Charlotte meets his eyes. “I sold it,” she says.
“What?”
“I sold it.”
“To whom?”
Charlotte is quiet, her eyes lowered to her plate. She twists her wedding band round and round her finger.
“Surely not,” Henry says. He knows she has befriended Nicholas; he doesn’t approve, but he knows. “After all I . . . after you—” He bites his tongue. It is an accident and the pain is fierce. He snaps forwards, holding his mouth, his face wrinkling.
Charlotte tells him what happened—that Nicholas came to the house and saw the paintings and offered her money. “Enough money, in fact, to go home.”
When Henry speaks there is blood at the corner of his lips. He spits his words. “How dare you, how dare—if you imagine I’m going to . . . A man, that man, here!”
“He’s a friend,” says Charlotte.
“He’s not a friend, he’s a cad. He’s a—”
“Henry, stop it.”
“Me? That’s what I should be saying to you. So what, he wanders around, stays for tea, buys your painting. How dare he think—”
“Stop it, Henry!” Charlotte yells. The girls stare. May begins to wail.
Lucie kicks in her highchair. “Sdop! Sdop!” she cries.
“When will you accept this?” Henry says. “We don’t need to go back. It is an insult and the man means it to be. He’s not interested in the damned painting. Fine, keep the money, but don’t think I’m letting you go anywhere.” He shakes his head. “The gall,” he says quietly. “The gall.”
“It was mine,” Charlotte says, looking down at her plate. “It’s a painting. I sell paintings.”
“Well, what did he pay?” he asks, sawing into a piece of meat. Charlotte stands and clears the other plates from the table. “Tell me, Charlotte!” he calls after her. “Tell me, damn it!”
Charlotte disappears into the bedroom and Henry puts the girls to bed. He is an anxious father, always worried about colds and chills, and as a precaution covers the children with extra blankets, leaving them to sweat and thrash about in the night. By morning the spot where Lucie’s plait meets her skull is damp and matted.
“Turn around,” Charlotte says, “and let me get this mess out. You let me brush your hair,” she tells her, “and I promise a trip to the park.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and grips the child between her thighs. The elastic is tangled up in tight loops of hair. Charlotte tugs at it and Lucie’s head jerks backwards. “Ow!” she cries. “Ooow. You’re hurting! You’re hurting!”
Charlotte hears the faint sound of hair snapping as the elastic begins to come free. “I’m not hurting. Just stay still and it will be done.”
But Lucie only squirms, pushing at her mother’s legs. “Let go!” she cries, her little voice breaking up into tears. “Let me go!”
“If I let you go now there’s no trip to the park.”
“No!”
“No what?”
“Don’t brush my hair! Please don’t brush my hair!”
“And no park?”
“Yes, park!”
“Then stay still and let me do your hair!” Charlotte tugs hard, removing the elastic, and with quick fingers rips the plait apart as if unwinding a rough rope.
Lucie begins to sob, then scream, as Charlotte takes the brush in her hand and hacks away at the knots. She hits her mother’s legs and squirms and wails, but Charlotte’s thighs hold her fast. “Nooo! You’re hurting me! You’re hurting!”
Charlotte brushes faster. It looks like it hasn’t been brushed in weeks. Surely not, though. Surely she brushed their hair yesterday morning. “I’m sorry,” she says to Lucie. “I’m sorry, but it has to be done.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be done!”
“Do you want me to cut it then? Because if I can’t brush it I’ll have to cut it.”
“Cut it! Cut it!” Lucie wails, her head wobbling back and forward as the brush works in and out of her hair. She is crying so hard now that she begins to cough and retch.
Charlotte sees the glint of her sewing scissors on her dressing table and just then hears the squeak of Henry’s study door. She grips Lucie’s hair in one hand and lunges for the scissors. Then in one swift motion she swoops back and drives the scissors into the matted root of the plait. They are small scissors and the knot is thick and wide. She has to saw at it, opening and closing the blades, the cutting making a rough, scratchy sound. Just as she is about through, Henry steps into the room. There. It is done. Lucie runs to Henry and hurls herself against his legs.
Charlotte stands up, a bunch of pale baby hair in one hand and her little blue-handled sewing scissors in the other. “Your princess,” she says, and drops the hair on the floor. Then she pushes past Henry and leaves the room.
Henry gathers Lucie into his arms and lies down on the bed with her, rocking her until she falls asleep, still whimpering. He loses track of how long he lies there. When finally he eases himself off the bed the first thing he does is get down on his knees to gather up every last piece of hair and put it in his pocket.
* * *
For days they do not speak. He knows Charlotte did it to punish him, and that it had nothing to do with Lucie. He will never forget the scene he came upon in the bedroom. His blubbering, inconsolable child, and her mother, rising up from the bed with the trophy of hair in her fist. How she held it out to him.
Over the next week, Henry stays out of Charlotte’s way. He leaves for work early, and when he comes home he keeps to the garden, busying himself with the orange tree. Charlotte watches him from the kitchen window—the stepladder, his gray gardening slacks visible only from the knee down, his torso and head sunk in leaves. He has found an infestation of stinkbugs and is killing them. The air around the tree reeks: a mix of turpentine, acid, petrol. Who knows when the insects came, but they have descended, grown fat and black without his noticing, and now swarm over the leaves, curling them, sucking the juice from the fruit, waving their orange antennae above their beady orange eyes. Henry holds a bucket of water and picks off the bugs one by one, then drops them in, trying to drown them. He keeps his white golfing hat pulled down low towards the bridge of his nose, and when he spots a bug, he ducks his face, pinches it off the leaf, and drops it in the bucket. “Get back!” he shouts if Lucie or May ventures near him, their faces upturned. The stink juice spray can blind. He seems to like this fact—it means no one can come near. He is safe here, hidden. He can kill and kill and kill. It is somehow satisfying. When the bugs are too high to reach he takes the pruning shears, lops off the tall branches, and chops straight through the insect. The girls stand on the veranda, watching. Henry brings them a leaf, holds it out, and points to the neat rows of tiny bright green spheres all clustered together. “Eggs,” he says, then drops the leaf on the ground and stamps on it.
Every evening he thinks he’s got them all, and every morning there are more. They do not drown in the water like he hopes. Instead they writhe and crawl over one another, trying to get out. The bucket is a black swell of wet beetle legs waving and sliding, wings lifting and falling. He goes to the garage to look for a bottle of poison. Then he laces the bucket with arsenic, digs a hole, tips the dark mass inside, and covers it up.
* * *
It is Saturday evening when he dumps the insects into the hole. When he comes inside Charlotte can smell the bugs on him. The smell is in his hair. On his shirt collar. Inside the red creases of his knuckles. At dinnertime he saws at his meat and chews his food to liquid. It sounds like someone squelching through mud—the wet slap of tongue on teeth. He chews with his mouth open: sucking and cupping and pulverizing the steak and potato. She waits for him to finish and finally swallow, reminded of a man she once knew who insisted that the radio be left on during dinner so he didn’t have to listen to his wife eat. She and Henry have nothing t
o say. Perhaps he chews this way because it acquits him of the expectation of speech. She pushes her hands beneath her thighs, leans forwards. The food on her plate is untouched. Henry takes another mouthful and begins chewing again.
With the semester over, Henry stays home; he shuts himself up in his study and works on his book. Charlotte retreats to Carol’s house and tells her—of the visits with Nicholas, the offer, the plan she had half-abandoned because she thought it would never come to anything. They sit on the veranda and talk. Then for a long time they do not talk and instead watch the trees, the distant, eastward line of tall pines. They are thin trees, narrowly branched, more branch at the top than the bottom. Ivy, bright green, grows thick along the trunks. Behind the trees are spindly gums, their tops standing taller than the pines, and behind the gums lies a stretch of blue mountain. The children play at the bottom of the garden. Every now and then there is the blur of a running child, a call and squeal. Carol pours more tea and says that one of them needs to make peace. That is her phrase, make peace. “Oh, Charlotte,” she says. “Oh dear.” Afternoon light shines softly from behind the trees, making their trunks appear black, and when the wind gusts the trees sway differently. The pines tilt one way, then another, stiff at the hips, while the gums swing and bend, back and forth, elastic, wild, leaves flailing. As the trees move, the mountains behind them become more and then less visible. Blue then not blue. Blue then not blue. Hills, Carol says, not mountains.
* * *
At dinner Henry sends the children into fits of giggles, pulling faces and teasing. Charlotte eats quietly. He makes a special effort to be gentle with them, kind, full of life. He bends his body towards them, dips his head; his eyes soften and shine. His hands move in and out towards the children’s faces, pinching their red cheeks, then tickling their bellies. He makes them chortle, pretending to steal their dinner, then lifting his eyebrows and opening his mouth wide in mock dismay when they eat the spoonful of potato he coveted for himself.
It makes Charlotte feel bereft, this purposeful display of happiness. This loving father. So alive to the present moment, so lighthearted, so eager to jump and swing and put on silly voices. So childlike. There he is now, chewing his dinner, then opening his mouth and showing its mashed-up contents, the girls shrieking with joy.
She thinks of Nicholas. She hasn’t seen him since she sold him the painting, two, coming on for three, weeks. It feels like a deliberate silence, a silence that is meant to say to her: Go. Go now. And why doesn’t she? There is still a little light outside and from where she sits she can see the rainy garden through the window. It grows wild now. The silver beet droops in huge arcs, each leaf wide enough to wrap a baby in, the white stems standing taller than the children. The lettuces have grown to three times the size of a human head. Red poppies bloom madly, nasturtiums mat the spare ground, and thick swathes of grass shoot up in a hedge of bright spiky shrubbery. It rains and rains. Wet trees hiss and drag across the tin roof. She watches Henry, but instead of meeting her eyes he looks at the children and it becomes clear, after a while, that he will not look at her, so she drops her gaze to her hands, opening and closing her fists in her lap, picking at the dirt under her nails. She finds it hard to tell whether he is angry at her or afraid. Is it easier to love a child, she wonders, than it is to love a wife?
A knot forms in her throat, but she cannot cry in front of the children—she cannot cry in front of Henry. “What’s wrong?” he asks eventually, looking at Lucie, and Lucie thinks the question is meant for her.
“What?” she asks.
“Not you,” Henry says.
And Charlotte says, “I’m fine,” understanding the question was meant for her, and Henry says, “No, you’re obviously not fine,” and she says, “It’s nothing.”
“Yes, it is obviously something.”
“It doesn’t matter. Really. I have a headache,” she tells him. As if he needs to ask. “Would you mind putting them to bed?” she says. He looks at her with blank confusion, then blinks twice. Charlotte carries her plate to the sink. “They can go without a bath tonight,” she says, then steps into the dark bedroom and closes the door.
* * *
Later that night Charlotte is woken by Henry gently shaking her shoulder. “Come,” he says. “Come for a walk with me.”
“I’m sleeping,” she replies.
“Please.” There is something in his voice. Something she hasn’t heard for a long time. “I have your jacket,” he says, his voice sad, gentle. He stands beside the bed, holding the jacket open, then helps her arms into the sleeves. There is no sound of rain.
They walk along the path until it meets the river. Black water stretches out into black sky, and the cool air smells of wild frangipani and orange blossom. It reminds him of the smell of the estate after monsoon rains: sweet and damp and grassy. That time, that country—had any of it been real? It seems impossible that it might still exist or that such a place could exist alongside this one, now. He tries to explain this to Charlotte. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She nods in the dark but says nothing. Henry takes her hand in his. “It’s like a little bright circle in my past that is not linked to my life now, not really, and yet I feel it inside me, that place. I always thought life would be governed by some deep sense of continuum. Now there are too many parts. Too many places. Too many things that happened in too many places. And the children—”
“What about the children?” Charlotte asks, defensive.
“I think it is them, having them, being around them, hearing them when I am trying to work, hearing you with them, all of that—it makes me think of the time when I was a child.”
They walk on, past the jetty and down towards the bridge. Henry says quietly, “I don’t remember it as well as I think I should—childhood, I mean. I don’t remember much, really, just bits here and there.” They come to a narrow crescent of sand and stand still. Small waves lap at the shore. Henry eases his feet out of his shoes and pulls off his socks. The sand is cold. The water colder.
“What are you doing, Henry?” She means wading out into the rising tide, his trousers rolled to the knees, and is about to warn him—You’ll catch your death—when he replies, misunderstanding her question.
“I don’t know, Charlotte. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should be finishing this damned book but it’s going nowhere. I don’t know why. I write and write and then throw most of the stuff away. I think too much, but about the wrong things. I feel like I’ve lost something but I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s us. Is that what I’ve lost?” He kicks gently at the water, moonlight rippling over the broken surface. “If only life would feel like a poem,” he says. “If life felt, always, the way a poem can make life feel. Stronger, more vivid, more important than it felt before. If I could make life be that perfect thing.” His voice is quiet, the words mumbled as if he’s talking to himself. “I don’t know. I don’t expect you to answer me. But when I think of my past it seems made up of so many bits and pieces, and this wasn’t how it was meant to be, it wasn’t, and now we are here—finally—and all I do is think of there.” He turns back to face her a moment.
“Where?”
“India, the hills, the house in Delhi. My mother.”
Charlotte sighs and shuts her eyes. For a moment she felt a great balloon of hope pushing up beneath her ribs; she thought he was talking about England, that they might go home, all of them, after all. Without all this arguing. Without fighting for it. But of course not. She knows now that leaving a place you love isn’t the worst thing; it is arriving in the second place and having to live as if the first place has disappeared. This is the tragedy—given enough time you come to doubt the place you knew before. That first life, once real, truly does disappear. Unspoken of, it becomes forgotten.
And so her memories condense, smaller, but brighter tha
n before. They are images now, rather than stories, the connections between the images breaking down. The frozen duck pond on the way home. The bulrushes covered in hoarfrost. The westward path making a sharp turn south, through a stretch of woodland. Then gray sky, and a slip of late sun yellowing the far hill. She is on her bicycle; it is blustery and cold. Squirrels dart through the undergrowth. Birds swoop and dive in the wind. Her freezing hands grip the handlebars, her knuckles red and chapped.
“I had a letter about her,” Henry says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We weren’t talking. I should have told you anyway. I thought you wouldn’t care.”
“About who?”
“My mother. She’s ill.”
“How ill?”
“Very.”
A copse of she-oaks surrounds the sand, and as a breeze blows in off the water the trees let out a high, whispery moan. Charlotte purses her lips and says nothing. Moonlight falls through the gaps between the trees and hits the white river shells, making them glow in the night. She watches Henry walk further out into the water, his head down and his hands pushed deep into his coat pockets. She feels all the tender feelings she’s ever had for him rise up inside her. She thinks again of the old path home and how they used to ride down it, very fast, side by side, the wind behind them. She thinks of the hill where they used to walk, the spot at the bottom where you turn and vanish behind the hedgerows. She thinks of the worn gray track still snaking around the perimeter of the village, sandy and cracked in summer, wet in the autumn, coated in ice throughout winter. Her mind is overtaken by fleeting images of these very particular, very small sections of what seem, now, like lost and only imaginary places. The fields of broad-bean flowers, the seedy, sharp smell of them, the mud and weeds, then the rise of grass, the birds looking for grubs, the dawn fox creeping forwards, she and Henry out early, startling the red animal to a run.
The Other Side of the World Page 14