The Other Side of the World (19 page)

F
or several days Charlotte sees no one but the children. Nicholas doesn't come back; another week passes and there is still no word from Henry. Charlotte doesn't know if she wants to hear from him; how will they resume, and must they? Meanwhile ­Carol has taken a job at the local library and so is out most of the time. It is as if the world has somehow been deserted; the suburb, with its neat lawns and lace curtains, is eerily quiet. Every day, all day, there is just her voice and the voices of the children. The birds. Then one afternoon a letter arrives from Henry. She tears open the envelope while the children whine and pull at her skirt. “A letter from Daddy!” calls Lucie. “Give me! Give!”

Dear Charlotte
, Henry writes.
My mother died peacefully a few days ago. I went to come home straightaway, but there have been troubles with the airline. They say it won't be long, a week perhaps. So hopefully by the time you receive this—
. She doesn't read to the end, but folds the letter up and puts it back in the envelope. She ought to be pleased at the news—there can be no doubt now. At the back of her mind had been the thought that perhaps he would not return, and that maybe this would be better, easier—an accidental parting of ways. But no. And it is unbearable, all of a sudden it is unbearable—to think of the days going on as they once did. Suffocating. She will make a show of it for the children though, because it is not their fault. “Daddy will be home soon!” she says as she pushes the envelope into the pocket of her dress.

To celebrate the news they make a cake, mixing flour and butter and eggs and popping it in a Bundt pan because that is
the shape the girls like. While it bakes they go out into the garden; there are weeds to pull and flowers to water. But Lucie trips and grazes her knee, then May gets a prickle stuck in her finger. Both girls wail, and while Charlotte tends to them the cake burns. When she opens the oven door, smoke billows out into the ­kitchen. It is too much: there is still dinner to cook and a bath to run, then the bedtime stories to be read. Charlotte starts to cry. The cake was meant to change the feeling of the day, to make them happy. Dusk is coming. Charlotte takes a glass from the cabinet and pours herself a drink. She is exhausted: awake since three in the morning, when May called out for her and she went, dutiful. But now she aches with tiredness—her eyes, the bones in her face. She is tired of the house, of the children, of Henry.

She hurries the girls through their dinner and their bath. And when she makes a simple request—
Please, put your nightie on now
—and Lucie staunchly refuses—
No, no I won't
—Charlotte's anger is instantaneous. She swoops down and yanks the red nightdress over her daughter's head, knowing the buttons are still fastened and that they have caught in her child's hair.

“Ow! It's hurting! Ow! You're hurting me!”

Charlotte forces the nightdress down, over her daughter's face. “You will put this on! You. Will. Put. This. On!”

Lucie's eyes and cheeks burst through the opening before the top of her head, so that Charlotte has to tug the thing, making it drag at Lucie's throat. The child coughs and gags. “Oh, stop making a show of it,” Charlotte snaps. It is too small, but it is the only one that is clean. Lucie screams and Charlotte yells at her, “Hold still! Hold still! Would you damn well—You stupid child—You stupid—”

Lucie screams and screams, then collapses between Charlotte's legs, lying on her belly with her face pressed into the floor,
hollering and dribbling into the carpet. The nightie hangs loose around her neck; beneath it her legs are bare and pink from the heat of the bath. Charlotte pauses, looks down at those legs, at the soft pad of skin behind the knee, and hits them. She hits them once, twice, three times, a red print of her hand aglow on Lucie's pale skin. Then she turns out the light and slams the door. She returns to the kitchen to finish the dishes while Lucie wails.

Ten minutes later, Charlotte goes back to find her lying on the carpet in a puddle of urine. Now Lucie lets her mother dress her. Quiet as a mouse. Charlotte crouches down, soft now.

Lucie says, “See the tears? See the tears on my face?”

“I do,” replies Charlotte, not looking. Lucie turns her back on her mother, then twists her head around, slides her eyes in Charlotte's direction, and holds her mother's gaze. Her brow furrows and she watches Charlotte until Charlotte cannot bear it anymore, the challenge, whatever it is, and looks away again, down into the floral twists of the carpet.

“I love apples,” Lucie says, her voice soft as though talking to herself. She is hiding now behind the curtains, her nose pressed to the cold window. “I love strawberries. I love squeaky toys. I love Bessie. Bessie talk to Lucie?” she says, coming out from her hiding place. “Bessie talk?” Bessie is the rag doll Lucie was given as a baby. In six months' time Lucie will be three; the rag doll is stained and losing her stuffing. “Bessie talk!” she demands, holding the doll out to her mother.

The guilt Charlotte feels then, the need for atonement. “And what does Bessie say?” she asks, kneeling down before her daughter. Charlotte aches to sleep. There is a terrible weight in her chest and in her feet. She feels giddy with the need for sleep. She bites her tongue deliberately, the pain sharpening her attention, keeping her awake. “Bessie's going to the library,” says Charlotte. “Off
we go! We're going to get some books. Now, get in the car, Bessie. Okay. Broom-broom. We're at the library now. Out we get.”

How quickly Lucie has forgotten her mother's cruelty. But just as Charlotte thinks this, she makes some terrible, invisible error. “No! Not like that. No! Noooo!” howls Lucie. “Like that!”

“Like what, sweetheart?”

“Like that! Like that! Like that!”

Charlotte doesn't understand. She feels tears sting her eyes and tries to change the subject. “Is Bessie hungry? Shall Bessie have something to eat instead? What about a cheese sandwich? Shall we all have a cheese sandwich?”

“Okay,” says Lucie. “Bessie wants crusts off. And butter. Just butter. Not cheese, just butter. Make Bessie eat the sandwich.” Charlotte responds with the appropriate munching sounds. “And ice cream. Now Bessie do a wee. And a fart. Bessie does a poo.” Charlotte hurries, trying to keep up with the commands. “Now make Bessie talk. Talk to Lucie, Bessie.”

“And have you had a good day?” Bessie asks Lucie.

“Yes.”

“What have you done?”

“Umm . . . You tell Bessie,” Lucie says to Charlotte. “You tell Bessie what Lucie has done.”

“Well,” begins Charlotte, in a squeaky little voice, “today I . . . went to the park and I had a swing. I saw a dog running after a ball and—”

“No—not that! Not that!”

“What then?”

“Something else. Bessie do something else!”

“One more thing—the last thing—and then it's time for bed.”

“No, not the last thing! Not the very last thing!”

“Yes, the very last thing. Yes!”

The fantasy begins now. Just a quick flash of an image. A woman on her own, in a train, in a room. Somewhere else.

“I don't want to go to bed,” says Lucie. She is sitting on the floor nursing Bessie and shifts around, turning her back to Charlotte.

“That doesn't matter, it's bedtime.”

“No! Bessie—I want to talk to Bessie.”

“Bessie's tired, she's going to bed too,” says Charlotte, but this only makes Lucie wail once again. Charlotte picks her up and tries plugging her mouth with the teat of a bottle. Lucie wriggles and gags and cries louder, milk and spit running down her chin. She throws herself from Charlotte's lap onto the floor. May, who's been quietly watching television, comes into the bedroom and begins to wail as well, the two of them thrashing about, all legs and arms and red sweaty faces. Lucie gasps and howls and gasps until she vomits, milk and bits of half-digested meat coating her nightie.

Charlotte leaves them there, opens the front door, and steps outside. How glorious is this release into cold dark air, the sensation of light rain fresh against her hot face, the smell of smoke and coal and damp leaves loose in the gutters, the smell of the river, the dank low tide and the rotting weed. Inside, the children continue to scream and flail. Charlotte walks down the steps and onto the grass, the sound of the children growing softer as she walks further and further away, right up to the front gate. The moon is behind the clouds and a wide panel of sky tilts over the black trees. She puts her hand to the latch, thinking of the river not far away, of Nicholas in his house above the sea.

She remembers a feeling from years before—a feeling of nascency, of potential, of openness to the world. Now she is a response but not a question; in all of this, she thinks, I am what comes after the event.

They don't know she is gone. They wouldn't know if she went. Not now. Not immediately. And they are young, too young—they would remember so little of their abandonment. She could just walk on now, through the gate, towards the train, or the river. Thunder booms in the distance and a great wave of cold wind pushes over and around her, sweeping the land clean and empty once again. Then she lifts her hand from the gate and turns back towards the house.

The moment she steps inside, the phone rings. “I'm catching a plane in the morning,” he tells her. “It gets in tomorrow night. No, don't worry, I'll make my own way.”

The trees stand very still in the dawn. White cabbage moths glint in the glassy air. A mist hovers over the grass. She has packed her bag and now pulls out her coat from the wardrobe, glimpsing the yellowed newspaper clipping that her mother sent shortly after Charlotte married, and which Charlotte has kept taped to the inside of the wardrobe door ever since. It started off as a joke between her and Henry; they used to laugh at it. She doesn't need to read it—after all these years she knows the words by heart:

The girl who marries must not expect to find the married state an enchanted garden of happiness, where never a weed nor a thorn grows. She will certainly have many times of trouble and weariness but she must, with brave heart and indomitable courage, face the new unknown life which, along with fuller joy than she has hitherto known, lies before her. She should do all in her power to make her home the daintiest, coziest little nest imaginable, so that her husband should be only too glad to
spend his evenings there instead of going off to his “Club.” She must bear in mind that no man, even “the dearest fellow in the world,” can bear with good temper being kept waiting twenty minutes for his dinner, or finding his shirts minus their complement of buttons or his socks full of holes. She should not forget that well-cooked daintily served meals go far to ensure household peace. No time is wasted that is spent as means to this desirable end. She should strive to be always as fresh and attractive as a newly opened daisy sparkling with the morning dew, and as sweet-tempered and loving a little wife as ever gladdened the heart of a husband.

Why had her mother sent her this piece? This fierce woman who for some unknown reason expected docility from her child. The wardrobe had belonged to Charlotte's father and his name is inscribed just below the clipping, written in pencil, in fine copperplate:
Mr. D. L. Thomas
. Although the wardrobe was given to Charlotte, she and Henry both hang their clothes here, and it is because of this, she supposes, that Henry chose to write his name below her father's. He meant to mark a simple change in ownership—the wardrobe was theirs now, it became theirs in the winter of 1961. But the appearance of her husband's name makes it seem as though the two men, together, are endorsing this strange comment sent to Charlotte by her mother. What kind of wife was her mother? This loyal woman who couldn't cook but who never admitted to such a thing. When her mother's Christmas cake sank in the middle she filled the hole with cold porridge before smothering it in royal icing. And how many burnt dinners were buried in the back garden? Charred roasts. Black potatoes.
Her mother out there in the blue dusk with the spade, the kitchen thick with smoke. She thought that if she buried the ruined food her husband might never know.

Charlotte folds the coat over her suitcase, then stands by the window waiting for the moment when it is time to wake the girls. Then she dresses them, feeds them, and wipes their faces with a warm cloth. “It's just for the day,” she says, biting down on her lip to stop herself from crying. “And guess who'll be home to see you tonight!” She stands her children side by side and kneels before them. “There now, let me get a good look at you,” she says, stroking May's tubby chest and straightening the collar of Lucie's blouse. The two girls sway slightly, little ships at anchor.

She leaves the suitcase to collect on her return, then hoists May onto her hip and takes Lucie by the hand. They walk towards Carol's house. It is Saturday—she will be home today. The morning sun is bright, the air cold. She is very conscious of the air all around her. The stretch of it. The thin gusting. The smell of fresh leaves and smoke. There is a flash of red in a neighboring garden—Mr. Oates bending down to water the flowers, then standing up and bending down again. Charlotte lets go of Lucie's hand and waves, Lucie's attention instantly diverted as she crouches down to inspect a row of marching ants. She pokes at them, watching one crawl over her small finger. “Come, Lucie,” Charlotte says gently, taking Lucie by the wrist and lifting her to her feet.

The house rises up out of the shrubbery, the bungalow surrounded by bare frangipani and flame trees. Carol isn't expecting them. “I've just got to go out for a bit,” Charlotte says to Carol. “Would you mind?”

“Of course not,” Carol replies, looking at her strangely. “Is there something I can help with?”

“No, Henry's back tonight, that's all.” As if this explains her appearance on Carol's doorstep. Errands, Carol must assume. A surprise, perhaps.