Aislinn Hunter: The World Before Us

Once Mrs. Farrington had settled in a high-backed chair near a corner of the room, Leeson returned to the task of explaining his charge — which he did rather unconvincingly between bites of oatcake. It was only upon reaching for his second oatcake — glancing around to mentally divide the number of cakes by the number of those in the room — that he noticed the girl who’d come with them was missing. He craned his neck toward the entryway, trying to recollect if she’d followed them in through the door.

“Of course I am quite familiar with the museum library,” George Farrington was asserting. “Two of my own books reside there — one botanical, the other verse. Though I am,” he confessed, prodding the dwindling fire with a poker, “serious about one art and a dabbler in the other.”

Leeson glanced at Herschel, who had become wholly distracted, first by the rash on his thigh and then by the half-dozen or so watercolour landscapes that hung in gold frames on the wall behind him. The farmer swivelled and rose on the sofa to get a better look, his smock lifting slightly as he did so.

“Those were painted by my uncle Reginald,” Farrington said, a hint of reprimand in his voice.

Herschel turned and sat back down, unsure of what exactly he’d done. He looked to Leeson, but Leeson was studying Farrington. The solicitor recognized his host now. It was the defect around his mouth that gave him away: an arced scar that tracked through one side of his dark-brown moustache and down onto his bare chin. A climbing accident , Leeson remembered the Superintendent saying, leaning sideways toward the Matron at the Whitmore. Burma, I believe . And Leeson, who had been standing nearby, had stepped forward to see whom they were discussing, and there was a gentleman — Farrington — in a top hat and bright blue waistcoat coming down the reception line at the Whitmore Ball, his boutonnière an exotic yellow bud with orange tips quite unlike any Leeson had ever seen.

It stood to reason, then, that if this was the celebrated botanist from the ball — and Leeson was fairly certain it was — he and Herschel were currently some ten or eleven miles from the Whitmore in the country house of the Farringtons, to whom much of the land they had traversed belonged.

Leeson stifled a yawn, realizing with a start that his host was speaking to him, saying something about the landscape the watercolours had been painted in. Obligingly he stood up to inspect the paintings, all the while wondering where the girl had gone off to, and whether or not some sort of sustenance beyond the oatcakes he’d already consumed might arrive. It did. His gaze had only just fallen into a rippled blue lake and the droopy willow that tickled it when the Farringtons’ maid re-entered the room. She curtseyed quickly, keeping her chin down while her eyes darted to further survey the guests. Wordlessly she handed a cloth sack to Mrs. Farrington, who with one hand whisked the maid back through the door and into the hall. So it was that a mere quarter-hour after they had entered the house, they were sent on their way again, Mrs. Farrington ensuring they had the sack of ham and butter sandwiches in hand.

It was near midnight when Herschel climbed back over the stone wall, and he and Leeson trudged across the lawn and into their beds. The main building was dark save for a row of candles placed along one of the gallery’s ledges.

The following morning a letter arrived at the Whitmore, delivered to the hospital clerk by a scrawny young man on a dun pony. It read:

Mr. George Farrington presents his compliments to the Governor of Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and requests him to be so kind as to take precautions that his patients should not pay visits at Inglewood, as two did yesterday (one describing himself as an assistant librarian of the British Museum) .

Mr. Farrington is very glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here, and hopes that they did not suffer from their long walk .

George Farrington did not mention the girl in his note. And we know from the asylum casebook that in Leeson’s interview with the Superintendent the next morning, he said he hadn’t seen her after the walk up to Farrington’s door, though he did comment on her absence and on the changing weather and on Herschel’s discovery of a roe deer bedded down in a whorl of grass. Numerous times in his description of events Leeson used words like intestate and disinherit ; he also talked of returning to work in law. He said, “You cannot disinherit a ham, nor can you disinherit roast beef pie.”

Dr. Thorpe wrote appears to be suffering from delusions twice in the transcript margins, and five times wrote tangent … before the description of “Activities Occurring on 2 August 1877” was returned to and set down.

The hospital logbook that Jane first examined when she was writing her dissertation detailed almost nothing of the inmates’ escape. It noted that on the 2nd of August the laundry had been collected at eight, that the new hen had not lain. In hasty black ink underneath that someone had written Patients C. Leeson, H. Morley and girl N— missing , and then, in another hand, there was an added note: Patient Hopper restrained at 2 p.m . Finally, scribbled in handwriting so tight and angular Jane had to read it with a magnifying glass: Mstrs H. Morley and C. Leeson returned . On the 3rd of August the first entry states: Letter from G. Farrington received . This was followed by the domestics of the institution: a list of objects needing mending, a detailed order of supplies and foodstuff requisitioned from Morrington, a change in staff schedules.

No further mention of N — was to be found.

Jane wakes to the whooping sound of the corner shop’s alarm. The shop recently hired a new assistant and the alarm has gone off at six a.m. three days in a row. Jane knows that if she sticks her head out the window the shop assistant will be on his mobile phone shouting in Punjabi and waving one hand toward the security gate. It usually takes five to ten minutes for the alarm to stop, so Jane presses her pillow over her face to muffle the sound, the metallic tang of last night’s sleeping pill still on her tongue.

It comes back to her then — the dream about the woods and the Whitmore, the dream about the girl she only knows as “N.” Jane is glad to be thinking about her again, but there’s guilt in the thought too. For the last six weeks, she’s been too busy with work at the Chester Museum to spend any time on the Whitmore; all the research she’d been doing was stuffed reluctantly into a box and shoved under her bed. What Jane wonders, tracing her way around the edges of the dream, is how N got out of the hospital — not the act, the hand that lifts the latch, opens the door, but rather what wells up in a person so that one day they do the unexpected. She would like to know this because there’s something welling inside her too, although she doesn’t see it as clearly as we do.

The sound of a steel gate being kicked repeatedly clangs into the room from down the street and Jane groans into her pillow then slides it off her face. Those of us who were in other rooms come in and gather around her, our presence as invisible as the chutes of air drifting under the cracked-open window.

After a minute the alarm stops and London begins to rouse itself: delivery vans rattle down the road, taxis ferry people to their jobs and businesses, the man in the brown corduroy jacket trots his beagle out to the adjacent green — doing so with such dependability we could set our watches by him if we had a need for watches. Across the street, morning light sifts through the clouds to give back the terraced row houses their eggshell colour; the neon signs on the chip and curry shops down the road buzz and flicker. Jane pushes the covers away and thinks about the tea set sitting beside her desk at work, the one that Gareth, the Chester’s director and curator, said he wanted shipped a week ago. And for a minute, caught up in the idea of simple tasks, caught up in the drift of the Whitmore and N, she doesn’t remember what day it is or what will happen by the end of it; she simply thinks work and puts her hand out for her spaniel, Sam, who trots over to have his ears rubbed. Then it’s there, in her waking brain: the fact that the museum is closing, that she will be unemployed in two weeks and that tonight she is going to see William Eliot.