The World Before Us

by Aislinn Hunter

  When Norvill and Nora returned to the lake they found George sitting on a rock some distance from the blanketed body. What was left of the picnic—the roast, cheeses and fruitcake—had been carefully packed away as if in the absence of help George wanted to busy himself with some task, to be useful.

  As soon as Norvill was within earshot, George said, “You’ll have to go away, find some excuse, take a commission.” His voice was gruff but there was also a streak of satisfaction under it.

  “Why?”

  “Why!” George was beyond angry; he slid off the rock and approached Norvill, not caring that Nora was there. “Where do I begin? The dead man? Or the married woman? Or Mother? Imagine her having to make idle chatter with you across the breakfast table after this!”

  Norvill picked up a stone and tossed it sideways into the lake. “I see.”

  George gasped. “Do you?” He stepped forward as if to strike his brother, but then stopped short. “And,” George huffed, his eyes settling on Nora as if to ascertain what she might or might not already know, “you must put a stop to this dalliance with Chester’s wife. You both appeared ridiculous.”

  We know from Jane’s work on the Chester archives, and from Charlotte’s later admissions to Nora, that Norvill did not end things. That even though he let the strings of the relationship go while preparing for his removal to the coast, Charlotte was more reluctant. It wasn’t just that she thought she could love him; it was that he had become entangled in a tragedy borne of his feelings for her. That afternoon of the picnic, sketching and lingering on the rock, she’d felt as if some sort of palpable organism, some natural order, was humming and expanding, encompassing everyone in the party but her. She imagined that if she looked around the lake or dared to step even a little distance into the woods she’d see the world pulsing, like a giant bed of moss or the great banyan Edmund had told her about—something the others felt connected to, but that she could never be.

  Once, later, standing on a chair in Scarborough while Nora stitched a hem, she confessed that it was Norvill who had changed this, who had brought something inside her back to life.

  Jane parks the Mercedes in the church parking lot and lets Sam out. Since she left the station she has been trying to imagine what sort of shape her wrongness might have taken; she has been playing at it as if it is a puzzle, removing one piece—William’s indifference—and replacing it with another—William’s possible concern—even as she knows that his concern isn’t, or ought not to be, the central part of the equation. This has led her to thoughts of Charlotte and Norvill, to what it is people are looking for in each other, and what, by extension, Jane is looking for in N. Prudence’s diaries—her disdain for Charlotte, for the headmaster George befriended, for the East, or for anything that might take her sons away from her—are making Jane rethink the contents of Charlotte’s diaries; though really it’s the gaps that interest her now. There were, after all, two hiatuses in Charlotte’s diaries that Jane hadn’t paid much attention to. These, she now understands, correspond to the trips Charlotte made to be with Norvill at the coast, trips that Edmund, in his defeat, likely permitted so long as his wife was discreet—although Jane imagines his compliance would have come without formal declaration.

  It’s not improbable that he wanted his wife’s happiness after all. Not impossible that both times, she’d come back flushed and rejuvenated and, perversely, more in love with him. Perhaps, although the cost was high, seeing Charlotte’s spirit returned to her was a relief to Edmund—especially if she shared her renewal with him.

  Jane hasn’t realized until now that those years of struggle for Charlotte and Edmund correspond to the years when the Chester museum was fully realized—when the collections that had been idling pleasantly alongside Edmund’s factories and family concerns were given almost everything he could offer in terms of money, attention and time. The clocks cleaned and working perfectly, the whale knit to the ceiling, the hummingbirds purchased, and the Vlasak plant specimens procured: each glassy piece a true correspondent to the animate thing it was modelled on, a marvel of petals, stems and leaves, the strawberry plant weighted with a glaze of frost—captured exactly as it might have been in the last brisk days of autumn.

  The day of the picnic, Nora shifted from one foot to the other; she had yet to purchase a second pair of shoes and the sole of the left one had lost some of its stitching and was flapping annoyingly near the toe. She’d confided this to Charlotte, who had reluctantly allowed her to station herself at the slip between the alders where the Chester children had shouldered their way through, the shrub’s green leaves silvering while she waited. The conversations of the men, when they stood close enough for her to listen, were wonderful. Mr. Chester was telling Mr. and Mrs. Sutton about his museum, the rarities of nature he’d collected and seen. “The world is a large place,” Chester said, and he ran his hand over his vest, lightly fingering his pocket watch. “Though I suppose you know that.” He was speaking to the Suttons, but sensed Nora’s eyes on him and nodded in her direction. He said this last phrase looking at her face, as if he could discern a worldliness at work there.

  When Leeson burst through the bushes, Nora was feeding Cato a bump of bread. The dog spun and Norvill appeared with a shotgun, and Nora did not have time to reach him. Leeson halted when he saw Norvill and the shot that stopped him again was loud and strangely flat, a burst that arced and tattered. Leeson’s arms swinging in a circle as he sought to right himself.

  Nora’s face was above Leeson’s before George reached them, her hands cradling his head. And she was there when Norvill bent down and saw what he’d done. A flicker of understanding crossed Norvill’s countenance: he saw that Nora knew the man.

  This is why it came as a surprise a month later when Prudence, taking her tea in the gazebo, announced that Norvill needed a maid for the house in Scarborough and that she had been requested. “The footman has no skills, he can barely mail a letter, and Norvill needs someone who can clean and cook, and take dictations related to his work; his hands are sore from the constant chiselling.” Prudence stood up and smoothed her skirt, her eyes welling because she preferred Nora to the others and because now that George had gone back to the Himalayas, the house was too quiet. That night, taking her tinctures, she confessed that Nora’s leaving would be difficult, that she was beginning to feel that she was alone in the whole of the world.

  Norvill came to Inglewood a week later to visit his mother and to collect Nora. The day before their departure he put on a tweed jacket and announced that he was heading out to the main cave to make strati-graphical sketches; it would consume most of the afternoon should anyone—meaning Prudence—need him. In a moment of compassion, or perhaps with sudden awareness that he would need someone to assist him, he’d stopped and turned just before the French doors to ask Nora if she’d like to join him.

  The entrance to the cave was a narrow slit at the base of a limestone cliff. Step into its darkness and you were suddenly in its throat: damp and dripping and hollow. There was almost an entry hall, Nora could sense it: a high sand-coloured vault framed by jagged columns that hung from the ceiling and rough balusters that sprung up from the ground. Nora lifted her hem and stepped over the puddle in the walkway. As she squeezed between two large mounds that looked like petrified mushrooms, Norvill chided her for not removing her bustle, held the lamp in each hand higher so that she could see where her skirt had caught. There were pools of water in the depressed regions of the warped floor and Norvill took her hand to guide her along the slippery wall. At the first intersection, dripping sounds came from three directions, a plik plonk plik that reminded her of the clocks in the small parlour. The world smelled of an absence of grass, an absence of green things.

  In the cavern Norvill called “the Inverted Forest” he took his sketch pad out of his satchel, gave Nora one of the lamps and asked her to hold it against the wall she would find some twenty paces past where she was standing.

  “Go slowly,”
he cautioned, and just as he said so a large glinting tooth—what she could only conceive of as a giant incisor—appeared hanging from the roof of the cavern inches above her head. She lifted up the lamp and saw dozens, no, hundreds more.

  Norvill stayed where he was, even though he could see she was frightened. He said, “It’s as if the trees stripped by winter have been strung upside down. That’s why we call it the Inverted Forest.”

  “No,” she replied, even though she knew it was not her station, “it’s as if we are inside the mouth of that bear you have stuffed in your entry, and are about to be swallowed.”

  What Nora didn’t tell Norvill, even as the years progressed and they fell into an easy affinity—he always treating her as help, though he gave her secretarial tasks and praised her liberally—was that she’d had a strange sensation in the cave in that hour when she was asked to hold the lamp up toward the lined and glittering wall behind her. She did not believe in spirits or ghosts, and she was not deceived by the mesmerizing theatrics she’d once seen Samuel Murray perform in a comedy for the Superintendent—the poet with black around his eyes and a gypsy scarf over his head, predicting everyone’s future in return for coins made of paper. No, what she felt instead was a kind of tenor—like on those rare days when a shift in the weather or a word dropped by a stranger recalls you to some other time, to how you felt or where you once stood or what work you were doing; recalls you to the person you were then.

  The tenor of the cave reminded her of Leeson. Of how she had been cold in the woods that day they left the Whitmore, and how, in one of the clearings, he’d seen that and had suggested she move to a spot of sun. Herschel had come back then, conveying urgency, so their movement had resumed; and Leeson had plucked her hand and tucked it into his when they reached the fallen tree, escorting her over it.

  In the cave the memory of Leeson had been there—so vitally present it was as if he had left his body by the lake and remained with her, watching.

  “Higher,” Norvill said, a second pencil in his mouth.

  Nora lifted the lamp and debated asking him if he felt something similar.

  But then he spat the pencil onto his lap. “Come now, Miss Hayling, lift it back up to where it was. Or is your arm getting tired?”

  The late-afternoon air carries the first fusty smell of autumn, and even though the trees are still green, the leaves, here and there, are letting go. Overhead a crow on the ridge of the church roof caws, then flaps up and over the bell tower.

  “Accck,” replies Herschel, and he lifts his arms up and down.

  A group of hikers with walking sticks and stuffed packs walk past Jane as she heads across the road and into the field that sits between the woods and the trail. One of the women lags behind to pet Sam, looking around for his person until she spots Jane standing along the grassy verge. Jane waves as if to say, He’s with me.

  It’s here that we briefly lose the girl—though she is a child and prone to do this: run headlong out of our orbit on the promise of some great adventure.

  “I’ll go,” Cat sighs, moving off toward the trail.

  But then the one who has been circling us for days says, in a gentle voice, “I’ll find her”—because he is good at that, and there are four slats on the gate, and two low branches bolstering the oak, and six hikers coming off the trail, and the world, today, is evens.

  A hundred years ago, Jane reasons, Nora Hayling was a flesh-and-blood human being who probably walked across the road she herself has crossed almost daily this week, coming out of the servant tunnel and passing between the church and George’s waterfall as she strode smartly into the village on errands for Prudence or on her half-days off, her body ghosting the same places Jane’s body has been. In one of Jane’s imaginings, the sun is on Nora’s face and she is closing her eyes under it, breathing in deeply through her nose; in another version, it’s that hour before rain when the air feels like dew. Or maybe it’s winter, the first lilt of snowfall, and Nora stops to lift her glove to see if she can catch a crystal of snow, study it before it disappears. And in that wondrous, short span of time, when the perfect sphere of it is there on her palm, maybe Nora sees Herschel, standing in the woods with his hand out to the field the day they took their long walk. Or maybe she sees Leeson sitting in the net of sun on the stump beside her, saying that the countryside was theirs to wander over as they saw fit, his face lit up and his eyes accidentally meeting hers, and Nora thinking, How lovely, how lovely it is to be seen.

  We see Jane. See her as she walks Sam along the stone wall, as she stops under the oak, tugs a leaf off its lowest branch and slips it into her pocket. Leaning against the wall by the stables she writes a note to Blake and at the bottom she adds call me and includes her number in London. Then she does what he’d done in his note to her, and underlines please.

  • • •

  Jane stretches out the kink in her neck and looks back to the woods, to the place where Lily went missing, and some of us feel the shape our hearts once took hang like pendulums in the hourless clocks of our chests.

  Sam barks at Jane and wags his tail and she picks up a stick and tosses it, says, “Go on!” And we watch as Sam runs nose-down through the waving grass, and we are as happy as she is to watch him run, to witness his unfettered pleasure.

  Some nights when there were only a few of us in her room, and it was still early and we were not yet tired from watching, we would ask each other to name the first thing we could remember.

  “Sand,” one of us said, “the good kind, not like the pebbled bits by the sea, but the fine grain you’d find in an hourglass.”

  And then we would try to puzzle if this sand was a memory from life or from a story—or something we glimpsed in the in-between we think of as “now.”

  “Was it in your hand or under your feet?” we asked. “Was it warm or cold?” “Was there water nearby?” “Did you swim?” “Who were you with—a man or a woman, a boy or a girl?”

  “I remember a park,” another said, “with gas lamps and a bench near the water.”

  The boy remembered a terrier bouncing up to catch a stick, and a carousel with brightly painted horses. The girl remembered her mother’s face appearing over hers so that they could rub noses.

  “Mwah!” said Cat at this, and she went around blowing kisses at everyone.

  “What we saw first is less vital than what we saw last,” the theologian droned, though the idiot corrected him, waved his hand at all the talk of Ceasing, said, “It is what things become, sir. The world is congregated by force, and no force is lost, it can only be converted.”

  So how do we begin? We begin with Jane—and not because she is here for us, but because we are also here for her, even though she does the work of conjuring us.

  Jane opens her notebook and smooths a new page. She sees the trio tromping through the spool of the woods, and Herschel cawing, and Leeson stepping over a thatch of sunlight. Together we watch as Jane imagines a small kindness in a clearing—Leeson taking Nora’s hand—and we laugh because one of us knows that she has it wrong, that his palm was rough and his arm unsteady.

  On the first blank page she writes: The Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics sat along a carriage track most people travelled only once … and then she pauses under the oak tree to consider the fact of it.

  After an hour, Sam trots over and nuzzles her face. Looking up, she can see that it’s getting late, that they ought to get on the road because she is expected at the cottage where Henri is waiting for her and because Lewis is driving up.

  “Onward!” we say, because we, too, have been daydreaming. So we try to pick up where we think we last left off—though memory being what it is, we are not always sure what is yet to come and what has already happened.

  “Attendance,” sighs the theologian.

  “Here!” we say. “Here,” and “Here,” and “Here.”

  And across the road the clock tower strikes six o’clock—a strong brass chord—and a chorus of bel
ls follows.

  Acknowledgements

  On October 20, 1877, a patient (or patients) at a hospital for convalescent lunatics wandered for eleven or so miles through the woods to make their way to a great man’s door. The great man, in real life, was the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and his letter to the Governor of Witley Hospital inspired the opening narrative of this novel. I would like to thank David Lord Tennyson for permission to use the contents of Lord Tennyson’s original letter (with the necessary fictional substitutions of name and place) as well as the current keepers of the letter itself: The Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. I would also like to thank Colin Gale at Bethlem Royal Hospital’s Archives and Museum in London. Not only was I allowed generous access to the hospital’s rare and wholly compelling Victorian archives, but that access allowed me to put together Tennyson’s letter (which did not mention his visitors by name) with Robert Cowtan, whose casebook I happened upon during my research. Cowtan was a patient at the real-life Witley Hospital—a man known for a belief in his great powers of walking—and it was he who made the real-life epic trek to Tennyson’s house.

  I am grateful for the support and funding provided by the following organizations, and grateful for the work of those people within them: The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council and The Office of Research and Scholarship at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The University of Edinburgh provided me with a studentship to pursue a PhD involving resonant objects in Victorian writers’ museums and that work has bolstered much of this novel.

  Thanks also to The University of Lancaster (UK), Macquarie University (Australia) and Memorial University (Canada) for writer-inresidence positions that contributed directly to the development of this book.

  At a point early in the writing of this novel I was invited into the back rooms of the Natural History Museum in London. I remember a lovely woman from the botany department opening an unmarked drawer and announcing very casually that I was looking at a pinecone brought back by Darwin on The Beagle. Thank you, Natural History Museum, for that.