The Other Side of the World (9 page)

“You should come for lunch,” Nicholas says. “There are views of the ocean, and the cool of the living room is like the shade beneath a giant birch tree.”

He smiles at her as though he's known her for a long time, and she can't help but smile back. He has a wide face and dark hair worn a little long. It is not a neat face, but it is handsome, the nose slightly off center, the eyes large and deep-set. When he talks his left eyebrow lifts and when he laughs it tends to twitch. The asymmetry of his features makes them seem in constant motion even when they are still.

“You're from London?” she asks, catching the lilt in his voice.

“Yes, I am, although that was a long time ago. And you?” he asks, tipping his head back and finishing his drink. “What are you doing here?” He shrugs his shoulders as he says this and casts a quick glance about the room. “Please. I want to know,” he says.

Charlotte stares into her empty glass. “It was my husband's idea,” she says.

“And how are you finding it?” Nicholas asks.

“It's not quite what I expected.”

“No, I'd think not. How long have you been here?”

“Three, four months.”

“A drop in the ocean.”

“Long enough.”

“So what will you do?”

“I don't know. I'm a painter—or was, it feels now.”

Nicholas cocks his head to the side. For a moment she forgets what she's saying, distracted by the way he looks at her. She's ­never seen a man listen like this before, as though he were waiting to give her something, or waiting for her to ask him for something, to make a request or beg a favor, anything, anything at all that might mean he could be of service. He smiles as he listens, but with lips closed and eyebrows slightly raised. He nods. “Yes, yes—of course, of course,” he says to things he might not understand, to things he perhaps has no experience of. He seems certain that if she says this is what such a thing is like, then it surely must be. He makes her feel that he believes her completely, trusts her every word.

In the car on the way home Henry is silent. The children are asleep in the back. Charlotte thinks of the week ahead. She accepted Nicholas's invitation to come to his house for tea.
Why not tomorrow?
he asked.
What are you doing tomorrow? Well, nothing, nothing in particular.
He was a psychologist.
I used to work at the hospital, but now I run a small private practice from home. A few patients a few days a week. Yes, I do collect
, he said.
No, I don't paint. Not anymore. But your painting
, he said.
Tell me about that
.

“So,” Henry says, interrupting her thoughts, “what were you two chatting about so happily?”

“Nothing much.”

“It looked like something.”

“You don't like him, do you?”

“I don't know him enough to form such a strong opinion.”

“I like him.”

“Obviously. I could have done without the embarrassment, that's all.”

“The embarrassment?”

“You, disappearing just when Adam was talking to us.”

“He was talking to you.”

“You could have waited. Instead we had to witness your flirting.”

“I wasn't flirting.”

“Well, whatever it was—”

“And if you really want to know, we were talking about England.”

Henry tightens his grip on the steering wheel. Charlotte turns her face away and stares out the window. A dark flat expanse of sandy country slips away into the night. Low trees lean in towards the road.

“I want to go back,” she says. “I want to go home. I'm not saying this on a whim. Three months is long enough. We've had our holiday. You know—”

Henry lowers his voice to a stern whisper, the way one might speak to a child who's finally outworn all patience. “
You
know,” he says slowly, “that is not going to happen.”

“Because you will not let it happen,” Charlotte shoots back.

“Because it
can't
happen.”

“You say that,” Charlotte says, turning to face Henry, “but people go back all the time. I've seen them queuing up on the docks. We saw them, you and I, on the boat, the other boat that passed us, with the people calling out. I should have listened. I should have listened to my mother. I should have—”

“You and your damned mother!” Henry spits. “We are
here
. This
is
our home now.
No
one
is going back!”

Charlotte pushes her fist against her mouth and starts to cry, her shoulders trembling in the dark.

Henry eases the car down the driveway, and as soon as he has pulled on the hand brake Charlotte gets out and runs inside. Henry stays where he is, his hands holding the wheel. He cannot
pretend he's sorry for coming out here. He's not. He's glad for it, most of the time, and even if they're yet to make friends and he doesn't always like the heat, he is forever relieved to be out of the cold. It is so good to be warm. It sounds insignificant but it is not; it's so good, it is such a relief, not to be cold and damp all the time. It's impossible to think of going back. She must know this. It's not fair of her to ask for something she knows he cannot give.

The light in the living room comes on and Charlotte appears on the veranda carrying a jug of water. She bends down and tends the pots of petunias. They struggle terribly in the heat, their petals wither, but still she tries, watering them to the point of drowning. Why these flowers? He keeps meaning to ask. There seems some element of decorum involved—the way she
must
have petunias—as if it is yet another English rule he doesn't understand. But perhaps the petunias are just for memories' sake—the good ones, the ­happy ones. Flowerpots on a sunny doorstep. He has fond memories too: the memory of her old laughter, loud and bright. What had he said that was so funny? “You do make me laugh,” she'd told him. Then, more quietly, “You do make me happy.” She had reached across the table and stroked his fingers, the back of his hand, then the length of his forearm from elbow to wrist. He remembers her looking down at the table while she did this. He remembers her mouth moving but forgets all sound, remembers their faces leaning in towards one another, the light disappearing. He remembers what came later—the tiny child in her arms, a warm, pink, wrinkled creature. How it opened its little black diamond of a mouth, its eyes still closed, and wobbled its head around to find her breast.

Charlotte is showering when she hears Henry come inside. There is the smack of the screen door, then a little while after this, the
sound of him singing. He will have carried the girls in to bed, humming to soothe them, and now he is out in the kitchen warbling a tune from
The Sound of Music
—making an effort to appear happy only because she seems very sad.

Henry knocks on the bathroom door. “Do you want me to wash your back?” he asks. He comes in and Charlotte turns, offering her body. He takes the bar of soap and lathers her down with warm, slow hands.

Yes, she will let him wash her back—she will not forgive him, but she will let him wash her back. It is habit, after all. Once upon a time such things seemed trivial. But lately she has discovered that within the intricacies of these repeated actions lies the old order, preserved. Habit is the only thing that can travel from one side of the world to the other and remain intact. He makes her morning cup of tea. She brings him his dinner. She lets him wash her back because he's always washed her back, because such gestures involve a complex system of kindness and gratitude, assumed even when not deserved. And because the refusal of one act of kindness would throw all such acts into doubt. Besides, she knows that after any altercation Henry likes to pretend that there is really nothing wrong. They were angry. Now they will act as if they were not.

She feels her insides sink, her heart a dark cave, a tiny bird fluttering wildly inside it. There is a speck of light in the distance but the bird cannot find it. She will keep doing what she does not want to do. “It is not fair,” she says to him. “It is not reasonable. I feel like I have no choice.” Henry's warm hands move over her shoulders, up and down her neck. He doesn't reply, so she twists away and his hands slip off her body.

“What do you want me to do?” Henry asks.

“You know what I want.”

“Please, can we not have this conversation again?”

Charlotte turns off the taps and steps out into Henry's arms, the towel held open for her. Everything will be all right if only they carry on doing the things they've always done. The strange time that she must endure will disappear in the common time of habit. He wraps the towel around her and holds her to him. She feels his heart beat against her cheek. She pulls back a little and he holds her tighter. “You're tired,” he says. “You'll feel better after a good night's rest.”

But Charlotte cannot sleep. At three in the morning she gets up and goes to the kitchen. She flicks the light switch and ­cockroaches dart across the floor to disappear beneath the oven. She makes a pot of tea, takes her sketchbook from the small drawer next to the cutlery, and sits down at the kitchen table. The work, she thinks, will calm her, the feeling of the lead against the grain of the paper, the nervy movement of her hand, shaping, scratching. The physical pleasure of this is great, sometimes greater than any visual delight.

Outside, birds gurgle and whistle in the bushes. Strange birds, the way they hop about on the grass as if lame. She's heard them at night on other occasions and opened her eyes, thinking it must be nearly morning, but they sing all through the dark, it seems. Two whistles and a gurgling trill that are somehow made at the same time. How many notes at once was that? More than two, perhaps five. It sounds like three birds, and sometimes seven or more singing together, depending on whether you concentrate on the whistle or the trill. She pours a cup of tea and looks over what she's done since they arrived: a few sketches of the children, a vase of flowers. A sleeping cat. They are all true to the world
but that is not what she wants. It is another world, the one she's lost, that she wants to capture now. The pencil moves quickly over the paper, shading in clouds, drawing the sightlines of fields, working from memory. Here is the church, and here is the steeple. Here are the hedges and the apples and the long line of ancient pears, tall and gnarled. Here is the road and the bridge and the hill and the kissing gate and the blackberries and the hole in the rotting fence, the willow and the low cloud, the hill touching the cloud, the shapes of the clouds, always the strange vertical reach of them, the sky tilting ever downwards, the field below it, and the small boy standing in the wind, his father beside him, the two of them holding the string of a high-flying kite.

She and Henry are both children of England, but as she grows older it seems as though England has become her child, a bundle of life that she wants always to have within arm's reach. She thinks of her mother's words the last time they saw each other. “We don't know what will happen,” she had said. “That's all, we don't know.”

Iris had caught the train from London and together they took a day trip to Ely. Charlotte drove. Her mother gazed out the passenger window watching the flat black fields skitter past. The mud came right up to the roadside: the dark mud of the farmland and then the gray mud that seeped up through the yellowing grass growing on the verge. A light rain began to fall and for a while Charlotte didn't turn on the windscreen wipers but let the gray haze of water slowly obscure the view, so that all they could see was the road snaking out in front.

“I'll miss you, you know,” said her mother.

“I know,” replied Charlotte.

“It won't be the same.”

“It will be okay.”

“But not the same.”

The weather worsened and the clouds sank closer to the ground, leaving just a thin strip of white daylight above the dark horizon. Iris tapped at the window with her knuckles. “No doubt you'll be glad to see the back of this.”

“Of what?”

“This muck and cold.”

“No,” Charlotte said. “No, I won't actually.”

“Henry must think you mad.”

“Yes, I think he does,” Charlotte said. Iris folded her hands in her lap and hummed a little song. “What's that?” asked Charlotte; there was something familiar about it but she couldn't say what.

“You don't remember? I used to sing it to you when you were a girl. Funny, how things come back to you.” Iris kept on humming.

“You'll see me again soon, I promise,” said Charlotte.

“Now, darling, let's not be silly about this.”

“I mean it.”

“I'm sure you do, but that doesn't mean it will happen. Life goes on. Your life will go on. You're young.”

Charlotte sighed. “I don't feel it. Not anymore.” Iris reached across and patted her daughter's leg. Then she turned away again to stare out the window. Charlotte watched the road, slippery with water and ice.

“You will again,” Iris said. “I'm only saying this because I
am
old. We don't know what will happen, that's all I'm saying, we don't know.”

They drove on, the tires hissing. Charlotte flicked the indicator and they turned into the village. “I'll miss you too,” she said.

They parked near the cathedral and strolled under the dripping trees until the wind picked up, turning the rain on an angle
and pushing it beneath their umbrellas. By the time they reached the tearoom their coats and shoes were wet through. They took a seat in the corner and ate scones piled with jam and cream and shared a large pot of tea. Her mother's hair was wet from the rain and lay plastered about her face. She made a great effort with her hair and this was now rather an embarrassment, the silvery white curls lost to the weather. “I should get a towel,” Charlotte said. “I'm sure they could give you one. You don't want to catch a chill.”