The World Before Us (46 page)

And because Gwen is an archivist, and knows that every scrap of information can carry within it tremendous value, she smiles at Jane over her laptop and says, “Well done, you.”

29

As she looks at the photograph of herself on the lawn at Inglewood House, the one with the soft voice feels the doubling that comes with the bowed gift of time; it is a doubling that she feels again as she looks at Jane packing up her notebook and pencils to walk out with Gwen.

I have to do something
, she had thought once, when she had a body, when she had a name, when Herschel and Leeson trudged across the lawn and no one, not even the Matron, saw them. Nora had slipped out through the kitchen to go after them, thinking that she might be able to convince them to return, that if they came back quickly no one would know they’d left the picnic. But the day was beautiful and the trees were fluttering their leaves at the sun, and the ground was drying beneath her. After a while, she stopped plotting her arguments. By the time she caught up with Herschel and Leeson in a clearing, the distance between her and the Whitmore felt good.

For two weeks she’d been keeping her head down, organizing her workday in ways that would allow her to avoid Bream. After he cornered her in the storeroom and forced her up against the shelves, she told the Superintendent that she had a fever and Thorpe allowed her to take the
hospital mending up to her room. For three days she barricaded the door with her wobbly dresser, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall. It wasn’t that Thorpe wouldn’t believe her, if she told. It was just that he was a man, and not wanting to think that it had happened as she said, he might try to find some fault in her.

In the middle of the whisking woods, Herschel and Leeson ahead of her, Nora lifted her head and thought,
This is what my life could be
. It didn’t bother her that the idea came without a corresponding image or a clear notion. It was enough that it suggested something else, a different way of relating to the world, another mode of being.

When they arrived at the foot of the Inglewood estate lawn, Nora thought about all the turns they’d made in the woods, the seemingly endless circles, the three times they’d realized they’d doubled back on themselves, and she laughed. How comical it was that they would arrive here—at the house of the botanist she had danced a quadrille with at the ball, the one whose face she’d studied while Samuel Murray recited his poem, who’d turned his fleeting attention on her later, taking the exotic flower from his lapel and placing it gently behind her ear.
It seems that you are one of the only ladies at the ball without a flower
.

The footman who went to fetch George Farrington barely glanced at her—and she realized she had no desire to be seen, or to be caught up in the extradition that would likely follow. She saw that Herschel and Leeson would be fine, that the footman would indeed bring the congenial Farrington to meet them.

She stepped off the gravel path and disappeared into the trees.

The police station in Moorgate is the same one where Jane had waited all those hours during the search for Lily. It is remarkably unchanged—grey-green walls, chipped paint, a stack of thumbed-through nature
magazines strewn over a square table, institutional waiting-room chairs. She walks over to the woman at the intake desk and she asks for Constable Avison, handing her the card he left with Blake.

The woman, her hair in a tight ponytail, her uniform perfectly pressed, leads Jane to the back of the station, and as Jane walks beside her she notices a butterfly tattoo peeking out from under the cuff of her sleeve. The interview room where she leads Jane is just like the one from twenty years before, a concrete square with one-way glass, though the formerly grey walls have been repainted a baby blue.

Avison plods in, wipes his hand across his face and sits down heavily. He thumbs open a file and slides a piece of paper across the table between them. It is a pixelated version of Jane’s own face, from a photo Lewis had taken at one of the girls’ birthday parties. The word
Missing
is in capital letters above it. Jane touches the page carefully with the tip of her finger, positions it on the desk so that it’s sitting straight in front of her, so that she can read the bare essentials of who she is: height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, no distinguishing features. She begins to make an awkward apology, tries to explain that there was some confusion about where she was going, that she’d forgotten her mobile.

Avison isn’t listening; he’s riffling through the forms he’s brought, and a few of them slide off the table onto the floor. Coming up for air, he finds the one he wants and fills out the top few lines in scraggly masculine writing.

“Am I in trouble?” Jane asks, not sure if this is just about disappearing, or if William has pressed charges.

“I suppose that depends.” Avison turns the form to Jane with an X marked next to the line that reads “under his/her own volition.” “But if I were you I would call your brother before you leave here.”

Jane signs her name and Avison takes the paper back. He indicates that Jane should follow him out. He drops the form onto a plastic tray at an empty desk and then makes a
shoo
gesture with his hand.

“Does a Constable Holmes still work here?” Jane asks. She points to where a trolley loaded with AV equipment is sitting. “He had a desk in that corner.”

“
Chief
Holmes?” Avison crosses his arms, looking at Jane differently. “You know him? He’s in his office.”

Jane shakes her head and pulls her bag over her shoulder. She just wants to know that someone here might remember what it was like
then
, that if she needed to talk about that time in her life, what she felt and went through, she could.

When she calls Lewis from the station, he is livid. But his voice also wavers with relief. “You didn’t answer your mobile and didn’t show up at the lake, so we called the police. Dad’s flown in and he’s up at the cottage, Gareth is calling every twelve hours, we had people handing out posters … What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

“Did Gareth tell you what happened?”

“Of course. Why do you think we were so bloody worried?”

Jane clears her throat. “Is William going to press charges?”

Lewis doesn’t say anything at first, and Jane closes her eyes, thinking that whatever happens she deserves it.

“He’s called twice to see if we’ve found you. He didn’t recognize you, Jane.”

What we remember, as Jane walks back to the car thinking about William, are those stretches of time when we believed we could no longer bear watching her. How during those weeks and months when Jane’s thoughts had little to do with us, we felt like we were dying all over again. The hardest part, of course, was feeling that the world was moving on without us—the shift of Jane’s arm as she opened a cabinet, the wind lifting the long grass in the park, Sam nosing his empty bowl across the
floor—agency in every corner. Our glimpsed memories were tactile then: a body in bed with the weight of a book, a child’s breath against the side of one’s neck, the cool circle of a pearl button under one’s fingers. One of us remembered a parcel of plum taken between teeth, another waking to a lover’s face, Herschel remembered waking to birdcall, to the sheen of a winter sun shawled by clouds—experiences that we would never be able to replicate. In our grief the memory of touch was everywhere: common touch, accidental touch, unexpected touch—a man dipping a woman’s cuffs into water to rinse them clean.

But now we have, we suppose, what Jane has as she drives back into Inglewood: a mix of joys and misgivings, a sense that maybe the narratives we have been trying to build our lives on are less fixed than we ever imagined, or peripheral to something else. In a way it’s like remembering the exact weight of the weather in the instant you knew yourself loved, even as you feel that weather changing.

What the one with the soft voice, what Nora remembers, is how, in the aftermath of the shooting, her hands raw from scrubbing the blood from her cuffs, Norvill came into the house and shouted her name. She remembers being shocked that he knew it. He had burst in through the garden, startling Mrs. Sutton, who had stepped out to get some air, and was standing in the library when Nora reached him, his clothes speckled with blood, his chest heaving.

“Mr. Farrington wants you there when the authorities arrive, to testify to the man’s—” And he paused, subduing his expression. “To testify,” he repeated more evenly, meeting Nora’s gaze, “to the poor man’s condition.” He cleared his throat and steadied himself by gripping the back of a nearby chair. “You won’t have to discredit him. We simply need you to testify to the fact that he is a patient at the Whitmore.”

When Norvill and Nora returned to the lake they found George sitting on a rock some distance from the blanketed body. What was left of the picnic—the roast, cheeses and fruitcake—had been carefully packed
away as if in the absence of help George wanted to busy himself with some task, to be useful.

As soon as Norvill was within earshot, George said, “You’ll have to go away, find some excuse, take a commission.” His voice was gruff but there was also a streak of satisfaction under it.

“Why?”

“Why!” George was beyond angry; he slid off the rock and approached Norvill, not caring that Nora was there. “Where do I begin? The dead man? Or the married woman? Or Mother? Imagine her having to make idle chatter with you across the breakfast table after
this
!”

Norvill picked up a stone and tossed it sideways into the lake. “I see.”

George gasped. “Do you?” He stepped forward as if to strike his brother, but then stopped short. “And,” George huffed, his eyes settling on Nora as if to ascertain what she might or might not already know, “you must put a stop to this dalliance with Chester’s wife. You both appeared ridiculous.”

We know from Jane’s work on the Chester archives, and from Charlotte’s later admissions to Nora, that Norvill did not end things. That even though he let the strings of the relationship go while preparing for his removal to the coast, Charlotte was more reluctant. It wasn’t just that she thought she could love him; it was that he had become entangled in a tragedy borne of his feelings
for her
. That afternoon of the picnic, sketching and lingering on the rock, she’d felt as if some sort of palpable organism, some natural order, was humming and expanding, encompassing everyone in the party but her. She imagined that if she looked around the lake or dared to step even a little distance into the woods she’d see the world pulsing, like a giant bed of moss or the great banyan Edmund had told her about—something the others felt connected to, but that she could never be.

Once, later, standing on a chair in Scarborough while Nora stitched a hem, she confessed that it was Norvill who had changed this, who had brought something inside her back to life.

Jane parks the Mercedes in the church parking lot and lets Sam out. Since she left the station she has been trying to imagine what sort of shape her wrongness might have taken; she has been playing at it as if it is a puzzle, removing one piece—William’s indifference—and replacing it with another—William’s possible concern—even as she knows that his concern isn’t, or ought not to be, the central part of the equation. This has led her to thoughts of Charlotte and Norvill, to what it is people are looking for in each other, and what, by extension, Jane is looking for in N. Prudence’s diaries—her disdain for Charlotte, for the headmaster George befriended, for the East, or for anything that might take her sons away from her—are making Jane rethink the contents of Charlotte’s diaries; though really it’s the gaps that interest her now. There were, after all, two hiatuses in Charlotte’s diaries that Jane hadn’t paid much attention to. These, she now understands, correspond to the trips Charlotte made to be with Norvill at the coast, trips that Edmund, in his defeat, likely permitted so long as his wife was discreet—although Jane imagines his compliance would have come without formal declaration.