The World Before Us (21 page)

Jane made two minor mistakes in the
sarabande
she played for William, which wasn’t bad because the piece was technically above her skill level. It had almost no easy phrases and an emotional ambiguity that made Jane think of a scene from a ballet—the wood nymph who was up to no good stopping on his way to mischief to admire the beauty of the moon. Both times she hesitated she glanced up to see if William had noticed, but his expression didn’t change—he was watching her in a way that seemed completely free of judgment. She played everything after the
crescendo
with her eyes closed and when the last note lifted up and dissipated she opened them to find him leaning forward in his chair. When he didn’t applaud or say anything or do any of the usual stuff, Jane stood up, flexing and unflexing her left hand, her face flushing even as she willed it not to.

William walked over to her, shaking his head in disbelief. “That was absolutely amazing. Seriously, Jane, I’m stunned, I had no idea.” When she looked down at the rug—at its border of green leaves and butter-coloured flowers—instead of meeting his gaze, he took her chin gently between his thumb and forefinger and guided her face up toward his. “You should be very proud of yourself.” He held her face like that for whole seconds before he turned and walked into the kitchen.

The next day when William was at work, Jane put Lily in front of the telly and went upstairs to see if there was anything to read in the study. It was a Friday and William had asked her if she could stay late because he had a dinner to go to.

His study was a cluttered room with a sloped roof just off the master bedroom. The walls were painted in what Jane’s grandmother would have described as “Oxford grey” and the furniture was a darkly stained wood that matched the built-in shelves on the supporting wall. Jane perused the spines feeling wholly uninspired because she’d been hoping for a novel, though she did pull Darwin’s
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
off the shelf because Claire had read it and said that it was wonderful.

Without quite meaning to, Jane opened up William’s desk drawers. She ran her hand over the business cards and paper clips and the elasticized receipts, sifted through the papers stacked next to his computer, feeling a pulse of pleasure at moving his items a few inches, in reading the notes he’d left sticking out of the books he was working through. In the bathroom she found a bone-handled shaving brush and razor, a bar of soap that smelled like cinnamon, a half-used tube of ointment for cuts and scrapes, paracetamol, plasters covered with fairies in pink dresses, and a paddle hairbrush in the back of a drawer that was probably his late wife’s. In his bedside table drawer she found a photograph of
her—Camille, she was called—in a silver frame, her hair long and damp and her shoulders bare except for spaghetti-thin swimsuit straps, a blue beach parasol poking up behind her. Jane studied the image and then blankly and stupidly thought,
And then she died
, as if the woman in the photo were just a romantic affectation abstractly attached to William, a character in some novel you could easily put away and not a human being who had slept and dreamed and woken up in the very bedroom Jane was, at that moment, standing in.

Jane suspected that William was going on a date, because after he’d come home from work and organized pasta for her and Lily, he changed into a nice suit. He came down the stairs flipping a burgundy tie into a knot and then, having checked it in the hall mirror, turned and asked Jane, “How do I look?”

She laughed and said, “Very handsome.”

By the time he returned that night, Lily was tucked into bed and Jane was asleep under a throw on the couch with the television on. This is the memory she goes back to most often: a dream within a dream that begins with William bending over her to wake her up, gently shaking her arm and saying her name. Jane drowsily thinking,
I hope it’s all right that I fell asleep
, worrying that everything is okay upstairs. The canned laughter of the comedy she was watching was coming in waves in the background, which meant that she couldn’t have been asleep that long. His face above hers because she can smell garlic or onion, the faintest trace of cigarettes, even though she’d thought he didn’t smoke. His hand on her shoulder to wake her and then on the blanket, his fingers trailing slowly over her T-shirt and across her breast as he gently tugs the blanket down.

By the time Jane sat up, she was already unsure if it had happened. She remembers trying to clear her head, trying to formulate a question. William seemed in a hurry to get her home.

“Ready?” He folded the throw she’d been using in quarters and dropped it over the back of the couch.

“Yeah.” Jane stood up, trying to shake the fog of sleep. She glanced around for her bag, conscious that her eyes were welling up.

“You all right?”

“I can’t remember where I left my bag.” She wiped her eyes and walked into the kitchen, only to remember that she’d dropped it by the front door when she came in. It was lying next to her cello at the foot of the stairs, and when she bent down to pick both up, William reached in, saying, “I’ll get this,” his hand around the cello-case handle before she could even think to say no. He walked her the two blocks to her grandparents’ house in a light rain without a word and handed her the cello at the gate, waiting at the end of the walk to make sure she was safely in before raising his hand to say good night.

By the following Monday evening Jane was convinced she’d made everything up. William had acted normal that morning when she’d appeared at the door, and when he’d come home from work he was harried as usual—running late because he’d been trying to get support letters for his grant and had accidentally left the office without the files on Inglewood in his briefcase and had to go back for them. During the first week Jane wouldn’t have minded, but now Lily was starting to act up. She was smart enough to sense that Jane would let her get away with a lot more than Luisa did.

That summer Lily was interested in fish, and William had gamely gone out and bought her an aquarium with two blue dolphin cichlids and a scuba diver figurine whose chest of buried treasure contained part of the water filtration system. He’d also helped her cut a dozen pictures of fish from a
National Geographic
, awkward frontal photographs and cropped images that she later sellotaped onto the headboard of her bed. Lily had given them all names—“Rusty” and “Lucy” and “Misty” and “Fritz”—names William said she’d imported from last year’s fascination with ponies,
the spirit of “Fritz” the Shetland pony somehow reincarnating into a photograph of a blue tetra. He’d explained this to Jane while rifling through Lily’s dresser drawer after work one day, searching for a favourite purple T-shirt Lily wanted to wear to bed. Jane was looking in the closet under the folded pile of clothes the cleaning lady had left in the basket.

“Did you tell Jane about the Gourami?” William asked.

Lily put her thumb in her mouth and shook her head no.

“Hey,” he said, tapping her fist, “what did we say about that?” He put his hands on his hips and turned to Jane. “Any luck?”

“Nope.” Jane pointed toward the top shelf of the closet where a row of stuffed animals was lined up. “Could it be up there?”

William came and stood beside her and started pulling the soft toys down two at a time. Lily grabbed the donkey she liked before it hit the floor, and he glanced down as she caught it. “Show Jane the Gourami, Lil. She’ll like it.”

Lily climbed up onto her bed and pressed a finger against the cut-out of a spotted orange fish with a black stripe down its side, the back end of its body almost translucent and flaring like a veil.

“It’s called ‘Jane’ now,” William said. “What was it called before, Lil?”

Lily made a squirting sound with her mouth and then laughed and hid her face behind the donkey, peeking over its head to say, “Luisa.”

On the trail that day in the woods, Lily had made a dozen fish faces, sometimes just with her lips, sometimes by opening her mouth and hanging out her tongue, and once, probably imitating something William had shown her, by putting her hands next to her ears and swishing them back and forth like fins. Jane thought, during the whole of that walk, of almost nothing but William, of how she must have imagined that he’d touched her that way—imagined it because it was something she thought she wanted, because a touch like that would mean he saw her differently: the way she thought she wanted to be seen.

13

On the walk back to the village, Jane runs the tips of her fingers lightly over the shrubs that border the pathway, thinking about the flower petals she plucked at the start of the trail two decades ago, how they were in her pocket all those long hours at the police station when William had gone back out to search and night was falling and she’d sat at a stranger’s desk. Jane had touched those petals again and again, saying each time her finger felt their crushed silk,
Please find her, please find her
; offering all kinds of behaviours, all manner of pacts—
If they find her I will always …
 or
If they find her I promise to never …
—to whichever god might be listening.

Turning toward the church it occurs to Jane that coming up to Inglewood is the most intentional thing she’s done in a long time. Even the split from Ben four years ago had been ambiguous, almost an accident—a fight over nothing that ended with him moving out. They had been at his brother’s art opening in Chelsea, and Jane had reached out to straighten Ben’s already straight tie and he’d swatted her hand away. Ten minutes later they were out on the fire escape having a go at each other—“You always—” and “You never—” and “If you’d just—” And Ben had shouted, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with you.” Without a word Jane
slipped the ring he’d given her for her thirtieth birthday off her finger, tucked it into his jacket pocket and turned toward the railing. There was a streak of orange left in the sky, the outline of the buildings across the river uneven against it. She counted the seconds in her head:
one thousand and one, one thousand and two
. By
one thousand and five
he was gone.

What surprises her now about what happened with William last night isn’t that she’d run, but that running away also feels like running toward. Neither her mother nor her therapist, nor Lewis for that matter, thought she should come back here. But returning to these woods—not just for herself or for Lily, but to sort through the story she has started to piece together about N—seems exactly right. Files, books and computer searches are all well and good, but these are the actual woods that N walked through, this is the village she must have come upon the day her new life began.

The church where Jane left the car sits at the top of the main road. Its crenellated tower is from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but the rest of it is early Victorian, probably rebuilt in the throes of the Industrial Revolution when most of the nearby cottages went up, or a few years later when the Farringtons first moved to Inglewood, taking up residence in the house and bringing their money with them. There is a cemetery plot on the west side of the church, its old stones jutting at angles, and on the far side of the parking lot is the field that acts as a brace between George Farrington’s botanical trail and the walled estate with its surrounding woods. Jane skims along the grassy sway with Sam in tow, thinking about the Whitmore trio and how they might have passed under the church tower on their walk to or from the Farringtons’. And then it occurs to her that the Chesters would have passed this way too, only a little later, on the weekend William lectured about. Edmund, Charlotte, the three children and the governess they’d brought on the
train with them. Passing under the thumb of the church tower’s shadow, Jane has to work at imagining this. Despite all her reading, until William’s lecture she had never pictured the Chesters
outside
the museum or the city, never imagined Charlotte bounding energetically across the hump of a field or stopping, as William said they did, at a riverside hotel for lunch, the world around them noisy, bustling and brightly lit.

As she crosses the parking lot back to the Mercedes, Jane cycles through the facts: William said that the Farringtons and Chesters had met twice at Inglewood House: in September of 1877 for the shooting party; and in the summer of 1879, after Norvill’s return from the coast, when Edmund had made enough money with the mill to fund a substantial part of what would become George’s last plant-hunting expedition. Sitting in the car with her hands on the steering wheel it comes to Jane that there is something too tidy about that fact, about their paths crossing here at Inglewood
twice
—as if the research William had done could summarily limit the extent of their interactions, as if he’d perused all the relevant documents and could say without reservation that those were the only instances upon which the two families properly met at the estate. It seems unlikely to Jane that the Chesters wouldn’t have been at least
occasional
visitors, especially if Norvill and Charlotte had the kind of relationship that Charlotte’s diaries suggest they did.

Jane starts the car and puts it into reverse. Whether William is right or wrong, it is the certainty with which he made the statement that they’d met twice that’s bothersome. Perhaps the same could be said for Jane’s assumptions about N? Perhaps her disappearance into the trees at Inglewood wasn’t an isolated incident based on a chance encounter but part of a series of connected events. Perhaps Jane’s mistake all these years as she picked up and put down the Whitmore story has been the same one William may have made about the Chesters and the Farringtons in his lecture: presuming that there were few previously existing ties between those gathered at Inglewood House for the weekend; presuming that
people’s lives—even those of the Whitmore patients—are ever simple or small, that there is no traffic of the heart or transit between one kind of place and another.