The Other Side of the World (16 page)

C
harlotte wakes to a freezing dawn and opens the curtains. What day is it? Henry has been gone for a long time. It feels like a long time. Has it been four days? Five? He called once from Delhi but she's heard nothing since, and without his coming and going the days are undifferentiated, full of chores and accidents—spillages, injuries, fits of wild crying.

She hadn't realized how much she looked forwards to him returning home in the evenings—how his presence soothes her. She wants, more than anything, just to lean against him now and rest her head on his chest. Since he's been gone, May has suffered from nightmares, crying out in the dark and then refusing to be left alone; Charlotte spent much of the previous night sleeping on the floor beside May's bed. Now she is tired and sore. She sets the children up at the kitchen table with paper and colored pencils and goes about preparing breakfast.

At the edge of the garden, crows gather in the pine tree. They cluster along its branches, wing to wing, and caw. They cry all at once but not in unison, some cries ending as others begin, each bird's single, repeated caw linked into the next, rising and lowering, lowering and rising, like a volley of sirens wailing through the cold air. Then all of a sudden the sound stops. For several minutes there is just the wind in the trees. The green triangle of the pine stands dark against the bright cloud. Then one bird swoops down off a branch, circles the tree, lands, and caws again. The others join in and the sky around the tree grows rough with sound.

The children eat buttered toast for breakfast, and later Char
lotte bakes scones. The girls want to help. May sits in her highchair while Lucie stands on a stool at the bench and spoons lumps of butter into a measuring cup. White flour falls like fine ash. It covers the floor, the table, the bench. It is in the children's hair. It is trapped in the fine down covering Charlotte's arms and scattered over the toes of her shoe. She tugs the fridge open to get the milk and the magnetic letters on the door fall off, into the flour, landing wrong side up. Through the window she can see the hibiscus and hydrangea bushes bowing down under the weight of water. Each day now it rains. Spring should be here. It is time. A breeze comes and mountainous clouds move quickly across the sky. The days are long and strange. Each day she goes down to the river and thinks of Henry. She didn't like India, when they visited. What she remembers most is eating
kulfi
and reading
Anna Karenina
while they ­waited out the monsoon rains. She remembers the feel of the book—a heavy, green, cloth-bound copy, the pages warped by damp.

“I'll write,” promised Henry the morning he left.

He is a long way away now, on a green mountain in the north. He walks slowly uphill, his feet slipping on the moss. He thinks of Charlotte, imagines her doing what he knows she does: cooking, pushing the pram, drinking tea from the floral Wedgwood cup. Now, as he walks, he phrases and rephrases a letter.
I always thought that we. Do you remember. The weather is
. He has been writing the letter in his head since he boarded the train at Delhi. That must be more than twelve hours ago now, four or five days since the taxi drove him away from the house in Australia. There were lengthy delays with the train and the change in Kalka. Then the creeping Toy Train up the mountain. He forgot what a long journey it was. He is in Shimla now, finally, and walking towards his mother. A steep road narrows
to a steep path. He watches his feet, placing them on the grass or in the mud but not on the slippery wet green stone. He feels he has been climbing for a long time now, first the road, then the path, but when he lifts his head he is surprised to find he is almost there, the tall white building visible up ahead and ­glowing amid the jungle. The house is built into the rock of the hillside, the original owner a marine engineer who ordered another level be constructed every time he came home on leave. It now rises five stories. Long ferns curl around the walls, jasmine clambers over the windows, pine trees and bright vines carpet the hill behind.

“It's urgent,” he says to the secretary stationed at the entrance, and asks to be shown to his mother's room. “You wrote to me. I've traveled for days.”

“Yes, yes,” replies the secretary, a tiny young man from the south. He wobbles his head as he speaks, as if he might really be saying, “No, no.” “I will call the director,” he says, and disappears into the dark house.

Half an hour passes before the director arrives, the gold trimmings of her sari glistening in the dim hall. She is a short woman who holds her head high as she walks, chin lifted, never looking at the ground. “Mr. Blackwood? Thank you so much for coming,” she says, holding out her hand. “I am Mrs. Ghosh. Please. Follow me.”

“I'd like to see my mother now if I could.”

“Yes, sir. Just some paperwork first.”

“If I could just—”

Mrs. Ghosh stands at the open door of her office and holds out her arm, ushering him into the chair beside the desk.

The place is rancid, the air thick with the smell of mold, cat piss, wet dog, and mice. Gray-green butterflies of mildew grace
the windows and pattern the walls. The worst-affected areas have been covered up with white paint, but the shadow of mold remains visible beneath. “It is just the season,” explains the director. “You wait, in a couple of weeks it will all be gone, everything sunny and bright.” Henry nods as his eyes skirt the office. The walls are cracked and the paint flakes off onto the floor. Water seeps through at the bottom of the wall and makes a dirty puddle on the carpet. “In November,” continues the director, thumbing a pile of damp, wrinkled papers, “in November we have one of our best seasons. Sunny, cool. Just a few days now, you'll see.”

“November,” Henry says, “is almost two months away.”

“Oh no, not so long,” she replies. “Ah, here it is,” she says, pulling out a string-bound folder. “Your mother's records.” She licks her thumb and turns the pages. “Ah, yes,” she says, pushing her large black-framed glasses up to the bridge of her nose. Henry fidgets.

“I know you are in a hurry, sir. But you must not be. She will not know if it is now or later, if it is you or not you. I must warn you, that is all. Your mother has suffered a multitude of small strokes,” she says, checking the paper in front of her. “That, combined with the dementia, well, it is not good. Not good, I am afraid. She hangs on, you know—I wish I had known her as a young woman, she must have been very strong, very willful. Perhaps she is waiting for you, I don't know. It can't be long now. I must say this. But I see from your face that I do not need to. Here, come with me, I'll show you the way.”

It is a terrible place, dark and cold, the walls wet and foul-smelling, the paint bubbling up where the damp comes through. He feels shame creep over him. Nobody in India leaves their parents to wither in a home. He should have made her move to England before it was too late and she was too ill to leave. It isn't all his fault, he reasons: there were no other siblings, there's
no ­other family, and Henry has his own life. That, his mother must know, is what she prepared him for. And why here? At least she might have been better cared for down in the plains. The disrespect would be no different, but she might have been better cared for. At least in the cities there are more people who've been abandoned. And the sheer number gives them a certain fiscal ­value—something that his mother, cooped up in this tiny private establishment, has no chance of benefiting from. He's heard the British still help to fund one of the homes in Delhi, and there is another place, west of Calcutta. But there has never been any arguing with his mother. The hills are the only place for her. They remind her, she says, of what India used to be. No, she told him when he tried to encourage her to come to England years ago. No, she could never leave. “There's nothing worse than the life of a migrant,” she said. “You lose everything. Everything.” Now, the two of them, Henry and his mother, have become like each other in so many ways, alone in the world and forgotten by it. Or so it seems, so it feels.

Beneath the sheet her body is just a few small bumps, her head sunk in a mound of pillows. A moldering wicker chair is placed beside the bed. Its feet scrape over the cold stone floor as Henry drops his weight into it. His mother's hands are folded on her stomach. Henry reaches out and takes her right hand in his. Her eyeballs flicker behind their shut lids but her fingers do not move. The bed is pushed up beside a large window. There is a view of the mountain, wet and dripping and covered in green—the bright green of the ferns and the darker green of the deodar trees. He strokes the top of her hand while two yellow butterflies weave a path through the woodland. Her skin is thin and comes together in pleats like the cooled surface of warm milk. Henry leans forwards and rests his head on the bed, the covers damp
to the touch. He can see, through the opening of the pillow slip, that the cushion behind her head is completely black with mold. He pulls away and feels the chill rising up through the thin soles of his shoes.

On the wall above her bed is a framed picture of the Queen. It is a poor black-and-white reproduction that looks like it has been cut from the newspaper and is now yellowing under the glass. Other objects of reverence are placed about the room. On a shelf by the window stands a set of silver teaspoons with English place-names and some funny little pictures decorating their handles, all displayed in a velvet case. Beside this are two porcelain animal figurines—a robin and a Staffordshire puppy. And next to the bed stands a plastic figure of Jesus, the details of his face worn clean away by his mother's devotions, her thumb working sandalwood over his brow, day after day after day. Henry has seen little brass figurines in shrines that have been rendered featureless out of love, their faces smoothed to a shine—the Seven Wives, and Krishna—but never before Jesus. The plastic statuette looks defaced rather than worshipped, and the ghostly image startles him even though it should not—after all, he had seen her do this over and over again when he was a child: put her hands together in prayer, then touch the figurine's tiny white forehead.

He doesn't know for how many hours he sits there. By the time he leaves for his hotel the rain has begun. It falls fast and heavy, the warm bullets of water breaking down through the trees. The valley is white with cloud and the steep road quickly turns into a brown river. Henry's small blue umbrella bobs through the gray haze as he picks his way among the rocks and dirt and rubbish that litter the edge of the tarmac. His feet squelch in wet shoes.
Others pass him on their way up, men and women in sandals with their trousers rolled to the knee. Their eyes meet his briefly, then slide away.

Back in his room Henry cannot sleep. For the first few hours of the night, car horns echo through the valley. Later it is filled with the sound of barking dogs. So many dogs, all yapping and howling at the same time, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. They follow each other around the lower edge of the valley, they gather at the top of the hills. His mother must hear them too. If not tonight then other nights. The wild dogs barking in the valley below and the wild dogs barking higher up, in the woodland near her window. On and on throughout the night. The last thing he hears is the horn of the train as it pulls into the station at dawn. He sleeps then, and when he finally opens the long red curtains the day is white with fog.

Henry has been gone just over a week now. Every morning Charlotte stands by the living room window and waits for the post. She waits and waits and nothing comes. Then one day the postman lifts his hand and waves to her. After this she is careful to hide behind the curtains and look through the lace. Bills come, and the
Times Literary Supplement
, but nothing from Henry. She stacks the envelopes neatly on his desk and closes the door.

At lunchtime she takes the children to the river for a picnic. She makes sandwiches and they eat them in the sun. Ham and white bread. Strawberry jam. Cordial from one drink bottle. Milk from another. They pinch off the crusts of the sandwiches and throw them to the seagulls, the birds red-eyed, squawking. Arching and flapping their wings. Later the children nap in the pram, under the shade of the river trees. Charlotte sleeps on the blanket
beside them. When they wake, the children play; there is a yellow ball, shells from the river, a bucket and spade.

Charlotte stands, brushes off her dress, and walks towards the bushland that borders the water. “I'll be back soon,” she says, then ducks under a low-hanging tree and onto a narrow path. A few steps in and there is no sight of the clearing behind. She follows what looks like an animal track, the leaves on the ground smoothed, beaten down by passing creatures going to and from the water. She has never been here before. In all these months. She thinks of Henry, far away. Up ahead is the sound of water, high tide slapping on rocks, but there is no sight of it. She bends down to pass beneath branches. Perhaps his letters have gone missing—overseas mail is often slow and wayward.

“
Mummy!
” May cries; the girls are somewhere behind her, in the clearing.
“Mummy!”
The child's fine, high voice drifts through the trees. A twig snaps beneath Charlotte's foot.

“Coming, sweetheart,” she calls back, but she walks onwards, towards the water, the path invisible behind her now. Part of her wishes to find Henry waiting when they arrive home. Then life would go on. Only, she is deep enough into it now to know that she does not really want this, the continuance. All about is the low, green-brown haze of shrub leaves, and spiky yellow flowers like gorse but which are not gorse. There are purple flowers like heather but which are not heather. Twists of black tree limbs rise up towards tufts of dangly eucalyptus foliage. Half a tree left after lightning. Contorted roots rise aboveground. Something rustles in the purple grasses beside her.