Jane knows she is repeating herself, hiding again. Not only because Maureen and her husband are of an age that means they might once have helped search for Lily, might still remember Jane’s name, but also because she might really want to escape this time, fall off the map for good.
The Whitmore’s concert announcements and entertainment programmes are spread out on the floor of Jane’s room where she left them last night. After the run-in with the kid at Inglewood House she’d been too wound up to come directly back here, so she’d driven to Moorgate — the largest hub in the area — and she and Sam had window-shopped the chain stores on the high street because it was Sunday and almost everything was closed. Tomorrow she’ll drive over there again to go to the local records office, where she had done some of her dissertation research. The original Whitmore ball invitation should still be there and she’ll be able to check the exact date. The office will likely have some of the Farrington estate archives as well, if they haven’t ended up in a private collection or with Prudence’s side of the family.
Outside Jane’s window dusk is falling. The street lamps blink on although they’re not yet needed. Across the river a group of hikers is traipsing back into the village, their heavy outer layers tucked under their arms or strapped to their packs. They pass a spry-looking gentleman in a tweed cap tossing crumbs to the ducks, and Jane watches them laugh at the brown-and-white-speckled forms congregating below him. There are a dozen cars situated around the church up the road, and when Jane presses her face to the window she can see that the clock tower reads half past five. After a minute she turns back to the Whitmore box, picks up the page of notes she made last night, puzzles over it again. She can see no patterns or leads in what she’s written; N is not mentioned, a hole in the middle of everything.
Jane had told Maureen yesterday that she would stay until Wednesday — three days away. Three days isn’t a lot of time, but it isn’t unreasonable. She decides that if on Wednesday she has no solid lead as to who N was or what happened to her, she’ll give up, head to the Lakes as Lewis expected her to, call Gareth and explain herself. She’ll clear out the cottage to sell it, and sift through the last of her mother’s things.
Out of habit we tilt our heads. We consider Jane’s predicament, how hard she is being on herself. We are sympathetic, but even our sympathy is outweighed by our determination to keep hold of the larger truths we are learning.
“What about the Whitmore?” we ask. Inglewood House is all well and good but some of us have never been there. As we walked through its rooms with Jane some of us felt as if we were dropping in on strangers with whom we had only one tenuous connection.
“We have until Wednesday,” John says, watching Jane rummage through the bag of clothes she’d packed hurriedly in London.
“How much time is that?” asks the boy.
“Arpeggio,” answers the musician.
“Not enough,” the theologian snaps, preoccupied with what pressed on him in the small parlour at the manor, a word or a set of words, a circumstance on the tip of his tongue.
Jane is changing to go out for dinner, and as she pulls a thin blue angora sweater over her head, we bristle because the cloud of it begs for touching and because we don’t want her to stop what she’s doing when there are still files to go through. Thinking about the ball gave some of us a semblance of self, the tour of Inglewood House did the same for others, and we are all craving to feel that way again. But Jane has turned away from the Whitmore box. She straightens her skirt and dabs her lipstick, and the cluster that is us rises to follow her out the door.
“I’m going for a walk,” the theologian says irritably.
“Don’t,” Cat replies. “You’re the one who’s always saying ‘stay together.’ ”
“Perhaps I overestimated the company.”
“There’s no need for—” John begins, but before he can finish the theologian has slipped out the door.
There is always a sense of gloom when one of us leaves. Few who wander off come back. For this reason, for a very long time in our first years of solidarity, hardly any of us went off on our own unless absolutely necessary. We don’t know what happens to those who disappear. Maybe they get better leads and head off to follow them; maybe they learn things they want or don’t want to know and, full to bursting with the knowledge, close their eyes and Cease.
“What now?” asks Cat.
“Dinner,” says the musician, and he raises his arms to conduct us, whistling as he ghosts through the door.
The idiot once told a bedtime story to the children that began with a great black sea that doubled as an ink-dark sky. When you looked, it was filled with stars and seashells lined up together.
“Stars and seashells?” the girl had squealed.
“Absolutely,” the idiot confirmed. “Caught in the great net of time.”
“Where are we?” she asked, hoping we were the fishermen.
“Where do you think we are?”
“On the water?”
“No.”
“In the moon?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She smacked her lips. “A spaceship!”
“No, we’re the house the sea-sky lives in. It’s in our heads twirling around; a spiral galaxy that’s shaped like a snail.”
“Ewww.”
“Why not?” He laughed. “Think of the breakfasts the mind can eat: Sands of time! Acres of now! Parcels of eternity! Tasty stuff.”
“Don’t listen to him,” the theologian said, calling out from the wingback chair under Jane’s sitting room window. “The sky is the sky, and the sea is the sea, end of discussion.”
But it was too late. We’d all listened to the idiot’s story and something in what he said as he carried on shaped how we started to think of ourselves, led to a sense that we were stuck together in something that could not be flattened out in ways that would otherwise be perfectly sensible. It was as if we were knots in a net that could take different shapes at different times. As if we might, one day, loop back on ourselves, come so close to the past we’d be able to taste the dust of our history in our mouths.
The pub at dinnertime is packed and smells of spilled beer and curry. Jane has avoided coming here until now because she doesn’t want to have the you’re-not-from-around-here conversation. She takes a seat at a low round table. A waitress comes over and drops a plastic menu in front of her, asks what Jane would like to drink.
“White wine, thanks.”
The girl taps the wine list and Jane scans it.
“The Chenin.”
“Small or large?”
Jane glances at the two tables nearest to her: plates of fish and chips, roast and potato, pints, a couple sharing a bottle of Malbec. “Large, thanks.”
The pub is almost exactly as she remembers from twenty years ago. The red-and-gold-medallioned carpets are the same, the leather stools and wood-backed booths, the belled lamps over the dining area tables. But there is a row of coin-operated games along the far wall now, flat-screen televisions recapping the day in rugby, a snooker table that may or may not have been there before. The customers are a mix of locals and tourists: a group of men in heavy boots and jeans at the bar, a few couples out on the smoking patio, the shop cashier from yesterday chatting up two girlfriends over by the far window and hikers tucking into dinner, their Gore-Tex jackets hanging off a nearby coat rack. At the far end of the bar there’s a cluster of twenty-year-olds standing around a high table, the kid from Inglewood House amongst them.