Sam whines and Jane glances over to find him sniffing along the flagstone by what would have been the servants’ entrance, beside a trap door for deliveries. The delivery door is flapped open on one side and Sam wags madly as he tracks someone’s coming and going. “I don’t think so, bub,” Jane laughs, pressing her face back to the library window. When she turns to him again a minute later, he has toddled down two stairs and his back end is sticking up out of the entrance. “Sam! Get out of there!”
The steps Sam is sniffing around on are worn in the middle from over a century and a half of use. Crouching down Jane can see that they lead into what looks to be the washing-up part of the kitchen. The open access is a permission she doesn’t think too long about. As a precaution Jane calls, “Hello?”—and taking this as a kind of consent, Sam bounds all the way into the kitchen and around the corner and out of view.
The washing-up area is spare, block-walled except for the plastered area near the pipes, most of which are post-war add-ons that terminate, open-mouthed, near the corner. There are two large metal basins along the far wall, old 1930s things, with wood counters on either side. A plastic Tesco bag is sitting on one of them. Jane goes over and opens it gingerly to find a freshly wrapped sandwich, a bottle of water, a bag of crisps and an apple. Hearing the plastic rustle, Sam trots back from the other part of the kitchen and wags his tail against the metal legs of the basin.
“Shhh,” Jane whispers.
As Jane wanders from room to room, she muses that Inglewood House seems just like any old house that a new owner is moving into — boxes and crates everywhere, workboot prints on the hardwood, cans of paint and drop cloths, a battery-operated radio on the floor of the main hall next to a dustpan and broom. The look and feel of the place is still mid to late Victorian: the rooms dark wood and richly painted, the details around the archways intact, the Gothic embellishments on the banister handrails just as the Farringtons would have had them. The library Jane had surveyed from the window is dark blue, the carved armchairs under the sheets probably Chippendales. Opposite the fireplace Jane lifts a sheet and finds a satinwood cabinet with Wedgwood plaques depicting hunting scenes on its doors. The dining room adjacent still has what looks to be its original wallpaper — a faded grey Asian print sprigged with cherry blossoms. In the study that she imagines would have been George’s, Jane lifts a sheet’s corner to find a dark-red scroll-armed sofa, threadbare where one might have rested one’s arm, and then a mahogany secretary and a worn black leather armchair. Under a sheet stamped with the name of a turn-of-the-century hotel she finds a cabinet filled with glasses and decanters. The boxes and crates in each room bear inventory stickers — ovals stamped FT and bearing a London address, their designations handwritten in marker underneath: GFS 60-122, GFS 123–140. The system reminds Jane of the work she should be going back to, although what’s here is infinitely more appealing because it seems to be about re-creating, not dispersing, a world.
Walking past marble pillars and carpets wrapped in plastic, Jane thinks how strange it is that she has tried and failed to properly imagine this place. She recalls what she knows of George and Prudence, of Norvill, and can’t even decide if the waist-high pillar in front of her would have hosted the sculpted head of a beautiful girl or Theseus slaying the Minotaur. At the end of the hall she opens a heavy wood door and is shocked to find a deteriorating wall-to-wall animal mural in what must have been the nursery or schoolroom. Ten wild animals are arranged around its perimeter: a shaggy lion in full-toothed roar, an elephant with his trunk trumpeting toward the ceiling. There’s a sanguine giraffe drawn out of proportion, a gorilla in a top hat and a mean-looking tiger so faded from the sunlight streaming through the window that he looks as if he’s receding into a far-off dream. Jane thinks about the young George Farrington as William had described him in the last chapter of his book: a self-conscious child, singular in his focus, constantly at his mother’s knee. And Norvill as a boy? Nothing that she has read would say. Charlotte’s diaries stick mostly to the details surrounding his visits to the museum or to the house to see Edmund, with little reference to what kind of man he was, let alone what kind of child. The Chester archives and Edmund’s accounts state when Norvill did and did not appear for meetings at the museum, what contributions he made by way of geological specimens, but offer nothing about what it might mean to spend formative days surrounded by tribes of wild animals — the painted ones in the schoolroom or the stuffed ones under plastic in the main hall.
When she finds the parlour near the front of the house, Jane lifts the sheet off the horsehair sofa and sits. The black leather is split on the curve of the arm so that she can slip her fingers into its seam and feel the bristled fibres. There are a half-dozen inventoried boxes along the wall of the parlour and a stuffed grouse shrouded in clear wrapping, a mahogany longcase clock beside it. The ceiling is lower than she expected, and the wall where she imagined a set of watercolours hanging from ribbons is bare. The view from the window is of the great expanse of the front lawn. This room, or perhaps George’s study next door, would have been lit up on the night of N’s disappearance — would have cast the light Leeson and Herschel and N were drawn toward after their long walk from the Whitmore.
Some of us have been in Inglewood House before, can conjure the objects that lined the shelves and cupboards, the pastoral oils that hung from the walls, embellishments we once touched or were responsible for. The plate was kept here, this book cabinet was locked, flowers were to be placed on this mantel, an armoire was located in this nook, the gun room was down that hall, this was the larder, the scullery; the laundry was pushed down this chute to be collected in the morning. We are like inventors, staring at a machine that isn’t there, that we seem to make exist out of the whirl of our own ardour. This, after all, is what we have been after — bits and pieces of stories we’ve lived, images that sail back to us as we enter a room, even if what we glean is the kind of knowledge that comes from village gossip — how one year the season’s bag of pheasants exceeded three hundred and George complained that it was more trouble to find mouths willing to eat so much bird than it was to go out on horseback and procure it. And so we see him here in this room, greeting a visitor or hastily reading a letter; or we glimpse Prudence upstairs in her cotton nightdress with her hair braided — recall how, in her last years, she insisted on starting each morning with three tinctures, how watching her open her mouth to receive them was like watching a baby bird.
You might ask what it’s like to conjure such moments, to say that Herschel once sat where Jane is sitting and that Leeson stood in this very room and bowed for Prudence with a Romantic flourish she secretly liked. To suggest that the three clocks plunged on with their awkward ticking, each half-second announced like some fissure in physics the idiot thinks we can slip into. To remember N at the door watching the footman, then darting away when he went to find Farrington. To know that Farrington, assessing the situation quickly, took over before the footman realized that the number of the party had changed.
“Twoo,” one of us says, and Cat sighs and air-kisses a circle around all of us.