Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  I hurried along the corridor, which smelled damp, more so than the rest of the house, and in some of the rooms that I put my head into there was an earthy waft of fungus.

  While the rooms above ground were mostly empty, this floor had been used as a graveyard for the broken things: three-legged chairs, brushes without bristles, buckets with holes. It unsettled me, the dirty mutilated clutter, the lack of natural light. I worked fast, opening doors and turning on lights, making mice and spiders run for cover. At the far end, I came across a storeroom containing old tins of paint and offcuts of wood stacked against the wall, and searched through them until I found a piece that I thought would do.

  Peter’s tools were in what must have been the butler’s or housekeeper’s room, with a small fire grate and a black kettle sitting on a grill. There was a bed in there too, pulled down from a wooden box where it could be pushed upright when not in use. When I went further into the room I saw that the bed had been made up with a fresh pillowcase, sheets turned down under a wool blanket and the corners tucked in. Peter’s tools were laid out on an old chest and beside them was the sledgehammer he had used to get into the Museum. I took a small-headed hammer and a handful of nails. I was pleased I’d got everything without bothering Peter.

  I heard the staircase door open at the far end of the corridor, the sound it had made when I’d shoved against it: the scrape of it against the floor and the noise of the hinges, although I couldn’t remember whether I’d closed it.

  ‘Peter?’ I called. ‘It’s Frances. I hope you don’t mind but I’m borrowing your hammer.’ I tightened the sash around the waist of my dressing gown.

  There was no reply, although I could hear his footsteps approaching on the stone floor.

  ‘Cara?’ I called, apprehensive now.

  I went into the corridor and looked both ways but there was no one there. I called for them again but heard nothing. The shadow at my back returned, grey air pressing up against me, and I spun round to catch it. Wrongdoing – the word came into my head as if someone had spoken it aloud. ‘Hello?’ I said, but my voice sounded hollow, and I ran then, along the corridor – the locket around my neck bouncing – out of the staircase door, and up into the daylight.

  We ate lunch: figs and cheese and bread. Cara was wearing the same blue dress she had chosen the night before. Peter went to make coffee. I could see him from where we lounged on the steps of the orangery, passing from one window to the next, picking up wine glasses and cups we had drunk from and left on the new furniture, white rings burned on to the polished surfaces.

  ‘Peter said he went up to the attic with you last night,’ Cara said, licking her fingers. She leaned back and closed her eyes. The remark sounded innocent but I wasn’t certain.

  ‘To show me your surprise,’ I said. ‘My new bed and the rug.’

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’

  ‘I thought we were both going to surprise you. I thought that’s what we agreed.’

  ‘You were fast asleep on the chaise longue.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to wake me?’ She pushed her hair out of her face.

  ‘You seemed tired, after all the hard work you’d done for me.’

  ‘So, you both went upstairs?’

  I tried to anticipate what Peter might have told her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just for Peter to show me the bed and the rug, and the bedside table. I pretended to be surprised – I thought that was what we’d agreed?’

  She sat upright, but paused, weighing up my tiny act of defiance. ‘I’m pleased you like it,’ she said. ‘I was just disappointed not to see your face when you went into your room.’

  We were silent for a few moments, letting the air settle between us. I could see Peter in their bathroom now, probably filling the kettle.

  ‘When was the baby born?’ I asked, feeling that her story was safer ground. I was beginning to understand that Cara and I both had our roles to play in the telling of her chronicle. Primarily I was the listener, her audience of one. And she needed an audience, even if it was only me, sitting in the stalls with my mouth open for most of the performance. Her story would have been simply memory and imagination without me to hear it; undiscovered and unaired, like a book without a reader. My second role was from the wings: the prompter.

  ‘Summer 1964,’ she said. ‘He was late, by my calculation.’

  ‘Your calculation?’ I said, not understanding.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Counting forward from when I’d had that conversation with Father Creagh in the back parlour, and seen Jesus get down from the painting. You remember?’

  ‘Jesus in the painting?’ I said, shocked again.

  ‘Yes, Frances. Keep up.’ She sounded irritated, and so I fell silent, letting her continue.

  ‘Peter drove me to the hospital in Cork. I wouldn’t let him come in with me in case he had to go upstairs and tripped and died.’

  ‘Like your father?’

  ‘I think he sat in the car or paced the corridors. I was frightened of the labour – the pain; the unknown, I suppose – but mostly about what I was going to deliver. If the child had no human father, what kind of creature was it going to be? I had no idea. I remember those final nights before the contractions started, I dreamed of shepherds and halos, and cows. All of it muddled and making no sense. He was just a boy though, with the right number of legs and arms and toes. He didn’t look like anyone I knew, not even me. Pale skin with the fairest down, eyebrows and eyelashes that were almost white. But the hair on his head was a kind of yellowy-orange apricot, and when he opened his eyes his pupils were huge, like when you wake a cat from a sleep.

  ‘I loved him, but he didn’t feel like he was mine. I didn’t understand how he’d come to be made, but Peter called him his son from the very beginning. I might have fed him and changed his nappy, but he was always Peter’s. Sometimes I would forget about him, and he was so silent, hardly ever cried, and when I picked him up and held him, there was an expression on his face that I couldn’t work out, as though there were thoughts going on in there that no baby should be able to think. Maybe all mothers believe the same things about their children. I don’t know. Like their child is special. But Finn was different. Peter would bring him into bed with us in the middle of the night even when he wasn’t crying and I would wake to find him stretched out between us, sleeping.

  ‘My plan was still to make it to Italy and the sunshine. I was tired of Ireland and the rain. When I went to O’Dowd’s for the messages, the people in the village were friendly but they knew everyone’s business. You had to be a relation, however distant, to fit in. But it all went wrong. There was a moment when …’

  She paused. She was looking over my shoulder, and when I glanced back, Peter was coming out with the coffee through the French windows on to the terrace

  ‘… a moment when, when I let Finn go. I should have held on to him. I should have held on.’ She was whispering and speaking fast. She sat up straight. ‘Coffee? Great!’ she said to Peter. I imagined someone, an Irish nun perhaps, her face stern above her wimple, taking the child out of Cara’s arms. Tears on Cara’s face as she struggled with her conscience.

  Peter had brought down a plate of Cara’s home-made garibaldi biscuits with the coffee. I hadn’t told her that they weren’t Italian despite the name. They had been Mother’s favourite, but I could no longer bear the thought of eating one. Cara and I drank our coffee and she showed me the ring from the Museum that she was still wearing. It was a mourning ring. The symbols around the outside were tiny skulls and the paste diamond had a hidden hinge; when she opened it a curl of hair was revealed behind glass. She took it off and made me read the inscription: Eliza Sutton, 6th June 1830, aged 17 years.

  ‘Her new wedding ring,’ Peter said without smiling.

  The sky had turned dark and several large drops of warm rain fell and we scooped everything up in the tablecloth laid out for the food, but the rain stopped before we
got inside. The three of us sat under the orangery portico, our backs against the closed doors.

  ‘I went down to the basement for the first time this morning,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t like it down there,’ Cara said. ‘I can’t help but imagine all the servants never seeing daylight.’

  ‘I thought I heard one of you come in. Were either of you down there?’

  ‘In the basement?’ Cara said, frowning. ‘Not me.’ She looked at Peter.

  ‘Cara,’ Peter said, ‘I was upstairs with you all morning. What were you doing in the basement?’ he said to me.

  ‘Neither of you were there?’

  ‘No,’ Cara said. ‘And you heard someone?’

  ‘I needed a piece of board for the window. A blackbird got into the room next to mine last night.’

  Cara sat up straighter. ‘A blackbird? Is it all right?’

  ‘It was flapping and crashing around the room. It gave me such a fright.’

  ‘Did it sing?’ She put her cup on the stone beside her.

  ‘Sing? No, it wasn’t singing. It was flapping – the poor thing must have been desperate to escape. The glass in the window was smashed.’

  ‘Peter,’ she said, something understood between them, excluding me.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ Peter had his eyes shut; he seemed tired.

  ‘What doesn’t it mean?’ I looked from one to the other.

  ‘Peter!’ she repeated. ‘The bird was in the house.’

  ‘The bird was in the house?’ I said, worried again about the face at the window, the footsteps in the basement, the pillow in the bath. My fingers went to the locket and I pulled the chain over my bottom lip.

  Cara stood, knocking her cup, one from the blue and gold set with the crest of the three oranges. It teetered and Peter reached out to grab it, but the cup tipped and broke against the stone.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Cara. That was a complete dinner service. It’s not going to be worth much now with a teacup missing.’

  ‘But the bird!’ She was leaning over him and speaking through her teeth.

  He stood up too, put his arm around her waist and tried to press her to him, but she pushed him off. Peter had his hands out as if he were trying to catch her, a bird herself, too fast for him.

  ‘Shhh,’ Peter said, but she was laughing madly and flinging her hands up to her wild hair and then down, and running a little way towards the house, and back to us. I wondered if I should slap her, or go and fetch a doctor on the bicycle; she was hysterical, but still it seemed to be a performance, stagey, and overdone.

  ‘Come inside.’ Peter caught her around the shoulders. ‘Come and lie down. It was only a bird.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, not knowing what I was apologizing for.

  ‘It’s nothing. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘It’s not nothing,’ Cara shrieked.

  ‘I buried it,’ I said. ‘Under the mulberry tree. Was that the right thing to do?’

  ‘It died?’ she said, and sagged, and Peter held her under the arms.

  ‘Come and lie down,’ he repeated.

  ‘Can I help?’ I said, but they were already going off towards the open French windows, Cara’s feet almost dragging along the paving.

  I picked up the pieces of the broken teacup and, not knowing what else to do, waited under the portico. Through their open bedroom window, I could just make out Cara sitting on the bed with her head in her hands and Peter kneeling in front of her. She let him lift off her dress and she put her hands around the back of his neck, her arms extended. I watched him extricate himself, pull back the bedcover and tuck her in.

  17

  Later, Peter came and found me in the old rose garden. I was avoiding going back into the house. It seemed threatening now, the empty rooms and dusty spaces sinister, when so recently I had thought it beautiful. I couldn’t help but believe it was playing tricks on me, trying to send me mad or drive me away.

  ‘Let’s go out to dinner,’ Peter said. ‘Cara’s sleeping.’ I glanced up to their bedroom. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine.’

  I went up the grand staircase, and just before I turned through the baize door into the servants’ quarters, I saw for the first time that the niche a little way down the hallway now had a marble statue in it, gleaming white in the gloom: a naked young man, not even a fig leaf to cover him. I went closer and saw that he was shiny from where thousands of fingers must have touched him as they had gone past. In one hand he held a bunch of grapes, while the other, raised in a toast to himself, held a chalice: Bacchus. And then I realized that he wasn’t marble, but plaster, and when I rapped on a thigh with my knuckles he was hollow.

  Upstairs in the attic, I opened all the doors, checking that no one was behind them, and I hurried out of the embroidered dressing gown into a man’s long silk robe with a lavender and grey stripe. Underneath it I put on three pleated skirt petticoats, with a belt around the middle to keep everything in place. I twisted my hair up behind my head, and put one of the fans in a black evening bag which I hung over my wrist. I didn’t even stop to look in the mirror that had appeared in my bathroom.

  Peter drove us into town and parked outside the Harrow. It wouldn’t have been my first choice after what had happened when I tried to go there for tea, but I didn’t have anywhere else to suggest. Peter was greeted by name, and the front-of-house manager gave me a little bow of his head. I might have got out my fan and waved it in my face, except he quickly showed us into a panelled dining room with thick patterned carpets, and everything hushed and glittering. The place mats had pictures of hunting scenes and the curtains were red damask. Dull accountants and solicitors in suits sat at dark wood tables with their sedated wives and demure teenage daughters. I imagined tipping their plates into their laps, disturbing the peace. Did they have no idea that Peter had asked me to go to dinner with him – Peter! I tried to calm my nerves.

  ‘Shall we have steak?’ Peter asked when we were sitting opposite each other and I was staring at my menu, reading the first line over and over. He scanned the wine list. ‘A bottle of the Volnay,’ he said to the waiter, who also gave a neat little bow. Before he left, Peter had added two double gin and tonics for while we were waiting. I couldn’t see the price of the wine but Peter said, ‘I’m due a little windfall. No expense spared tonight.’

  When the waiter returned with the bottle and uncorked it, Peter said, ‘I think the lady should taste it.’ The waiter raised his eyebrows but poured a small amount into my glass and I swirled it, sniffed it and rolled it over my tongue as Peter had shown me. I was too distracted to notice how it smelled or tasted, but I nodded and the wine was poured.

  We started with pâté and Melba toast, a tiny gherkin sliced and splayed on the side of each plate. My nervousness made me hungry. Peter leaned closer to talk about the contents of the Museum, how amazing it was that the room hadn’t been discovered by the army when it was right under their noses for years. He poured some more wine and lit our cigarettes. A corner of my Melba toast shot off the side of my plate and under the table, and I drank to hide my embarrassment. I told him about a house I had heard of in the south of France that had been left untouched for a hundred years, the owners dead, the heirs unknown, and its treasures only recently discovered.

  ‘Was it history you studied at Oxford?’ Peter asked.

  ‘At St Hugh’s, yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have come across Mallory, then? She was at St Hilda’s.’

  ‘What did she read?’

  ‘Classics. We met at Sotheby’s. Ridiculous that she had a degree and had to take a secretarial role, while I left school with a certificate in English and walked straight into a good job.’

  I almost told him how I’d been at Oxford for less than a year, that at the end of my third term Mother had become ill and I’d had to go home to care for her. That time she recovered, but I didn’t return to university. ‘I don’t recall the name,’ I said.

  ‘She was a bit of a bluestocking. Is
n’t that the term? The absolute opposite to Cara. I was attracted to Mallory’s mind, and with Cara it was all about … I don’t know.’ He looked as though he wished he hadn’t started the sentence. ‘I fancied her, I suppose.

  ‘But anyway, I do regret not going to university,’ he continued. ‘Learning for the sake of learning. I was in such a hurry – to start earning money, to go to London, to get on. It might have been good to have some time, for study and for fun. Mallory tells me – told me – all sorts of stories about the things she got up to.’ He sounded wistful.

  ‘Are you still in touch with her?’

  ‘No, not really. I hoped for a while that we could be friends but it was too difficult. I miss it though, our friendship. All my fault, of course. But anyway, what was your time like at Oxford? Plenty of high jinks, I imagine?’