The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  “You know I love you,” Nicholas says. “You know that.”

  Charlotte is quiet. She strokes the back of his hand. After a while she says, “Yes,” although it is not clear whether this means yes, she knows, or yes, she loves him too.

  “I want to be with you,” he says. Charlotte doesn’t reply. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “What for?” asks Charlotte. There is a long pause. Nicholas looks away, leans down, and picks up his wallet from the floor. He takes out a scrap of paper and writes something on it.

  “I’m afraid I’m returning to London,” he tells her, “to sort out some business.” His voice is solid, factual. “Nothing needs to happen here, but if you do go, if you do go back, I’ll be there.” His voice softens. “Take it,” he says, passing her the piece of paper. “This is where you’ll find me.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “And when?”

  “Soon.”

  A green silk nightdress hangs from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. Charlotte gets up, walks across the room, and slips it on. “I think you should go now,” she says.

  When she makes the bed in the morning she finds money on the sheets. Silver and copper coins. They must have been in the pockets of his trousers. She rings once and he doesn’t pick up. She rings twice and he doesn’t pick up. She knocks on his door and he doesn’t answer.

  For days Henry wanders the city. Through Lodi Gardens and down towards Khan. There is the smell of frangipani after monsoon rain, of citrus flower and jasmine. It was a small home, this one—the little enclave of Anglo-India that he was hidden within as a boy. It was not the real India. That’s what ­people said. But they said this about other parts of India too; they said it about New Delhi, with its wide, tree-lined streets and ­empty pavements—that was British India, they said. They said it about Calcutta. They are beginning to say the same thing about ­stretches of southern India, where the beaches are overrun by foreign tourists in bikinis. When Henry was a boy visiting Goa, he saw mongooses fighting cobras. Somehow between then and now even the behavior of the animals has changed. No one sees such things anymore. What is the real India? It is the poor India, the rural India. This is what people now talk of. But how narrow the idea of nationhood could become, how simple it could seem to those from elsewhere.

  During the Raj it had been a common belief that Henry’s forefather, Colonel James Skinner, was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. But by the time Henry was a boy no such high regard remained. Of course every Indian had wanted to be an Anglo-Indian, if only to garner British privileges, but when the British left, all that changed. Those of his kind who stayed did so as his mother did, in ghettos, kept company by yellowing portraits of the Queen.

  Around him an afternoon storm is gathering. Mountains of clouds rise up behind the dense canopy of black plum and ­Indian beech. The sky darkens and the new green leaves glow in the yellow-gray light. A wind stirs and rain begins to fall, the drops slow and fat at first, then faster and closer together. Henry runs through the rain and takes shelter in a tomb. It is dark inside. Black sparrows circle in the dome of the roof, tiny darting things rising up and up to the very top of the curved, mottled ceiling, then swooping down again. Henry cranes his head to watch. Pigeons coo in the red stone alcoves as they look out over the wet trees. The tomb is peaceful—cool and quiet. It smells of dust and urine and birds. He feels like he could stay there for a long time. He feels this, although he knows that his time is up; he doesn’t belong here anymore, and this sense of not belonging is made worse by the fact that he can well remember when he did—a sense of an original belonging. The belonging of a child who lives fully in whatever place he is. Now that he’s come back and seen the place again and remembered, it seems as if everything that came after his early childhood was simple fabrication, history commanding him to become someone he wasn’t meant to be, something so very different from what he was when he was born—first a British Indian, then an Englishman, now an Australian. What made him think he could reinvent himself so easily? But he hadn’t the choice, he reminds himself, not always.

  He walks back and forth, watching the way the world appears and disappears through the archways. He likes the darkness. He likes looking through the darkness of the tomb and out into the light of day. Something stirs inside him, a small memory. He has stood this way before. In the center of their house in Australia, with the doors open, looking straight through into the front garden and the back. There is the darkness of the house, the lightness of the trees and the lawn outside. The pines swaying in the distance. The high clear sky. The sound of his children. These two places—inside him there are always two places.

  The rain stops as quickly as it started. The trees look brighter, the air rinsed clean. All over the gardens, people begin to emerge from shelter. In the distance there is the sound of horns as taxis speed along Prithviraj Road carrying tourists to India Gate. He might have been happier, he thinks, if he had never left this place. His parents sent him to England so that he might benefit from new opportunities, and he moved his children from England to Australia for exactly the same reason. And although the benefits he experienced were no doubt many, to his own mind they seem vague, while the costs appear clear now, as he grows older and understands that he will always be an outsider, that he will always live in a place he is not from. For a long time he thought habit would counter this fact and custom would disguise it. He thought, in the beginning, that such things would not matter in the long run. But they did, they do, they always will.

  Henry writes detailed letters to Charlotte telling her all this, explaining, but the letters are never sent. And he never gives them to her, because by the time he returns home she has gone.

  For several days Charlotte sees no one but the children. Nicholas doesn’t come back; another week passes and there is still no word from Henry. Charlotte doesn’t know if she wants to hear from him; how will they resume, and must they? Meanwhile ­Carol has taken a job at the local library and so is out most of the time. It is as if the world has somehow been deserted; the suburb, with its neat lawns and lace curtains, is eerily quiet. Every day, all day, there is just her voice and the voices of the children. The birds. Then one afternoon a letter arrives from Henry. She tears open the envelope while the children whine and pull at her skirt. “A letter from Daddy!” calls Lucie. “Give me! Give!”

  Dear Charlotte, Henry writes. My mother died peacefully a few days ago. I went to come home straightaway, but there have been troubles with the airline. They say it won’t be long, a week perhaps. So hopefully by the time you receive this—. She doesn’t read to the end, but folds the letter up and puts it back in the envelope. She ought to be pleased at the news—there can be no doubt now. At the back of her mind had been the thought that perhaps he would not return, and that maybe this would be better, easier—an accidental parting of ways. But no. And it is unbearable, all of a sudden it is unbearable—to think of the days going on as they once did. Suffocating. She will make a show of it for the children though, because it is not their fault. “Daddy will be home soon!” she says as she pushes the envelope into the pocket of her dress.

  To celebrate the news they make a cake, mixing flour and butter and eggs and popping it in a Bundt pan because that is the shape the girls like. While it bakes they go out into the garden; there are weeds to pull and flowers to water. But Lucie trips and grazes her knee, then May gets a prickle stuck in her finger. Both girls wail, and while Charlotte tends to them the cake burns. When she opens the oven door, smoke billows out into the ­kitchen. It is too much: there is still dinner to cook and a bath to run, then the bedtime stories to be read. Charlotte starts to cry. The cake was meant to change the feeling of the day, to make them happy. Dusk is coming. Charlotte takes a glass from the cabinet and pours herself a drink. She is exhausted: awake since three in the morning, when May called out for her and she went,
dutiful. But now she aches with tiredness—her eyes, the bones in her face. She is tired of the house, of the children, of Henry.

  She hurries the girls through their dinner and their bath. And when she makes a simple request—Please, put your nightie on now—and Lucie staunchly refuses—No, no I won’t—Charlotte’s anger is instantaneous. She swoops down and yanks the red nightdress over her daughter’s head, knowing the buttons are still fastened and that they have caught in her child’s hair.

  “Ow! It’s hurting! Ow! You’re hurting me!”

  Charlotte forces the nightdress down, over her daughter’s face. “You will put this on! You. Will. Put. This. On!”

  Lucie’s eyes and cheeks burst through the opening before the top of her head, so that Charlotte has to tug the thing, making it drag at Lucie’s throat. The child coughs and gags. “Oh, stop making a show of it,” Charlotte snaps. It is too small, but it is the only one that is clean. Lucie screams and Charlotte yells at her, “Hold still! Hold still! Would you damn well—You stupid child—You stupid—”

  Lucie screams and screams, then collapses between Charlotte’s legs, lying on her belly with her face pressed into the floor, hollering and dribbling into the carpet. The nightie hangs loose around her neck; beneath it her legs are bare and pink from the heat of the bath. Charlotte pauses, looks down at those legs, at the soft pad of skin behind the knee, and hits them. She hits them once, twice, three times, a red print of her hand aglow on Lucie’s pale skin. Then she turns out the light and slams the door. She returns to the kitchen to finish the dishes while Lucie wails.

  Ten minutes later, Charlotte goes back to find her lying on the carpet in a puddle of urine. Now Lucie lets her mother dress her. Quiet as a mouse. Charlotte crouches down, soft now.

  Lucie says, “See the tears? See the tears on my face?”

  “I do,” replies Charlotte, not looking. Lucie turns her back on her mother, then twists her head around, slides her eyes in Charlotte’s direction, and holds her mother’s gaze. Her brow furrows and she watches Charlotte until Charlotte cannot bear it anymore, the challenge, whatever it is, and looks away again, down into the floral twists of the carpet.

  “I love apples,” Lucie says, her voice soft as though talking to herself. She is hiding now behind the curtains, her nose pressed to the cold window. “I love strawberries. I love squeaky toys. I love Bessie. Bessie talk to Lucie?” she says, coming out from her hiding place. “Bessie talk?” Bessie is the rag doll Lucie was given as a baby. In six months’ time Lucie will be three; the rag doll is stained and losing her stuffing. “Bessie talk!” she demands, holding the doll out to her mother.

  The guilt Charlotte feels then, the need for atonement. “And what does Bessie say?” she asks, kneeling down before her daughter. Charlotte aches to sleep. There is a terrible weight in her chest and in her feet. She feels giddy with the need for sleep. She bites her tongue deliberately, the pain sharpening her attention, keeping her awake. “Bessie’s going to the library,” says Charlotte. “Off we go! We’re going to get some books. Now, get in the car, Bessie. Okay. Broom-broom. We’re at the library now. Out we get.”

  How quickly Lucie has forgotten her mother’s cruelty. But just as Charlotte thinks this, she makes some terrible, invisible error. “No! Not like that. No! Noooo!” howls Lucie. “Like that!”

  “Like what, sweetheart?”

  “Like that! Like that! Like that!”

  Charlotte doesn’t understand. She feels tears sting her eyes and tries to change the subject. “Is Bessie hungry? Shall Bessie have something to eat instead? What about a cheese sandwich? Shall we all have a cheese sandwich?”

  “Okay,” says Lucie. “Bessie wants crusts off. And butter. Just butter. Not cheese, just butter. Make Bessie eat the sandwich.” Charlotte responds with the appropriate munching sounds. “And ice cream. Now Bessie do a wee. And a fart. Bessie does a poo.” Charlotte hurries, trying to keep up with the commands. “Now make Bessie talk. Talk to Lucie, Bessie.”

  “And have you had a good day?” Bessie asks Lucie.

  “Yes.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Umm . . . You tell Bessie,” Lucie says to Charlotte. “You tell Bessie what Lucie has done.”

  “Well,” begins Charlotte, in a squeaky little voice, “today I . . . went to the park and I had a swing. I saw a dog running after a ball and—”

  “No—not that! Not that!”

  “What then?”

  “Something else. Bessie do something else!”

  “One more thing—the last thing—and then it’s time for bed.”

  “No, not the last thing! Not the very last thing!”

  “Yes, the very last thing. Yes!”

  The fantasy begins now. Just a quick flash of an image. A woman on her own, in a train, in a room. Somewhere else.

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” says Lucie. She is sitting on the floor nursing Bessie and shifts around, turning her back to Charlotte.

  “That doesn’t matter, it’s bedtime.”

  “No! Bessie—I want to talk to Bessie.”

  “Bessie’s tired, she’s going to bed too,” says Charlotte, but this only makes Lucie wail once again. Charlotte picks her up and tries plugging her mouth with the teat of a bottle. Lucie wriggles and gags and cries louder, milk and spit running down her chin. She throws herself from Charlotte’s lap onto the floor. May, who’s been quietly watching television, comes into the bedroom and begins to wail as well, the two of them thrashing about, all legs and arms and red sweaty faces. Lucie gasps and howls and gasps until she vomits, milk and bits of half-digested meat coating her nightie.

  Charlotte leaves them there, opens the front door, and steps outside. How glorious is this release into cold dark air, the sensation of light rain fresh against her hot face, the smell of smoke and coal and damp leaves loose in the gutters, the smell of the river, the dank low tide and the rotting weed. Inside, the children continue to scream and flail. Charlotte walks down the steps and onto the grass, the sound of the children growing softer as she walks further and further away, right up to the front gate. The moon is behind the clouds and a wide panel of sky tilts over the black trees. She puts her hand to the latch, thinking of the river not far away, of Nicholas in his house above the sea.

  She remembers a feeling from years before—a feeling of nascency, of potential, of openness to the world. Now she is a response but not a question; in all of this, she thinks, I am what comes after the event.

  They don’t know she is gone. They wouldn’t know if she went. Not now. Not immediately. And they are young, too young—they would remember so little of their abandonment. She could just walk on now, through the gate, towards the train, or the river. Thunder booms in the distance and a great wave of cold wind pushes over and around her, sweeping the land clean and empty once again. Then she lifts her hand from the gate and turns back towards the house.

  The moment she steps inside, the phone rings. “I’m catching a plane in the morning,” he tells her. “It gets in tomorrow night. No, don’t worry, I’ll make my own way.”

  * * *

  The trees stand very still in the dawn. White cabbage moths glint in the glassy air. A mist hovers over the grass. She has packed her bag and now pulls out her coat from the wardrobe, glimpsing the yellowed newspaper clipping that her mother sent shortly after Charlotte married, and which Charlotte has kept taped to the inside of the wardrobe door ever since. It started off as a joke between her and Henry; they used to laugh at it. She doesn’t need to read it—after all these years she knows the words by heart:

  The girl who marries must not expect to find the married state an enchanted garden of happiness, where never a weed nor a thorn grows. She will certainly have many times of trouble and weariness but she must, with brave heart and indomitable courage, face the new unknown life which, along with fuller joy than she has hither
to known, lies before her. She should do all in her power to make her home the daintiest, coziest little nest imaginable, so that her husband should be only too glad to spend his evenings there instead of going off to his “Club.” She must bear in mind that no man, even “the dearest fellow in the world,” can bear with good temper being kept waiting twenty minutes for his dinner, or finding his shirts minus their complement of buttons or his socks full of holes. She should not forget that well-cooked daintily served meals go far to ensure household peace. No time is wasted that is spent as means to this desirable end. She should strive to be always as fresh and attractive as a newly opened daisy sparkling with the morning dew, and as sweet-tempered and loving a little wife as ever gladdened the heart of a husband.

  Why had her mother sent her this piece? This fierce woman who for some unknown reason expected docility from her child. The wardrobe had belonged to Charlotte’s father and his name is inscribed just below the clipping, written in pencil, in fine copperplate: Mr. D. L. Thomas. Although the wardrobe was given to Charlotte, she and Henry both hang their clothes here, and it is because of this, she supposes, that Henry chose to write his name below her father’s. He meant to mark a simple change in ownership—the wardrobe was theirs now, it became theirs in the winter of 1961. But the appearance of her husband’s name makes it seem as though the two men, together, are endorsing this strange comment sent to Charlotte by her mother. What kind of wife was her mother? This loyal woman who couldn’t cook but who never admitted to such a thing. When her mother’s Christmas cake sank in the middle she filled the hole with cold porridge before smothering it in royal icing. And how many burnt dinners were buried in the back garden? Charred roasts. Black potatoes. Her mother out there in the blue dusk with the spade, the kitchen thick with smoke. She thought that if she buried the ruined food her husband might never know.