Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

When we gather back together as a group we find Jane in front of this cabinet. She is wearing the dress her mother, Claire, wore the night she met Henri, a cap-sleeved Chanel from the 1950s with a ribbon-cinched waist and bell-shaped skirt. A photo exists of Claire in this dress, taken on the deck of a friend’s boat as it puttered on the Seine: the occasion was an evening party, a group of the nearly-famous holding martinis in their hands. Claire, seventeen but passing for older, was standing next to Henri, to whom she had yet to be introduced, and Henri was staring at the photographer, a woman he was dating at the time. The group’s faces were brightly overexposed as if they’d been caught out at something, Claire’s hand on the rail near Henri’s, the lights of the city bleary dots between them.

Jane is looking partly at the cabinet display and partly at her reflection in the glass. All day she has been trying to remember something her therapist had once said about how one defines oneself, about the power of intention. She was twenty and wanted to give up the cello. “Why?” the therapist, Clive, had asked, and Jane shrugged. She could have said “to spite myself” or “to spite my father,” but by then she was tired of the rawness of trying to communicate everything, of feeling like every failure or step forward had to be brought back to what had happened in the woods when she was fifteen. So she gestured at the cello case propped in the corner of the room and said, “You try lugging it everywhere.”

Behind Jane the musicians start to tune their instruments. The caterers set silver platters down on the long table, unwrap the canapés. We hear the ting, ting of glass touching glass as a waistcoated server stacks the stemware into triangles, as if the world is stable and nothing or no one can knock things over.

“She’s going to leave,” one of us sighs.

“No, she’s not,” says the idiot.

“ Ttthhhhhtttt, ” says the one who sucks on his teeth.

We look at Jane’s reflection in the cabinet glass to gauge her mood and see the aching space of our absence. Twenty-five rows of chairs are cast back at us, along with the lectern where William will stand and a tall ceramic vase stuffed with oriental flowers.

“I’ll wager you,” says the musician.

“Wager us what exactly?”

“She took a diazepam in the bathroom,” the theologian says, “while you were all out here gaping at the quiche.”

“Our mouths divined with heaven,” intones the poet.

“ Vrrrooooooom ,” drones the boy, as if he’s a jet fighter.

“ Shhh , everyone, give her a bit,” the one with the soft voice says, watching Jane study the glass-blown rose, the wilted edges of its thin petals.

What Jane remembers most vividly about the last time she saw William was the constable’s desk where she was told to sit and wait. It was in the part of the police station she had never imagined — a brown-panelled backroom area where the officers piled their everyday coats on racks and kept outdated family photos on their desk, where coffee mugs emblazoned with phrases like “World’s Best Dad” were clustered on a card table next to a well-used coffee maker. The nameplate at the desk said Shaun Holmes in brass, and this made her think of the Sherlock books that her brother, Lewis, liked, and so, to distract herself, she tried to remember if Sherlock was the character’s real first name, the one his mother gave him when he was born, or some kind of nickname. Shaun Holmes had a frame on his desk with a photo of an Alsatian that Jane thought probably came from a calendar of dogs. Maybe October was Alsatian month, and if she opened the frame and peeked at the back of the image she’d find the squares of September with notes like Sara’s birthday or dinner at K’s written in the boxes. But then Jane rationalized that if “Sara” or her birthday mattered to Shaun Holmes, he’d have a photo of her in the frame instead. Constable Margaret Mobbs, the woman who’d brought Jane to the desk after her statement on the trail, after it became clear that Jane couldn’t stop crying, came by after a while with a book for twelve-year-olds, milky tea from a vending machine and a packet of plain crisps. She stood there a moment and then touched Jane’s head, said, “I’ll leave you to it?” Instead of replying, Jane reached out her finger and tapped the last silver ball of a set that hung from strings on a stupid contraption on Constable Holmes’s desk. The ball clicked with a light tock into the next ball, which tock ed its neighbour in turn, the effect diminishing as it moved along.

“Newtonian,” Mobbs said. She wiped what appeared to be a line of dirt off her sun-baked cheek and a strand of dull-brown hair slipped out of its ponytail. “Inertia.”

Jane had to concentrate to remember what that was, because she knew that she knew it, but didn’t right then. What it meant then was that Lily was out in the woods and Shaun Holmes and everyone from everywhere was looking for her, and that one click could lead to another and at the end everything would be okay.

“Or cause and effect,” Mobbs added, then shrugged. “Actually, I’m more of a history of the ancient world kind of girl.”

Hours later, long enough that Jane’s grandparents would have arrived if they’d driven straight up from London, if they’d been home to take the call and not out at the ballet and having a drink after with the director of the symphony orchestra, Jane looked up from the Alsatian — who was a real dog after all — and saw William. He was hunched in his jacket behind a desk on the other side of the room, a survey map open in front of him, a Styrofoam cup that was still steaming placed on top. His gaze was directed down at the cup, and it stayed there for a long time, and Jane both wanted and did not want him to look up at her.

To test the sound, the cellist with the cropped red hair begins to play from the music sheet in front of her. The guests will start arriving soon and the musicians have yet to check the acoustics properly. The violinist, a gangly man with a boyish expression, folds his legs under his chair and joins in. Jane recognizes the piece: a Dvořák quartet her father had encouraged her to practise, suggesting once that if she got good enough at it they might try to play it together. And it’s this — the memory of her father’s dissatisfaction, and the aching swell of the notes the cellist is playing so beautifully — that makes her start toward the front door of the Chester. If she failed at Dvořák and at the cello, and if what happened with Lily made her a disappointment to her father and to her mother, why should things be any different now, with William? That day in the police station, William had known that Jane was sitting across the room, and for more than an hour he refused to glance up at her. By the time her grandparents arrived, the room was so full of volunteer search-party members being handed maps, flashlights and headlamps that Jane hadn’t known if he was still there. Besides, she reasons now as she puts her hand out to the door, if she were meant to see William it would have happened — there have been conferences and lectures, probably a hundred near misses. In the years before her grandmother died Jane was in his end of the city every Sunday, two blocks down the road. Jane grabs the handle and opens the door onto the street. If Gareth sees her now, or Duncan or Paulo, she’ll say she’s just stepping out, going for a walk before the party.

As we move to go outside a second violinist picks up the thread of music and the movement swells.

“I know this piece!” the musician amongst us exclaims, and he begins to nod along. After a few bars he hums loudly, matching the violinist note for note, and even though the cellist has stopped to adjust her music stand he keeps singing and whirling around. We get like this sometimes, when what is happening to Jane becomes less important than what we can learn about ourselves. “It’s number twelve! Listen, listen!”