Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

And the girl made the happy sound, but not as loudly as before.

We all turned to Jane. She clicked the radio off, opened the cupboard and shrugged her coat on. In the kitchen Sam padded through us to inspect his bowl. Wrapping a wool scarf around her neck Jane glanced once more at the spot where the girl was standing, then ran her eyes over the newspaper folded on the end of the counter, the coffee mug in the sink, as if she were forgetting something.

“She saw me!” the girl said, and the boy leapt off his kitchen stool and went to stand next to the girl, windmilling his arms.

“No she didn’t,” the theologian sighed, but some of us weren’t convinced, wanted to believe the children.

“Are you sure?” Cat asked.

“Of course I am,” the theologian said, and he walked right up to Jane, close enough to see the flecks of mascara under her lash line, the fine baby hair on her cheek.

“Because?” the girl begged.

Jane opened the door and we moved to follow her.

“Because,” the theologian said gruffly, “the living only see what’s useful.”

• • •

Just before we reach the inn the boy runs ahead and the girl follows him. The rest of us discuss whether Blake will be in Jane’s bed when we get to the room, and the musician hums, and the poet grunts the way he did earlier, like a rutting pig. We debate whether Jane will stay in Inglewood longer than she said she would; we can sense that she is light-headed at having slipped away from the world of accountability. When she thinks about the Chester and the work she dropped there, about what happened with William, she pushes the thought out of her head and instead thinks about Inglewood House, and the Whitmore, and us. This makes us happy, even though we know it shouldn’t. But we also know it won’t last. We know this just as we know Gareth will have phoned Lewis when Jane didn’t return his calls or show up for work on Monday. Just like we know that Lewis will have tried calling the cottage by now, will have gone round to Jane’s flat and found her mobile. Lewis is probably up at the Lakes already, trying to find her.

Two tunnels of light from a car’s headlamps swing over us and we stop squabbling. The car cuts its engine in front of a stone house near the top of the village and the heavy clunk of the car door is followed by the wooden thump of a front door closing. For a second the sounds of the street fall back into the pulsing whirr of the nearby woods. And then, just as the boy turns toward the door of the inn, a ragged unhappiness palpable in his movements, we hear the same high bark we’ve heard before, a sure and sharp greeting. Some of us look to the field, and some of us to the house at the top of the street, imagining a dog in the yard uncurling himself to salute his master’s return. The dog barks again, behind us this time, and the boy turns and stares up the road past the church to the woods beyond it. Without a word he starts to run.

The boy is clearer to us in that moment than he has ever been, his eight-year-old arms working, legs moving furiously: a boy with a shock of brown hair, a child’s luminescent skin; a large plum-coloured bruise on his back. The theologian runs after him and is almost astride when the boy picks up speed and throws his arms out like an airplane, banking left for the field before he wavers and vanishes completely.

Jane is drying off from the shower when Sam starts barking. Some dog outside has set him off and Jane has to come out with wet feet and dripping hair to shush him. Fair play , she thinks; she’s left him alone longer than usual this evening. She taps the mattress, “Come here, Bubby,” and Sam jumps up. Jane scratches his head, runs her palms over his white and wavy spaniel ears. For the last half hour she’s been puzzling over the evening’s unexpected events: Blake, the craziness of the two of them — how good it felt; and the vigil at the grotto, the sudden appearance of the larger world’s concerns in a place that has always been so closed, so loaded in her mind.

She pulls on a T-shirt and slides into bed, thinking about all the opportunities she had to tell Blake about William and Lily. The sound of the falls was a cue that brought back that day, and the earthy smell of the woods, its mushrooms and resin, and the weight of the weather hanging over the field.

During the two weeks when Jane was watching Lily they had a number of conversations about love. Lily was obsessed with pairs: This fish swims with that one; my best friend is Bronwyn; these horses ride together . On the Wednesday of the first week William had suggested that Jane walk Lily over to the Natural History Museum so they could have lunch with him. At the stone steps that led up to the main doors Lily had stopped abruptly and announced that her nanny, Luisa, didn’t have a boyfriend. She studied Jane’s face as people milled around them, trying to register if Jane found that fact as unsettling as she did.

They arrived early and William wasn’t in the main hall waiting for them, so Jane gave William’s name at the information stand. A nice woman in a navy blazer called upstairs and then came around the desk to say that he was still in a meeting but that they could wait in the exhibition hall. She bent down to talk to Lily, who seemed to know her, and said, “Well, aren’t you looking smart today?” Then she stood up and added, “You must be Jane.”

Jane nodded, feeling a frisson of excitement she didn’t quite understand — the thrill of an adult acknowledging that William had spoken about her.

The woman left them in the hall where the museum mounted temporary exhibitions. That summer it held a display on early human settlements. Lily immediately made up romances: the Homo erectus pictured above the partial skeleton was married to the Neanderthal ; the wax models in the cave diorama were a royal family— This one’s the King, this one’s the Queen ; the mammoth is in love with the ox, this is their human baby. Jane enjoyed it so much — the crazy menagerie Lily was inventing — that she didn’t bother telling her that half of her pairings lived in different millenniums or belonged to different species. Standing behind a velvet rope that surrounded a cast of early human footprints, Lily glanced at the parallel trails — the fleshy indents of a smaller set of tracks following a larger one — and then turned her attention back to Jane. “Do you have a boyfriend?” She pursed her lips in a kissy fish face and Jane laughed and said no, wondering if Lily thought that she was closer to Luisa’s age, twenty-two and not fifteen, trying to remember if, as a child, she’d also organized the world of adults into a large, undefined category.

A week and a half later, at lunch in the pub in Inglewood, Lily had asked if they were going to see the caves at the end of the Farrington trail. This was partly because she’d liked the dioramas that day at the Natural History Museum — wax models of shaggy-haired hominids staged around a campfire — and partly because William and Jane had been talking about caves on the drive up. William had said that one of the reasons the Farrington trail was so popular was the caves at the end of it. The larger one was a draw for cavers and tourists, although most people only ventured a hundred feet in, to the railings that bordered the first chasm.

Lily was in the back seat of the Saab dancing a pony on her knee but quietly listening; for the first part of their conversation William was using a tenor Jane had come to recognize, a pitch that meant he was speaking to both her and his daughter: simpler words, uncomplicated sentences. He mentioned the caves in Lascaux, moving the conversation tangentially to fill the space that Jane tended to leave open, and she told him that her father had taken her and Lewis to see their grandparents in Toulouse the previous summer and they’d made a day trip up to see the cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume. William, who’d been watching the road, the intermittent traffic, turned and looked at Jane in the way that always made her feel like he was considering her. She liked the heat of that kind of attention, how it demanded reciprocation, how it made her push through her uncertainties in order to find something to give him.