The World Before Us (12 page)

To test the sound, the cellist with the cropped red hair begins to play from the music sheet in front of her. The guests will start arriving soon and the musicians have yet to check the acoustics properly. The violinist, a gangly man with a boyish expression, folds his legs under his chair and joins in. Jane recognizes the piece: a Dvořák quartet her father had encouraged her to practise, suggesting once that if she got good enough
at it they might try to play it together. And it’s this—the memory of her father’s dissatisfaction, and the aching swell of the notes the cellist is playing so beautifully—that makes her start toward the front door of the Chester. If she failed at Dvořák and at the cello, and if what happened with Lily made her a disappointment to her father and to her mother, why should things be any different now, with William? That day in the police station, William had known that Jane was sitting across the room, and for more than an hour he refused to glance up at her. By the time her grandparents arrived, the room was so full of volunteer search-party members being handed maps, flashlights and headlamps that Jane hadn’t known if he was still there. Besides, she reasons now as she puts her hand out to the door, if she were meant to see William it would have happened—there have been conferences and lectures, probably a hundred near misses. In the years before her grandmother died Jane was in his end of the city every Sunday, two blocks down the road. Jane grabs the handle and opens the door onto the street. If Gareth sees her now, or Duncan or Paulo, she’ll say she’s just stepping out, going for a walk before the party.

As we move to go outside a second violinist picks up the thread of music and the movement swells.

“I know this piece!” the musician amongst us exclaims, and he begins to nod along. After a few bars he hums loudly, matching the violinist note for note, and even though the cellist has stopped to adjust her music stand he keeps singing and whirling around. We get like this sometimes, when what is happening to Jane becomes less important than what we can learn about ourselves. “It’s number twelve! Listen, listen!”

Outside, the evening air is surprisingly cool. Jane stands on the pavement, lifts her chin and watches as the clouds pull their veils over the city.
Rain
, she thinks, and squints skyward. Unsure of what she’ll do, a
few of us start to worry, and we argue about fluttering her again. Then the one singing Dvořák picks up the melody, his voice swaying loudly as if he’s remembering the best piece of music on earth.

“Shut it!” the theologian shouts.

“Leave him be,” says the idiot.

“I can’t think with the distraction,” the theologian seethes.

“Folly,” says the poet, “on the hill behind the seat.”

The theologian exhales, and Cat says chirpily, “Right. I’m going to go back in and poke my fingers into the sweets.”

The girl amongst us whispers, “Wait,” with little-girl urgency. She turns to Jane and tries to wish her back inside, but Jane stays where she is, and what we know of the girl—her brightness, the soft plane of her presence—turns to us for help. When we don’t do anything, she takes Jane’s hand, flutters her own fingers over the open curve of Jane’s palm, tracing and retracing the same path with such focus we can almost see her bent into her work.

“What are you writing?” we ask.

Jane lifts her hands and rubs them together.

“Is it a letter?”

“No.” The girl sighs, and when Jane drops her hands back to her sides the girl returns to what she was doing.

“Is it a word?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

Two months after she stopped playing the cello Jane told her therapist that she was thinking of a career in museums. And to Clive’s credit, even with everything he knew about William’s job, he didn’t say a word, just cocked an eyebrow and scribbled something into her folder. Then he closed it and set it down on the table.

Less than a year later, when Jane was reading the casebook of an asylum patient for a class assignment, the image of Clive’s blue folder, with its two-dozen sheaves of paper, dropped so casually onto his side table, came back to haunt her. What if
those
documents—the details of what had happened to her and how she’d struggled after Lily disappeared—might one day be all that was left, the one bit of evidence that defined who she was? Jane’s mother, if she spoke about Lily at all, always referred to “that thing that happened”—as if Lily’s disappearance were an altercation Jane had had in the schoolyard or some childhood accident and not the defining before and after of her life. This was partly why Jane took to studying asylum archives for her dissertation, why she later took to N—she was drawn to the idea of what falls off the side of the page, what goes missing.

Jane was thirty years old when she finally stopped seeing Clive. She’d been skipping sessions now and then and not saying much when she did go. She’d started sleeping around a bit before she and Ben got serious, and with no other fodder—no recently dead mothers or on-again, off-again father complaints—Clive had begun to make an issue of the promiscuity.

“Absolutely,” he said when she told him she was done. “Terms of service—the client decides when they’ve had enough.”

She remembers how he shrugged, and that the shrug stung. Then he picked up the stress ball on his side table, sinking into his chair in that slouchy fat-gut way she hated. He was still tossing the ball back and forth from one hand to the other when she lifted her scarf and coat off the rack in the corner.

“So, we’re done then?” he asked as if expecting a summary statement or some expression of thanks.

“It’s not a divorce, Clive, and neither of us is dying.”

“Right then, best of luck.” He stood up and shook her hand in that hearty well-done-us way that reminded her of politicians on the telly
after a particularly depressing summit. Then he sat down and watched her open the door. “Small everyday acts of bravery, Jane”—she could hear the ball softly hitting his palm behind her—“small everyday acts.”

When Jane opens the door and steps back inside the Chester, we breathe a sigh of relief even though we’re unsure what turn of thought has led her back in. While we were outside someone adjusted the lighting, and now the hall is glowing in lamplight, the marble floors gleaming, the bowhead fixed above us like a celestial being. The hummingbirds, the tortoise, the sixteen cabinets are all where we left them—our eyes settle on each display as if we are passengers on a train compulsively counting our bags to confirm that all our belongings are here. The girl is still beside Jane.

“What did you draw?” we ask her.

She shakes her head as if it’s a secret.

“A picture?”

“No.”

“An arrow?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Invisible cities,” says the girl.

8

It’s almost seven o’clock when Jane gathers enough nerve to leave her office and enter the natural history hall. There are already a hundred people milling about, and the crowd is so noisy that the sprightly notes of the quartet’s Vivaldi are almost lost under the chatter. Jane’s mother liked to call rooms like this, filled with wealthy arts patrons, “philanthropic rooms”—said disdainfully, because to Claire forging a career as an academic or a musician was something one
did
, whereas having money was something that happened to you. Claire came from old money, but after she met Henri she sidled out of it, acted as if every success, every honour she earned, was achieved despite some vaguely difficult upbringing. At parties or conferences when people asked if she was Andrew Standen’s daughter, she would say, “the cabinet minister?”—then light up a cigarette and laugh bitterly as if the suggestion were ridiculous. It was the same for Jane except that Jane couldn’t escape her lineage: at university she was Claire Standen’s daughter, at social and charitable events she was Andrew Standen’s grandchild and for the eighteen years she studied cello she was Henri Braud’s offspring—even though her father had
toured through most of her childhood and then left for good when Jane was sixteen.

Jane’s mother had visited the Chester only once—three years after Jane started working there as the full-time archivist, and four or five months before Claire died. From where she’s standing by the glass wall of the gift shop, Jane can almost track Claire’s movements in the natural history hall that day. By then Claire had lost over a stone and had cropped her hair into a pixie cut so that its loss wouldn’t be so noticeable. “Look, I’m Twiggy,” she’d said, twirling around by the Nelson cabinet. Claire had loved unexpected parts of the collection: common seashells, flints, a Royal Worcester vase in over-bright colours, the Canopic jars secreted back from Egypt. She’d stopped at the mounted aardvark and touched his bristly snout, looking straight into his glass-bead eyes. The prognosis by then wasn’t good—a few months, the doctors said, a year at the outside—and Claire had retreated, as she always did, into her intellect, filtering everything through irony and her sense of the absurd.

Duncan, scrubbed clean of cardboard dust and wearing a tuxedo, sidles up to Jane. She’s already on her second glass of Chardonnay.

“Break anything this afternoon, Janey?”

Jane rolls her eyes at him even though she wants, irrationally, to unbutton his black jacket and bury her face against his chest, hide in the space between his lapels. It occurs to her, as she leans into him and he casually drapes his arm over her shoulder, that it was ridiculous not to take Lewis up on his offer to be here with her. A month ago when they’d met up at The Lamb and Lewis suggested he’d come to the lecture, she had said, “No, no, I’ll be all right, I can handle it.” No one at the Chester knows about Lily, and that’s probably why she told Lewis she’d be fine—she didn’t want anyone watching her, watching her and William.

“Big crowd for a book about gardens.” Duncan takes a sip of wine and surveys the audience, most of them standing and socializing around the empty seats. When he spots a pretty twenty-something in a black cocktail dress he lifts his arm off Jane’s shoulder and straightens his bow tie. “You ever heard of this guy?” His eyes follow the girl until he loses her.

“The author?” Jane stalls. To her relief, Duncan doesn’t notice.

“That Judith’s a bit of a ball-breaker, isn’t she?”

“Sorry?”

Duncan glances at Jane. “The conservation supervisor. I saw her come out of Gare’s office and the look on his face—I swear I thought he’d had a stroke.”

“That’s not funny.”

Duncan turns and gives Jane his full attention, leaning his right shoulder against the glass of the gift shop wall. “You okay? You’re acting a bit odd.” When Jane doesn’t reply, his gaze drifts down to take in her dress and the heels she’s wearing. When his eyes come back up they stop overlong at her chest. “You look great, by the way. Your—”

Jane interjects before he says something crass. “Have you read the book?” There is a large pressboard mock-up of
The Lost Gardens of England
staring down at them from over Duncan’s shoulder.

“Nah. You?”

Jane nods.

“What’s his name again, anyway?” Duncan takes another sip of wine and squints into the distance. “Is it Wallace?”

“William,” Jane says, scanning the crowd. She can feel the muscles of her face trying to approximate indifference. “William Eliot.”

Names are the most valuable things. We have always said this. They are more valuable than the clocks, books, photographs and objects we find ourselves circling; more important than the tortoise behind the musicians,
than the logbook and slivers of wood from Nelson’s ship in the nautical cabinet beside us. Names are pronouncements, entries, claims. Where things hold secrets—ones the people passing through the Chester do not always seek out—names state. They say,
I was, I am
. When the Chester first opened, it was the things that were highlighted: the wadded birds that could be stroked so that their feathers’ remiges and vanes might be felt under the tip of a finger, the sea sponge modelled in glass that could be lifted toward a lamp and turned over, its latticework marvelled at. The pickaxe the explorer Hoburn carried on his expedition north was once swung through the air by the nephew of a Society member, one swift
swish
that startled everyone. Back then, names mattered less because the men attached to them still lived. But Edmund Chester knew better. He forecasted a future rife with forgetting. As much as we love his museum, as much as we love Jane, we must admit that if we thought in terms of currency, and if fluttering were allowed, we would pick up the gold astronomical clock in our hands, we would secrete Jane away and we’d hold them both ransom for names. To have lost the thing that you have carried with you the whole of your life is no slight thing. This is why we stand around Jane’s desk and crane our necks when she flips through censuses or logs, church registers, hospital records or ship manifests. We are looking for the slightest scrap of a signature, any blotted bit of ink we might know. Some of us mouth the names she writes down to see if the form they take is familiar, to see if we can slip into them like we would our own coats or favoured pair of shoes.

A day or two before Jane met Lewis at The Lamb to tell him about William Eliot’s lecture, the suggestion arose that we should all take names. It was evening, and we were in Jane’s flat and still reeling from news of the closure. One of us said that taking names would help us sort out who was who, be an expedient way to reference the speaker. He was over by the bookshelf perusing the spines, and after a minute he said, “Call me John.” Most of us are superstitious and so we hesitated.

The theologian said, “No.”

“I think we should all have a say,” John countered.

“Ah, democracy, excellent choice,” said the idiot.

It was almost ten o’clock and Jane was curled up on the sofa. There was an old black-and-white film on the television and she’d been drifting in and out of sleep. The dog was flopped down by the door, nosing the draft from the landing.

“What exactly is the motion?” the theologian asked from the window.