The Other Side of the World (2 page)

He leads her to the table, sits her down, and pours tea. He made it half an hour ago, when he expected her home, and now it is stewed and a little cool. Charlotte wraps her fingers around the cup and stares out the window. “Charlotte?” he whispers. There is not much time. Any minute the baby will sense her mother and wake, crying. Then the conversation will be over. Charlotte's gaze drifts further out, over the fields and towards the hedges. “Charlotte? Tell me. Please. What did he say?”

She chews at her bottom lip and looks down into her cup. “I'm three months pregnant,” she says.

It is an announcement, Henry knows, that ought to make them happy. For a long time they both imagined themselves surrounded by a large family, but then Lucie came along and everything changed. At least it seemed to Henry that everything changed, because Charlotte changed so much. She forgot the names of people and places, forgot terms and definitions. She described objects by tracing their shape in the air. For weeks she'd struggled to remember the name for a certain kind of bent and twisted metal; unable to bear it any longer, she'd knocked on their neighbor's door, with Lucie on her hip, and tried to describe the thing she'd lost the words for. Wrought iron, the neighbor said, and Charlotte started to cry.

In those first months Lucie hardly slept, and Charlotte began to lose other things: she found her watch in the freezer, the citrus press in their wardrobe, and she put Henry's hat in the oven one night when he came home from work. “What is a memory?” she asked him when he found the hat and she could not recall how it got there. She meant this in the spirit of inquiry but it sounded
as though her forgetfulness had spread to such a degree that she had lost the very concept of recollection. “Don't worry yourself about it,” said Henry. “It is a detail, a minor detail—the whereabouts of your watch or my hat.” Henry hadn't thought it possible for a mother to be sent mad by her child. And now here she is, weeping over her tea and expecting another baby.

Henry reaches across the table and covers her small hand with his larger one. She is incredibly beautiful, even like this. Her translucent skin, her wide-set eyes. They are the color of the sea at Land's End in the sunlight. She chopped a fringe into her dark hair over the summer, and this only makes her eyes seem bigger, if sadder now, and somehow even more lovely. He strokes her cheek with the back of his fingers and from the corner of his vision spies the brochure lying on the carpet, beside the armchair, where it must have slipped when he got up to get the door. He does not think as he says it, the words just come out. “We should move to Australia,” he says.

“What?” Charlotte replies, uncomprehending. He sees the shock on her face but once the words have settled he knows he is right. It is the only option. It is the only way.

“You know this means we can't stay here,” he says.

“What does? Why on earth not?”

But before Henry can respond the baby wakes, letting out a shrill wail. Charlotte leaps towards the pram, lifts the bundle to her shoulder, and walks to the window, where she stands, watching a robin peck at the bird feeder that hangs from the ­branches of the apple tree. Henry thinks it a barren, pointless view: all muddy fields and black hedges and more fields. A line of trees in the distance. Charlotte says she loves the different shades of winter grey, that she loves to see the structure of plants beneath their leaves and to notice how whole trees sway at once. Great, heavy,
empty branches dipping and lifting in the wind. Not the twigs. Not just the leaves, as it seems in summertime. But the whole, almost human, structure, the body and the arms.

Henry, however, does not like the wind; he does not want another English winter. He had not planned on another child. He cannot bear the thought of another child in another terrible winter. Although he's been in England more than half his life, still his body rebels against the cold—too often the weather seems a kind of punishment. As a boy he taught himself to numb his limbs at will, in defense against the worst of the elements. He remembers his arrival in England—the boat trip, the long train journey, then the ancient grey boarding school by the sea presided over by a one-legged headmaster, injured in war. There, each morning, the headmaster would march the boys down to the beach and order them into the water. The headmaster always went first—he'd drop his crutches on the sand and throw himself into the ocean. “Come along now!” he'd call. “Tonic for the soul!” It was the only thing, he said to the row of children who stood shivering on the beach, that made his body feel whole again. Then the bravest of the boys would plunge in and do their best not to scream. Every day they did this, no matter the season—the landscape ­perpetually bleak and windy, snow settling over the sand during winter. For Henry, the pain of being in that freezing water was always something terrible—the cold clutching at his lungs, the slow, burning loss of sensation. But so routine was this suffering that after a time he could bring the numbness on in an instant.

Henry goes to the kitchen and stokes the AGA cooker while Charlotte feeds the baby, Lucie's hot red mouth working the teat of the bottle. She drinks quickly, making little glugging and um
ming noises as the milk goes down. “We'll be all right, you and I,” Charlotte says to Lucie, to the unborn child, to no one in particular. “We'll be all right.” But if he is serious? Once he sets his mind on something, there can be no stopping him—and everyone is talking about it, about getting out and moving somewhere else. “Every man and his dog are moving to Australia these days,” her hairdresser said, just a fortnight ago. “I'd do it if I could.” But it is impossible for Charlotte to even consider such a thing. This is her home—there could be nowhere else. And things will pick up again soon, she is sure. The commissions will come again.

When Charlotte was seventeen she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Later, after she married, she had the letter framed and hung in the bedroom so she could see it from her bed. Through the last phase of her pregnancy she'd gazed at this letter as if it were a riddle. A code for a past life now irretrievable. Then for months after Lucie was born she hadn't the strength to lift a brush, and when she started again it was for the money alone, painting forgeries (“pastiche” was what they called them in the business) of Dutch flowers that she sold to the dealers for a tidy sum. But things will change, she is certain. She can do better than this. There will be more money. They could move to a bigger house. She will make herself right again. He must believe her. If she can somehow get herself back to what she was before.

Lucie's suckling slows and becomes erratic. One-two. One. One. One-two. Her eyes blink, heavy. A few more sucks and her eyes close. The teat comes loose from her mouth and a line of milk dribbles from the corner of her lips. Charlotte stays very still while Lucie's head grows heavier in the palm of her hand, then she wipes the milk from the curve of her daughter's chin. The baby's mauve eyelids tremble. What does she see while she is sleeping? Such a perfect child. So perfect when she is asleep.
Charlotte can love her well then, she can admire her then—the dimpled chin, the curious tilt of the eyebrows, the apple-round cheeks. She bends down to kiss her. When Lucie wakes, the two of them might go outside for a walk. It is lovely out there, cold and crisp and brightening; it looks like the clouds are brightening. The weather will improve, she thinks, and he'll forget this mad idea. God willing, he'll forget.

F
or the next few weeks Charlotte hears nothing of Henry's plan. She doesn't know whether this is because he has given up on it or because he is keeping his thoughts secret. Either way, she thinks it better not to ask. The winds come and disperse the clouds, making the autumn crisp and fresh, cold and breezy. In the absence of rain they resume their morning walks through the fields, heading out early before Henry leaves for college, sometimes walking in the dark, little Lucie rugged up in her pram under the blanket that Charlotte's mother knitted. They walk at Charlotte's insistence. Henry would much prefer to stay warm under the bedcovers, but Charlotte begs him: Come on, Henry, please, you know you'll like it. And while he hates the cold he likes to be near Charlotte, likes to see her flushed and happy, out in the open air, at dawn. He knows these walks are her favorite thing and so says yes even when he doesn't really want to.

So they head out, the blue of day just lighting the edge of the fields, the trees hung in hoarfrost, the pale path curving around the grass. In an odd way Charlotte feels she has come to live for these walks, for this place. For Henry's quiet company—their voices drifting back and forth, gentle, unhurried. For the sky all about them. The land flat at first, all horizon, while the wind buffets, pushing them into the day, then the light breaking as they reach the top of the hill. She is closest to the sky then, the blue-grey air cascading down either side of the slope. Rabbits hide in the hedge shadows come springtime. Blackberries grow on the hilltop in summer. Foxes lurk. But never another human soul at
such an hour as this, just after dawn, midweek, heading into winter. Now there is just the sound of their boots slipping, crunching, the wind over the grass and in the hedges. Thin branches knock and scrape.

They buried her placenta here. Carried it up in a bucket in the dark of dawn just a few days after Lucie's birth. Henry took a small shovel in his knapsack while Charlotte pushed the pram through the mud. At the top of the hill Henry crouched down and began to dig a small hole, the trees leaning towards him in the wind. “How deep should it be?” he asked, the wind carrying his voice away from her. She didn't know. As deep as he could make it. But the ground was frozen and it was difficult to work a decent hole with the hand shovel. “There,” he said after a while, dropping the shovel and brushing his hands against his trousers. He pushed himself up, palms against his knees. “It's ready.” He stepped back towards Charlotte. She nodded, and he took hold of the pram, jiggling it to keep Lucie asleep, her little round cheeks red in the chilly air. Charlotte took the bucket and knelt down beside the hole. It was shallow—no doubt the foxes would soon catch the smell of it and dig the bloody organ out. But they were burying it, that was what mattered. Marking her place, their place, together. Charlotte scraped out the loose dirt at the bottom of the hole, then put her hands into the bucket and lifted the placenta; it was slick, and heavier than she expected, the color of liver. It slipped against her fingers as she placed it gently into the earth, putting her hand to it one last time before she pushed the dirt over, covering it up and tamping down the ground as if planting seeds.

“Come,” Henry said then, “we should go.” He was worried someone might see them. See his wife with her bloody hands.

Charlotte knelt there a moment longer, looking out through the empty branches, down to the town below. Small ancient
buildings, the line of the path through the fields, the horizon beyond. She had walked up here every day when she was pregnant, the child wobbling and drifting inside her. She'd walked this way when the contractions began and thought she'd happily birth the baby out here, in the wild grass. She patted the soil down one more time. Her hands were freezing. This thing. The memory of the child moving inside her. The feeling of it turning. The weight. “When I die,” she said, “I'd like my ashes scattered here.”

“Darling,” said Henry, thinking her morbid.

But isn't this what one wants from a place of happiness? Such a desire is a sign of something good. Charlotte stood, smacking her hands together to rid them of dirt. From the top of the hill they could just see the roof of their cottage, the church steeple to the north of it. “All right,” she replied. They held hands a moment, then Henry hooked his arm around Charlotte's waist and they traipsed down the hill.

That was less than a year ago, Charlotte realizes now, as they make their way down the same path. A few more weeks and it will be winter again, too cold to go out so early. They must make the best of these autumn mornings. Today the furrows in the eastern field are filled with frozen water, air bubbles preserved beneath the ice. They walk over them, feeling the plate of ice splintering, the sound sharp in the air. Alongside them cows eat rose hips and apples from the low branches, their breath steaming. “The cold is on its way,” says Henry. The cows will move and snow will arrive.

“A white Christmas, maybe,” she replies. That's what she always wants. She'd paint it this year, like Cézanne, rugged up in his fur coat, the easel sunk in snowdrifts. The different whites and greys. They always surprise her, the colors a cloud can make. She reaches out and laces her fingers through Henry's. “I love
you,” she says. He squeezes her hand. The fields always make her happy.

But when she comes inside, this feeling vanishes. The cottage is small and messy, the day ahead lonely and full of chores. She turns quiet while she prepares Lucie's bottle. As Henry leaves for work he passes her a brochure. “Here,” he tells her, putting it in her hand, “just take a look.”

“Henry—”

“Just look.” Then he kisses her, closes the door behind him, gets on his bike, and rides away.

Once he is gone the house seems very still. The baby nuzzles her face against Charlotte's chest. She puts the brochure down and moves the baby to her hip. Henry won't be home until dinnertime. The days with a baby are longer than she expected. She thinks she should know how to look after a baby by now, but does not. Lucie's body is slippery in the bath. Poo often leaks from her poorly folded nappy. Charlotte's milk didn't last. Henry says he's tired of eating baked beans on toast for dinner and can't she make something else? But she doesn't know what to cook, she has forgotten.

She makes tea, then lays the baby down on a blanket on the floor and watches her. From the corner of her eye she ­glimpses the brochure: women in swimsuits, on water skis. The baby wriggles and drools. She can roll over, and tosses herself back and forth. Today Charlotte has dressed her in pink stripes. Everyone says Lucie looks good in stripes. The woman at the grocery shop. The old lady at the post office. Charlotte sits staring at her daughter for a long time. It is like watching the sea from a high window. Hypnotizing and, after a while, soporific. She knows that when he gets home Henry will ask if she has looked at the brochure and she'll say she really didn't have time, although she knows very
well that this is because there's too much of it. The hours blur and stretch, refusing to break down into smaller units of action: one thing, then the next.

She reaches up and touches the hair at the nape of her neck. It is ropy, matted. Why is this? These details of her life are still new to her, unfamiliar. Then she remembers: the gush of milky vomit in the night, some of it in her hair. She has never known the nights to be so long: the endless cycle of feeding, crying, ­vomiting. Henry has fashioned himself a pair of earplugs from candle wax and tape, and so sleeps on, oblivious. While he snores, Charlotte rocks the baby, jiggles it, does what she can to soothe it until she realizes she cannot soothe it and so just holds it tight and close while it cries. In these moments she is neither awake nor asleep but something in between, and in her mind's eye strange visions surface. There is an image of the cars parked outside the shopping arcade, of the train station in Milan where she and Henry once stood. The blue metal gate at the front of her mother's house, the bus stop on the main road, the queue for bread and cabbages on market day. All images, she realizes, of places where she has ­waited for something to happen, for something to change. She must bathe, she thinks, looking down and seeing the same blue dress that she has worn for months now. She wore this dress in the last days of pregnancy. She wore it during the early hours of labor, and it was the first thing she put on after Lucie was born. The dress is navy and covered in small white spots. When Lucie feeds, her eyes graze the dress and she stares at the patterned fabric. It is soft with wear and smells of milk.

Meanwhile Lucie kicks; Lucie smiles. She flaps her arms in her mother's direction. Charlotte doesn't say to herself, I am a mother. Instead she finds herself thinking, riddle-like, I am a woman with a child. She reaches down and puts a pair of socks
on Lucie's fat feet. They are stripy socks to match her stripy suit. Her daughter flaps at her again, gurgles. Charlotte tries to make gurgling sounds in return but she is so tired. At the edge of the field, trees bend back and forth, but she cannot hear the wind. The cup of tea beside her has turned cold. She sits a while longer, then lies down next to her baby and closes her eyes. There is the feeling of her body sinking. It is not like falling asleep. It is ­heavier. Darker. Like being sucked into something.

When she wakes she has forgotten where she is, the time of day. She thinks for a moment that it's early morning, a new day, the next day, then remembers. Her cheek is wet with spit and itchy from the rough carpet. She knows she cannot stay in the house until dinnertime and so goes back out to the fields. She can spend hours this way, pushing the pram through the grass. Always happiest, it seems, when surrounded by these acres of open space. She does not know why, she just knows that she is. It is something about the sky, the empty stretch of ground. About being alone with her child outside. The smell of the air. It is as if the place has chosen her. The leaves on the poplar trees are flickering, silvery in the wind. What time is it? Noon, perhaps. Or later; she doesn't know. Storm clouds gather in the distance. She painted this once, a fen storm, wrapped in her black coat, her easel set up in the mud of the field. The clouds were tinged with purple, slouching diagonally down towards the hill. Roiling, Henry called it. Between the hill and the clouds a yellowish sky glowed.

She stands there, in the wild grass, rocking the pram. Lucie calls at the sound of a bird. They are fine, out here, she thinks, she and Lucie. They are peaceful together. She won't tell Henry. He doesn't like all this tramping. “You shouldn't take her out for so long,” Henry says. “Not in this season; she'll catch her death.” She bends over to stroke her daughter's face and Lucie smiles.
Such soft cheeks. Everyone says Lucie looks like Henry—
Isn't she her daddy's girl
, they say. And it is true—already Charlotte can see that the child has his fine features, his dark hair. But she still finds this strange, to look at her child and think of her husband. The likeness is in the bones: in the slope of cheek and jaw, in the broad spread of the forehead. When they met it was what she noticed first—the beauty of him. Tall and slim, with warm, heavy-lashed eyes like those of a deer.

It was the summer of 1958: Henry was completing his degree at King's College London and she was in her final year at the ­Royal College of Art. Charlotte's mother, Iris, took regular holidays to India to visit a favorite student of hers who'd married an Indian man, and after Iris retired from teaching she opened up the extra rooms of the house to Anglo-Indian boarders. Henry rented the ground-floor room, directly beneath Charlotte's bedroom, and she took to making them both tea in the afternoons, when she returned from the studio. At first she simply knocked at his door and passed him the teacup, but then one day she glimpsed what was inside: the floor covered in sketches, papers pinned to the wall, books piled in a circle around the armchair like a corrugated fortress. She hadn't known what he was studying, and assumed it to be medicine or engineering—that was what most of them came for. But it turned out that Henry was writing his thesis on the use of illustrations in Charles Dickens's
Bleak House
, and the sketches scattered about the room were from that—dark little pictures of women with their faces hidden. The papers on the wall—above the bed and by the window—were drafts of poems Henry was working on. They stood in the doorway and talked fiercely about their studies, and Henry gave her a chapter of his thesis to read. Charlotte brought it back the next day, covered in notes, and they took their tea out into the garden, where they sat beneath
the fruit trees and talked until dinnertime. After this they were inseparable, and soon enough Henry proposed. Charlotte knew it was coming. She knew it was what she wanted, discovering this one winter night as she sat in the back row of the audience while Henry read from his first poetry collection, published earlier that year. It was the sound of his voice, how it soothed her; no one else had a voice like his, dark and breathy, the vowels coasting on the body's subtle expulsion of air.

“And what will you do when you've finished your studies?” Iris asked her daughter when she announced her engagement.

“I'll paint—what do you think I'll do?”

“Yes, but I mean what will you do for money?”

Charlotte thought this such an annoying question. So irrelevant. “I suppose I'll sell my paintings,” she said.

“And will that be enough to live on?”

“People make do.”

“One wants, I think, to do more than just make do,” Iris replied.

Henry and Charlotte waited until he'd finished his thesis and then they married in a registry office. After their honeymoon—a wet week camping in Devon—the two of them moved to Cambridge, where Henry had been offered a college lectureship. They signed the lease on Fen Cottage in July of that same year, and three years later Lucie was born. Charlotte had been desperate for a child but didn't fall pregnant easily that first time. The wait made Lucie extra precious somehow: a gift that was meant to perfect them.