It was the summer of 1958: Henry was completing his degree at King’s College London and she was in her final year at the Royal College of Art. Charlotte’s mother, Iris, took regular holidays to India to visit a favorite student of hers who’d married an Indian man, and after Iris retired from teaching she opened up the extra rooms of the house to Anglo-Indian boarders. Henry rented the ground-floor room, directly beneath Charlotte’s bedroom, and she took to making them both tea in the afternoons, when she returned from the studio. At first she simply knocked at his door and passed him the teacup, but then one day she glimpsed what was inside: the floor covered in sketches, papers pinned to the wall, books piled in a circle around the armchair like a corrugated fortress. She hadn’t known what he was studying, and assumed it to be medicine or engineering—that was what most of them came for. But it turned out that Henry was writing his thesis on the use of illustrations in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and the sketches scattered about the room were from that—dark little pictures of women with their faces hidden. The papers on the wall—above the bed and by the window—were drafts of poems Henry was working on. They stood in the doorway and talked fiercely about their studies, and Henry gave her a chapter of his thesis to read. Charlotte brought it back the next day, covered in notes, and they took their tea out into the garden, where they sat beneath the fruit trees and talked until dinnertime. After this they were inseparable, and soon enough Henry proposed. Charlotte knew it was coming. She knew it was what she wanted, discovering this one winter night as she sat in the back row of the audience while Henry read from his first poetry collection, published earlier that year. It was the sound of his voice, how it soothed her; no one else had a voice like his, dark and breathy, the vowels coasting on the body’s subtle expulsion of air.
“And what will you do when you’ve finished your studies?” Iris asked her daughter when she announced her engagement.
“I’ll paint—what do you think I’ll do?”
“Yes, but I mean what will you do for money?”
Charlotte thought this such an annoying question. So irrelevant. “I suppose I’ll sell my paintings,” she said.
“And will that be enough to live on?”
“People make do.”
“One wants, I think, to do more than just make do,” Iris replied.
Henry and Charlotte waited until he’d finished his thesis and then they married in a registry office. After their honeymoon—a wet week camping in Devon—the two of them moved to Cambridge, where Henry had been offered a college lectureship. They signed the lease on Fen Cottage in July of that same year, and three years later Lucie was born. Charlotte had been desperate for a child but didn’t fall pregnant easily that first time. The wait made Lucie extra precious somehow: a gift that was meant to perfect them.
* * *
Charlotte comes in from the fields as dusk settles. Lucie’s cheeks are cold to the touch, and that night she begins to cough. Charlotte hopes it is nothing, just a dry tickle, but it quickly worsens, and over the coming days the cough grows louder, short fits turn into long ones, Lucie gasps for breath. She coughs so much after feeding that she vomits. She coughs so much that Charlotte cannot sleep—the sound terrible, the incessant bark, then the pause when there is neither coughing nor breathing, Lucie’s eyes bulging and watering, her face turning pink then red, the edges of her lips darkening to blue, and only then, just when Charlotte is about to shake the child from worry, or put her over her shoulder and hit her back to get her breath going again, just then comes the long, moaning, wheezing, sucking sound of an inhalation, followed by dry retching and the first explosion of sour milk from Lucie’s mouth, her tiny body squirming and shuddering with the effort.
The doctor comes and leaves a bottle of red medicine, instructing them to keep her warm. “I told you so,” says Henry. “I told you not to take her out in the cold. You’ve been doing it again, haven’t you?” She needs a warmer climate, he says, beginning once more with his plan. The cure is sunshine. Life would be better. Australians spend their weekends relaxing in the sun. On and on he goes—rabbiting, Charlotte calls it.
Two weeks later Lucie still hasn’t improved and Henry grows more determined. He travels to Australia House in London, where he watches promotional films and gathers more pamphlets. He makes inquiries and reads books, plans dates and marks places on a map. He ponders weather reports like an explorer about to embark on the greatest of journeys. “I don’t know what you’re doing with all that,” Charlotte says when she comes upon him late at night, hunched over the kitchen table peering at documents and flyers.
“I’m just making investigations.”
“Nothing will come of it,” she replies, stoking the fire.
“You know it would be for the best,” he says, putting the piece of paper down and trying to meet her eye, but she slips away from him. “Whose best?” she wants to say, but doesn’t. Lucie is his excuse.
“You haven’t even glanced at these pictures,” he says. “You haven’t read the pamphlets. If you’d only look—”
* * *
For days Charlotte paces the cottage with the sick child limp over her shoulder, Lucie’s cough exploding in wet, phlegmy barks. When Lucie refuses to eat, the doctor comes again, diagnosing pneumonia. He peers at the child, taps her ribs, and listens to her breathing. He weighs and measures her. Then he looks out through the window, towards the damp fields. “This winter wouldn’t be helping,” he says. “These days each winter seems colder and wetter than the last. Keep her rested. Keep the house dry. I’ll be back to check on her tomorrow.”
After the doctor leaves, she and Henry argue. “You don’t know,” Charlotte says. “You don’t know that it will be any better over there.”
“Well, it jolly well can’t be worse.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” she replies. “The summer will be here soon.” Red poppies will sprout out of nowhere. Teasels and cow parsley will sway in the grasses. The farmlands will be full of broad beans and wheat and yellow flowering rapeseed that grow as tall as her. There is a path running through these. The summer before last, Henry lifted her up so she could see over the top of them. On and on they went, acres of yellow. Everywhere the sound of bees.
“Is there an English summer?”
“Oh, Henry. Please.”
“Well, if you’d stop being so damn cheerful.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, of course not—because you’re miserable, you’re exhausted, which is why we should go, why we can’t stay. Don’t you see that? Tell me you can’t see that. Think of the coming baby. Of Lucie.” As if that’s not all she thinks of.
She looks away from him. On the far side of the room the washing hangs over the radiators. On the wall next to this the paint flakes and peels with damp. Just the week before, Henry discovered a starry pattern of black mold on the wallpaper behind the armchair where Charlotte nurses Lucie. Henry phoned the landlord and asked him to see to it, but the man explained that it was just the climate and nothing could be done. Their neighbor said he was just a miser. “I saw him,” she told Charlotte. She’d heard Lucie was ill and so brought her a small stuffed animal. “I saw him just before you two moved in, painting over a whole wall of black mold. Covering it all up with that glossy paint. Straight over the wallpaper, he did it. I’d come to the door for something, I can’t remember what. ‘You can’t do that!’ I says when I saw him, and he says, ‘But look here now, it looks all bright and cheery this way!’ and on he went. You just scratch that wall there and you’ll see it. The nerve of some people,” she said as she stood at the front door, holding out the yellow toy and jiggling it at the baby’s face. The child went cross-eyed trying to focus on the moving object. The neighbor paused a moment and glanced up, nose in the air. “You can smell it,” she said, her pink nostrils twitching. “Take one sniff and you can smell that mold. I’d be looking for somewhere else if I
was you.”
* * *
Henry does what he can. He fills the hot water bottles. He gathers wood and keeps the fire burning. He makes endless pots of strong tea. Soon the roads are so bad that he can’t ride his bike to the university. Charlotte shovels snow off the garden path. The water in the toilet freezes at night and they have to smash it with a crowbar in the mornings. Then the wind comes up, whistling in beneath the front door. Henry plugs the draft with a towel, but it’s too late—that night Lucie’s fever worsens and she vomits again. In the morning Charlotte washes the sour-smelling sheets, but there’s nowhere to hang them outside, so she drapes them over the dining table and chairs and over the doors. She has a painting to finish, but it’s too cold in the shed, so she sets up her easel in the kitchen. In the living room Lucie crawls towards the front door, wailing, then stops and bangs her head against the ground, over and over again. Henry picks her up and tries to calm her. “Shoosh now, shoosh now,” he says.
He knows he has to get out of the house. The smallness of it, the damp, the feeling—so real—that at any moment he might explode. If it were summer he’d just open the door and plunge into the fields, Alfred running after him. But the house is freezing even though the fire burns. He holds Lucie to his chest and riffles about in the box by the back door, searching for hats and mittens. Everything is a tangle of black and grey. Three mittens in different sizes. Four hats, none of them Lucie’s. Henry runs back and forth, fetching, carrying, searching. He puts Lucie in the pram and she starts to cry. It is cold. It is early. He has not had enough tea. He needs his scarf and a handkerchief. Alfred needs his lead. But Henry is already outside when he remembers these things. He will not go back for them now and instead marches out towards the path.
They travel a loop, down through the fields of Manor Farm, then Rectory Farm and over the grounds of Thrift. They pass the old barn, the line of ancient pear trees, the green pond, and the wet black meadow ditches. He walks fast, trying to warm himself. The pram bumps along and Lucie whimpers, then falls asleep. Henry puts his jacket over her. It is bright outside. Fresh and gusty. Cold and white.
When Henry returns he parks the pram by the back door and collects an armful of wood. Balancing the woodpile with one hand, he opens the door and slips in sideways, careful not to make room for Alfred, all wet and muddy from the walk. Henry kicks the door closed as he steps inside, ducks through the low doorway between the laundry and kitchen, then drops the wood by the stove. But the back door didn’t close properly and Alfred runs in behind, catching Henry by surprise as he bends over, stoking the fire. Henry stands and spins round, trying to block the entrance to the living room, but as he does so the new wood, just catching alight, falls to the floor. Henry kicks this towards the hearth tiles as he lunges for the dog; he doesn’t see the teapot—a smudge of blue and white—until it’s too late, his forearm striking the side of the pot and sending it skidding off the bench. It smashes on the kitchen floor, hot tea spraying across the walls. Alfred leaps into the living room, runs happily towards Charlotte, jumps up, and streaks her dressing gown with muddy paws.
“Henry!” Charlotte cries, when she sees what has happened in the kitchen. Henry looks down, frozen with alarm, the marbled linoleum covered now in tiny pieces of blue-and-white china. Half a cornflower here. A leaf and stem over there. The teapot belonged to Charlotte’s grandmother and is part of a set that Charlotte inherited. It is the only thing her grandmother left her and is, Henry knows, Charlotte’s most cherished possession.
“How could you not see it?”
“I did see it, I’m sorry, it was—” He wants to explain that it was an accident, that he was trying to catch the dog, that he had been distracted by the fire, but instead says, “You shouldn’t have left it there, perched on the edge.”
“If you hadn’t let Alfred in—”
“I said I’m sorry—it was a mistake.”
“You could have closed the door.”
“I thought I had.”
Lucie, still outside in her pram, wakes up and begins to wail. In the kitchen Alfred spins in circles of joy—his long pink tongue hanging out the side of his mouth and his wet tail whacking the doors of the kitchen cupboards. Henry kicks the wall. “Damn this house,” he spits. “If it wasn’t so small this wouldn’t have happened. Look at us,” he says, spreading his arms, “we’re like rabbits in a burrow.” Henry can’t swing out his arms without hitting something, breaking something, doing damage. Even the furniture is too large and cumbersome for the space. There is the chesterfield lounge that once belonged to Henry’s father, the little round feet knocked off to get it through the door. And the grandfather clock given to them by Charlotte’s mother, now relegated to the small damp alcove that functions as the laundry, because it is the only space where the ceiling is high enough for the clock to stand.
* * *
Charlotte doesn’t reply. The pot is broken. It can’t be fixed. What more is there to say? Henry’s right, though. The house is too small: Charlotte finds herself permanently blotched with bruises—arms, shins, knees, thighs—where she’s bumped into protruding corners of furniture. The drip-dripping of the hot water tap in the kitchen can be heard in every room. Everything in the house is too close. The ceilings are too close. The walls are too close. The doors and windows are too close. The very air is thick and stuffy and too close.
Charlotte crouches down and begins to gather up the pieces of china. The baby is due in three months and she feels it shift. She’d once been consoled by the smallness of the place. It meant there was less to clean and less room in which to make a mess. Now it means that everything just gets dirty faster. Charlotte hates this; she’s comforted by order—neatness calms her. The clutter sets her teeth on edge—the narrow kitchen bench crowded with jars of tea and coffee, sugar and biscuits. But it is the filth she can’t stand. She sees it now as she scuttles about low down, gathering up the last shards—unidentifiable grime on the linoleum, hard bits of dropped vegetable, the drips of food on the cupboard doors, the residue of oil and tomato sauce on the surface of the cooker. The spat-out and regurgitated food, the flakes of dried mud from the soles of boots, the windows smeared with thin, greasy finger marks, the debris scattered over the carpet—bread crumbs, sand, black grit from the chimney—the grey murk of dust condensed along the skirting boards, the brownish hem on the side of the white kitchen door, opened and closed so many times by hands coated in oil, butter, and flour that it has developed a varnish-like layer of filth.
Henry stands above her, too close. “I could get another one, very similar, better. You could choose it, we could—” Charlotte feels her scalp tighten with irritation and senses the first flush of rage blooming on her neck and spreading to her cheeks. She lifts a hand to silence him. “Just shut up, Henry,” she says, tight-lipped. “Just shut up.”
Henry closes his mouth and looks on. Alfred has been put outside and now whines at the door, scratches. Charlotte’s newly washed hair drips onto her pink robe, leaving a round stain of darker pink across her shoulder blades. Henry can smell the light scent of shampoo—lemon, lavender—a sweet, fruity aroma that cuts through the stale air of the kitchen.
Charlotte blames Henry for the broken pot. Henry blames everything else: the country, the house, the weather. Charlotte stands up with her back to him and tosses the china into the dustbin. He takes a step towards her, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder, but Charlotte turns as he does so and he misses her. “If we had more space,” Henry says, “this wouldn’t have happened. If we move—”
Charlotte looks away and twists her hair into a wet knot. He is blocking her exit, his body filling the space between the sink and the bench, and she thinks quickly about how to leave the room without touching him, without being touched.
“We could have a huge house in Australia,” he says. “A garden. Imagine. We could start again, start over. We could—”
Charlotte pus
hes past him and takes the stairs to the bedroom. “Fine,” she says as she disappears into the narrow stairwell. “Fine, I’ll go.”
The day passes, hectic, apologies withheld on either side. In the evening Henry and Charlotte sit in the living room by the fire. They’ve managed not to speak since morning, since Charlotte said those words—Fine. Fine, I’ll go. Now Henry does a crossword and Charlotte knits. A yellow cardigan for Lucie, the collar tricky. She’s found some lovely brown leather buttons for the front and is looking forward to seeing them stitched neatly in a row and fastened tight over Lucie’s little belly. But now she peers at the row she has just completed, sighs, unstitches, knits again. Charlotte is afraid of what she said. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t quite not mean it. She doesn’t understand the new difficulty of life and wants somehow to escape it—the difficulty, that is, but not the life. The mess, the exhaustion, but not the place. She is tired of him nagging. How to unsay what she said? She is afraid he will take her statement as a clear yes. Fine. Fine, she’d said. They each wait for the other to speak. To address the question.
It is Henry who breaks the silence. “Clothes and linen collected before marriage. Nine letters.” He has T something O something S something. “Any idea?” This gap bothers him—he needs to solve it before he can reach the next answer.
The Other Side of the World Page 3
