Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

“No, no. To your right,” the heavier-set of the two calls gruffly, and the sideboard shifts slightly.

“Got it,” the lankier one replies, and with the sideboard’s tall back perched at a precarious angle they inch inside the door and disappear around the corner into the entry hall.

Jane hesitates to follow them. She can hear the shuffle of their boots over the track of carpet laid down over the hardwood, the older of the two saying, “Easy, easy.” She can imagine the two of them tottering the sideboard past someone in the main hall whose job it is to check off all the chairs and desks and paintings; who would ensure that everything is deposited in the correct place. Someone who would know Jane has no right to be here. Her gaze drifts up to a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head — the very same one that Leeson would have rapped when the trio arrived here. This is where they stood , Jane thinks, this is the last place N was seen .

Over the past few days the main floor of the house has been filled with twice the amount of furniture that was here when Jane last wandered through it. Enormous desks, high-backed chairs and tables of every size and composition peek out from under sheets, blankets and plastic wrap; a new row of boxes and crates lines the main hall. Jane peeks around the corner into the library and is almost run over by the two movers who, released of the burden of the sideboard, are heading out again, the lean one laughing at something the older one said. They stop when they see Jane, as if the joke is inappropriate.

“Miss,” the lanky one says. He nods courteously as they pass through the entry, and then picks up the conversation again.

The library is half assembled: the furniture still draped but put in place so that Jane can make out the arrangement of a long sofa, three high-backed chairs and a screen; the round reading table where the butler would have placed the morning paper near the window, a pianoforte in the corner along with a stool with leaf-scroll feet. One of the armchairs, a bird’s-eye maple with brocaded yellow upholstery, is uncovered as if someone has just been sitting there, its fabric worn gently from use. There’s a trace of perfume in the room, and although Jane knows it probably belongs to the archivist she’s looking for, it’s floral enough that she can imagine it belonging to Prudence or coming in gusts from the rose bushes outside.

Another set of movers, younger this time, comes into the library. Each of them is carrying a wood-frame box, the kind you move paintings in. They set the boxes down gently in the corner, nod at Jane and then traipse out again, their voices, the easy chitchat of “Are you going to Jack’s after?” echoing down the hall. When they leave, Jane can hear the sound of someone typing. She follows it around the corner and through an open door into the old dining room where she finds a woman with dark hair cut into a fashionable bob sitting at a two-hundred-year-old table and pecking away on a laptop. When she glances up and sees Jane she jumps a bit, puts her hand over her chest and says, “Mother of God, you scared me.”

It’s almost four p.m., and even though she’s finishing up for the day, Gwendolyn is friendly. The references that give Jane some semblance of authority — Miranda at the records office, and William Eliot in London, who Jane says “is helping me with some research”—immediately put Gwendolyn at ease. She unwinds the woolly pink scarf she’s been wearing to make up for the cold of the room and says, “Miranda’s a laugh, isn’t she?” as if she assumes Jane has spent time with the woman socially. It turns out that Gwen and Jane did their postgraduate studies at UCL two years apart and had a number of professors in common, though the ones Jane didn’t get on with Gwen liked, and one of those had recommended her for this job.

The request to look at Prudence Farrington’s diaries is simple enough, and William Eliot’s name seems to carry some weight. Gwen says she’ll have to check with her supervisor—“liability and all that,”—but that it ought to be fine so long as Jane has an LRO card and works with the material here, supervised. When Jane first mentioned the “diaries” Gwen’s gaze had drifted over to a locked filing cabinet on the wall, an ugly metal thing wedged against the cherry blossom wallpaper beside two modern steel shelves crammed with cardboard boxes. “We’re not very organized yet, we just got electricity on Monday.” She points to the photocopier and fax machine sitting against a wall where the sideboard the movers carried in probably once stood. “I don’t think those have been plugged in yet. And we’re already two months behind. Anyway, do you want my mobile number or do you just want to stop in tomorrow to see if my supervisor at the Trust okays it?”

“Stopping in is fine.”

“Great, let’s say nine.”

Undressing that night in her room at the inn, Blake watching from where he’s flopped on the bed, Jane remarks that she hadn’t seen him on the Inglewood grounds when she looked from the library window.

Blake laughs. “I did go in. I was sent to the duck pond for fucking off, had to scrub my hands raw to get rid of the smell of Victorian goose shit.”

Jane pulls back the duvet and slips in beside him. He leans over and kisses her. After a minute he sits up and raises his hands, pretending he’s filming her, mimicking the crank style of an old-fashioned camera, one eye squinched shut as if with the other he’s looking through a lens.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to remember this.” He keeps filming.

“Remember what?”

“You, you idiot.” He drops the imaginary camera and kisses her eyelids, moves down her neck whispering into her skin, “Record, record, record.”

In the morning, just after eight, Jane slips out of bed to get something for breakfast — takeaway coffees, pastries. This is to avoid going through explanations again with Maureen: guests need to be booked in advance, paid for beforehand, their details taken so we know in an emergency who is staying in the rooms . Sam raises his head a few inches when she opens the door but he doesn’t get up, so she decides to leave him with Blake, who is snoring, slack-mouthed, into his pillow. She frames them there as she turns to go: Blake under the mountain of the duvet, Sam’s head pressed between his front paws at the foot of the bed, his white tail fanning out behind him.

We rouse ourselves when Jane leaves the room but we don’t follow her out, and the girl asks why we aren’t going with her.

“It’s just coffee,” the musician says, but we know he is lying. We have followed Jane out for coffee before, have followed her in restaurants from her table to the loo, moved in her flat from one side of the kitchen to the other in order to track her thinking.

“She’ll be back,” Cat says chirpily, and the one with the soft voice bends down to the girl and says, “We’ll all go to Inglewood House with her later. It’ll be fun.”

“Now then—” Cat says, as if there is some task we need to get up to, as if we haven’t all been subdued in the wake of our decision to follow Jane back from the Whitmore. We’d had a row at the gate as to whether those of us who belonged at the Whitmore should stay, whether knowing who we’d been and what we’d done was enough of an ending. It was the theologian who’d convinced us to get back in the van.

“Not much doing here,” he said, slapping his hands together in a ghostly imitation of a clap. “Pretty desolate. And work that needs to be done.”

“What work?” the musician asked quietly.

“Songs to sing, poems to write, lessons to be planned.” The theologian stepped gaily over the road in an approximation of a dance and we stood back and angled our heads, trying to decide what might have taken possession of the man we thought we knew. “I suppose,” he continued drily — as if the fake show of enthusiasm had depleted him—“that the nature of said work has yet to be determined.” He ushered us into the van and as Blake closed the door he added, “But let’s not allow such trivialities to diminish our dedication to the task.”