The World Before Us (41 page)

Without meaning to, Jane starts counting like she did after that last fight with Ben:
one thousand one, one thousand two
,
one thousand three
.

“Fuck. Sorry.” Blake comes close and butts his head lightly against her shoulder. “Don’t be angry.”

Because she isn’t angry, and because she wants to, Jane takes Blake’s hand and leads him upstairs to her room. Once there, she pulls his sweater up and over his head and pushes him gently down on the bed. She knows she shouldn’t keep him, knows that there are other ways to find or feel tenderness and she knows, too, that Paula is probably sitting in the rust-coloured wingback near the door, waiting, like any parent would, for her child to come home.

26

Out of the kind of idleness common to her weekday afternoons, Charlotte Chester once began what she referred to in her diary as a “catalogue of touch.” Jane read about it the summer she started compiling the Chester archives. It began, Charlotte had written, with a paper cut.

Charlotte and Celia were in the front parlour of the new house beside the museum making a collage for Edmund. Fumbling with the shears, Celia asked her mother to help her cut out the duck she’d found illustrated in a periodical. She wanted to affix a top hat to it on the paper they were using for pasting. Distractedly flopping the publication onto her lap, Charlotte had grazed the side of her finger. She made a small sound, inspected the incision and put the affected knuckle in her mouth. Celia, six at the time, promptly plopped down off her chair, approached her mother and, reaching for the wound, kissed it. The hours that day had passed dully, but suddenly, in that instant, Charlotte felt keenly aware, could parse two separate sensations: the sting of her finger and the wet press of her daughter’s lips. It had been a long time since she’d been so acutely in her body. Edmund had been absent, travelling back and forth to the mill or up late at night tending to urgent matters with the museum—yesterday
a theft, last week the delayed shipping of an expected exhibit of fossils. Hers had become a life of the mind: books as lived experience, ideas for charitable projects she did not begin, a tedium that wore a circle around her children, whose play she supervised without passion.

“Does it still hurt?” Celia stood at Charlotte’s knee, a look of uncertainty clouding her face.

“No, darling, it just tickles.”

That night, the sheets from her husband’s factory settled coolly in the place where Edmund ought to have been, Charlotte decided to consume herself for one whole day with the sense of touch. She would make it an experiment, would do as she had seen the members of Edmund’s societies do: form through careful and sustained observation a hypothesis about the various modes and expressions of her subject. The effort would require a notebook, which she could easily steal from Edmund’s study, and the kind of attenuation she knew she could not steal, the kind she had started to lack.

In the end, Charlotte wrote, the catalogue was a disappointment. She’d noted the unexpected warmth of the keys taken from the maid, the cool brass of the library doorknob, the viscous quality of the honey clumped by Thomas into his younger brother’s hair after a row at lunch. There was the constant swish of her skirts against her stockings, the side of her hand inching across a letter to her mother, the repeated smoothing of the raw silk of her dress. And then, almost miraculously, the bell of a purple foxglove lifted from where it had fallen to the carpet, her finger slipping gently into the satin of its cup.

A year later, in Scarborough, when she joined Norvill for two weeks on the pretense of visiting a distant cousin, she repeated this practice with him. They would wake in his bed and she would set to memory the rough pads of his fingers stroking her cheek, his lips nibbling her chin,
even the way the soft of her stomach nestled against the taut plane of his. His house was modest, perched halfway up a cliff that banistered the sea, let to him by an acquaintance of George’s who owned a fleet of fishing vessels. On the days when Norvill had to slip into the city to advise on the survey work he was overseeing, Charlotte occupied herself with the brace of the coastal wind, the grit of the sand she’d bring back in her skirts from the beach, the slick ribbon of seaweed she once touched lightly to her tongue. It was easy, from that distance, to see that her children were cloying. To love them less for how they leaned into her, tugged at her even from across the country. It was not the same with Edmund, whom, on those aimless afternoons window-shopping along winding village streets, she loved more. When the clerk in the jewellery shop on M—— Street showed her an impossibly small ammonite fossil that had been set into a ring, she realized with a pang that it was Edmund she would like to receive it from, not Norvill.

It was not that Edmund had disappointed her or that his touch was not pleasurable. She knew any number of women in her circle who did not have things as well as she. Charlotte could see the strain in their faces, the flinch at the card table or on stairwells when their husbands leaned close or moved to guide them by the arm. Once, at an exhibition in London, Edmund dared to take Charlotte into the gallery where the painted nudes had been hung, even though none of the other women had gone. She admired him in his ease, playing subtly at being aroused, and wondered why exactly she felt so removed from him.

Afterward, in the carriage, when he ran his hand over her bodice, pulled at the ribbon streaming down from her collar, she realized it was the children who were the cause—that giving birth to them had necessitated a transfer of love, and her body had become affiliated in new directions. In their house she was constantly pulled at, once slapped by Thomas when she refused him a sweet, exhausted by the demands and piddling violences, and even by the rare and precious hours of cradling
that Celia still sometimes permitted. Norvill, as much as she had come to love him, represented an escape from such needling, although he was starting to create problems of his own. The two of them had become less careful than they were in the beginning; and once, even after she had asked him to remove himself, he had stayed inside, pushing deeper until he was finished.

On Charlotte’s last day in the house on the cliff, Norvill asked her to come and live with him. He went down on his knees in the bedroom, his shirt half on; there was a sickle-shaped mark on his chest from where she’d accidentally scratched him.

“I couldn’t possibly.” She continued packing.

“Leave Edmund.”

“Again,” she said, “you’re being ridiculous.”

He sat down on the bed with his back to her. In the quiet they could hear the housekeeper gathering cutlery in the next room—the Inglewood maid George had sent to take care of Norvill. There was a pocket of silence and Charlotte almost spoke, but waited until the clatter of the breakfast things being loaded onto a tray in the dining nook resumed.

“I do think of it,” she said.

“What?” He turned around. He was still handsome—though wind-burnt from the survey work. The strain of the shooting, of having to leave Inglewood, had aged him.

Charlotte set the dress she was struggling to fold onto the bed and felt the billows of silk exhaust themselves in her hands. “I have, these past weeks, in your occasional absence,
imagined
”—she said the last word sternly so that he would not mistake it for sentiment—“a possible life with you. And dared”—again a stern emphasis—“
once
, to picture us there, on the beach with some child of our own, living out our days …” She searched for the word and then settled on “… simply.”

Norvill grabbed her hand. “And why not?”

“Because I love Edmund, too.”

Jane has read Charlotte’s diaries and Edmund’s letters, and in those months when she assembled the material for the Chester family display we read and reread them too. And we saw how time works—how it pulls some stones off the beach and casts others onto the sand—how Edmund became the kind of subject he’d once celebrated. A plaque was made in his name and hung beside the Chester family cabinet in the slant-roofed room that had been both storage and a servant’s quarters in the Chesters’ first residence. We think of him and of the Chesters often—even here, so close to the Whitmore and Inglewood House—because the home they made became ours, and because time in the museum moved in a different way than it did outside, and we liked that. Whereas the tourists and school children, the locals on weekend excursions experienced the Chester over the course of two or three hours, curious but swept up by the demands of their everyday lives, we
lived
there, had the patience to study the details. The museum was a place where we’d come to feel at home, where the clocks had stopped ticking, where time had settled into its rusted hinge.

We are certain that Edmund knew about Norvill and Charlotte. The summer she went to Scarborough he dashed off business letters with uncharacteristic indifference, slashed a week of appointments from his diary, proposed a new configuration of the board that would eventually see Norvill expelled. A stain of ink the size of a fist appeared suddenly on his desk and he wrote to his sister that everyone was at a loss as to how to remove it. We know how things were done in that world, but Jane does not. We understand that a man can stand in the hall while his wife receives a letter from a distant cousin, and intentionally not observe its arrival. We understand polite efficiencies—how the maid might knock the ladle lightly against the side of the tureen as Charlotte glances up from the flawless weave of the table linen to find Edmund smiling
thinly. How Edmund might state that the morning paper has said that the weather has taken a turn on the coast; that he’s wondering if it’s still advisable for her to leave.

We are, all of us, observers. Even Herschel, who has lost his tongue, who sits on the outside of our circle to
tweep
his yes and
whoot
his no, sees what is happening—sees Jane and sees Blake, his chin pressed against the top of her head, his arm under her pillow while they are sleeping; sees the tidal pull one person can effect upon another. So we stand around the room, stir the curtains, watch the tap slowly dripping and wish we could feel even one water drop on our palms. And in the dark, in drifts of memory, we recall some of the people and things we have happened upon, moments that aroused us from the stupor of our lives—the plumes of a peacock unfolding under an elm, the bright platter of a sky coroneted by trees, a list retrieved from between an armoire and the wall of a house by the sea:

Flat of palm on abdomen

Shift of sheets

Hard shelf of his hips against the soft of mine

Curve of water glass against my lips—his hand trembling

Coarse planking of the wood floor

The hitch of a sliver

Blake’s phone rings at half-nine and he stumbles out of bed to yank it from the pocket of his trousers. He listens for a second and then covers the bottom of the phone to relay that it’s his father, asking why he isn’t at work.

Later, while he is in the shower, Jane uses Blake’s mobile to go online and check her new e-mail account for a message from William. After yesterday’s phone call she’d run upstairs from the records office to use
the computer terminals in the public library and set up a generic e-mail account in Helen Swindon’s name. Before she lost her nerve she’d dashed off a note thanking him in advance for any assistance he could offer in relation to her search for connections between the Whitmore and Inglewood House in 1877.

William’s name pops up in small bold letters in her otherwise empty inbox just as the taps in the shower squeal off and the pipes in the wall groan and thump.

Ms. Swindon—

In regards to your inquiry … unable to find any reference to the three visitors … relevant sections concerning Whitmore death at Inglewood attached. Let me know if I can be of further assistance
.