Bedford’s surviving letters to prospective patients make it clear that he honed this writerly skill over the years, describing treatment variously as a renewing bath, a match strike, a dusting off and reordering of prized books on a shelf. These ideas, he acknowledged in his journal, were inaccurate, but he believed they had proved serviceable to those who were not able to grasp the complexities of the matter.
What words, we wonder now as we look at Jane setting the galvanizing machine onto a trolley, would Bedford have used on Leeson? What might he have suggested to usher him toward acceptance? What within the world of that northern asylum might bring the most pleasure? Afternoons in the airing courts? Feminine company? Perhaps to be told of an arrival, a long-awaited visit? Yes, that would be it — to convince Leeson that the treatment would be like opening a door to the person in the world he most wanted to see.
7
Because the upper galleries will be roped off during William Eliot’s lecture this evening, some of the second-floor cabinets are being disassembled already. Earlier, Gareth had asked Jane to show two contract-based conservators around, and they’d jumped right into the work. It had surprised Jane to learn that there were companies you could hire to assist with this, specialists who came in at the end to help pack things up. The supervisor, Judith, was efficient to the point of brusque, which was fine with Jane, but her assistant, Thad, was overly chipper. Discussing the Hoffmann fossil cabinet, he’d said “brilliant” so many times in a row that Jane had considered wrenching the clipboard out of his hands and swatting him over the head with it.
By mid-afternoon two of the cabinets in the botanical gallery have been emptied, and there are notable holes in the science and ceramic collections. Each unoccupied space has been endowed with a small place card that reads: Sorry, this item is currently on loan to another museum, or Sorry, this item is currently undergoing restoration—because there are no signs that read, Sorry, this museum is closing. When Jane had gone upstairs a few minutes ago to see if the conservators had everything they needed, Judith was taking the Neanderthal skull and pelvis to the lift on a trolley and Thad was trotting behind her so determinedly it looked as if he were afraid she might try to lose him. Gareth had told Jane that another half-dozen contract workers were scheduled to come in on Monday to work alongside the staff for the two weeks he expected the dismantling to take. Getting up from his desk he said, “Don’t worry, Jane, they’ll stay out of your way,” waving his hand like someone who could make a whole group of people disappear with the flick of a wrist. Still, it was deflating. Watching Judith and Thad wheel away the anatomist’s collection Jane is reminded of those people in Hazmat suits contracted to clean up after pensioner deaths or murder scenes — someone entering your world and taking it in hand even though they’d had nothing to do with it when it was vital.
Jane stops on the landing on her way back to her office and surveys the mix of locals and tourists who are wandering around the natural history hall below. She spots a clutch of girls in navy kilts and monogrammed blazers staring up at the whale skeleton while their teacher explains something about it. Another group from the same school is standing in a cluster near the Darwin cabinet. The girls’ kilts are hemmed above the knee, their long hair is thickly fringed and there’s a tight, self-conscious look on most of their made-up faces. Jane knows that Lily would be in her early twenties now, but always imagines her stuck at the age of these petulant girls — fourteen, fifteen — on that precipice between childhood and adulthood.
In the years after Lily disappeared, Jane imagined that William must have believed he’d see his daughter again the same way that Jane, after her mother died, still expected her to be at her desk under the stairs of the cottage, or to pull up outside Jane’s flat and tap the car horn. But such belief dissipates. In the beginning William must have thought he would spend the rest of his life imagining his daughter rounding a corner and appearing before his eyes: Lily at six, at seven, at eight. He must have looked for her in the parks he walked past, in the crowds of children on tours at the Natural History Museum where he worked — fifty faces staring up at the giant woolly mammoth — and he would have glanced at each one of the girls as he passed by. But then slowly his grip on her must have loosened; he would have questioned whether or not he would know the shape of her face, the exact shade of her light-brown curls. At some point he probably stopped calculating her age. He would pack up his day’s work in the herbarium, then stop to stare out at the inner courtyard and down toward the ferns. He would be forced to work it out and hate himself for it: she was five when she disappeared, it was 1991 … what year is it now? And he’d have to look at his desk calendar or picture himself dating a letter to ground himself: the exact date difficult to determine because it fell into a larger swell of time without purpose, and his head was filled with catalogues, inventories, procedural systems. His life one of habits — habits that dictated when to wake up, when to eat, at what hour to switch on the telly, when to go to bed, what list from the collections to mentally flip through in the half hour between getting under the covers and falling sleep.
The research probably saved him. When Jane saw The Lost Gardens of England on the shelf in the museum shop she imagined the writing of it would have been a kind of solace. There’d have been little room for Lily in a book on plant hunters of the nineteenth century, in the classifications of species, in letters and dispatches from Ningpo or the Casiquiare River, the descriptions of Amaryllis and Lobelia shipped back from the Cape. So she had conceived of the book as a kind of escape for him — until two weeks ago when she read it and got to the last chapter on George Farrington and the alpine gardens he’d planted up north, and realized that to write that chapter William must have had to visit the estate again, to drive up from London on the same road he and she and Lily had taken together and to canvass the trail at Inglewood much as he’d been doing when Lily disappeared.
Jane puts her hands on the railing to steady herself, and one of the schoolgirls below, a blonde with pencilled eyebrows and a long aristocratic nose whom Jane has been absent-mindedly staring at, gives her the two-fingered salute and then stalks off toward the Nelson cabinet. In a few hours she and all the other visitors will be gone, and Jane will be standing in a black dress by the door, greeting guests, greeting William. For years she has imagined his life, how it must have changed, what it must be like now: the compactness of it, the self-imposed isolation — like the shells in the Moore collection, something small and hard a body could curl into. A lump rises in her throat when, descending the stairs, she realizes that it’s not really his life she’s been imagining, but her own.
From a distance, patterns are easy to discern and people are predictable. Most have a habit of circling back to what they know, to places that feel safe and familiar. Over the past eight years we’ve come to know what Jane will pay attention to when she walks through the museum: which cabinets she will ignore, which ones she’ll gaze at, which she’ll open. But the past six weeks have changed everything. Her movements and intentions are affected by collections going up for auction, by the need to assemble documents according to other people’s schedules, by the fact that William Eliot will be here giving a talk about his book. Jane is thinking less about us, and more about him because of this.