The World Before Us (18 page)

“If you are asking me if I’m worldly, Mr. Farrington, I couldn’t say.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m unsure of the categories or means by which you’d gauge it.”

George smiled thinly at her. He liked her calling him Mr. Farrington because he knew that is what she would call Norvill when they were not alone, which meant that in some small cleft of her thinking he and his brother might be interchangeable, even fleetingly the same.

“Allow me to explain.” He smoothed a clean cream page with his hand. “By shooting, I meant, of course, pheasants, but I also meant
seeds. By projecting the seeds from the shotgun into the rock face I have discovered a means by which to better integrate my alpine species into the landscape.” He dipped the nib of the pen she’d been using into its inkpot and then dashed out a few black lines to form a cliff and a lake. “In Wallanchoon,” he continued, “the natural order of things is to see flowering plants like the
Rhododendron
and yellow rose thriving on the lower part of the pass while the heartier tenants take up residence in amongst the lichen and sedge.”

Charlotte watched studiously as the cliff he’d outlined was endowed with inky smudges and crevices.

“At first I attempted to plant my seeds here in a similar fashion, in two bands on the mid and upper ledges of the cliff, but few of the plants took and it cost me three-quarters of my supply. Last summer, I had a better idea.” He set the sketchbook down, leaned back on his palms, and looked over his right shoulder at the Suttons, who were craning their necks up at the rock face above them. “Rather than climb it again, scattering the seeds as I went, it occurred to me that
shooting
the seeds toward the cliff might better mimic the dispersal of the wind.”

Charlotte tilted her head, trying to picture George climbing the cliff, imagining him first in some sort of harness, and then climbing a laddered rope, though attached to what she couldn’t say.

Returning to the paper in front of him, George drew, in five sure lines, a rowboat, then added a dashed-off human form and a shotgun from which ten lines of India ink sprang. “Shall I demonstrate?” he asked, leaning intimately over Charlotte’s lap to set the sketchbook down beside her.

“Please do,” she replied with a teasing expression that seemed to indicate that she knew exactly what George was doing and why.

George stood and called for Rai, and then, bowing, swung a last look at Charlotte Chester, thinking that he would have pursued her too if she was to his taste, if he wanted a woman at all.

• • •

George went over to the rowboat and Rai followed, carrying two of the shotguns they’d brought for the pheasants and a sack of seeds. The valet hiked his tunic up as he manoeuvred the back end of the boat into the lake. Cato ambled after him to the waterline and then barked when Rai, without a backward glance, stepped into the water and hopped on board. Edmund and Sutton, long engaged in a discussion about efficiency in manufacturing, moved toward the rocky outcrop that jutted into the closed end of the lake for a better view, their forms blackening against a stand of fir trees. Charlotte turned back to her sketch and frowned, thinking it flat somehow. She remembered a criticism of Turner she’d read once, the critic arguing that without the human form, no landscape could ever be sublime.

Balancing her sketch pad on her knee she thought to try a bird, a swan perhaps, but when she glanced up for a model there were no swans in view, only the boat cutting across the lake, its oars knitting the water. Gathering resolve, Charlotte dipped her nib into the inkpot and attempted to add her husband and the insufferable Sutton into the scene. She would have liked to draw Celia, but the children, bored with the protracted nature of the photographic exercise, had taken off “on an expedition.” Bess, their governess, had been sick all morning, Charlotte feared to think with what, which meant that one of the Farrington maids had been charged with minding them. The girl was bright enough, and pleasing to little Celia because she’d taken her to investigate the chest of toys in the old schoolroom after they’d first arrived. When Charlotte had last seen them, Thomas was constructing a catapult out of a Y of wood and one of Celia’s ribbons. Charlotte had told him to stay close if they were going into the woods and to watch his younger brother and sister. She’d also allowed the maid, whose shoes were too soft-soled for the forest, to stay within earshot of them
near the first clump of trees. This, Charlotte confirmed, was where she was presently stationed.

Before George’s first shot, Charlotte stood with her sketch pad and moved toward a flat-topped rock jutting out between the limestone crag and the picnic spot, trying to subdue the annoyance she felt at Mirabelle Sutton, who had hefted herself up to join their husbands, thus ruining the integrity of Charlotte’s composition. Norvill, seeing that Rai hadn’t done it, had taken it upon himself to pack up the lamb and was bent over his work a few feet away. He’d been growing restless since lunch, swatting at flies one minute and then brushing off the tufts of dog fur that had fastened to his trouser legs the next. His jerky gaze finally moved from his leg and boot to the cut of lamb that was drawing the insects, then on to the wicker basket where the food belonged. The maid, standing stupidly by the trees, appeared to be of no use, and his mother, reclining on a chaise a few feet away, was seemingly oblivious. Charlotte alone was following his actions, observing him in a way he could feel, so he turned to her and gazed brazenly at her figure, bound as it was in a dress he’d once said was becoming, a pleated and vested thing that was too heavy for the afternoon, her chest flushed and splotchy because of it.

Prudence Farrington coughed politely and Norvill swung around. He glanced at the needlework on her lap to assess the extent of her occupation. “Is anything the matter, Mother?”

“Of course not, darling.” She peered at him from under the straw of her hat and then gently tapped her chest under the pleated bow of her striped walking dress. “Do I seem unwell?”

“You appear both perfect and content.”

Prudence smiled up at him in the same polite way she probably smiled in rooms with no one else in them, the corners of her lips lifted tightly in feigned tolerance. Together they watched as a fly of considerable
size landed on her skirt and began to inch over the silk of her knee, Norvill admiring its daring, its proximity and permission, envying it almost, until his mother adjusted her position on the folding chair to gain a more direct view of the rowboat and it flew off. Prudence would be fifty-five this year but she had kept both her figure and her quick turn to temper. As a boy, Norvill had never been sure what would set her off, though he was usually quite certain it was a direct consequence of an act that emanated from him. She’d been in great spirits, however, since the guests arrived—thinner and frailer than when he’d come at the start of summer, but more congenial.

Aware that his gaze was still on her, Prudence shifted again and stared sternly back at her son, puffing up slightly in her chair. The gesture reminded Norvill of George’s description of a hooded snake he’d once encountered in India; how it seemed to sit up and waver at its intruders, widen its body.

“Would you bring me some lemonade, Norvill?”

“Of course.” He poured and handed her a half glass and the tips of their fingers met briefly.

She took a drink from it and returned it to him. “It’s good to have you both home at once,” she said finally, but her eyes were on the boat by then, on George, as they’d always been.

Seeing that George was almost in position to shoot at the upper ledges of the rock face, Norvill crossed the divide to fetch Charlotte. She was well out of danger but it was within the realm of possibility that small stones or rubble could skitter down and reach her. He picked up the lap blanket she’d dropped earlier and placed it on the rock next to her, then, with more urgency than he intended, he said, “You should come back to the picnic area where it’s safe.”

“Am I in peril?”

He winced, unsure of the possible allusions. “It’s not for me to say.”

Charlotte breathed deeply, gave him a bemused expression, and returned to her sketch. Norvill remained where he was at her shoulder, taking in her scent under the pretense of admiring her drawing. In the dark coil of her hair he believed he could detect the same lavender notes he remembered finding on her pillow in the early years of the Chester when the house doubled as a museum and, sent on an errand for Edmund, he’d happened past their bedroom.

“The sketch is charming,” he said, leaning closer.

“It’s tedious,” she chided. “The lake is wanting, and there are no swans to fill the space.”

“Why not draw the boat?”

Charlotte flipped the page to show Norvill George’s caricature of a man with a shotgun in a skiff. “It’s already been drawn.”

“Are you afraid of repetition?”

Repositioning the inkwell she’d set beside her, Charlotte returned to her sketch. “One always ought to be wary of being unoriginal.”

Norvill studied the perfect line of untouched skin that marked the part in her hair; hair that, in this light, was the colour of the Arabian mare George had shipped from Spain last year. “Does my admiration for your accomplishments offend you?”

Charlotte laughed, perhaps at the huskiness of his voice—a mocking laugh that made his skin prickle. “And if I gave the sketch to you?” she asked, smiling clearly and easily up at him, “what would you do with it?”

“Have it mounted,” he said, anger welling in his throat.

11

After the first hour of driving, the motorway is mostly empty. It’s pitchblack outside and other than the ambient light from the dashboard we are tunnelling through darkness. Jane has yet to relax her grip on the steering wheel and she’s shivering, though we’re unsure whether that’s because she’s using the cold to stay awake, or because Lewis has yet to fix the Mercedes’ heater like he’d promised. Our thoughts are scattered; we retrace William’s lecture one minute, then circle back to our concern for Jane the next. Her thinking has been hard to follow—there’s a prickliness about her, a distance. She switches lanes to pass a car numbly thinking,
Indicate, accelerate
, then
Breathe, slow down
.

A taxi had dropped Jane off at Lewis’s house just before midnight. She’d thought about knocking on the door but hadn’t wanted him to see that she was upset, so she’d jotted down a note about taking the car on the back of a receipt folded up in her wallet and slipped it through his post box. When she got back to her flat she parked her grandparents’ old Mercedes in a No Stopping zone and put the hazard lights on. Inside the flat she threw a handful of clothes into an overnight bag, left her mobile phone with its four missed calls from Gareth on the kitchen table,
changed out of her dress and collected Sam, remembering to leave a note for Dora, who lived in a flat upstairs, saying that she wouldn’t need to walk the dog. She had her seat belt on before it occurred to her to go back for the box of files—pulling the Whitmore research out from under the bed and stuffing it into the boot next to a fuzzy grey jumper that probably belonged to Natalie or one of the girls.

Those of us who were there, who had followed her when she ran out of the Chester, tried to sort out what she was doing; we broached whether one of us should stay in the flat and wait for the others to return.

“Attendance!” shouted the theologian, but everything was moving too fast for voices to be sorted.

By the time the Mercedes surged onto the motorway headed north, we were divided, at odds about what to do, unsure where we were going.

After she slapped him, after the conversations in the radius around William and Jane stalled, everyone had turned and stared at her. This is the scene she keeps trying to suppress while she’s driving: the publicist rushing over and putting her hand on William’s arm, saying, “Mr. Eliot? Is everything all right?” and William just standing there, rubbing his cheek and staring at Jane with a shocked expression that either meant he’d finally recognized her or that he was baffled at the seemingly random act of a stranger. And so she had run—pushing through a group of six or seven people holding wineglasses, and past Jacek, the security guard, who she was sure would reach out and stop her, force her to turn around. An expression of concern clouded his face; perhaps he’d assumed she’d had a row with a date and was rushing out to get some air.

No one was on the street when Jane burst through the door, and not knowing where to go she’d slipped into the park across the road, ducking behind the boxwood and moving along the hedge, her heels spiking
the grass. There was a bench in an unlit corner along the far side of the green and so Jane made her way there, her hand on her mouth to keep the sound in her throat from escaping, though it came out anyway, a yelp she didn’t recognize as hers, a sound like the one Sam sometimes made in the middle of the night, his back legs scrabbling the floor.

City sounds travel differently at night, and sitting on the park bench Jane became as aware of the din as we often are: the
whoosh
of the nearby traffic drifting over the park only to slide back down over the sloping roofs of the terrace houses; the weight of her own ragged breath rising in the air and then cascading around her. Sound becoming like movement or waves of light—which is how we sometimes see it, as if the human cacophony is a spectrum of colour: Jane’s jagged breathing an ice blue; the woodsy thrum of the string quartet, who had picked up their instruments again on the other side of the Chester’s windows, a burnished yellow-brown.

Hearing the music start up again, Jane had turned toward the park gate and dared to imagine that the space she and William had occupied, the stillness and silence that had followed the slap, might somehow be blotted out by guests moving toward each other and rejoining their conversations, by the quartet taking up their instruments and playing again as if nothing had happened between movements. But then, on the other side of the boxwood, she heard a car stop in front of the museum, its tires slick on the pavement. A few seconds later a man’s muffled voice stated a destination and the driver replied, “No problem.”