A taxi had dropped Jane off at Lewis’s house just before midnight. She’d thought about knocking on the door but hadn’t wanted him to see that she was upset, so she’d jotted down a note about taking the car on the back of a receipt folded up in her wallet and slipped it through his post box. When she got back to her flat she parked her grandparents’ old Mercedes in a No Stopping zone and put the hazard lights on. Inside the flat she threw a handful of clothes into an overnight bag, left her mobile phone with its four missed calls from Gareth on the kitchen table, changed out of her dress and collected Sam, remembering to leave a note for Dora, who lived in a flat upstairs, saying that she wouldn’t need to walk the dog. She had her seat belt on before it occurred to her to go back for the box of files — pulling the Whitmore research out from under the bed and stuffing it into the boot next to a fuzzy grey jumper that probably belonged to Natalie or one of the girls.
Those of us who were there, who had followed her when she ran out of the Chester, tried to sort out what she was doing; we broached whether one of us should stay in the flat and wait for the others to return.
“Attendance!” shouted the theologian, but everything was moving too fast for voices to be sorted.
By the time the Mercedes surged onto the motorway headed north, we were divided, at odds about what to do, unsure where we were going.
After she slapped him, after the conversations in the radius around William and Jane stalled, everyone had turned and stared at her. This is the scene she keeps trying to suppress while she’s driving: the publicist rushing over and putting her hand on William’s arm, saying, “Mr. Eliot? Is everything all right?” and William just standing there, rubbing his cheek and staring at Jane with a shocked expression that either meant he’d finally recognized her or that he was baffled at the seemingly random act of a stranger. And so she had run — pushing through a group of six or seven people holding wineglasses, and past Jacek, the security guard, who she was sure would reach out and stop her, force her to turn around. An expression of concern clouded his face; perhaps he’d assumed she’d had a row with a date and was rushing out to get some air.
No one was on the street when Jane burst through the door, and not knowing where to go she’d slipped into the park across the road, ducking behind the boxwood and moving along the hedge, her heels spiking the grass. There was a bench in an unlit corner along the far side of the green and so Jane made her way there, her hand on her mouth to keep the sound in her throat from escaping, though it came out anyway, a yelp she didn’t recognize as hers, a sound like the one Sam sometimes made in the middle of the night, his back legs scrabbling the floor.
City sounds travel differently at night, and sitting on the park bench Jane became as aware of the din as we often are: the whoosh of the nearby traffic drifting over the park only to slide back down over the sloping roofs of the terrace houses; the weight of her own ragged breath rising in the air and then cascading around her. Sound becoming like movement or waves of light — which is how we sometimes see it, as if the human cacophony is a spectrum of colour: Jane’s jagged breathing an ice blue; the woodsy thrum of the string quartet, who had picked up their instruments again on the other side of the Chester’s windows, a burnished yellow-brown.
Hearing the music start up again, Jane had turned toward the park gate and dared to imagine that the space she and William had occupied, the stillness and silence that had followed the slap, might somehow be blotted out by guests moving toward each other and rejoining their conversations, by the quartet taking up their instruments and playing again as if nothing had happened between movements. But then, on the other side of the boxwood, she heard a car stop in front of the museum, its tires slick on the pavement. A few seconds later a man’s muffled voice stated a destination and the driver replied, “No problem.”
Jane could have peered around the edge of the shrub to confirm that it was William and his family getting into a taxi. She could have stepped out and tried to explain herself, tried to justify in some semi-coherent formulation what had just occurred, but she didn’t. The taxi doors opened and people got in, and the driver sped away.
• • •
When she gets tired of driving, of the quiet of the near-empty roads, Jane switches on the radio. The music is so loud we’re barely able to converse, to confirm who is with us and who is missing. The theologian shouts at us to stay awake, to focus, because this is one of the ways he believes you can Cease — by being lulled into the complacency that comes with travel. So the musician hums along to Ravel, and the idiot watches for cars sweeping by in the opposite direction, christening each set of ghosting headlamps with a name: “Electron,” “Proton,” “Neutron,” “Nucleus.” Cat asks repeatedly, “Who is missing?” and John shouts, “Stop asking that!” even as he tries to ferret out who got left behind. There is something strange yet ordinary about it all, as if we are a family heading out on holiday — our excitement almost frantic, the lot of us talking over each other and then sulking in silence.
By the time we pass the exit that leads to the family cottage at the Lakes we decide that Jane must have known where she was headed from the moment she left the city. Most of us assumed that she would do what she’d mentioned to Lewis in The Lamb weeks ago — hole up and regroup, go through the last of Claire’s things. But we are wrong. Instead, Jane takes the exit toward Inglewood. She is focusing on the notes of the final movement of Brahms’s fourth symphony as she turns, and then she follows the broadcaster’s voice as he relays the news: austerity measures abroad, the high street in peril, monks setting themselves on fire, the miners still trapped underground. Jane thinking, Boccherini String Quintet in E Major when the music starts playing, thinking that by the time the rescuers drill an air hole down far enough the miners will all be dead.
As she drives into Inglewood village Jane is strategizing about where to leave the car so that it won’t be conspicuous. The locals probably expect a few unfamiliar vehicles parked around the inn, whereas a car left by the trailhead in the early hours of the morning might raise questions. Jane knows that there’s been a volunteer search-and-rescue group working in the area since well before Lily went missing, a handful of residents who can be called out to assist climbers or cavers lost or in trouble in the caves at the far end of the botanical trail — people who might take seriously a car sitting in the hikers’ parking lot at five a.m.
The last time she’d come here with William and Lily they’d parked down the road from the pub along the narrow river that forms a channel through the centre of town. The limestone cottages lined up on either side of the water are grey and nearly identical, as if the whole village had been built in a fit of industrial prosperity. Inglewood had been pleasant that day, the sun out and the main street in bloom. Ceramic pots bursting with pansies were lodged outside the shops next to welcome mats and boot scrapers; bells rang above the doorways when people walked through.
This morning, the sky is a dusky grey as Jane drives down the street. The porch lights on most of the houses hunkered along the river have yet to be turned on. At the top of the street Jane sees a church, its tower lit by a dozen spotlights hidden in the shrubbery. There’s a parking lot at the rear with two cars already in it, so Jane pulls up next to the one closest to the road — an old Vauxhall with a layer of leaves matted against its windscreen. She cuts the engine, gets out and opens the back door for Sam.