Charlotte fills the basin with hot water and scrubs the skin of her hands with the nail brush. The water burns but the brown paint sticks to her cuticles. The painting is the only thing she has for herself, he must know this—how she endures the chores of the day so as to have these hours, this task. And without it? What will she be then? She is a fool, she thinks, as she scrubs her skin pink. She is a fool for thinking she could live this way, to think she could hurry it along, to think she could redeem the situation with a painting. Her plan is unreal, ridiculous even. Henry would laugh. She splashes water on her face and rubs hard with the small damp hand towel.
Henry knocks on the door again. “Charlotte?” he says. “Charlotte—come out of there now.”
* * *
Next morning she wakes early, carries the canvas out to the garage, and covers it with an old blanket. It is still dark outside and the air smells of smoke. Inside, the fire has died down to black. She clutches her dressing gown against her chest and crouches, poking and prodding the embers. Burnt wood breaks up into splinters and ash floats out into the living room. She pokes some more, finds the small red center of the log, and blows.
Henry lies in bed. He is awake but keeps his eyes closed, listening to Charlotte tend the fire. He knows he ought to get up but it is too cold; the walls are icy to the touch and freezing air seeps in between the floorboards. He thinks of his book, the hypothetical book, not yet in existence, the book that will be, eventually, new essays on Hardy.
Charlotte puts a cup of tea down at his bedside, the soft gray glow of daylight slipping in behind her. She switches on the bedside lamp and goes to the wardrobe for her clothes.
“What are you doing?” Henry asks.
“Going into town.”
“So early?”
The children hear their mother’s voice and come into the bedroom. Charlotte opens the curtains. A film of condensation covers the lower half of the window and Lucie clambers onto a chair to run her finger across the silvery wet glass—through the mist, she says. Her finger squeaks as she draws. She draws eyes, a bird, a long banana with caterpillar legs. There is the phlegmy sound of her breathing, in and out through her mouth, chest rattling. When she speaks her voice sounds wet and bubbly: Look, look whad I dwawed. Little strips of bright world appear through the sketch, small finger-widths of world, the frangipani with its leaves almost gone, the calico cat on the tin roof of the shed. She presses her nose to the cold glass. Fine white light comes sidelong into the room, illuminating her silhouette: the bright haze of her hair, all knot and curl, the fluff and pill along the sleeves of her blue jumper where her little arms rub back and forth, back and forth all day long. On the ground below her, May chews on a lemony biscuit—yes, it is good; she nods. Sweet crumbs dot the crown of her head and float in the wisps of her fringe. She holds the small biscuit in both hands as if it were a sandwich. Then she lifts one hand to brush her hair away from her face and leaves a dusting of crumbs, yellow against her creamy forehead.
* * *
The river path leads, eventually, to Nicholas’s house. Charlotte sits in the conservatory sipping tea while he waters the geraniums, the room a bright tangle of flowers, wild blue, trailing purple, common brick-red, and white. “Welcome to the jungle,” he says. The glass wall overlooks the front garden and the sea, and from where she sits the horizon is a high, flat wall of watery blue. In the garden the children play, teasing Nicholas’s dog, a Labrador called Gretta. Henry does not know she is here.
Water drips through the bottom of the pots and onto the ground. She tells Nicholas about the portrait, about her and Henry arguing, then feels guilty for doing so and tries to make up for it by telling him more—about her plan that feels, now, in the light of day, rather embarrassing. No, he says, not at all. He seems, perhaps, even excited by it. They sit at a low glass-topped table and the flowers engulf them in a wide green arc, arranged behind and around Nicholas as he sits back on a cane lounge. Charlotte sits across from him, perched on the edge of a low rocking chair. The glass door is open to the breeze and the geraniums bob up and down, nodding their bright heads. She watches the girls dance around outside; they pull Gretta’s tail and stroke her ears and the dog grins and drools and rolls over.
“And then I just keep thinking,” she says, “how much easier it would be if I didn’t do this. If I didn’t paint. I think of quitting altogether but as soon as I do I’m overcome by this terrible emptiness. I think of stopping, and then I think, but what would I do?”
“What would you do?” he asks, leaning forwards.
“I don’t know. Nothing. I’d do nothing. I could do nothing. I’d have to reinvent myself, but when I think about that, it would be like trying to become no one, to become someone else, someone not me.”
“And then?”
“Then I think, well, I can’t stop. Because it’s the only way I know how to live. It’s the only way I know how to try. I don’t know. It’s a continuity. The thing that makes me feel continuity. Of life. Myself. It feels like I would just be nothing if I stopped. It would be an erasure.” Her gaze drifts back outside. Lucie strokes Gretta’s pink belly. Charlotte has said too much and feels herself shrink back. She puts her teacup down and stares at the bright patch of sea in the distance, the gray outline of a cargo ship balanced on the horizon.
“Maybe it’s the hope that gives you the sense of continuity, not the painting itself. Maybe—maybe the painting doesn’t matter as much as you think,” he says, reaching over and picking a few dead flowers off the geranium closest to him.
“Don’t say that,” she replies.
“No. Of course not,” he says, looking down and stretching his legs out before him. The tips of his brown shoes shine in the sun.
“But perhaps, perhaps that’s part of it,” she says. “I don’t know. I blame things, and then I feel awful for it. I blame the place, the weather, the country. I blame Henry. I wish everything wouldn’t always come back to that.” She picks up her teacup again. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” she says. Nicholas blushes and Charlotte realizes that what she first took for arrogance is simply nerves. He is more beautiful than she first thought, too. His eyes seem to brighten when he looks at her. She has the urge to touch him, just for a moment. What would that be like? This clever man bristling with talk. What is he doing here? And why her?
“No. But it is difficult,” Nicholas says.
“Painting?”
“Marriage.”
“Yes, people say that, don’t they.” Charlotte closes her eyes.
She stays there all day. They talk and drink more tea. They go out into the garden. Everything that moves seems alive. The shadow of the tree branches on the grass. The dappled light on the dark lower boughs of the tree. There are soft circles of light that widen then shrink as the leaves above lift and open in the breeze. Then comes a quick gust of wind, and the flickering of light makes it seem as if the trees are shivering.
They sit beneath the plum that in the strange weather has not lost its foliage, and in the green shade her legs look terribly white. Around them are mandarin trees, lemon and orange. Some leaves curl and hold the light. Others droop, letting the light slip and fall. Strings of spiderweb glitter between the branches. Birds sing further out, the sound higher up, floating above the human voices. What she wants, she realizes, is a witness to her life. Someone who can affirm what is true. She is thinking of the doubt that has grown between her and Henry, how neither of them believes the other’s story, the other’s version of historical truth. Why they moved, why they must or must not stay. Who they moved for. There is something impoverishing about this mutual mistrust, this mutual suspicion—something mean, and they do not know how to rise above it. Yet both are nostalgic for the same thing: the good life, or at least the fantasy of it.
* * *
She does not remember traveling home. She remembers moving but does not know how. Was it the bus,
or a taxi, or did someone drive her? She remembers images: the light moving between the trees, the sight of water, then no water, then water again. There is the memory, further back, of children wading, of the sky through dark branches, of the sun pushing its way through dense canopy. At lunchtime she and Nicholas had packed a picnic and they all walked down to the sea. There were green apples, ham sandwiches, tea from a thermos. Seagulls squawked in the air above. Then everything seemed terribly bright, too bright; something flashed at the corners of her eyes.
She feels a coolness against her skin now as a cold flannel is pressed to her forehead.
Then it is removed, dipped in water—the sound of ice against the edge of a bowl—and replaced, the cloth again cool and damp on her face. Henry is beside her, stroking her arm; the room is dark, the window is dark. “You have a migraine. It was the midday sun,” he says. “The brightness of it.” The same thing used to happen to his mother in Delhi. He sits beside the bed and tells Charlotte these stories: of the heat, the gold haze of the sky, the birds of prey drifting above the city. He tells her of his mother, vanishing for days into her darkened room, attended to by whispering servants bearing heavy silver trays that never held more than a fine porcelain cup filled with beef tea. Charlotte reaches out and takes hold of Henry’s hand. “What happened today?” he asks, but she just closes her eyes. “There now,” he says, stroking her arm. “Sleep now,” he says. Now, she thinks, now, now, now.
* * *
When she wakes it is just after two in the morning. She slips out of bed and goes to the garage. The migraine feels like a black hole into which the day has vanished. The afternoon seems to have occurred so long ago, and in her mind’s eye it appears smaller because of this: Nicholas, the scene in the conservatory, the trip home, the cool water on her forehead—all this has shrunk in her memory, so distant, so small in her mind, like a miniature; the room is small, the people are small, as if she is peering at the scene from a great height.
She switches on the light and squints against the bare bulb. Her head is tender and her body feels light, as though she’s emerged from days of fever. She drags the painting from its place behind the boxes and pulls the blanket away. Then she sets to work, filling in the mouth, broadening the forehead, blocking in the blue of his shirt. All painting is done from memory, she reasons. Even when Henry sits before her, she turns away from him every time she makes a mark, holding the image of his face in her mind and matching it to the image on the canvas.
* * *
Henry gets up in the night for a glass of water and sees the light on in the garage. What happened today? She still has not answered. The water is cool and tastes of river. He has been dreaming—they were on their way to Africa. He wanted to take Charlotte on safari. He thought there was nothing much to the dream, but as he looks out across the dark yard the memory of it comes back to him. “There are lions and tigers and bears,” he’d said to her—lions and tigers and bears! He held out a guidebook, and on the front was a photograph of an elephant and a leopard. “I don’t want to die at the hands of a wild animal,” Charlotte said.
“Wild animals don’t have hands.”
“I don’t want to be chased, eaten, squashed in a stampede, lost in the jungle—”
She pretends she is not afraid of things, but Henry knows she is—she is afraid of insects, spiders, snakes, very large dogs and very small dogs, mice, heights, swimming over seaweed. “You will be happy there,” he said.
“How can you predict the future?”
“Because I am getting older and once you are my age you have been into the future many times.”
He knows she is out there painting. Is it still the portrait? Something happened today. He feels afraid of this.
With the winter nights, rats have come to nest in the roof. In the dark, when the house is quiet, he hears them—they scratch and make strange clicking, hissing noises that must be their speech. They are there now. Above him in the kitchen. The sound makes him shiver. He hears one gnawing low down at the wall near the oven, trying to make a hole. He stamps then, to frighten it. The scratching stops a moment, then starts again. He puts his glass on the draining rack and goes back to bed. He tries to stay awake for Charlotte’s return, so as to ask her what she’s doing, but she doesn’t come to bed, and when he wakes again it is light and Charlotte has already dressed in fresh clothes and set out the bowls and plates for breakfast.
A few days later the phone rings. The children are taking their morning nap and Charlotte gets up quickly to answer the call, not wanting the sound to wake them. The book she is reading slips off her lap.
“Gretta is sad,” Nicholas says. His voice surprises her—she had forgotten she’d given him her number. “I think she misses the children,” he continues. “I thought I might take her for a walk by the river over your way. Would you join me?”
“I’d love to,” she says, “but the girls are sleeping.” She looks down at her yellowed copy of Mrs Dalloway lying on the floor. There is a chair in the kitchen that is always in sunlight and she’s been sitting there, reading. This is one of her most treasured moments of the day, the house quiet, still. Today she has been reading the opening pages of the book over and over again; Clarissa setting out for flowers. What a lark! What a plunge! It makes her think of Lucie as a baby, riding on Henry’s shoulders as they walked down Oxford Street in London in the spring—Lucie’s hair lifting in the breeze and her chubby arms waving in delight above her head, the child laughing, chortling, thrilled by the height and the crowds, Henry holding fast to her legs.
“Couldn’t you come when they wake?”
“Well, yes, I suppose. But dinner—”
“Oh, come on, the rain has stopped and it’s a beautiful day.”
* * *
Something always surprises her. Today he seems taller than she first thought. When he tilts his head towards Gretta his soft hair falls forwards over his eyes. Gretta licks and jumps at the children, leaping one way, then the other, and eventually falling over sideways in excitement. Three brown ducks skid across the smooth river and Gretta lunges after them, thundering into the water. Nicholas throws the ball further out, past the ducks, and Gretta swims to fetch it, forgetting about the hunt. The sky has grown overcast, a white circle of sun just visible through the film of cloud.
Gretta comes back with the ball. Nicholas picks it up and throws it out across the grass, then wipes his hands on the front of his trousers. Dog slobber and mud. His hands remind her of her father’s hands, thick and veined, the white skin gathering a reddish tinge. Again and again the ball vanishes into the distance, Gretta and the children racing after it.
Charlotte is starting to like the path by the river, perhaps even love it a little. Yet she feels somehow troubled by this, as if it is a betrayal of sorts, something to be suspicious of. As if this flicker of affection is not part of her real feelings, or at least not as strong as her real feelings, and thus shouldn’t be permitted—as if this new sentiment were trespassing in some way.
It would make life easier to feel this—to feel real affection for this new place. It would make Henry happy. But she is afraid—without clear reason—that it would necessarily lessen her feelings for home. As if there were only so much affection, so much loyalty, to be portioned out. It is the same kind of fear, she realizes, that she felt when pregnant with May. Would she have enough love for a second child? Would it mean giving up some of the love for her first? How mad that seems now—the foolishness of not seeing, not knowing, that such love simply doubles, triples, quadruples as required. Unless one refuses, of course—unless one resists.
At some point they leave the river and walk beneath the pines. Beneath the trees it is always dark. Small wedges of light shine down through the spaces between the needles.
“And the portrait?” Nicholas asks.
“Yes,” she says, dropping her voice as if sharing a secret, “it is a
lmost finished.”
He nods as if this news satisfies him. “And how do you know when it’s finished?” he asks. She likes the way he begins his questions as if picking up in the middle of a long chain of thoughts: and, and, and.
“I suppose,” she says, “when it is no longer changeable, for better or worse.”
They have become friends. Or conspirators. Something, anyway, that Charlotte does not quite understand. They walk further into the trees.
“There was a man once who became a priest because I didn’t marry him,” says Charlotte.
“Was he terribly ugly?” Nicholas laughs.
“No, not at all. I just didn’t know he wanted to marry me.”
“He didn’t ask you?”
“Apparently he was going to, but then he heard I was engaged to Henry.”
“What makes you think of this?”
“I don’t know—walking here with you, thinking about the other lives we all might have led. Other lives and other places.”
The path turns uphill and the trees thin. Overhead, clouds break apart and windy light ripples the long grass. The yellow blooms of dandelions nod at the ground. They talk about Duccio’s flat panels of face, Bacon’s smears. Lucie runs ahead, then comes back and takes hold of Charlotte’s hand. She tugs at Charlotte, pulls her round. As she does so she begins to sing—Ring a ring o’ rosies, a pocket full of posies. The light, high voice of a child. Charlotte joins her, the two of them singing together, their outstretched arms and interlocked hands forming a rough diamond. Charlotte looks down at her child, the top of her hair brown, the long ends blond, even white, lightened by the sun. And below this the small dress decorated with a pattern of violets, its skirt fanning out over the grass. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down! Nicholas claps as Charlotte and Lucie land on the ground. The last wild frangipani leaves sway up above, the branches wobbling, making light appear and disappear through the shifting triangles of green. The sky seems far away, the sun close. Nearby a boy flies a yellow kite. The kite is arrow-shaped, with a long rainbow tassel for a tail. The boy holds the line tight while the kite noses the high air, dipping and tugging—the wind strong. It looks alive up there, an animal trying to escape its invisible tether, eager to follow the pull and blow.
The Other Side of the World Page 12