The World Before Us (16 page)

Jane stands by the hummingbirds, not sure what she’s waiting for. Her black dress, reflected back at her in the cabinet’s glass, suddenly seems like something one would wear to a funeral. Her thoughts are muddy: she looks from bird to bird and can’t separate the impact of seeing William from the contents of his lecture or the fact of the Chester’s closure. One moment of clarity emerges: William, at least, is
making use
of the things he knows—things
she
knows.

To Jane’s left, reflected in the glass, a girl in a white gossamer blouse and long blue skirt appears. She is coming over to look at the hummingbirds, and the effect of these two images blended—the semblance of the girl and the nimble hover of birds—is so beautiful and unexpected that Jane can’t bring herself to turn around.

“Mina?” A blonde woman in a green strapless dress appears in the reflection behind the child. “Where are you going, darling?”

Mina turns around and says something too quiet for Jane to hear.

“Yes, they are. All right then, a quick look, hurry up.” She smiles at Jane in the reflected glass—two women of childbearing age catching each other’s gaze and therefore complicit, sharing what it is to have children, or what it must be like.

Mina walks toward the cabinet and the woman takes a mobile phone out of her beaded clutch purse. She checks its little rectangle of light and then turns away from the ruckus of the main hall, presses some keys and puts it against her ear.

Jane looks down at Mina and makes a silly face. The girl is eight, maybe nine; she has the kind of mousey-brown hair that gets blonder in the summer, a heart-shaped face, a chicken pox scar on her brow just above the bridge of her perky nose. Because she has manners and because her mum has let her come over, she mouths,
Hi
to Jane and then she turns and studies the hummingbirds, counting them under her breath.

“Mina?” It’s a man’s voice this time.

Mina glances over her shoulder at William, and Jane watches as he comes toward them, touching the blonde woman’s waist as he moves past her, the mobile phone still pressed against her ear.

“Sweetie, it’s time to go, it’s past your bedtime.” He reaches down for Mina’s hand and she threads her fingers through his. Then William stands there for a few seconds registering what she’s looking at—something Henri or Claire would never have done for Jane—taking it in as if it matters. “That one’s lovely,” he says, and he points a fraction of an inch off the glass at one of the birds on the middle branch, a broadbill with a blue throat and green chest. He doesn’t look at Jane.

“I like this one.” Mina identifies a grey bird with splayed wings and a ruff of purple feathers around its neck, her finger pressing against the glass so that for an instant after she moves her hand away, there’s a faint round print there.

William turns to Jane and his eyes flick up into hers. The small red centre of pressure that has been in her chest all night balloons and moves up to her throat.

“Sorry to interrupt.” He smiles at Jane and places his hands on Mina’s shoulders to steer the girl, who Jane can now see resembles Lily, toward the woman who is putting the phone back into her bag.

“Sorry—” Jane turns toward William and tries to steady her voice. “Have we met before?”

It’s obvious she’s speaking to William, but instead of replying he turns first to his wife so that she can register his confusion, see that
despite what these sorts of things sometimes look like, there’s been a mistake. Then he turns and looks directly at Jane.

“I don’t believe so.” His voice is even, but his brow is creased and his lips are pinched in a vaguely baffled expression. He is looking at Jane—Jane, who everyone says
hasn’t changed a bit in all these years
, who in all the essential ways still resembles
that Jane
—and he doesn’t know her.

How ridiculous it suddenly seems—the monastic life she’d imagined for him, the amount of space she’d believed she occupied in his everyday existence, an expanse she’d thought would equal the space he and Lily consumed in her. Jane can feel herself begin to shake, William staring at her blankly now, a stupid passive expression on his aging face.

“Will?” his wife asks, standing behind Mina and moving her arm protectively over her daughter’s chest.

It isn’t even a thought. It takes Jane two steps to reach him, to place her left hand gently against his cheek and slap him sharply with the right.

10

September had swept in, and Inglewood House, when Norvill Farrington arrived, was colder than he’d expected. He stood morosely in his old childhood room—a panelled suite that felt claustrophobic compared to his own bright and well-appointed accommodations in London—and rang impatiently for the footman. There was, he saw now, something too rural about the house: its dark, stocky furniture, grey flagstones, thick wood-beam ceilings, heavy curtains and mahogany shelves; the tiger and deer skins in his room becoming more motley every year. It had been a shooting lodge before his parents purchased it in 1847, and in the intervening thirty years the only substantial improvements seemed to have been made to George’s gardens. When Norvill was young, the house had fascinated him; he’d grown up with dead pheasants displayed in terrariums, stag and fox heads mounted along the hall outside his room, a stuffed bear in the entry near the stairwell. He’d spent whole hours contemplating the animals’ wet-seeming noses, the muzzle of white fur around the roe deer’s snout, the fox’s yellowed canines. But now it all seemed oppressive and disingenuous and
cold
—the wildebeest, cheetah and buffalo heads imported, fixtures that, like the brass telescope on
his desk and the globes on his bookshelf, seemed to say
the real world is elsewhere
.

In Norvill’s absence a large mirror had been hung to the left of his bed, its frame a Baroque monstrosity. He recognized it from the room of his mother, Prudence, and imagined it had been moved because of the patina that had developed on its reflective surface—or perhaps because replacing things and shuttling objects around the house were two of Prudence’s abiding pleasures. Norvill took off his hat, jacket and shirt to change for George’s reception and surveyed himself briefly in the marred mirror. He almost didn’t recognize the figure blinking back at him: his face was more sun-kissed than expected, his cheeks ruddier, moustache thinner. There were patches in his sideburns and on his chest that, upon close inspection, were flinted with strands of white. Standing there, the brown and amber hues of the room cloaking him, he felt as if he were a stranger, or if not a stranger, a kind of double: a brother to himself, a “George” observing his sibling’s return to the nest, his awkward attempts to settle into it.

Norvill mentioned the mirror in a letter he wrote that night to Charlotte Chester—secreted to her through his footman and the lady’s maid Prudence had assigned to her. He felt a frisson of excitement over the daring of the note, its physicality and possible interception, in the downstairs gossip he knew its passage would elicit. The letter was written on George’s monogrammed house stationery, and the envelope bore the inky scratch of Charlotte’s given name. The top slip of paper inquired after her quarters: were she and Edmund happy with their rooms? Was the fire sufficient or would they require extra bedding? The second slip confided that although the prospect of her company made the journey north desirable he felt a growing agitation at finding himself back in Inglewood, his countenance reflected in the obscenity of his mother’s mirror in a room and a house that were resolutely his, but wholly belonged to George.

William Eliot’s lecture at the Chester—his references to Norvill and Inglewood, to the gardens of the estate—had helped us conjure an image of life there. Some of us remembered the great lawns and the elaborate flowerbeds, glass hothouses and peacocks; some of us remembered a mirror and Norvill’s description of how he felt looking into it. The mirror was larger than the room’s windows, its frame a sea of gold waves, though up close you could discern carved sprays of laurel and
Acanthus
, bevelled curves where the dust always settled. One of us remembered the feel of the frame under her hand, could see herself running a cloth over its furrows, too busy with work to study her own reflection.

What we liked most about William’s lecture was how the simple act of making a statement allowed us access to an image. When he said “Inglewood” and “lake,” some of us could see a boat tethered to a rock by a fraying length of rope; when he said “manor,” one of us saw a library of windows to wash and drawers of cutlery to polish. A vision of Prudence Farrington appeared vividly to some of us at the mere mention of her name—one of us saw a stern and stubbornly uncorseted woman with streaks of grey ribboning her brown hair, another pictured her striding along an Indian carpet in a yellow-striped walking dress she’d had made for the shooting party, her pursed mouth relaxing enough to form a series of words that took the guise of a favour, though such appeals were usually closeted demands. The morning’s work put away because of this request, and the pattern of the day unexpectedly changed.

When the party reached the lake it was announced that Norvill would row the guests to the picnic spot on the opposite shore in two groups—announced
by George on the grounds that he himself would then be able to identify points of interest in the dale, although Norvill believed it was simply a matter of George not wanting to pick up the oars. George had taken to calling their excursion an “exploring party,” and as such wanted to be at the front of the group at all times in order to draw their attention to various flora on the trail and to regale them with stories from his last plant-hunting expedition in the Orient.

There were six in the first group: Edmund and Charlotte Chester, their three children and one of George’s housemaids—a milk-faced girl whose name Norvill had already forgotten; and five in the second group: the Suttons of Helton Hall sitting stiffly on the bench in front of Norvill, George and Prudence behind, the Hindu and George’s prize lurcher Cato at the stern, the hound leaning into the wind and working his nose in the direction of the swans. The Hindu, Rai, had ostensibly been brought along to haul the hampers and carry the guns, although Norvill suspected that George preferred his valet’s company to anyone else’s. As much as their mother enjoined her elder son to the role of congenial host, and as much as George embraced it, Norvill knew that his brother would, in every instance, rather be scampering up the ledge of some Yangma rock face beside his former porter than leading a group of bustled women across the estate’s grounds. Rai, wedged behind the hampers, was apparently of the same mindset: his brown face was impassive above his light-wool
gho
and his eyes stared drearily at the approaching shore. Loading the boat he’d said nothing, as usual, though when pushing off he’d levelled instructions at the dog in his native tongue—the velvet lilt of his voice causing the Suttons to sit even straighter.

It had been a slow morning, with the guests still adjusting to their accommodations, the rooms in Inglewood House draftier, Norvill imagined, than they were probably used to. The large east-facing windows in the guest wing let the sun in early, which would have woken anyone whose curtains hadn’t been secured, provided the noise of the servants
lighting fires and rustling through the corridors hadn’t already done so. Norvill would have done things differently, of course—ensured no one was disturbed, sent breakfast to the rooms at a later hour. But, as the older of the two brothers, George resided on the estate, an act with which he staked further claim on both his authority and their mother’s affection. When he wasn’t away on his expeditions, he continued in his role as sole executor of the family’s diminishing fortune, which was why Norvill was rowing across the midriff of the lake, and George was sitting in front of him pointing up to the rock face that backed it, explaining how the prickly white stalks of the
Spiraea ariaefolia
rooted themselves in the nooks of such a vertical plane.