Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

Jane is startled when she finally looks up and finds the archivist standing beside her chair. The woman smiles as if she’s used to this, as if it’s one of the job’s small pleasures.

“There’s a note on file that says Mrs. Farrington’s diaries are on loan to the Trust. I believe they have George’s Tibetan notebooks and sketches as well.” She lifts her shoulders apologetically and turns to go.

“Sorry—” Jane interjects. “Do you mean the Trust that’s restoring the estate?”

“Yes — the Farrington Trust in Inglewood. In all honesty, between them and that gentleman from London we’ve been moving those boxes up and down from storage a lot lately.”

“Gentleman from London?” Jane can hear how thin her voice sounds, so she clears her throat, tries to sound assertive. “Do you remember his name? I think he might be a colleague.”

The archivist purses her lips. “He was finishing a book — something about Victorian gardens? A nice man — bit posh — he was up here a lot in the spring and then again a month ago.” She juts her chin in the direction of the stack of material on Jane’s table. “Looking through most of the same things that you are.”

Jane glances down at the archives she’s been working through: it’s all Whitmore material save for the Farrington household books and index binder. “Sorry, do you mean the Farringtons? Or the Whitmore?”

“A bit of both, same as you.”

To clear her head after she gets back to the inn, Jane takes Sam for a walk in the field that runs along Inglewood’s stone wall. On her way back she stops at the spot where the wall slumps a bit, the section she’d climbed over yesterday, and peers across the lawn to where the gardeners are working on a series of freshly dug beds. She has never liked the waste of large estate grounds, the kind that seem to exist solely for the purpose of having an expanse of lawn to gaze across, but she can appreciate the beauty of a good garden: the bright explosions of pink and white flowers the gardener in the wide-brimmed hat is carrying on a tray, the twitching green reeds around the pond she’d glimpsed earlier on the far side of the wisteria arcade.

Without quite meaning to, Jane scans the pair of gardeners packing up by the stables to see if one of them is Blake. Eventually she spots him near the ivied enclosure off the back of the house just past the library, a gated space that would have been the family’s private garden. He turns toward the stables, stretching his back as he goes, and Jane ducks and heads for the road before he is close enough to see her.

Turning back toward the inn, Jane whistles for Sam, who has been tearing around in the treeline, then she picks up a skinny branch and whisks it through the long grass in front of her, all the while trying to convince herself that the archivist in the records office must be mistaken about William looking through the Whitmore material. There’s something more than territorial about her discomfort, a resentment she can’t quite shake off. This feeling isn’t like the one she experienced listening to his talk on Norvill, her sense of that’s mine ; this has more to do with the whole of her life, with feeling like a fake. She can still see Clive’s face when she said she was going to take an MA in Archives and Records Management at The University of London, how he held his pudgy features perfectly still as if he didn’t want to give away his belief that this was just another move in a series of moves that involved replicating the lives of others. Music because Henri did music, archives because William did archives. She’d seen the same tight-lipped expression on Lewis’s face at The Lamb when she said she might write about N and the Whitmore. As if she was trying to be Claire, as if getting her research published would somehow create a meaningful connection between them.

Watching Sam zigzag across the field, Jane realizes that there is something else bothering her: the possibility that William has already made a connection between Inglewood and the Whitmore. Maybe George Farrington had business with the hospital? If Farrington attended the ball, as Jane suspects he did, in what capacity had he done so? Was he a patron? She circles back to her revelation from the first evening at the inn: his letter to the Superintendent said, Mr. Farrington is glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here —a courtesy, and an indicator that he was familiar with the hospital or at least sensitive to the kinds of patients who moved through there.

Back in her room, Jane fills Sam’s water bowl and he drinks all of it, then flops down happily inside the door despite the mess of burrs in the white fur along his hocks and under his belly. Her new hairbrush is still in the shop bag so Jane takes it out and settles down beside him, stroking his ears and running her fingers through his soft curls before gently working the tangles out, one knot at a time.

Later in the evening we go to the pub with Jane. Most of us like the closeness of a public room, the chatter of everyday conversations. We can tell, when Blake saunters in, that he is looking for “Helen.” He’s taken care with his clothes, is wearing a pressed shirt with a collar, black trousers and polished boots.

He spies Jane reading at one of the low tables along the bench wall where they’d sat the night before. Her pint glass is empty so he heads straight to the bar to order her another one, striding past us and stirring up a waft of rosemary chicken from a nearby table.

“I thought I’d catch you at the house today.” He puts a full pint down beside her empty one, avoiding her papers, and stands waiting for her to offer him a seat. When she doesn’t say anything, he straddles a low stool, tugs the corner of her pile of papers toward his side of the table and asks, “What’re you working on?”

“Just some Farrington stuff.” She places the Whitmore papers on the bench beside her and then changes her mind and tucks them between the straps of her handbag under the table. “Thanks for the pint.”

Blake leans in to say something, but hesitates as the waitress from last night appears. “Heya, Blake.” She smiles warmly at him and then flicks a quick slit-eyed look over toward Jane. “Can I get youse anything to eat?” She reaches across the table to take Jane’s empty glass and her long blonde hair swings forward and her midriff touches Blake’s arm. “Curry’s on special.”

Jane shakes her head, smiling at the girl’s territorial exercise.

Blake keeps his eyes on Jane. “No, we’re great, Katie, thanks.”

Katie wends her way through the crowd back to the bar. Blake checks to make sure she’s gone and then turns back to Jane and says, “Sorry,” as if he owes Jane the apology, as if he is protecting her — as if he thinks something is happening between them.

Around ten, Blake’s dad, who’s been up at the bar, walks past the table to say good night. He grins awkwardly at Jane and pats his son’s shoulder. By now Jane is used to the idea that everyone in the room seems to know Blake and is watching them, though when Blake explains to his father that she’s part of the restoration team from London, her lip twitches and she sits up straighter. Embedded in the lie is what happened less than a week ago with William, and a whole other world she is trying to ignore. Still, despite the lie, Jane finds to her surprise that there is a lot she can say to Blake: that she has an MA in archives and record management, that she used to play cello, that her father is a famous violinist, though she won’t give his name, that she has a brother who is a geneticist, and, when Blake presses her for details about her relationships, that she lived briefly with an architect.

“That’s one,” he says.