The World Before Us (14 page)

Jane takes a glass of white wine from a waiter’s tray and wanders to the back of the hall to stand by the Vlasak cabinet while she waits for the lecture to start. She can see Gareth milling around by the bar, sipping Mortlach from his private stash and chatting up Randall Wood, the Chester Prize’s co-founder. A few acquaintances from other museums come by to talk with Jane, stay for a minute or two asking after work prospects, and then, finding Jane anxious and distracted, excuse themselves to circulate amongst the crowd. When no one is looking, Jane turns toward the side of the mahogany cabinet and drains the last half of her glass of wine, closing her eyes at the calming effect.

“Brilliant,” the theologian says. “Here we go again.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Cat snaps. She moves toward Jane, as if to put her arms around her.

A few minutes later, Gareth passes through the crowd near Jane
and raises a hand in greeting; his tufty white eyebrows flare up as if to say,
What are you doing back here?
Then he slips between a woman in a red jacket and a man in a grey suit, moving in the direction of the main door. Jane calculates that he’s probably seen William arrive and is going to greet him. She starts for the bar.

“What do we do?” Cat asks.

“Abandon ship,” the musician says.

“
Ka-pow, ka-pow
,” shoots the boy, and the girl standing next to him whispers, “Stop it.”

“And the handbook says?” This is the theologian’s favourite quip, his way of taking pleasure in our confusion, as if there were a handbook, as if we could even open it if such a thing existed.

“We stay with her,” the one with the soft voice says, and the poet throws his arms overhead and intones: “And so to enter the last chamber of the ungated world.”

When Lewis came back from the bar that day at The Lamb, dropping a last round of pints on the table and plunking himself down on the bench, Jane closed her eyes tight and said the one thing she’d been holding back. “William Eliot’s written a book.” Then she opened an eye to gauge the expression on his face.

When Jane was growing up, Lewis was the only person other than Clive who’d let her talk openly about what had happened with Lily. But ever since he and Natalie had the girls, she’d been unsure how the mention of Lily would sit with him. As soon as William’s name was out of her mouth, she was sorry she’d said it.

“A book on what?” Lewis looked peeved.

“Victorian plant hunters.” She moved the pint Lewis had set in front of her closer and a dollop of stout slopped over the side.

“And?”

“And nothing.” Jane tugged a few napkins out of the dispenser to wipe up the spill, and then, without looking up, added, “He’s giving this year’s lecture at the Chester.”

“Oh. I see.” Lewis tilted his head to try to catch her eye; it reminded her of when she’d go to his house for curry night, how she’d notice him trying to calculate whether she was on her third or fourth glass of wine. “You want to talk about it?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll say, ‘Heya,’ there’ll be a load of
Rhododendron
prattle, that kind of thing.”

“Naturally.” And that’s when Lewis asked if he should come, and Jane said she’d be okay without him.

“Mostly it’s just got me thinking,” she said. “I’ve got all that research on rural asylums—you know that paper I was working on? Maybe
I
could write a book.”

“A book?”

“On the Whitmore and the mystery of N. You know, the problem of the historical record.”

Lewis placed his head in his hands. As if he was tired, as if he had been listening to her make things up for a hundred years, as if he was bored of watching her try to copy everyone else, as if she’d never find something of her own.

“I could do it,” she said.

Lewis drained his pint and then patted his jacket pockets to locate his keys. He said, quietly, “I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

We remember the exact moment Jane brought up the idea of the book. We remember it because we thought it would change things.

“Did you hear that?” John asked.

And those of us who’d wandered away from the snug turned our attention back to the conversation. We had been distracted by a couple
at the bar having a row about where they wanted to holiday and if they could afford a five-star. The boy, who was fluttering the specks of salt on the table, stopped when the theologian stood over him.

“Hear what?” we asked, some of us still weighing the pros and cons of a beach hotel in a country whose name sounded like white sand.

“She was talking about the Whitmore; she said she might write about it.”

“How long ago was the Whitmore?” Cat asked, trying to splay time into a chronology. “And what came first?”

“A waterfall,” the boy said.

“
Tweep tweep,
” called a voice from the other side of the room.

“Magpie!” shouted the musician.

The theologian interjected. “I think the woods were first.”

“Was it a hundred years ago?” we asked, because we easily forget numbers.

“Once again, time is relative,” the idiot said, and the theologian grunted.

“The dates are in Jane’s book,” the one with the soft voice said, and then Lewis stood up and we stopped our bickering.

“I wish,” Cat said, looking at the receipt Lewis had left on the table, “that we could write things down like people do. I forget sometimes what matters to me and what matters to everyone else. How can we figure anything out if we all start thinking we like stout, or—” She gestured to the girl, who’d wandered off toward the bright flickering keno lights. “That we like bedtime stories, or—” She lifted her hand toward the boy kneeling on the bench near the window.

“Dogs. I like dogs.”

“Exactly.” She sighed. “See? I think I like dogs too.”

“Maybe you do,” John said, “maybe we all do. Suppose it’s the
why
that matters.”

“
Why
I like dogs?”

“Yes. Why.”

“Terriers,” the boy said, staring out at the playing field through a pane of yellow stained glass, “I like terriers.” He turned toward us. “Have I said terriers before? Or just dogs?”

“Terriers,” we all replied.

“Which is why we have Jane,” John said, watching her as she shrugged on her cardigan. “Even if we could write ‘terrier’ down on a notepad we’d probably forget we’d done it or where it got put.”

“Writing is against the rules,” the theologian intoned.

“Na-na-na-na,” the musician chided before drifting over to the dartboards.

“In the meantime—” Cat reached her arm out toward the boy, who was watching two teenagers kick a ball back and forth over the green. “In the meantime,” she repeated, when he didn’t feel her shape trying to touch his, trying to show him that everyone was going, “we will all try to remind you every day—okay, everyone?
Terriers
.”

“One terrier,” he said, as the teenagers, in their brightly numbered jerseys, moved farther into the field. “Dock.” He turned to us as he said the name.

“Dock?” we asked. “Is that the dog’s name or what they called you?”

“Dock,” he repeated. “Dock,” saying it quietly. “The dog’s, maybe? I’m not sure.”

Lewis put on his jacket, pocketed his wallet and said, “Walk you to the tube?”

Jane slipped her arm through his and squeezed tightly. We could tell she was relieved to have told someone about William, even if the conversation hadn’t gone the way she’d wanted.

We turned to leave. If we lost track of Jane we’d have to make our way back to her flat on our own, which meant there was a chance we
might get lost, spend hours or days making mistakes in direction. The boy suddenly called out, “It was the dog’s name! He was brown and white and he liked crusts of bread and
I
named him.”

So out we went, giddy from our progress, the boy imploring from the back of the group, “Can we please, please, please try not to forget.”

We haven’t forgotten the dog. And we haven’t forgotten what Jane said about writing a book. But things are different now. We bristle when the subject comes up. The night a few weeks ago when she pushed her Whitmore files under the bed, some of us stormed out, and some of us stood over her while she was sleeping and called her a liar. So now, when Gareth steps onto the stage to place a jug of water and a glass on the low table beside the lectern, and Jane goes up on her toes to see if William is standing in the crowd nearby, some of us are wishing her well and some of us are just wanting the production over with. The boy, full of pent-up energy, is zooming around, while the girl walks in circles around Jane the way children sometimes do, running their fingers around the bell of a skirt or along the silky waves of a curtain.

“Come here, sweetie,” the one with the soft voice says, and the girl wanders back to us.

“Who’s that?” the girl asks when she’s back in the fold, and we turn to where she’s pointing, to the marble bust of the museum founder sitting on its pillar at the far side of the stage.

“That’s Mr. Chester. Edmund Chester,” we say, and his name feels good coming out of our mouths, the sure shape of it.

This is the wonder of names. Like the press of a footprint in the snow: proof that someone has been there.

9

There is a scattering of applause during Gareth’s introductory speech when he mentions that the Chester Museum has been exhibiting the work of individual collectors for one hundred and forty-two years. He waits until the applause subsides, nods to acknowledge it, and then continues. “Edmund Chester was a man of his time, of the Industrial era, in that he valued and upheld the two most prevalent ideals of his age: progress and mastery. For Edmund, society’s ability to move forward and look back simultaneously was a wonder. The men that he admired, those he surrounded himself with, strove to understand the world in new ways, to mechanize it, simplify it and coordinate it, while also preserving and revelling in the past and in the fortitude of the elements. Men of his generation didn’t rest on their inheritances; they used their money and titles to ferret out new possibilities, business models, technologies, remedies and inventions, formulae that could be shared amongst all kinds and classes of people, that could affect how all members of society lived their lives. The associations to which Edmund belonged, the fraternity to whom we—as inheritors of this collection—owe a debt of gratitude, believed that they had come of age in an era of optimism and vitality, one
that was a means to a new kind of power, a power that was not exempt from accountability. Those who didn’t invest in factories or inventions supported local homes, schools and civic institutions. Like Edmund they believed that knowledge mattered, that our history, values and society were reflected in how we regarded and understood the material world—a material world that wasn’t limited to the creatures and specimens found in nature but one that extended to those things we made ourselves.”

Jane can detect a hint of anger in Gareth’s voice, a gruffness that she’s only heard a few times, most distinctly when he announced the museum’s closure. He has been the director and head curator at the Chester for almost thirty years, and he helped vote in the very government that is cutting museum funding. Jane knows that when Gareth was a young boy his mother brought him here once a summer, packing sandwiches and a canister of tea. After they wandered through the museum they’d lunch in the park across the street because it wasn’t gated then and anyone could use it. Seeing his interest in the diorama of exotic animals—the mounted wolf and the moose whose great antlers had been hung with pondweed—his mother bought him a book on mammals. In the year that followed, whenever he was stuck inside the house because of pollen counts and the cotton that seemed to puff up in his chest, she’d give him quizzes on the mammals’ Latin names, on their subspecies, diets and habitats.

Gareth had told all this to the Minister when he’d invited him to tour the museum a month ago. As Jane trailed behind them, she heard Gareth explain that he knew what it was like to visit a museum and carry the experience back into the world. Even back then, Gareth said, he knew that the scientific instruments and plant models he saw in those cabinets had applications and counterparts in the landscape he walked through every day to school. The Minister seemed to see it otherwise: he thought of museums like the Chester as a series of dimly lit rooms where things that were interesting but no longer relevant were shelved.
He barely glanced at the displays, seemed to take more interest in the walkway carpet. “Cutting the museum’s funding is a mistake,” Gareth had said. Jane knew he thought it was a poorly conceived cost-cutting measure by a government that specialized in being shortsighted, that was ignorant about the finite nature of resources, whether natural, manmade or ephemeral. Gareth understood the black-and-white economics, but not the sense of it. He had done his best to appeal the decision, but no one in power had budged.

What, Jane wonders now, would Edmund Chester make of the museum’s closing? Of the longcase clock auctioned off to a private buyer in the south for a coastal home he’d hardly set foot in, of the birds going to a lawyer, the Darwin collection to a bank executive, of the whale bones being shipped to a failing aquarium halfway around the globe? Even the specimen jars that were part of the original collection had been packed into padded cases and would soon be driven down the road to the Natural History Museum, where they’d be left in storage because that museum did not have room to display them.