suppose,” he continued drily—as if the fake show of enthusiasm had depleted him—“that the nature of said work has yet to be determined.” He ushered us into the van and as Blake closed the door he added, “But let’s not allow such trivialities to diminish our dedication to the task.”

  When Jane gets back to the inn with a tray of coffee and a bag of croissants she had to drive to the next village to find, Blake is drying off from his shower and Sam is standing by the door because he hasn’t been let out yet.

  “The police were here for you.”

  “Sorry?” Jane shakes her head.

  “And the room charges were slipped under the door, which I suppose means you’re leaving.” Blake picks a card up from the tea tray. “A Constable Avison? I said you were o
ut for the day because I didn’t know what else to say. They hung around for half an hour and made a bunch of calls. You just missed them.” He is matter-of-fact and distant. “I think I have this right.” He hands her the card. “Please tell Ms. Standen that we strongly encourage her to call us.”

  Jane doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know where to start.

  Blake pulls his jeans on. “On the plus side it appears that your name really is Jane.”

  “Did they say what they wanted?”

  Blake laughs, but it’s not a laugh that she knows. “No. Probably because they could see how badly I wanted to know, standing there in my fucking boxers and everything.”

  “I don’t work for the Trust.”

  He pulls his T-shirt on over his head. “Yeah, I get that now. I’m not a total fucking idiot.”

  Because she doesn’t know how else to do it, Jane closes her eyes and blurts out: “I slapped the father of the girl who went missing at a public event last week and then I took off from my job at a museum in London and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I’m sorry I lied.”

  When she opens her eyes he is putting his boots on. Once they’re laced he says, “Sam needs to go outside,” and grabs his jacket off the chair and walks out, slamming the door behind him.

  Jane puts the constable’s card in her pocket and packs her things. Maureen stiffly takes the keys, deducts the deposit from the amount owing with quick jabs at her calculator and then pauses mid-stroke while she’s writing out the receipt. Jane wonders if the constables gave away the fact that “Helen” was not her real name.

  “I’m sorry for any trouble,” Jane says.

  Maureen glances over to her husband, who is leaning against the door jamb with his arms crossed. He looks angry, as if Jane has disappointed him too—as if she’s made them both complicit in some kind of wrongdoing.

  Sitting in the car, Jane cradles her head in her hands and tries not to cry. She opens the glovebox to have something to do, rustles through it. There’s an old parking permit from Lewis’s last lab, a yoga schedule, the Mercedes manual from 1970. She pulls the manual out and brings it to her nose, wishing it might still carry the scent of her grandparents, some trace of being a child.

  28

  Walking up the avenue that divides the great lawn of Inglewood house, Jane tries to compose herself. She can still feel the heat of her face, the knot in her stomach that won’t go away. What could have been days or even weeks has suddenly turned into a day maybe, or into hours. She looks over her shoulder at the clipped green expanse of the lawn to see if anyone is following her but there’s only the line of shrubs and bushes at the edge of the property, the sculpted heads of marble horses peeking through the gaps in the evergreen, a cluster of parked trucks and cars by the road.

  To calm herself down Jane imagines Herschel Morley, Charles Leeson and the young woman who may or may not be Nora Hayling walking out of the Whitmore and across eleven miles of forest and fields to arrive here: a great lawn bordered by hedges and what would have been, at night, the eerily bright marble of rearing horses in the recesses between the hewn trees.

  It’s possible that a census will place Nora in time, locate where she lived before and after the Whitmore, identify family, suggest what happened. It’s possible that when N left Herschel and Leeson on the steps, she did something as simple as head down into the village, knock on her parents’ door and go home. Still, it’s the other possibilities—infinite ones—that make Jane anxious to read Prudence’s diaries, to find some note that might finalize the equation, draw an unbroken line between Inglewood House and the Whitmore, between Nora Hayling and N.

  Prudence Farrington’s diaries range from 1870 to 1910, although within that span entire years are missing or lost. As Gwen takes five volumes out of the file cabinet, Jane knows to expect gaps, missing weeks or months due to bouts of illness or travel. Gwen confesses that she has only read the diaries once so far, and not deeply, though she remembers being surprised that the two years after George’s death were so scantly recorded. Jane has seen this before in her research at the Chester: the writer mourning or self-censoring or turning instead to black-edged letters. Sometimes, too, the executor intervenes: tearing out pages or burning whole books to expunge impassioned feelings, accidental indiscretions.

  Gwen points to a tall-backed chair at the other end of the dining room table where a book support has been set up and tells Jane that she can work there. Then she pulls a pair of rubber gloves out of a box sitting on what must have been an original window seat—its cushion the same dusky pink as the cherry blossoms on the Oriental wallpaper. “I’ve actually met William Eliot,” Gwen says, as if just remembering Jane’s mention of him yesterday. “His wife and daughter rented a cottage up here for a month last year when he was doing some research for his book. I have a daughter Mina’s age and they played a few times. He seems like a lovely man.”

  Jane is working her way through the spring of 1877 a few hours later when Gwendolyn gets up and apologizes. She has to fetch some lunch, and there isn’t a fridge or microwave working in the house yet so she’ll be walking down to the pub. She stands for a moment at the end of the table and Jane realizes this means she has to leave as well—the material can’t be left unsupervised, and even though Jane is usually the one supervising, she doesn’t properly belong here.

  Gwendolyn puts the diaries back into the file cabinet and locks it, then locks the dining room door behind them with a skeleton key. “I’ll only be twenty minutes or so.” She offers Jane the option of waiting in the library, warning her to avoid the man supervising the movers as he’s in a bit of a mood because one of the workmen dropped a Queen Anne side table. “You’re welcome to look at the books on the shelves. We’re just in the process of cataloguing them.”

  Because the movers are traipsing in and out of the library—once hauling a wood bench so large that it takes four of them to carry it—Jane stands in the corner out of the way, near the brocade curtains, and surveys the titles the Trust is placing back on the shelves. Most of the books concern botany, geography and history, their spines splitting or warped, though they would have been relatively new when George purchased them, probably to keep current with the scientific discoveries and political boundaries of the day. She likes this about George—that he must have been less concerned with having a gentleman’s library than with the importance of the material in the books themselves. In a row of volumes that are mostly verse, Jane pulls out a tatty copy of Virgil, then a lightly worn blue calfskin Milton, then a book with a torn cover and no discernible title save for an illustrated embellishment of a hive of bees. She opens it up to the first leaf: To my muse. I see what I see.

  “In the razed field,/in the cusp of its wealth,” says the poet, and Cat claps and Herschel tweeps. “We lay on the rough skin of earth,/and loved with our mouths.” The poet leans over Jane’s shoulder, reading as she is reading: “To speak and name the field song,/to pluck wonder like a flower,/is to waver between worlds:/the gods and ours.”

  Jane closes the book and turns it over in her hands, looking for the author or publication date, and the poet seems to deflate. He knows he has been in this room before with that very book placed in front of him. He had stopped here with the succubus after being released from the Whitmore. He remembers feeling anxiety—a combination of terror at being outside the hospital’s gates and dread of being returned to what Dr. Thorpe had called “your wife’s care.” He had shredded his notebook in the carriage on the way over, and yet his wife had insisted they come, leading him straight into the house like a dog on a chain. All of it—the newness of the situation, the lightness of the air, the motes in front of his eyes—had induced in him a kind of panic. His hands scrabbling and near useless as his wife thrust his own book into them and demanded he sign it.

  What the poet remembers most is how he wanted to knock her teeth out because she kept showing them to him, smiling widely, though her eyes were on George Farrington. Some sort
of exchange was being made, an agreement he couldn’t keep track of. He remembers a peal of laughter emitting from his wife’s ugly mouth, then a “Delightful!” which led to the girl being called in.

  It was the girl the poet knew from the other world, the world he had just been expelled from. She was the same one, he was certain of it, although she was healthier now—more substance to her, a rosy brightness to her skin. She curtseyed and smiled at him, left a tray of tea and biscuits, a pair of scissors nestled amongst the cups and saucers. For a brief instant he could breathe again, and so he closed his eyes to compose a line in his head about knowing.

  The succubus beside him suddenly picked up the scissors, her hands touching so many surfaces—a desk, drawers, an envelope, a chair—until there was nowhere in the room where the poet could stand that was free of his wife’s contamination. “You take it,” she said to George Farrington, in a voice the poet had heard the first time he bedded her. She sat down and tilted her neck, and Farrington took the shears to the black snakes of her hair, clipping a tress from near her neckline. The Countess turned and levelled her eyes at the poet even as she spoke to Farrington. “Now,” she said, “let’s take one from him.”

  Jane returns the poet’s book to the shelf and draws the curtains farther so she can look over the back lawn for Blake. The gardens have come a long way in the past week: the central mound has been turned over, a new row of rose bushes has been planted, and the trellises have been reset. There are so many changes that even as Jane cranes her neck to gaze over the grounds for the gardener whose body and gestures she knows, she’s wondering what work is his, what parts of the garden he might have planted in the stretch of days they were together, and what he would say if he came up to the house and saw her now.