The Other Side of the World (20 page)

May reaches out her fat little arms and Carol takes her. “Milk? Milk?” May asks, bouncing her head at her mother.

“Yes, darling,” Charlotte replies, running her palm over her daughter's soft hair. “I'll bring more milk. I've packed them some lunch,” she says to Carol, passing her a bag.

“Oh, you didn't need to do that,” Carol says. “There's always plenty here.”

“Hold me, Mummy. Hold me, hold me, hold me,” Lucie begs, tugging at Charlotte's dress. Charlotte picks her up, a tall heavy child now, and holds her tight. She breathes in the smell of her. Wax and butter and soap and clean clothes. She sets her down and crouches before her, kissing her softly on the nose. “I love you, my poppet. I do love you,” she says, staring into her daughter's huge and shiny eyes. “I do,” she says again, her voice cracking. She pushes her nose into May's squishy cheek and kisses her too, the warm sweet skin. Then she turns and walks down the hall. “I won't be long,” she calls, dipping her head to button up her coat. “You be good for Mrs. Russell. And remember I want those sandwiches eaten by the time I get back!” Then she is gone, stepping out from the warm fug of the house and pulling the door shut behind her. A child's voice calls. There is the sound of small feet running across floorboards.

Henry pays the driver, walks up the path, then stands in the open doorway, his suitcase hanging from one hand. “Charlotte?” he calls, taking off his hat and holding it to his chest, but there is no answer. Perhaps she is sleeping, he thinks. He puts his bag down
and goes quietly towards the bedroom, switching on the lights. “Charlotte?” There is something about the air that tells him the house is empty. Even when Charlotte is asleep he can smell her presence, the loose note of rose that always strays from the complex source of her perfume, and somewhere below this there is always the residue of a morning's work in the kitchen—the smell of toast and coffee, onions and meat. At this time of night there is normally a cacophony of child noises as Lucie begs to stay in the bath and May cries.

He walks down the hallway, throwing open one door after another. “Charlotte!” he calls again, louder this time. He checks the bathroom. He runs now, to the back of the house, to the laundry, out into the yard, scanning the dark mounds of the garden. “Charlotte?” he calls, quieter now, and a little out of breath, his voice carrying across the wide, black stretch of lawn. The light from the laundry spills out into the yard. “Charlotte?”

He finds her note on the kitchen table, scribbled on a piece of foolscap and held down by an orange. He reads it slowly, then reads it again and returns it to the table. She does not tell him where she has gone, only that she has gone and he must not—
please don't—
try to find her. Sure enough, some of her clothes are missing, her shoes, and a suitcase. He steps away from the wardrobe and pushes his hat onto his head.

C
harlotte's plane lands in London and she takes a train to King's Cross. The concourse is thick with people: men bustling homewards, carrying fat briefcases, women balancing brown paper packages, small children being led by the hand. Charlotte makes her way to the ticket office and pays her fare. Then she steps up into the carriage, finds a seat, and pushes the ticket into the pocket of her coat. She knew where she was going without ever having decided it; she simply understood, all along, where her life was to take her: away, back and away. She turns her face to the window, imagining her children awake and needing her, calling for her and wondering why she is taking so long. They will have slept and woken up again by now. Henry will be home. She imagines he will have lied to the children—told them, perhaps, that she has gone to visit a friend who is ill. “But why?” Lucie will ask. “Why? Where is she?” I don't know sweetheart. I don't know, Henry will reply. Charlotte stares out the window, blinking back her tears.

It is past eight at night when the train pulls into Cambridge. She takes a taxi into town and walks from there—down Senate House Passage, past the library, along Adams Road, and out through the fields into the nearby villages. She knows the way and the moon is bright. She shivers in her coat and pulls it tighter; the autumn air is cold. Eventually she reaches their old house, and although she knows she should walk on, she can't help but stop to look; the door has been painted blue, and new curtains hang in the windows. Her instinct then is to just lay herself down
in the fields and never rise again. Her suitcase is heavy, her skin red where the handle rubs against her palm; her feet are swollen and aching in their tight shoes. She is cold. She wants a bath. She wants a pot of tea and a bath. But it is too late to book into a room, so she walks until she can't walk anymore, out through the fields leading towards Grantchester, past new-turned earth, brown and muddy, the smell of it in the air, the path edged by bare hedgerows and rose hips. She remembers living amid this mud and grass and feeling that all the world was held at bay, fields away from her. She remembers the first walk she and Henry took together when they moved into the little cottage, stopping in the dusk, the sky low and gray, and looking out over the ridges and furrows of the medieval fields, thinking about all the nights the fields had lain just so. All the rains that had drenched them. All the winds. All the frosts. The two of them full of a strange dim wonder as they tried to grasp the ancient nature of the place.

Australia is not just a different country; it is a different world in a different time, ahead, somehow, of the time she finds here, which will always be contained by time past, by the time of youth and childhood and all the vague gray time before that, the mists through which her family had come. Real future is not possible here, it seems. She's seen it, though—out there she lived in that other time, that broken time, that time that floats outside of all the times she'd known before, incommensurate. And now she's come back, forcing time to fold and pleat and become continuous again, the past and the future occurring once more in the same place, one on top of the other, one beside the other, and that great journey, that hot suburban life, is instantly reduced to one meager experience among many. She wants her children now. She wants them in a way she has never wanted them before, her body aching with a kind of adolescent love, a pained adolescent crav
ing. Only now does she think of how wrong she was. She was wrong to leave them. That is all she can think: she was wrong.

It starts to rain and the wind picks up. She knows she can't stay out all night, and even if she did make it back to town, nothing would be open at this hour. There is a little shed in the woods, just off the path into town. She used to pass it on her bicycle. It was once used to store old crates from the orchard. She heads towards the spot where she thinks the shed ought to be, slipping in the ­muddy drain beside the path and snagging her dress on the brambles. In summer this tract of woodland is thick with nettle and cow parsley and meadowsweet, full of soft green light. Now she stumbles about in the dark, leaning against trees, pushing through shrubbery. Then it is before her, a shape in the clearing. The door is open, and inside, yes, there are old wooden crates, tools for digging and pruning. She sits down on her suitcase and leans against the wall. Branches creak and drag on the roof. Foxes slink by, digging, sniffing. There is the call of an owl. Soon she drifts into a troubled sleep and dreams that she is to have a child, only it is to be born from her left breast and to give birth she must cut open the underside of her breast with a knife. Except when she does this, she finds not a child but the liver of a calf, whole and dark and slippery, and she understands that she must cut this open as well. Inside the liver lies a small, dead infant. She puts this child aside, slices open the soft skin beneath her right breast, and finds there not a second, living child but three tiny and completely white tulips—stem and leaves and petals—all folded neatly together as if held fast in a locket.

She sees the advertisement in the morning, a sign written in neat white copperplate on a piece of blackboard and hung from the bars of the college gate. Charlotte stands in front of the sign,
chewing her bottom lip and blinking. In different ­circumstances she might have done other things—she could have taught, or sought out commissions as she once did years ago, but she doesn't have the luxury of time, and has nowhere to stay. She hides her suitcase under some bushes outside and walks into the porters' lodge. She doesn't ask for the job, she begs. She looks a fright, she knows, damp all over and gray under the eyes. She lies about her experience but it is a petty lie that does not exaggerate her ability. And it is not exactly a lie, she reasons, to say that she has international experience or that she has been, for nearly seven years, a housekeeper to a professor. Of course Henry is not that, but he will be eventually. The head porter is suitably impressed, and only when she knows she has the job does she apologize for her fatigued appearance, explaining that she's had the flu. “But I am fine, really, and can start immediately.”

No one knows she is married: she removes her wedding ring when she signs the form setting out the terms of her employment. Six months initially, but they will be happy, they are certain, for her to stay on. It is surprisingly difficult, she is told, to come by a decent housekeeper these days. Another porter shows her to her apartment, a small set of rooms at the top of a large Georgian house. Once an attic, it was refurbished for housekeeping staff when the college acquired the building several years before, he explains. There is a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a bedroom with a fireplace. Once he has left she puts her few clothes away in the wardrobe and hangs out her apron for the morning, when her duties are to begin. Then she runs the bath and lies there with her eyes closed until the water cools and her skin wrinkles and grows soft. Later she makes tea, and drinks it sitting by the fire. Her body is heavy with exhaustion but sleep will not come, so she stays sitting in the chair as the darkness drifts down all about.
It is a relief, this blotting out of the world. It is so pleasant—she had forgotten how pleasant it could be—to see the busyness of other people's lives painted over by the night and to draw the curtains at four. The southern light is meant to be uplifting, but how soothing it is to be surrounded, now, by damp, close, low-lying dark, to hear the patter of rain on the glass, the windows rattling a little in the wind, the dark like a common tissue linking her to land and people. Charlotte closes her eyes and feels herself made of this same stuff, the shadowy inner reach of her own mind conterminous with the night. It is not unlike the comfort of floating in water, of feeling oneself adrift in a single substance, in contact with something into which one might meld and vanish if it were not for the border of skin. When she was a child she imagined her body to be black inside, because that was what she saw when she closed her eyes. Now it seems right once again. It is not dark because she closes her eyes to the light of the world; it is dark because that is what it is like inside.

T
hose first hours pass, then after that more, and eventually she drifts off and wakes in the armchair at dawn. Soon a whole day has gone by. Then a week. A month. At some point, a little further on, she looks up from the bucket she has just pushed the mop into and realizes she has not been thinking of her children. It is something she understands in retrospect: there is a small blank in her mind where that thought of her children should be. She doesn't know how long ago she stopped thinking of them, only that this is the first time such a thing has happened—the first time she has ceased to consider them, the first time they have been allowed to drop away from her consciousness, the first time since the day they were born. She thinks of that last night together. How after she came inside and answered the phone she went back to the bedroom to find May asleep on the floor. She picked her up and put her into bed, pulling the covers up and kissing her forehead. Lucie was still awake. “Moon! Moon! Go see moon?” she asked, pulling at Charlotte's skirt and peering at her with huge brown eyes. A full moon shone through the window.

“Yes, we'll go see the moon,” Charlotte said softly. “Mummy will always show you the moon.”

The flyscreen banged shut as she and Lucie stepped outside. Somewhere behind the fence stood a fir tree. It went unnoticed by day, tucked away behind an olive haze of scrub. At night the ­pointed tip of its triangular mass stood taller than everything else before it, the long branches and clumps of needles blacker than the sky.

“I put my eye outside,” said Lucie, “and I peek it.” She was
talking about the moon still. Charlotte carried her deeper into the garden. They walked down through the grass, away from the light of the house.

“Where is it?” Lucie asked.

“Is it over there?” said Charlotte, pointing in the direction of the sea.

“No,” said Lucie.

“Is it over there?” Pointing this time towards the river.

Lucie looked. “Just stars,” she replied. They crept down further, towards the back fence.

“Is it up there?” Charlotte said, pointing into the trees. And then they spied it, the huge, white, shining moon nesting behind a clump of leaves. They scurried forwards and the moon disappeared. Lucie threw her arms around her mother's neck and clung to her. Charlotte felt her daughter's breath against the side of her face, soft little gusts that smelled of butter and meat. Right then she wanted to stand in that dark garden with her forever. She wanted the world to stop. No, she thought, she wanted the world to never stop, but to go on and on, never letting this moment expire, never letting it change or end.

I thought I had come home
, she writes in her diary. But home is never the same once you have left it for any length of time and come back. Home is a secret world that closes its door in your absence and never lets you find it again.
How do I get inside? No one can tell me
. She tries not to pay attention to the children playing in the street, but every now and then she sees a child who looks too much like one of her own, a blonde-haired baby in a pink jumper held high in its mother's arms. She has gone out to fetch bread and sees them at the roadside, waiting to cross. The baby leans backwards, its thin hair lifting in the wind, then drops its head against its mother's shoulder. Charlotte stares, unblinking, until
it seems indecent, then forces herself to look away. How easy it is to imagine the round weight of the child, its nappied bottom on her hip, its tubby belly warm against the palm of her hand. The child's soft hair against her nose.

Meanwhile she repeats her housekeeping duties day after day, beginning with the beds in the northeast wing of Chapel Court, then the rooms and bathrooms, dusting, wiping, hoovering. After this comes the Hall, previously the nuns' refectory, where she mops the floors following breakfast. Someone else polishes the tables, others stack dishes in the kitchen. Outside, the ­gardeners tend the lawns and the beds of primroses, purple and yellow and pink. Later, she returns her mop and bucket to the closet and takes out the garbage. Then she unties her apron, folds it, and slips it into her handbag before passing through Cloister Court on her way to the chapel, where she sits for a while, not praying but thinking, and watching the day play against the colors in the ancient windows. At last she stands up, walks slowly to the porters' lodge, ticks off her morning chores on the roster, then returns to her room, where she fixes a plate of food—peanut butter sandwiches or a fried egg on toast.

At night she sits in the armchair and knits. She works by a small candlestick lamp, soothed by the slip of needles and wool, the weight of the jumper pooling in her lap. She thinks of Henry then. “Do you love me?” she asked him that last night when they were lying together in bed, just before he left for India.

“I do,” he said. “You know I do.”

“Why do you love me?” she asked.

“Shhh,” he replied, “it's late,” as if he didn't know the answer. Charlotte pushed her way through the sheets and took hold of his fingers. He squeezed her hand back, then let go, patted her arm, and rolled away.