The World Before Us (15 page)

Edmund had not been ashamed to admit that he loved
things
. In his letters and journals he praised everything from a piston to a pendulum, a cluster of mushrooms in the woods to his factory—a place he loved for the way it expressed a working order, a procedural seamlessness, though he also knew from his own encounters with misfortune that order was an illusion. Jane thinks that the museum was his refuge in this way—a perfect expression of the largely mysterious world, of the gaps in mankind’s knowledge, of the delight of the newly discovered, all under the shelter of one roof. For Edmund, the collection must have been like a giant puzzle, and he’d occupied himself with fitting one piece into the next, whole years spent expanding the imagined frame. The museum was his way of capturing the accomplishments and wonder of men’s lives in rooms that testified to their efforts and erudition—men like Arthur Nicholson and Perry Humphrey, men like Norvill Farrington, who, in those early years,
held up the scarab beetle on its card of paper and explained to those gathered how the wings made a chirring sound, a mode of vibration that caused the body to sing.

What would Edmund Chester have said he’d accomplished, if he’d had time to say so on his last day on earth? Jane thinks of him as a man of science. His pleasure was in the “how” of the world, its palpability, its reverberations. Even when lifting Charlotte’s chin with his hand in the happy years of their marriage he had probably marvelled at how her eyelids lowered the slightest bit; how her lips parted in anticipation. His life was one of constant study: measuring inches of cloth by hours, assembling fossils bone by articulated bone, weighing his grief against his joys, his discoveries against his losses. In the end perhaps he would have said he had offered people a glimpse of the wonder of the world; he’d helped expose its mysterious workings.

A year or so before his death, Edmund wrote a letter to his son about what he called a series of “disagreements” with the house clock. This letter is one of Jane’s favourites. Sitting on the landing, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the guts of the old longcase clock on the floor around him, its pendulum stilled, he found himself thinking,
This is the symbol of the age
: the world’s workings laid out before us, and those of us with the patience to sort through the intricacies casting about its parts. He admitted that on some nights he’d wake with a start and hold his breath until he could make out the clock at the base of the stairs ticking. How even though the maid wiped its brass bezel and glass regularly, he often took a cloth to it himself because it gave him pleasure that the cut of cloth he used came from his own factory, and that the clock face was aging as he aged, that it too needed tending.

Edmund also liked a good gathering. If he were here tonight to see his museum closing, the collection dispersed, Jane thinks he might have been pragmatic enough to enjoy the champagne, to take his wife’s gloved hand in his and say,
Let’s begin again
. He might have reinvented himself,
bolstered himself by dwelling on what was possible. Jane is under no such delusion about herself. She took up the cello and then gave up the cello; she went to university to study archive and records management and then came to the Chester to work. Standing in a hall full of people bursting with enthusiasm about their own careers she finds herself with no secret or special skills, no hidden reserve of optimism and little imagination for reinvention. Instead she has a paralyzing numbness, a sense that whatever she gets close to dissipates or breaks. What Edmund Chester touched made him feel alive; what Jane touches makes her feel absent, as if there’s a life force in everything but her, as if she’s on the outside of a world twitching with possibility.

As Gareth nears the end of his speech, he directs his gaze to the front row, a few seats in from the end. From where Jane is positioned along the side wall she can make out the back of a man’s head: short, sandy-coloured hair, William’s long neck and narrow shoulders. “We all live in history,” Gareth concludes, “because it is history that shapes us.”

While the audience claps—some of the staff members from other museums standing up in a show of solidarity—Jane moves slowly along the wall toward the first row. She stops beside a marble column where she has a good view of William—out of his line of sight because he’s watching Gareth, but able to observe how his eye-glasses are now thick brown frames instead of the wire-rimmed ones he used to wear, how his face is softer, his lips thinner. Jane feels a twinge, a mix of sadness and surprise, that she remembers his lips, her fifteen-year-old desire to kiss them.

What she thinks will happen, what she
wants
to happen, is for William to read and for the lecture to end and for him to turn at some late point in the evening when the room has thinned, and see her talking with Gareth a short distance away, and to come over. When Gareth
introduces them, William might smile and shake her hand. And maybe Gareth will say, by way of context, that Jane is a good archivist, and they’ll talk about his lecture or Jane’s work on the Whitmore archive, and it will be okay that everything that matters between them goes unsaid.

After she bought
The Lost Gardens of England
Jane had thought about not reading it. She returned to her flat, set the book on the side table and stared at the cover—a Marianne North painting from nineteenth-century Jamaica with a green assemblage of cabbage palm, breadfruit, cocoa and coral trees. It was as if she was waiting for the book to do something. Then, two weeks ago when she finally did set herself down on the sofa and pick it up in her hands, she read the whole thing in one sitting. But she didn’t follow the stories—the steamship sinking off the coast of Madras with a whole cache of specimens collected in Ceylon, the murders of two Scottish plant exporters along the Yangtze—so much as imagine William doing his research, working on the problem of the missing specimens he described, the lost lives. She convinced herself that she was reading the book with an archivist’s eye for how one uncovers and arranges historical events, for the ways in which what one knows and doesn’t know can be shuttled between the struts of fact and extrapolation. But she knew she was lying to herself, and the farther into the book she read, the more exposed she felt. By the time she finished the last page describing George Farrington’s legacy—his alpine and
Rhododendron
plantings in the woods at Inglewood, the very woods where Lily, and N too, were lost—she was shaking. She closed the book, pulled a wool throw across her lap, turned her face into the sofa cushion and cried like she hadn’t since she was a child.

When she woke up the next morning she thought about calling her therapist, but didn’t. Instead she remembered how Clive had suggested, during one of their last appointments, that Jane had to let go of the idea of William. He’d said, “Grief is different for everyone.” Later he amended the statement: “Actually, what you have is not grief, it’s more like sorrow.
You’re sorry that this happened to Lily, and sorry that it happened to you. Grief can be shared,” he said gently. “What you have in common with Mr. Eliot is more like guilt. And that is always individual.”

What little we know about ourselves we know because of Jane. Our task as we see it is to wait: wait through those weeks and months when her thoughts have nothing to do with us, days when we have to force ourselves not to make ripples in the living world to gain her attention. Days we have almost risked Ceasing to be able to work a keyboard, switch on the History Channel, put a fist through a wall. We have, in our own way, been waiting for William too, for something to be repaired or unconditionally broken.

When William takes the stage, the applause peaks and then subsides. He adjusts the microphone and places his book and lecture notes on the podium; he pushes the bridge of his glasses up with a finger. “Thank you, Gareth, for that wonderful reminder of the value of museums like this one, and for the warm introduction. I must confess to feeling a bit intimidated. I see so many colleagues here, so many people doing wonderful work in museum science. To have a book—especially one that started out as so much scribbling—be so well received is, frankly, unexpected.”

He pauses and takes a sip of water and his hand trembles as he puts the glass down. “When Gareth first called me about the award, he very clearly stipulated that new work was expected in terms of the lecture. I happily accepted because there was a thread of information, a tiny confluence, if you will, that I had uncovered during my research, but which had no place in the final book. This has to do, of course, with the wonderful museum we are privileged to be sitting in tonight. Many of you may not be familiar with the name
Norvill
Farrington, but hopefully
by the end of this talk you will be. He was an important reformer of museum science in the Victorian era, a geologist of some note, an early supporter of the Chester and friend to its founder, Edmund. He also happens to have been brother to George Farrington of Inglewood—the Victorian plant hunter who features in the last chapter of my book.”

While William pulls his lecture notes out from under his book, we turn to Jane. Her face is impassive save for two red blooms on her cheeks. We know that she is wishing to be elsewhere even as she is relieved to be here; that she is trying, as she has always tried, to put the idea of William into an equation so that she can say “he is X” or “we owe each other Y” and leave it at that. Instead, the idea of him slips constantly out of every box she tries to put him in. We sense her anger welling too—because William has announced that he is going to be talking about Norvill. Norvill, whom Jane knows through her work on the Chester family archives. Norvill, who she irrationally thinks is
hers
.

“Norvill Farrington was born in London in 1843,” William begins. “By the time Norvill was twenty he’d become acquainted with Edmund Chester through a mutual friend, the collector Roger Cain who was also a member of the Royal Society …”

The details in the first part of the lecture are all facts that Jane knows, information gleaned during the months it took her to organize the Chester display upstairs, months spent going through the museum’s records and the trunks of material she found when Gareth sent her to Edmund’s great-granddaughter’s house on the coast, boxes of ledgers and letters pulled out of her attic along with Charlotte Chester’s diaries, writing desk, hair combs and scarab bracelet.

At first, listening to William speak, Jane feels strange. It’s uncanny, this doubling: Jane’s knowledge of the Chester family set against his, the confluence of their interests and thinking. Even the steady rhythm of his voice is unsettling, although there’s a wooing quality to it too, as if he’s reading a bedtime story, as if at the end something will be
said
,
a moral tale delivered that will make the world more coherent, easier to live in.

Jane leans against the marble pillar and its coolness kisses the space between her shoulder blades. Listening to William, she can feel longing seep over her. She registers it as if from a distance, thinks how the feeling is like being overtired as a child—thinks of Claire eight months pregnant with Lewis and hauling a two-year-old Jane across the university quad, trying to find some secretary of undergraduate services or assistant to the assistant registrar who’d watch her
just for a few hours
. Jane had wanted that too—a large office chair in some out-of-the-way corner, a place she could curl up in.

William may be right about Norvill and Edmund’s friendship, and about the two occasions in the 1870s when the Farrington and Chester families met, but gradually Jane registers that he’s skipping over other key facts entirely, and as she follows the thread of his lecture she tries to guess if he’s overlooking them on purpose. What about the details in Charlotte Chester’s letters and diary, details that Jane had noted: brief remarks in a feminine hand that read “N.F. for dinner,” “N.F. for tea,” “discussed contemporary novels with Norvill”—Norvill’s name scrolled over the pages even as the names of other guests, ones noted in Edmund’s own daybook, were overlooked? William hasn’t mentioned Charlotte by name at all. He is focusing instead on how Edmund Chester helped secure funding for one of George Farrington’s Himalayan plant expeditions, how Edmund himself funded George’s last trip to Tibet—an agreement that was reached after a weekend shooting party at Inglewood. An event that Jane has seen referenced in the archive.

When he is finished and the applause subsides, William slips into the crowd and Gareth gently ushers him down the centre aisle to the book-signing table at the back of the hall. A dozen people are already holding books for William to sign. It is obvious that William is new at this; he is overly formal with the first few people who press their copies
into his hands—Hamish Andrews, a senior member of the board who congratulates him heartily, and a botanist maybe five years older than William who inquires amiably about his research sources for the chapter on the Madras shipwreck. William glances up at his publicist, a woman in bright-red lipstick and a metallic dress who is monitoring the process, as if checking to see whether discussion is allowed.