The World Before Us (36 page)

After Jane had finished telling William about the cave she turned to him and saw that he was grinning. She’d been talking for ten minutes, maybe more; it was the most she’d ever said to him. She’d been trying
to articulate a thought—about what it was like to be shown something, to have a person wave a red laser over a russet stain, trace the lines of a reindeer’s back until its thick black antlers and gentle face materialized. “In this one there is kissing,” Marc had said, and although he was joking he wasn’t exactly wrong. It was one of the clearer paintings: the incised tongue of the larger reindeer touching the head of the one with red horns kneeling before it.

Shortly before they got to Inglewood, Lily spilled the last of her juice over the Saab’s back seat. She announced the accident and Jane unclipped her seat belt and turned around. She took the plastic cup from Lily’s hand and used a fistful of tissues from the box on the floor to dab the bib of Lily’s red overalls, mop up the puddle that had gathered around a button on the upholstery. She felt the car slowing down.

“Do you want me to pull over?”

“Nope, almost done.” She tapped Lily on the nose with her finger. “Better?”

Lily lifted up her plastic pony; there were beads of apple juice in its glossy pink mane.

William was still driving slowly. “I’d feel better if you were buckled up.”

Jane dried the pony, wiped Lily’s booster seat around her legs, then swivelled back down onto the passenger seat. She lifted her hips to smooth the clump of her sundress and refastened her seat belt. When she glanced down to see if her hands were sticky she noticed that the front hem of her dress had settled a few inches above her knees, the half-moon scar she’d earned in a riding accident when she was seven noticeably white against her summer tan. She left the hem where it was and looked out the window at the patchwork of farmers’ fields. A test, she thought. To see if what she wanted to happen, what she
thought
had happened the night William woke her on the sofa, was actually occurring.

Jane rolled down the window when they exited the highway. At the
first sign for Inglewood, William, his eyes on the road, asked, “How did you get that scar?”

Jane told the story about the cave twice that day, first to William on the drive up and then, later, to Constable Mobbs. An hour before Jane’s grandparents were due to arrive, Mobbs reappeared, pulling a chair up to the desk where Jane was sitting. Mobbs’s face was red as if she’d been running and for a second Jane thought there might be some news.

“You holding up okay?”

Jane felt her chin wobble and her eyes begin to well so she turned back to the swinging spheres of the contraption on Holmes’s desk and knocked the end ball with her knuckle.

“It’s called Newton’s Cradle,” Mobbs said. She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “I asked Oliver. Something about the transfer of energy.”

Jane pulled back and released the first ball, and watched the last swing out. The three balls in the middle didn’t move.

“Right then.” Mobbs patted her cheeks with her hands as if she were aware of how flushed they were. “Listen, I need to ask you again if you can think of anything else that might be of use, not just what you saw or didn’t see—” She ducked her head lower to get Jane’s attention. “But anything that you and Lily talked about on the trail, anything she said. If Lily’s wandered off”—Mobbs pursed her lips and glanced across the room to where William had been sitting before going back out with one of the search parties—“you’re the only one who can help us understand what she might have been thinking. Okay? Can you do that?”

Jane nodded and Mobbs pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. And for the next half hour Jane recounted the story of the cave at Fontde-Gaume, telling Mobbs how Lily had been listening to her describe it to William, and how later, when Lily had to pee and she and Jane discovered the grotto, Lily had mistaken it for a cave. She’d thought they could
go inside it, that they’d find painted bison and mammoths and oxen and horses. “She kept going on about the reindeer,” Jane said, because the kissing reindeer was the part of the story Lily had liked best, that and the part at the end about the domed cavity at the back of the narrowest tunnel, the wall that was marked, almost like a finger-painting, with the splayed fingers and narrow palms of human hands.

23

The archivist helping Jane is called Freddy. He’s a paunchy and bald middle-aged man who spends the first hour of the morning moving fussily around the local records office reshelving books and indices from a squeaky trolley. When Jane walks over to his desk to request a biography of George Farrington, he produces a slip of paper from under a stapler and flusters, “Miranda left a note for you. Sorry, I forgot it was here. She thought you might like to look at Lucian Palmer’s journals. Do you want me to call them up?”

“Sorry, who is Lucian Palmer?”

Freddy lifts the piece of paper to indicate he’s told her everything he knows.

“Why not?” she says. “Thanks.”

Palmer, Jane discovers, is
Dr
. Lucian Palmer, and his medical journals—two deteriorating calfskin booklets with marbled endpapers—show that he was a village doctor who was occasionally engaged as a Visiting Physician at the Whitmore. His notebooks list his patients by a coded
system that includes their initials, the location where they were tended to, their symptoms, treatments and outcomes. Some entries reference hospital visits and certificates he’s signed:
B
for births,
D
for deaths, and
S
for statements made on behalf of those committed. Jane leafs through a hundred yellowing pages of tight, almost illegible handwriting looking for capital
W
s, for
Whitmore
, which Palmer tended to mark with a flourish.

The seventh reference to the Whitmore says
Whitmore patient
where the deceased’s initials usually go, and
INGWD
for the location. Jane checks the page twice. She’s been connecting the two places in her mind for so long that it is strange to see proof of it. A short paragraph follows in which Jane can only glean
called upon
and
G.F
. and “death by—” She tries a few more times to make out Palmer’s microscopic cursive, then takes the journal up to Freddy. But after several minutes with a magnifying glass he can only add
carriage to
—.

“May I get a copy of this?”

Freddy examines the delicate binding. “What pages?”

“Just that one for now. Is the other archivist—”

“Miranda.”

“Is Miranda coming in today?”

“At noon.”

There is nothing else in Dr. Palmer’s journals that references both Inglewood and the Whitmore, and the best that Jane can discern, after she comes back from a quick and early lunch in the parking lot with Sam, is that the coded entries take place in or around 1877, the year N disappeared. She wades back into the birth and death records in the Farrington folder, but finds nothing related to 1877 there. George died in Tibet in 1881, and Norvill in Scarborough in 1890. Prudence lasted until
1912, still tucked in at Inglewood House, and died at the ripe old age of ninety from pneumonia.

Jane scans the material she has amassed on the table and picks up the
Biographical Sketch of George Farrington, Esquire
, by S.B. Atkinson, which Freddy had dropped off last: an exaggerated turn-of-the-century account that hadn’t seemed credible when Jane glanced through it. She places it on the book support, gently opens its flagging millboard and skims the contents again. It is the kind of biography that was typical of its day—embellished and flattering, with enough anecdotes of a personal nature to cement the authority of the writer. Some of the details she recognizes from the chapter in William’s book on George and from his lecture at the Chester: George’s birth at Buxton House, his father Hugh’s rise through government, the move to Inglewood, Hugh’s death in India, George’s growing renown as an importer of rare species. She turns to the last few paragraphs of the book—a book that she now knows William must have read—and tries not to picture him in this very same room with George’s death unfolding in eloquent detail before him, his thumb on the corner of the nicked page the same way hers is now.

In
The Lost Gardens of England
William describes George’s death in what was then a closed-off region of Tibet. William’s version is less florid than the Victorian biographer’s. Unlike the drama posited by S.B. Atkinson—brimming with details he’d likely never have had access to—William is matter-of-fact: George was climbing along a steep crevasse where he’d heard there was an unusual strain of poppy. His Sherpa, moving up ahead, came into some kind of difficulty and George misstepped in his rush to reach him. He fell some distance down a cleft in the rock. The Sherpa survived, though he was days getting off the mountain, and two weeks later returned with ropes and men from his village to retrieve George’s body. George was given a sky burial in the Buddhist tradition, as he’d instructed—his corpse left to the vultures—though
his Sherpa honoured his request that a lock of his hair be sent home to Prudence.

When Miranda comes in and settles behind the desk to relieve Freddy, Jane walks over with Lucian Palmer’s journals and asks what made her recommend them. She knows an archivist can’t reveal information about other patrons, but she asks anyway—was this one of William Eliot’s sources? The gentleman who was up from London?

“I really can’t say if the gentleman
read
it during the course of his research. Was it of any use?” She smiles, and her arched eyebrows give her away.

“Yes, it was helpful, thanks.”

Jane moves slowly to her table and sets Palmer’s journal on top of the stacks of material she still has to read through. Her hands are trembling. Sitting down she tries to sort out what exactly is unsettling her—it’s more than the way that William’s name recalls the scene she caused at the museum; it’s more than just the hazy sense of his presence here with her again as she’s going over the Farrington material. Jane smooths her hands over her hair and takes a deep breath. No, it’s more like anger; anger at the possibility that even here, doing the only piece of research she’s ever chosen wholly for herself, she’s following in his tracks again: William up ahead in the woods, William ducking in and out of view, William turning the corner. What if Jane doesn’t find N? What if William has already found her?

The old pay phone in the hall takes credit cards. Jane nestles her notebook between her knees and swipes hers before she loses her nerve. When the operator answers, Jane asks for the Natural History Museum number. “The botanical division if you can find it.”

The phone at the museum rings three times, and when a woman answers Jane’s chest hitches with relief. “Hello, sorry, I’m looking for William Eliot’s number.”

“I can transfer you. Who’s calling?”

Jane pictures the woman in the blazer at the information desk who’d called upstairs when she was fifteen, a public relations smile on her face. “Helen, Helen Swindon.”

It takes two tries for the transfer to go through and both times as the phone rings Jane can feel her stomach churn.

“William Eliot.” His voice is brusque.

Jane glances at her watch: it’s quarter past twelve so he’s either just back from lunch or trying to head out.

“Hello, Dr. Eliot, my name is Helen Swindon. I’m with the Inglewood Trust Restoration Project—” Her voice goes up airily at the end as if she’s asking a question. “I know you’ve recently written on the Farringtons and I’m wondering if I can ask you a few questions.”

“Where are you calling from?”

Jane doesn’t know how to respond, wonders, irrationally, if he recognizes her voice, wants to know where she is so he can ring the police, have her arrested for assault.

“Are you here in London?”

“No, I’m up in Inglewood.”

“Sorry, I’m just finishing a meeting.” His voice is neutral, efficient.

“If it’s a bad time—if I’m intruding …”

“How pressing is it?”

Before Jane can answer, William moves his mouth away from the phone and she can hear him say, “See you at three.” Then he comes back, says, “Sorry, that was the last interruption,” sounding more relaxed, like the William of twenty years ago.

“I’ve really just one quick question, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Try me.”

Jane presses her forehead against the hallway wall. “Well, the Trust, as you probably know, is currently researching the Farrington archives, and one area I’ve become interested in is the relationship between Inglewood House and the old Whitmore.”

“The convalescent hospital?”

“Yes. I think George Farrington visited there and had dealings with the Superintendent.”

“It’s Helen?”

“Yes.”

William lets out a breath as if he’s trying to remember what he’s read. She can see him in his black leather chair exactly—although she’s picturing him at thirty, not fifty—a plate-sized fern fossil sitting on the corner of his desk with a framed photo of Lily beside it. “Are you asking about the monies Farrington left the hospital, or about something else?”

Jane shifts her position and the notepad drops from between her knees. “There was an incident in 1877 involving three patients who showed up at Farrington’s estate. I’m wondering if you know of it.”

“Not offhand, but I can see what I can locate—most of the material is indexed on my computer at home. What’s the number there?”

Jane looks up at the hallway ceiling, realizing she’s stuck. “We’re in and out of the office mostly during the day. Would it be all right if I call you?”

“Fine.” His voice is muffled and she can picture him tucking the phone under his ear. “What’s your e-mail in case something pops up?”

Jane squeezes her eyes shut. “I’ll send it to you this afternoon.”

“Right.”

“Sorry—William?”

For a few seconds he doesn’t say anything, and Jane realizes with a pang that she shouldn’t have used his first name, that whoever “Helen” is, she wouldn’t have.