The Other Side of the World (14 page)

C
harlotte arrives home from their walk to find Henry's car parked in the drive. She pushes open the front door and calls out, she and the children tumbling inside, all talking at once. They fall quiet at the sight of Henry sprawled on the sofa fast asleep, one arm flung over his head, a leg dropping off the side of the cushion, his mouth hanging open. Charlotte crouches down next to him. He snores once and his eyeballs flicker beneath their thin lids. The children look on. This, Charlotte thinks, is what he might look like when he is dead—the bluish tinge beneath his sunken eyes, the dark hollows of his temples. And his jowls, the way they fall back towards his ears, pulling the skin of his cheeks tight and exaggerating the fine bone-work beneath. Charlotte leans over, watching him breathe; he takes shallow gulps of air through his open mouth, thin lips just covering his small, ­tightly packed teeth. Looking at it like this—open and still, the lips stretched taut—his mouth seems not a mouth but a black and shallow hole in the lower half of his face.

Just then Henry startles and wakes, his eyes opening straight onto Charlotte. He blinks and the black circles of his pupils shrink, pulling her into focus. “Oh—” he says. “It's you.” He sounds relieved, pleased, perhaps a little surprised, as if she has come back to him, as if he's lately become accustomed to seeing her as someone else. She leans forwards and kisses him on the cheek, then goes outside to fetch the washing. The breeze has looped the tablecloth over the line and made a tangle of it. Charlotte gives the cloth a few good tugs and pulls it free, bundling the
washing against her stomach and carrying it to the house. She feels the air shift around her; a change is coming.

Inside, Lucie wants to read Henry a book—she has in her hand a copy of
The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
by Beatrix Potter and is ­already telling him the story. “And they find a door, a mountain, and is a key, I think? And spikes. There. See? Can I touch spikes? They are not spiky.” She is referring to the illustration of the hedgehog's head, tucked up beneath a cotton handkerchief. It is like listening to someone recount a dream, Henry thinks, the connections grand and infeasible and incomplete. Lately she has taken to reading to her dolls. What did he hear her say?
Once upon a time and long long ago and again and again and again
.

In the kitchen the phone rings. Charlotte answers. He hears her voice lifting and she laughs. It must be Carol. They call each other often these days and can chat for hours. Henry doesn't know what women find to talk about for so long. It suits him though: right now he really doesn't feel like talking. Normally it is Charlotte who checks the mail, but because he came home early he was at the gate when the postman arrived. He knew the paper straightaway—rough and cream-colored. A letter from India. He read it in the kitchen, then put the letter away and lay down on the sofa, where Charlotte later found him. It was too much: the scene with Collins, then this news.

It had been a poor monsoon, the letter from the nursing home said. So much rain and fog and dampness. His mother hadn't handled it well. There'd been the flu, then a chest infection, and now she was refusing to eat. “I write only to inform you,” the director said. His mind jumps from one difficulty to another. He'll have to think about it. He doesn't want to go—he thought he'd left that
place forever. And Collins? It's clear the man is out to make him obsolete. Henry pulls Lucie up onto his lap. “Read! Read!” she says.

“Once upon a time,” begins Henry, “there was a little girl called Lucie, who lived at a farm called Little-Town. She was a good little girl—only she was always losing her pocket handkerchiefs!”

Lucie giggles; she likes the book because of the pictures, and because she and the girl in the story share the same name. She strokes the picture of the tabby cat. “Nice pussy, nice pussy,” she says. Henry relaxes. He likes the feeling of his child against him. He twists a strand of Lucie's hair around his finger. He's worked so hard. And now? He could let it all go. His mother would never stand for such a thing. She didn't send him to England so that he could capitulate. But now, now she might never know. What is the point, really, of a life spent in the hope of becoming a footnote in someone else's work? There is something oddly seductive, he thinks, about the prospect of giving up. He could let Collins have what he wants and be done with it.

Lucie turns the pages, wanting to look at all the pictures. While she does so he drifts off into memories of India, to thoughts of that high, wide Indian sky racing across the plains. He hasn't remembered India for a long time, not properly, not deeply. He's thought about Australia, and he's remembered England, and he's thought of how good it is to be in Australia and not England. But this experience is new. He does not know, in fact, if he has ever remembered these things before—they are so vivid, so surprising, like first memories, even though he knows they are not, cannot be first memories. The gardener sweeping the lawn, gathering the fallen neem leaves into a small pile, then wrapping them in newspaper. The green, green grass beneath the yellow leaves, soft as carpet. The gold embroidery on his mother's daybed glowing
in the sunlight. His father taking him by rail trolley to the tennis club in the summer. The slingshot Henry wore around his neck and loaded with plum stones. The parrots, the pigeons, the green butterflies and the black ones with turquoise specks, the bats flying over at dusk. Birds flying in separate directions. And Henry charging about, far below, firing fruit stones and pebbles into the air. Rarely did he hit anything—a lame pigeon perhaps, unable to take flight. But England cured him of his outdoor ways. That, and the awful sadness of leaving his mother behind. He realizes, now that he is older, that he knew her for such a small portion of his life, just one decade of childhood. To think of sending his own children away at such an age.

Lucie pulls at his shirt. She wants him to read again. But his voice betrays his wandering attention and Lucie jumps off his lap and goes in search of Charlotte.

How long has it been, he wonders, since he's seen his ­mother? Seven years, more? He and Charlotte visited her shortly after their engagement and she hardly recognized him. It was his fault. He shouldn't have left her there. He should have brought her out to England after his father died in '54. But he couldn't force her, and she wouldn't go.

Her great and foolish dream was that the British would return to India and she would find her place again in the strange seam that ran between the two cultures. If the British were there, she could aspire to be one of them. If they were not, she was as good as lost in a foreign country. Now she lives on the dark fringe of the hills, belonging to no one.

Outside it begins to rain. Light at first, then heavy, torrential. Rain lashes the garden, wind lashes the rain. He hears the back door open, then sees Charlotte braving the weather, her thin body folded over behind an umbrella that she carries like a shield
in front of her, fending off the downpour to get to the vegetable patch, where she tugs three lettuces free of their moorings in the mud. She will make lettuce soup because that is what they have in this climate: summer vegetables in wintertime.

The next day Nicholas comes over while Henry is at work. Charlotte takes him to the garage and shows him the finished portrait. She knows no one should see it before Henry has and yet there they are, she and Nicholas, looking at the picture together. “This painting,” he says, “is a marvel.” The slight disturbance of balance across the face, the blurring of shadow over the cheeks. She has done something he has never seen before. It is so beautiful, so strange, real and yet not real. True somehow. “Do you know,” he says aloud, “do you know how good this is?”

He takes off his glasses and inspects the surface of the painting. Charlotte hasn't seen him without his glasses before. It is like the removal of a disguise—his face is lovely this way, she realizes. Brighter.

“No,” she says, “I'm not sure. It's not—”

“Of course it is.”

She must show this work, he says. She must do more. The world should see this, he tells her grandly. His tone makes her nervous.
World
; the word echoes slightly in her head. As if there were such a thing; her life here has become so small. For a moment she thinks she could love him—does love him—simply because he wants this for her. She hasn't fallen in love for a long time and the feeling frightens her: a nervous rush in her stomach, the need to touch him. “Now you're being silly,” she says, flapping a hand at him, although the thought thrills her; she wants to believe him. She wants them to believe in this together. They stand in silence, looking.

She shows him other paintings as well—the canvases shipped from England. There are still lifes, landscapes, the painting of the storm coming over the fens. “This,” says Nicholas, pausing at the storm canvas. “This is the one. May I?” he asks, picking it up and holding it at arm's length. They look at the bruised English sky together. Then he puts the painting down and leans it against the wall so as to get a better perspective. “Wonderful,” he says under his breath. “Just wonderful.

“I'd like to buy it,” he says. “Really I would.”

“No,” says Charlotte. “I can't.”

“I think you can,” he says. “I think about six hundred pounds should do it.”

“No. No, I'm not sure. Besides, that's far too much.”

“I think you'll find that it's exactly enough.”

“For what?”

“The cost of a ticket to London. You and the children.”

“But why?”

“You know very well why. Because it's time for you to go home.”

She hadn't forgotten about the plan so much as pushed the thought away, as if it might somehow jinx the painting. During the day, when she is at home with the children, such a plan seems fanciful, ridiculous. A kind of gross ambition. Yet then, at night, when the girls are asleep and she's out in the garage working away again—then the plan returns, but differently. Then it seems exciting, the obvious thing. A night vision. It hadn't seemed possible to carry this dream into daylight, and yet here he is, standing beside her and making this suggestion, offering this thing that she's told herself, sternly, she must not hope for. Not ever. Not really.

“So,” Nicholas says, “will you let me?”

T
hat evening she watches Henry tend the roses. He has cured them of rust and mite and now they flourish and grow up past his waist. There is a breeze and the flowers sway. Henry is tall, his long arms reaching over to check the buds. In his blue shirt he is the same color as the dusk. She watches him fade.

Later that night, over dinner, Henry says to her, “Where is the painting?”

“What painting?”

“I had to find something in the garage this afternoon and I noticed the storm painting is gone. I'd seen it. Now it's not there.”

Charlotte meets his eyes. “I sold it,” she says.

“What?”

“I sold it.”

“To whom?”

Charlotte is quiet, her eyes lowered to her plate. She twists her wedding band round and round her finger.

“Surely not,” Henry says. He knows she has befriended Nicholas; he doesn't approve, but he knows. “After all I . . . after you—” He bites his tongue. It is an accident and the pain is fierce. He snaps forwards, holding his mouth, his face wrinkling.

Charlotte tells him what happened—that Nicholas came to the house and saw the paintings and offered her money. “Enough money, in fact, to go home.”

When Henry speaks there is blood at the corner of his lips. He spits his words. “How dare you, how dare—if you imagine I'm going to . . . A man, that man, here!”

“He's a friend,” says Charlotte.

“He's not a friend, he's a cad. He's a—”

“Henry, stop it.”

“
Me?
That's what I should be saying to you. So what, he wanders around, stays for tea,
buys your painting
. How dare he think—”

“Stop it, Henry!” Charlotte yells. The girls stare. May begins to wail.

Lucie kicks in her highchair. “
Sdop! Sdop!
” she cries.

“When will you accept this?” Henry says. “We don't need to go back. It is an insult and the man means it to be. He's not interested in the damned painting. Fine, keep the money, but don't think I'm letting you go anywhere.” He shakes his head. “The gall,” he says quietly. “The gall.”

“It was mine,” Charlotte says, looking down at her plate. “It's a painting. I sell paintings.”

“Well, what did he pay?” he asks, sawing into a piece of meat. Charlotte stands and clears the other plates from the table. “Tell me, Charlotte!” he calls after her. “Tell me, damn it!”

Charlotte disappears into the bedroom and Henry puts the girls to bed. He is an anxious father, always worried about colds and chills, and as a precaution covers the children with extra blankets, leaving them to sweat and thrash about in the night. By morning the spot where Lucie's plait meets her skull is damp and matted.

“Turn around,” Charlotte says, “and let me get this mess out. You let me brush your hair,” she tells her, “and I promise a trip to the park.”

She sits on the edge of the bed and grips the child between her thighs. The elastic is tangled up in tight loops of hair. Charlotte tugs at it and Lucie's head jerks backwards. “Ow!” she cries. “
Ooow
. You're hurting! You're hurting!”

Charlotte hears the faint sound of hair snapping as the elastic begins to come free. “I'm not hurting. Just stay still and it will be done.”

But Lucie only squirms, pushing at her mother's legs. “Let go!” she cries, her little voice breaking up into tears. “Let me go!”

“If I let you go now there's no trip to the park.”

“No!”

“No what?”

“Don't brush my hair! Please don't brush my hair!”

“And no park?”

“Yes, park!”

“Then stay still and let me do your hair!” Charlotte tugs hard, removing the elastic, and with quick fingers rips the plait apart as if unwinding a rough rope.

Lucie begins to sob, then scream, as Charlotte takes the brush in her hand and hacks away at the knots. She hits her mother's legs and squirms and wails, but Charlotte's thighs hold her fast. “Nooo! You're hurting me! You're hurting!”

Charlotte brushes faster. It looks like it hasn't been brushed in weeks. Surely not, though. Surely she brushed their hair yesterday morning. “I'm sorry,” she says to Lucie. “I'm sorry, but it has to be done.”

“No, it doesn't have to be done!”

“Do you want me to cut it then? Because if I can't brush it I'll have to cut it.”

“Cut it! Cut it!” Lucie wails, her head wobbling back and forward as the brush works in and out of her hair. She is crying so hard now that she begins to cough and retch.

Charlotte sees the glint of her sewing scissors on her dressing table and just then hears the squeak of Henry's study door. She grips Lucie's hair in one hand and lunges for the scissors. Then
in one swift motion she swoops back and drives the scissors into the matted root of the plait. They are small scissors and the knot is thick and wide. She has to saw at it, opening and closing the blades, the cutting making a rough, scratchy sound. Just as she is about through, Henry steps into the room. There. It is done. Lucie runs to Henry and hurls herself against his legs.

Charlotte stands up, a bunch of pale baby hair in one hand and her little blue-handled sewing scissors in the other. “Your princess,” she says, and drops the hair on the floor. Then she pushes past Henry and leaves the room.

Henry gathers Lucie into his arms and lies down on the bed with her, rocking her until she falls asleep, still whimpering. He loses track of how long he lies there. When finally he eases himself off the bed the first thing he does is get down on his knees to gather up every last piece of hair and put it in his pocket.

For days they do not speak. He knows Charlotte did it to punish him, and that it had nothing to do with Lucie. He will never forget the scene he came upon in the bedroom. His blubbering, inconsolable child, and her mother, rising up from the bed with the trophy of hair in her fist. How she held it out to him.

Over the next week, Henry stays out of Charlotte's way. He leaves for work early, and when he comes home he keeps to the garden, busying himself with the orange tree. Charlotte watches him from the kitchen window—the stepladder, his gray gardening slacks visible only from the knee down, his torso and head sunk in leaves. He has found an infestation of stinkbugs and is killing them. The air around the tree reeks: a mix of turpentine, acid, petrol. Who knows when the insects came, but they have descended, grown fat and black without his noticing, and now
swarm over the leaves, curling them, sucking the juice from the fruit, waving their orange antennae above their beady orange eyes. Henry holds a bucket of water and picks off the bugs one by one, then drops them in, trying to drown them. He keeps his white golfing hat pulled down low towards the bridge of his nose, and when he spots a bug, he ducks his face, pinches it off the leaf, and drops it in the bucket. “Get back!” he shouts if Lucie or May ventures near him, their faces upturned. The stink juice spray can blind. He seems to like this fact—it means no one can come near. He is safe here, hidden. He can kill and kill and kill. It is somehow satisfying. When the bugs are too high to reach he takes the pruning shears, lops off the tall branches, and chops straight through the insect. The girls stand on the veranda, watching. Henry brings them a leaf, holds it out, and points to the neat rows of tiny bright green spheres all clustered together. “Eggs,” he says, then drops the leaf on the ground and stamps on it.

Every evening he thinks he's got them all, and every morning there are more. They do not drown in the water like he hopes. Instead they writhe and crawl over one another, trying to get out. The bucket is a black swell of wet beetle legs waving and sliding, wings lifting and falling. He goes to the garage to look for a bottle of poison. Then he laces the bucket with arsenic, digs a hole, tips the dark mass inside, and covers it up.

It is Saturday evening when he dumps the insects into the hole. When he comes inside Charlotte can smell the bugs on him. The smell is in his hair. On his shirt collar. Inside the red creases of his knuckles. At dinnertime he saws at his meat and chews his food to liquid. It sounds like someone squelching through mud—the wet slap of tongue on teeth. He chews with his mouth open:
sucking and cupping and pulverizing the steak and potato. She waits for him to finish and finally swallow, reminded of a man she once knew who insisted that the radio be left on during dinner so he didn't have to listen to his wife eat. She and Henry have nothing to say. Perhaps he chews this way because it acquits him of the expectation of speech. She pushes her hands beneath her thighs, leans forwards. The food on her plate is untouched. Henry takes another mouthful and begins chewing again.