The World Before Us (35 page)

Two tunnels of light from a car’s headlamps swing over us and we stop squabbling. The car cuts its engine in front of a stone house near the top of the village and the heavy
clunk
of the car door is followed by the wooden
thump
of a front door closing. For a second the sounds of the street fall back into the pulsing
whirr
of the nearby woods. And then, just as the boy turns toward the door of the inn, a ragged unhappiness palpable in his movements, we hear the same high bark we’ve heard before, a sure and sharp greeting. Some of us look to the field, and some of us to the house at the top of the street, imagining a dog in the yard uncurling himself to salute his master’s return. The dog barks again, behind us this time, and the boy turns and stares up the road past the church to the woods beyond it. Without a word he starts to run.

The boy is clearer to us in that moment than he has ever been, his eight-year-old arms working, legs moving furiously: a boy with a shock of brown hair, a child’s luminescent skin; a large plum-coloured bruise on his back. The theologian runs after him and is almost astride when
the boy picks up speed and throws his arms out like an airplane, banking left for the field before he wavers and vanishes completely.

Jane is drying off from the shower when Sam starts barking. Some dog outside has set him off and Jane has to come out with wet feet and dripping hair to
shush
him.
Fair play
, she thinks; she’s left him alone longer than usual this evening. She taps the mattress, “Come here, Bubby,” and Sam jumps up. Jane scratches his head, runs her palms over his white and wavy spaniel ears. For the last half hour she’s been puzzling over the evening’s unexpected events: Blake, the craziness of the two of them—how good it felt; and the vigil at the grotto, the sudden appearance of the larger world’s concerns in a place that has always been so closed, so loaded in her mind.

She pulls on a T-shirt and slides into bed, thinking about all the opportunities she had to tell Blake about William and Lily. The sound of the falls was a cue that brought back that day, and the earthy smell of the woods, its mushrooms and resin, and the weight of the weather hanging over the field.

22

During the two weeks when Jane was watching Lily they had a number of conversations about love. Lily was obsessed with pairs:
This fish swims with that one; my best friend is Bronwyn; these horses ride together
. On the Wednesday of the first week William had suggested that Jane walk Lily over to the Natural History Museum so they could have lunch with him. At the stone steps that led up to the main doors Lily had stopped abruptly and announced that her nanny, Luisa, didn’t have a boyfriend. She studied Jane’s face as people milled around them, trying to register if Jane found that fact as unsettling as she did.

They arrived early and William wasn’t in the main hall waiting for them, so Jane gave William’s name at the information stand. A nice woman in a navy blazer called upstairs and then came around the desk to say that he was still in a meeting but that they could wait in the exhibition hall. She bent down to talk to Lily, who seemed to know her, and said, “Well, aren’t you looking smart today?” Then she stood up and added, “You must be Jane.”

Jane nodded, feeling a frisson of excitement she didn’t quite
understand—the thrill of an adult acknowledging that William had spoken about her.

The woman left them in the hall where the museum mounted temporary exhibitions. That summer it held a display on early human settlements. Lily immediately made up romances: the
Homo erectus
pictured above the partial skeleton was married to the
Neanderthal
; the wax models in the cave diorama were a royal family—
This one’s the King, this one’s the Queen
; the mammoth is in love with the ox, this is their human baby. Jane enjoyed it so much—the crazy menagerie Lily was inventing—that she didn’t bother telling her that half of her pairings lived in different millenniums or belonged to different species. Standing behind a velvet rope that surrounded a cast of early human footprints, Lily glanced at the parallel trails—the fleshy indents of a smaller set of tracks following a larger one—and then turned her attention back to Jane. “Do
you
have a boyfriend?” She pursed her lips in a kissy fish face and Jane laughed and said no, wondering if Lily thought that she was closer to Luisa’s age, twenty-two and not fifteen, trying to remember if, as a child, she’d also organized the world of adults into a large, undefined category.

A week and a half later, at lunch in the pub in Inglewood, Lily had asked if they were going to see the caves at the end of the Farrington trail. This was partly because she’d liked the dioramas that day at the Natural History Museum—wax models of shaggy-haired
hominids
staged around a campfire—and partly because William and Jane had been talking about caves on the drive up. William had said that one of the reasons the Farrington trail was so popular was the caves at the end of it. The larger one was a draw for cavers and tourists, although most people only ventured a hundred feet in, to the railings that bordered the first chasm.

Lily was in the back seat of the Saab dancing a pony on her knee but quietly listening; for the first part of their conversation William was using a tenor Jane had come to recognize, a pitch that meant he was
speaking to both her and his daughter: simpler words, uncomplicated sentences. He mentioned the caves in Lascaux, moving the conversation tangentially to fill the space that Jane tended to leave open, and she told him that her father had taken her and Lewis to see their grandparents in Toulouse the previous summer and they’d made a day trip up to see the cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume. William, who’d been watching the road, the intermittent traffic, turned and looked at Jane in the way that always made her feel like he was
considering
her. She liked the heat of that kind of attention, how it demanded reciprocation, how it made her push through her uncertainties in order to find something to give him.

The Dordogne was greener and lusher than the parts of France Jane had visited before. As they drove toward the caves in the early morning a mist was lifting off the fields, clouding the drowsy heads of the sunflowers, dissipating around the stocky bulls grazing in their pastures. It was the first time Henri had taken Jane and Lewis anywhere without Claire. She’d backed out of the trip at the last minute because of a deadline, saying she’d meet them in Paris, though by the time they’d packed their things in Toulouse even that was in doubt. Jane had overheard them having an argument on the phone the morning they left for the caves and Henri’s annoyance had been palpable for the first part of the drive, but by the time they exited the motorway and started heading west, wending through a series of compact villages and driving under the rocky overhang of the Dordogne’s cliffs, he’d softened. He began talking about his own childhood, how his father had brought him here when he was ten or so, just a little bit younger than Lewis.

There were no tickets left for the English tours of the cave so Henri bought tickets for the French. Jane’s French was tolerable but Lewis’s was almost non-existent. Henri said he’d translate, and ruffled Jane’s hair
as they walked toward the bridge where the tour started. “But Jane will understand everything perfectly,
n’est-ce pas
?”

The tour guide was a man in his fifties in a baggy knit sweater. He introduced himself as Marc, and midway through his preamble he stopped and smiled at Lewis. “
Anglais?
” Lewis blushed, and Marc turned to a couple in blue rain slickers. “
Et vous? Vous parlez français?
”

The man replied, “We are German.”

“Okay.” Marc smiled. “I will try to do French and English if that is acceptable.” He surveyed the French speakers—a family of five and two young women with daypacks—to make sure they didn’t mind and then clapped his hands together.
“Parfait.”

Before he unlocked the iron door that led to the cave Marc explained the rules of the tour:
no bags past the entry, no touching the walls, not even with shoulders; we move quickly and stay close because our time inside is limited
. He looked at the German man and at Henri, and explained that there would be narrow passageways, and a Rubicon where it would be necessary to crouch down. “You see?” he said to the German in English. “Ducking?” And he bowed his head to make sure the man understood. Jane was closest to the large iron door that had been set into the cave wall, and as Marc took out his ring of keys to unlock the six bolts that crossed it he smiled at her. “
Vous êtes prête, mademoiselle?
You ready?”

What struck Jane about the caves was how difficult it was to see anything at all on the walls until the marks were pointed out. The lighting was dim to preserve the paintings and her eyes were slow to adjust. At a short railing, Marc stopped the group and gestured overhead. “I will give you a moment,” he said. “See what you see.” Jane scanned the convex limestone above her, the layers of rock yellow at her height but a brighter eggshell white above. There was a pool of brown to her right, but no shape she could distinguish clearly. Marc lifted a laser pointer to the brown stain and he used its red beam to trace the head, hump and chine of a bison. “Look here.” He moved the pointer a foot to the right. “And
here.” The French girl behind Jane, the one whose perfume smelled like sweets, gasped, and Jane understood—she, too, was startled. How suddenly clear they were: two bison face to face, their delicate heads and rust-coloured horns bowed in front of their thick brown bodies.

“Look,” Marc said, running the pointer over the bison’s thin legs. “The artists are using perspective. Dimensionality,
non
? We had it and then we lost it.”

When her eyes had adjusted more fully to the subdued light, Jane could see that the bison were both painted
and
carved. Their backs and bellies were incised, their eyes scored into the stone; pupils the size of tuning pegs seemed to follow her when she shifted back and forth.

Marc smiled at her. “Yes, good. It is almost like it is moving. The whole herd is running. Imagine the flame of a torch as our ancestors passed through here.” He moved his hand back and forth under the curl of the bison’s stomach. “How it would catch the folds and curves of the cave wall. Undulating,
non
? They are alive, you see.”

Marc stood back and let everyone take turns standing underneath the two bison. When Lewis, the last of the group, went up, Marc asked him, “How many do you see?” and Lewis glanced up the corbelled vault of the cave and answered, “Two? Maybe three?”

“Come close, everyone.” Marc ushered the group together. “Look again,” he said, “
regardez
.” And he passed one of the floor lights over the upper reaches of the chamber to where a dozen bison grazed along a horizontal plane. “You were surrounded,” he said cheerfully, “this whole time.”