The Other Side of the World (15 page)

W
ith the semester over, Henry stays home; he shuts himself up in his study and works on his book. Charlotte ­retreats to Carol's house and tells her—of the visits with Nicholas, the offer, the plan she had half-abandoned because she thought it would never come to anything. They sit on the veranda and talk. Then for a long time they do not talk and instead watch the trees, the distant, eastward line of tall pines. They are thin trees, narrowly branched, more branch at the top than the bottom. Ivy, bright green, grows thick along the trunks. Behind the trees are spindly gums, their tops standing taller than the pines, and behind the gums lies a stretch of blue mountain. The children play at the bottom of the garden. Every now and then there is the blur of a running child, a call and squeal. Carol pours more tea and says that one of them needs to make peace. That is her phrase,
make peace
. “Oh, Charlotte,” she says. “Oh dear.” Afternoon light shines softly from behind the trees, making their trunks appear black, and when the wind gusts the trees sway differently. The pines tilt one way, then another, stiff at the hips, while the gums swing and bend, back and forth, elastic, wild, leaves flailing. As the trees move, the mountains behind them become more and then less visible. Blue then not blue. Blue then not blue. Hills, Carol says, not mountains.

At dinner Henry sends the children into fits of giggles, pulling ­faces and teasing. Charlotte eats quietly. He makes a special ­effort to be gentle with them, kind, full of life. He bends his body
­towards them, dips his head; his eyes soften and shine. His hands move in and out towards the children's faces, pinching their red cheeks, then tickling their bellies. He makes them chortle, pretending to steal their dinner, then lifting his eyebrows and opening his mouth wide in mock dismay when they eat the spoonful of potato he coveted for himself.

It makes Charlotte feel bereft, this purposeful display of happiness. This loving father. So alive to the present moment, so lighthearted, so eager to jump and swing and put on silly voices. So childlike. There he is now, chewing his dinner, then opening his mouth and showing its mashed-up contents, the girls shrieking with joy.

She thinks of Nicholas. She hasn't seen him since she sold him the painting, two, coming on for three, weeks. It feels like a deliberate silence, a silence that is meant to say to her: Go. Go now. And why doesn't she? There is still a little light outside and from where she sits she can see the rainy garden through the window. It grows wild now. The silver beet droops in huge arcs, each leaf wide enough to wrap a baby in, the white stems standing taller than the children. The lettuces have grown to three times the size of a human head. Red poppies bloom madly, nasturtiums mat the spare ground, and thick swathes of grass shoot up in a hedge of bright spiky shrubbery. It rains and rains. Wet trees hiss and drag across the tin roof. She watches Henry, but instead of meeting her eyes he looks at the children and it becomes clear, after a while, that he will not look at her, so she drops her gaze to her hands, opening and closing her fists in her lap, picking at the dirt under her nails. She finds it hard to tell whether he is angry at her or afraid. Is it easier to love a child, she wonders, than it is to love a wife?

A knot forms in her throat, but she cannot cry in front of the
children—she cannot cry in front of Henry. “What's wrong?” he asks eventually, looking at Lucie, and Lucie thinks the question is meant for her.

“
What?
” she asks.

“Not you,” Henry says.

And Charlotte says, “I'm fine,” understanding the question was meant for her, and Henry says, “No, you're obviously not fine,” and she says, “It's nothing.”

“Yes, it is obviously something.”

“It doesn't matter. Really. I have a headache,” she tells him. As if he needs to ask. “Would you mind putting them to bed?” she says. He looks at her with blank confusion, then blinks twice. Charlotte carries her plate to the sink. “They can go without a bath tonight,” she says, then steps into the dark bedroom and closes the door.

Later that night Charlotte is woken by Henry gently shaking her shoulder. “Come,” he says. “Come for a walk with me.”

“I'm sleeping,” she replies.

“Please.” There is something in his voice. Something she hasn't heard for a long time. “I have your jacket,” he says, his voice sad, gentle. He stands beside the bed, holding the jacket open, then helps her arms into the sleeves. There is no sound of rain.

They walk along the path until it meets the river. Black water stretches out into black sky, and the cool air smells of wild frangipani and orange blossom. It reminds him of the smell of the estate after monsoon rains: sweet and damp and grassy. That time, that country—had any of it been real? It seems impossible that it might still exist or that such a place could exist alongside this
one, now. He tries to explain this to Charlotte. “I've been thinking about it,” he says. “I can't stop thinking about it.”

She nods in the dark but says nothing. Henry takes her hand in his. “It's like a little bright circle in my past that is not linked to my life now, not really, and yet I feel it inside me, that place. I always thought life would be governed by some deep sense of continuum. Now there are too many parts. Too many places. Too many things that happened in too many places. And the children—”

“What about the children?” Charlotte asks, defensive.

“I think it is them, having them, being around them, hearing them when I am trying to work, hearing you with them, all of that—it makes me think of the time when I was a child.”

They walk on, past the jetty and down towards the bridge. Henry says quietly, “I don't remember it as well as I think I should—childhood, I mean. I don't remember much, really, just bits here and there.” They come to a narrow crescent of sand and stand still. Small waves lap at the shore. Henry eases his feet out of his shoes and pulls off his socks. The sand is cold. The water colder.

“What are you doing, Henry?” She means wading out into the rising tide, his trousers rolled to the knees, and is about to warn him—
You'll catch your death
—when he replies, misunderstanding her question.

“I don't know, Charlotte. I don't know what I'm doing. I should be finishing this damned book but it's going nowhere. I don't know why. I write and write and then throw most of the stuff away. I think too much, but about the wrong things. I feel like I've lost something but I don't know what it is. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's us. Is that what I've lost?” He kicks gently at the water, moonlight rippling over the broken surface. “If only life
would feel like a poem,” he says. “If life felt, always, the way a poem can make life feel. Stronger, more vivid, more important than it felt before. If I could make life be that perfect thing.” His voice is quiet, the words mumbled as if he's talking to himself. “I don't know. I don't expect you to answer me. But when I think of my past it seems made up of so many bits and pieces, and this wasn't how it was meant to be, it wasn't, and now we are here—finally—and all I do is think of there.” He turns back to face her a moment.

“Where?”

“India, the hills, the house in Delhi. My mother.”

Charlotte sighs and shuts her eyes. For a moment she felt a great balloon of hope pushing up beneath her ribs; she thought he was talking about England, that they might go home, all of them, after all. Without all this arguing. Without fighting for it. But of course not. She knows now that leaving a place you love isn't the worst thing; it is arriving in the second place and having to live as if the first place has disappeared. This is the tragedy—given enough time you come to doubt the place you knew before. That first life, once real, truly does disappear. Unspoken of, it becomes forgotten.

And so her memories condense, smaller, but brighter than before. They are images now, rather than stories, the connections between the images breaking down. The frozen duck pond on the way home. The bulrushes covered in hoarfrost. The westward path making a sharp turn south, through a stretch of woodland. Then gray sky, and a slip of late sun yellowing the far hill. She is on her bicycle; it is blustery and cold. Squirrels dart through the undergrowth. Birds swoop and dive in the wind. Her freezing hands grip the handlebars, her knuckles red and chapped.

“I had a letter about her,” Henry says. “I'm sorry I didn't tell
you. We weren't talking. I should have told you anyway. I thought you wouldn't care.”

“About who?”

“My mother. She's ill.”

“How ill?”

“Very.”

A copse of she-oaks surrounds the sand, and as a breeze blows in off the water the trees let out a high, whispery moan. Charlotte purses her lips and says nothing. Moonlight falls through the gaps between the trees and hits the white river shells, making them glow in the night. She watches Henry walk further out into the water, his head down and his hands pushed deep into his coat pockets. She feels all the tender feelings she's ever had for him rise up inside her. She thinks again of the old path home and how they used to ride down it, very fast, side by side, the wind behind them. She thinks of the hill where they used to walk, the spot at the bottom where you turn and vanish behind the hedgerows. She thinks of the worn gray track still snaking around the perimeter of the village, sandy and cracked in summer, wet in the autumn, coated in ice throughout winter. Her mind is overtaken by fleeting images of these very particular, very small sections of what seem, now, like lost and only imaginary places. The fields of broad-bean flowers, the seedy, sharp smell of them, the mud and weeds, then the rise of grass, the birds looking for grubs, the dawn fox creeping forwards, she and Henry out early, startling the red animal to a run.

“I thought I might go back,” he says. “Just for a couple of weeks. You could come if you want. You and the girls.”

“Really, Henry.”

“No. I didn't think so.”

When they return home the house is dark and quiet. The chil
dren have not stirred, both sleeping with their arms tossed up over their heads. Charlotte stands at the entrance to their room and leans against the doorframe. Henry comes up behind her, kisses her neck, and pulls the door gently closed. Then he leads her back to the bedroom, feeling for her skin beneath her heavy jumper. They make love in the dark. Afterwards Henry rolls Charlotte onto her stomach and kisses her back. She has a dark birthmark high on the outside edge of her thigh, roughly a hand's length down from the curve of her bottom. Its color is something between aubergine and chocolate. Henry can feel it under his palm—a thick, smooth coin of skin. He runs his fingers down the warm meat of her leg, then puts his tongue to the mark. His fingers stray into her pubic hair, then away, down the inside edge of her other leg. He touches her from behind, then slips inside her once more.

Thunder wakes her late in the night. She dreams she is hearing fireworks, until the weather moves overhead and the crack of the storm makes the house shake. It passes slowly—the thunder, then the rain. “Henry,” she whispers. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” he says, rolling towards her. He puts his hand out, trying to find her face in the dark. His palm opens against her nose, his fingers stroking her forehead and coming down towards her mouth. He feels her lips move beneath his hand.

“You should go,” she whispers. “If you want to, you should.”

PART THREE

Homecomings

1965–1966

H
enry leaves two days later. He kisses the girls good night and slips out once they are sleeping. Charlotte helps him with his bags, then watches from the veranda as the taxi drives away, the taillights disappearing in the trees. That night she sleeps with the children and in the morning meets Carol, and the group of them walk down to the river. At the water's edge a giant gum has turned gray and lost its leaves. “What happened to it?” asks Lucie.

“It has grown old,” Charlotte replies.

“What is old?”

Charlotte thinks for a moment, then says, “Days and days and days.”

Lucie stands watching the tree, then stumbles up to it and touches its smooth trunk, quickly, as though it were scalding hot, then a second time, slowly. “I'm stroking it,” she says. “I'm stroking the tree.”

They arrive home to find a dead worm curled up on the garden path, its body baked hard by the sun. “What is dead?” Lucie asks. Several answers flash through Charlotte's mind but they are all inadequate. Instead she cheats, distracting her child with the blooming flowers, the torrent of red geraniums over the side of the hanging basket—
Let's pick some for the table.
But the next day Lucie finds the worm curled in the same place. Is the worm still dead? Yes, the worm is still dead. The sun is out and the grass is shining with the remains of night rain. Lucie crouches down to touch the wet grass beside the worm. “Who makes the rain?” she asks.

Henry flies into Delhi late at night and takes a taxi, the city dense with sirens and horns and headlights. The car plaits its way through the streets, tailgating a motorbike, buzzing up to race a truck, then overtaking a bus from the inside lane. Henry grips the cloth of his trousers with his sweaty hands. Further ahead an amber traffic light turns red. The driver pushes his foot to the brake and the car skids to a stop. A beggar comes up and puts his hand to the window just as the lights change again and the car takes off, roaring across three lanes of oncoming traffic to make the exit. Horns. Lights. One horn:
hurry up
. Two horns:
I'm passing
.

Henry sits in the back and gazes out the window. He paid for the airfare with the money from the trust fund his father left him. He didn't tell Charlotte about the fare. He said his mother was covering the costs, but he knew she didn't have any money to give and now feels his guts twist up with the lie. There's not much left of his father's money, he reasons, not enough to make a difference to them now. It paid for Charlotte's new shoes before they sailed out, and for the new bikes they'd bought on ­arrival. They were going to save the rest to put towards ­schooling, be sensible. Or he could have been kinder and given it to her, helped her go home. And now he is here. Of all places. Along the roadside is everything his mother wanted him to forget: the men sleeping on benches and on the ground and on the footpaths; the man defecating by the bridge—not squatting but just standing with knees a little bent, the shit falling out; the stone-and-cloth shacks by the highway and the thin mangy dogs; a truck piled full of corpses, the pale soles of their dark feet sticking out through wooden railings.

“Where have you come from?” the driver asks.

For a moment Henry can't remember the right answer. “Australia,” he replies, looking up. The driver is silent. They've not got far to travel and Henry is glad for it.

The driver punches the horn as he speeds past a rickshaw, then eyes Henry in the rear-vision mirror as if doubting what Henry said. “And where are you going?”

The power is out when he arrives at his lodgings. Everything is dark. The attendant lights a lantern and walks him around the side of the house towards his room. It all looks very different from how he remembers it, when the guesthouse was their ­family home. The attendant places Henry's suitcase at the foot of the bed. Would this have been his mother's room? He is jet-lagged and his sense of the house is confused. Which way had the attendant brought him? By the fish pond, he guesses, close to the front gate, which would mean he is in one of the outer rooms and that the room where his mother once slept would be through the adjoining wall. Of course no one knows who he is now. After his sister died his father stayed on in Calcutta, while Henry and his mother moved here, to be with his mother's family. It was a fine new house then, built by his mother's father, with rooms for everyone and a wide green garden glittering with orange-and-blue dragonflies. Everyone hoped that his mother would recover here; she would be well cared for and would not have to look out every single day over the places where her daughter had played. But it never happened, and soon enough Henry was packed off to school in the hills. By 1947, when India became independent, Henry was already in England and the house was sold to a wealthy developer who turned the building into a guesthouse. The family had dispersed.

Henry switches on the fan to disguise the sound of traffic. Mosquitoes bump against the high ceiling, then swoop down to
wards his arms. He knows that his is an accidental return, an accidental journey—like all his journeys, he thinks, created by the rough chances of the time. Charlotte must understand this. She must forgive him this. The ideas have not come of their own accord. It has always been someone else who suggested it, some ­other set of circumstances that made it possible. His geography has been determined by forces outside himself: the war, India's push towards independence, Australia's own fear of invasion. They shouldn't have taken him—they did not really want him. Neither England nor Australia, nor India for that matter. He could see it in the glare of the taxi driver's eye: he is too fair, but not fair enough; his English is good, but a little clipped, something you see as well as hear, something that makes him seem, just for a moment, like one of them—the way his lower jaw moves out when he speaks, pushing his chin forwards and bending his bottom lip down away from his teeth. He wonders what it would be like to belong somewhere and never doubt it. To not be constantly pestered by the knowledge of your own foreignness. He knows that his mother felt this herself, and sent him off to England in the hope that he might avoid this same experience, that he might come to feel himself part of a country, a rightful member of a place. But family has a way of passing down its fate. How he ­envies Charlotte her feelings for England, her sense of kinship.

He takes his breakfast early, while the sun is low behind the trees. His bags sit by his feet and the lanky black-and-white dog sniffs them over while Henry butters his toast. Two elderly ladies sit at the far end of the table, each picking at a basket of stuff in her lap. He thinks it some kind of intricate needlework at first, then realizes that the two are slowly working their morning
pills out of their packets and lining them up next to their plates piled with rice and vegetables. Beside him sit an older man and a younger woman. The man is touching sixty perhaps, the woman thirty-five. But he can never tell with women, something that always amuses Charlotte. “How old do you think she is?” she'd ask, meaning the woman at the grocery store, or a lady at a party, or the librarian, or the woman with six whining children.

“I don't know.”

“Well, go on, have a guess.”

“No, really, I don't know.”

Five wooden birdhouses hang from the branches of the neem tree that shades the breakfast table. The day is still but the little wooden houses swing gently on their ropes as lorikeets and squirrels wrestle for seed. Henry glances again at the woman and man sitting next to him. At first he assumed them to be strangers. They do not seem to notice one another's presence; they are sitting across from each other but have turned away so that they are facing in opposite directions. The man has taken an early swim in the green pool and now sits at the table in his bathers, staring into the hazy distance of the garden. The woman sits angled slightly to the left as if to signal to the man that she is not open to conversation, her head buried in the newspaper. For a long time they do not speak, then the man says something without turning towards her—Henry doesn't catch what it is—and the woman replies, just as briefly, without looking up from her reading. They are not strangers then, Henry thinks. Strangers look one another in the eye when they speak. They might be father and daughter were it not for the difference in appearance: the man thin and gingery, the woman round and dark. Perhaps they are a couple? Old couples ask questions and give answers, all without noticing the person they are talking to. But she looks too young for them
to be married, and they are too unenthusiastic—too uninterested in each other—to be traveling as friends or lovers. They could be siblings, Henry thinks, if not for their age. Siblings and old couples can be quite similar, really, both cool with years of residual irritations and rivalries. But perhaps he has the woman's age wrong and they are husband and wife after all? Do he and Charlotte look like that? Will they soon? How sad it must sometimes feel, but happy too, he imagines, and peaceful, the accumulation of years a kind of comfort in itself. He pictures his own parents plowing on through the decades, breakfasting on the veranda every morning. They were always very calm. He never asked if they were happy. Now he realizes that of course they were not. Henry stands and goes in search of more tea; there was a man about just a moment ago, carrying a silver pot.

Later, once he's finished his breakfast, he calls for the porter, who takes his bags and stacks them in the boot of the white Ambassador. Henry climbs into the backseat, and as the driver closes the door the cuff of his blue shirt slips back from his wrist, revealing a single red prayer string. Henry has seen men with inches of wishes tied to their wrists, and now this. Such frugality. If he made only one wish, what would it be?

At half past seven the train pulls out of Delhi station. His seat is by the window, and although he tries not to look he can't help it. He sees it all: the miles and miles of slums, the dwellings made of scraps of sacking and plastic or cardboard, the roofs pinned down by bricks, the pigs and children digging in the pyramids of rubbish, the women washing in greenish water or cooking over damp fires fueled with refuse, the rags of clothes hanging on decaying brick walls, the buffalo and goats wandering through the mud and
slime. No one else in the carriage is looking. They have seen it too many times and for too long to bother noticing it anymore. Henry has forgotten these things. He must have seen these sights as a child, seen them without judgment or understanding; he would simply have seen children and animals, women washing.

Henry leans his head back and closes his eyes. When he opens them again the train is speeding through rice paddies spotted with small grass huts. The flat plains of green stretch out in every direction. Rain begins to fall, spattering the windows. Soon the green of the rice fields gives way to trees—thin, silver-limbed eucalypts.

The train starts to climb and the eucalypts are replaced by acacia, then conifer and deodar. The bright green of the hillside is ­colored with pink hibiscus and waves of yellow lantana. Fog collects below as the train moves higher and higher, vine-covered branches leaning out over the deep valley that is soon sunk in cloud. Monkeys perch in the forks of the trees, watching as the train passes, then they run across the vines and jump down, out of sight. They are so much bigger than he remembers—these creatures as fat and tall as dogs.

Opposite Henry sit a husband and wife, fast asleep, their toes turned inwards. The woman's chin collapses on her chest, the man's cheek presses against the window. Henry slides his own window open and breathes in the high, cool air. It smells of diesel and freshly wet earth. The air is cold and dark beneath the trees and they speed now through tunnel after tunnel, black tunnels glistening with water, yet when they emerge the train still seems to move beneath the earth, with high slopes of wet grass and moss-covered rocks rising up beside the carriages. Henry presses his face to the gap of the window and looks up—the spires of conifers tower straight above the train, their uppermost branches lost in the bright fog, their lower ones black with water, the railway tracks running along beneath their roots.