The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  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, t
hat 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.”

  “Humbug,” said her mother. “It’s just a bit of water.”

  Charlotte concentrated on pulling apart a warm scone. She was not accustomed to seeing her mother without curls. It was one of Iris’s little rules that she did not let anyone into the house, nor did she ever leave the house, until her hair was washed, set, and dried. She thought the curls deflected attention from her wrinkles and made her appear taller, the fluffy hairdo adding an inch or two to her shrinking frame. She was very particular about such things: her soft glossy hair and her matching neck scarves and earrings—yellow today, Charlotte noticed. Charlotte realized now how well the curls disguised her mother’s age. Without them the bones stood out, like some curious rock formation exposed to the elements, the high forehead and the sharp cheekbones loosely draped in powdered skin.

  Iris glanced nervously about the room, her painted eyebrows, too pink and too arched, lending her a look of constant fright. Charlotte turned away. It was not fair, that the weather could embarrass a woman like this. But it was true, her mother was frail, older than her years.

  “I suppose it’s too late to change your mind?” Iris said, picking up her teacup.

  “Yes,” Charlotte replied. “Everything’s done.” She pulled at the string of beads on her neck, running her finger and thumb along the loop. “Strange to think we go in just a few days. I never would have thought . . . I never thought . . .”

  She wanted to say that she had considered letting Henry go alone, that she would stay if she could, that she didn’t want to go, that it was his decision. That she’d never really said yes, or if she had she’d never meant to. She opened her mouth to tell her mother this, but something stopped her.

  There was a time when she told her mother everything, but while the desire to confess was still there, it now felt as though any mention of her own feelings would be a betrayal of Henry. It was not just that some of those feelings would be about her private quarrels with Henry, and so sharing them would mean speaking badly of him. No, the betrayal would not be a simple one to do with secrets but a deeper betrayal, for now that she was married it was Henry who was the rightful receptacle of those feelings, and her mother had no claim to them. Besides, Henry might be right, their new life might be something wonderful. There was that possibility.

  “I’ll write,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Iris, holding her napkin to her mouth and wiping a streak of cream from her top lip. “Yes, you do that.”

  Charlotte is still sleeping when Henry leaves for his office ­early the next morning. He readies himself quietly, careful not to disturb—he heard her moving about in the night. Such restlessness troubles him; it is too much like the time before, that old life when she was as good as lost to the fields.

  He pushes the thought away: there is a busy day ahead. He has essays to mark, an article to finish, and a new book of poems he must start in on. Once settled at his desk he drinks his coffee and organizes his papers. But his mind won’t stick to the tasks at hand. Instead the scene in the car comes back to him, over and over: Because you will not let it happen, she said. Because it can’t happen, he corrected her. For Charlotte’s sake he will act as if the argument has not bothered him, although in truth her request has left him unnerved. Surely, he thinks, surely she understands the impossibility. She must. They can’t go back now—they couldn’t afford it; it would mean they’d have to repay their full fares out, as well as the return. And even if they had the money, he wouldn’t want to go. It would be a failure on all fronts. Yet for her to be unhappy like this?

  He sits with his shoulders hunched over the desk, papers spread around him. Beyond the window the sky is high and clear, pale and bright. He spends a lot of time looking at the sky. He does so, at first, in order to better think about his work, then to better think about Charlotte, then he looks at the sky to clear his mind, to stop thinking about these things altogether. A new feeling troubles him, as if the center of his life were somehow ­slipping away. Hours pass, unproductive, until eventually he ­rouses himself. What is the point of this? he thinks. He stands up,
shuffles his papers into his briefcase, and leaves for home.

  Back at the house he finds Charlotte in the kitchen, the children playing on the floor in the doorway. He steps across the mess of toys and kisses her on the cheek. She tilts her face towards him without pausing her work, making it clear she is busy. Henry would normally take a cold drink from the fridge and sit down, but today he fusses about trying to be helpful although really just getting in the way—refolding the tea towel on the rack, sweeping the crumbs from around the toaster into the palm of his hand. There is a bill on the counter and he slits the envelope open with a butter knife.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says slowly, inspecting the piece of paper without reading it, “perhaps we’d be better off in a city, out of the suburbs.” His voice is soft, his tone casual—he wants, more than anything, to appease. “Somewhere else,” he continues, “not here perhaps. Perhaps we’d be better off in South Africa. It’s an option, you know. The jacaranda trees in Cape Town are meant to be lovely, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I’ve heard—high up on the mountain. Or we could get an acreage, if you’d prefer, just out of the city. Maybe this isn’t the place, maybe you’re right—”

  Charlotte is pouring batter into a tin, the Golden Wattle Cookery Book open to a recipe for sponge cake. “What?” she says. She looks up at him, her voice loaded with disbelief. “Henry, you’d be subject to apartheid.”

  “Oh,” he says, his gaze sinking down and landing somewhere to the left of her feet, the toes of her brown house shoes ­dusted with flour. “Oh, of—of course,” he stammers. He’d returned home hopeful, pleased with this new idea. It had come to him while he was driving, looking out over the tawny grasslands. The surprise now is not so much that he hadn’t thought of his own predicament, but that she does. For the first time he understands that in her eyes he is, or could be, that thing: a person others would call colored. “Of course,” he says again, his stomach lurching. “How did I not think of that?” His eyes dart across to Charlotte, but she is busy pushing the cake into the oven. She slams the door closed and turns to the sink. He wants her to say something else. He wants her to absolve him of this embarrassing blunder. Instead she seems to be pretending that he is not there. Henry hovers in the doorway a minute longer, then he moves to the sideboard, takes the placemats from the drawer, and sets them out for dinner.