The World Before Us (37 page)

“What is it?” He sounds annoyed.

“Do you know anything about a Whitmore patient who died at Inglewood? It’s referenced in Dr. Palmer’s notebook.”

“Yes, that was the man caught trespassing. A Gleeson, I think, something like that. You’ll have to look yourself. The details are in Farrington’s private correspondence.”

Jane parks the Mercedes on the pavement in front of the inn four hours later and sits in the car, resting her head on the steering wheel while Sam thumps his tail expectantly against the back seat. Even though she stopped at the pharmacy on the way back from the records office and downed two paracetamol and a bottle of water, her head is pounding. She’s stunned by the conversation with William and by his assertion that Leeson died at Inglewood. All afternoon, sifting through files and journals, she’d tried to sort out what she was feeling about it, about hearing William’s voice so privately in her ear and about his casual reference to Leeson and the story she was trying to unravel. This is the first time since leaving London that she feels a desperate need to self-medicate with more than wine.

Upstairs in her room Jane finds an envelope addressed to “Helen” slipped under her door. She sits on the edge of the bed and opens it. On a scrap of ruled paper Blake has printed:
Meet me at the pub at 8
. And beneath that, underlined:
please
.

We watch Jane fall back on the bed and put her hands over her face, and we debate whether she will meet him. After what happened with the boy we are under strict orders to stay together and that means we have to tag along with Jane. “No more lollygagging,” the theologian had snapped,
as we crossed the parking lot outside the records office this morning. He turned to the girl, who was already lagging behind. “That means
you
, little miss.”

When Jane gets up and starts her bath, we move to various corners of the room. Some of us drop our heads on our knees in an approximation of exhaustion. We have learned a lot today and are trying not to lose any of it. The idea that William has been thinking about us, that he might know something about the Whitmore, about the world we inhabited, feels as strange to us as it does to Jane, even if his interest in us is peripheral.

Jane slides down into the tub and closes her eyes, trying to still her thinking, and in the calm that follows, the room becomes quiet enough for us to hear Sam’s easy, regular breathing and the lapping of the water as it fills the tub.

Leeson, standing in a thicket near the lake, blinked dumbly at Celia Chester. He thought
child
and then
soap
, as if she belonged in one of those sudsy advertisements inked onto the back pages of magazines, a thought immediately succeeded by the knowledge that he should not be by the lake or out of the hospital, that he had no experience with children and could not be trusted. Still, he noted the pleasing pink blooms on the child’s cheeks, how her lashes flitted up when she saw him, though the soft expression on her face quickly rearranged itself into wide-eyed terror. Before he could even declare himself she emitted a high-pitched shriek. Leeson, stunned, put a hand out to calm her, but before he could reach her she dashed off into the bush. In the seconds that followed Leeson heard a commotion, heard Celia calling out and others calling back to her. He smoothed the front of his waistcoat, then tapped the flat of his hand to his head.
Think, think, think
, the hand said, as if he were late for
an appointment and only had to remember where he ought to be going. He raised his chin in the direction of the voices—one shouted, “Present yourself!”; another cried, “Edmund!”—and took a few steps toward them. It was clear: there had been a mistake; the girl had been startled; he was to blame. He would make himself known so that he might clarify the situation.

Within minutes the rustling on the other side of the bushes grew louder.

“Show me where!” a man shouted.

The man’s voice was the kind that Leeson imagined men in the military would have: brusque with resolution. Instinctively, he hunkered down beside the hazel thicket the girl had dashed around, debating whether or not he should raise an arm above the foliage or shout “Here!” Instead, overwhelmed by a vision of men in red tunics brandishing rifles, he slipped back into the welt of the marsh grass and moved through the loosestrife toward the mud bank of the lake. He had heard the group early on when he’d first lost his way, and drawn by the resonant voices of the men, the bubbling-up of a woman’s laughter, he’d tried to listen to their conversation through the trees, retreating when he heard a dog bark the way dogs do to announce a visitor who is not threatening. He’d wondered if the laughter was N’s, wondered if he’d remember what hers sounded like, if he had ever, in fact, heard it before.

After the voices, and after the trampling steps of two men passed the glut of reed in which Leeson was hiding, he got up off his haunches and, stooping to keep his head below the level of the nearby bushes, moved toward the lakeside where the voices had originally come from. He calculated that if he was there and waiting, sitting calmly in the open, the conversation might be between gentlemen divested of the urge to shout.

What he would always remember was the feel of the sun on his
face when he came into the clearing and saw George Farrington, how surprised he was by its warmth after hours of walking through the spun nets of the trees. A summer sun in autumn—as if brought out for the tea, arranged by the host to please his guests. Leeson, never one to shy away from a direct gaze, peered up into the orb of it to assess whether it was the same sun as always or if its commission had made it perceptibly different. Its searing whiteness was so unlike the version in the watercolour Farrington had shown him a month before in the small parlour at Inglewood—a circle so theatrically delineated it failed to resemble anything other than a button of yellow.

The shot was a colour too—a bright burst that kissed his arms and chest and passed through the left lobe of his lung. His eyes were still speckled with sun but had cleared enough that he could see the shape of a man, of men, rushing toward him, even as the ground rose up to meet his back. A commotion of voices hovered over and around him while his own throat bubbled up a confused apology. He thought briefly that it was Bedford again looming over his face intimately, but Bedford proved to be George Farrington, his scarred lip giving him away. Things could, Leeson thought, be better. Thorpe would want an explanation; Leeson could imagine him in his dark-panelled office already—jotting details into his book.

“Look at me!” George shouted, his face coming into focus, his hands on Charles, in Charles, pressing down. What to say to such an audience? That he had been wilfully detained these past months? That the stump of meat he received at lunch was often overcooked and that the kitchen staff did this to him intentionally? That sometimes the body is nothing at all and other times it is like the pulse of a frog’s throat: ghostly thin and vibrating?
Ribbit
, he wanted to say, or
Pardon me for
—but the botanist was shouting “What were you thinking?” over his shoulder at a man with long side-whiskers wearing a black hat. Bubble and spit came out
of Charles’s mouth when he tried to speak of an old favourite hat of his own, a silk topper with a narrow brim that he had recently been missing because it fit him so perfectly. The botanist in a rage above him, while a cushion of some sort was placed under his head.

And then she was there, wiping the mud off his cheeks with the corner of her shawl, her fingers in his short greying hair. “Shh,” she said, and he could see that she was crying. “Shh, Charles, I’m here.” He counted the number of times her lips opened and closed, tried to work one word apart from the other. One of the men pulled her away as she said, “But I know him, please, sir—” Charles’s attention wholly on the progression of each word: odd, even, odd, even, odd, even. Then everything thickened and went silent; Charles was both in and above himself, observing his form as indifferently as his doctors had done. N beside him on her knees, her hair duller than he remembered, though otherwise she was exactly the same.

Jane stands up in the bathtub and reaches down to pull the plug. She watches the water swirl away until Sam pads into the bathroom and
woofs
lightly to gain her attention.

Those of us who were waiting in the main room start toward her, but the theologian interrupts us, says, “I have a confession.”

“Go on,” Cat chides.

The theologian clears his throat and announces, “I realized something yesterday at the cottages. I think I know who I was.” He pauses and turns toward us, and we can feel the full force of his attention. “I believe I was the local headmaster.”

What the theologian had remembered as he stood outside the long row of cottages by the falls was the sensation of being inside one of those
rooms, of watching a grey wall of fog thickening outside his front window. He could imagine himself in a wingback chair with weak springs, the sitting room warm in the ambit of the fire. He recalled an evening that was over-quiet because the bird he’d kept had died—a linnet gifted to him by a former pupil. He’d considered, in that hour, in the form of his former body, the nature of fog—how quickly it can roll in and recede. He’d thought he ought to use the idea of fog in the lesson he’d planned for the next day’s class—a metaphor to illustrate what God does, and doesn’t, allow us to see. He was so deep in rehearsing his analogy that he didn’t hear the sound of a horse approaching until it stopped outside on the cobblestone street, and George Farrington appeared suddenly outside his window, as if he’d stepped through a curtain.

When the theologian tells us that he was the local headmaster, we move toward him to ask if he remembers any of us, if he can see us as we once were.

He says, “I think I remember the boy. He may have been a pupil. It seems to me that his brother might have worked for Farrington in the stables.”

“Do you remember the ball?” Cat asks, because she has been obsessing about that event.

“No.”

“But you remember the picnic,” the one with the soft voice says. “The day Leeson died?”

The theologian wavers and moves toward the room’s only chair. “I remember the fact of it, gossip, but I was not there.”

“And your name?” John asks.

“Bernard,” the theologian sighs. “Bernard Hibbitt.”

We have always imagined that knowing who we once were would enact some kind of completion. The theologian’s revelation dissuades us of any such conviction.

“Tweeet?
” Herschel asks.

“I don’t know,” John shrugs. “He’s still here.”

“You thought I would Cease,” the theologian says.

“Pretty much,” John replies. “I think we’ve all been expecting it. As if we only have to learn a certain amount about ourselves and then—”

“
Whoooo
,” Herschel says.

“Exactly.”

“You’re not even
a minister
!” Cat exclaims, and she throws her arms up in the air.

The theologian takes a deep breath. “So what then? I’m still here. As are you—” He waves his hand at us and says our names almost disdainfully: “
Eliza, Alfred, Herschel
—”

“Samuel,” adds the poet, bowing. “Samuel Murray.”

“Which means …?” the musician asks.

“That we were wrong,” John surmises.

“About Ceasing?” begs the girl.

“About everything.”

While Jane dries off and sorts through her limited wardrobe, we concentrate on what we know. We ask the theologian to tell us his story in the hope that he will be able to recount the details that matter, find intersections between his life and ours. We decide that we will call his story “Bernard,” because all of our stories get titles—words that we use as clues to help us remember.

“Dock,” says the girl, before the theologian starts, because it is one of the words we have asked her to be responsible for.

“Yes,” we say. “Good, the terrier,” and our hearts sink because we realize that she doesn’t fully understand that the boy is gone.