Bitter Orange

by Bitter Orange (retail) (epub)

  “Oh, I’m not that worried,” I said at the same time as he said, “Cara will be fine in the house on her own.” I hadn’t been thinking whether Cara was all right. I put down my knife, ready for him to take my hand in his, but he picked up his own knife and fork and continued eating. “She’ll be fast asleep, I’m sure,” he said, getting back to his meal.

  I finished off my wine and topped up both of our glasses. We ate without speaking until I said, “I’m sorry about the blackbird. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “You did the right thing, burying it. And anyway, you weren’t to know.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “One of Cara’s Irish superstitions. If she knocks over a chair she makes the sign of the cross, if the first lamb of spring is black she’ll have bad luck, and if she has itchy palms she’s going to come into some money.” Peter scratched at his hand with the handle of his knife and we laughed. A woman at the next table turned to stare, and I could tell she was thinking what a handsome couple we made and how wonderful it must be to find love later in life.

  “And a blackbird?”

  “I’m not sure I quite understand, myself. She was gabbling when I took her up to bed. A bird in a room is meant to be a premonition of someone’s impending death,” he said. “It’s all muddled in Cara’s head: Catholicism and Protestantism mixed in with Irish superstition. If the bird sings it’s meant to mean one thing and if it’s shrill it’s another.”

  “And what if it doesn’t make any noise at all? Just flaps about and dies?”

  “Then you become a very resourceful woman and go and find a shovel and bury the damn thing.”

  We leaned towards each other and laughed again.

  “And then a piece of board, a hammer, and some nails,” I said. “I hope you didn’t mind me using them.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I saw the bed when I was in the basement,” I said, and although his head was down and he was concentrating on his food, for two breaths his jaw stopped working. “If you need to talk to someone, you know I’m—”

  “Yes, thank you.” He cut me off and caught the waiter’s attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, thinking he was going to ask for the bill and take me home, but he ordered another bottle of Volnay, and when it arrived we didn’t bother to taste it.

  “And you weren’t down there, this morning?”

  “Down there?”

  “In the basement?”

  “What did you say you heard? Footsteps?”

  “Yes, coming towards me down that central corridor.”

  “It’s just the house shifting about,” he said, offering me a cigarette.

  “Shifting?”

  “You know, settling, its outsides changing with the temperature and its insides dealing with us living in it. Anyway, it wasn’t me or Cara and there’s no one else in the house.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because that would be ridiculous. We would have seen them by now, wouldn’t we? Not just shapes at the windows and footsteps in the corridor.”

  I drew on my cigarette.

  “Look,” he said. “Logic says it’s creaks and rumbles, or . . .” He seemed to change his mind about what he was going to say, and looked around for the waitress with the dessert trolley.

  “Or what?” I said.

  “Or else it’s all in your head.”

  I drank some more wine, smarting as though I’d been chastised. It made me determined to be less frightened. He was right, logic was the thing to drive away the demons.

  We changed the subject, talking about our fellow diners, inventing stories for them, finding everything funny. The waitress came pushing the dessert trolley.

  “What would you recommend?” Peter smiled at her.

  “Me?” she said. “I don’t know.” It looked as though she’d never been asked the question before, wasn’t required to speak to the customers.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t sneak a slice of that cheesecake when no one’s looking?”

  A blush rose in her cheeks and I tried to keep in mind how Cara had described Peter as a careless flirt.

  We both had sherry trifle. Peter tipped the last of the second bottle of wine into my glass and paid the bill. The room was dark except for his handsome face, lit by the candle between us.

  I stood and swayed into him, and he caught me by the elbow, jogging the table, and one of the empty glasses fell but didn’t break. A solicitor’s wife nearby tutted, and Peter and I looked at each other and giggled. We stumbled our way out of the Harrow Inn to the car. Most of the drive home was a blur of the town’s high street and dark hedgerows, apart from when the car swerved onto the verge and back into the road. “Oops,” Peter said, as I fell against him and he pushed me upright. Everything was hilarious.

  When we got to the house, I was convinced the car was going to hit the fountain.

  “Mind the Canova!” I shouted, laughing and bumping into the door while he swung the car around.

  “Didn’t you know, it’s a bloody fake!” he spluttered, slamming on the brakes.

  “Counterfeit Canova.”

  “Phoney Canoney.”

  We thought we were so witty.

  We went in through the front door—unlocked—and helped each other up the grand staircase, me tripping on the ends of the robe, shushing each other. I thought about inviting him upstairs for coffee and then remembered I didn’t have any coffee or even a kettle.

  On the top landing outside the door to the spiral staircase we stood together and I tilted my chin up to him, ready.

  “Franny,” he started. “I think . . .” He met my eye, and put his hand on the top of my arm for the length of time it took me to blink once, twice. I was certain he was telling me that he would like to, but he couldn’t, shouldn’t.

  “. . . I think I should see how Cara is,” he finished.

  “Of course,” I said, taking a step back, reaching out for the baize door behind me with my hands. “Of course.” I liked that we were both behaving honourably, in opposition to our desire.

  He went along the hallway towards their rooms. I willed him to look back one time, and my blood rushed as he stopped and turned. I had no doubts that his expression was one of longing and self-denial.

  “You should wear that gown more often,” he said. “It suits you. You mustn’t worry that everyone was staring. Who cares what anyone else thinks?”

  It was as if he had slapped me. I hadn’t noticed anyone staring, not at how I looked.

  “Well,” he said. “Goodnight, Franny.”

  He went farther down the hallway and I watched him. After he had gone inside and closed the door, I turned and stumbled up the spiral staircase, holding my knuckles to the rough wall as I went, oblivious to the pain.

  In the night, I woke to the same sound in the room next to mine: someone shaking out damp linen and clawing at the window frame. I thought about the board I had nailed across the broken window, wondered whether it had come loose, but was also certain that it hadn’t. I lay there remembering Mother, the way that in death her flesh had shrunk away from her body, giving the appearance that her fingernails and hair had grown. I took the pillow from under my head and pressed it over my ears and face, breathing in the smell of unwashed linen. It is not possible to suffocate oneself.

  The next morning, I slept in, rising at midday to drink three glasses of water and take two headache tablets before going back to bed. The noise I had heard in the room next door seemed improbable. Later, when I woke properly and the afternoon outside shimmered, I lay in bed piecing together the evening, remembering with disappointment that Peter had said the fountain was not a Canova. I told myself that I had misinterpreted what he had said about my robe, he liked the clothes I was wearing, that was what mattered. And I remembered how he had looked at me, the touch of his fingers on the top of my arm when we stood together on the landing, and how he would have kissed me if he were free.

  Still,
when I got up I put on the old dressing gown and not the clothes I had worn the previous evening. Down in the blue drawing room, I touched the disfigured peacocks and then jumped at a hunched figure reflected in the mirror: its beaky face and clawed hands reminded me of Mother on her deathbed. But this person uncurled and stood up; it was Peter. He had a tape measure in one hand and a clipboard in the other; a pencil stub was tucked behind his ear. He was actually working.

  “Hello you,” he said, smiling.

  I looked at my hands and saw they were shaking.

  “Are you all right? Sorry about last night, bit too much to drink.” Peter looked down too. “What did you do?” He took hold of my hand and examined my knuckles, grazed from where I had rubbed them against the wall. I pulled my hand from his. I wanted him to know without me having to tell him.

  The door opened and Cara came in wearing a new dress, a green silk that floated over her hips to the floor. The back of it was open and swooped to her waist, her shoulder blades sticking out like the stumps of wings. Ostrich feathers, dyed green, had been stitched around the top edge. “What do you think?” she said as she began to turn in the centre of the room. The mirror reflected back the flecks of green fuzz which came loose and fell around her. “I found another wardrobe full of clothes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. She was beautiful, but now I could see she knew it. Peter and I watched her turning and humming and smiling at herself.

  “I think the birds are still getting in,” I whispered to Peter so Cara wouldn’t hear.

  “In the attic?” His eyes were fixed on her. I couldn’t tell whether it was love there or hate.

  “Could you take a look?”

  “Of course,” he said, winding in his tape measure.

  Cara stopped spinning. “Did you hear the blackbird in the middle of the night?” she asked, lifting the green silk in her hands and letting it fall. The moths had got to it and eaten the bottom to lace. “It was singing in the mulberry tree.”

  “Are you superstitious?” I ask Victor.

  “How are you, Miss Jellico?” He bends towards me.

  “Are you superstitious?” This time I must have said it aloud, because he answers.

  “Black cats and rabbits’ feet?”

  “That sort of thing,” I say, and he leans in farther to listen. “White cows and butterflies, field mice and hares. I saw a hare once in the library at Lyntons.” Victor tenses, hopeful for a net that he can use to save me. A child’s net on a stick that he can thrust into the rushing water where I spin and turn in the eddies. He would scoop me out if he could. But there’s nothing now that will stop me flowing downstream with the current. Soon I’ll reach the falls and be swept over the brink, and that will be the end of me. “They are supposed to be shape-shifters,” I say. “Women in disguise. Cara kept a piece of hare’s fur under her bed. She told me it would make her more desirable to Peter and bring him potency.”

  “And did it?” he says.

  “No.”

  “She was jealous of you, wasn’t she?” he asks after a short gap. He wants to keep the conversation going.

  “Do you believe in the virgin birth?” I ask in return.

  “I do,” he says, almost offended. He is a good actor. “To deny it would mean that Christ was merely human, and yet we know he was not. He is the Son of God. The incarnation is one of the cornerstones of my faith.”

  I see there is a Nursing Person in the room. He is always more zealous when someone could be listening.

  “Cara talked to you about that too?” He whispers this, still trying to winkle out the truth.

  “Did you know,” I say, “that right into the nineteenth century the Irish believed that the female hare didn’t need a male to conceive?”

  Victor raises his eyebrows.

  “Parthenogenesis,” I think I say.

  But Victor is fading and the hare is back in the library. It’s crying, a kind of strangled wail, the sound they make when in distress.

  “Shhh, Mrs. Jelli-co,” the Nurser says.

  I am holding the neck of a champagne bottle; the bottom half has been broken off, jagged. The hare stretches up on its hind legs to start boxing, but it grows taller, its amber eyes sinking back in its head, its fur turning to skin and its forelegs becoming arms, until Cara is standing before me, a wound in the side of her head, wide and bloody. My bottle drips onto the pages of books.

  Every day Cara cycled into town for food. Peter saw her off without comment but if she was gone for a long time, more than a couple of hours, he would lean on one of the gateposts, smoking and watching the avenue for the dust which her bicycle wheels spun out. I don’t know what he would have done if she hadn’t come back. We ate well and we drank almost to excess, and we ransacked the Museum for items we needed or others we liked the look of. We used copper saucepans, bone-china crockery, and crystal glasses, and when they were dirty we went and got more, stacking the unwashed against the walls and under the table.

  A week or so after Peter and I had been to dinner, I clutched an open bottle of champagne, my thumb over the top but the bubbles spilling, as I ran down through the trees to the lake, following Cara and Peter, laughing and shouting. The fun I never got to have in my twenties. The moon was out and shining silver on the water.

  On the jetty we pulled off our clothes—dresses and dressing gowns, trousers and a top hat—hopping and laughing, and I caught glimpses of pale skin, white limbs, of Cara’s small breasts and Peter’s bouncing penis as he ran to the edge and flung himself forwards, and we followed him, screaming at the cold. I didn’t once stop to think about those times Cara had refused to swim, had said that she couldn’t.

  We rose up shouting and splashing and laughing. The water was black and the shapes of our bodies tangled with the shadows made by the weeds and the bulrushes which crowded in from the bank like slender spectators. My kicking feet touched soft mud and recoiled, while above the surface it was hard to tell the heads and the hands and shoulders from the movements of the water. Minutes must have passed before we missed her. How is it possible for three to so easily become two?

  “Cara!” we shouted, Peter and I. “Stop joking.”

  Did Peter dive and find a branch that might have been a pale wrist or grab at a handful of grassy fronds which could have been hair, dragging her from underneath, or was she floating on the surface? I was never certain. Only that next, Cara was sprawled on the bank and us beside her with the smell of pond around us, waterweed stuck to her legs, and her feet and ankles muddy as if we had uprooted her, a white lily laid out in the moonlight. Peter pushed with his hands in the middle of her chest, once, twice, I heard him counting, crouching over her. Her stomach and the triangle of dark hair between her legs lifted each time Peter pressed and I saw, just before Cara coughed herself back into life, the silver streaks across her abdomen like a starburst reaching out from her groin. I’d never had a child, had never carried one, but I knew what the marks were. I had washed Mother’s often enough.

  Mother used to say her stretch marks were my fault, that I had ruined her body, and if it hadn’t been for me she would have been unscarred and tight like her childless sister, and my father wouldn’t have strayed. After Mother became ill again, every Sunday evening I had to move the crockery from the lid of the kitchen bath. I stacked it on the floor under the window, laying out two tea towels to go beneath the plates, cups, and bowls, ensuring they didn’t touch the floor. I removed the coloured flannels which we kept in the bath and turned on the taps, testing the temperature with an elbow and then going into the bedroom to undress Mother. When I had helped her into the water, I washed her with the flannels while she lay back and directed me. I was tender with her, but each time she had a specific order and colour for the particular areas of her body: her armpits, her breasts, her private parts, though I never learned them; they were never the same.

  Peter carried Cara up to the house, her body loose but alive. He had pulled his trousers on and I had tugged my
damp arms into my dressing gown, seemingly even in an emergency the two of us required decency, while Cara remained naked. I ran a bath for her, and he lowered her, dumb and staring, into it, and knelt by her side. I sat on the toilet seat, unsure of what Cara had intended. It came to me that if she hadn’t wanted to be rescued she wouldn’t have tried to drown herself when we were with her, and I speculated whether it would have been possible to stage the episode for dramatic effect. A means of telling Peter and me to turn our gaze away from each other and back to her. Could she have been holding her breath in the lake and pretending to spit out water when Peter had pumped her chest? I didn’t know. But I wanted to comfort Peter just as he was comforting Cara, to tell him that everything would be all right if he would only let me help.

  “What can I do?” I said.

  “We’ll be fine,” Peter replied.

  The three of us sat in silence for a few minutes until I became uneasily aware of Cara’s nakedness and their stillness. Neither of them had looked at me. I picked scallops of mud from under my fingernails. “Should I get a glass of brandy?” I said.

  “You should go to bed,” Peter said. “We’ll manage.”

  I stood up. I didn’t want to leave, to be excluded. “I’m going to get some brandy.” I wanted to be helpful.

  “Please,” he said. “Just go to bed.”

  I couldn’t resist looking when I went up to my rooms, so quick to forget the promise I’d made to myself in London. I had never removed the telescope from under the floor. I lifted the board and looked at Cara in the bath, her face still turned to the wall, and I looked at Peter leaning over the rim, tenderly picking the weed from her hair.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the morning, Peter woke me, knocking on my door, averting his gaze and apologising when I opened it, and saying he had to go out and would I mind keeping an eye on Cara. He didn’t say what I should do if she tried something similar, he didn’t mention the previous night, but of course I said yes. It was a responsibility, but I still wanted to help him.

  I stood at my bathroom window brushing my teeth, bending to watch Cara drag a stepladder across the terrace. I hurried, thinking I should go down to stop her. I went to the sink to spit and rinse, and when I returned to the window the ladder was under the orange tree and she was already on the top step. I leaned out farther to see what she was doing. The sun sent flashes of light through the warped glass of the orangery as she stretched up into the leaves. She teetered and my body jolted and my arms flew out anticipating her fall as though I could have caught her from my window. I went to call to her, but then worried the noise would startle her, and I knew that if I ran downstairs I wouldn’t reach her in time. Her arm was above her head, flailing; I didn’t want to watch but couldn’t drag my eyes away. She must have caught a leaf and pulled down a branch, was probably thinking about an orange vinaigrette, or a bitter orange syrup to go with a sweet sponge pudding, though I knew the fruit probably wouldn’t be edible. The oranges fell and she came down the stepladder to safety.