The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  “It was only a dream.”

  “But it told me the truth, didn’t it?”

  “Some of it, not all.” Charlotte stares out the window; he has misunderstood her.

  Henry flicks the indicator, then throws a glance over his shoulder before turning left. He drives slowly, carefully. “Almost there now,” he says gently, as if they’ve been on a terribly long journey that is finally coming to an end.

  “And the girls?” she asks. “What have you told them?”

  “That you have been unwell. That you were unwell and that you’d come back when you were better.”

  “What did they say?”

  “What could they say? You were gone. You’ve been gone for a year.”

  “And now?”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “You haven’t told them?”

  “I didn’t know how, and I thought it didn’t matter, that it wouldn’t help. They’ll see you. You’ll be there. That’s enough. You left without explanation. You’re returning that way.”

  “Is that how you think of it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You make it sound like we are moving backwards, resuming something old.”

  “I don’t know how else to think of it. I loved you. I love you still.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte says, but does not know quite what she is agreeing to. Love? Something old? Old love, perhaps. She wants to be with them all, more than anything, but he must know she is not the same, that they are not the same and that she can’t return to that country, to that suburb, to that house. But he must know this, surely he must.

  * * *

  They pull up on the street, opposite the entrance to the hotel. Henry walks around to the other side of the car and opens the door for her. Charlotte pauses a moment, then swings her legs out, letting him take her by the elbow. His hands are large on her—she had forgotten this. They dip their heads against the wind and step slowly over the black ice, Charlotte lifting her face at the curb to catch sight of a waiter through the front window. He is positioning serviettes beside the place settings. A tower of folded white cloths rests on his left forearm and with his right hand he carefully peels them away, one by one, leaning towards the table just enough to drop the serviette into place without disturbing the white tower. Around and around the tables he goes, like a wind-up doll. A smoking room is visible through the next window, the back wall lined with rows of pale leather-bound books. She feels Henry steer her leftwards. Then he nods to the doorman and removes his hat, and they step inside.

  His room is two flights up. He takes the keys from his trouser pocket as they make their way through the entrance hall. The keys hang from a plain metal loop. Henry hooks this over his finger and Charlotte follows him up the stairs.

  When they arrive he gestures for her to enter first, then closes the door quietly behind them, unwrapping his scarf from his neck as he clicks the lock. He pushes the keys back into his pocket and with his free hand yokes his scarf over a spare hook on the hat stand. Then he shakes his jacket from his shoulders and hangs it up too. Until this moment he has looked almost robust, but without the padding of the corduroy and the thick weave of the wool he looks frail, shrunken, his shoulders narrow, his back a little hunched.

  Charlotte drops her gaze to her hands, and with her handbag still slung over the crook of her arm tugs at the fingers of her gloves. She pulls off the left glove and holds it crushed in her palm while loosening her fingers from the fit of the right. Then she undoes the clasp of her bag and pushes the gloves inside. She does not know what is meant to happen next. She thinks she should put the bag down, only she doesn’t know where. She has not yet taken off her coat.

  “They’re through there,” he says, pointing to the door of a small adjoining room. She steps forwards, Henry close behind. “Go on,” he says. The door creaks as she pushes it open, then she stands in the shadow against the wall and searches out their figures. Bit by bit her sight adjusts to the dimness and she sees them, tucked up in bed. She can hear Henry breathing, somewhere behind her. Then his voice coming from the far side of the room. “Please,” he says. “Go to them. All they have wanted is you.”

  She steps forwards once more and kneels down beside their bed. She tries to quiet her breathing. Her palms sweat. The two of them, close enough to touch: May with her round arms thrown above her head, Lucie pressed against the wall with her sweaty feet sticking out of the covers. Charlotte bends down, closer, and closer still, until she can feel May’s puffs of breath warm on her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry says. “I tried to keep them awake so they could see you, but they were so tired.”

  “No, it’s better this way.”

  Charlotte looks down at their long bodies, at Lucie’s thinning face, her fat baby cheeks gone, and she understands, by dint of evidence, how life masses together to become life. She had forgotten. She gazes down at them and feels something beneath the surface of her skin ache and stretch, as though she were being drawn forwards by a magnetic force. Henry stands in the doorway and blocks the light. Then she hears him moving up behind her. His wide, warm hand comes to rest on the back of her neck. From the corner of her eye she can see his other hand bunched in his pocket.

  She remembers the letter she left him. What had it said? I know you think there something poor in my motherly constitution. And I suppose there must be, there is. Is guilt something I feel? Yes, but bewilderment more so. I know I ought to feel differently. I wish I did. I wish you could understand this. It has always struck me that you have deliberately not understood so many things. Why? You’ve always seemed so intent on dismissing my complaints about this place and my affection for the old one. I say this calmly, but I can’t begin to explain the pain this has caused. To be told that such things do not matter.

  I don’t expect you to understand. There was always something about you I couldn’t fathom, some quality that seemed strange. Now I think I know what it is—it is homelessness, a grown-up version of the restlessness you must have learned as a child, and it means you can pretend to be at home anywhere. I cannot. There is a chance, of course, that my leaving will make us the same—both wanderers, both alone.

  “You should eat,” comes his voice. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “What would you like? I can order some food up.”

  “Oh, anything. A sandwich. Some toast.”

  “You need more than that.”

  “You choose then.”

  Henry lingers behind her, watching Charlotte kneel at the bedside. May lies closest to her. The child takes a quick, deep breath and sighs, turning towards Charlotte and pressing her soft warm nose to her mother’s breastbone. Charlotte puts her mouth to the whorl at the crown of May’s head: she smells warm fur, skin, and soap, remembering, again, in this one deep breath, the whole of her child’s existence. She strokes May’s silky hair and feels her stir. The child mutters something in her sleep, rolls over, and kicks the covers away. Then her eyes open slowly, close, then open again. “Mummy?” she says. “Mummy?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Charlotte whispers. “I’m here.”

  Lucie hears the voice and wakes too. She opens her eyes, sits up, and stares at Charlotte as if she doesn’t quite know who she is. She blinks once, twice, then scrambles across the bed and throws herself against Charlotte’s chest, knotting her arms around her neck. Charlotte had forgotten the weight and warmth of her child; she holds her tight. There is, again, the feeling of being made whole by this simple proximity. It feels like the first flush of love: the burning need to touch and be near. May begins to cry and Charlotte pulls her close. Lucie pushes her face to Charlotte’s skin and says, “You still smell of Mummy.”

  “Yes,” says Charlotte, kissing Lucie’s head. The children clamber over each other to get nearer to her. May’s hair flaps at Charlotte’s face
while Lucie wraps her arms tighter and tighter around Charlotte’s neck. They wriggle and twist. Charlotte’s breathing becomes shallow and rapid—the children’s hands on her hair, her forehead, her throat, stroking, patting, fiddling, their bony limbs digging into the softness of her stomach. For an instant she feels buried beneath them and fights the instinct to buck them off, the way a small dog might be flicked from the ankle. Of course, she thinks, this is how it has always been: the great need for them, the great love. Then the swift feeling of being overcome, smothered. Henry is saying something but she cannot hear him because the children are yelping at her ears, vying for attention.

  “What was that?” she calls to him.

  “Nothing,” he replies, as Lucie gains better purchase on Charlotte’s neck and tugs her down towards the bed. Charlotte feels her mind turning in smaller and smaller circles—she does not know if she can bear this all over again, the closeness, the constant pressing in, the airlessness. The need for her own resignation, the desire for her own space.

  As if sensing this, Lucie stops her wriggling and pulls away. “Where were you?” she asks, as if Charlotte’s absence had been brief.

  “I went away.”

  “Why?”

  What did her father used to say? Y is a crooked letter that cannot be fixed. They have grown up so much. Now they are children, tearing through a green world. It will be one of her most enduring memories, the sudden sight of them in that courtyard, one of those memories that will make her feel so happy and so sad at the same time—these two girls chasing each other over the grass, their legs racing, their faces upturned and grinning, not looking where they are going as they gallop in arcs and zigzags, slightly knock-kneed, their hair flipping behind them, their cardigans falling from their shoulders, the two of them breathless from running and still trying to laugh so that they gasp and smile and sigh and gasp again.

  “Thank you for coming back to see me,” says Lucie.

  Charlotte laughs, alarmed by the formality of the phrase. It makes her return seem temporary, generous and unexpected—a gift, not a demand, not a necessity. A surprise, of course it is a surprise. “You’re very welcome,” Charlotte replies.

  “Did you miss me?” Lucie asks.

  “Oh, darling, I did. Of course I did,” Charlotte says, tucking her arm around Lucie’s shoulders, but Lucie resists.

  Henry goes to fix Charlotte a drink. When he comes back he sets the glass down on the bedside table.

  What did he say on the way over? Give them time. But it is not the same. What made her think it could be? There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother’s fear of her children. Lucie and May stop touching her, sit back and stare. They stare at her as though they have never seen her before, as if she does not belong here, as if she has no right to belong, not now, not after so much time apart.

  She has seen it before, this look—when she once walked in on Lucie and Henry playing together with Lucie’s dolls. She was an interruption, an interloper in a new world. Lucie froze and stared. Then she uttered her command: Go away. The force of it was so unexpected that Charlotte could only laugh and do as her daughter told her. She waited outside the door a moment, then retreated to the kitchen, the sound of the game recommencing as she moved down the hall, one doll talking to another in the quick, high voice that Henry reserved for his children’s play. Now both girls look at her with these strange wide eyes. They look, unblinking, until Charlotte flinches and turns away.

  Henry comes up behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “It will be all right,” he whispers, “just be patient.” But she did not expect this. They seem to understand so much while knowing so little. One can pretend with a child but one cannot lie. It is true, she is a stranger. She does not belong here anymore. Not now, not like this.

  “Ah,” she says, “I almost forgot—I have something for you both.” She reaches down to the floor and picks up her handbag, dipping her fingers in and fishing about. In an instant she has their attention.

  “What is it? What is it! A present? Mummy’s got me a present!” they both chime at once. “Is it a present from England?” Lucie asks.

  “Wait, here it is—no, that’s not it,” says Charlotte. “It must have fallen out in the car. Just wait a moment and I’ll go see if I left it behind.”

  “No!” Lucie cries. “No, stay here!”

  “I won’t be a minute,” says Charlotte, “and I’ll be back with a treat.”

  “No!” Lucie’s eyes well with tears.

  “Stay with them,” Henry says, “and I’ll get it—if you tell me what I’m looking for.”

  “But that would spoil the surprise,” Charlotte says, standing up and putting out her hand for the keys. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  She hurries down the stairs and out into the cold. The car is on the other side of the street; she goes quickly, slipping on the ice, then unlocks the driver’s door and ducks into the vehicle. A few moments later Henry appears at the entrance to the hotel. Charlotte sinks down behind the steering wheel. Henry looks towards the car but doesn’t see her. Charlotte watches: he is talking to the doorman, describing the curve of her hat with his hands and pointing. No, the doorman seems to indicate, shaking his head.

  The gifts have slipped underneath the passenger seat: two small picture books and a bottle of boiled sweets. She knows Henry thinks she is lying and that there are no gifts—why else would he chase after her? And now it is as if he has given her the idea. Of course it was always there as a possibility; he must have feared it all along. She sees that now—the little sideways glances, the questions, the constant holding of her hand, the touching of her shoulders, her neck. Of course it is natural, that suspicion—it is what she deserves. She pushes the presents into her pockets and turns them over and over in her hands. Then she opens the door and steps out of the car.

  Snow whirls slowly beneath the orange streetlamps, and all about is the long hollow moan of wind and ice. Pedestrians hide from the sound, hunching their necks into the high collars of their coats, tugging their hats down over their ears. Across the road the lights shine in the upstairs windows of the hotel. She could have been back inside with them by now. Instead she finds herself standing on the pavement and waiting. The tissue paper in which the presents are wrapped turns soft beneath her sweaty palms.

  New eras of life always begin as something imaginary: new countries, new motherhood, marriage. It seems that at some point such things should cease being imaginary and become real, the dream leading naturally, easily, into the life that is built in its wake. But for some reason this never happens, the imagined version always hovering behind the real life that one falls into, so that the two never merge. She has the overwhelming desire to lie down with her daughters in the dark, the children asleep on either side of her, her skin in contact with theirs as they breathe, like the surface of water clinging to a lifting fingertip. Oh, to remember the complete happiness of this, the peace, how it stops all wanting, all thought. But this—now it is so plain to her—this feeling belongs to a time before. It was always fleeting. Always inconstant. A momentary bliss that is now simply part of her history.

  There is a feeling, at the end of something, of going forwards into the rest of your life. She knows she will not be forgiven. She knows she must never expect forgiveness, however much she might hope for it. What will they remember most? Her jewel-like glass bottle filled with the perfume of violets. The fox fur in the wardrobe that Lucie used for dress-ups. The slippery pink bedspread, the smell of Imperial Leather soap and talcum powder on her skin. Tomorrow, he whispered, when she turned away from the staring children and he came up behind her, tomorrow we’ll start over. Everything is different now. You’ll see.

  Through a window across the street Charlotte sees the shape of a mother bending down to kiss her child; she hovers a moment, then reaches out and touches the stem of a lamp,
making the room dark. Where does sorrow come from? It seems a magical thing, no matter how terrible, perhaps more so when it is very terrible—so deep and loose and slippery. How to correct this but return to those children and live in the shadow of error, in the general disappointment of her own imperfect love? Ever since they emigrated she has felt they needed something she could not give, and that this failure was not innate but part of the place he’d taken her to. And now what? Her failure has changed her.

  Without warning the snow turns to fine rain. In the distance she hears the sound of a bell calling out the hour. How many? Nine, perhaps ten. Her feet are numb in her shoes, and the damp seeps through the lining of her coat. She takes shelter beneath the branches of a tree, cold and sorrow sickening her as she watches the upstairs windows of the hotel, their bright rectangles of light blurring in the rain. She thinks of the car windscreen and the streetlights seen through the crust of snow. Henry’s blue gloves slipping down the sides of the steering wheel as they turned the corner. Henry beside her, saying nothing. “You should say something,” she had said. “Now is the moment when you are meant to reassure me.”