The World Before Us (40 page)

Sitting in the pub and waiting for Blake to return it occurs to Jane that accountability is a complicated thing: trying to ferret out what you owe yourself and what you owe others.

Lewis made an offhand comment about this once to Jane at a Friday-night dinner at his house. He had tested the chicken curry he’d made to see if it was too spicy for the girls and was dumping in a can of coconut milk to compensate for the heat. He turned to Jane. “You’re lucky, you know, that you don’t have anyone to be responsible for.” He saw the expression on her face and apologized, said that he was talking about the curry, that he liked it hot but the girls couldn’t handle the chilies—adding that they hadn’t had spicy curry in five years.

Both Lewis and Claire felt the burden of accountability in spades. Jane suspects Claire liked it that way. She and Lewis were the types who’d get everyone out of a burning building before the rafters fell, who’d go back for the stragglers. Even Claire’s suicide was a way of refusing to push the inconvenience of her cancer onto anyone else. The
fact that hanging herself was the wrong decision for Jane and Lewis doesn’t negate the set of considerations that went into the decision. Jane knows that she is more like Henri. She and her father interpret: choose to be accountable when it works for them, when the wind is blowing a certain way or holidays line up or some poor girl from a Victorian asylum goes missing and makes a hole in a page just big enough for all of Lily to fit into.

Sitting in the pub, Jane tries to line up her story the way we try to line up ours. There was a girl called N. There was a girl called Lily. One day Jane stood in a beautiful tract of woods and a five-year-old ran along a trail ahead of her and Jane became transfixed with the way the sun flickered over the leaves at her feet, a box of light framed by the trees. And so she stopped and played at stepping into it. Because of that moment, she has put a bar of light into every story she has ever read or told. That is not accountability. It’s a way of trying to place one’s self in the world; it’s
conjecture
. Which is a way of saying,
It’s a lie
.

Blake comes back to the booth and apologizes. He admits sheepishly that he was supposed to babysit his younger sister, but he’s bailed, and he has been trying to reach his brother to fill in. He looks embarrassed, and when he sits beside Jane again he slides his hand under the table, pushes the hem of her skirt above her knee, reasserts himself.

“My name isn’t Helen.”

Blake shakes his head as if he has water in his ears. “That’s”—and he searches for the right word—“unexpected.” After a minute he says, “Are you a murderer?”

Jane laughs, but it’s not a normal laugh, it’s the kind that could snag and become something else. No one has asked her that before and the question is both horrible and a release.

Blake starts to say her name and the
H
comes out before he stops, says, “I don’t exactly know what to do here.”

Jane can sense him backing away, can feel the space he’s made on the bench between them.

“It’s Jane.”

“Jane?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“And you’re married? And some posh bastard is on his way up here right now to have a go at me?”

“I’m not married.”

Blake rubs his neck. Before he can say anything, the
ping
of a text goes off on his mobile, and maybe buying time to think, he checks it and then puts it back in his pocket.

It occurs to Jane that even though she’s glad she has told Blake about her name, it’s probably too much for him. She’s twisted their narrative around and made it too strange, and to her surprise she feels immensely sad about that, not because she wanted to keep him but because he seems like a good person and because whatever it was that passed between them, it at least felt real.

“Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t mean to, it’s—” She tries to catch his eye, but he won’t look at her. “It’s complicated.”

Blake pushes his palms against the edge of the table so hard his knuckles go white, and in the silence that follows, Jane imagines that he’s trying to decide whether to get up and walk out of the pub or stay and sort it out.

The mobile
pings
again and Blake checks it and then he stands up. “Listen, my parents were supposed to be at their friends’ place an hour ago. My mom’s really pissed off.” He puts his mobile away and for a second Jane is unsure what, exactly, he intends to do. She’s about to say
Right, go on then
when he reaches his hand out and says, “You still owe me an explanation.”

Blake’s sister Gemma is a pudgy twelve-year-old who squints up from under her fringe at Jane before promptly turning back to the telly. Blake’s parents hover in their cluttered sitting room after Blake introduces Jane, and Martin narrows his eyes as if he’d somehow misremembered her name.

“We met yesterday.” Martin bends down to scratch Sam’s chest while Blake’s mom drapes a brown paisley scarf over her shoulders and shoots her husband a look that says,
Why didn’t you mention anything to me
?

Jane is close to saying,
I can see this is a bit awkward
, when Blake gestures to the door. “Right, have a good time, me and
Jane
will just be doing ‘homework’ up in my room.”

His mom swats him on the arm with her handbag and then turns to Jane, raising her eyes to the ceiling and shaking her head in a
kids today
kind of way before she realizes the accidental implication.

At ten Gemma clomps up the stairs to bed, and Jane and Blake settle on the sofa with a bowl of microwave popcorn. All night, while Gemma was still up, there’d been a hum of tension between them, Blake holding back and Jane trying too hard. When they hear Gemma’s door close, Blake turns to Jane and says, “Look, I’m not mad, I’m just confused.” Then, sensing she isn’t ready to talk about it yet, he gets up and flips through a binder of burnt DVDs. “Want to watch something?”

“That would be lovely.”

Blake pulls out a Swedish film that he says is his favourite and slips it into the DVD player. When the title comes up and the English subtitles appear, Jane turns to Blake and asks playfully, “Are you trying to impress me?”

“Absolutely.”

To Jane’s surprise it turns out that Blake knows the film so well he can talk about the director’s other work and point out the gaffe in the background of the dinner party scene where a gauzy white curtain that has been mostly closed is suddenly gaping open. Halfway into the film, caught up in the story, the tension between them gone, Blake leans over and nuzzles Jane’s neck. “I can’t stop thinking of all the things I want to do to you.”

Jane laughs. “That’s not happening in your parents’ house.”

“Fine. We have a garden. I know you like the outdoors.” He stands up and nudges his head toward the back door.

Jane doesn’t get up, so he plunks himself back down and tries to kiss her, letting her playfully push him away. When she turns her attention back to the film, he leans over, rubs the stubble on the side of his face lightly against her cheek and says quietly, “You like me more than you know.”

When Blake’s parents come back they are tipsy and more animated than when they left. They’ve obviously had a conversation about the woman sitting in their house with their son, and have arrived at a wait-and-see conclusion. Jane is rinsing teacups and Blake is sitting on the counter tossing the last of the popcorn into his mouth when Blake’s father asks Jane if this is her first time in Inglewood.

“No, I’ve been here once before.”

“When?” Paula’s voice is too chirpy, as if she’s trying to gauge exactly how long Jane has known her son.

“I was fifteen.” Jane puts the garden-vegetables-themed dishtowel she’s been using to dry the cups down on the counter and says gently, “Which was in the early 1990s, because I am currently
thirty-four
.”

Martin clears his throat to cover the awkward silence that follows,
his arms spanning the two counters in the kitchen as if he needs to prop himself up. “Were you on holiday?”

Jane smiles thinly and thinks about how to reply to that, about the implications of the word
holiday
and how the warm familial image it conjures—of her and William and Lily pootling through the woods together—doesn’t fit at all with what transpired in the end. “No.”

“Family is it?”

Paula swats Martin’s arm with the back of her hand. “Oh, stop. Leave her alone. And you,” she points at Blake, “off the bloody counter.”

“Well, it was sort of a holiday,” Jane says, and then she corrects herself, “I mean, it was meant to be a kind of day out.” She looks at Blake who has hopped down from the counter and who is now leaning against it next to his parents; takes in the triangle they make—Martin a fair bit taller than Blake and Paula—a tidy arrangement of a dark-haired family with similar features, the easygoing and happy sort you’d see in the window of a village photo studio.

“Remember the girl who went missing on the Farrington trail? Lily Eliot? 1991. She was five? Her father was a botanist?” Jane can see from Martin’s and Paula’s expressions that they do remember, but that Blake, obviously, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He would have been—what—a newborn, or maybe a one-year-old? Martin and Paula would remember because they were new parents with a baby at home and it would have been the worst thing imaginable—the idea that a child could simply disappear. “Anyway,” Jane says and takes a deep breath, “I was the minder who was with her when she got lost. That was the last time I was here.”

What follows is easier than any of us expects. A pot of tea is put on and a plate of biscuits is set out and the four of them move to the round wooden kitchen table. Martin and Paula describe the search-and-rescue
operations—the constables coming in from nearby districts, the teams of tracking dogs, how the two of them took turns going with the volunteer groups out into the woods. Through these simple descriptions, Jane glimpses something she’s never been permitted to see before.

“We were shown a photograph of Lily and told what she was wearing,” Paula says, “and there was a key on a ribbon we were told to look for. I swear I lived in terror of finding it.”

Blake doesn’t say anything; he listens to his parents and watches Jane as if he’s trying to gauge whether she’s okay, as if he’s starting to put together why she lied about her name.

“They never caught him,” Paula says, and when she realizes that Jane doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she looks at her lap, explains, “Everyone thought it was Michael Wilson. He and his wife owned the old hardware shop at the top of the village. But there was nothing to prove it and—” Paula stops and wraps her hands around her teacup.

“And they never found her body,” Jane says.

For a second no one says anything, and all of us in the room, all of us gathered around the four people at the table, feel as if a veil has been lifted. We have been so selfish in our own pursuits, have refused to see any truth that did not enrich our own.

We turn to find the girl but she is upstairs on Gemma’s bed where we left her—nestled amongst a row of stuffed bears dressed in T-shirts and bow ties and tutus—watching as Gemma makes her way through a video game of moats and towers in which a princess in a beautiful dress waits to be rescued.

As Blake walks Jane to the inn, he doesn’t say much. Jane is trying to remember what businesses are at the top of the street, trying to place where the hardware shop would have been before the Wilsons sold the property and moved out of the village. “You know how it was back then,”
Paula had replied, when Jane asked if Michael Wilson was ever brought in for questioning. “People gossiped. If you were even a little bit different or kept to yourself. The constables went round the shop a few times but that was it. Still, his business plummeted because of it, so he and the missus eventually left.”

When Jane was first in therapy Clive assured her that what he called
the information exchange
would work both ways: if she remembered a pertinent detail about the day Lily went missing he would relay it to the police, and if anything was discovered on their end they would relay it, through Clive and her grandparents, to her. When the weeks and months went by without anyone imparting the kinds of details Blake’s parents had just provided her with, Jane stopped believing that this arrangement was true. Instead she started to believe that they were waiting for
her
to remember something first, that if she did they’d reward her with information of their own, a kind of barter. So for months Jane tried harder to see whatever it was that she hadn’t seen that day: a man passing them on the footpath, or a flash of a jacket in the trees, Lily turning repeatedly in a specific direction. In the end she convinced herself that she wasn’t being told anything because she hadn’t earned it, because she didn’t deserve the truth.

Despite their kindness, Blake’s parents—the kind who know, but don’t want to know, what their almost-twenty-year-old son is up to—had stood stiffly when he said it was late and that he was going to walk Jane back. Jane sensed that it isn’t because they don’t like her or feel some degree of sympathy for what she’s been through, but because, despite all that, they still disapprove. When Jane and Blake reach the pool of light under the lamp of the inn Jane pulls out her key and Blake says, “My cousin Max died last summer. That’s why I’m not at uni.” He scuffs the toe of his boot. “We’d taken ketamine with some girls at a rave and he was fucked up and stepped onto the road without looking. I’m not saying they do, but I feel like my parents blame me.”

Jane touches the thatch of hair that’s fallen over his eye and moves it gently to the side. “I’m sorry.”

“When do you have to go back to London?” Blake stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and looks across the road, and Jane realizes that even though she’s told him the truth about her name, about Lily, there’s still the whole lie about her work at Inglewood between them.

“Probably in a day or two.”

He nods and turns his attention to the moth twitching around the globe light and then he takes a few steps toward the picnic table and kicks its struts with his boot. On his second kick he shouts, “Fuck!” so loud Jane thinks it will wake the elderly couple whose window is on the front of the inn just below hers.