At the end of the night Henri waited outside with Jane for her taxi. He kissed her forehead, and in that brief press, standing between the warmth of his lips and the palm of his hand cupping the back of her head, she was happy. As the late-night crowd dwindled behind them, the last of the men and women heading out through the glass door of the bar had looked twice at Henri, because even though he was nearing sixty and dressed casually in black jeans and an old sweater, he was still a commanding figure.
As usual, Jane thinks now, there’s a kind of arrogance behind his phone calclass="underline" the assumption that he can sail back into her life, after years of dashed-off postcards, and help her; as if what happened between her and William, what happened to Lily, somehow involved him; as if he’d risen to the occasion for her back then, when she was fifteen and needed him.
Flexing her neck, Jane tries to slow her breath, get her thoughts together. She picks up a thin shard of porcelain and touches the nib of its ivy to her wrist, the point lightly pricking her. She calculates, numbly, that the teacup is one hundred and twenty-seven years old, imagines all the clumsy maids and careless children, the repeated washings it has endured — not to mention being packed up and carted across the country numerous times before and after the war. A delicate slip of a teacup that has survived all this, but, Jane realizes with a start, has not survived her.
Gareth knocks on Jane’s office door and then, as he has done since the day he hired her, immediately walks in. She’s still testing the point of the teacup against her wrist when he steps toward the desk.
“Busy?” He rubs his thumb under the bristle of his moustache and eyes the teacup.
“Not really.”
“Is that the Grainger?”
“It is.” She clears her throat. “Was.”
He pulls his spectacles out of his pocket and leans in, the white tufts of hair on either side of his bald spot falling forward. When he straightens up he smooths them back with his palms. “Listen, I rang Oliver at the V&A about you. He says they’ll put you on their inventory list so that if something short-term comes up—”
“Lovely. Thanks. But don’t go to any trouble.” Jane musters a smile, clasping her palms in front of her the way the girls who come through the museum on school tours do when they are corralled into queues and told to behave.
The state of Jane’s office hasn’t changed much in the six weeks since the news about the closure came down, and Jane can tell that Gareth, leaning sideways to look at the stack of solander boxes lined up under her worktable, is registering that fact for the first time. The oak file cabinets have yet to be emptied, a tray piled with books and papers is mushrooming on a swivel chair in the corner, the glass storage case that runs along the side wall is still filled with objects waiting for their archives to be compiled and packed — parts of the Hendry shell collection on the upper shelf, Glauber’s seventeenth-century mammal compendium beside it and a variety of anatomical specimens below. Gareth walks over to get a better look. He slides the glass door back and lifts one of the spirit jars off the shelf and up to the overhead light. Inside, a hairless cat with a bony spine and thin tail floats in formalin; its eyes are stitched into slits, its ears curled forward and as long as a rabbit’s.
“Ah, the feliform hare — I wondered where this had got to. I might keep this chap.”
Jane doesn’t say anything, and so Gareth sets the jar back on the shelf and turns to face her. His right eyelid is sagging slightly, which always happens when he’s overworked. “Listen, Jane, I know the last few weeks have been difficult for you — for all of us — but you’ll find something.” He drops a paternal hand onto her shoulder as he moves past her. “Failing that, at least be reasonable and hold off doing away with yourself until there’s room to cart a body out.” In the doorway Gareth puts his hand in his jacket pocket and rattles his keys, a habit that Jane realizes she’ll miss terribly. “And don’t worry about the Grainger,” he adds. “See what Paulo can do with it, and then let me know and I’ll call the buyer. Things break, Jane, you ought to know that by now.”
Jane first met Gareth when she was twenty-six years old. It was the first time any of us had stepped foot inside the Chester. She’d graduated the year before with a Masters in archives and records management and had been recommended to him by the senior archivist at the special collections library where she’d interned. Gareth agreed to interview her even though the vacancy was for a short-term position and he knew people who could fill it. It was winter and crowds were milling around the natural history hall in squeaky boots and woolly sweaters; the cloakroom beside the small museum shop was packed with puffy coats. Jane was early for her interview, and nervous, so she wandered across the hall and down a row of display cabinets, stopping when she reached a large glass case on thick oak feet. It contained a series of criss-crossed branches upon which Nathanial Hartford, Esquire, had supervised the wire mounting of two hundred and four hummingbirds in an attempt to display all the colours and designs of the species. The birds were caught in various stages of rest or flight, their wings closed or spread out like the slats of a fan. Most people paused here briefly, if they stopped at all, but Jane studied each bird in turn, the dark beads of their eyes, their long bills, flamboyant gorgets. Those of us who had followed her into the museum studied the birds too, and watched her, the care she gave each individual thing.
“When is a bird no longer a bird?” one of us asked.
The question was soft, hung in the air like dust in a shaft of light. We turned toward the woman’s voice and could see some semblance of form, as if a stranger had arrived and was standing on the far side of a crown-glass window.
“Hello?” another of us called, and the one with the soft voice said “Hello” back.
In those days we didn’t speak; some of us didn’t even know we could. Instead we moved around Jane, around the city and the country the way the living sometimes do, heads bowed, caught up in our own half-formed preoccupations. But when this thought came out, it was voiced and heard, so we moved closer together and closer to Jane, suddenly aware of each other the way a group of strangers roused by a near-accident or noise on the street might look up from the pavement to discover they are not alone.
Before Jane, before the Chester Museum, there had been a long period of silence. It hung like a pendle on a chandelier, a heavy glass tear. Some of us woke in the woods to William shouting for Lily, others to the search party that followed, to men and women crashing through the forest, their flashlights arcing across the places where we’d been sleeping. Others of us woke years later to Jane’s footsteps in the asylum wards when she visited the Whitmore as a graduate student, her heels clipping down a long corridor.
It was, for all of us, like waking from a long and fevered sleep, the nature of the self we woke to slowly taking shape. One of us said he looked for his hands but couldn’t see them; another said that she moved toward a door that was nailed shut. What sense can be made of such a world, emptied of everything that was once familiar? When those of us who were in the woods saw Jane standing there in a panic we went forward to comfort her; when those of us who were at the Whitmore found her moving through the wards, we followed her from room to room. We did not say a word, did not even know there were others like us there; each of us was wholly alone in the whirl of our own uncertainty. In the gutted hall of what was once the Whitmore’s women’s gallery, Jane stopped and dropped her satchel on the floor, and so we stopped with her, watched her pry a wood board off the old window and peer out across the lawn toward the woods. There was a notebook sitting in the open mouth of her bag and she pulled it out and then rummaged around for a pen. On the top line of a fresh sheet of paper she wrote the word Whitmore—a blue scrawl we all moved toward.