Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  ‘As you start your journey to a better place?’ he asked, remembering our conversation in the vestry.

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  He tilted his head back against the tomb and closed his eyes. ‘How many would you say there were?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘How many people in the congregation today?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Thirty, thirty-five.’

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said. ‘I counted from the pulpit. Every Sunday there’s fewer. And there’s fewer marriages, christenings. Funerals, however, are on the up. I keep waiting for the call from the bishop to say that the parish isn’t sustainable.’

  ‘It must be busy at Christmas and Easter at least.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. He poured the rest of his water out on to the grass and stood. ‘I should get going. No doubt someone has something burning to say about the flowers or the next jumble sale.’

  ‘If you ever …’ I hesitated, ‘want to come to Lyntons, I could show you around.’ I rushed the words.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps.’ He was already walking away.

  I spent the rest of that Sunday reading in my room with the window open until, drifting off to sleep at about three o’clock in the afternoon, I heard someone calling, ‘Hello! Hello? Are you at home?’ It took me a moment to realize the woman’s voice – an English one, upper class – was coming from outside, and when I stuck my head out of the window, there below me was Cara. She smiled, a different face from the one in church – the lipstick gone and her eyes clear – but she was wearing the same yellow dress. She was leaning out over her windowsill at an alarming angle and twisting her head to look up, her hair falling in a wedge. ‘Hello,’ she said for a third time. We were sixteen feet apart. ‘Frances, isn’t it? How do you do? Peter and I …’ She smiled again and glanced back into the room behind her. ‘Get off, Peter,’ she said, laughing, letting go of the sill with one arm and falling forward, but not seeming to care. My insides lurched and I almost went to lean out too, as if I could catch her before she fell. ‘Would you like to come for dinner this evening? I’m Cara, by the way.’ She turned once more into the room. ‘Shhh,’ she said to the unseen Peter.

  ‘I thought you were Italian,’ I said.

  ‘Italian? No.’ She sounded surprised. ‘You’ll come, then?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but –’

  ‘Oh, please don’t say no. I’ve had boring old Peter and no one else for weeks. We’re having tagliatelle al limone, and I’ve made enough pasta to feed an army.’ She pronounced tagliatelle al limone and pasta like an Italian.

  I’d never eaten pasta, but I knew it was served in dark Soho restaurants, the kind I’d walked past but never dared enter. Red candles glowed from wine bottles on tables set for two. Mother would have said it was nasty foreign food, but I was hungry and tired of the tinned meals I was making do with.

  Seeing me hesitate, Cara said, ‘And I want to know everything about you, since you’re our new neighbour.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, my stomach overriding my unease. ‘I’d love to.’

  Cara looked back into her room. ‘See?’ she said to Peter. ‘I told you she’d say yes.’ And I wondered what they’d been saying about me, why Peter had thought I would refuse their invitation, and what I could talk about when they wanted to know everything. I had nothing I could tell.

  ‘Good,’ she said to me. ‘Seven thirty? It’s a little late for Peter, but we can’t let him eat at six like a workman, or at four for that matter, because then it would be nursery tea and we’d have to have boiled eggs and soldiers.’

  I saw Peter’s hands on her waist tickling and she screamed with delight. I didn’t tell her that at four I’d always had to take in the tray with garibaldi biscuits on a plate and a pot of tea for Mother.

  I washed and put on the same skirt and blouse that I’d worn to church. It was my outfit for formal occasions: a second cousin’s christening, a meeting with the editor of a journal. There weren’t any mirrors in my rooms, and although I’d lost a little weight since Mother had died, I knew I was heavy, wide-hipped and big-bosomed, as she had been before she became ill. Mother, though, in the years when we had lived with my father in our grand house in Notting Hill, had been tall with long legs, and an elegant neck, and had carried her extra weight well. I changed out of the skirt and blouse, and instead put on Mother’s evening dress, which I had brought with me. I recalled my father crouching with his arms wrapped around me while we watched her descend the sweeping stairs, holding the fabric of the dress between thumb and forefinger to keep it clear of her feet, stepping so slowly it seemed to me that she floated. The dress had a short velvet cape and a velvet belt with a velvet buckle, which nipped in her waist. I remembered how much I had wanted that dress, to own it, to put it on and to walk down the stairs in it. I ran out of my father’s arms towards her, and she bent down to sweep me up and then I was squashed between them, between the velvet and the weave of my father’s suit, the smell of her perfume and the feel of his moustache against my cheek as he kissed me goodbye remaining long after they had left for the evening, leaving me with the housekeeper.

  Now, the dress rucked and creased itself around my stomach, and as much as I tugged the sides together, it gaped, surprised I was attempting to wear it. I removed it, smoothed the wrinkles as I laid it on my bed, and squeezed myself into Mother’s underwear, which had also come with me. Her girdle dug into the pudding of my stomach and my breasts rolled over the top of her thick brassiere. I attached her black stockings to the suspenders, stretching the nylon to transparency around my thighs. It was impossible to take a full breath with everything on, but the dress’s zip closed, and the hook and eye met. The underwear snagged my skin when I moved, as though Mother were following me around, and even when I was standing, a ring of fat circled my stomach in between the brassiere and the girdle, like a child’s inflatable swimming ring jammed around my waist. It would have to do.

  In the bathroom I put on the one Hattie Carnegie earring lying beside the talcum powder and thought about what was under my feet. I lifted the skirt of the dress and, holding on to the sink, dropped to my knees; as quietly as I could, I lifted out the board and laid it on the floor beside the gap. I couldn’t resist; I looked again through the lens.

  Peter, wearing his pyjamas, sat on the edge of the bath, which shone where the water had been drained, while Cara, in her underwear, bent over him. She pressed his cheek with one hand so that he tilted his head away from her, and with the other she scraped a razor along the side of his face. After every stroke she moved back to wave her hand in the soapy water that filled the sink. He was motionless, only his eyes following her while she worked. Each of her movements, the press of her fingers on the skin of his face, the upward slice of the blade, was precise and focused. I’d had no idea that the act of shaving could be so intimate.

  I drew away and let go of the breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Efficiently, busily, as if spying on my neighbours were a normal and regular occurrence, I picked up the earring, put the board back as silently as I had removed it, and raised myself up.

  5

  At seven twenty-eight I was ready and going down the back stairs – which circled around a rusted dumb waiter – then along a short passageway and through a servants’ door padded with green baize, which divided the known from the foreign. Beyond it was the landing of the grand staircase, which was in the imperial style, with two flights of stairs that descended to a half-landing, where they joined and switched back on themselves. A void soared upward here, double height, past the walls of the bedrooms and attic to a glass cupola. Magnificent, as Peter had said. Every time I stood there it lifted me and at the same time emphasized my insignificance, a type of exaltation I never achieved in church. The last of the sun shone through the stained-glass panes, lighting the staircase and turning the walls, streaked with brown where the rain had got in, rosy. I had explored only a little of the interi
or of the house in the week since I’d arrived, scurrying down the grand staircase, anticipating that it would come out in an entrance hall, but discovering that the bottom flight ended in a dim hallway that ran north to south through the house. The unexpected layout unnerved me, as if I had been spun around without knowing it, and I’d run back up the stairs towards the light.

  On the middle floor, the wide hallway leading off the top landing had an arched and coffered ceiling and was decorated with what once must have been white plaster mouldings on duck-egg-blue paintwork. The blue was all but gone, lumps of the plaster were missing and the floor crunched with the debris. Several holes as big as heads showed the wall’s lath insides. On my left there was an odd blank wall, and on my right, two closed doors. I went beyond them, past an arched niche, empty now, but once probably containing a statue, a muse perhaps, who had been tipped from her pedestal and smashed, the head taken home as a souvenir of war. After this there were open doors showing high-ceilinged rooms beyond, stuffed with broken army-issue beds and upended mattresses, everything piled together. Bird droppings and feathers coated it all, and through the twisted metal I caught glimpses of the drive and avenue on one side, and the parkland on the other.

  Calculating the location of my attic room, together with where Cara had talked to me from her window, I went back to the first closed door. I stood there gathering courage, smoothing the skirt of my dress over the girdle, standing straighter, running my tongue over my front teeth. I took a breath and knocked. I waited, looked down at my chest and adjusted the dress again, then checked my watch: seven thirty-two. I knocked once more, a little louder. Another couple of minutes went by in which I worried that I had got the time wrong, that she hadn’t meant this evening, or that they had forgotten. I dithered, considered going back up to my rooms and pretending I had also forgotten, but started worrying they would be offended. I tapped again. At least I could say I had knocked three times.

  I heard someone running, something falling over, followed by a curse, and then Peter flung open the door. He was still in his pyjamas. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he said when he saw me, and his hands went up. ‘Is it that time already?’

  ‘I’m too early,’ I said, heat shooting over my face. ‘Or another night.’ My words came out in their own order, nonsensical.

  ‘Another night?’

  ‘I could come another night.’

  ‘God, no,’ Peter said. ‘It has to be now. Look at it all!’ He opened the door wide and put out an arm. The enormous room must have once been the saloon – the space where the Lyntons would have received their guests in the original Georgian house. Now it was almost empty. The only decorations, if you could call them that, were the strips of pasta draped over half a dozen lengths of string that ran from high above the three great windows to the opposite wall. The effect was that of a laundry, ivory stockings drying for an army of thin-legged women. But it was the light which made the room beautiful. It poured through the open sashes, splashing the floor with amber oblongs, turning it to honey.

  A door on the left opened, their bedroom I presumed, and Cara stuck her head out, her dark crazy hair the first thing I saw. ‘Frances! Two minutes! I’ll be out in two minutes.’

  Peter plucked at his pyjamas. ‘We’ll be with you in two ticks. Make yourself at home.’ He disappeared into their bedroom and I heard talking, the voices too quiet for me to make out what was being said.

  I stood in the middle of the room and looked around. I averted my eyes from the door opposite their bedroom, which stood ajar and must have led through to the bathroom. An electric stove, similar to mine, sat with its back to the wall and next to it was an old refrigerator. A long wooden board had been placed on top of four upturned packing cases made taller with books, to create a long table, with two more packing cases and a stool tucked under it for seats. The surface was cluttered with newspapers, ashtrays, notebooks and a typewriter, and at the ‘kitchen’ end there was a heap of dirty dishes and a loaf of bread which had been cut straight on to the table. The floorboards were bare and there were no other chairs or sofas, no rugs or pictures on the walls. I tried not to look at the debris on the table but noted the fact that aside from the pasta there was no sign of any dinner preparation. I went to one of the windows and gazed out at the parkland and the hangers in the distance. Again, I smoothed my dress over my stomach to try to make the bulge between brassiere and girdle disappear.

  Ten minutes later Peter and Cara emerged from their bedroom, apologizing for their lateness, blaming each other and laughing. Cara came towards me like an old friend, her arms out wide. She hadn’t changed her dress from the one she’d been wearing when she’d invited me to dinner and which she’d worn to church, but she’d hung three bead necklaces around her neck. Her hair was still loose, framing her face, and her feet bare, the nails still painted green. Peter was wearing a baggy untucked shirt and flared jeans. I grew hot with the thought that I’d ever imagined my floor-length dress with its velvet cape and belt, thirty years out of date, would be suitable to wear to dinner with my new neighbours.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s taken us so long to meet,’ Cara said. She took me by the shoulders and leaned in as if to kiss me on the lips. I stiffened but at the last minute she embraced me.

  It was new and shocking in 1969, Cara’s hugging. Now I know people do it all the time; I see them sometimes here in this place, when one girl is coming on shift and another leaving. Women embracing women, women embracing men, men embracing women: I wonder how they know when it’s going to happen. What tiny movement, what piece of body language that I have always missed, means they are about to put their arms around each other? And do men embrace men? In this place, I have no one to embrace and no one comes to embrace me.

  Cara smelled of citrus, sharp yet sweet. Her hair pressed into my face, springy and not quite as soft as it had appeared. When she released me she said, ‘Come and sit. It really is the most wonderful evening.’ She led me by the hand to a window seat and sat down. ‘Did you ever see sunsets like the ones at Lyntons?’ In the distance, the cedars were hazy and the cows had gathered beneath them. I lowered myself on to the edge of the seat, aware of the girdle constricting my hips. I folded my arms across the fat ring that grew from my middle. Warm air carrying the smell of grass came in through the window.

  ‘Sorry about the tin cup. We’re rather short on glasses,’ Peter said, handing Cara and me drinks. His feet, poking out from his flared trousers, were bare.

  Cara stretched out on the window seat, her back against one side of the frame, her feet up on the other. The flimsy material of the yellow dress fell down over her thighs, exposing her knees, and she didn’t adjust it. ‘They say we’re in for a hot August and that’s fine by me.’ Cara clinked her cup on mine.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me to dinner.’ I hoped this might prompt one of them to say they should start cooking but Cara didn’t move, and Peter, leaning on the wall beside us, took a sip of his own drink. I tried it too; I thought it might be Martini, very strong. We’d kept sherry in the cupboard at home in London, and as Mother had become more bedridden I’d sometimes taken a swig to brace myself for my nursing duties and as a kind of compensation or gift I allowed myself when I left the bedroom and retreated to the kitchen.

  ‘We should have got you down much sooner,’ Peter said.

  ‘I love the sunshine,’ Cara said. ‘To have its heat on my skin.’ She lengthened her neck and tipped back her head. Her voice was upper class, English girls’ school I thought, but with a trace of something else. She seemed a different Cara to the one I’d created in my head from the glimpses I’d seen. That one had been Italian, Catholic, hot-headed, quick to argue. This one was languid, sleepy, not worried about what anyone thought of her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and took another sip, trying to think of some topics of conversation. Cara began to speak just as I said, ‘I thought you were Italian,’ immediately realizing I’d already told her that. I drank again to hide my face, gl
ad the cups were large.

  ‘I grew up in Ireland,’ Cara said. ‘Anglo-Irish parents. Peter arranged Italian lessons for me. It’s such a beautiful language, don’t you think? I’m not proficient, though. It’s just that I can do the accent.’

  ‘And the swearing,’ Peter said, winking and taking a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. ‘But –’

  ‘But I’m not very good at normal conversation,’ she finished for him, smiling.

  Peter pulled a cigarette from the packet with his lips, lighting it with a silver lighter.

  ‘I can’t speak any languages,’ I said.

  ‘How about English?’ Peter said with a smile.

  ‘Oh, yes. English. Of course.’ I looked down.

  Cara took the cigarette from Peter’s lips. He held the packet out to me and I shook my head. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘It’s a terrible habit,’ Cara said.

  ‘I can’t speak any other languages either,’ Peter said, covering my embarrassment. He lit another cigarette for himself and they both smoked without speaking, not seeming worried about the silence.

  ‘Have you been here long – in England, I mean?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve just arrived,’ Cara said. ‘We were four and a half years in Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland?’ I said, at the same time as Peter said, ‘Well, that was after –’

  ‘Yes, Scotland,’ Cara said.

  ‘How lovely,’ I said. ‘Sorry. After?’ I would have liked to step outside the room, knock on the door and start again.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said.

  I didn’t know; I had lost the thread of the conversation.

  Peter, still leaning on the wall beside us with his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and his eyes squinting from the smoke, put his fingers into Cara’s hair near her scalp and worked through the curls to the ends, teasing out the strands while she looked out of the window. They seemed so much in love. I tried to keep hold of what I’d seen in the church that morning, the shouts I’d heard coming from these rooms, my view through the judas hole of Cara’s sobbing, and Victor’s warning, but these impressions were overtaken by the reality of the people in front of me.