Bitter Orange

by Bitter Orange (retail) (epub)

  “The last photo was of Mallory—he’d written her name, and the year, 1961, on the back. I was furious that he’d brought it with him. But she was nothing I’d imagined. I was expecting someone tall and elegant, you know, with a cigarette in a cigarette holder, sophisticated, bored. But she was a dumpling of a woman, short and almost round. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to rip the picture up but instead I tipped out the flour from the flour tin, put the photo at the bottom, and poured the flour back on top. I don’t know why; so I could look at her as often as I needed, I suppose.

  “The Italian food I ordered didn’t arrive that first time. When Peter came back after a week or so, I’d spent all the money, and there was only one hard-boiled egg in the whole house. He was so angry. Then I dropped it by accident, our one bit of food, and he trod on it when we were arguing. You can’t be trusted with money, and you can’t keep house, or something like that. I have to admit that I did hide the washing-up I hadn’t done under the bed when I saw his car arriving. We’ve always argued about money. He says I spend too much but he’s always worrying about it. He won’t admit it, but I know he’s paying the mortgage on their house where Mallory still lives. He feels guilty about leaving her. He says she won’t agree to a divorce, but I’m not convinced he’s even asked her.” She stretched her arms, rolled her head. “Anyway, you don’t want to hear all this,” she said.

  “I do,” I said. “Please.”

  “You really are so sweet, dear Fran.” She smiled and then frowned, remembering. “It was a terrible row. I accused him of all sorts of things, of not believing me when I said there was no father, of not wanting the baby, of not wanting me. I shouted at him, Going back to your wife, are you? Your tubby little wife, who I know you’ll be happy to make love to. That stopped him, and just before he trod on the egg he said in his serious voice, That is not what this is about. And he went off to O’Dowd’s for his tea. He wouldn’t talk about it. Peter’s so reserved, so English, it’s infuriating.

  “He came back later with a loaf of bread, a pat of butter, and some jam. He made me a pot of tea to have in bed—I was always in bed in that house, it was freezing and damp—and fed me little pieces of bread and butter from his hand. When he got in beside me he said he was tired and needed to sleep. In the morning he said he’d been to see an Italian woman someone had told him about and had arranged lessons for me.

  “When I got bigger he became excited about the baby, our baby, he called it, as though we’d made it together. Most of the time I didn’t think too much about the fact that it didn’t have a father. It isn’t possible to live in a state of amazement and disbelief for very long. Sometimes when Peter was away I went to Mass and confession in the local town. I could never bring myself to tell the priest I was a virgin. I knew he’d peer through the grille and see I was pregnant. I told Mrs. Sheehy though—the woman who taught me Italian. She was the only one to say that it must be a miracle. I remember her touching my stomach with the tips of her fingers and then pulling them away as if they’d been burnt. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it too. She never said it aloud though: that I could have been carrying the son of God, or that it was, you know, the Second Coming.”

  Cara laughed, and I laughed with her because it was the thing to do, although I was embarrassed, shocked that anyone could really think such a thing, let alone say it.

  “Mrs. Sheehy was such a nice woman. She arranged for me to have her nephew Jonathan’s old pram and baby clothes. He was twenty-three and leaving for England.

  “When my due date came closer I waited for a parcel from Isabel, a matinee jacket or a baby’s knitted hat or something, or a card from Dermod, just with his name would have been enough. Anyway, nothing arrived.”

  Cara looked out of her bedroom window and I watched her reflection, indistinct but luminous. The moon shone above her head and her shadowed eyes stared back at me. I was spellbound.

  In the sitting room, the dark corners and the soft light from the candles hid the worn patches on the chaise longue, the holes in the rug, and the scratch on one of the side tables.

  “My goodness,” Peter said. “Look at you both.”

  He took Cara by the hand and lifted his arm for her to turn under it. She held her skirt and curtsied.

  “And Franny,” he said. He let go of Cara and she stood watching, smiling as though I were her creation, her debutante, and she were showing me off for the first time. “Charming, charming.” He took my hand and bowed over it.

  He opened a bottle of champagne and we toasted each other and the clothes, and later we toasted the Reynolds lady, the dinner service, the desk, and ourselves again. Cara lay on the chaise longue, her head resting on an embroidered cushion, her eyes closed. Peter took her tipping glass out of her hands and brought another coffee to where I sat on the window seat.

  “I should go upstairs,” I said. “Let you get to bed.”

  “Finish your coffee first.” He nudged me over and sat beside me. We watched Cara, sleeping.

  “She’s beautiful in that dress,” I said.

  “As you are in yours.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a dressing gown really.”

  “Well, it suits you.”

  “There are so many beautiful things in the Museum. You don’t think it matters, us borrowing them?”

  “Of course not. Better that they’re used and worn and admired, than rotting away in a locked room.”

  “We can always return them when we’ve finished, I suppose,” I said, my fingers tracing the embroidery on the fabric.

  A candle guttered and went out. It was late.

  “You must carry on wearing it. It’s wonderful to see you happy. It’s good for you, anyone can tell that. And there are lots more clothes in the Museum to try, funny pantaloons, and hats and furs, all sorts.”

  “My aunt—my mother’s sister—had a fur stole,” I said, taking a swig of my coffee.

  “One of those scarves?”

  We were whispering, aware of Cara sleeping a few feet from us.

  “Yes, fox fur,” I said. “When I was ten, I came home early from school and it was draped over the bannister. I was reaching out to touch it when my aunt came down the stairs. My father was following her.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows, didn’t comment.

  “My aunt said I could stroke her fox-fur stole and touch the pointed face and paws if I didn’t say anything to my mother.”

  I turned to sit sideways on the window seat, bringing up my feet and tucking the dressing gown underneath them.

  “And did you?” Peter asked. “Touch it?”

  “No.” I tipped up my coffee cup, drank. “But I should have, or at least I shouldn’t have told Mother what I’d seen. The next day I was sent to my grandparents’ house in Dorset. The war had started and everyone thought London would be bombed straight away, do you remember? I believed I was being evacuated like my school friends. But a few months later my mother came to collect me and take me back to London. My father had moved my mother and me to four rooms in a house in Dollis Hill, sold our family home, and moved in with my aunt. I never spoke to either of them again, and my mother never really recovered. I think she’d always known about the affair, but she loved her younger sister a great deal, and now when I think about it there must have been more going on, more history between the three of them than I ever found out. Anyway, she blamed me, for bringing it into the open, for forcing my father to act, and I had to live with that.”

  “Oh Franny,” Peter said.

  But I hadn’t finished. Now I had started I couldn’t stop. He was a good listener, like me.

  “A couple of years ago my aunt died in a road traffic accident,” I continued. “She left me the stole in her will. I told the solicitor I didn’t want it but it arrived all the same. I’m not sure what she was trying to say by leaving it to me—thanking me perhaps for the fact that she was able to be with my father, the love of her life, for twenty-seven years? I don’t kn
ow. The skin had become brittle and much of the fur had fallen out. It was quite disgusting. One night I took it to the end of the garden that belonged to the apartment beneath ours and buried it. Sometimes it’s better not to tell. Don’t you think?”

  “Better to lie?”

  “Or just say nothing and deal with the reparation by oneself.”

  “I don’t know.” He put his hand on my knee. “Some things might be too much for a person to carry alone.”

  “A trouble shared is a trouble halved? That old cliché?” I said.

  We both looked out of the window. The sky was a dark purple, not quite black, and the moon was reflecting off the glass roof of the orangery where the leaves pressed to get out. Peter’s expression was a blur, unreadable.

  “I have to go to bed,” I said, aware of the weight of his hand through the fabric of the dressing gown. I wondered if he knew it was there and, if he did, what he meant by it. I stood up.

  He stood too. “I’ll come with you.” He picked up a candelabra which still had a few candles alight. “There was one more surprise Cara wanted to show you,” he said. “But I think we should let her sleep.”

  “Another surprise?” I tried to sound excited, as Cara had asked me to.

  We went along the hallway without switching on the lights, Peter leading the way through the baize door and up the spiral staircase. It was only then that I remembered the face at the window and that I had not been upstairs since I’d returned from London, although I was less certain now about whether I hadn’t mistaken the floors after all.

  The door at the top was ajar. As Peter pushed it open, I hesitated, apprehensive, nervous of our own shadows dancing about us.

  “You don’t still think you saw someone up here, do you?” Peter asked.

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, probably not.” There was an odour though, similar to the one I had smelled when I’d first arrived and had taken up the bathroom carpet. The smell of the mattress I’d shared with Mother, before the men came to take it away, together with the other things of no value.

  In my bedroom Peter held the candelabra aloft. My old army bed had gone and in its place was a wooden single bed, high off the ground, beside it a matching chest of drawers with a lamp on top. He went across the room and switched it on, and I saw the rug Cara had mentioned.

  He put a hand on one of the carved bedposts. “Edwardian, I think.”

  “Oh Peter,” I said. “It’s incredible. Thank you.”

  “I’m afraid the mattresses weren’t up to much but hopefully better than the one you had before.”

  I sat down. “It’ll be lovely to sleep here in a proper bed.” I wanted to say something that would keep him in the room longer, words to demonstrate that I understood him.

  “And see.” He gave an exaggerated turn. “No one else here. Just the two of us.”

  “Of course. I’m sure it was only Cara on the floor below that I saw.”

  “Would you like me to check the other rooms?”

  Was he lingering? I wondered. Finding an excuse to stay with me longer? Perhaps, I thought, he had come upstairs with another purpose. After all, he hadn’t needed to escort me, and not by candlelight.

  I thought about the toilet flushing in the middle of the night, the pillow in the bath, and worried that he would think me a terrified middle-aged woman frightened of her own shadow. “No, no,” I said. “I’m fine.” Inside I was saying, Yes, yes, stay.

  “I should probably start locking the doors downstairs at night. We don’t want people getting in, not now.” He was thinking of the things we’d found in the Museum and how much they were worth.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right.” In my mind I saw the man Cara had described, excited to become a father, cycling to the sea with her, feeding her pieces of bread and butter. A romantic. I wanted him to confide in me.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m glad you like the room. Do let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “I should let you try out your new bed.” I followed him along the dark corridor towards the spiral staircase, reading significance into the fact that he hadn’t put the lights on. I was right behind him when he stopped dead, and almost fell into him as he caught my arm. I was ready then, lifting up my head.

  “Damn,” he said. “I forgot to get you a desk.”

  He flicked on the overhead lights.

  “Oh,” I said. “A desk. Yes. A desk would be lovely.”

  He didn’t kiss me. Of course he didn’t kiss me.

  SIXTEEN

  In the empty attic room next to mine someone was shaking out damp linen: tablecloths or monogrammed napkins; items small enough for one person to hold by the corners and flap. The noise infiltrated my dream, and when I woke with a start of terror I lay in my new bed in the dark and listened to the sound come again. I thought of the face at the window and now I was certain it had been there, and whoever it was had gone into the room next door. I felt for my watch and held it up to my eyes: too dark to see.

  I had explored all of the rooms on the attic floor soon after I’d arrived, walked their echoing emptiness, pushed away the threads of old cobwebs and crouched to look out of the tiny windows. The ones facing west had the same vista as mine: a high view of the parkland with the hangers looming in the distance.

  The air was thick under the ceiling as if the lead on the roof stored each sunny day and at night pressed it down on me. I tried distraction, remembering the conversation from when Peter had led me upstairs—upstairs to this room!—had he really said there’s no one here but the two of us? I was almost dropping off to sleep when the noise came once more and I listened, stiff with fright, imagining the face with no eyes or mouth or nose. Now, the person in the room next door was female, elderly, joints knobbed, hair thin, a crazy woman doing the laundry in the middle of the night. I heard her climb onto the windowsill, rattling at the sash and the loose glass, saw her clawing at the frame with fingernails as horned and sallow as the rinds of old cheese.

  I couldn’t stay in bed, just listening and imagining, and so with a willpower I hadn’t known I possessed, I flung back my sheet and stepped out of bed. The noise stopped. In the corridor, I pressed an ear against the door to the adjoining room. Silence. I considered going to get Peter, but only a few hours ago I had told him I wasn’t afraid. I thought about going back to bed but knew if the sound started again I wouldn’t have the courage to return. Mother’s locket lay against my chest and I touched it without thinking, and then I opened the door.

  In front of the smashed window a blackbird lay on the floor, its head crooked, its uppermost eye already dulled, but the yellow rings around it, and its beak, shining. When I held the bird in the cup of my hands it was still warm.

  “I told her I was sorry,” I think I say to Victor.

  The brown Nurse Assister is pressing her warm fingers over the cold slow blood in my veins and counting.

  “Don’t stay too long, Chaplain,” she says. “Mrs. Jelli-co needs to sleep.”

  “Chaplain!” I say. That’s the word for him in this place, not vicar.

  “What is it, Miss Jellico?” Victor’s breath is on my face and smells of peppermints. Did he think this morning he would be visiting the dying and that he would have to get close? Does he keep a packet of them in the pocket of his cassock? Do cassocks have pockets? I observe him and see that his dog collar is wonky, as if he put it on in a hurry.

  “Miss Jellico?” he says, reminding me.

  “Sorry,” I say again. “I told her I was sorry.”

  “Told who?” Victor asks.

  I am walking through the cows and she makes them part for me, like Moses and the Israelites. I have never liked cows and they have never liked me. I am not afraid of dying. The chaplain is beside me. “Cara Calace?” he says.

  I have never liked cows.

  “She looked like she was sleeping,” I say. “So peaceful.”

  “What did yo
u do, Miss Jellico? We were friends once, remember? You can tell me.”

  “I did it,” I say.

  In the morning, I got up before Cara and Peter, and put on the dressing gown, for the first time not bothering with Mother’s underwear. I found a shovel in the outbuilding where I had discovered the jam jars, and I buried the blackbird between the roots of the mulberry tree. I searched in the stables and other buildings for a suitable piece of wood to nail over the broken window but couldn’t find one, so I went down to the basement. The door at the bottom of the spiral staircase caught on the flagstones and I had to shove it hard. It opened with a rusty complaint. I felt around until my fingers touched a light switch, and when I turned it on a chain of bulbs flickered into life one by one along a corridor, a spine that ran the length of the basement from north to south, echoing the ones on the two floors above. Peter hadn’t taken me to the basement on our tour; possibly he had decided it wasn’t worth it, or he wanted to keep the amount of wine he’d discovered a secret. He’d told me that the footprint of the basement was the same as the house, but with maybe thirty rooms: cupboards and stores, larders and alcoves, as well as the old kitchen. And I’d told him that when Lyntons was first built the basement had been the ground floor with windows onto the garden, but in the early 1800s the house had been remodelled and the earth piled up around the outside to create the western terrace and the portico, and in effect entombing the servants.