The World Before Us (29 page)

“What now?” asks Cat.

“Dinner,” says the musician, and he raises his arms to conduct us, whistling as he ghosts through the door.

The idiot once told a bedtime story to the children that began with a great black sea that doubled as an ink-dark sky. When you looked, it was filled with stars and seashells lined up together.

“Stars
and
seashells?” the girl had squealed.

“Absolutely,” the idiot confirmed. “Caught in the great net of time.”

“Where are
we
?” she asked, hoping we were the fishermen.

“Where do you think we are?”

“On the water?”

“No.”

“In the moon?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She smacked her lips. “A spaceship!”

“No, we’re the house the sea-sky lives in. It’s in our heads twirling around; a spiral galaxy that’s shaped like a snail.”

“
Ewww.
”

“Why not?” He laughed. “Think of the breakfasts the mind can eat: Sands of time! Acres of now! Parcels of eternity! Tasty stuff.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the theologian said, calling out from the wingback chair under Jane’s sitting room window. “The sky is the sky, and the sea is the sea, end of discussion.”

But it was too late. We’d all listened to the idiot’s story and something in what he said as he carried on shaped how we started to think of ourselves, led to a sense that we were stuck together in something that could not be flattened out in ways that would otherwise be perfectly sensible. It was as if we were knots in a net that could take different shapes at different times. As if we might, one day, loop back on ourselves, come so close to the past we’d be able to taste the dust of our history in our mouths.

The pub at dinnertime is packed and smells of spilled beer and curry. Jane has avoided coming here until now because she doesn’t want to have the
you’re-not-from-around-here
conversation. She takes a seat at a low round table. A waitress comes over and drops a plastic menu in front of her, asks what Jane would like to drink.

“White wine, thanks.”

The girl taps the wine list and Jane scans it.

“The Chenin.”

“Small or large?”

Jane glances at the two tables nearest to her: plates of fish and chips, roast and potato, pints, a couple sharing a bottle of Malbec. “Large, thanks.”

The pub is almost exactly as she remembers from twenty years ago. The red-and-gold-medallioned carpets are the same, the leather stools and wood-backed booths, the belled lamps over the dining area tables. But there is a row of coin-operated games along the far wall now, flat-screen televisions recapping the day in rugby, a snooker table that may or may not have been there before. The customers are a mix of locals and tourists: a group of men in heavy boots and jeans at the bar, a few couples out on the smoking patio, the shop cashier from yesterday chatting up two girlfriends over by the far window and hikers tucking into dinner, their Gore-Tex jackets hanging off a nearby coat rack. At the far end of the bar there’s a cluster of twenty-year-olds standing around a high table, the kid from Inglewood House amongst them.

Jane watches him, curious in spite of herself. His back is mostly to her but sometimes he shifts around the table to talk to the girl in the miniskirt on his right or the guy in the hoodie on his left. There are at least two rounds of drink in front of them, a mix of pint and shot glasses. One of the three girls, the one with the dancer’s posture, who Jane thinks is the prettiest, is already swaying, her cheeks flushed and her gestures theatrical. The girl next to Blake, the loud one in the spangled silver top and large hoop earrings, leans sideways to say something in Blake’s ear and then turns her head, narrows her eyes at Jane. This reminds Jane of the young girl at the Chester, glaring at her from under the bones of the whale.

• • •

“Helen?”

Jane looks up from her almost empty glass of wine to see Blake holding a pint glass, a smart-ass expression on his face that she’d like to wipe off. This is what kids do, she thinks, when they get bored of their village bollocks. If, as teenagers, she and Lewis had stayed in the Lakes they’d have found whole new ways to push the envelope too. She smiles up at Blake, probably unconvincingly.

“How’s the hand?”

He pulls it out of his jeans pocket and displays the plaster. “Saved.”

Jane glances back at his table of mates, sees the girl in the silver top seething. “I think you’re wanted.”

He pulls a stool out with the toe of his boot and straddles it, places his pint on the table.

“I meant
elsewhere
,” says Jane.

“They’ll live.”

Jane leans back and before she can say anything more he has leapt up to the bar and is getting her another drink. One of the workmen asks him a question and pats him on the back, and Jane hates herself for noticing how attractive he is. He’s wearing black jeans and a white long-sleeve shirt. She glances down at her own clothes—a black A-line paired with a light blue sweater. Ben used to call it her librarian-wear.

“So where are you from?” Blake swings a leg back over the stool and slides a glass of wine toward her. It is so topped up he must have told the barman he was trying to get her drunk. “London?”

Jane raises her eyebrows in a noncommittal fashion before realizing this probably looks like flirting. “Why do you want to know? So you can send birthday cards?” She can hear herself trying to sound tolerant, trying to sound like someone engaging in playful banter because it is the polite thing to do.

Blake spins the pint in his hand and looks over at his friends as if gauging whether or not he should pack it up and go back. “Listen, Helen,
you have beautiful lips. I mean, the bottom one especially, there’s a kind of”—he narrows his eyes—“luscious thing happening there, and I am completely fucking horny and a little bit drunk, but I am also a nice guy and a good conversationalist. I like music, I like books, I read the paper
daily
, I can name, I don’t know, like fifty varieties of roses, and animals like me. My mates over there are talking about a YouTube video that shows two yobs eating their own feces—” He takes a breath. “So I’m asking you to save me.”

Jane glances around the room. She feels like she’s part of a spectacle, but no one other than the spangled girl is watching them.

She looks at him again. “How old are you, Blake?”

He grins. “You remember my name.” He pushes her wineglass closer with the tips of his fingers. “Nineteen. Why? How old are you?”

She debates how to handle this. “The proverbial too-old-to-behaving-this-conversation?”

He shifts forward and his knees touch hers under the table. “I’d like the record to show that
you
just called this a conversation.”

“My mistake. Clearly.”

“So, Helen,” Blake drums his fingers on the table, a chuffed expression on his face as if the lads he was sitting with bet him that he wouldn’t make it past two minutes. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Hmm, this is a serious question?”

“I have to say that you strike me as a very serious woman. So, yes.”

Jane thinks about this. She wants to come up with an answer that is pithy or maybe even a little bit honest; she wants, almost, to say her name
is actually Jane
. But what wells up in her instead is something she can’t quite articulate. It has to do with the fifteen-year-old version of herself that she can see across the room in the booth that she shared with William and Lily, a girl in black shoes that are too fancy, a girl whose ankles are crossed under the table, whose knees sometimes glance William’s.

“Have you ever been in love?”

Blake blinks at her. The question is unexpected. “Well, Helen”—he pauses and picks up a coaster, taps it on the table—“assuming you are engaging in a
real
conversation, I will answer you honestly. I have never been in love.” When Jane doesn’t say anything, he cocks his head. “
Is
this a real conversation?”

“Three times for me,” Jane says. “Different kinds of love.”

He nods. “That’s a respectable number.”

For the next half hour we sit in the pub with Jane and some of us pace the room and eavesdrop, and some try to remember if we know this place, try to fathom how long it has been here, wonder if the man at the bar is the son of the son of the son of a man or woman we once knew. Those of us who have been with Jane the longest want to whisper to her,
Look how that boy is seeing you
. To show her how open he is to the possibility of who she might be, how attenuated to her gaps and omissions. Ben was never like that; he held his ideas of Jane up in the air between thoughts of himself, of the wife he’d left for her, of the woman he wanted her to be. When they made love Jane closed her eyes and Ben looked at his own flexed arms as he propped himself above her. Even when she was in charge he thought,
I’m fucking her
, and “her” was always the girl he saw at the Portrait Gallery in a Prada dress, the daughter of Henri Braud and granddaughter of the renowned Standens.

“And then what happened?” Blake is leaning forward, laughing the way you do when a story has turned so tragic it’s funny.

“She hung herself.”

“Jesus.”

“From the top step above her desk. A neighbour found her. Mrs. Greeves.”

“Grieves? Like grieving? You’re kidding.”

“No, Greeves with two
e
’s; I never thought of that, actually.”

Blake shakes his head. “My mum is one of those boring-but-nice mums. There’s four of us and we’re all little bastards, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if she did something crazy one day: drowned the cat, set fire to the house.” He shifts his position and his leg falls against hers more deliberately.

“Do you like being a gardener?” Jane asks.

“It’s all right. Do you like estate management, or renovation work or whatever it’s called?”

“I do.” Jane smiles. “You know, it’s late. And I’ve got to let Sam out and I swear your girlfriend over there is going to come over and drive a fork through my throat, so I’m going to say good night.”

Blake stands up and Jane stands too, and she says, “It was really nice chatting with you,” and is surprised by how much she means it.

“Let me walk you out.”

“Um, I think you need to get back to your mates.”

“Helen, look at me.”

She does. He is staring at her intently, one side of his mouth lifted in a nervous smile, a chop of hair hanging over his forehead in a way that probably drives his mother crazy. There is a thumbprint-sized patch of stubble on his jaw that he missed shaving, an acne scar on his chin. She can tell the ridge of his nose has been broken, probably in rugby. She wants to put her finger lightly on the bump of it.

“I’d like to see you again.”

Jane laughs. “That’s very flattering, and I mean it, but probably not a good idea.”

19

As the woman at the local records office in Moorgate enters Jane’s information into the computer, Jane has to fight her anxiety about using her real name—Helen Swindon doesn’t have a reader’s card but Jane does.

“Right, here you are,” the woman says, squinting at what must be Jane’s particulars. “I just need to see two pieces of ID.” She glances down at Jane’s driver’s licence and bank card, says, “That’s fine,” and then slides a temporary pass across the counter. Jane slips it into her pocket and the woman goes back to the Sudoku puzzle she was working on. A few minutes later after Jane has emptied her things into one of the lockers in the cloak room and checked through a window to make sure the car is all right—Sam still sleeping off his morning run through the woods in the back seat—Jane walks past the woman again.

“Don’t forget to sign in,” the woman says, tapping the metal part of a clipboard with her pencil.

Jane writes her name illegibly, a false signature that feels like the physical form of a lie, and then she walks through the nearby door and into a bright but soulless reading room. Of the eight plywood tables lined up under the windows only two are occupied: one by a woman in a
fleece jacket sifting through a folder of newspaper clippings, the other by an elderly gentleman reading what appears to be a turn-of-the-century will. The whirling progress of a microfiche on the other side of a short supporting wall and the
peck-peck
of the archivist’s typing are the only noises in the room. Jane pulls out a banquet chair with tatty upholstery, sets her notepad down on the empty table and then takes her reader’s card up to the archivist, a woman her own age with cropped blonde hair and a small diamond nose-ring.

“How can I help?”

“I’m looking for the index for the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics.”

“Right. Have a seat and I’ll bring it over.”

The Whitmore index is bigger than Jane remembers. The Whitmore was only one of five county asylums whose archives she’d surveyed when she was writing her dissertation. It hadn’t been until she found the hospital logbook and the startling reference to “girl N——, missing” that she’d properly paid attention back then, stopped seeing what she was reading as “types” and “categories” and instead saw a specific place and a particular person. Her eyes had jumped to the next line and the next to see if N had been found, stopping in shock at
Letter from G. Farrington received
—the name so immediately familiar from William’s tour-guiding on the day Lily went missing that she’d had to get up and leave the room, splash her face with cold water.