The Other Side of the World (21 page)

O
n the other side of the world Henry waits. He waits through December and into January, past February and March. It is a long, hot, unbearable summer, dragging on past Easter. The lawn is scorched and little by little the greenery of the whole front yard dissolves into sand. Week in and week out he hopes for rain. By Easter, Charlotte has been gone over five months and in all that time they've had no more than two days of broken showers. Plane trees and maples are dying throughout the suburbs. The lemon tree has dropped its leaves. Dust rises from the ground when they walk. Each afternoon, clouds collect on the horizon, but then they slip quickly across the sky—moving inland—never giving rain. Wind rattles around the house, and the floorboards creak and split from the dry heat. Often Henry thinks he hears someone in the house with him, someone other than the children. Or else he sees things; out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of something moving in the breeze and is startled, thinking it is her, standing outside the window—her hair blowing back from her shoulders, her scarf—but it is just the peach-colored sheet drying on the line, billowing back and forth.

By the end of April there is still no word from her. He tries to imagine her unhappiness, what she must have felt before she left. It is his fault, he thinks. If he hadn't been so preoccupied with his book, with work, with the garden, if he'd not gone back to India and left her here alone. If he'd not refused her. Or if he had told her that night, when she asked, why he loved her. What he loved.

He waits then in the only way he knows, immersing himself
in his studies. The book that started as lecture notes on the ship flourishes. One essay links neatly into another, and soon enough he has completed a draft. He reworks it, fiddles with it, plays the arguments back and forth.

During the day a woman comes in to look after the children. At night he bathes and feeds them, but he only knows how to cook three things: curry, which they won't eat, and spaghetti or sausages, which they will. So every night they eat spaghetti or sausages. One night Lucie asks for carrots and Henry realizes that it has been months since he's cooked a vegetable to go with the meal. “Of course, of course,” he says, pushing his chair back so quickly that it topples to the floor. But he can't even manage this. “I'm sorry, sweetheart,” he says, peering into the almost empty fridge. “We have a tomato, and look, here's an apple, would you like an apple?”

“No, no, no! I want a carrot!” She begins to cry.

He thinks often of the letter Charlotte left for him.
The story that starts a marriage
, she wrote,
is very often the same story that ends it
. Or rather, the seed of the end is planted in the beginning. It is the sadness of marriage that one can only learn where the end begins when it is too late; by then love is over and one is left bearing the various carapaces of wedlock—the little roof over our little house, the hat you wore on our honeymoon, the ­umbrellas we each carried of an English summer to keep us safe from ­unwanted rain. We err, she wrote, because we think happiness is a state in itself, when really it is only a symptom of love.

By the time the official envelope arrives it is June and Henry has forgotten that he ever made the application. The fine paper. The red, rectangular stamp of the college, the small black stamp of
the post office. He'd applied for a research fellowship at Jesus College, to allow him to complete his manuscript, and the letter informs him of his success. He did it for Charlotte, when they were still together, and now she isn't here to know of this good news. It would have been all right, Henry wants to say. If you had just waited I would have given you what you wanted. Imagine that, imagine saying to her, “Look, look at this, I'm taking you back to England.” Instead he thinks to himself, now I will find you. I will find you and I will love you and I will bring you home.

S
he is on her way back from cleaning the Bowery when she hears the sound. The small light notes of a child's voice. One child, then another. No, she thinks, it is not possible. It has happened before, this error—wrongly thinking that another child is her own. Nor is the mistake limited to human voices; she hears the call of her children in animals and inanimate objects—the distant howl of a dog, whining pipes. Surely not, she thinks, yet still she waits. All is quiet. Then comes the patter of feet and the small, rising notes of the voices again. Laughter, a curling, playful squeal. She steps off the path onto the damp grass and moves closer to the tree that stands at the edge of the courtyard. She presses her body against the tree and peers around, her heart thumping, the smooth cool bark against her cheek. There is the flash of blue cloth. The streamer of a pink hair ribbon. She tilts her face to see out across the lawn. Yes—yes. How could it be, but yes—the flash of their dark little eyes, the leap of leg over grass.

She feels her knees give and crouches down, biting her lip to keep from crying out. May is tugging off flower heads, squishing them between her fingers, then rubbing them onto her wrist and sniffing. Lucie is building a house out of sticks and leaves; she runs back and forth between the trees, gathering supplies—mud, stones, twigs. Her old rag doll, Bessie, watches on, propped up against a purple-flowering hebe bush. Lucie runs and ferries and runs and ferries, her small cheeks red in the cold and her hair loose and damp. She is tall for a three-and-a-half-year-old. And she is a good
little runner, her Lucie, fast and light, but her eyes are up in the sky, then casting back towards May, then darting left to where a ­gardener works up a pile of leaves for burning. She is not looking at the smooth, worn, tangled knot of roots rising up in her path. Just then Lucie's toe catches the loop of a tree root and her body crashes down. Charlotte pulls back, out of sight. May trots over to her sister and then there is the voice of a man. “Are you okay there, sweetheart? Where's your mummy?” It is Mr. Jones, the head gardener. Of course he does not know who they are, and if he did he would know that they have no mummy, or that they do not know where their mummy is. Charlotte hears May say exactly this:
I don't know
.

She knows she should leave before she is discovered but Lucie is squealing and holding her ankle as if it were sprained or broken. Mr. Jones is saying, “There now, there now. Can you move it? It will be better soon, little one. Where's your daddy?”

From out of nowhere comes Henry's voice.
Luu-cie? Lu-cie!
He is running, taking great heavy strides, his voice bouncing in his chest then exploding over the grass.
Lucie!
Charlotte peeks around to see him hitching up his trousers and bending down, gathering Lucie into his arms. There he is, with our child, Charlotte says to herself,
with our child
. Lucie's long legs are bunched up in her father's lap, her red face pressed to the soft cloth of his shirt.

It only takes a few inquiries on Charlotte's part to discover what has brought the children to the garden. Henry has a small apartment that looks out over that very courtyard and has been there now for two months. He has a book coming out, the porter—a friendly man who prides himself on knowing such particulars—­tells her, and is in Cambridge on a fellowship, making final
­changes to the manuscript while he works on a series of lectures that he is to deliver later in the year. Some annual series, a great privilege to be asked, and so on and so forth.

“Do you know him?” the porter asks.

“Oh no,” Charlotte says. “No, I saw him with his children the other day and thought I recognized him for an old acquaintance, but it seems I was wrong.”

The following week the roster changes and she is assigned to clean his rooms. Charlotte suggests that she'd be of more use in the undergraduate rooms. “Not at all,” the college manager says, thinking he is doing her a favor. “You've got enough of those. Although if it's a question of too much work—”

“No, it's not that.”

“Well then,” he says, “there's no problem?”

“No, sir, none at all.”

The next morning she takes her mop and bucket and waits under the archway until she sees Henry leave, one child hanging on to each hand and a rucksack of books on his back. Then she dashes up and cleans as fast as she can. It is not long before she learns their routine. They leave the college at eight thirty. At eight forty-five he rings the doorbell of a house on Adams Road. It is an enormous house set back from the footpath, the garden dense with apple trees and tall weeds. A woman comes to the door. Henry hugs and kisses the children, then hurries back to the library, where he works until a little after lunch. He and the girls return home in the afternoon and Henry carries on at his desk. If she is to trust the light in the window, he works late into the night. She reasons that if she arrives at nine each morning she could, at a push, be out by ten or ten thirty. This way they could run a little late or come home early and she will still be safe.

Henry's rooms smell like their house used to smell: old books,
lemony washing powder, the fat from fried meat. Where to begin? she thinks. Should she begin? The carpet by his bed is covered in paper; there are piles of notes, pages of typed passages, several stacks of periodicals, books bent open to mark a place, cuttings from newspapers with notes scribbled in the margins. His belongings are in chaos, and she assumes that he cannot possibly know where anything is in all those mounds of paper. She imagines he does not even know the photograph is there, and because of this will not miss it. It only comes to her attention by accident. She is throwing the bottom sheet over the mattress, and as it billows out the breeze disturbs a stack of papers on the bedside table. The first few papers drift to the floor, and as she tidies them up she notices the corner of a photo sticking out from the bottom of the pile. She eases it from its place and sits down on the bed. It is of the three of them, her and May and Lucie, just days after May's birth. May is wrapped up against Charlotte's chest while Lucie leans over to peek at her sister's scrunched-up face. Charlotte has one arm around Lucie and the other under May, her head tilted towards the older child and dropping down to gaze upon the new.

She can't remember seeing the photo before. It is clear from her disheveled appearance that she did not know it was being ­taken, the milk leaking through her nightshirt, her hair unbrushed. She has no photos of them, of the children, or of ­Henry—she left everything behind, and how often she has regretted that decision. She peers closer, to better see the look of love on her own face. Then she presses the photo into the pocket of her apron, makes the bed, and leaves as quickly as she can.

It is only a matter of time before her first theft leads to others. She takes a dress from Lucie's wardrobe, a ribbon from May's top
drawer. She takes a book that she remembers as once belonging to her. She starts arriving earlier and leaving later, spending the extra time sifting through her children's possessions.

Charlotte has accrued quite a collection of items by the time Henry makes his complaint. Of course she denies it, and points out that the keys to the college rooms are available to a great many staff.

“But you are the only one,” the head porter points out, “who has regular access to the rooms.”

“May I ask what is missing?” she says.

“Items of a personal nature,” he replies.

“How do you know Dr. Blackwood hasn't simply misplaced them? He is on his own, you know, with those children. Things get lost,” Charlotte says. “And he is not exactly orderly.”

“I don't care what is missing or why,” the porter tells her. “We can't have this kind of incident. If you don't know where the things are, then I suggest you find out. You have until Friday,” he says, then picks up his bangle of keys and waddles out the door.

The complaint was made on Monday. This exchange takes place on Tuesday. Charlotte is too afraid to clean his rooms on Wednesday, and come Thursday she stands trembling in the archway, awaiting Henry's departure for the day. It is freezing. Soon, she thinks, there will be snow.

Twenty minutes pass, half an hour. A lamp glows in the window. She doesn't see them leave; it is late, perhaps they've gone out already and forgotten to switch off the light. She is about to drop the box of stolen items outside the front door, then all of a sudden she knocks. It is a small, accidental knock, a thing of habit. She pulls her hand back as if she's touched something hot. Quickly she turns to go, her coat swinging out as she makes for
the stairs, but just as she steps away she hears a key click in the lock. The door opens.

“Charlotte?” Henry says. “Charlotte?”

The girls are sick. Of course he is at home.

“Yes, Henry,” she replies, turning slowly back to face him. “I came to return your things.”

S
he would have walked, only Henry said no. The footpaths are treacherous, he told her, and I don't want you slipping and injuring yourself when I've just found you alive and well. The snow has come early and the cold is fierce. No, he said, I'll come and collect you and bring you back here, to the hotel near the river. There wasn't room for them all in his apartment and Charlotte didn't want the college knowing of their situation, so Henry had booked rooms at the Royal. He'll be driving past the river now, she thinks, checking her watch. Her husband, ever punctual. The water a dark stripe in the corner of his vision. He'll see it as he drives straight ahead, lose it as he turns left, then right. On the river there will be rowboats—the faint sound of blades smacking and cutting at the water, the creak of hull and oarlock, the call of boys.

Charlotte opens the window and pushes her face into the cold. Outside, the college grounds are empty—the air filled with the whirr of falling snow. There are no birdcalls, no lawn mowers, no hum of the London train, no movement other than this drift of white. The wind gusts towards her and she steps back into the dim room. Although there is not much more to pack, her stamina has vanished. There is a glass paperweight from the market, a small blue vase for the flowers she gathered on her tramps through the fields, the photograph she stole from Henry. But the effort required to wrap these last things and place them in the box seems monumental. She crouches on the ground, tugs a sheet of newspaper from the pile, and stuffs it into the vase. She slips the
photograph of the children into her handbag. Altogether there is less than she expected, just a couple of boxes and a suitcase. Henry will be surprised.

Another gust blows snow into the room. Charlotte gets up to close the window and sees his car parked beside the hedge. How had she not heard his arrival? The purr of the engine and the slow crunch of wheels over gravel and ice. She had kept the window open so that she might catch the sound of these things. She didn't expect this. He will be here any moment now. She had meant to watch for the car and use those last minutes to compose herself. To be ready; to know what to say. She starts to sweat. There is the smell of it. This frightened animal called woman. Her hands shake as she lifts the small round mirror to her face and tries to fix a smudge of blue eye shadow. She rubs a hand against the center of her chest and walks a nervous circle, to the door and back, her heart skittering beneath her palm. Should she let him in, and invite him to sit down, or should she wait by the window and call out—
It's open
—when he knocks? Then they'll walk towards each other. Or will he find her with her back to him? She'll turn, and each will pause, unsure of who should make the first approach. He'll brush the snow from his coat; he'll take off his hat. And the children? Where are they? The children.

What Henry noticed most was the smell of geraniums, sharp and sweet in Charlotte's warm, stuffy little room. They crowded the windowsills and the middle rung of the bookshelf: two with common brickred flowers, one with wild purple blooms, and another with a pale pink bud on a stem that shot up like a tree, reminding him of the blossom on a crabapple. While he waited for her to close the last box he bent down and rubbed a scented leaf between thumb
and finger. The plants on the windowsill reached sideways towards the light. The leaves of others trailed down onto the ground to be crushed underfoot. All over the floor were spots of crimson and pink where the petals had dropped and been smudged into the carpet.

As he drives he rubs at his jaw and catches the smell of the leaf still on his fingers. The windscreen wipers skid and drag over the ice. Henry manages to clear a small circle in front of his face but the rest of the window remains opaque.

“I had a dream, you know,” he says, keeping his eyes on the slippery road. “That this happened. Not me finding you again, but before, everything that came before. It was a long time ago now, one of those dreams that I didn't know was a dream. I dreamed, like this—very real—that you were in love with him.”

Charlotte raises her voice in protest. “That's not the reason, and it wasn't—” she says. But Henry holds out his hand to silence her.

“I know,” he says. “I mean I knew. Of course I knew. I am not a fool. Although I suppose that's what everyone says and then we go and do foolish things.” He pauses a moment, checking the side mirror before veering right.

“That's not why—” Charlotte begins, but Henry talks over her.

“It was a very simple dream,” he says. “We were out together, you and I, and we met Nicholas, just by chance. He'd been ­eating a cake of some kind and there was icing sugar on his cheek. We were all talking. Or Nicholas and I were talking. You, I think, were standing quietly beside me, with your arm through mine, looking at the ground. There was grass on the ground, worn down, with patches of mud showing through. Perhaps we were at a market. I don't know. Anyway, Nicholas and I were talking when you reached over and brushed his cheek, to clean the sugar from it. You did it very slowly, and carefully, little strokes with the fingers of your left hand. Nicholas and I stopped talking, and
then, after a moment, he dropped his gaze from mine. I'd been politely pretending I hadn't seen it, the sugar—the sign of this indulgence of his. But you insisted. I remember thinking, in the dream, that I couldn't tell whether you were touching him like a mother would or as a lover might. I didn't know, I couldn't make up my mind, although it seemed obvious that the point was not to wipe his cheek clean. The sugar just gave you an excuse to put your hand to his face. Then I dreamed that we were in a boat that was sinking, half of it torn away and filling with water. I had to save the girls. I didn't know where you were. And then I woke up and I knew. I just knew.”

“It was only a dream.”

“But it told me the truth, didn't it?”

“Some of it, not all.” Charlotte stares out the window; he has misunderstood her.

Henry flicks the indicator, then throws a glance over his shoulder before turning left. He drives slowly, carefully. “Almost there now,” he says gently, as if they've been on a terribly long journey that is finally coming to an end.

“And the girls?” she asks. “What have you told them?”

“That you have been unwell. That you were unwell and that you'd come back when you were better.”

“What did they say?”

“What could they say? You were gone. You've been gone for a year.”

“And now?”

“I haven't said anything.”

“You haven't told them?”

“I didn't know how, and I thought it didn't matter, that it wouldn't help. They'll see you. You'll be there. That's enough. You left without explanation. You're returning that way.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You make it sound like we are moving backwards, resuming something old.”

“I don't know how else to think of it. I loved you. I love you still.”

“Yes,” Charlotte says, but does not know quite what she is agreeing to. Love? Something old? Old love, perhaps. She wants to be with them all, more than anything, but he must know she is not the same, that they are not the same and that she can't return to that country, to that suburb, to that house. But he must know this, surely he must.

They pull up on the street, opposite the entrance to the hotel. Henry walks around to the other side of the car and opens the door for her. Charlotte pauses a moment, then swings her legs out, letting him take her by the elbow. His hands are large on her—she had forgotten this. They dip their heads against the wind and step slowly over the black ice, Charlotte lifting her face at the curb to catch sight of a waiter through the front window. He is positioning serviettes beside the place settings. A tower of folded white cloths rests on his left forearm and with his right hand he carefully peels them away, one by one, leaning towards the table just enough to drop the serviette into place without disturbing the white tower. Around and around the tables he goes, like a wind-up doll. A smoking room is visible through the next window, the back wall lined with rows of pale leather-bound books. She feels Henry steer her leftwards. Then he nods to the doorman and removes his hat, and they step inside.

His room is two flights up. He takes the keys from his trouser
pocket as they make their way through the entrance hall. The keys hang from a plain metal loop. Henry hooks this over his finger and Charlotte follows him up the stairs.

When they arrive he gestures for her to enter first, then closes the door quietly behind them, unwrapping his scarf from his neck as he clicks the lock. He pushes the keys back into his pocket and with his free hand yokes his scarf over a spare hook on the hat stand. Then he shakes his jacket from his shoulders and hangs it up too. Until this moment he has looked almost robust, but without the padding of the corduroy and the thick weave of the wool he looks frail, shrunken, his shoulders narrow, his back a little hunched.

Charlotte drops her gaze to her hands, and with her handbag still slung over the crook of her arm tugs at the fingers of her gloves. She pulls off the left glove and holds it crushed in her palm while loosening her fingers from the fit of the right. Then she undoes the clasp of her bag and pushes the gloves inside. She does not know what is meant to happen next. She thinks she should put the bag down, only she doesn't know where. She has not yet taken off her coat.

“They're through there,” he says, pointing to the door of a small adjoining room. She steps forwards, Henry close behind. “Go on,” he says. The door creaks as she pushes it open, then she stands in the shadow against the wall and searches out their figures. Bit by bit her sight adjusts to the dimness and she sees them, tucked up in bed. She can hear Henry breathing, somewhere behind her. Then his voice coming from the far side of the room. “Please,” he says. “Go to them. All they have wanted is you.”

She steps forwards once more and kneels down beside their bed. She tries to quiet her breathing. Her palms sweat. The two of them, close enough to touch: May with her round arms thrown
above her head, Lucie pressed against the wall with her sweaty feet sticking out of the covers. Charlotte bends down, closer, and closer still, until she can feel May's puffs of breath warm on her cheek.

“I'm sorry,” Henry says. “I tried to keep them awake so they could see you, but they were so tired.”

“No, it's better this way.”

Charlotte looks down at their long bodies, at Lucie's thinning face, her fat baby cheeks gone, and she understands, by dint of evidence, how life masses together to become life. She had forgotten. She gazes down at them and feels something beneath the surface of her skin ache and stretch, as though she were being drawn forwards by a magnetic force. Henry stands in the doorway and blocks the light. Then she hears him moving up behind her. His wide, warm hand comes to rest on the back of her neck. From the corner of her eye she can see his other hand bunched in his pocket.

She remembers the letter she left him. What had it said?
I know you think there something poor in my motherly constitution. And I suppose there must be, there is. Is guilt something I feel? Yes, but bewilderment more so. I know I ought to feel differently. I wish I did. I wish you could understand this. It has always struck me that you have deliberately not understood so many things. Why? You've always seemed so intent on dismissing my complaints about this place and my affection for the old one. I say this calmly, but I can't begin to explain the pain this has caused. To be told that such things do not matter.

I don't expect you to understand. There was always something about you I couldn't fathom, some quality that seemed strange. Now I think I know what it is—it is homelessness, a grown-up version of the restlessness you must have learned as a child, and it means you can pre
tend to be at home anywhere. I cannot. There is a chance, of course, that my leaving will make us the same—both wanderers, both alone.

“You should eat,” comes his voice. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, a little.”

“What would you like? I can order some food up.”

“Oh, anything. A sandwich. Some toast.”

“You need more than that.”

“You choose then.”

Henry lingers behind her, watching Charlotte kneel at the bedside. May lies closest to her. The child takes a quick, deep breath and sighs, turning towards Charlotte and pressing her soft warm nose to her mother's breastbone. Charlotte puts her mouth to the whorl at the crown of May's head: she smells warm fur, skin, and soap, remembering, again, in this one deep breath, the whole of her child's existence. She strokes May's silky hair and feels her stir. The child mutters something in her sleep, rolls over, and kicks the covers away. Then her eyes open slowly, close, then open again. “Mummy?” she says. “Mummy?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Charlotte whispers. “I'm here.”

Lucie hears the voice and wakes too. She opens her eyes, sits up, and stares at Charlotte as if she doesn't quite know who she is. She blinks once, twice, then scrambles across the bed and throws herself against Charlotte's chest, knotting her arms around her neck. Charlotte had forgotten the weight and warmth of her child; she holds her tight. There is, again, the feeling of being made whole by this simple proximity. It feels like the first flush of love: the burning need to touch and be near. May begins to cry and Charlotte pulls her close. Lucie pushes her face to Charlotte's skin and says, “You still smell of Mummy.”

“Yes,” says Charlotte, kissing Lucie's head. The children clam
ber over each other to get nearer to her. May's hair flaps at Charlotte's face while Lucie wraps her arms tighter and tighter around Charlotte's neck. They wriggle and twist. Charlotte's breathing becomes shallow and rapid—the children's hands on her hair, her forehead, her throat, stroking, patting, fiddling, their bony limbs digging into the softness of her stomach. For an instant she feels buried beneath them and fights the instinct to buck them off, the way a small dog might be flicked from the ankle. Of course, she thinks, this is how it has always been: the great need for them, the great love. Then the swift feeling of being overcome, smothered. Henry is saying something but she cannot hear him because the children are yelping at her ears, vying for attention.