The Other Side of the World (11 page)

Henry slips away into the front yard. Charlotte does not notice him return, so when he steps through the wet washing she starts in fright. “Here,” he says, passing her a posy of new roses, wrapped hastily in a sheet of newspaper. Charlotte shields her eyes with one hand and takes the flowers with the other. The scent sweeps over her. Black Prince, Wild Edric. Henry ­reaches
for her head and pulls her gently towards him. Her hair feels warm to the touch. “I've been thinking,” he says. “Why don't you paint me?”

Charlotte lifts her face to him, uncertain, the roses held to her nose. “Just let me put these in water,” she says.

All that day the air hums with the sound of lawn mowers. Now the window is open to the night and the sweet green scent of cut grass drifts through the kitchen. Charlotte pushes the dining table against the wall to create room for her easel and positions a chair next to the sideboard, a brass lamp lighting the space. “Make yourself comfortable,” she says, and Henry fidgets, crossing and recrossing his legs, putting his hands on the armrests, then taking them off and folding them in his lap. Charlotte lines up the canvas and takes her sticks of charcoal from their tin.

“It's a bit difficult,” he says, “when I know that I'll get uncomfortable one way or another.”

“Remember,” she says, “that you'll have to keep your legs in the same position for each sitting—it affects the slope of your shoulders.”

“Yes, yes,” Henry replies, crossing his legs the other way.

The self-portrait asks:
Is this who I am?
And almost in the same moment the painting replies:
Yes. I am this question
. Meanwhile, the portrait says,
Look. This is who I have become
, and the best ask yet another question:
Who do you see, who do you think this is?
It is the question of the self, for the self, one that brings a little ­tremor to the eyes of the sitter, and which makes them appear nervous when they are trying to look strong, sure, brave, or wealthy. Henry holds a blue hardcover book in his hand, his index finger wedged into its depths to mark his spot. “Can I read?” he asks, waving the book in the air.

“No, better not, it will disturb the angle of your head. Besides,” she says, shifting the easel further into the corner, “I need to see your eyes.” He takes his final position and Charlotte ­crouches down to run a piece of chalk around the feet of the chair legs.

After a while he begins to notice the sounds outside: the crickets chirping in the grass, the frogs out by the water. They must have been there all the time. Strange, that he did not hear them at first. Lucie heard these sounds as she fell asleep. “What's the night singing, Daddy?” she asked as he tucked her in. “What's the night singing?” Every question always posed twice. Once for her. Once for the person with the answer. They are not the sounds he fell asleep to as a boy—the caw, caw of the peacock and the rumble of trains. And they are not the night sounds of England—the wind moaning around the house, the squeak of rusty bikes passing by in the summer twilight, their riders whistling. Lucie's first memories will be of an entirely different place. And how right that seems—whatever Charlotte says about tradition and history—how right that our experience should evolve and that our children's experience should move in ever wider circles than our own. “My ­children,” wrote Hawthorne, “shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” Henry wants his daughters to have something like this, something different from what he'd had. Something better.

The breeze moves at the back of his neck, and for the first time he feels a coolness, almost a thinness in the current of the night. First signs of water have begun to appear as silver dew on the lawn in the early mornings. Sweet white blossoms burst open on silver trees. Weeds have begun to sprout in the dirt and even the seedlings that Henry was sure had been killed off by the heat are coming back to life—the tomatoes and silver beet, lettuce and pumpkin. There has been nothing but sand, and yet out of it come miraculous bright green shoots, small and thirsty.

He stares down at the floor; through the cracks of the boards he can see the dirt cave beneath the house. When he looks up Charlotte is staring at him and swaying as she considers his face from one angle, then another. Her gaze jumps back and forwards over the surface of Henry's body. Every now and then she makes a mark or scratches out a set of lines, but most of the time she waltzes back and forth, then side to side, measuring his face with her thumb held to the vertical stick of charcoal. It is not what he expected. He thought he'd sit down and she'd set to work with the paints, throwing an occasional glance in his direction. Henry hears the clock, tick—tick—tick. Then he doesn't hear it at all. Then it comes again, louder than ever. Tick—tock—tock—tick. It is as though time passes only intermittently. The clock on the wall is one of three clocks given to them as wedding gifts, this one a wooden cuckoo clock with white numerals and a yellow bird that peeps out at every hour. The other two clocks remain wrapped in paper and stowed in the bottom of a packing box. They hadn't asked for such things. They already had sufficient; Charlotte had the grandfather clock, and they had the wind-up alarm clocks on either side of the bed. Not to mention their watches. Charlotte doesn't like them—clocks in general, and the given ones in particular—and shipped them over only due to some peculiar superstition that it is poor form and a breeder of misfortune to discard such presents. The gifts were given, after all, to celebrate the longevity of love.

Half an hour passes. An hour. Henry's left foot grows numb, then his right buttock begins to ache. His bladder presses against the waistband of his trousers. These dull pains flare then recede, flare and recede, and each time the space between them grows shorter, the intervals of peace smaller and smaller, until each different sporadic pain becomes constant and the three or four small
agonies coalesce into one and become fierce, the different parts of his body united by the strange blaze of total discomfort.

Henry is taken aback when he looks at the canvas. After all that, there is hardly anything to see: a few lines, a mark where his eyes will be. The rough outline of a head. It will take a long time, he realizes, much longer than he thought. “Months, weeks, I don't know, it's hard to tell,” Charlotte says. “Tomorrow?” she asks. “We'll keep going tomorrow.”

E
very night for the next three weeks Henry sits for his portrait. The chalk lines that mark the chair's place begin to fade. Before each sitting Charlotte gets down on hands and knees to find the marks and line the chair up exactly. She'll have him staring straight ahead, she thinks, into the face of the viewer, his big dark eyes like tunnels. She wants to create that odd moment when it is hard to tell whether those eyes are looking at you or whether you are looking into them—a certain opacity, a certain depth—the deep wild eyes of an animal, like the horses with which her career began. Horses in the fields. Horses drinking water from troughs covered with ice. Old dappled horses in their stables. She liked the shape of them, the wide neat planes of their faces. What would she call this one?
Man by the Window. Man Sitting. Portrait of Henry
.
Portrait of a Husband.
It was like naming a baby: the title fitted for a while, then didn't, the creation outgrowing her meager definition.

“Could you turn to the left a fraction? And tilt your face down a bit? There. Good,” Charlotte says, hovering before him and pulling on her cigarette—a habit reserved for when she's painting. She stands back, staring at the canvas, then squints as she sucks down more smoke. She breathes out, opens her eyes wide, and steps forwards with the brush.

“Watching you at work makes me think I ought to write a book about painting, about the use of museums and galleries in novels, perhaps. Something like that,” says Henry. “Characters in galleries.”

“Oh?” replies Charlotte, distracted.

“Yes, James and George Eliot. Rome.” It is nice, this time together. There's something new and quiet about it that he likes, that helps him think, the feeling of her concentration in the air. It seems infectious.

Charlotte peers at him, makes a few sweeping gestures with her brush, then steps out from behind the canvas. “Yes, I suppose so. That could be interesting,” she says. He finds it hard to tell when she is listening and when she isn't, whether she is open to conversation or not. “And now?” she asks. “Have you finished the chapter on Hardy?”

Henry lets out a small groan. “I'm tired of it. I don't know how to finish it. People walked out today, you know.”

Charlotte is standing with her back against the wall, watching him talk. Watching, always watching. She looks down to her palette and mixes a shade of beige. She wants the texture of flesh, the illusion of candor. “What do you mean?”

“The students. Some walked out of the lecture this morning. They slip out when they think I'm not looking, but I hear the door. Everyone hears the door.” It had been a horrid day. Out of nowhere he has started suffering memory lapses in the middle of his lectures, the last four ruined by this forgetfulness. Today he was determined to get it right; he memorized and repeated and memorized. He carried handwritten pages, and notes on little rectangles of ruled paper.

When he stepped onto the stage he knew the lecture off by heart, all the twists and turns of argument, the unfolding of ideas like a shining, rising marble staircase. He took the first step up, reached the landing, moved higher. The faces were below him, bright-eyed, listening. He talked. They listened. He took another step, talked on, and when he looked up he could see the top; he
could see where he was going, where he was to end up, the sun streaming down. For a moment he was distracted by the beauty, light overwhelmed him, and before he realized what was happening the steps had fallen away and he was left floating in the light of huge, confused, crazy ideas. Dust motes coasted on the air. He saw them rise slowly towards the closed window and thought of Lucie watching them float up and up on a sunbeam and trying to catch them in her dimpled little hands. “Mummy smells of strawberry,” she said as she banged her palms together, causing a spray of gold dust to fan out. “What is it?” Lucie asked. “What is the floating?”

He didn't know where he was supposed to go next. He stared at the fluorescent light, at the little black dots of dead flies caught in the white tube. He looked out into the rows of seats, at the young, wide-open faces, watching him, waiting. He opened his mouth, sucked in the cold air, then started again. Anywhere. Somewhere. He didn't know. He kept going, head down, eyes on the brown linoleum, his shiny shoes pacing the floor, trying to find the small turn he had missed.

Charlotte sighs. “Don't say it,” Henry warns. “Don't make excuses for them. It's me. I forgot where I was up to and bungled the lot, not just a bit, the whole of it. It's not coincidence. That's how my thoughts are now, I don't know why. It's how the book is. Or whatever you want to call it. A complete mess.” He wants her to console him but she works away in silence, the brushstrokes scratching and wobbling the canvas. Charlotte mutters something to herself, then comes towards Henry, peers hard, and leaps back, ducking behind the painting. She glances at him, then back at the canvas, then glances away again.

“Do you remember when we took Lucie to the National Gallery,” Henry asks, “and people stopped to stare at her like she was part of the exhibition?”

“Yes,” says Charlotte, pausing and holding the brush in midair. “I remember just being so happy to be out of the house and looking at colors. You know, I haven't done that since we've been here.”

“What?” asks Henry.

“Craved the sight of color. Like I used to, in winter, when it was all gray and just the little dots of primroses could send me into giddy bouts of joy.”

“I remember the Constable room,” says Henry. “I keep thinking of Henry James sending his characters wandering off around the Constables. Of course that's not where they were, not where he put them, but I can't change the image in my mind. For some reason that's where Isabel always is when she meets Osmond again, in London, looking at Constable's clouds.”

“We finally got to those rooms and then had to rush out because Lucie started screaming. We went there for those paintings. Then we never saw them. Maybe that's why,” says Charlotte.

She wipes her brush on her apron, the same one that she made scones in just that afternoon. Then she fusses about, looking for a tube of sienna. She is beginning work on his eyes. “Could you lift your chin half an inch or so? And left?” she asks.

Henry fixes his vision on her. He thinks if he stares hard with wide, lifted eyes, he might channel some intensity into the painting. Over the past weeks he has begun to care about the future of this image. He wants it to succeed. He wants it to succeed while knowing the risks—that he might appear ugly or old or mean. But she seems happier now. She seems better than before. She is always happier when she works.

“She told me she wanted to go home today,” Charlotte says.

“Who?” replies Henry.

“Lucie. She said, ‘I want to go home now.' ”

“What did you say?”

“What do you think? I told her we were home, that this is home.”

“And?”

“She gave me this dreadful look—so fierce, so confused—then turned and ran out into the garden. It was horrible. She knew I'd lied.”

“But you didn't,” says Henry.

“I feel like I did.”

“I thought she would have forgotten.”

“Me too. I was afraid she would, and now I almost wish she had.” Charlotte's hair has come loose and long wisps fall across her eyes. She lifts the back of her hand to her forehead and pushes the hair away.

“She'll get used to it,” Henry reasons, looking to the floor. Paint is spattered across the floorboards and there are small tracks between the kitchen and easel from a blob of pigment stuck to the sole of Charlotte's shoe.

“Will she?” asks Charlotte.

She works on in silence for another half hour or so, until she looks up and sees that Henry has nodded off in the chair. She puts down her brush and touches him gently on the face. He startles. “Sorry, I didn't mean to.”

“Never mind. You go to bed,” she says. “I'll clean up and come in later.”

She puts the paints away, washes the brushes, pushes the easel to one side, and then takes the kitchen scraps out to the compost. She shakes the plastic container, dislodging the wet globs of tea leaves and potato peel. The garden is lit up by the upstairs lights of the neighbors' house. Charlotte has still not said hello, although she has heard them calling each other's names: Delilah, Doris. Doris is the younger one. She can see her now, the shadowy outline of her body
visible behind the lace curtains and thin blind. The woman sits on the edge of the bed in her nightie, the slope of fabric loose across her large breasts. She sits there very still, all alone, and after a few minutes reaches over and ­switches off the light. In the morning the blind will go up—although the lace curtain is always drawn—and she'll be heard, downstairs, calling to the cat, the door open, her voice drifting through the trees, up and down the street. The sound of dry cat biscuits rattling on a tin plate, a fork tapping on the edge of a can.

A few days later there is a knock at the door. Henry is at work and the children are finally asleep after lunch. Charlotte has just set up the canvas and taken out her brushes when she hears the knock and opens the door to find Nicholas standing there, holding a box of apples. Charlotte apologizes—she hasn't visited as she promised, and realizes this just now. There had been the car trip home, the argument, and then the work on the painting.

He waves her apology away. “Never you mind,” he says, holding out the box. “I just came by to bring you these. They're from the garden, and one can only eat so many. You'd do me a favor taking them. The whole place stinks of rotting fruit.”

Charlotte lifts the box from his hands. Thanks him. “Won't you come in?” she asks.

“No, no, I couldn't.”

“Please,” she says.

He follows her inside. All about is the mess of paints and jars. “I
am
interrupting,” he says. Charlotte shakes her head and tells him she was just packing up, that she needs some tea. He slips his hands into his pockets and swings round from the hips, looking about. The photographs on the wall. The vase of wilting flowers on the dresser. The fallen petals. Piles of papers and books pressed open, facedown.
He swivels and sees the painting. “Yours?” he asks. Charlotte holds out her hands, palms up, showing the paint stains on her fingers. He steps forwards, peering at the canvas. She comes to stand behind him.

“How incredibly wonderful,” he says softly.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“I'm not sure if I've got the eyes quite right, that left one especially,” she says, walking forwards and standing next to him.

“Does anyone really care about getting it right?”

“I don't mean identical so much as—”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“—the life of it.” They stand for a moment, looking. She can hear Nicholas breathing, the air coming fast in and out of his nose.

“But there is the likeness,” he says, “of an unexpected kind—what you were just saying. The atmosphere of a man, so to speak.” He is quiet then. She wants to believe him.

“Will you stay for tea?” she asks.

They sit on the veranda and watch pigeons peck at the crumbs left over from the children's sandwiches. Charlotte likes his chattiness, the gentle banter that is meant only to put her at ease: how he struggles with a coastal garden, his admiration of Henry's vegetable beds, how he loves to swim far out to sea and float there on his back.

“Have you ever?” he asks.

“No, no, nothing like.”

“The sky here. That is the thing.”

He is wearing corduroy trousers and a white shirt with sweat marks growing at the pits and back. He tips his head to get at the dregs of his sweet tea. From deep in the house comes the sound of a child's cry. Lucie waking. They both hear it. He puts the cup carefully back on the saucer and stands. “I'll leave you—” he says.

“No, please stay.”