The World Before Us (20 page)

The worst part of not knowing is how the imagination fills in the blanks, how it tries to ferret out an answer from all the possibilities and
how, in doing so, it settles on the most terrifying. In that version, Lily is abducted. And sometimes she is murdered, and sometimes raped, and sometimes she is still alive and suffering.

Clive once told Jane that what she really had to live with was the not knowing.
All kinds of accidents, Jane, are very real in a place like that
. Sitting by the lake, the early morning light coming up over the stiff-necked trees, Jane thinks,
Accident
and she can see some version of it, the long muddy slope William had slid down when he was calling for Lily, the gap in the boulders around the shore side of the drainage grate, the relatively short distance from the trail to the water. This lake, her grandmother told her years later, was the first place they thoroughly searched. Within twenty-four hours they’d brought in divers and two days later they dredged it from one end to the other, but they found no trace of Lily.

Because William refused to see Jane or her grandparents, Jane came to believe that if, in the years that followed, someone found a shirt, a shoe or a body, they’d call William, but no one would think to contact her. The key to Jane’s grandparents’ house had been around Lily’s neck, which meant that for months Jane had nightmares about the person who might have taken Lily appearing in their house in South Kensington, waiting in Jane’s bedroom for her to come home from school or rehearsal. Clive had wanted to know what “he” looked like when Jane confessed this, because if any leads came out of Jane’s sessions it was agreed that he could pass on the particulars. But the intruder was never the same: sometimes he was a version of some movie actor, sometimes a stranger, and sometimes he looked like her father or like William.

What Jane wants now, sitting on the rock, the waves of the lake lapping in front of her, is a sign or a ritual. If she had something of Lily’s she would send it off on a leaf over the water or dig it down next to the roots of a plant. But she has nothing—just as she found nothing in William’s face when she walked up to him at the gala: a vacancy where she had hoped for more.

• • •

Turning away from the lake, Jane listens for Sam. The last time she saw him he was running between the trees along the shore, probably on the trail of a wood mouse or a squirrel. When she doesn’t hear him she whistles and starts back up toward the trail. She is thinking about the shooting party William described at the lecture, about how the Chesters had stopped on their way to Edmund’s prospective mill to tour the Farrington grounds and walk out to the caves. They’d probably inched down the very slope she was now climbing on their way out to the lake. The rock that she’d been sitting on still had an old mooring ring mortared into the stone, and it was flat enough to use as a jetty. William had mentioned how Prudence Farrington’s diary described in great detail the preparations at the house around the time of the Chester–Sutton visit but said little of the occasion itself. It seems to Jane that William’s lecture, too, was full of gaps—the fact of Norvill and Charlotte’s relationship chief amongst them. In the latter part of his talk he’d focused on the state of the gardens that summer, and on George’s autumn trip to Sikkim, for which he’d procured funding from the Suttons. William had been fixated on the story of the plants—the retrieval of seven
megalantha
specimens from Kangchenjunga; the discovery of
Campanula grandiflora
and
rupestris
.

This, Jane realizes now, is where his attention has always been: not on the people in the story but on the withering plants sealed in terraria and Wardian cases. The fact that Norvill had received a commission to survey fault lines along the east coast shortly after the shooting party, and then went away for the better part of a year, had been a quick footnote in William’s lecture. But it was something that Jane hadn’t known, something that surprised her. The Suttons, William had said in conclusion, returned to Helton Hall. Edmund eventually purchased the mill up north and the Chester family went back to their museum.

The pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, Jane thinks, and everyone was back where they had started—except Norvill.

By six a.m. the sky that zigzags above the trees has turned a cloudless blue. It is still too early for a B&B, but Jane supposes that by seven the local hotel staff might be up and making breakfast, which means that she can see if there’s a room available. She can picture it, a narrow single with awful floral paper and a costly in-room phone from which she can call Lewis to make sure it’s okay that she’s taken the car. But then she imagines Lewis saying,
Gareth called
, followed by an awful hanging silence.

At the gate Jane stops and whistles for Sam again. For the last twenty minutes he has been darting in and out of the treeline. She stands there listening, waiting for him to come barrelling toward her, but he doesn’t. Leaning against the wood slats in the cold, she whistles again, her fingers in her mouth this time, like Lewis taught her. She whistles this way twice and then puts her hands in her pockets thinking,
Okay, it’s been a while since he’s been allowed off-leash, he’s nine years old, this is the last of his wild oats
. And then it dawns on her:
Maybe this is how it works: you do what’s expected of you all of your life and then one day this loses its lustre and you stop what you’re doing, take off into the woods and disappear
.

We watch Jane whistle again, turn her ear toward the humming woods, scan the dawn-lit lip of pasture and the crumbling stone wall behind it. We know she is willing herself not to be scared but her heart is pounding. She can hear birds, the falls, a car engine turning over on the main road, even the distant
shush
of cars on the motorway. Time stalls, then hitches forward: Sam comes bounding through the alder. He skirts a post at the edge of the woods and runs straight for her, his wet and glistening body wrapped in night smells as he leans against her legs, the happiest she’s ever seen him.

12

The first time Jane met William Eliot he was standing in her grandmother’s overplanted South Kensington garden in a crisp white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His hands were caked in dirt and he was listening while Jane’s grandmother Meredith carried on about the crested irises. There were two freshly planted pots of lavender at his feet and a snake of ivy he’d cleared from the overgrown trellis. When Jane stepped out of the glass door of the conservatory to ask if she’d missed breakfast, Meredith ignored her at first, concentrating on what William was saying about the
Botrytis
. It was a Sunday and Jane had slept in; her bare feet warmed on the flagstone while she crossed her arms over her nightdress and waited for her grandmother’s attention, an eleven-year-old who was not yet self-conscious in front of strangers.

“Jane?”

When Jane looked up, both Meredith and William were staring at her, William with a bemused expression, Meredith tight-lipped. A bee had zigzagged up from the lavender and was hovering around Jane’s elbow, and she had been following it, the insect lightly touching her fingers before veering off toward the verbena.

“This is Mr. Eliot. He lives down the road. He’s the botanist I was telling your grandfather about.”

William bowed over-formally and winked at Jane on his way back up. “Lovely to meet you, Miss Standen.”

Meredith waved Jane toward the kitchen as if reading her mind. “There are scones in a brown bag on the counter. But get dressed first, please, and run a brush through that hair.” She turned to William, smoothing a grey curl at her temple. “It’s easier to take the children out of Cumbria, I’m afraid, than it is to take the Cumbria out of the children.”

It was Meredith who, four years later, organized Jane’s babysitting. She’d run into William at the local produce shop, commenting, as he tried to unload a basket of groceries at the till with Lily hanging off one arm, that she hadn’t known he shopped there. Meredith took the girl’s hand as William explained that the nanny’s father had had a stroke and she’d flown home to Spain the night before. He was going to have to call an agency, he said, and find someone for the week—maybe just until three each afternoon because he was in the process of making arrangements to get off work early.

Meredith relayed the conversation to Jane as they sat in the Mercedes in stop-and-start traffic that was about to make Jane miss her cello lesson. If she arrived even five minutes late Mikhail would already have left and they would still have to pay him. Jane had only made that mistake once in the year she’d been studying with him, but for at least two lessons after that incident he had been gruffer than usual and Jane wasn’t anxious to work through his distaste again. As she edged along the turn lane that led to the academy, Meredith asked Jane what she thought about helping out with Lily, just for the week, and Jane, craning her head out the window because the lorry in front of them was impossible to see around, said, “Fine, yes.”

Lily was, according to Meredith, a sweet girl, and Jane figured she’d probably be easier to mind than Lewis was when he was eight and Jane
was ten and she’d been left in charge at the cottage. And she liked Mr. Eliot, had met him a handful of times in the four years since they’d first been introduced in the garden. He’d always been warm and friendly, though in the year after his wife died he’d seemed bewildered, almost glassy, as if something else was going on behind his eyes. Some months after the funeral, he’d stopped in for tea, sitting stiffly on a tall-backed chair while Meredith offered him biscuits. Jane and Lewis, noticing snowflakes outside, had raced down the stairs to put on their coats, and Jane remembered pausing for a second, watching William curiously from the entrance archway before stepping into the first faint fall of snow.

There are two memories from the weeks of babysitting Lily that Jane circles back to. In the less complicated one William had come home from work with bags of groceries and Jane was helping him put them away. Halfway through he stopped and hopped up onto the counter to direct Jane as to what went where—“upper cupboard,” “crisper”—while juggling three mandarins to amuse Lily. When everything was put away, Lily invited him over to a spot on the dining room floor where she and Jane had organized a teddy bear birthday party. There were six stuffed bears, with varying degrees of wear, set up in a circle around a dishtowel. The birthday bear was wearing a napkin ring for a crown and all the bears had little plastic cups in front of them. Lily handed her father the small green cup that belonged to the brown bear with the chewed-on ears and then expertly tilted a plastic teapot with a mermaid decal on it to pour him tea.

“What kind of tea is this?” He put his nose into the empty cup.

“Chocolate.”

William took a fake sip and said, “Mmm, lovely.” He called over to Jane, who was packing up her cello in the living room. “Miss Standen, would you like some chocolate tea?”

“No, I should get going.” Jane picked up the score she’d propped
against a stack of hardcover books on the coffee table and dropped it into her bag.

William stood up and came over with the plastic cup still in his hand. “What were you playing today?”

“Just practising. A prelude I’m working on for my exam.”

He inclined his head. “Will you play something for me before you go?”

“What would you like me to play?”

“Surprise me.”

William waited to see where Jane would sit and when she chose the brocaded bench under the back window he picked up the Hope chair beside the bookshelf and moved it into the middle of the room.

Jane watched him settle in as she checked her tuning. When she was satisfied, she put her bow down and reached into her pocket for a hair elastic and said “Sorry,” because she didn’t mean for him to be watching her tie up her loose hair, fixing the strands so that they wouldn’t fall forward while she was playing.

“Are you going to play the piece you were practising?”

Jane laughed. “No, I’m not that good at it yet.”

“What then?”

She lifted her bow. “I’ll play the
sarabande
from Bach’s fourth cello suite. I like it better.”

Jane was used to being looked at when she performed but there was something different about playing for William and the gentle way he studied her face. Mikhail mostly followed her hands, and Jane’s father—when she was eight and nine and he still made time to listen to her—had mostly gazed at the floors or out the cottage window, as if gauging the music he was hearing by its effect, as sound pared off from the physical act of its production. Usually Jane looked down at her bowing hand or closed her eyes, unless she was in lessons, in which case she mostly watched Mikhail’s face, because she could tell by the set of his mouth
whether she was succeeding or failing—and because secretly she was always anticipating the moment he’d shake his head, say,
Stop
, and instruct her to go back and do it again. The previous week, in the middle of the very
sarabande
she was playing for William, Mikhail had snapped his fingers and interrupted her, chiding her for a decision she’d made. “Lighter!” he said. “How do you walk through your house?” He stomped in place. “Like this? All the time? You’re always storming off? In the
bourrée
we think of steps, no?” He tapped the ground with his foot like a dancer. “But in the
sarabande
the accent is on the second beat.” He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a line of music on the board behind him. “Ornaments are
here
,” he said, “and
here
—unless you are indifferent. Start again.” She started again and he stopped her before she even got to the crescendo in bar seventeen. “It’s a
decision
, Jane. It’s a decision about what phrase is swallowed by, or swallows, the rest. The slur is too long technically to obey. So: decide. It’s the swell of it, okay? Like this—” He arced his hand up and let it fall. “You can play like everyone else
da-da-da-dee
if you want, but I thought we agreed you could start making decisions of your own now. No rushing through it. No thinking. Just feel.”