The World Before Us (43 page)

There’s a plastic bag of picnic supplies in the well between the front seats. Jane rummages through it: overwrapped corner-shop sandwiches with wilted lettuce stuck to the sides, a bottle of wine that a week ago she would never have consented to drink, crisps and two glossy lemon puddings with sprinkles on the top.

She drops the pudding back into the bag and asks, “Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.” Blake raises his eyebrows and smiles charmingly, as if he’s done something wonderful—and crowded in the back of the van we think that maybe he has. Time has taught us to appreciate the gesture.

Blake parks on the side of the road across from the Whitmore’s main gate. He turns to Jane and says, “Shall we?”

Jane leans forward in her seat. Through the wrought iron she can make out the faded brown brick of the gatehouse and, beyond that, the east wing of what was once the main building’s women’s ward. “What are we doing here?”

Blake shrugs. “I saw all that stuff in your room. Thought it would be fun to break and enter.” He grabs the bag between the seats and then locks the van once Jane is out. “A bunch of us used to come out here when we were younger to mess around. We have to go in through the woods.”

The brick of the Whitmore’s main buildings is the same umber we remember, though some of it is covered in graffiti. The slate roof of the administration block has collapsed in one corner and the windows of the long galleries—a quarrelled stretch of clouded glass—have been replaced with pressboard. The grass is weed-licked and long.

Blake walks across the lawn, grinning at Jane, the plastic bag of picnic supplies swinging in his hand, Sam trotting happily beside him. At the greening fountain he drops his peacoat for Jane to sit on and then sprawls out on the grass; he is facing the ruin of the building, and she is facing the cleft in the woods they just came from.

If we try, we can remember the fountain working. How bright and charming it was, its marble the white of the Greek temples Professor Wick once described at an afternoon lecture series given by the patients.
The cherub at the centre of the fountain holding a jug that spouted the purest water—though the poet once shook his head and said that it was a pity to live in a world where the fountains did not pour wine.

We lie on the grass with Jane and Blake, and drowsy tufts of cloud drift above us. We want to stay with Jane to see if she will talk about the Whitmore, but we feel a competing desire to explore the grounds, to wander through the emptied wards of the buildings. Pulses of lived experience are already lighting up the caverns of what we call memory, and for some of us, there is an easing, a sense of calm that comes in proximity to the idea of “home.” We know that on the other side of the Whitmore’s dim exterior, the galleries and day rooms, sickbeds and laundry, the rose-windowed chapel will have changed, that time and use will have altered them. Still we know that these rooms, even the shape and weight of them, can give us something Jane cannot: a folding-over of our lives, a direct way in.

“Stay with Jane,” Cat says to the girl, and all of us wait until the child sits in the grass beside Sam.

A hundred small fissures of time open as we walk toward the old wood door. One of us remembers a sickbed and being fed awkwardly with a spoon, the light tap of the metal on his front teeth. Another remembers feeling cold, as if all the blood had drained from his body, as if there couldn’t be blankets enough. Some of us remember the ball, some of us the airing courts, some of us singing in rehearsals for the talent show, the warble of our breath in our throats. And one of us remembers Christmas, everyone working in the kitchen to make sweetmeats and preserves for gifts. The tang of jam in our mouths—in what we remember of our mouths. A burst of raspberries, their small, flecked seeds on our tongues.

27

After lunch, when she returns to the records office, Jane discovers that the servant ledger nestled in the back of the bowed leather
Register of Employment for Inglewood House
lists a Nora Hayling in service, starting the 22nd of August 1877. Some of the other staff entries have end dates inked in a different hand, and notes about termination or retirement, but Nora does not. The only entry that coincides closely with the date Nora was hired is a reference to a Mary Margaret Teems, who was let go on the 26th of July that same year for pilfering flour and sugar.

During her dissertation research years ago, when Jane first discovered N and the story of the trio’s long walk to Inglewood, she’d leafed through the Whitmore patient casebooks looking for an
N
name, though she hadn’t searched at that time for Eleanors or Honoras, names that could be shortened to Nora. So now she fills out a request slip for the Whitmore women’s book from 1877, prepared to start again, even though she is feeling dubious about the possibility of Nora from Inglewood being connected to N from the Whitmore. While Jane knows that patients at convalescent hospitals like the Whitmore could be a mix of professionals
and paupers, the educated and the working class, it was unlikely a patient like N—especially because she was a woman—would be able to transition so quickly into a maid’s position. Though John Hopper, she suddenly remembers, was released that December and almost immediately went to work as an apprentice clockmaker.

When the Whitmore’s women’s casebook disappoints—turning up nothing but Marthas, Frannies, Alices and Emmas—Jane decides to clear her head by taking Sam, who has been waiting patiently in the car, for a walk up the high street of one of the nearby villages. Even in those childhood summer months when she and Lewis would go and stay with Claire in the cottage at the Lakes she had never travelled far, and so she feels pleasure in the idea of an excursion, in driving for twenty minutes and arriving somewhere new.

At the top of the main square in one of the Dales’ villages there is a cenotaph. It’s surrounded by the requisite gaggle of fifteen-year-olds dressed in heavy black boots and duffel coats. Jane parks the car and wanders past them toward an old-fashioned sandwich and pastry shop. It’s the sort meant to appeal to tourists, where the girls who work behind the counter are allowed to have nose rings and wear blue nail polish, but still have to tie their hair under white caps with lacy fringes and scoot around in long black dresses with floor-length aprons. There is an espresso machine in the window, the beautiful old-fashioned kind that makes great coffee, so Jane loops Sam’s leash around the empty bike stand out front and goes in to wait in the queue of locals on breaks from work and tourists with time on their hands.

The girl who makes Jane’s coffee has a thick brown fringe and a pretty face, the idiosyncratic kind high-street clothing shops use in their adverts—naturally beautiful but with one flaw, a gap tooth or wide-set eyes, but always young. She smiles at Jane and asks if that’s her dog outside.

“Yes, is he okay there?”

“He’s all right. I just wondered if he needed some water; we usually have a bowl out.”

“Sure, thanks.”

The girl slips into the narrow sink area at the end of the counter. Jane watches her, thinking that she’s probably Blake’s age. She wonders briefly if they know each other, have some sort of history he’d call up if Jane described meeting her. She studies the girl, not jealously but curiously: watches her reach up over the metal sink by the dishwasher, grab a plastic bucket off the shelf of pots overhead and fill it with tap water. The girl’s dress is a mass-market version of what the female servants at Inglewood would have worn as they washed teacups and scrubbed pots in the deep sinks in the kitchen where she’d met Blake, girls who would have ascended the narrow stairwell that went up to the attic rooms at the end of very long days, who would have slept on the far side of a baize door that separated one world from another.

On the drive back to the records office Jane is thinking about N, about how little time she has left to find her, about what Blake will say when she tells him she’s leaving, and about the girl in the servant’s dress with the brown hair, who she now, for whatever reason, imagines as the type of girl Blake should be with. Her thoughts swim in circles, and the same phrase, the one that always comes with thoughts of N, rises again:
Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley, and girl N—— missing
.

Jane taps the car’s brakes without meaning to and her body jerks forward. Sam slides with a small thump into the back of her seat. She glances up at her rear-view mirror, thankful the woman in the VW wasn’t following too close behind.
And girl N—— missing
.

N wasn’t a patient at the Whitmore; she
worked
there, was so expendable no one bothered to cite her full name. And she didn’t “escape” the women’s ward; she saw Herschel and Leeson take off, and took it upon herself to follow them.

• • •

Freddy brings the Whitmore Hospital’s
Servant Engagement and Discharge Book
back up from the basement and in its fusty pages Jane finds a Nora Hayling. She is fifteen years of age when she is hired in 1874 as a laundress. No previous engagements are cited, though unlike most servants of her class, she’d been educated at a local school. In 1876 she was promoted, with the strike of a pen, to assistant seamstress. Unlike the other women listed in the book—the assistant nurses, housemaids, and women’s attendants—there is no discharge note, no
left to be married
, no
resigned
or
retired on pension
, no
died in hospital
or death date. There are also no references to her or her position in the Whitmore’s logbooks, except ones that reference the seamstress proper—a woman called Humphreys; notes such as
the seamstress requires
and then an order for twenty yards of cotton or a reel of lace. The
Engagement
book reveals that Humphreys would already have been in her fifties when Nora was hired, which means she might have wanted to find someone to foist fine work on, a young girl with sharp eyes and nimble fingers, one who was educated to a reasonable standard, easy to work with, willing to learn.

Jane draws a line down the centre of a clean page and writes Nora Hayling’s details from the Whitmore on one side, and from the Inglewood servants’ book on the other. She allows herself to imagine the possibility that Nora Hayling is N: that it is late August 1877, and N has been missing for more than a fortnight, and suddenly she is there at Inglewood, being hired as a housemaid. That she is working for the Farringtons at the time of the outing by the lake where Norvill and Charlotte are flirting and George is soliciting funds for his expedition, and Leeson is shot.

But even with all this, there is a gap: if she did not go up to the door that night of the escape from the Whitmore with Leeson and Herschel,
as George’s letter suggests, then where did she go? And why did she make her way back to the estate?

The number of cars parked around Inglewood House has increased since the Sunday four days ago when Jane climbed the stone wall and snuck into the house with Sam. The church parking lot is full, even though there’s no service, and the two gardening company Transits that usually sit at the mouth of the old servant’s tunnel are boxed in by a long moving truck stationed at the foot of the front lawn. Two movers in white coveralls heft a sideboard down its ramp.

Jane hasn’t asked Blake anything about the Trust’s work because she is supposed to be involved in it. He’d asked her how long they thought the first stage would take and she’d said, “You know what these things are like …” fingering the dark fringe of his hair and ignoring his blank expression, the one that said, no, he didn’t.

The movers toggle the sideboard back and forth, shifting the weight of its heavy pedestals between them, and Jane follows them up the walkway. Just before she reaches the front steps and the Doric columns that flank them, she hesitates, roots around in her bag for her notepad and pen, flipping the pages over until she comes to a sheet of writing with the word
Farrington
underlined at the top. If someone asks her what she’s doing on the property she can always pretend to be a grad student doing research. The movers in front of her have stopped at the open door to finesse the angle of the sideboard.

“No, no. To your right,” the heavier-set of the two calls gruffly, and the sideboard shifts slightly.

“Got it,” the lankier one replies, and with the sideboard’s tall back perched at a precarious angle they inch inside the door and disappear around the corner into the entry hall.

Jane hesitates to follow them. She can hear the shuffle of their boots
over the track of carpet laid down over the hardwood, the older of the two saying, “Easy, easy.” She can imagine the two of them tottering the sideboard past someone in the main hall whose job it is to check off all the chairs and desks and paintings; who would ensure that everything is deposited in the correct place. Someone who would know Jane has no right to be here. Her gaze drifts up to a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head—the very same one that Leeson would have rapped when the trio arrived here.
This is where they stood
, Jane thinks,
this is the last place N was seen
.

Over the past few days the main floor of the house has been filled with twice the amount of furniture that was here when Jane last wandered through it. Enormous desks, high-backed chairs and tables of every size and composition peek out from under sheets, blankets and plastic wrap; a new row of boxes and crates lines the main hall. Jane peeks around the corner into the library and is almost run over by the two movers who, released of the burden of the sideboard, are heading out again, the lean one laughing at something the older one said. They stop when they see Jane, as if the joke is inappropriate.

“Miss,” the lanky one says. He nods courteously as they pass through the entry, and then picks up the conversation again.

The library is half assembled: the furniture still draped but put in place so that Jane can make out the arrangement of a long sofa, three high-backed chairs and a screen; the round reading table where the butler would have placed the morning paper near the window, a pianoforte in the corner along with a stool with leaf-scroll feet. One of the armchairs, a bird’s-eye maple with brocaded yellow upholstery, is uncovered as if someone has just been sitting there, its fabric worn gently from use. There’s a trace of perfume in the room, and although Jane knows it probably belongs to the archivist she’s looking for, it’s floral enough that
she can imagine it belonging to Prudence or coming in gusts from the rose bushes outside.