Bitter Orange

by Bitter Orange (retail) (epub)

  I went downstairs, composing what I would have said to Peter if she had fallen, what possible kind of apology I could have made for not keeping her safe. When I went out onto the terrace, Cara was sitting on the orangery steps eating an apple. I didn’t see any oranges.

  “It’s just you and me today,” she said, her mouth full. “Peter had to go to London.”

  “When will he be back?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “He has to see a man about a dog.” She took a bite of her apple and tapped the side of her nose. I sat beside her, stretching out my legs. She tossed the apple core and it bounced down the steps and settled under the box hedge.

  “I expect you want breakfast,” she said. “There are some of yesterday’s pastries upstairs.”

  When I went to their room to make coffee and get the paper bag which Cara had said was on top of the fridge, three bitter oranges lay in a china bowl in the middle of the table, and I saw that the Reynolds painting—if that’s what it was—had gone from the wall above the chaise longue, and a sword in a silver curved scabbard was hanging in its place.

  “I was thinking about going to the obelisk,” I said. “I thought I’d do a painting there.” I had eaten three pastries and the inside of my mouth was coated with a buttery film. We were drinking coffee and smoking. “Want to come?” I needed a distraction, an activity to use up the time until Peter came back and I could hand Cara over.

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “All right.”

  We went to the lake, over the bridge—our work at pulling back the undergrowth had halted after one day—and along the opposite bank. The obelisk was uphill from the grotto. Once, it must have been visible from almost everywhere in the park including the house, but a grove of beech and the occasional fir had grown up around it and now they were higher than its pinnacle. I’d read that a double-headed lead figure of Janus had once perched on the very top, but it was no longer there. We went through one of the three openings onto a small stone platform with a curved seat set along the back wall. Behind it was an inscription:

  Here lies buried a horse, the property of Alexander Lynton that in the month of September 1804 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep afoxhunting with his master on his back. In October 1805 he won the Hunters Plate on Worthy Down ridden by his owner being entered in the name of Beware Chalk Pit.

  I realised I had forgotten my paints, but anyway, the trees crowded the entrance and there was no view. Cara read the inscription and we sat on the stone seat staring out at the trunks.

  “Peter told you not to leave me on my own when he was gone, didn’t he?”

  I looked at her, then looked away.

  “It’s fine. I know he’s worried about me doing something silly, as he puts it. But I never would, not without him.”

  I was uncomfortable with her talking about wanting to kill herself even in such oblique terms. Naively, I believed that talking about it would make her more likely to want to do it. I might not be thinking about food, but if someone mentioned dinner, I was hungry. Wasn’t that how suicide worked too?

  “I sometimes think though,” she continued, “that it would be the ultimate penance. Death. A few Hail Marys aren’t always quite enough.” She gave a sour laugh.

  “But you have so much to—”

  “Live for?” she said, finishing my sentence, which had sounded like a platitude before it was out of my mouth. “It’s the past that worries me more,” she said. “The things that happened when we left Ireland.”

  “The past?” I said, hoping once again to change the subject and get her back onto her Irish story.

  “You want to hear the rest of it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “When Finn was three months old we packed up the house on the west coast. We handed the bicycles back, and we gave away almost everything else. We took as much as we could fit in four suitcases. I gave the pram away too, I was sorry to see that go. Even while we were packing the cases into the car, I thought we were about to drive to the airport near Cork and catch a plane to Italy. Peter didn’t tell me anything about our travel plans and I didn’t think to ask. It seems idiotic now, but we’d—I’d—been thinking about it for so long that I just assumed that was where we were heading. Finn and I slept in the car—it was early in the morning when we left, dark, and it wasn’t until it got lighter through Peter’s side window that I realised we were going north. We had a terrible row, Finn was crying, and I was shouting at Peter to stop and let me out on the side of the road, but he wouldn’t. The bastard just kept on driving north.

  “He sold the car at a garage a little way south of Galway. I went into a grocer’s while he haggled about the price, and I bought a packet of disposable nappies, a copy of Woman’s Way, and a bag of oranges even though I knew they’d probably be dry inside and we didn’t have enough money for any of it. The garage owner drove us to the port in his van as part of the deal. I still thought we were going to Italy, although I realised by then it wouldn’t be by plane.

  “It was really misty when we got there, to the port. I kept waiting for it to clear, so I could see the cruise ship, and when I glimpsed it, through the mist, it wasn’t a cruise ship at all but some rusty old transportation boat. Cows were being boarded—hoisted up in a sling and swung over into an opening in the hold. The mist was so thick that when they were lifted up they disappeared into it until all we could see were their hooves over our heads.

  “We were given a tiny cabin with bunk beds and I was sitting there, bent over on the bottom one trying to feed Finn, when Peter told me the boat didn’t go to Italy. We were going to Scotland because that’s where he had the offer of work. He said he was sorry that he’d misled me but he knew if he’d told me before, I wouldn’t have gone with him. And he was bloody right. All the time it was about the work and the money, and Mallory, I knew it was. By then I didn’t care, I was tired and I just wanted to leave Ireland.”

  Sitting there, listening to Cara, I thought about my aunt, who had been in a similar position—living with a married man who still supported his wife. Did my aunt resent the money my father paid to Mother, the rent on the apartment in Dollis Hill? I had never thought of it that way before. Cara continued to talk while my thoughts wandered, until I heard her say, “The boat sank when we’d been going for about five hours.”

  And I gasped.

  “I was resting with Finn,” she went on, not looking at me. “Reading the copy of Woman’s Way that I’d bought. Miss Landers had finally had a letter published. I remember thinking that I must congratulate her next time I went to her house, and then I remembered that I no longer lived in that town and had no idea what she was doing—it could be that she’d hired a different girl to read the magazine to her and write the letters, and they’d be celebrating together.

  “It was the noise of the cows that I noticed first: the sounds they were making changed, became higher, panicky. Maybe they caused the boat to sink somehow or something went wrong with the engine, we never found out. Peter wasn’t in the cabin—he’d gone up to speak to the captain, to look at the controls, or something. I’d been happy for him to leave me with Finn, I didn’t want to see him or talk to him. The boat began to list and everything loose slid about, and the porthole in our cabin went below the level of the water. Finn stayed asleep, arms outstretched, on the bed. He was a good sleeper. And then the boat fell the other way, but I managed to grab him before he slipped off the bed, I had him tight in one arm and I opened the cabin door with the other. I yelled for Peter but there was so much noise. I’d just gone into the corridor when the boat heeled right over and the lights went out and the emergency ones came on.

  “People were shouting and the cows were making a terrible sound. Finn must have been crying but I don’t remember. I was quite calm—I knew I had to get out and find Peter. I was inching my way along the wall of the corridor, my head and shoulders bent over because it was so narrow, but the door to the neighbouring cabin had swung open, and the inside was just a deep hole, a kind of a
well with dark water sloshing about and a jumble of whatever had been loose piled together at the bottom. I knew if I fell in, there was no way we would be able to get out. There was a lip to the doorways—a rim about as wide as my heels—and I had to slide along it, holding on to Finn, who was wriggling and twisting.

  “I don’t know how I made it up the stairway, but I did. On the next deck there was more shouting and chaos, a couple of sailors had one side of the lifeboat free but the other had jammed. A man yelled at me in a language I didn’t understand, and I was scrabbling around, grabbing on to doorways and handles and calling for Peter. It was almost dark, everything was wet, waves were rushing up over the hull, the engine screaming. It was like I was at the centre of a storm, people shouting instructions that I had no time to act on before they were pulled away, someone falling past me, glass smashing. The noise of the cows was awful. For years afterwards it would come into my dreams and wake me, and I’d have to go to the bedroom window to check for water. They sounded like children crying, human children.

  “I found Peter in the stern, holding on to a railing, just clinging on. When he saw me he was desperate. He let go and grabbed hold of me. You wouldn’t think it now, would you, someone so confident in the water, but he was terrified. I was trying to keep hold of him and keep hold of Finn, and then we were pitched into the sea—the boat tipped, or a wave came, and I was upside down. I didn’t know where Peter went but I had the baby. His hair was floating and I could see him clearly, every pearly fingernail, each downy hair on his round cheeks, the flecks of slate in his blue eyes.

  “There was everything with us under the water: all the bits of the boat that were unattached. And for what seemed like ages I couldn’t see Peter. We’d let go of each other when we fell in. Finn and I were low down: I could see shapes above me, barrels, bits of the boat, cows even. And then Peter got hold of my ankle and he wouldn’t let go, he was hanging on and pulling us down. And so I released Finn. I just opened my arms and released him. I tried to send him upward. I thought that someone, a sailor, would find him and pluck him out. But Peter and I made it to the surface in the end and Finn was gone. I never saw him.”

  “You mean he drowned?” I said, shocked. I had been waiting for the part when they were rescued, expecting a sad epilogue where Finn would be given up for adoption.

  “Yes,” she said. “He died. Afterwards, when we were in Scotland, just the two of us, we made a pact, Peter and I. We swore that whatever happened we would be together, always; neither one of us would ever be left alone.”

  I didn’t ask her to explain. I didn’t want to know. We were both silent, looking at the trees. She lay sideways on the stone bench, curled her legs, and put her head in my lap. A robin was singing somewhere in the trees, the sweetest song, and I put my hand on her head.

  When she spoke again she said, “Do you believe in heaven and hell?” When I didn’t reply, she turned her head to look up at me and said, “I know you believe in God, Fran. I saw you in church that time when I coughed out the wine.” She smiled but it was strained.

  “I think I used to.”

  “But not any more?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Peter doesn’t believe in any of it. He won’t even talk about it with me, says he’s had enough of my Catholic mumbo jumbo. Father Creagh told me I’d go to hell for believing my baby was the second Christ, and that Finn would too. But in Miss Landers’s letter, the one that Woman’s Way printed and she got the guinea for, she said that hell was a cruel invention put about by the Church to scare us, keep us under control, and that it didn’t exist.”

  “Perhaps she was right.”

  “But where’s the proof?” Cara cried, sitting up.

  “Where’s the proof for any of it?” I said. “It’s what you believe.”

  “But I need to know,” she whispered, “whether these places exist.”

  “You will one day; we all will.”

  “No, Fran. I can’t wait any longer.” She took my arm. “I need to know now.”

  She stared at me until the hairs rose on my skin and I thought Peter was right, we do need to watch her, she shouldn’t be left alone.

  We walked through the woods, the ground dense and spongy where leaves and needles had lain rotting and undisturbed for years. The path had all but disappeared and the hillside was steep. I led the way, digging my heels in and holding up the dressing gown to make sure I didn’t trip. I was thinking about Peter being terrified under the water, clinging on to Cara and losing his child, or at least one he regarded as his own.

  “I know you don’t really believe me,” Cara said, close behind. “About Finn not having a father.” I stopped and as she careered into me, I swung around to face her, both of us almost losing our balance. We caught hold of each other, an odd embrace, like old friends. Her hands grasped my elbows, keeping me upright, and the bony chambers inside my ears knew that if she were to release me I would go tumbling backwards down the hillside, bouncing off the trees until I reached the lake. “I do, Cara, I do,” I said. Her intensity frightened me.

  “Peter and I don’t make love.” She whispered the words into my ear.

  “Oh . . . perhaps—”

  “No,” she said, cutting me off. “We haven’t ever made love.” She steadied me on the sloping ground and let me go. We each took a step back. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. “He can’t get a . . . you know . . . an erection. We’ve tried or rather I’ve tried lots of times but he always says he’s too tired, or too busy. I know they’re excuses to avoid embarrassment, disappointment.” She sat down heavily. “I’ve always thought he couldn’t do it with Mallory either, maybe not with anyone.”

  Associating Peter with these things was shocking and at the same time exciting.

  “I won’t leave him though,” Cara said. “Not after everything that’s happened. He takes care of me. Who else would look after me or forgive me, in the way Peter does? Anyway, where would I go?”

  “You could go back to Ireland.” My words came out more spiteful than I had intended, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was lost in her own thoughts.

  “Ireland? I’d rather die than return to Ireland.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back to the house.”

  But she carried on sitting. “I’ve been thinking though,” she continued, “that maybe Peter had been able to do it with Mallory and there’s something wrong with me, something he doesn’t like. I thought for a while that it was because she’d had an education, been to university and I hadn’t, but Peter despises university.”

  “No he doesn’t,” I said. “He’d liked to have gone if he’d had the chance.”

  “How would you know?”

  “He told me.”

  She made a pfff noise but I could see she was disconcerted. “And then I remembered how Mallory looked in that photograph I found,” Cara went on. “She was as fat as you and I was thinking whether it would be possible to become your size. How much more would I need to eat every day?”

  I nearly fell again, dumbfounded by her words. Her face was composed, and I couldn’t work out if what she was saying was designed to hurt or whether she was simply artless, an innocent. I remembered the evening she had undressed me, and how I had thought she’d meant it when she said I was beautiful, and all the time she’d been examining and assessing me. Did she think I would be flattered? Cara carried on.

  “Voluptuous, that’s the word Peter used. Maybe he’d be able to make love to me if I was voluptuous. But then, it made no difference when I was pregnant.” She paused, thinking, while my surprise turned to anger. “That’s one thing we have in common, you and I—both of us virgins.” She laughed and I took a step back, a foot sliding. I had never slapped anyone before, could I do it now? “Do you think it’s something I could get used to eventually, never making love? You’re nearly forty, aren’t you? Is it something I’d be able to live with, not having Peter desire me like that?”

  I st
ared at her.

  “Because, well, you haven’t, have you? Ever had sex?”

  “What?” I said, my brain lagging behind her words.

  “Don’t be like that, Fran. I just want to know.”

  I pushed her then, on the shoulder, just a shove but it surprised her and she fell back. I might have picked up a rock if there had been one in the wood and hit her with it, such was the fierce fury that flared in me, but instead I turned and went down the hillside at a clip, tripping and sliding until the ground levelled off and I reached the lake. I didn’t hear her call after me, I no longer cared what she did. I went across the weir and followed the path past the mausoleum, stomping through the little wood where the fox had been but taking a different path.

  I walked off my anger and thought how odd it was that the three of us had come together to live at Lyntons, and maybe all of us virgins. Because Cara had been correct in her assumption about me. Perhaps I wore my virginity like a flag hoisted above my head, out of my line of sight but there for everyone else to see. It wasn’t something I’d been bothered about in the past. I was studious in my teenage years, working on getting into Oxford. I made friends with a couple of other academic girls at university and I spent some enjoyable hours with Hamish, a young man with only one arm, studying with him and going for walks beside the river, always making sure I was on his right should he have wished to take my hand. But I never thought about it going further than that. I didn’t stay in contact with him or the girls after I left Oxford.