The World Before Us (28 page)

You might ask what it’s like to conjure such moments, to say that Herschel once sat where Jane is sitting and that Leeson stood in this very room and bowed for Prudence with a Romantic flourish she secretly liked. To suggest that the three clocks plunged on with their awkward
ticking, each half-second announced like some fissure in physics the idiot thinks we can slip into. To remember N at the door watching the footman, then darting away when he went to find Farrington. To know that Farrington, assessing the situation quickly, took over before the footman realized that the number of the party had changed.

“
Twoo
,” one of us says, and Cat sighs and air-kisses a circle around all of us.

The poet wanders off to the study, the theologian stares at the grouse, and the one with the soft voice sings a song that must be what the living call a lullaby.

Is what we are conjuring guesswork? Or a kind of love? We know that Norvill once stood in the door to his childhood nursery, his face clouding over as he read a letter from Charlotte. We know that he crumpled the note and threw it against the wall, and that he was made desperate because of it. Admittedly some of our knowledge is conjecture, but some is fact gained by access and some is understanding human nature, our dispositions imposing themselves on the maps made by others.

And, too, one of us happened to pass him in the doorway in the way that people constantly pass by each other: the seen and the unseen, the preoccupied and the perceptive. The body is a miraculous thing: an assemblage of struts and muscles and nerves; two hundred and six bones placed exactly under a corset of muscle and ligament; and eyes to see, ears to hear. The hand that curls around a leaf of scented paper is a marvel to watch, and so too is the arrangement and rearrangement of lines on a face marred with unhappy thoughts.

18

When the young man who has been working in the gardens walks down the servants’ steps and into the kitchen of Inglewood House, Jane is thumbing gently through a box of books in the library. She doesn’t hear him, but Sam cocks his head and turns toward the sound, then trots across the main hall to the top of the stairs. They’ve been in the house nearly two hours. After the first fifteen or twenty minutes Jane had relaxed, realizing they weren’t going to trip any alarm wires or walk into a security guard; the house is clearly in a state of suspension, the Trust probably local enough to live up to its name.

Jane notices Sam’s agitation and thinks he might need to go out to pee. She takes a last look around the library and follows him down the stairwell. When she gets to the bottom step she sees a young man, in a T-shirt and dark trousers, standing at the sink with his back to her. He’s rinsing his hands with water from a plastic bottle. Jane can make out the fuzzy interference of music playing in his earbuds. Stuck on the bottom step, she glances at Sam, who is standing ten feet behind the stranger, undecided whether she should sneak across the kitchen to the exit or go
back upstairs until he’s gone. She’s about to step down and cross between the built-in pantry and the sinks when he turns around.

“Whoa, Jesus!” He plucks out his earbuds and says, more politely, “Sorry, you scared me.”

Jane smiles. He’s eighteen, maybe nineteen, has a mop of dark hair and patches of stubble on his chin. She can see now that he’s wearing navy overalls, the upper part cinched around his waist and the knees caked with dirt. She tries to sound casual. “I didn’t know anyone was working today or I would have said hello on my way in.”

He looks her up and down quickly, the way boys his age tend to do—interested because she’s a woman, but vaguely dismissive because she’s older—and then he taps his thigh to call Sam over, and the dog bounds up to him without so much as a backward glance at Jane, leaning in with his full weight while the kid kneels down to pet him. The boy angles his head toward the back gardens, says, “We’re running a bit behind, and it’s my dad’s company, so two of us are doing weekends. I thought you lot weren’t coming back till Monday?” He reaches into his pocket to turn his music off and flinches when he catches the cut on his hand on the seam. He lifts up his hand to inspect it. There’s a smear of blood across his palm.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just nicked myself rewiring the trellis.”

Jane slowly lets out the breath she’s been holding and steps toward him. “Let’s see.”

He meets her halfway and shows her a three-inch cut between his thumb and index finger. It’s long and narrow, but not too deep.

“It probably just needs a plaster.” Jane tries to sound apologetic and authoritative at the same time. “I don’t really have anything with me.”

He shrugs and looks again at Jane; his eyes are glassy and bloodshot. Jane realizes with a start that he’s totally stoned.

“Spit on it,” he says.

“Sorry?”

“It’ll help clean it.” He grins at her.

“Listen—”

“Blake.”

“Listen, Blake, I’m just finishing up, but I think that cut needs to be cleaned properly, so maybe you ought to dash over to the pharmacy.”

The kid narrows his eyes. He can tell that she’s speaking to him differently now. “I’m not as high as you think.”

“Right. Well, I’m just going to check off a few more boxes—” Jane jabs a thumb toward the stairs to the main floor and clears her throat. “You should really clean that up.”

He nods but stands there, and Jane feels sure he’s going to call her bluff. Does she have enough on him that he will be less likely to out her? Maybe he’s just stoned—hardly a serious offence—but he’s probably the one who left the delivery door open, so why would he want to attract attention to that fact by claiming he happened upon a break and enter? Besides, she hasn’t
taken
anything, doesn’t have a stack of books or a vase under her arm.

“It’s Helen, by the way.” She sticks out her hand to break the silence.

He offers Jane the hand with the cut, and when she doesn’t shake it because it’s still bleeding, they stand there awkwardly.

“Brilliant,” he says, “see you around, then, Helen.” He presses his earbuds back in, gives Sam another head scratch, and walks up the steps, throwing one last look at Jane before he’s gone.

Back at the inn, Jane runs into Maureen re-stacking magazines and travel guides in the lounge and asks about the restoration work at the house.

“I think the Trust got some last-ditch money from an investor in London to redo the house and gardens as Farrington left them, though
there’s talk that the investor plans to turn the upper floors into some kind of swanky hotel.” Maureen straightens her back, clearly stressed at the thought of competition, and drops a guide to Five Best Local Walks on top of a pile of brochures. “You hear a different plan every week. If you ask at the pub, Lucy will tell you—she’s one of the local Trustees. Everything all right with your room?”

“Yes, great.”

Maureen picks up the remote control and turns on the television in the corner. It’s an older model that flares before the picture of an outdoor concert takes shape. Jane recognizes the orchestra playing in the summer performance series, the stage lit up with blue and white lights, Battersby conducting. Reflexively, Jane scans the string section for people she might know.

“You like classical music?” Maureen’s tone makes this more a statement than a question.

“My dad plays.”

“Oh, what’s his name?”

“Henri Braud.” Henri’s name is out of her mouth before she realizes what she’s done, but Maureen doesn’t seem to recognize it and she’s already moved on to tucking the throw cushions on the sofa back into their appointed corners.

“Anything else I can do for you?”

“No thanks.” Jane lifts the plastic bag in her hand. “I forgot to pack a hairbrush or moisturizer, went out for supplies.”

Maureen takes a last look around the lounge and turns to go. “Right then, see you in the morning, Helen. I’ve a roast to see to now.” She looks down at Sam. “Good night, Chase.”

Climbing the steps to her room Jane tries to sort out what she’s doing. She’s running away, exactly like she did when she was twelve and her mother rang up to say she wasn’t coming down to South Kensington to fetch her for the summer holiday. Furious because her bags were by the
door and she’d already spent hours waiting for Claire to pull up outside her grandparents’ sitting room window, Jane took off. It was a ridiculous effort. She made four cheese-and-chutney sandwiches and took the tube to Leicester Square, ending up in a five-screen cinema where she spent the last of the birthday money Henri had sent from Prague watching one film after another, movies she didn’t even want to see. Her grandfather had raised his hand in a solemn salute when she returned at midnight, then picked up the phone in the hall to call Claire and report that Jane was fine, all without a reprimand.

Jane knows she is repeating herself, hiding again. Not only because Maureen and her husband are of an age that means they might once have helped search for Lily, might still remember Jane’s name, but also because she might really want to escape this time, fall off the map for good.

The Whitmore’s concert announcements and entertainment programmes are spread out on the floor of Jane’s room where she left them last night. After the run-in with the kid at Inglewood House she’d been too wound up to come directly back here, so she’d driven to Moorgate—the largest hub in the area—and she and Sam had window-shopped the chain stores on the high street because it was Sunday and almost everything was closed. Tomorrow she’ll drive over there again to go to the local records office, where she had done some of her dissertation research. The original Whitmore ball invitation should still be there and she’ll be able to check the exact date. The office will likely have some of the Farrington estate archives as well, if they haven’t ended up in a private collection or with Prudence’s side of the family.

Outside Jane’s window dusk is falling. The street lamps blink on although they’re not yet needed. Across the river a group of hikers is traipsing back into the village, their heavy outer layers tucked under their arms or strapped to their packs. They pass a spry-looking gentleman in a tweed cap tossing crumbs to the ducks, and Jane watches them laugh at the brown-and-white-speckled forms congregating below him.
There are a dozen cars situated around the church up the road, and when Jane presses her face to the window she can see that the clock tower reads half past five. After a minute she turns back to the Whitmore box, picks up the page of notes she made last night, puzzles over it again. She can see no patterns or leads in what she’s written; N is not mentioned, a hole in the middle of everything.

Jane had told Maureen yesterday that she would stay until Wednesday—three days away. Three days isn’t a lot of time, but it isn’t unreasonable. She decides that if on Wednesday she has no solid lead as to who N was or what happened to her, she’ll give up, head to the Lakes as Lewis expected her to, call Gareth and explain herself. She’ll clear out the cottage to sell it, and sift through the last of her mother’s things.

Out of habit we tilt our heads. We consider Jane’s predicament, how hard she is being on herself. We are sympathetic, but even our sympathy is outweighed by our determination to keep hold of the larger truths we are learning.

“What about the Whitmore?” we ask. Inglewood House is all well and good but some of us have never been there. As we walked through its rooms with Jane some of us felt as if we were dropping in on strangers with whom we had only one tenuous connection.

“We have until Wednesday,” John says, watching Jane rummage through the bag of clothes she’d packed hurriedly in London.

“How much time is that?” asks the boy.

“
Arpeggio
,” answers the musician.

“Not enough,” the theologian snaps, preoccupied with what pressed on him in the small parlour at the manor, a word or a set of words, a circumstance on the tip of his tongue.

Jane is changing to go out for dinner, and as she pulls a thin blue
angora sweater over her head, we bristle because the cloud of it begs for touching and because we don’t want her to stop what she’s doing when there are still files to go through. Thinking about the ball gave some of us a semblance of self, the tour of Inglewood House did the same for others, and we are all craving to feel that way again. But Jane has turned away from the Whitmore box. She straightens her skirt and dabs her lipstick, and the cluster that is us rises to follow her out the door.

“I’m going for a walk,” the theologian says irritably.

“Don’t,” Cat replies. “You’re the one who’s always saying ‘stay together.’ ”

“Perhaps I overestimated the company.”

“There’s no need for—” John begins, but before he can finish the theologian has slipped out the door.

There is always a sense of gloom when one of us leaves. Few who wander off come back. For this reason, for a very long time in our first years of solidarity, hardly any of us went off on our own unless absolutely necessary. We don’t know what happens to those who disappear. Maybe they get better leads and head off to follow them; maybe they learn things they want or don’t want to know and, full to bursting with the knowledge, close their eyes and Cease.