The Other Side of the World (22 page)

“What was that?” she calls to him.

“Nothing,” he replies, as Lucie gains better purchase on Charlotte's neck and tugs her down towards the bed. Charlotte feels her mind turning in smaller and smaller circles—she does not know if she can bear this all over again, the closeness, the constant pressing in, the airlessness. The need for her own resignation, the desire for her own space.

As if sensing this, Lucie stops her wriggling and pulls away. “Where were you?” she asks, as if Charlotte's absence had been brief.

“I went away.”

“Why?”

What did her father used to say?
Y
is a crooked letter that cannot be fixed. They have grown up so much. Now they are children, tearing through a green world. It will be one of her most enduring memories, the sudden sight of them in that courtyard, one of those memories that will make her feel so happy and so sad at the same time—these two girls chasing each other over the grass, their legs racing, their faces upturned and grinning, not
looking where they are going as they gallop in arcs and zigzags, slightly knock-kneed, their hair flipping behind them, their cardigans falling from their shoulders, the two of them breathless from running and still trying to laugh so that they gasp and smile and sigh and gasp again.

“Thank you for coming back to see me,” says Lucie.

Charlotte laughs, alarmed by the formality of the phrase. It makes her return seem temporary, generous and unexpected—a gift, not a demand, not a necessity. A surprise, of course it is a surprise. “You're very welcome,” Charlotte replies.

“Did you miss me?” Lucie asks.

“Oh, darling, I did. Of course I did,” Charlotte says, tucking her arm around Lucie's shoulders, but Lucie resists.

Henry goes to fix Charlotte a drink. When he comes back he sets the glass down on the bedside table.

What did he say on the way over? Give them time. But it is not the same. What made her think it could be? There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children. Lucie and May stop touching her, sit back and stare. They stare at her as though they have never seen her before, as if she does not belong here, as if she has no right to belong, not now, not after so much time apart.

She has seen it before, this look—when she once walked in on Lucie and Henry playing together with Lucie's dolls. She was an interruption, an interloper in a new world. Lucie froze and stared. Then she uttered her command:
Go away
. The force of it was so unexpected that Charlotte could only laugh and do as her daughter told her. She waited outside the door a moment, then retreated to the kitchen, the sound of the game recommencing as she moved down the hall, one doll talking to another in the quick, high voice that Henry reserved for his children's play. Now
both girls look at her with these strange wide eyes. They look, unblinking, until Charlotte flinches and turns away.

Henry comes up behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “It will be all right,” he whispers, “just be patient.” But she did not expect this. They seem to understand so much while knowing so little. One can pretend with a child but one cannot lie. It is true, she is a stranger. She does not belong here anymore. Not now, not like this.

“Ah,” she says, “I almost forgot—I have something for you both.” She reaches down to the floor and picks up her handbag, dipping her fingers in and fishing about. In an instant she has their attention.

“What is it? What is it! A present? Mummy's got me a present!” they both chime at once. “Is it a present from England?” Lucie asks.

“Wait, here it is—no, that's not it,” says Charlotte. “It must have fallen out in the car. Just wait a moment and I'll go see if I left it behind.”

“No!” Lucie cries. “No, stay here!”

“I won't be a minute,” says Charlotte, “and I'll be back with a treat.”

“No!” Lucie's eyes well with tears.

“Stay with them,” Henry says, “and I'll get it—if you tell me what I'm looking for.”

“But that would spoil the surprise,” Charlotte says, standing up and putting out her hand for the keys. “I'll be as quick as I can.”

She hurries down the stairs and out into the cold. The car is on the other side of the street; she goes quickly, slipping on the ice, then unlocks the driver's door and ducks into the vehicle. A few moments later Henry appears at the entrance to the hotel. Charlotte sinks down behind the steering wheel. Henry looks to
wards the car but doesn't see her. Charlotte watches: he is talking to the doorman, describing the curve of her hat with his hands and pointing. No, the doorman seems to indicate, shaking his head.

The gifts have slipped underneath the passenger seat: two small picture books and a bottle of boiled sweets. She knows Henry thinks she is lying and that there are no gifts—why else would he chase after her? And now it is as if he has given her the idea. Of course it was always there as a possibility; he must have feared it all along. She sees that now—the little sideways glances, the questions, the constant holding of her hand, the touching of her shoulders, her neck. Of course it is natural, that suspicion—it is what she deserves. She pushes the presents into her pockets and turns them over and over in her hands. Then she opens the door and steps out of the car.

Snow whirls slowly beneath the orange streetlamps, and all about is the long hollow moan of wind and ice. Pedestrians hide from the sound, hunching their necks into the high collars of their coats, tugging their hats down over their ears. Across the road the lights shine in the upstairs windows of the hotel. She could have been back inside with them by now. Instead she finds herself standing on the pavement and waiting. The tissue paper in which the presents are wrapped turns soft beneath her sweaty palms.

New eras of life always begin as something imaginary: new countries, new motherhood, marriage. It seems that at some point such things should cease being imaginary and become real, the dream leading naturally, easily, into the life that is built in its wake. But for some reason this never happens, the imagined version always hovering behind the real life that one falls into, so that the two never merge. She has the overwhelming
desire to lie down with her daughters in the dark, the children asleep on either side of her, her skin in contact with theirs as they breathe, like the surface of water clinging to a lifting fingertip. Oh, to remember the complete happiness of this, the peace, how it stops all wanting, all thought. But this—now it is so plain to her—this feeling belongs to a time before. It was always fleeting. Always inconstant. A momentary bliss that is now simply part of her history.

There is a feeling, at the end of something, of going forwards into the rest of your life. She knows she will not be forgiven. She knows she must never expect forgiveness, however much she might hope for it. What will they remember most? Her jewel-like glass bottle filled with the perfume of violets. The fox fur in the wardrobe that Lucie used for dress-ups. The slippery pink bedspread, the smell of Imperial Leather soap and talcum powder on her skin.
Tomorrow
, he whispered, when she turned away from the staring children and he came up behind her,
tomorrow we'll start over
.
Everything is different now. You'll see.

Through a window across the street Charlotte sees the shape of a mother bending down to kiss her child; she hovers a moment, then reaches out and touches the stem of a lamp, making the room dark. Where does sorrow come from? It seems a magical thing, no matter how terrible, perhaps more so when it is very terrible—so deep and loose and slippery. How to correct this but return to those children and live in the shadow of error, in the general disappointment of her own imperfect love? Ever since they emigrated she has felt they needed something she could not give, and that this failure was not innate but part of the place he'd taken her to. And now what? Her failure has changed her.

Without warning the snow turns to fine rain. In the distance she hears the sound of a bell calling out the hour. How many?
Nine, perhaps ten. Her feet are numb in her shoes, and the damp seeps through the lining of her coat. She takes shelter beneath the branches of a tree, cold and sorrow sickening her as she watches the upstairs windows of the hotel, their bright rectangles of light blurring in the rain. She thinks of the car windscreen and the streetlights seen through the crust of snow. Henry's blue gloves slipping down the sides of the steering wheel as they turned the corner. Henry beside her, saying nothing. “You should say something,” she had said. “Now is the moment when you are meant to reassure me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything.”

“I'm driving. There is snow.”

“Then tell me I'm wrong. Tell me it will all be okay.”

“I don't know, Charlotte. I don't know what to say.”

There is the sound of rain hitting the leaves. Then wind blowing the branches. Then leaves shaking the water off. Pitter patter pitter patter patter pitter. Drops fall above and to the sides, for it is a high tree, a wide tree. A purple-leafed birch, with what ­Henry would call a weeping habit. She does not remember hearing the bells again. But they must have rung, the sound must have swarmed around her while she stood there, waiting.

For a brief moment she thinks of Nicholas. He is here somewhere, in England. She could hold out her hand and a taxi would take her to him. He'd made her that offer, after all. “I will be there,” he'd said. “I'll wait for you.” But does she want that? This seems hardly the question. She doesn't know what she wants. She only knows what she cannot bear.

“Go to them,” Henry said. “Go.” And now she cannot. “Why?” he'd asked, when they were driving towards the hotel. “If you could just tell me why.” Silence filled the car. She watched
the windscreen wipers catching and dragging on the ice, and thought,
How is it that you can ask me that question? To not understand. After all the time we've had to understand things.
Then he said, without looking at her, “How could you?”

When she came back to England it was to visit a remembered place. To return to a remembered place. She had thought this was what she needed, this homecoming. She could not have known that such a return would never be simple, never complete, and that her feelings for England came from a remembered time that was itself gone, uninhabitable. The era before their departure. The countless dusks when she stood still in the fields, rocking the pram, when time seemed lost, ancient, unmoving. What is the difference, she thinks, between a time and a place? Children, she thinks, looking up at the windows of the hotel—her children are like this. They are places in time, a mother's first memory of new personhood retrieved through the body of the child. She always cherishes the remnants of the baby in the expressions of the girl. How sad this is. How lovely. How strange it is to see, every day, the stark evidence of a person's disappearance, quite indistinguishable from a person's becoming. Those early versions of ourselves, she thinks, that vanish over an ordinary course of days.

“I was not myself,” she had explained to him, her eyes turned towards the river.

“What was that?” he asked. She could hear the fast ticking of the indicator. She felt the car veering right.

“Nothing,” she said. “It doesn't matter.” If he couldn't understand, if he must insist that she make it plain. And then she was holding Lucie to her chest. And Henry stood quietly, watching, and now she knows that he will never ask for another explanation, that he will never have the chance, never again. “When I was sleeping I saw pictures in my eyes,” said Lucie, her nose pressed to
Charlotte's collarbone. “What did you see?” asked Charlotte. Her child dreaming, the miracle of it.

“I saw you,” Lucie said. “You and me.”

Charlotte pushes the gifts deep into her pockets and steps out into the street.

Acknowledgments

This story was inspired by the migrations of my grandparents. I would like to thank them for their willingness to talk about their lives and share their stories with me. Thank you also to my ­mother, Rosemary Bishop, for sharing her memories. Although the book is fiction, and this story is not the same as that lived out by my grandparents, I have drawn on these oral histories and used them for my own imaginative purposes.

In the course of writing this book I have consulted a great many texts and have used these similarly. I am especially indebted to the following: A. J. Hammerton and Alistair Thomson's
Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants
(Manchester University Press, 2005), Reg Appleyard's
The Ten Pound Immigrants
(Boxtree, 1988), Thomas Jenkins's
We Came to Australia
(Constable, 1969), Elizabeth and Derek Tribe's
Postmark Australia: The Land and Its People Through English Eyes
(Cheshire, 1963), Nonja Peters's
Milk and Honey—But No Gold: Postwar Migration to Western Australia
,
1945–1964
(University of Western Australia Press, 2001), Margaret Hill's
Corrugated Castles: A Migrant Family's Story
(Seaview Press, 2005), Marie M. de Lepervanche's
Indians in a White Australia
(­Allen & Unwin, 1984), Coralie Younger's
Anglo Indians: ­Neglected Children of the Raj
(BR Publishing Corporation, 1987), Blair R. Williams's
Anglo Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era
(Calcutta Tilljallah Relief, 2002), Gloria Jean Moore's
The Anglo Indian Vision
(Australasian Educa Press, 1986), Lionel Caplan's
Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World
(Berg Publishers, 2001), and Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyde's
Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections Between India and Australia
(Wakefield Press, 2010).

I would like to thank the staff at the Cambridge University Library and the State Library of Western Australia. I would also like to thank the Australia Council for the Arts for a New Work Grant; and Asialink, the Department of Culture and the Arts, Western Australia, and the Australia-India Council for an Asialink Fellowship. Thank you to Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla and to my host Pankaj K. Singh. Some of Henry's island musings rightly belong to Elizabeth MacMahon and her work on the island imaginary. Thank you, Liz, for lending them.

I am indebted to a great many people who have encouraged and supported this work over many years. Thank you to Alice Nelson—without your friendship and wise eye the book would never have made it. Thank you to D. S. for talking to me about portraits. Thank you, Sylvia Karastathi, for those early conversations on women, fiction, and painting and for pondering characters in galleries: that moment is yours. Thank you, Diana, for good company and cake. Thank you to Catherine Therese for pointing me in the right direction. Thank you to my wonderful editor Elizabeth Cowell. A great many thanks to Sarah Branham and the team at Atria. Thank you to my agent Emma Paterson at Rogers, Coleridge and White.

The greatest thanks are to my family: to Milla for your companionship and your beautiful questions, and to Dashiell for joining us in the last stages and making us all laugh. Above all, thank you, Boyd—for your fortitude, love, and care. This is for you.