Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

The poem, dark and otherworldly, made only a kind of half-sense — talking rats, kings who ate shoes, flowers that bloomed only when you looked away from them — but as those present allowed the words to wash over them, the work started to take on a fuller meaning. It was like listening to the most dysfunctional of the patients: their words took on weight if you dropped your notions of what was acceptable or logical.

Just when the poem was about to reach its peak, just when the gates between the upper garden and the underworld had been bashed by those above in order to bind the two worlds forever, Ockley coughed noisily into his hand — perhaps out of spite. The poet opened his eyes, saw that he was not alone, and stopped speaking. For a second or two his gaze settled on the face of each person present, as if to see with whom he’d been intimate, and then without a word he fled past all of them out of the room.

His words, as some of us remember them — and as the poet standing watch beside Jane’s bed recites them — seemed like a dark art. For some of us, listening to him was like being pricked repeatedly with a pin — the sensation a discomfort radiating out from its point of entry. A poem of nerve ends, of images that stitched you up in a zigzag pattern and then scissored you open again.

If George Farrington had been less obsessed with the scraps of the poet’s new work, he might have remembered N standing behind him in the library, remembered that he and she had danced in the same quadrille earlier in the evening, and that during the course of the dance he’d had cause to move past her a few times, her gloved hand settling briefly in his, the delicate bones of her fingers palpable under his thumb.

Instead he was preoccupied with whether or not the poet had set his work down on paper, and if he had, how it might be recovered and sent to a publisher, previewed perhaps in a magazine, delivered to readers who had been waiting for a new title to appear. As he discussed these matters with Thorpe, Farrington became aware of the Countess’s eyes on him, how she was glaring at him from her place at the window with a gaze so unrelenting that he eventually begged his mother to go over and distract her.

The limits of our attention being what they are, only small strains of the evening remain with us: Herschel obsessing about the Matron, who was watching Hale — puffed up at being in the orchestra — to make sure he didn’t harass the red-haired girl from the laundry. Leeson at the long drinks table watching the Commissioners from a distance; Wick obsessing over who had been rifling through his personal things: someone had taken two cigars from a mahogany box under his bed and his book on The Systems of Chemical Philosophy . Old man Greevy watching Leeson stare idly as the gentleman with the boutonnière, who was a head taller than any other man in the room, walked over to join in the Commissioners’ conversation. The old man mumbling, “That one is master of the estate at Inglewood, I’ve a nephew works for him.” A room that is filled with people stuck in the web of their own complicated narratives: Leeson turning his attention to N as she wavered there, to the shine of her ribbons as she left the drinks table for a chair, catching glimpses of her between other bodies as she slipped her feet out of her shoes to flex them under the blossom-pink folds of her skirt.

This is our problem with time and its knots and bows: our impressions are muddled, and as Jane is sleeping we say, “The night sky was B minor,” “My feet felt pink,” “The music was punch,” “The panelled room was a woods I felt at home in.”

Yes, we would like to remember exactly, to whisper to Jane that this or that transpired, to slide one piece of the puzzle into the next, to assure ourselves that the conversations we eavesdropped on, the sprung looks between people, actually occurred. We would like to bring together hardwood floors and medallion ceilings and window-glanced sky, would like to say with surety that Hale played well and Hopper was kissed, that Wick was vindicated and that N wished, because of Bream’s groping advances, that she was elsewhere.

But there are only a few things we all agree on: that Leeson at one point noted the man he would later recognize as Farrington, that Farrington was watching the poet, and that the poet — like us — was watching the ghostly figures of his invented world.

Leeson had been walking in the woods around the lake for almost an hour, but he’d had to double back when the ground became too quaggy as his shoes were already the better part of ruined. He was, by this juncture, lost. He had been looking for N in the forest, accidentally coming out past the Farrington estate house when he’d meant to retrace— exactly —their steps from the month before.

For weeks now he’d been trying, from his ward-confinement at the Whitmore, to deduce what had happened on the walk up to the Farringtons’ house. He’d been asked numerous times by Superintendent Thorpe where the girl had gone — only to have the good doctor suddenly drop the topic a week ago. Today, during the four hours it had taken him to retrace the route to the estate, he’d rehearsed the events of that August afternoon, reciting the facts as he had to Thorpe: the door was left unlocked, Herschel had walked out, Leeson had followed, then the girl. It had been the three of them in the woods, and then it was just him and Herschel taking tea in the house of the gentleman he recognized from the ball.

After the trio’s excursion, Leeson’s privileges had been revoked and he had been under constant threat of transfer back to a less convivial institution. These threats had been most disconcerting in the first two weeks after their adventure, though their power waned once he was given leave to go as far as the airing courts. At the end of the third week, having been on his best behaviour, he had been allowed to return to morning duty in the greenhouse, where he was given the responsibility of refilling the watering cans. He’d passed time in the afternoons playing a game he called “evens and odds,” jotting down figures in his notebook: evens meaning that the girl was still in the woods and odds that she was elsewhere and he’d never find her. According to his calculations the lace doily on the day-room table had five hundred and eighty holes, the wood planks in the ward corridor amounted to one thousand and forty; there were fifty-eight patients in the men’s wards and forty-eight in the women’s; there were two balding attendants; the rug had twenty knotted sections of tassels, the first grouping consisting of three hundred and sixty strands. The cutlery was five — odds — and the number of the confraternity at his breakfast table evens every morning except Sunday, when Professor Wick ruined it by plopping himself down and knocking over a singular cup of tea. The tomato plants, shrivelling in their beds later that morning, were even, which was a small consolation; the cards in the games room even; the magpies odds one Monday and a subsequent Friday, and evens the rest of the week. And so it went in favour of his finding her, somewhere, he decided, between the pollarded oaks and the estate itself.

Leeson’s second escape had been well orchestrated. On his last day of greenhouse duty, the attendant Bream had appeared on the other side of the glass with a wheelbarrow. He’d rubbed his thick neck with one dirty hand while pointing to the gatehouse with the other. You’re to weed along the walk . He’d waited to see if Leeson would obey and how quickly, because he was known for enjoying the task of inspiring complicity as much as he was known for the clotted stupidity of his preposterously slow thinking.