No further mention of N — was to be found.
2
Jane wakes to the whooping sound of the corner shop’s alarm. The shop recently hired a new assistant and the alarm has gone off at six a.m. three days in a row. Jane knows that if she sticks her head out the window the shop assistant will be on his mobile phone shouting in Punjabi and waving one hand toward the security gate. It usually takes five to ten minutes for the alarm to stop, so Jane presses her pillow over her face to muffle the sound, the metallic tang of last night’s sleeping pill still on her tongue.
It comes back to her then — the dream about the woods and the Whitmore, the dream about the girl she only knows as “N.” Jane is glad to be thinking about her again, but there’s guilt in the thought too. For the last six weeks, she’s been too busy with work at the Chester Museum to spend any time on the Whitmore; all the research she’d been doing was stuffed reluctantly into a box and shoved under her bed. What Jane wonders, tracing her way around the edges of the dream, is how N got out of the hospital — not the act, the hand that lifts the latch, opens the door, but rather what wells up in a person so that one day they do the unexpected. She would like to know this because there’s something welling inside her too, although she doesn’t see it as clearly as we do.
The sound of a steel gate being kicked repeatedly clangs into the room from down the street and Jane groans into her pillow then slides it off her face. Those of us who were in other rooms come in and gather around her, our presence as invisible as the chutes of air drifting under the cracked-open window.
After a minute the alarm stops and London begins to rouse itself: delivery vans rattle down the road, taxis ferry people to their jobs and businesses, the man in the brown corduroy jacket trots his beagle out to the adjacent green — doing so with such dependability we could set our watches by him if we had a need for watches. Across the street, morning light sifts through the clouds to give back the terraced row houses their eggshell colour; the neon signs on the chip and curry shops down the road buzz and flicker. Jane pushes the covers away and thinks about the tea set sitting beside her desk at work, the one that Gareth, the Chester’s director and curator, said he wanted shipped a week ago. And for a minute, caught up in the idea of simple tasks, caught up in the drift of the Whitmore and N, she doesn’t remember what day it is or what will happen by the end of it; she simply thinks work and puts her hand out for her spaniel, Sam, who trots over to have his ears rubbed. Then it’s there, in her waking brain: the fact that the museum is closing, that she will be unemployed in two weeks and that tonight she is going to see William Eliot.
The woods dreams are the ones Jane has most often, though in the past few months there have also been the usual sort about missed recitals and failed exams, about something bad happening to the dog, about her brother, Lewis, turning into a robot. And there have been dreams set in the museum where she works — though these are mostly about lost objects that turn up in the wrong cabinets or collections. We have our preferences, can behave like a pack of critics, sigh, “Not that one again” when the dream about Jane’s mother losing her in Marks and Spencer starts up, or turn away when the narratives become too strange, when they dwell too long on death or dying.
Sometimes when that happens we play a game. It’s a child’s game, but some of us are children. Besides, we know all games have a purpose: they prepare you for the world you are about to enter, inform the character of the person you are to become. We call this game “Where Is It?” and we start by taking turns. One voice calls out a question: “What’s my name?” or “Where was I born?” or “How far have I travelled?” or “What age do you think I am?” And those of us in the room begin to look for the answer in the things around us. We look on the spines of books; we look in Jane’s picture frames, in the water glass on the bedside table. We look in the closet, in her yawning handbags, in the hollows of her pencil skirts and dresses. We skim the empty music stand, peer down the sound holes of the cello, repeat the question into the black slot of its S then wait to see if it will send back an answer. We finger the knotted ends of the blue rug, gaze out the window that looks over the city street. When we get bored, the one who asked the question will coax us on by repeating the question—“Where is it?”—and we’ll move into the living room and run our eyes over the potted fig, the wingback chair, trace the swirling limestone fossil Jane’s brother gave her one Christmas. Then we’ll look in the gap between the sofa and its cushions, peer into the rubbish bin. “This is easier in the museum,” we’ll say, but shrug and keep going: inspect the Dutch jug from the market, the bird’s nest Sam sniffed out in the park, the soft folds of the curtains. We’ll stare into the blank screen of the telly, at the mirror above the dining room table, look into the rounds of the spoons in the drying rack — but we’ll see and find nothing.
In the past few weeks we’ve begun looking under the far side of the bed at the box where Jane put her research papers, near the blanket the dog sleeps on. If we’re feeling really brave we stay there, let Sam stretch his neck, sniff the air in our direction, his spaniel’s face as white as a lamb’s, his brown eyes curiously discerning. Yesterday he gave a low growl and those of us who were studying the box gave up and moved slowly back to our corners. That’s when we saw Jane curled up and sleeping. “There it is!” we said. “In there!” Thinking, Of course! Finally! We knew the answers must be hiding somewhere.
At seven o’clock Jane comes back from walking Sam around the green. She puts his leash on the kitchen counter for Dora, drops some food into his bowl and starts to get ready for work. Standing in front of her wardrobe, she tries to steady her thoughts, to focus on what she has to do in these next two weeks before the museum closes for good. Today is the last day of public admission, and tonight is the Chester’s official farewell party, a gala timed to coincide with the annual Chester-Wood Book Prize lecture and reception. A month ago, William Eliot, botanical keeper at the Natural History Museum, was announced as the recipient of this year’s prize for his non-fiction book The Lost Gardens of England. In less than twelve hours he will take the podium to deliver a lecture and talk about his work. Jane has not seen William since she was fifteen years old, and even though there is a part of her that wants to believe otherwise, she is certain he will not want to see her now.
Pressing the pads of her fingers against the puffiness under her eyes, Jane steps back to check her appearance in the bathroom mirror. She is thirty-four. She is not vain but knows she is pretty enough. Her mother was stunning — which is how Jane grew into her own self-assurance: by basking in the attention spilled onto her by men caught up in her mother’s beauty. Tying her hair up, Jane thinks again about N, wonders if she was tall, if she was pale-skinned, if she had dark hair. In the dreams N always resembles her — not the girl Jane was at eighteen, but the woman she is now: high cheekbones, pert nose, a tendency to blush when self-conscious. Her former boyfriend Ben once remarked, just after he’d moved in with her, that Jane reminded him of a deer, all that nervous, pent-up energy. He was running a finger over her collarbone, imagined he could feel a tremor. She took his comment the wrong way, as she often did, swatted at his hand and got out of bed. She threw his trousers at him, forgetting that he lived with her now and had no apartment of his own to retreat to. He thought it was funny, tried pulling her back down, said, “Come on, I love deer. What’s not to love?”