The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  They part company at River Drive. Nicholas reaches out and takes Charlotte’s hand. He holds it too gently, and for a moment too long. She feels his palm against hers, soft and dry. There is ink under the nails of his right hand. They stand at the corner of the street, the sun in Charlotte’s eyes. “See you soon, I hope,” he says. Behind him is the copse of pines they have just walked through, the trees dark against the bright white sky.

  * * *

  While Charlotte is out walking, Henry arrives at work to find his office locked. His books are boxed up and his name on the door replaced by another. The secretary points the way to his new ­office, a poky little room at the end of a brick alley in the far corner of the courtyard. It is smaller than the last, and its narrow, dirty window looks out onto another brick wall. He pushes at the window but it will not open. Some new professor has moved into Henry’s old office. Someone American. Young and already famous, so the rumors go.

  While Henry is unpacking his books there is a knock at the door. It’s Collins. “I’m sorry about all this,” he says, waving an arm in the direction of Henry’s files and papers now spread across the floor. “It was a last-minute thing. We’ll have you back in the other room for next year.”

  “It’s quite all right,” says Henry. “I understand.” Of course he understands. It is clear to him that they both understand everything. He pushes a book into place on the shelf.

  “Actually,” Collins says, glancing down, “I came by on another matter.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan. A change of numbers. That new course you planned—on Yeats. We might have to postpone it. There’s just not the numbers.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Yes, there was interest. But it clashes with the course on Donne, and I’m afraid the numbers there were greater, and it’s been running for a long time, that one. Be a terrible shame to stop it now. It’s almost a tradition in these parts.”

  “What about something else, something new? Something to catch their interest.”

  “Their interest?” Collins asks, confused.

  “Something modern.”

  “It would have to be discussed. But I suppose if they’re all reading it anyway—Plath and Larkin and all that—well, why study it? Anyway, let’s raise it at the next meeting.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Next year, though, we’ll have you back in your old room and you can run Yeats then. Although it would be good to teach a poet whose name the students know how to pronounce. Anyway, Donne doesn’t run first semester.”

  “Yes, of course,” says Henry, picking up another book from the box. “Yes, I understand. Thank you.”

  “Good then,” Collins says. He makes to leave but then turns back. “By the way, I’m thinking of writing something on Hardy. The elegies, actually. Incredible poems, aren’t they? Don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I’d appreciate a chat when you’ve got time: pick your brain and so on. Anyway”—he knocks a light fist on the doorframe—“I’ll be in touch.”

  Henry is left standing, book in hand, as Collins’s footsteps fade down the alley. Collins is a medievalist. What is he thinking, taking up the Victorians? He’s moving in on Henry’s territory, that’s what. Crowding him out.

  Australia is a land that offers a vision of the world as it was at creation, a country of new beginnings. It is where one comes when one needs to feel close to the original ferment of the earth. That is the story, is it not? Great men have become part of this place in one way or another and Henry has made it his business to know of these things. Two of Charles Dickens’s sons came out to make their lives here; both Joseph Conrad and Thackeray walked around Sydney Harbour; Alfred Marshall built up his economic theories based on money made through the labor of convicts and Aboriginals. It is not a bad place. But it is not quite what Henry thought it would be. It is not the free place he was promised. There is freedom looking up into the sky, and when he tends the vegetable garden, or plays with his children, but not everywhere. He should have seen it coming. “Where did you say you’re from?” Something like that. Of course it was something like that.

  Once more no one knows quite who, or what, he is meant to be. He experienced this in England, but it is worse here—with his Queen’s English and his strange-colored skin. Just last week he noticed a small article in the newspaper about migrants going home. “I miss the BBC,” one woman was reported to have said. And sure enough, everybody likes his voice because it reminds them of England or of the voice they’d like for themselves. The voice of the homeland. The voice of the clever and the worldly. But his voice and his appearance do not fit. Not here. Perhaps not anywhere.

  He cannot have been what they were expecting. A British citizen, according to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914, which deemed all people of the colonies and dominions British subjects. Had his parents known of the changes that were coming? Was that why they hurried Henry out of India? By 1948 the Nationality Act had been forever altered, and under this new legislation it was quite possible he’d never have made it into England, and certainly not Australia. Under this act he’d never pass as white, not officially, not on paper. Could he prove the British ancestry on his paternal side? The stories were all there but he’d never seen the documents. As it happens, he is deemed a white Australian by default. Because he is legally British, and British in dress, custom, and family ways. Yes, they ate roast on Sundays. Yes, they went to church. Yes, they were members of the tennis club. Because he is British he traveled on an assisted passage to this mythical country. Utopia—that is how he described it to Charlotte. They didn’t interview him for the job. They had no idea what he looked like. He was coming from England, that was what they knew. And now what? He’s been moved to a poky little office, his course has been cut, and Collins is preparing to stake his claim. It is over, that is what he thinks. I am done.

  His hands tremble as he fastens the buttons on his coat. The buttons are large and covered in cloth and the holes are a little too small. He will go home and see his children. That is all he wants these days, the company of his family. It will not be long now. Just a short drive and he’ll be home. Will they have eaten lunch? Will they all sit down together? And little Lucie, what will she tell him about her adventures? He never imagined he’d be impatient to talk to a two-year-old, but as he drops his notebook into his briefcase and turns to leave he knows that is all he wants, all he needs.

  Charlotte arrives home from their walk to find Henry’s car parked in the drive. She pushes open the front door and calls out, she and the children tumbling inside, all talking at once. They fall quiet at the sight of Henry sprawled on the sofa fast asleep, one arm flung over his head, a leg dropping off the side of the cushion, his mouth hanging open. Charlotte crouches down next to him. He snores once and his eyeballs flicker beneath their thin lids. The children look on. This, Charlotte thinks, is what he might look like when he is dead—the bluish tinge beneath his sunken eyes, the dark hollows of his temples. And his jowls, the way they fall back towards his ears, pulling the skin of his cheeks tight and exaggerating the fine bone-work beneath. Charlotte leans over, watching him breathe; he takes shallow gulps of air through his open mouth, thin lips just covering his small, ­tightly packed teeth. Looking at it like this—open and still, the lips stretched taut—his mouth seems not a mouth but a black and shallow hole in the lower half of his face.

  Just then Henry startles and wakes, his eyes opening straight onto Charlotte. He blinks and the black circles of his pupils shrink, pulling her into focus. “Oh—” he says. “It’s you.” He sounds relieved, pleased, perhaps a little surprised, as if she has come back to him, as if he’s lately become accustomed to seeing her as someone else. She leans forwards and kisses him on the cheek, then goes outside to fetch the washing. The breeze has looped the tablecloth over the line and made a tangle of it. Charlotte g
ives the cloth a few good tugs and pulls it free, bundling the washing against her stomach and carrying it to the house. She feels the air shift around her; a change is coming.

  * * *

  Inside, Lucie wants to read Henry a book—she has in her hand a copy of The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle by Beatrix Potter and is ­already telling him the story. “And they find a door, a mountain, and is a key, I think? And spikes. There. See? Can I touch spikes? They are not spiky.” She is referring to the illustration of the hedgehog’s head, tucked up beneath a cotton handkerchief. It is like listening to someone recount a dream, Henry thinks, the connections grand and infeasible and incomplete. Lately she has taken to reading to her dolls. What did he hear her say? Once upon a time and long long ago and again and again and again.

  In the kitchen the phone rings. Charlotte answers. He hears her voice lifting and she laughs. It must be Carol. They call each other often these days and can chat for hours. Henry doesn’t know what women find to talk about for so long. It suits him though: right now he really doesn’t feel like talking. Normally it is Charlotte who checks the mail, but because he came home early he was at the gate when the postman arrived. He knew the paper straightaway—rough and cream-colored. A letter from India. He read it in the kitchen, then put the letter away and lay down on the sofa, where Charlotte later found him. It was too much: the scene with Collins, then this news.

  It had been a poor monsoon, the letter from the nursing home said. So much rain and fog and dampness. His mother hadn’t handled it well. There’d been the flu, then a chest infection, and now she was refusing to eat. “I write only to inform you,” the director said. His mind jumps from one difficulty to another. He’ll have to think about it. He doesn’t want to go—he thought he’d left that place forever. And Collins? It’s clear the man is out to make him obsolete. Henry pulls Lucie up onto his lap. “Read! Read!” she says.

  “Once upon a time,” begins Henry, “there was a little girl called Lucie, who lived at a farm called Little-Town. She was a good little girl—only she was always losing her pocket handkerchiefs!”

  Lucie giggles; she likes the book because of the pictures, and because she and the girl in the story share the same name. She strokes the picture of the tabby cat. “Nice pussy, nice pussy,” she says. Henry relaxes. He likes the feeling of his child against him. He twists a strand of Lucie’s hair around his finger. He’s worked so hard. And now? He could let it all go. His mother would never stand for such a thing. She didn’t send him to England so that he could capitulate. But now, now she might never know. What is the point, really, of a life spent in the hope of becoming a footnote in someone else’s work? There is something oddly seductive, he thinks, about the prospect of giving up. He could let Collins have what he wants and be done with it.

  Lucie turns the pages, wanting to look at all the pictures. While she does so he drifts off into memories of India, to thoughts of that high, wide Indian sky racing across the plains. He hasn’t remembered India for a long time, not properly, not deeply. He’s thought about Australia, and he’s remembered England, and he’s thought of how good it is to be in Australia and not England. But this experience is new. He does not know, in fact, if he has ever remembered these things before—they are so vivid, so surprising, like first memories, even though he knows they are not, cannot be first memories. The gardener sweeping the lawn, gathering the fallen neem leaves into a small pile, then wrapping them in newspaper. The green, green grass beneath the yellow leaves, soft as carpet. The gold embroidery on his mother’s daybed glowing in the sunlight. His father taking him by rail trolley to the tennis club in the summer. The slingshot Henry wore around his neck and loaded with plum stones. The parrots, the pigeons, the green butterflies and the black ones with turquoise specks, the bats flying over at dusk. Birds flying in separate directions. And Henry charging about, far below, firing fruit stones and pebbles into the air. Rarely did he hit anything—a lame pigeon perhaps, unable to take flight. But England cured him of his outdoor ways. That, and the awful sadness of leaving his mother behind. He realizes, now that he is older, that he knew her for such a small portion of his life, just one decade of childhood. To think of sending his own children away at such an age.

  Lucie pulls at his shirt. She wants him to read again. But his voice betrays his wandering attention and Lucie jumps off his lap and goes in search of Charlotte.

  How long has it been, he wonders, since he’s seen his ­mother? Seven years, more? He and Charlotte visited her shortly after their engagement and she hardly recognized him. It was his fault. He shouldn’t have left her there. He should have brought her out to England after his father died in ’54. But he couldn’t force her, and she wouldn’t go.

  Her great and foolish dream was that the British would return to India and she would find her place again in the strange seam that ran between the two cultures. If the British were there, she could aspire to be one of them. If they were not, she was as good as lost in a foreign country. Now she lives on the dark fringe of the hills, belonging to no one.

  Outside it begins to rain. Light at first, then heavy, torrential. Rain lashes the garden, wind lashes the rain. He hears the back door open, then sees Charlotte braving the weather, her thin body folded over behind an umbrella that she carries like a shield in front of her, fending off the downpour to get to the vegetable patch, where she tugs three lettuces free of their moorings in the mud. She will make lettuce soup because that is what they have in this climate: summer vegetables in wintertime.

  * * *

  The next day Nicholas comes over while Henry is at work. Charlotte takes him to the garage and shows him the finished portrait. She knows no one should see it before Henry has and yet there they are, she and Nicholas, looking at the picture together. “This painting,” he says, “is a marvel.” The slight disturbance of balance across the face, the blurring of shadow over the cheeks. She has done something he has never seen before. It is so beautiful, so strange, real and yet not real. True somehow. “Do you know,” he says aloud, “do you know how good this is?”

  He takes off his glasses and inspects the surface of the painting. Charlotte hasn’t seen him without his glasses before. It is like the removal of a disguise—his face is lovely this way, she realizes. Brighter.

  “No,” she says, “I’m not sure. It’s not—”

  “Of course it is.”

  She must show this work, he says. She must do more. The world should see this, he tells her grandly. His tone makes her nervous. World; the word echoes slightly in her head. As if there were such a thing; her life here has become so small. For a moment she thinks she could love him—does love him—simply because he wants this for her. She hasn’t fallen in love for a long time and the feeling frightens her: a nervous rush in her stomach, the need to touch him. “Now you’re being silly,” she says, flapping a hand at him, although the thought thrills her; she wants to believe him. She wants them to believe in this together. They stand in silence, looking.

  She shows him other paintings as well—the canvases shipped from England. There are still lifes, landscapes, the painting of the storm coming over the fens. “This,” says Nicholas, pausing at the storm canvas. “This is the one. May I?” he asks, picking it up and holding it at arm’s length. They look at the bruised English sky together. Then he puts the painting down and leans it against the wall so as to get a better perspective. “Wonderful,” he says under his breath. “Just wonderful.

  “I’d like to buy it,” he says. “Really I would.”

  “No,” says Charlotte. “I can’t.”

  “I think you can,” he says. “I think about six hundred pounds should do it.”

  “No. No, I’m not sure. Besides, that’s far too much.”

  “I think you’ll find that it’s exactly enough.”

  “For what?”

  “The cost of a ticket to London. You and the children.”

 
; “But why?”

  “You know very well why. Because it’s time for you to go home.”

  She hadn’t forgotten about the plan so much as pushed the thought away, as if it might somehow jinx the painting. During the day, when she is at home with the children, such a plan seems fanciful, ridiculous. A kind of gross ambition. Yet then, at night, when the girls are asleep and she’s out in the garage working away again—then the plan returns, but differently. Then it seems exciting, the obvious thing. A night vision. It hadn’t seemed possible to carry this dream into daylight, and yet here he is, standing beside her and making this suggestion, offering this thing that she’s told herself, sternly, she must not hope for. Not ever. Not really.

  “So,” Nicholas says, “will you let me?”

  That evening she watches Henry tend the roses. He has cured them of rust and mite and now they flourish and grow up past his waist. There is a breeze and the flowers sway. Henry is tall, his long arms reaching over to check the buds. In his blue shirt he is the same color as the dusk. She watches him fade.

  Later that night, over dinner, Henry says to her, “Where is the painting?”

  “What painting?”

  “I had to find something in the garage this afternoon and I noticed the storm painting is gone. I’d seen it. Now it’s not there.”