The Other Side of the World (12 page)

A
utumn slips quickly into winter; the change is faster than any they've known before and it seems that there are only two seasons here instead of four: just hot and dry or cold and wet. There are no gradations, no signs of slow change. One afternoon a biting wind blows in from the south and by nightfall they have the fire burning in the living room. Lucie sits on the hearthrug and brushes her doll's hair. May chews on the leg of her crocheted monkey. The wind pesters; the old walls creak, the windows rattle, the air whistles in and out of the chimney. Cold gusts blow up through the gaps between the floorboards. Come midnight the wind drops and the house fills with a strange quiet. Charlotte is still up working on the painting, Henry seated before her, wishing he could have gone to bed hours ago or got on with his own work—marking, an essay to finish, the next round of lectures.

Charlotte knows she is making slow progress; she is struggling with the movement of the thing, how best to give a sense of the muscles working, how to animate a still face. The nose has appeared, and the shadow above the top lip, but she is thinking too much, losing the connection between eye and hand. She thinks of how Nicholas stared at the painting, how he admired it. She wonders if he was telling the truth or if he just wanted to please her, and if so, why. At this rate it could still be many months until the painting is finished. Rain starts to fall—she hears it on the tin roof. They are both tired. Charlotte has a cold. The girls have been unwell. Henry is busy and keeps to himself more and more these days. He is distracted when he walks in the door
of an evening, surprised by the sight of the children. It is as if he forgets about them during the day.

Tonight she has painted and repainted the blue of his shirt. There is something wrong with the color but she can't determine what. The color she put down previously no longer ­matches the shade she sees on his body. It must be her eyes. Or the light. The fatigue perhaps. The brush feels heavy in her hand, her feet ache, and she is distracted by the knowledge of all the chores left undone. Carol came over in the afternoon with the boys. She brought cake, and while she and Charlotte sat talking in the ­kitchen the boys ran amuck—books were pulled from the shelves, the linen press was used as a hiding place, the taps at the bathroom sink were left running and the water overflowed onto the floor. Charlotte was late with dinner, trying to clean up. Now she has washed the plates and cutlery but left the saucepans until morning. There have been days during the past week when so many dirty dishes accumulated that she resorted to ­piling them on the kitchen floor or stacking them, filthy, in the unused oven, out of sight. Tonight she burned the sago pudding while ­changing May's nappy, and the pot, full of black sticky mess, soaks in the sink. The washing has been done only to be abandoned in a basket by the back door. By morning it will smell musty and have to be rinsed again. The dustbin is overflowing and toys lie scattered over the floor.

“How much longer, do you think?” Henry asks.

“Until we take a rest?” He isn't wearing his watch.

“No, until it's finished.” He knows, as soon as the words slip out, that it isn't a question he is meant to ask.

“Do you want to stop?” asks Charlotte, coming out from behind the canvas.

“I was just wondering.”

“And if it is too much longer?”

“I didn't mean that.”

“You mean you think I'm working too slowly.”

“No, I know that you—”

“That I'm going as fast as I can?”

“Look, you're unwell, we're both tired, I didn't mean—”

“It will take its own time,” Charlotte says, interrupting him. “I've told you.” She turns away and fishes in the jar for a smaller brush. The smoke from the burnt pudding has drifted through the house, and everything smells of it. Henry is right. She is taking too long. She is taking up his time.

“What I meant—” Henry begins, but Charlotte cuts him off.

“I know what you mean,” she says. “It's over. Don't trouble yourself. I understand.” She drops the palette on the table, marches into the bathroom, and closes the door. Henry gets up to follow her but Charlotte clicks the lock. She sits on the toilet seat and cries.

“Now there, it's not so bad,” Henry says, his voice muffled through the wood. “I didn't mean anything. Come out and we can talk.”

But there is nothing to say, she hasn't the energy to say anything, and she knows now that their coming here was due to the simple fact that she didn't have the strength to refuse him.
Fine. Fine I'll go
. But she hadn't really meant yes. She was exhausted, and preoccupied with Lucie and the coming child. She was, quite literally, not herself then, but a woman dispersed among her children. The thought is there now, at the edge of her mind; the truth scurries from attention, from the swinging arc of the mind, the hunting light looking for it now. The thought is fleeting, only half-understood, so simple it can't quite be believed. She was too tired, that's all. She hadn't the energy to say
No, I am not going.
No, I am staying
. To say
Fine, you go
. And now she knows this. It makes
the portrait seem paltry, a minor act of compensation, and in this moment she knows that she must make plans. Secret plans. Fantastical plans, even. She will paint and sell the paintings and keep the money in an old cake tin. She will keep the cake tin in the bottom of her wardrobe, beneath the jumpers, and she will save every cent until she has enough to send them all home. Henry can't argue, surely, if she has the money. He can't stop her. How long will it take to save so much? Years, years upon years. But it will happen eventually: she and her children at home amid the foxgloves and hollyhocks. Then she'll keep her apples wrapped in paper in a box in the cool of the cellar. She'll wake to hear ­cuckoos in the summer morning. She'll make jam from rose hips and hedge plums. She'll not mind the cold, she thinks, remembering the pleasure of gathering sticks and logs from the woodland in the autumn dusk. How she and Henry used to go fossicking in the evenings, creeping through the darkening patch of wood, moving over the damp earth, through the birch and oaks, dragging whole fallen branches back along the path to the house, great thick ­pieces of lichen-covered trees, her belly huge with Lucie then, the evening air shading to mauve, the smell of other people's fires burning, and above them the rooks coming in to roost.

“Come on, Charlotte,” he says, still talking to her through the door. “Don't be like this.” She is tired, he thinks to himself. She is unwell. She will come out soon and they will carry on. But does he want to? The effort of sitting still, in the same position, night after night, was more than he'd imagined. He sat there on the hard wooden chair and dreamed of lying on a featherbed. Of lying on a beach. Of lying down and being fed cherries and grapes, fruits dangling into his mouth from a stalk. If only he could sit there and read.
Portrait of a Reader
, she could call it.

“No,” she'd said. “I need your eyes.”

“Couldn't I read until you get to my eyes? Or once you've finished them?”

“
Henry
,” she'd said, as though he were a small, silly child.

Charlotte fills the basin with hot water and scrubs the skin of her hands with the nail brush. The water burns but the brown paint sticks to her cuticles. The painting is the only thing she has for herself, he must know this—how she endures the chores of the day so as to have these hours, this task. And without it? What will she be then? She is a fool, she thinks, as she scrubs her skin pink. She is a fool for thinking she could live this way, to think she could hurry it along, to think she could redeem the situation with a painting. Her plan is unreal, ridiculous even. Henry would laugh. She splashes water on her face and rubs hard with the small damp hand towel.

Henry knocks on the door again. “Charlotte?” he says. “Charlotte—come out of there now.”

Next morning she wakes early, carries the canvas out to the garage, and covers it with an old blanket. It is still dark outside and the air smells of smoke. Inside, the fire has died down to black. She clutches her dressing gown against her chest and crouches, poking and prodding the embers. Burnt wood breaks up into splinters and ash floats out into the living room. She pokes some more, finds the small red center of the log, and blows.

Henry lies in bed. He is awake but keeps his eyes closed, listening to Charlotte tend the fire. He knows he ought to get up but it is too cold; the walls are icy to the touch and freezing air seeps in between the floorboards. He thinks of his book, the hypothetical book, not yet in existence, the book that will be, eventually, new essays on Hardy.

Charlotte puts a cup of tea down at his bedside, the soft gray glow of daylight slipping in behind her. She switches on the bedside lamp and goes to the wardrobe for her clothes.

“What are you doing?” Henry asks.

“Going into town.”

“So early?”

The children hear their mother's voice and come into the bedroom. Charlotte opens the curtains. A film of condensation covers the lower half of the window and Lucie clambers onto a chair to run her finger across the silvery wet glass—
through the mist
, she says. Her finger squeaks as she draws. She draws eyes, a bird, a long banana with caterpillar legs. There is the phlegmy sound of her breathing, in and out through her mouth, chest rattling. When she speaks her voice sounds wet and bubbly:
Look, look whad I dwawed
. Little strips of bright world appear through the sketch, small finger-widths of world, the frangipani with its leaves almost gone, the calico cat on the tin roof of the shed. She presses her nose to the cold glass. Fine white light comes sidelong into the room, illuminating her ­silhouette: the bright haze of her hair, all knot and curl, the fluff and pill along the sleeves of her blue jumper where her little arms rub back and forth, back and forth all day long. On the ground below her, May chews on a lemony biscuit—yes, it is good; she nods. Sweet crumbs dot the crown of her head and float in the wisps of her fringe. She holds the small biscuit in both hands as if it were a sandwich. Then she lifts one hand to brush her hair away from her face and leaves a dusting of crumbs, yellow against her creamy forehead.

The river path leads, eventually, to Nicholas's house. Charlotte sits in the conservatory sipping tea while he waters the geraniums, the room a bright tangle of flowers, wild blue, trailing pur
ple, common brick-red, and white. “Welcome to the jungle,” he says. The glass wall overlooks the front garden and the sea, and from where she sits the horizon is a high, flat wall of watery blue. In the garden the children play, teasing Nicholas's dog, a Labrador called Gretta. Henry does not know she is here.

Water drips through the bottom of the pots and onto the ground. She tells Nicholas about the portrait, about her and ­Henry arguing, then feels guilty for doing so and tries to make up for it by telling him more—about her plan that feels, now, in the light of day, rather embarrassing. No, he says, not at all. He seems, perhaps, even excited by it. They sit at a low glass-topped table and the flowers engulf them in a wide green arc, arranged behind and around Nicholas as he sits back on a cane lounge. Charlotte sits across from him, perched on the edge of a low rocking chair. The glass door is open to the breeze and the geraniums bob up and down, nodding their bright heads. She watches the girls dance around outside; they pull Gretta's tail and stroke her ears and the dog grins and drools and rolls over.

“And then I just keep thinking,” she says, “how much easier it would be if I didn't do this. If I didn't paint. I think of quitting altogether but as soon as I do I'm overcome by this terrible emptiness. I think of stopping, and then I think, but what would I do?”

“What would you do?” he asks, leaning forwards.

“I don't know. Nothing. I'd do nothing. I could do nothing. I'd have to reinvent myself, but when I think about that, it would be like trying to become no one, to become someone else, someone not me.”

“And then?”

“Then I think, well, I can't stop. Because it's the only way I know how to live. It's the only way I know how to try. I don't know. It's a continuity. The thing that makes me feel continuity.
Of life. Myself. It feels like I would just be nothing if I stopped. It would be an erasure.” Her gaze drifts back outside. Lucie strokes Gretta's pink belly. Charlotte has said too much and feels herself shrink back. She puts her teacup down and stares at the bright patch of sea in the distance, the gray outline of a cargo ship balanced on the horizon.

“Maybe it's the hope that gives you the sense of continuity, not the painting itself. Maybe—maybe the painting doesn't matter as much as you think,” he says, reaching over and picking a few dead flowers off the geranium closest to him.

“Don't say that,” she replies.

“No. Of course not,” he says, looking down and stretching his legs out before him. The tips of his brown shoes shine in the sun.

“But perhaps, perhaps that's part of it,” she says. “I don't know. I blame things, and then I feel awful for it. I blame the place, the weather, the country. I blame Henry. I wish everything wouldn't always come back to that.” She picks up her teacup again. “I shouldn't tell you this,” she says. Nicholas blushes and Charlotte realizes that what she first took for arrogance is simply nerves. He is more beautiful than she first thought, too. His eyes seem to brighten when he looks at her. She has the urge to touch him, just for a moment. What would that be like? This clever man bristling with talk. What is he doing here? And why her?

“No. But it is difficult,” Nicholas says.

“Painting?”

“Marriage.”

“Yes, people say that, don't they.” Charlotte closes her eyes.