Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  I recognized it too: English Country Houses, Volume III, and then I recognized her. Anne Bunting glared at me across the courtroom and I couldn’t help myself, I blushed. I had never stolen a library book before then; other things later, but never a library book.

  ‘One that shouldn’t be removed from the library?’ the man asked.

  ‘None of our books are to be removed from the library. They must be viewed in the reading room.’ Anne Bunting touched the corner of her mouth with the tip of a finger, concerned her lipstick had smudged.

  Another of the men – they were all men and none of them had ever held a chisel and a mallet – stood and said, ‘Your Lordship’ – or was it Your Majesty? – ‘I fail to see the relevance of this line of questioning.’

  His Lordship Majesty raised an eyebrow at the man who was putting the questions to Anne Bunting, who in turn pretended to be surprised. It was a charade, the law.

  ‘To provide evidence of character,’ the man who was asking the questions of Anne Bunting said. ‘To provide evidence of Miss Jellico’s poor character.’

  I’d never had a birthday party, surprise or otherwise. Never played charades or been led into the middle of a room blindfolded for friends and family to jump out. Mother had taken me and another girl to the zoo for my eleventh birthday, and although we’d had nothing to say to each other, when her birthday came around she invited me to her party out of social obligation. The terror and humiliation of that afternoon remained with me for many years: my old-fashioned dress, the present I’d given unwrapped in a frenzy and cast aside, the rules of blind man’s buff that I didn’t understand, the girls I understood less. And somehow worse, the kindness of the girl’s mother when I cried.

  Now in the sitting room, Cara was behind me and I heard her laughing, felt her fingers cover my eyes, smelled her lemony scent, anxious that I wouldn’t understand the surprise, wouldn’t get the joke. She let go, moved away and I opened my eyes.

  The three tall windows facing the parkland were pushed upward as always, and Cara was standing in front of me, smiling. But everything else was different, as though I had walked into another house, the wrong room, slid through a mirror into an alternative reflection.

  The previously empty space was now full. A silver candelabra sat in the middle of a circular mahogany table. The makeshift one with the wooden plank had been moved to the edge for use as a kitchen counter, and the packing-crate seats were gone, replaced by four upholstered chairs. Places were set for dinner: china plates with a crest of three oranges, and blue and gold rims, cutlery and cruet, crystal glasses, a decanter filled with wine, and folded linen napkins. More candles sat on side tables beside a chaise longue upholstered in burgundy velvet, worn and frayed, low armchairs arranged beside it. I stepped on to a Turkish rug.

  Cara and Peter were silent while I looked around and took it in, two children waiting for praise for tidying their room.

  ‘Where did it all come from?’ I said stupidly.

  Cara picked up a fallen petal that lay on a side table. I recognized one of the Chinese vases they’d unpacked, now filled with dog roses from the garden. A few drops of water lay on the polished wood.

  ‘The Museum, of course,’ she said, and I saw she was still wearing the ring from the musical jewellery box.

  Peter came from the kitchen area, carrying a silver tray with three cocktail glasses, each with an olive at the bottom and filled with what I assumed was Martini.

  A painting of a woman with a rosebud mouth and wearing a tall grey wig had been hung on the wall above the chaise longue. A silk dress billowed around her, and she sat in a landscape like a photographer’s backdrop – the colours too muted, the view too flawless.

  ‘Is that a Reynolds?’ I said. Peter was behind me with the tray.

  ‘I believe it is,’ he said, proud of his own good taste.

  Cara lifted a glass and held it out to me, but I moved to a desk that had been placed against the wall. It was small, with a curved back, long tapered legs and three tiny drawers.

  ‘Is this French?’

  ‘Eighteen nineties, I think,’ Peter said. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Perfect condition. Absolutely no worm.’

  I sat on the chair in front of it. A silver fountain pen had been placed there on top of a blotting pad, next to a pile of visiting cards embossed with the same design as on the dinner service. The chair was on castors and groaned as it took my weight. The rounded arms were smoothed by the grease from the hundreds, thousands, of times they had been touched. I opened one of the little drawers – the miniature handles made for a woman with more delicate fingers than mine. There was nothing inside. I picked up the pen, removed its lid and pressed the nib on one of the visiting cards. No ink came out. What might I have written if I hadn’t already been a little in love with Cara and Peter, if I hadn’t spent two days in London with my memories, and the previous night hiding in my hotel room from the man in the white dressing gown?

  Mr Liebermann, we have broken into the Museum and Peter and Cara are using your things as if they were their own.

  Or, Dear Dorothea Lynton, we have found your lost possessions. Come and save us from ourselves.

  Could I have stopped everything then and told them to put it back? Would it have made a difference? I looked at Cara and, behind her, Peter, saw their faces waiting for my approval. Had anyone sought that from me before? A drop of condensation from the outside of Cara’s cocktail glass fell to the rug.

  ‘The ink bottle was dry,’ Cara said. ‘But we can buy some more.’ She came over, took the pen from my hand and replaced the lid. ‘Please say you’re not angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ I said. I looked at Peter. ‘It’s beautiful.’ An expression passed across his face which I thought then might have been love, but was likely only relief.

  Cara gave me my glass, and just as we had when our Martini had come in tin cups, we chinked them together. They began talking at once, showing me what they had discovered: a floor-standing globe in a wooden frame; a virginal that unfolded ingeniously from a side table; a marble bust of Julius Caesar; paperweights and letter openers; samplers and a sewing basket; a cigar box and a Chinese cabinet; a Syrian backgammon set inlaid with fruit woods; photographs in silver frames of shooting parties and people at wedding breakfasts, infants and horses, all of them surely dead.

  Peter poured more Martinis and we sat on the window seats and smoked while Cara cooked – an early dinner for once – and we ate at the table using the heavy silver knives and forks, a different set for each course, and dabbed our lips with the napkins, each corner embroidered with the initials DML. And Peter poured and poured the decanted wine. We ate lemon sole with a caper butter sauce, tiny pink lamb cutlets, and lemon syllabub. It was the first dinner I’d eaten with them where Peter made no comment about the extravagance and cost of the food. We talked about the ownership of the Museum’s contents in a roundabout way. I told them what Victor had said, that after the army left, the house had sat empty, apart from a month or so when Dorothea Lynton had moved back in. They told me how they had struggled up the stairs with the larger pieces, how they had worked for two days and a night to make it ready. And how they had been sure I would return home soon. That was the word they used too: home.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Cara said when we were drinking coffee, and she took me by the hand and led me into their bedroom. Over my shoulder I saw Peter light another cigarette and settle himself against a cushion that had been placed on the window seat.

  Once, soon after I had found the judas hole in my bathroom floor, I went into the attic room on the other side of my bedroom and pulled on the floorboards to see if any more were loose. Now, standing in the room I had been hoping to also spy on, the memory made me hot with shame. Peter’s and Cara’s army-issue beds, which they had often complained about, had been replaced by a high double bed. Clothes were flung over the scrolled wooden boards at either end, and lay in heaps on top of the covers and around the floor.
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br />   ‘I don’t know how you managed to do all of this in such a short time,’ I said.

  ‘Everything aches.’ Cara flopped back on to the unmade bed amongst the clothes and blankets.

  I sat on the edge beside her and looked around. It was the worst of all the rooms in the house. Most of the ceiling plaster had fallen, exposing the laths, and the paper hung in moulding strips from the walls. A huge tiled chimney breast dominated the space with an ornate overmantel carved and dark, made darker by a stain that leaped from the chimney hole and spread over the wood and tiles that might once have been green but were now mostly black.

  ‘I think there must have been a chimney fire and a leak from the attic,’ Cara said, seeing me looking. ‘I like to think one put the other out.’

  She stood on the bed, picked up a bamboo pole which was resting on the side of the headboard and leaned with it towards the central window – one of three, just as in their sitting room. Hanging from a nail in the top of the frame was a length of string tied around the base of a wine glass – we had been drinking from the same glasses at dinner. Peter had admired his in front of the candlelight and said they were Regency and could be worth as much as ten pounds each.

  ‘Watch this,’ Cara said. She nudged the glass with the cane. As it turned, the diamond facets caught the very last of the evening sun and spinning spots of light moved over the tattered walls and across Cara’s face.

  She sat with her back to the headboard, her legs crossed, and picked something from the pile of clothes. Flapping it in front of her, a dress unfolded – a long blue skirt with a high bodice and short puffed sleeves.

  ‘What do you think?’ She flapped it once more to straighten it. ‘Here,’ she said and tossed it to me. ‘You should try it on.’

  ‘Is it yours?’ I held it in front of me. ‘I’m sure it won’t fit.’

  ‘I found them in the Museum, silly. In the big press that was in the corner. Look at it all.’ She pulled more things from the pile: gloves, stockings, silk and lace tumbling about the bed. ‘And fans too.’ She opened one with a flick of her wrist and waved it in front of her, then she jumped off the bed, throwing the fan behind her and taking the dress from my hands. She made me stand and held the dress up to me, against my skirt and blouse, Mother’s underwear beneath them holding me firm. She put her head on one side. ‘I’ll wear this one and we’ll find you another.’

  She burrowed into the pile while I stood, wondering how I could escape the embarrassment of changing in front of her. She tugged out a heavy robe, embroidered with exotic birds and plants on a cream background. The sleeve openings were long, and the lapel wide. ‘This,’ she said. ‘This would be perfect.’ She stopped jumping around and stood in front of me. We looked at each other as she undid the top button of my blouse and the next. I didn’t watch her fingers while she undressed me because I might have stopped her. She pulled the blouse out from my skirt and took it off my shoulders. She unzipped my skirt and lowered it for me to step out of. Each item of clothing she folded and put on the bed. I was wearing Mother’s brassiere, and the girdle with the suspender attachments. My stockings hung from the clasps in swags, stretched from overuse. Behind me she unhooked my brassiere and took the straps from my shoulders and then came to face me again, and I let her take it off my arms. I didn’t resist or protest. There was nothing erotic about the undressing or Cara’s gaze, which was only curious, uncritical. She looked at my breasts where they rested on the ring of flesh above the girdle, my nipples pointing to the floor. She undid the zips on the sides of the girdle, inching it down, one side and then the other, the satin and the interior seams sticking to my skin, the stockings coming with it. My waist was scored with a red horizontal line where I had been held in for so long. I let it out, all the overflowing abundance of my body, the undulations and the rolls, the flab and the stretch marks, the bits Mother would tut about and pinch. I stepped out of it all and threw it away.

  ‘It’s 1969,’ Cara said. ‘You should be free.’

  I trembled as she leaned in towards me. If she had kissed me then I would have kissed her back, although the thought had never been in my head. I could smell red wine and coffee on her breath, her face an inch or two from mine. She lifted up the locket that I kept around my neck. ‘This is pretty.’

  ‘It was my mother’s.’

  She opened it. Inside was a tiny photograph of a laughing girl with ringlets and dimples. ‘You were a beautiful child and you are a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my fingers curling into my palms. I didn’t tell her that the picture had come with the locket when Mother had bought it. The photograph of a model daughter she’d never bothered to change for one of me.

  Cara closed the locket, picked up the robe and put it around me, finding a wide sash and tying it about my waist. She turned her back to take off her own clothes and put on the blue dress. It was torn around the bottom, the fabric darker in the creases and with tiny rips around the waist, which was high up under Cara’s breasts.

  When she was pinning my hair into a twist on the back of my head, I asked her if she’d been up to my room in the attic.

  ‘Oh, Fran! How did you know?’ She took a hairgrip from between her lips. ‘It was meant to be a surprise. We got you a new bed too and a rug. You’ll have to pretend to Peter that you know nothing about it or he’ll be terribly disappointed.’ She tucked the grip into my hair, then turned my head to examine me from the front. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘I saw you up there when I was in the car with Peter.’

  ‘When you were in the car? I wasn’t up there then. We got your room ready last night in case you came back.’

  ‘But I saw you at the window.’

  ‘At the window? I know, I called to you and waved, remember? From one of the bedrooms on this floor.’ She nodded her head at the bedroom door that led to the hallway, to indicate the room opposite. ‘I had to squeeze past all that old army junk to get to the window. We ought to chuck it out and put in some furniture from the Museum, make the whole house nice.’ She was talking too much. ‘We could have friends to stay and a house party. Peter could choose the wine and I’d do the cooking, and you, you could entertain our guests.’ She stopped and stared at me and my pulse thudded. ‘What did you see?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a face, a shape. I thought it was you.’

  ‘But it wasn’t me. Was it an adult’s face?’

  ‘Yes, an adult’s.’

  I remembered what Peter had said about her seeing children’s faces at windows. Was she thinking of the child? She searched through her make-up bag and I stared at the top of her head, willing her to look up and tell me, but when she did she smiled, a wide, normal smile. ‘Some lipstick, I think. Mouth open,’ she said.

  ‘Peter told me your child’s name was Finn.’

  ‘Mouth open,’ she repeated, and put the lipstick on me.

  15

  ‘I told Peter it wasn’t Paddy’s baby, that there wasn’t a father,’ Cara said, putting the lid back on the lipstick. We were sitting on the middle window seat in her bedroom, below the spinning wine glass. With the last of the sun, the revolving dabs of light had gone from the walls. ‘He knew it couldn’t be his: nothing had happened in the front seat of his car or in the larder, apart from some kissing.’ Now, listening to Cara, she seemed so credible, her story once again convincing despite its outlandishness.

  ‘We were in Killaspy’s drawing room with Isabel. I had to tell him there wasn’t a father: it wouldn’t have been right to accept his offer and go away with him without him knowing. He stood there saying nothing – in shock, I suppose. It was Isabel who slapped me and started crying and saying not only did she have a hussy for a daughter but a liar too. She shouted about why couldn’t I have kept my legs closed for a few more months until I was married to Paddy, that it wouldn’t have been long to wait, would it? But no, I couldn’t, and now I had brought shame on her family name, shame on her. I remember Peter flinching at the slap and at her
words, but I held the sting against my cheek with my hand and dared myself to smile just to annoy her some more. Dermod had come in with the tea and I could see from the look on his face that he’d heard everything. He slammed down the tray and ran out, and I couldn’t believe that for all his stories of the mysteries and miracles while I’d sat next to him at the kitchen table, he’d react like that. No one believed me. That’s why it’s so important, Fran, that you do.’

  She bent forward and put her arms around me, my chin caught against her shoulder, my arms awkwardly pinned so I could only raise my hands to pat her waist. She must have taken that as confirmatory because as she drew away, she continued. ‘I didn’t know where Dermod had gone. I looked for him in all his usual places – the broken tractor, the henhouse, under his bed – but I never got to say goodbye. I wrote him a note and I left another for him to take to Paddy, apologizing and trying to explain.

  ‘Peter was much calmer than Isabel. I packed a bag and we got into his car and drove away. I couldn’t believe I was really leaving. We stopped for dinner in a hotel in Cork, and he took my hand over half a grapefruit and said he didn’t care who the father was, we were going to be together and that was all that mattered. I tried to tell him again that it wasn’t Paddy, it wasn’t anyone, but he put a finger on my lips.

  ‘He took me to a little house he’d rented on the west coast. It was nothing like Killaspy, two rooms and an outdoor privy, but it didn’t matter. He bought me that cheap wedding ring – the one I threw in the lake – so I would seem respectable. We had two weeks – a kind of honeymoon, I suppose – before he had to go back to work. He borrowed a couple of bicycles and we freewheeled down the boreens to the sea. We sat freezing on the bench outside O’Dowd’s the grocer’s and held hands. He bought wild oysters and I showed him how to shuck them and swallow them whole. We didn’t talk about the baby. The only time it was mentioned, apart from at the dinner in Cork, was on our first night in the little house, when he said he’d heard it wasn’t good for a mother-to-be to make love, it might damage things, and he didn’t want to hurt me or it.