Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  The bath panel had three screws along the top and three along the bottom. I fetched a knife from the bedroom – the Lynton coat of arms on the handle – slotted the tip into the groove on one of the heads and tried to turn it. The knife slipped from the slot, fell from my hand and knocked against the wooden panel. From the other side, from under the enclosed bath, I heard a muffled cry, not an animal but something human. I scuttled backwards across the floor, jamming myself under the basin, all of me straining to listen but not wanting to hear. When nothing came, I lunged and grabbed the knife, holding it out with my shaking hand as if it might save me from whatever was under the bath. Plumbing, I muttered, water draining through the pipes. The timing of the noise a coincidence.

  I stretched forward, the knife out. And twice I knocked its blade on the bath panel. Tap, tap. The sound came back from underneath, someone weak, moaning with effort.

  I ran then, out of the room, slamming the bathroom door behind me. I pulled my blanket off the bed and left the attic, running down the spiral staircase to the ground floor. I went to the blue drawing room, where the envelope with the remaining peacocks’ eyes inside – those we hadn’t been able to reach even with the stepladder – had been discarded beside the mirror. I pulled the French windows and the shutters closed, and pressed myself into a corner with my back against two walls and my eyes on the door to the hall.

  I tried to stay awake, listening to every creak and groan the house made, but after an hour or two my head nodded to my knees. The light crept around the edges of the shutters in the morning and the house breathed. Whatever had been there the night before had gone.

  I walked barefoot down to the bridge and, as I approached, a bird of prey took off from the balustrade, wheeling above me with a brown body and wide herringbone stripes on the tail and wings. When she dipped and turned over the lake’s edges and I saw the flash of white on her tail before she disappeared at the far end, I guessed she was a Montagu’s harrier. I leaned over the edge of the bridge where the bird had perched, and I thought about how Peter had tried to convince me it was Palladian and how more than anything I had wanted to believe him. When the rising sun had warmed my back, I used the dinner knife that I’d brought with me to carve my name, Franny, into the stone. After it was done I dropped the knife into the lake.

  When I went back up to the house, although it was early, Peter was sitting on the portico steps and Cara had propped herself against a column. They straightened when they saw me coming through the rhododendrons; they looked like they’d had another argument.

  ‘Frances,’ Cara called. ‘What are you doing out already?’ She put down the cup she held as if getting ready to hug me.

  ‘And in your nightdress?’ Peter said as I approached the steps. He picked up the cup.

  I must have been white, still shaken. ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

  ‘There was someone …’ I started. ‘In my bathroom last night.’

  She took a step down. ‘Are you hurt? What happened?’

  ‘Like the person you thought you saw at the window?’ Peter didn’t sound as though he believed me.

  I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. ‘They were under the bath.’

  ‘What?’ Cara said, and Peter turned his head to look at her.

  ‘I heard them,’ I said. ‘Moaning behind the panel.’

  ‘Moaning?’

  ‘It would have been the pipes clanking. They’re always clanking,’ Peter said.

  ‘Crying,’ I said.

  ‘You know it wasn’t the pipes,’ Cara said to Peter.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not being ridiculous,’ Cara said. ‘It’s ridiculous to live like the only things that are real are the things you can see. You want evidence for everything, proof.’

  ‘That’s right.’ His voice was rising. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, or devils, or virgin births.’

  ‘What do you bloody believe in then? Nothing! You’re soulless.’ Cara tightened her lips and looked across the fields, and Peter came down the steps, put his arm around me and squeezed.

  ‘You’re overtired – shattered, I expect.’

  I would have liked to lean into him, have Cara and her disgruntled face vanish.

  ‘I heard it though,’ I said.

  ‘See,’ Cara said, unable to resist turning back.

  ‘I’m sure it was the water in the pipes,’ Peter said again.

  ‘There’s something behind the bath panel.’

  ‘But there was nothing in the room next to yours in the end when you made me check. Was there?’ He held me more firmly, reassuring a child.

  ‘Something was moaning under the bath.’

  ‘All right. Maybe an animal did get in there. Why don’t I come up and take off the panel? What do I need – a screwdriver?’

  ‘I already tried.’

  ‘You won’t find anything,’ Cara said, petulant. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’ She took her cup from him.

  ‘It won’t hurt to take a look,’ he said, his voice calm but his body tense.

  Cara shouted something in Italian, each word a barb.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said to her, but he let his arm fall from around me. I wondered if they had been arguing about the cigarette case again, or the desk.

  She waved her hands, shouted some more, and the dregs of her coffee splashed on to the stone, turning it darker where it fell. We watched her anger and then Peter took his wallet from his back pocket and I saw it was thick with money. He counted four £1 notes and held them out to her so she had to come down the steps. She snatched them from him and strode off. I wanted to be alone with Peter but I wanted Cara to stay, to reassure me that I wasn’t going mad. Perhaps Peter saw my concern because he said, ‘Don’t worry. She’ll go into town to buy some food. She’ll have calmed down by the time she’s back.’

  ‘Do you think she’s all right going on her own?’

  ‘To be honest with you, I don’t care.’

  I took out the cigarette case and Peter lit two cigarettes.

  21

  In the last twenty years I have learned to be more circumspect of people and their stories. It is an advantageous skill for one who is incarcerated. ‘I didn’t do it’ is often heard in here. But when I was younger I used to believe everything anyone said. ‘You’re too gullible, too easily led,’ Mother used to tell me. ‘Just like your father.’ Her words were meant to hurt, to be an insult, but they would always take me back to a summer when I was eight or nine, at any rate to a summer when we were still living in the house on Lansdowne Road in Notting Hill. Mother could have been there that day, but I don’t remember her; I only recall my father, in the communal gardens our house backed on to. I had taken my dolls’ tea set to the lawn and laid out the tiny plates, cups and saucers, and we – my father, my dolls and I – were having a picnic. He was eating a slice of imaginary Victoria sponge when we heard a man say, ‘What are you doing? I say, what are you doing?’ again and again.

  For a while we thought someone was playing a joke on us, hiding in the bushes around the perimeter of the garden, moving from one spot to another. We heard a woman laughing and saying in a breathy voice, ‘My God, my God!’ My father was hurrying me to pack up the tea set, avoiding my questions about what was going on and muttering about calling a policeman, when he spied a bird in a tree, black with a yellow beak and a splash of white behind its eye. Eventually we caught the Indian mynah bird in a cardboard box and returned it to an old lady who lived around the corner. She gave me half a crown and my father a glass of sherry.

  Mother would continue her tirade with: ‘No one says what they’re really thinking. You should learn to read between the lines or everyone will say you’re a mooncalf. Do you want to be a mooncalf, Frances?’ But the world is a nicer place when you think everyone is telling the truth. There are no agendas, no hidden motives; no one lies for dramatic effect.

  I didn’t get it, not then. It wasn’t until I was in
court that I realized what she had meant and that it was duplicity that would get me what I wanted, even though what I wanted wasn’t what anyone expected. I learned from the wig-men that the law is not about finding the truth, it is about who can tell the most convincing story. It is a game that must be grasped swiftly if you want to win, even if to everyone else it looks as though you have lost.

  ‘Can you tell the court what this is?’ a wig-man asked. An usher passed me the cigarette case, and I turned it over and over in my hands in the way that Anne Bunting had turned the library book. So familiar, an object of love. I would have liked to slip it in my pocket, but the court was watching.

  Later, when I put in a formal request to the prison governor for the cigarette case to be returned to me and it was granted, I cried. I hadn’t expected to see it again.

  Cara was right: there was nothing there, under the bath. No marks in the dust, no dead animals; even the smell had gone. I felt foolish, but I didn’t want to stay in the attic on my own. I followed Peter downstairs and he went to the Museum to look through some rolled canvases he had found. I said I was going for a walk, but I went to their rooms to search for something to eat. I discovered the heel of a loaf of bread and the remains of a packet of butter. It reminded me of the food I’d eaten when I had first arrived. The butter was on the turn, but I was hungry and I gobbled it before either Cara or Peter returned. I had been grateful when Cara had first invited me to eat with them, but now, scrounging scraps from their kitchen, it occurred to me that it was a type of control: Cara could be generous when it suited her, or not, when it didn’t.

  I put Bookends on the record player. We would play all three albums over and over whenever we were in their sitting room, so that everything we did, eating, talking, laughing, was done to a background of music, until the lyrics infiltrated my dreams, and I would wake up humming. It was odd to be in that room with the music, but without Cara or Peter; the shame of spying even more intense than when I watched them through their bathroom ceiling. I sat and then lay on the chaise longue.

  The sound of Cara coming in with the groceries woke me. She put the needle back to the beginning of the record and I stayed where I was, watching her swaying to the music while she unpacked the shopping, singing about Mrs Wagner’s Pies. She didn’t ask me whether Peter had found anything under the bath. She’d bought a whole salmon, two pounds of tiny pink potatoes, a bag of sugar and half a dozen eggs. She held up each package to show me. She was happy again as she made mayonnaise, which she said was much nicer than salad cream.

  I thought about getting up, finding an excuse to leave, but I remained there on the chaise longue so as not to tip her out of her happy mood. But I was cross with myself. I didn’t want to have to consider every word before I spoke, as I had when I’d first come to Lyntons, concerned about how it might be received. A few weeks ago I had chased off the little voice of insecurity and now I didn’t want it to climb back up to my shoulder.

  ‘Can I pay something towards the food?’ I asked.

  Still whisking and pouring, Cara looked at me and I saw that she thought I should have offered weeks ago. ‘No need,’ she said, waiting too long to reply. ‘Peter’s paying for it. I thought we’d have another picnic, on the roof.’

  I inched my way out of the attic window, one foot on the edge of the lead gutter that was filled with rotting leaves and twigs. Thirty feet below me I knew the stone woman and Cupid were kissing in the fountain. I passed up the picnic basket to Peter and then the blankets, trying not to glance down. Behind him, Cara was clambering across the roof.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do it in this,’ I said. I closed my eyes to stop my head spinning. I was wearing the dressing gown.

  ‘Come on,’ Peter said. When I opened my eyes, he was leaning out from the roof, his arm extending down. I reached up and put my hand in his. ‘I’ve got you,’ he said.

  The architectural landscape of the roof inverted the building’s spaces, creating walkways between the tiled sections, with a dozen chimneys jutting up from the lead. We went up close to the outside of the glass cupola, now an immense vegetable-garden cloche, and peered through the broken panes to the grand staircase far below. The air was still and the clouds over the hangers had heads of bright cauliflowers and undersides of deep purple. The roof radiated heat through the soles of my shoes. From this height, I could see the far side of the bridge, the tower of the mausoleum and the top of the obelisk.

  We found a spot behind a wide chimney stack and Peter opened a bottle of champagne. I spread out the blankets and tablecloth we had brought up with us. Cara took three blue and gold plates from the basket and three napkins. We laid out the salmon and the tiny potatoes and salad, and a bowl of mayonnaise. Cara had brought two paper parasols and she and I held them over our heads, sitting cross-legged in our fine clothes.

  We ate and drank, and Peter opened another bottle. Cara and I wedged the parasols into gaps in the brickwork and we lay beneath them with our faces in the shade. Peter was reading. Cara began to hum the song that had been on the record player earlier and he joined in.

  ‘Pass me the cigarettes,’ Cara said, and they both laughed. I knew they had got the words wrong but I didn’t tell them. My cigarette case was in my dressing-gown pocket as usual, but I didn’t want to remind Cara that it existed. Peter lit three of his own cigarettes and we were silent for a long time, smoking and drowsing. Everything was still and heavy.

  I was almost asleep when Cara said, ‘I went to the post office this morning to see if we had any letters.’

  After a moment or two, as though making conversation were an effort, Peter said, ‘And did we?’

  Cara rolled on to her side, propping up her head on one hand. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There was one from Father Creagh, forwarded on from Scotland. He wrote to tell me that Dermod had died.’

  Peter looked up from his book. ‘Dermod? Oh, Cara. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, sitting up.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Peter said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us sooner? All afternoon we’ve been lounging around, eating and drinking, and Dermod was dead.’

  ‘He died before this afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Peter said. ‘What did Father Creagh say? How did it happen?’

  I gave Peter a look, almost reached out my hand to quieten him. I didn’t think we should speak about dying and death in front of Cara.

  ‘I don’t mind talking about it, Frances,’ she said. ‘He drowned.’

  We were silent, all of us, I supposed, contemplating the awful coincidence of both Finn and Dermod perishing under the water.

  ‘He was fishing,’ Cara said. ‘When the tide went out they found the boat. It had sunk with him in it. They think he must have hit his head somehow, and got stuck.’ Her voice seemed softer, her Irish accent creeping in.

  ‘Poor man,’ Peter said.

  ‘Will you go home for the funeral?’ I asked.

  ‘Home? To Ireland? Ireland isn’t my home. And anyway, the funeral was today. The letter was at the post office for a week.’

  ‘That bloody postman,’ Peter said. ‘I don’t know why he can’t cycle out here.’

  ‘It’s too far,’ I said.

  ‘Cara manages to cycle to the village and back.’

  ‘It’s five miles along the road, and he’s old. It wouldn’t be fair to expect him to come out this far.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Cara said, sitting up. ‘I don’t care about the postman, all right?’

  Peter and I looked at each other. ‘Have another drink,’ he said, our answer to everything. He poured the last of the second bottle of champagne into her glass and opened a third. She had seemed happy when she was making the picnic, and all the time she had known Dermod was dead. It didn’t seem possible.

  ‘It was Father Creagh who wrote to you?’ Peter said. ‘Not your mother?’

  ‘Still not a word from Isabel.’ She finished her glass and held it out for more. She seemed dista
nt, unconnected, but by then the champagne was making everything seem distant and unconnected. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  ‘Do you miss your mother, Fran?’ Cara lit another cigarette and the smoke rolled from her nostrils. The only sound was the ticking of the roof as it expanded in the late afternoon sun; even the birds were silent.

  ‘I miss the mother I had when I was a child,’ I said. ‘But if you mean the mother I had for the years after that, then no.’ I surprised myself and I wondered if I would be punished later for admitting this aloud, with another dead blackbird, more noises under the bath, or the smell of the bedroom we had shared. ‘It’s good she’s dead.’

  Mother had lain in our bed for a week after she died. I stopped sleeping beside her and sat every night in the armchair in the bay window with a blanket over me. They say that the person – the soul – leaves the body when someone dies and what’s left is an empty vessel. But I didn’t find it that way with Mother. She still inhabited hers; she was still in charge. Her body stiffened but she continued to tell me what to do. Her eyeballs blackened but she watched me. On the Sunday evening, I laid the tea towels under the kitchen window, moved the crockery from the bath lid to the floor and ran the water, but her body was heavier than I had anticipated, literally a dead weight. And so I brought a bowl of water into the bedroom with the flannels laid on a towel and rubbed at the purple patches that had bloomed on her skin, worrying that the order in which I used the coloured flannels was incorrect. I brushed her hair as I had done for the past ten years and cut her toenails – following the curve of the toes, as instructed – and wrapped the parings in a sheet of newspaper before putting them in the fireplace to be burned. I’d been doing it for so long, I couldn’t stop. And then I dropped the flannels into the cooling bathwater and went downstairs to ask Mrs Lee if I could use her telephone. She charged me fourpence, although we both knew that was too much, and she stood in her kitchen doorway with flour on her apron, unashamed to be listening in to the conversation.