The World Before Us (11 page)

Until the announcement of the museum’s closure, our lives followed patterns of their own. We acknowledged each other as fellow passengers might do, like commuters on a train. We took up watch over Jane in shifts, sailing past each other almost wordlessly. This was partly because it’s easier to keep track of each other when there are only four or five of us in a room, but also because watching Jane isn’t easy. When Jane drops honey into her tea, some of us gaze at the spoon and yearn to
taste what it carries; when she puts her hands over her mouth and begins to cry, there are those of us who ache to comfort her. Watching her work has always been best—there is possibility in it, in hovering around her, hanging over our own hoped-for histories like question marks.
Keep going
, we’d say.
Open that file
;
look there
. Sometimes we thought she heard us. Especially on those days when she turned her attention back to N and the Whitmore, when she sent out inquiries, dug into the archives, asked the right questions, when she gazed, as she did this morning, at the galvanizing machine and thought about Leeson, or dreamed of the woods—instances that allow us to say,
Yes, that is close to what happened
. But sometimes her papers got shuffled around or were crumpled into the wastebasket; sometimes days went by without Jane giving a thought to us, and so we’d grow restless, argue about what we were doing here and if we should leave, as if what concerned one of us concerned us all.

Even though it is not allowed, we know that we can flutter Jane, that there are ways we can effect change. A month ago, when she heard that William had won the Chester-Wood Prize and would be reading at the award ceremony, she spent a whole night staring through the dark at the ceiling. At half-five in the morning she got out of bed, threw on jeans and a jumper and took the tube to William’s house with the idea that seeing him beforehand was the only reasonable solution. She stood at the bottom of the walk for half an hour, thinking he’d step out to go to work, or that he’d notice her from the front window, be the one to come outside, that he’d know what to do. But then an upstairs light came on, and Jane lost her nerve. So we started wishing her up the steps, willing her toward the pearly circle of his door chime.

Morality is not solely the terrain of the living—we argued about what we were doing as it was happening, unsure if what was good for us was good for Jane. Still, we wanted her done with it, we wanted her attention back on us, so we gathered together in the blue curl of morning, put our hands out and
thought
Jane forward as hard as we could. There
were whole seconds when it seemed she might go, when she lifted her foot onto the next step, reached out her hand.

“This is it,” we said. And in our excitement we lost our concentration, saw her shake her head and turn around. Watched the wrought-iron gate swing closed behind her.

Sometimes when we are brooding, when our own progress seems blocked, we turn our backs on Jane and her work, on the museum things we’ve come to love, and look for distraction. We sprawl on the roped-off furniture in the upper galleries, watch people pee in the loo, follow random strangers, wander outside the building. Some of us have braved travel and left the city, some have even given up—were here one day and then wavered like light on water and vanished the next. On the bad days we leave Jane to her work, drift aimlessly past cabinets and museum visitors or wander up to the second-storey gallery windows. Once there, we stare out at the brusque efficiency of a city going about its business—the awnings rolling up and down over the shops near the corner, umbrellas opening and closing, people’s clothing changing weight and shape with the season—so that when we shake our heads to clear the dream, we sometimes find weeks have gone by in a flickering instant. We have come to think of time the way we think about the museum: that being inside it is like inhabiting the past, the present and the future simultaneously. This is why we have to stay awake, be vigilant: we need to believe that we, like the museum objects around us, bear time with equal complexity, that eventually we might discover who we have been, what purpose we serve and what use we might one day be.

At four o’clock, Jacek, the museum’s security guard, places a wrought-iron stand with a Closed sign outside the front door, and the last patrons, a group of well-heeled elderly ladies and an American family carrying
shopping bags, begin circulating quickly through the collections. An hour later the caterers come in through the loading bay and begin setting up in the corner of the natural history hall. By the time the final visitor, a Japanese girl picking through the discount postcards in the gift shop, has made her way out, a long table draped in linen has been set up and a raised stage and podium erected at the back of the room.

Jane comes out of her office just as the musicians arrive. They set down their instrument cases to rearrange the chairs and music stands placed on the dais, one of the young men bumping into the tortoise display behind him when he bends to pick up his violin.

The main hall is the kind of impressive room Edmund Chester dreamed about: his whale skeleton is suspended between four marble columns and the ceiling is painted blue above it, so that looking up at its bowed jaw and notched spine you can almost imagine it whole, see it steering itself across the ocean. The cabinets and long-cases that line the west wall are accordingly nautical in theme: turtle collections, navigational instruments, a display of fossils brought back on the
Beagle
. The cabinets on the opposite wall contain flora and fauna. The largest, the Vlasak cabinet, is an old oak hutch filled with a variety of plant models made entirely from glass: moss, fern leaves, pine and cypress cones, lace vine, a rose replete with thorns, a sprig of wild strawberry.

When we gather back together as a group we find Jane in front of this cabinet. She is wearing the dress her mother, Claire, wore the night she met Henri, a cap-sleeved Chanel from the 1950s with a ribbon-cinched waist and bell-shaped skirt. A photo exists of Claire in this dress, taken on the deck of a friend’s boat as it puttered on the Seine: the occasion was an evening party, a group of the nearly-famous holding martinis in their hands. Claire, seventeen but passing for older, was standing next to Henri, to whom she had yet to be introduced, and Henri was staring at the photographer, a woman he was dating at the time. The group’s faces were brightly overexposed as if they’d been caught out at something,
Claire’s hand on the rail near Henri’s, the lights of the city bleary dots between them.

Jane is looking partly at the cabinet display and partly at her reflection in the glass. All day she has been trying to remember something her therapist had once said about how one defines oneself, about the power of intention. She was twenty and wanted to give up the cello. “Why?” the therapist, Clive, had asked, and Jane shrugged. She could have said “to spite myself” or “to spite my father,” but by then she was tired of the rawness of trying to communicate everything, of feeling like every failure or step forward had to be brought back to what had happened in the woods when she was fifteen. So she gestured at the cello case propped in the corner of the room and said, “You try lugging it everywhere.”

Behind Jane the musicians start to tune their instruments. The caterers set silver platters down on the long table, unwrap the canapés. We hear the
ting, ting
of glass touching glass as a waistcoated server stacks the stemware into triangles, as if the world is stable and nothing or no one can knock things over.

“She’s going to leave,” one of us sighs.

“No, she’s not,” says the idiot.

“
Ttthhhhhtttt,
” says the one who sucks on his teeth.

We look at Jane’s reflection in the cabinet glass to gauge her mood and see the aching space of our absence. Twenty-five rows of chairs are cast back at us, along with the lectern where William will stand and a tall ceramic vase stuffed with oriental flowers.

“I’ll wager you,” says the musician.

“Wager us what exactly?”

“She took a diazepam in the bathroom,” the theologian says, “while you were all out here gaping at the quiche.”

“Our mouths divined with heaven,” intones the poet.

“
Vrrrooooooom
,” drones the boy, as if he’s a jet fighter.

“
Shhh
, everyone, give her a bit,” the one with the soft voice says,
watching Jane study the glass-blown rose, the wilted edges of its thin petals.

What Jane remembers most vividly about the last time she saw William was the constable’s desk where she was told to sit and wait. It was in the part of the police station she had never imagined—a brown-panelled backroom area where the officers piled their everyday coats on racks and kept outdated family photos on their desk, where coffee mugs emblazoned with phrases like “World’s Best Dad” were clustered on a card table next to a well-used coffee maker. The nameplate at the desk said
Shaun Holmes
in brass, and this made her think of the Sherlock books that her brother, Lewis, liked, and so, to distract herself, she tried to remember if Sherlock was the character’s real first name, the one his mother gave him when he was born, or some kind of nickname. Shaun Holmes had a frame on his desk with a photo of an Alsatian that Jane thought probably came from a calendar of dogs. Maybe October was Alsatian month, and if she opened the frame and peeked at the back of the image she’d find the squares of September with notes like
Sara’s birthday
or
dinner at K’s
written in the boxes. But then Jane rationalized that if “Sara” or her birthday mattered to Shaun Holmes, he’d have a photo of her in the frame instead. Constable Margaret Mobbs, the woman who’d brought Jane to the desk after her statement on the trail, after it became clear that Jane couldn’t stop crying, came by after a while with a book for twelve-year-olds, milky tea from a vending machine and a packet of plain crisps. She stood there a moment and then touched Jane’s head, said, “I’ll leave you to it?” Instead of replying, Jane reached out her finger and tapped the last silver ball of a set that hung from strings on a stupid contraption on Constable Holmes’s desk. The ball clicked with a light
tock
into the next ball, which
tock
ed its neighbour in turn, the effect diminishing as it moved along.

“Newtonian,” Mobbs said. She wiped what appeared to be a line of dirt off her sun-baked cheek and a strand of dull-brown hair slipped out of its ponytail. “Inertia.”

Jane had to concentrate to remember what that was, because she knew that she
knew
it, but didn’t right then. What it meant
then
was that Lily was out in the woods and Shaun Holmes and everyone from everywhere was looking for her, and that one click could lead to another and at the end everything would be okay.

“Or cause and effect,” Mobbs added, then shrugged. “Actually, I’m more of a history of the ancient world kind of girl.”

Hours later, long enough that Jane’s grandparents would have arrived if they’d driven straight up from London, if they’d been home to take the call and not out at the ballet and having a drink after with the director of the symphony orchestra, Jane looked up from the Alsatian—who was a real dog after all—and saw William. He was hunched in his jacket behind a desk on the other side of the room, a survey map open in front of him, a Styrofoam cup that was still steaming placed on top. His gaze was directed down at the cup, and it stayed there for a long time, and Jane both wanted and did not want him to look up at her.