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For Boyd
Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.
—Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
Because of course the dream–England is no more than a dream.
—Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
Prologue
Cambridge 1966
She 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.
PART ONE
Departure
Cambridge, October 1963–December 1964
She clambers over the fence and strides out into the field. It is autumn, cold—an arctic wind blows and her coat billows behind her. Rain falls in a sudden shower, but she pushes on into the green distance and further, towards the blue rise where the woodlands begin. It is like wading into the sea, she thinks. The wind against her, the grass up at her knees. They go on for miles, these grazing lands, and the further she walks the smaller she becomes, until she is just a thin black mark against the fen. Henry must be wondering where she’s got to—she could never be lost here, but she could disappear, she thinks, as she passes the slow cows chewing frozen ground, steam rising from their flanks. She passes the pond, covered now with silvery ice, the frosted hedge of brambles. Above her the sky is mottled brown and grey, and the air smells of dung and grass. The leaves on the hawthorns are gone; those on the horse chestnuts are still browning and falling. She is on her way back from the doctor’s, so it must be a Monday, or perhaps Tuesday. Dr. Pascoe only sees patients Mondays and Tuesdays. How can I lose track of time like this? she thinks. Dates do not seem to matter; one day feels the same as the next. But they do matter, the doctor assured her, they do indeed. “You must be mistaken,” she said. “You cannot be right.”
She startles at the sound of a crow. The certainty—impossible—that the call is that of her child. The sound coming towards her as she moves further away, her own voice drifting back: Lucie? Is that you? No, of course not, it’s just a bird, the baby asleep at home. Charlotte watches the crow swoop down, coast on a low current of air, and land further out. She can count on one hand the times she’s left the house alone, without the baby. And every time it is the same—how she startles at every long, high note, thinking it is Lucie. She feels the strange phantom sense of the child’s weight against her hip, the loose stone of her head lolling, asleep, on her shoulder. The crow calls again—she sees it call, the open black beak, the silky, lifted throat—and her skin prickles. A gust of wind disperses the cry; the sound rises up, then floats down over the field, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her arms suddenly ache to hold her daughter. She looks back but can’t see her bike. Where did she leave it? Perhaps it is over that way, behind the hedges. But the field appears the same from every direction. She finds her way to the fence and begins to trace a path back along the perimeter. Above her the clouds ripple and bend, moving herdlike towards a distant corner of the sky. Her stomach heaves. She stops, holds on to the fence, leans down towards the grass, and vomits a string of yellow bile. She stays that way a moment, hunched over, gripping the wood and dry retching, then wipes her mouth with the sleeve of her coat and rests her head against the railing. “It’ll pass soon,” the doctor said. “These things always do.” She weeps then, at the memory of his words. “All for a good cause now,” he’d said. “All for a good cause.”
She remembers last night’s dream, that the two of them, she and Henry, were looking at rainbow-colored paintings in Vienna. They stood before a very bright canvas, and Henry said to her, “It is the color of your soul forming.” He looked at the painting as he spoke, and she knew he was not talking about her, about her soul, but about the soul of the child now growing inside her, the child she has not yet told him about, although it is his.
She pushes back out into the field, walking faster now, puffing a little, her breath white in the thin, cold air. Icy grass crunches underfoot, her toes numb in her wet shoes. She was supposed to ride into town and ride home again, not stop like this and disappear into the wilds. If only the doctor had given her a script and sent her home. Just something to settle her. Then a cup of tea and a lie-down. Further ahead a flock of birds lifts up from the grass, sways in the sky a moment, then swerves back down to ea
rth. She doesn’t know what she’ll say to Henry. She doesn’t want to have to tell him.
* * *
In the warmth of the living room, Lucie grunts—her arm jerking up into the air, then falling back down. Henry shuffles forwards in his chair to check on her. She is asleep in her pram and he rocks it a little with his foot, pushing the toe of his shoe against the lower rung. Has it really been seven months since she was born? It seems so much longer, that Sunday dawn when the midwife set him to work, boiling water and fetching cloths. The baby grunts again, kicks her legs, squirms. Henry holds his breath and checks his watch: eleven thirty. What’s keeping her? Charlotte should be back by now, he thinks, running his palm along the armrest of his favorite wingback chair. The chair is covered in gold velveteen and he strokes the smooth grain of the fabric as if petting a calm animal. Lucie settles, then snuffles in her sleep, and Henry sits back and returns to his reading, examining the brochure that came through the letter box early that morning. Come Over to the Sunny Side! the brochure says. Beneath the curve of blue writing two blond women in red swimsuits skid over Sydney Harbour on water skis. Australia brings out the best in you. You could be on your way to a sunnier future in the New Year. Fine for your wife. Good for your children.
It is not that he expects Charlotte to come home and say she’s perfectly well. She isn’t, of course she isn’t, that’s why she went to the doctor in the first place. The headaches, the nausea. The way she works through the night, sleeps a couple of hours, then gets up for Lucie at the crack of dawn. He has to clear her paints and brushes from the bench in the morning to make himself some toast.
A dog-eared copy of Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds lies open, facedown, on the coffee table beside him. He’s supposed to give a lecture next week on the early love poems, but every time he tries to prize one apart he finds himself lost in a tangle of memories. Reciting “The Cap and Bells” to Charlotte in the summer, the two of them lying in the grass and watching puffs of bright clouds. Or reading the poems together by winter firelight: “When You Are Old” and “To an Isle in the Water.” Shy one, shy one, shy one of my heart.
Someone once told him that the southern sun could cure all manner of ailments. It does look bright, in the picture. It is certainly an improvement on the Women’s Voluntary Services for Civil Defence pamphlet that Charlotte keeps taped to the side of the fridge. In case of emergencies. She likes to think of emergencies. That pamphlet also came through the letter box, a long time ago now. The paper is grimy with dust and the tape has browned and been replaced, the top right corner torn away with the old Sellotape, taking with it part of the title—something about the larder and what to stock in an emergency, all that bother about the atomic bomb—but the rest of the lettering remains clear. Henry knows it by heart; from a slight distance it looks like a poem and he is unconsciously drawn to read it, over and over again, so that by now the thing has lodged itself permanently in his brain.
Suggestions for Food that would be Particularly Useful:
CANNED MEAT
corned beef
steak and kidney pudding
cooked pork sausages
herrings
pilchards
sardines
CANNED VEGETABLES
baked beans, carrots, tomatoes, etc.
peas and beans
CANNED SOUP
MEAT OR YEAST EXTRACT
TEA OR COFFEE [instant if possible]
Boiled sweets [in tins]
The list is followed by instructions on how to fireproof their home with various quantities of borax and boric acid. It is something they have both laughed over: Just wait a moment, darling, I hear a bomb’s coming—I think I’ll spray the thatch and paint the woodwork. Yes, yes, I’ll dip the curtains while I’m at it. Henry can’t imagine. He doesn’t want to imagine. His gaze drifts back to the picture in his hand. Any Briton who lives in the United Kingdom may apply for an assisted passage by sea or air to Australia for permanent settlement provided he is healthy and of good character. The sea, it says, is warm enough to swim in all year.
He wonders how they might decide if he is of good character. He is educated. He has a job. He has a wife and child. Such things could be the sum of a good man. He does like the look of the sun, glinting on the water like a million little pieces of shining glass. The picture stirs a memory—something about his mother’s blue dopatta, the one dotted with small mirrored circles. It smelled of violets and neroli. He remembers pushing his face into his mother’s body, the circles of glass filled with shifting color and light. This is an image but perhaps not quite a memory. Broken, moving, far away. No, he must be wrong; servants wore dopattas. He and his family wore what the British wore.
He stares at the brochure and finds himself filled with a strange nostalgia—for the light, the color of the sky, as if he’d already been there, to Australia. The picture makes him think of his childhood before the war, before he was sent to Southampton in the midst of battle. He remembers hiding on deck behind wooden crates while distant liners were bombed and sunk. He was eleven years old. It was 1945. A younger boy crouched beside him and clung to Henry’s back. They sat there and cried, terrified that they would be bombed next. What was his mother thinking when she packed him off during the war? Only of his safety. India, she said, was going to the dogs and England was where he belonged—it was his ancestors’ country after all. What did they used to call him? Kutcha butcha, half-baked bread. There had been, before this, some discussion of moving to McCluskieganj—that promised homeland for the Anglo-Indians. But there was his father’s job with British Petroleum and his mother’s extended family. Besides, they were used to the city—they were not farming people. They’d be no good living off the land, and they didn’t want an enclave. “Why would I go there?” said his mother, full of disbelief. “McCluskieganj, that is for the Indians.” This is how they were, too British to be Indian, too Indian to be British.
Nevertheless, their future was uncertain in an independent India. “And independence will come,” said his father. “It is just a matter of time.” The problem was what might come with it—the violence, the unrest, at the very least the erosion of status. It was possible that Henry and his family would come to represent the enemy. They were, after all, children of the Raj.
He remembers that last conversation—they were on the veranda, near the mango tree. The monsoon was upon them. Henry was home from boarding school and sat on the ground, pushing a toy train along a track, his parents assuming he wasn’t listening.
“Better to send the boy home,” said his father, meaning England. “Get him out while we still can.” His parents promised they’d follow later but never did, and now here he is.
The picture on the brochure reminds him not of India exactly but of something else, something more elemental, of running through damp green space, of fine grass beneath his feet, of running fast into sunlight—flash—and then back into shadow—flash—and then out into sunlight again—flash, flash. It looks lovely. Magical, that is what people said. Why has he never thought of it? There’d be no harm in applying for an assisted passage. It might be good for them. It is so cold outside. The house is so small. And there is Charlotte. Perhaps he will suggest it to her, if the doctor doesn’t have a solution. Something to lift her spirits. Truly, he’s never seen the likes of it—the yellow tinge of her skin, the grey-brown circles under her eyes, and her body, how she’s grown so thin, eating little more than dry toast and a bit of potato. Meanwhile, the baby cries and cries. If she is not sleeping, she cries and cries.
He looks down at the book of poems. He hasn’t the heart to sit there with his sharpened pencil and decipher them, scanning the poems line by line. These days he prefers the memory of a poem to the actual reading. Could he tell his students this? He likes the way the sounds hover in the mind, merging, drifting. What does one learn from a poem? he wonders. He feels he should have le
arnt more than he has, or rather, if he had learnt more they would not be in the mess they now find themselves in. As if there were something he should know about love, something these poems should teach him.
Leaves fly past the window and for a moment Henry mistakes them for birds. Brown and slow, then quick and tumbling. It begins to rain. In the field across the road, children play in the drizzle. Alfred, the dog, sighs and slumps down against the door. Henry switches on the radio just in time to catch the weather. A cheerful voice tells him it will be cold but bright. Bright cloud is on the way, the voice says merrily. It is exasperating. Surely nowhere else has so many ways to tell you to expect cloud, the forecast regularly listing several different types (low, grey, white, high). Henry adds “bright” to the list. Rain, too, comes in more kinds than he would have liked: light and heavy showers, scattered or isolated showers; patchy, fine, light or heavy rain. Even the prediction of sun is compromised: “sunny intervals” really means “intermittent rain.” When he first came to England he didn’t mind the weather. He liked the novelty of putting on layer after layer of woolly clothing, and he found the quick changes—from showers to wind to fog to sun—exhilarating after the predictable weather of Delhi, where you had, simply, hot and hotter, wet and wetter. But he is older now, and he has a child. The damp makes his knees ache and creak. It is no good. He is a man for a dry land. Australia is a dry land. In his mind he sees a kind of paradise: sunlight, blue sky, pineapple and steak, golf and tennis.
Henry’s thoughts are interrupted by the sound of Charlotte’s bike clattering against the side of the cottage. He presses himself up from the armchair and goes to meet her at the door. “What is it?” he asks, seeing her eyes red from crying. “What did he say?” But she only dips her head and falls against him. He bends to kiss her hair and smells vomit. He puts his hand to her back and feels her spine beneath her coat, reminding him of an old skinny cat. “Come along,” he says. “Let’s get you inside.”
The Other Side of the World Page 1