Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

The next post, Jane saw, bore the number 8. There was a tall, rubbery-looking bush behind it. She said, “Let’s play a game, Lily,” and the girl beamed up at her, expectant, her light-brown pigtails bobbing. “Every time you see a post like this”—she took Lily’s hand in hers and led her over to the side of the trail—“you have to tell me the number on it. If you get it right, we’ll both shout hooray.”

Lily nodded and then stood there, waiting.

“Okay, we’ll start at the next post. Ready. Set. Go.”

Lily broke into a little-girl run, elbows out, fists pumping furiously. She sped headlong up the trail and along the verge to search for the next post. Jane watched her dart ahead and then let her eyes drift up the trail to where William might be. Behind her she heard the sound of someone’s footfalls, then a blonde woman in jeans and trainers passed her, nodding as she went, an old border collie trotting alongside her.

After a minute, Lily found a post and grabbed its top, which came up to her waist; she smiled so hard her eyes squinched shut. “Nine,” she said triumphantly. She was right, so she and Jane both shouted hooray. Then Lily skipped back onto the path to find the next post and the one after that. She was always right about the numbers, and she and Jane always shouted hooray.

When Jane tried to shout William’s name, her voice came out too quietly, too unsteadily, like the kind of voice you use to tell someone a secret. She wanted to make it loud, to scream, but nothing came. When his name finally did emerge it was jagged, in pulses, “ Wil-li-am ,” like a faltering heartbeat. She yelled it twice, three times, all the while turning circles and looking for Lily. He came slowly at first, then seeing Jane standing in the middle of the path alone, he started to run. Without asking what was wrong he began calling for Lily, and when she didn’t appear he turned to Jane, his voice constricted. “Where is she? Where did you see her last?”

Jane sputtered, “I don’t know, she was just here.” She pointed toward the bend he had just come from, to the post on the pasture side, and William took off, running up the slope, scrambling between the thin rails of the alder. When he came back down, flushed and angry, Jane said again, “She was just here,” and her chest heaved into sobs. She wanted him to understand that it had happened quickly, that Lily had found the post and then run ahead to look for the next one, and that when Jane rounded the bend in the path after her, Lily was gone.

“Lily!” William turned away from Jane and shouted into the trees on the lake side of the trail. Jane tried to find her voice but when she called “Lily” it broke and fell because everything had suddenly gone wrong, and even if it turned out okay, even if Lily appeared magically exactly where she ought to be, Jane had messed up and William had seen that she wasn’t a good sitter, that she had let him down.

“Lily!” William shouted again, starting down the slope to the lake, losing his footing and sliding a few feet. He picked himself up and ripped off his jacket, untied the canvas bags from his waist, tossing them up toward Jane, moving down along the bramble recklessly, panic in his voice, shouting, “Lily!” again and again, tripping in the underbrush, losing and regaining his footing. Then suddenly he was shouting, “Come out now!”—angry, as if this were a game Lily was playing, hiding somewhere close, crouching down in a patch of sage and staying very still. He was gone whole minutes, his shouts coming up over the verge to where Jane stood.

When his calls grew distant, Jane walked toward the trail edge, picked up his jacket and gripped it in her hands. The bird sounds were louder, William’s voice barely audible, coming from back toward the lake. And then, there was nothing. It was there, in that span of time, that Jane allowed herself to imagine that he’d found her, that Lily was standing at the edge of the trail next to some post they’d already passed, that he was scooping her up in his arms that very instant and that she was saying the number, smiling fiercely at him and telling him to shout hooray.

Up ahead the woman with the collie reappeared. She’d turned around, and her dog was limping. A breeze sifted between them off the lake and lifted Jane’s hair ever so slightly; she felt it brush against her skin just as she heard William’s voice again, his distant shouts drifting up toward the spot on the path where she stood. The woman heard them too and began to walk quickly toward Jane, a look of concern on her face. William’s voice coming closer and closer, Lily’s name arcing through the boughs of the trees.

The tea set that Jane thought about first thing this morning when the shop’s alarm was blaring is sitting on a trolley beside her worktable. Gareth had stopped by right after she arrived to ask if she’d completed the exit forms, and Jane had lifted the Grainger file off the stack on her desk to show him that she was working on it. The set, one of the museum’s most beautiful, consists of twenty-one pieces of china. The teapot and matching cups and saucers are a light green with gold leaf, each with an ivy band painted so precisely that it’s hard for Jane to look at the set without imagining the delicate wrist and steady hand of the artist. The Grainger, like the rest of the ceramic collection, was auctioned off last week, and Jane is supposed to have its deaccession complete so that the conservation department can pack it for shipping. But even now, lifting a teacup off its padding to check its catalogue number, she feels reluctant. She wonders if this is what it’s like to lose the things you love in a burglary or house fire, is grateful that she’s allowed to touch everything one last time.

Given the tastes of the day the Grainger tea set is relatively plain. It once belonged to a Duchess who was quite active in the Victorian land preservation movement, who liked to call herself a friend to nature. She didn’t mind when the rose bushes grew too close to the windows, tolerated her husband’s hound under the table, accepted his penchant for stag-horn furniture. Before washdays, she often let her girls run from the grounds into the house without taking their boots off, though she sometimes complained in her diaries about the mess. She had both a rigorous mind and a self-effacing quality that Jane finds refreshing.

The Grainger set was donated by one of the Duchess’s granddaughters. Its supplementary information file consists of the original bill of sale, transfer of title, notices on two royal inventories and a roughly drawn place setting for an afternoon tea given in honour of the Duke’s return from India — complete with a small crown designating the chair for the Queen. There is also a letter from the Duchess to her cousin B— written on a thin blue sheaf of paper and dated 11 May 1884 … The weather has turned for the better though the wind is bothering my hat. At present Minnie is skittering about by the gazebo waiting to take the tea service away. I fear I won’t have so much as a teacup to hold on to should someone come across the lawn …

The phone on the desk rings and Jane glances at it. It has been ringing all morning: other archivists sending their condolences; Jane’s brother, Lewis, calling to ask if she’s okay. Angling the teacup she’s holding to copy the number inked on its base, Jane turns toward the phone as the long beep of the answering machine goes off.

“Janey, c’est moi ,” her father says, his voice filling the airless room. And then, as if catching himself, he switches to English. “Pick up if you are there.”

There’s a small click as the teacup hits the base of the desk lamp, a sound so delicate it’s like a pebble being tossed against a stone. Stunned, Jane looks at her open hand and then at the four pieces of china settling next to the ledger in front of her. In the white noise of Henri’s silence on the other end of the line she can hear her father’s steady breathing.