The Other Side of the World (10 page)

“Humbug,” said her mother. “It's just a bit of water.”

Charlotte concentrated on pulling apart a warm scone. She was not accustomed to seeing her mother without curls. It was one of Iris's little rules that she did not let anyone into the house, nor did she ever leave the house, until her hair was washed, set, and dried. She thought the curls deflected attention from her wrinkles and made her appear taller, the fluffy hairdo adding an inch or two to her shrinking frame. She was very particular about such things: her soft glossy hair and her matching neck scarves and earrings—yellow today, Charlotte noticed. Charlotte realized now how well the curls disguised her mother's age. Without them the bones stood out, like some curious rock formation exposed to the elements, the high forehead and the sharp cheekbones loosely draped in powdered skin.

Iris glanced nervously about the room, her painted eyebrows, too pink and too arched, lending her a look of constant fright. Charlotte turned away. It was not fair, that the weather could embarrass a woman like this. But it was true, her mother was frail, older than her years.

“I suppose it's too late to change your mind?” Iris said, picking up her teacup.

“Yes,” Charlotte replied. “Everything's done.” She pulled at
the string of beads on her neck, running her finger and thumb along the loop. “Strange to think we go in just a few days. I never would have thought . . . I never thought . . .”

She wanted to say that she had considered letting Henry go alone, that she would stay if she could, that she didn't want to go, that it was his decision. That she'd never really said yes, or if she had she'd never meant to. She opened her mouth to tell her mother this, but something stopped her.

There was a time when she told her mother everything, but while the desire to confess was still there, it now felt as though any mention of her own feelings would be a betrayal of Henry. It was not just that some of those feelings would be about her private quarrels with Henry, and so sharing them would mean speaking badly of him. No, the betrayal would not be a simple one to do with secrets but a deeper betrayal, for now that she was married it was Henry who was the rightful receptacle of those feelings, and her mother had no claim to them. Besides, Henry might be right, their new life might be something wonderful. There was that possibility.

“I'll write,” she said.

“Yes,” said Iris, holding her napkin to her mouth and wiping a streak of cream from her top lip. “Yes, you do that.”

C
harlotte is still sleeping when Henry leaves for his office ­early the next morning. He readies himself quietly, careful not to disturb—he heard her moving about in the night. Such restlessness troubles him; it is too much like the time before, that old life when she was as good as lost to the fields.

He pushes the thought away: there is a busy day ahead. He has essays to mark, an article to finish, and a new book of poems he must start in on. Once settled at his desk he drinks his coffee and organizes his papers. But his mind won't stick to the tasks at hand. Instead the scene in the car comes back to him, over and over:
Because you will not let it happen
, she said.
Because it can't happen
, he corrected her. For Charlotte's sake he will act as if the argument has not bothered him, although in truth her request has left him unnerved. Surely, he thinks, surely she understands the impossibility. She must. They can't go back now—they couldn't afford it; it would mean they'd have to repay their full fares out, as well as the return. And even if they had the money, he wouldn't want to go. It would be a failure on all fronts. Yet for her to be unhappy like this?

He sits with his shoulders hunched over the desk, papers spread around him. Beyond the window the sky is high and clear, pale and bright. He spends a lot of time looking at the sky. He does so, at first, in order to better think about his work, then to better think about Charlotte, then he looks at the sky to clear his mind, to stop thinking about these things altogether. A new feeling troubles him, as if the center of his life were somehow
­slipping away. Hours pass, unproductive, until eventually he ­rouses himself. What is the point of this? he thinks. He stands up, shuffles his papers into his briefcase, and leaves for home.

Back at the house he finds Charlotte in the kitchen, the children playing on the floor in the doorway. He steps across the mess of toys and kisses her on the cheek. She tilts her face towards him without pausing her work, making it clear she is busy. Henry would normally take a cold drink from the fridge and sit down, but today he fusses about trying to be helpful although really just getting in the way—refolding the tea towel on the rack, sweeping the crumbs from around the toaster into the palm of his hand. There is a bill on the counter and he slits the envelope open with a butter knife.

“I've been thinking,” he says slowly, inspecting the piece of paper without reading it, “perhaps we'd be better off in a city, out of the suburbs.” His voice is soft, his tone casual—he wants, more than anything, to appease. “Somewhere else,” he continues, “not here perhaps. Perhaps we'd be better off in South Africa. It's an option, you know. The jacaranda trees in Cape Town are meant to be lovely, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I've heard—high up on the mountain. Or we could get an acreage, if you'd prefer, just out of the city. Maybe this isn't the place, maybe you're right—”

Charlotte is pouring batter into a tin, the
Golden Wattle Cookery Book
open to a recipe for sponge cake. “What?” she says. She looks up at him, her voice loaded with disbelief. “Henry, you'd be subject to apartheid.”

“Oh,” he says, his gaze sinking down and landing somewhere to the left of her feet, the toes of her brown house shoes ­dusted with flour. “Oh, of—of course,” he stammers. He'd returned home hopeful, pleased with this new idea. It had come to him
while he was driving, looking out over the tawny grasslands. The surprise now is not so much that he hadn't thought of his own predicament, but that she does. For the first time he understands that in her eyes he is, or could be, that thing: a person others would call colored. “Of course,” he says again, his stomach lurching. “How did I not think of that?” His eyes dart across to Charlotte, but she is busy pushing the cake into the oven. She slams the door closed and turns to the sink. He wants her to say something else. He wants her to absolve him of this embarrassing blunder. Instead she seems to be pretending that he is not there. Henry hovers in the doorway a minute longer, then he moves to the sideboard, takes the placemats from the drawer, and sets them out for dinner.

During the meal Henry is silent, and as soon as it is finished the children are whisked off for their bath. He pours a drink then and sits down to the television news. There is the trumpet call of the evening broadcast, followed by the first bulletin, the presenter's voice drowned out by the racket coming from the bathroom, the water too hot then too cold then not deep enough, Charlotte's stern voice pitted against Lucie's wails. Henry feels a rush of shame. It was a genuine suggestion but now he must pretend it was not. Worse, perhaps, is that his own error of self-judgment has been revealed; she knows what Henry, until tonight, did not know or did not wish to admit to himself. In marriage one wants to be equal. Such a desire might not be conventional, but it is what Henry wants. Yet now he feels lesser somehow, foolish and lowly. Fraudulent. Misplaced, even to her. As if Charlotte has known all along how the world must see him and for his sake has pretended otherwise.

His attention drifts back to the set; the picture is fuzzy. He gets up from his chair and wiggles the antennae, then sits back
down again. It doesn't really matter; he isn't especially interested in the picture—more irritated by the flickering of the screen. It is the peace and quiet that he likes, Charlotte and the children leaving him alone in the belief that when he sits down to the evening news he is doing something noble—
Don't bother your father now
—keeping up with the events of the world for their collective benefit. “You are an intelligent man,” Charlotte said over dinner. “Really, how could you not think?” Her voice was steady—a parent reprimanding then absolving a wayward child. But he only suggested it for her sake, to help her and make things better. His attention drifts in and out. Sometimes, when the children are being bathed he has a little doze as the news rolls on, and this, too, is a failure to be accommodated, with Charlotte coming up behind him and stroking his head. “Poor darling,” she'd say, “you've been working too hard again.”

By now the news has passed and the presenter introduces the weather. The cardboard map of the country comes into view, with the weatherman standing to the left of it and pointing with his wooden rod. There are numbers stuck on the map indicating today's temperatures, and wavy lines to show low- and high-pressure zones. He's never understood these details—the way air moves up and down, in and out. Many times he's marveled at a bird rising higher and higher on an invisible current and supposes this must be part of it, but maybe not.

In the background he can hear the bathwater gurgling fast down the plughole. Charlotte struggles to get them in, then struggles to get them out—pulling the plug is the only way, playing on the fear that they'll get sucked down and end up somewhere else: China, she used to say, but now it would be England. Whatever place happens to be on the other side of the world. Upside down, back to front. Topsy-turvy.

The picture on the television flickers and jumps. This time he gives the set a good thump and the picture steadies. There's only a few minutes left, the presenter now tracing the wavy lines to indicate how the weather will change or not, depending; more heat, no rain. Henry stares blankly, not really listening but taking in the shape of the country, so large and roughly symmetrical. An island with a center, a center that is an interior. There is something consoling about this image—how it seems geometrically stable, as if it were of the right proportions to function as a raft, a landmass capable of floating amid all the surrounding water. A place of safety. Dry and buoyant. A line comes to him: No man is an island.
No man is an island entire of itself
. But that is the fear, isn't it? The fear and the desire. And there he was, being ­exactly that in suggesting South Africa, showing his ignorance. Self-­enclosed, rootless, dislocated from the main. A person painted with the tar brush—a nigger, for want of a better word, because nobody knew what else to call an English Indian man in Australia. He's heard of others not so unlike himself being excluded from the bowling club and the Returned and Services League, having stones thrown through their windows. Aliens, they were called, in formal parlance. He hadn't really meant it, the South Africa idea, she must know that. It was just a thought, that was all, just another foolish thought.

Henry switches off the set and sits back in his chair. The house is quiet: Charlotte is putting the girls to bed. He can hear, ever so faintly, the lilt of her voice as she sings to them. He closes his eyes and listens, Charlotte's voice mixing with the sound of a birdcall coming from the night garden. The bird makes a hollow, hooting song, like that of an owl, but it is perhaps not an owl.

From where Charlotte sits she hears it too, the birdcall carrying through the house. She stops singing then and listens, the bird hoot-hooting while May drifts off to sleep. She imagines, just for a moment, that it is the sound of a ghost. But come now, she thinks, there is no such thing—this is what she tells the children—and ­wishes only that she knew the name of the creature so as to dispel the inexplicable rush of fear. May whimpers and Charlotte is pleased to move closer to her, finding comfort in the comfort she gives. For the bird ignites a familiar, troubled feeling, the feeling she often has at night, when the children are asleep and Henry has nodded off in his chair and she is left to wander through the house switching off the lights. She feels then not just that she is ­surrounded by a country unfamiliar but as if the whole known world has disintegrated into the salty, black air that floats around the house.

The next day is Saturday and Henry is up early, digging in the garden. The ground is tough, full of rock and root. He has no stomach for company and works hard; the sky is still pale, the sun not fully risen, but already he has sweated through his shirt. Almost there now, he thinks. Just this last corner to clear. After this he will double dig the new beds, plant out the cucumbers in mounds. The carrots have come out looking strange: stubby and knotted, with extra roots shooting off the sides like tentacles. He has put them in a bucket and will give them to Charlotte for scrubbing. He'll have to talk to her then—they haven't said a word since dinner last night. Henry can count on one hand the times they've gone to bed without talking. It's never any good, he can't sleep on a fight. Is it a fight? He's not sure anymore—it feels as though they've reached a stalemate and he doesn't know now who should be sorry for what. If only she would paint again, he
thinks. If she could find her way back to this. Then maybe they could forget all the rest of it.

He places his boot on the top edge of the pitchfork and ­presses his weight down on it. The prongs move deeper. He wriggles and levers and pulls the fork out, then drives it in again, wrestling once more with the mangle of stones and weed roots and the spindly suckers of palm trees. It is good, this. It is what he needs, what he's always wanted—to be outside, in the sun, in the air. He ­straightens up and rests a moment. The sun is higher. The air hot and dry. He can hear Charlotte calling to the girls. His shirt clings to his back. He closes his eyes, to better feel the sun, and knows what it is, this place, its unexpected hold on him—how it reminds him of his old life in Delhi—the flat land, the pulsing, throbbing heat, the sky. If only he had never left it. If his sister hadn't died and he hadn't been sent away to that school in the hills. That was the beginning of the end, for although he was still in India, ­Shimla was where his life in England really started, in that mountain fog that the British flocked to, breathing it in and savoring a memory of home, the damp air carrying the faint smell of old pea soup, vegetable and fetid. He tries to unravel the logic of his life: if he'd never been sent to the hills, if independence hadn't come.

He gives a few more good heaves with the pitchfork, applying his weight to the knot of palm roots and levering the handle back and forth. When the root is exposed he bends down, grabs it in both hands, and pulls. He heaves and yanks and grunts and bit by bit the root separates itself from the dirt. Henry pulls harder, and harder, and harder still—he'll get it this time, dammit, he'll get this, he'll damn well—Then the thing snaps and Henry is thrown backwards. He lies there, blinking slowly. The breeze moves over his face. The blue sky swarms above. There's not even a cloud to look at. Trees move a little at the edge of his vision. A bird calls.
A child can be heard; their voice higher, then lower, then higher again as they jump up and down on a trampoline. A dog yaps in a nearby yard.

The world is drenched in light. Then, for a moment, it falls dark as Charlotte's shadow steals across his vision. She is making her way towards the washing line. Henry stands and brushes himself down; her shadow is the only dark spot in the glaring landscape, the black bend of her shoulders and the curve of her hat wobbling over the lawn.

At the opposite end of the yard Charlotte cranks the line ­lower. She hauls the white sheet onto the wire. The sun is too bright, shining on the white cotton, so she has to peg the sheet with eyes half-closed. The bottom of it trails on the ground. She ducks behind and pulls the hem down over the other side of the wire to lift the sheet out of the sand.

Henry watches her bend down to gather up a wet towel. She wears an A-line skirt, a split running up from the knee. It is the skirt she often wears when doing housework, and the seam at the top of the split has torn open and been mended many times. It must have recently torn again and not been fixed, for the split is long and ragged, running halfway up her thigh. As she bends over, Henry glimpses a flank of white skin. He imagines it warm, a little sticky with heat, soft. He'd like to touch it. He'd like to come up behind her and put his hand inside her skirt. Run his palm along the length of her leg. To say, Leave the children to play. Come inside with me.