The Other Side of the World
Page 22
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything.”
“I’m driving. There is snow.”
“Then tell me I’m wrong. Tell me it will all be okay.”
“I don’t know, Charlotte. I don’t know what to say.”
There is the sound of rain hitting the leaves. Then wind blowing the branches. Then leaves shaking the water off. Pitter patter pitter patter patter pitter. Drops fall above and to the sides, for it is a high tree, a wide tree. A purple-leafed birch, with what Henry would call a weeping habit. She does not remember hearing the bells again. But they must have rung, the sound must have swarmed around her while she stood there, waiting.
For a brief moment she thinks of Nicholas. He is here somewhere, in England. She could hold out her hand and a taxi would take her to him. He’d made her that offer, after all. “I will be there,” he’d said. “I’ll wait for you.” But does she want that? This seems hardly the question. She doesn’t know what she wants. She only knows what she cannot bear.
“Go to them,” Henry said. “Go.” And now she cannot. “Why?” he’d asked, when they were driving towards the hotel. “If you could just tell me why.” Silence filled the car. She watched the windscreen wipers catching and dragging on the ice, and thought, How is it that you can ask me that question? To not understand. After all the time we’ve had to understand things. Then he said, without looking at her, “How could you?”
When she came back to England it was to visit a remembered place. To return to a remembered place. She had thought this was what she needed, this homecoming. She could not have known that such a return would never be simple, never complete, and that her feelings for England came from a remembered time that was itself gone, uninhabitable. The era before their departure. The countless dusks when she stood still in the fields, rocking the pram, when time seemed lost, ancient, unmoving. What is the difference, she thinks, between a time and a place? Children, she thinks, looking up at the windows of the hotel—her children are like this. They are places in time, a mother’s first memory of new personhood retrieved through the body of the child. She always cherishes the remnants of the baby in the expressions of the girl. How sad this is. How lovely. How strange it is to see, every day, the stark evidence of a person’s disappearance, quite indistinguishable from a person’s becoming. Those early versions of ourselves, she thinks, that vanish over an ordinary course of days.
“I was not myself,” she had explained to him, her eyes turned towards the river.
“What was that?” he asked. She could hear the fast ticking of the indicator. She felt the car veering right.
“Nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.” If he couldn’t understand, if he must insist that she make it plain. And then she was holding Lucie to her chest. And Henry stood quietly, watching, and now she knows that he will never ask for another explanation, that he will never have the chance, never again. “When I was sleeping I saw pictures in my eyes,” said Lucie, her nose pressed to Charlotte’s collarbone. “What did you see?” asked Charlotte. Her child dreaming, the miracle of it.
“I saw you,” Lucie said. “You and me.”
Charlotte pushes the gifts deep into her pockets and steps out into the street.
Acknowledgments
This story was inspired by the migrations of my grandparents. I would like to thank them for their willingness to talk about their lives and share their stories with me. Thank you also to my mother, Rosemary Bishop, for sharing her memories. Although the book is fiction, and this story is not the same as that lived out by my grandparents, I have drawn on these oral histories and used them for my own imaginative purposes.
In the course of writing this book I have consulted a great many texts and have used these similarly. I am especially indebted to the following: A. J. Hammerton and Alistair Thomson’s Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester University Press, 2005), Reg Appleyard’s The Ten Pound Immigrants (Boxtree, 1988), Thomas Jenkins’s We Came to Australia (Constable, 1969), Elizabeth and Derek Tribe’s Postmark Australia: The Land and Its People Through English Eyes (Cheshire, 1963), Nonja Peters’s Milk and Honey—But No Gold: Postwar Migration to Western Australia, 1945–1964 (University of Western Australia Press, 2001), Margaret Hill’s Corrugated Castles: A Migrant Family’s Story (Seaview Press, 2005), Marie M. de Lepervanche’s Indians in a White Australia (Allen & Unwin, 1984), Coralie Younger’s Anglo Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj (BR Publishing Corporation, 1987), Blair R. Williams’s Anglo Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era (Calcutta Tilljallah Relief, 2002), Gloria Jean Moore’s The Anglo Indian Vision (Australasian Educa Press, 1986), Lionel Caplan’s Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World (Berg Publishers, 2001), and Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyde’s Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections Between India and Australia (Wakefield Press, 2010).
I would like to thank the staff at the Cambridge University Library and the State Library of Western Australia. I would also like to thank the Australia Council for the Arts for a New Work Grant; and Asialink, the Department of Culture and the Arts, Western Australia, and the Australia-India Council for an Asialink Fellowship. Thank you to Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla and to my host Pankaj K. Singh. Some of Henry’s island musings rightly belong to Elizabeth MacMahon and her work on the island imaginary. Thank you, Liz, for lending them.
I am indebted to a great many people who have encouraged and supported this work over many years. Thank you to Alice Nelson—without your friendship and wise eye the book would never have made it. Thank you to D. S. for talking to me about portraits. Thank you, Sylvia Karastathi, for those early conversations on women, fiction, and painting and for pondering characters in galleries: that moment is yours. Thank you, Diana, for good company and cake. Thank you to Catherine Therese for pointing me in the right direction. Thank you to my wonderful editor Elizabeth Cowell. A great many thanks to Sarah Branham and the team at Atria. Thank you to my agent Emma Paterson at Rogers, Coleridge and White.
The greatest thanks are to my family: to Milla for your companionship and your beautiful questions, and to Dashiell for joining us in the last stages and making us all laugh. Above all, thank you, Boyd—for your fortitude, love, and care. This is for you.
About the Author
Author photograph by Craig Peihopa
Stephanie Bishop’s first novel was The Singing, for which she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. The Singing was also highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award. The Other Side of the World is her second novel. It was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award under the title Dream England and was winner of the 2015 Readings Award for New Australian Fiction.
Stephanie’s essays and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Australian, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, and the Sydney Morning Herald. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of New South Wales. She lives in Sydney.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiousl
y. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Bishop
Originally published in Australia and New Zealand in 2015 by Hachette Australia Pty. Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bishop, Stephanie, 1979- author.
Title: The other side of the world : a novel / Stephanie Bishop.
Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2016. | The Other Side of the World is her second novel and was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award under the title Dream England. It was published in London by Tinder Press as The other side of the world (2015).
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042117| ISBN 9781501133121 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501133138 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781501133145 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Interracial marriage--Fiction. | Home--Fiction. | Identity (Psychology)--Fiction. | England--Fiction. | Australia--Fiction. |India--Fiction. | Psychological fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9619.4.B557 O84 2016 | DDC 823/.92--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042117
ISBN 978-1-5011-3312-1
ISBN 978-1-5011-3314-5 (ebook)