Bitter Orange

by Claire Fuller

  ‘Oh, I’m managing,’ I said, straightening my papers.

  ‘When Peter works, at least he can perch at the table. Don’t you get backache, sitting on the bed like that?’

  She bent her head to window height and looked out. She walked around the small room and took in my open suitcases with my clothes folded inside, my hairbrush on top, a towel hanging over the peg on the back of the door, my plastic shower cap over it. I was being examined, my belongings assessed, and I was concerned she would find them lacking.

  ‘Is your bathroom next door?’ She went out into the corridor and I almost ran to follow her, convinced she must have come upstairs with suspicions about the hole in her bathroom ceiling. ‘You don’t even have a mirror,’ she said, taking a glance around the room. ‘There might be one in another bathroom. Peter could look for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But really, I am managing.’ I was desperate to draw her back into the bedroom. I went and sat on the bed, hoping she would follow. She came and sat beside me and picked up my book, Garden Architecture. She rubbed her fingers over the gold lettering: A Pictorial Guide for Gardens Old and New. If she wasn’t here to expose the judas hole, I wondered why she had come upstairs. To tell me she and Peter had made an embarrassing mistake? That I wasn’t the right sort and we could no longer be friends?

  ‘Do you miss your parents now they’re gone?’ I blurted out, wanting to delay her announcement.

  She looked at me, momentarily surprised at the question. ‘Not really. My father died when I was born.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘He was running up the stairs when my mother was having me. He was holding a bowl of hot water or a pile of towels or something, and he tripped and cracked his head open. Died in childbirth.’ She made a noise, half laugh, half sigh, and I could tell she had said this story many times until now it was a joke even while she recognized its tragedy. ‘I used to try and work out where it happened, examining each step for a trace of his blood. Of course, there was nothing there.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, slipping into an Irish accent. ‘Where do I start with Mammy?’ Another half-hearted laugh, and back to her English accent. ‘Isabel Catherine Calace. Née Gentleman. Dutch ancestors, I think. She grew up at Killaspy – the house I was born in. Met my father, Augustus James Calace, at a hunt ball. Fell in love, blah, blah, blah. Still alive and well and living there as far as I know.’

  ‘But I thought you said you’d lost them both?’ My mind scrabbled back to our conversation before yesterday’s dinner.

  ‘Did I?’ she said. ‘I meant that we’re estranged. I haven’t seen Isabel, or heard from her, in five years. Isabel, that’s how I think of her now. Anyway, I’m positive someone would write and tell me if she died – Father Creagh or Dermod.’

  ‘You were telling me about how you met Peter, when we were on the bridge.’

  ‘Do you want to hear it? It’s a long story, and aren’t you on your way to bed?’ She gave a teasing tug on the sleeve of my nightdress.

  ‘Please,’ I said. I had been listening to Mother’s stories for years. Her wonderful life before my father left, the fabulous parties she’d attended before they met. I was happy to listen, and I knew when someone wanted, needed, to tell me their history. With Cara it took only the tiniest bit of encouragement.

  ‘Well, first I have to tell you about Killaspy.’

  ‘The house you were born in?’

  ‘Yes.’ She put her hands up, felt for the ends of the turban and unwound it, her hair springing free and settling into its wedge shape. She scratched at her scalp. ‘It’s just outside a small town in County Kilkenny. South-east Ireland. It’s not as big as Lyntons, not as majestic, but handsome in a run-down way. Three storeys, symmetrical, solid, a few outbuildings, a duck pond, drawing room, parlour, dining room which we never used, six bedrooms if you count the attic. Except that it would have once had double that, and stables. But in 1921, when Isabel was five, a group of men came with cans of petrol and set fire to the back of the house, and the stables caught alight. She tells this story better than me; she could remember it, of course, or at least she could remember the story. No one died – no people, anyway.

  ‘Isabel was sent to the end of the drive in her nightdress, clutching her old dressing gown that she used as a comforter. Some people came from the town to help put the fire out, but not before the back half of the house and the stables were destroyed. The remaining walls were shored up and the mess was cleared away, but it was all so expensive that my grandparents had to sell off most of the land, and they couldn’t afford to send Isabel to boarding school in England so she was taught by governesses until, as I said, she met Augustus. And the house was left like that, and now, or at least five years ago when I was there, it was still the same.’

  I shuffled back on the bed until I was against the wall, the pillow again over my stomach. I wanted to hear more. Cara lay on her side across the end of the bed, her head propped up on one hand, and continued.

  ‘Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would take the house keys from the peg in the kitchen and go up to the attic. At the end of the corridor there was a door which was always kept locked and beyond it was just empty space, a drop of three storeys down to the ground. I liked to stand there, right on the edge. It was wonderfully frightening. Lots of the walls of the burnt part of the house were still upright, but all the floors had gone, and across from me I could see the fireplaces with plants growing out of their grates. The roof had gone too, and I would just stand there and let the rain fall on me.

  ‘So, that’s where I grew up. You need to know, because Killaspy’s the reason I met Peter. I knew something was up when Dermod and I arrived back from Dublin. The rooms smelled of polish, there were flowers in a vase on the hall table and the dogs’ beds had been dragged into the scullery, though that didn’t stop them sleeping on the sofas in the drawing room. The fire had been lit – and that was only usually done when it was cold enough to be able to scratch off the ice on the insides of the windows. I knew it hadn’t been lit for my homecoming.

  ‘Isabel was in her bedroom, putting on her make-up, spitting into her block of mascara and brushing it on her eyelashes. She’d trapped a bee under a glass tumbler on her dressing table and it was buzzing. I don’t know how it was there, in November – did you know bees form a cluster in their hives in winter? – but maybe it had been woken when the fire was lit. Isabel asked whether I’d had a good journey, as if I’d been visiting relatives instead of having been away for a month without her knowing where I’d gone. I asked her what was going on, and she said we were having a visitor, a Mr Robertson. And that was Peter!’

  Cara smiled at me, and I smiled back, both of us excited to have reached the point where Peter would enter the story.

  ‘No one ever visited us,’ she continued. ‘It wasn’t that sort of house, or we weren’t that sort of family. People didn’t know what to make of us, living in Killaspy with the rain coming in, and the back half of the house burned. The front had a beautiful yellow algae blooming across it from the water that overflowed the gutters. I rather liked it. Anyway, I asked her if Mr Robertson was coming to do the repairs. I was sitting on the end of her bed and the bee was buzzing and she looked at me in the mirror and she said, “No, he’s coming to buy it.” I knew she wanted me to be sad – it was the only home either of us had ever known – but I was happy, because I thought that if it was sold there would be enough money for me to get away from Ireland and go to Italy. And I knew she knew that, so we just stared at each other and then she put her hand over the bottom of the upturned glass and the bee went quiet; it just kept walking round and round its little prison. “What does the bee have to say?” I asked her, because she would sometimes do that, question animals about things. And she didn’t move, like she was listening to it, and then she said, “One mustn’t believe what bees say,” and scooped it up inside the glass and let it
out of the window.

  ‘Before Peter arrived, I went to see Paddy. He was our neighbour’s son, and the same age as me. I suppose we had a sort of understanding. I liked him, I’d always liked him. When we left school he took over his mother’s herd of Friesians. I loved those cows, and maybe I loved Paddy too. Isabel wanted me to marry him, although farmers were having a difficult time in Ireland then, but the Brownes had a nice farmhouse and cattle, and marrying Paddy would keep me near her. Anyway, I put on my father’s wellington boots and went to see him. He was bringing in the cows, giving the last ones a little tickle with a stick and saying, “Go on, girl, go on.” ’

  Cara jerked up her chin as she spoke, and I could see her there, the farmyard ankle-deep in slurry, the sun going down, and Paddy, gazing at her with his green eyes.

  ‘I hadn’t seen Paddy for a month, hadn’t told him where I was going, but he’d heard I was back. He said, “Did you have a grand time in Rome, hob-nobbing with Pope Paul the Sixth?” Paddy liked a joke and he knew I’d only got as far as Dublin before Dermod fetched me home. I asked him if he’d missed me, but he turned on the milking machine so he didn’t have to answer. It was ever so loud – it wasn’t possible to hear each other without shouting. We had a nice routine when I helped him in the dairy. He would go along the row of cows and hang the belts over their backs and attach the milkers, and I would go after him with a bucket of warm water and rags to clean the udders, and then he would attach the teats. We were a good team. I miss those girls, they were used to me. I remember thinking that if Mr Robertson bought Killaspy straight away, then I would be gone within the month, and I pressed my cheek against a cow’s flank when Paddy wasn’t looking, so I could breathe in its smell of hair and straw. I never thought they smelled bad like some people say.

  ‘I kissed Paddy while the milking machine was pulsing away. I’d kissed him before, at the dances we went to. He used to taste of the port wine he would slip into the fruit cup, which was all we were supposed to drink. But this time he tasted of milk, and I let him put his hands inside my coat and up my jumper and under my bra. I quite liked the scratch of his calluses on my skin. But that was all he did, that was as far as I let him go.’

  Perhaps Cara thought I looked shocked at her frankness, because she added, ‘It’s important for you to know. That’s all I let him do. I said I had to leave, that we had a visitor, and he said he’d heard that my mother was selling Killaspy, and I felt I was already leaving him and the dairy and Ireland. But of course, things never work out like you expect them to, do they?

  ‘As soon as I got home, Isabel called for me to come and meet Mr Robertson, and even though I wanted her to sell the house and I knew I was supposed to be the good daughter, I went in with my wellington boots on and kissed her on the cheek and said, “Hello, Mammy.” She hated being called Mammy, but I was cross with her for not admitting that she’d missed me, and cross with her for sending Dermod to bring me home. I was only twenty-one. She was sitting in one of the wing-back chairs beside the fire, and Mr Robertson, Peter, was sitting opposite, on the sofa. Between them was a little table we owned, with an inlaid Chinese design. One of the swallows was missing, and on every other day the hole where it had come out was filled with dust and crumbs, but I could see that Dermod had even cleaned that. The table was one of a set of three; the others had been sold off years ago. Dermod had baked a seed cake, which was usually delicious, but this time he had covered it in yellow icing and it was the most lurid thing in the room. And I could see he’d been told to put out the best china for our visitor.

  ‘I’d expected Peter to be old – fifty or sixty at least, if he was thinking of buying Killaspy. I had no idea how much it was worth, probably very little, but everything seemed to be a lot of money then. And I thought he was handsome. He is handsome, isn’t he? Isabel introduced us and he half stood up to shake my hand, but then he realized he was holding a plate in one hand and having to fend off one of the dogs with the other. Suki had her nose in his crotch and wouldn’t go away; she always was a devil. I didn’t feel like rescuing him, so I dragged the piano stool over and took a piece of cake. I asked him what he thought of the house and he said, “Charming, charming,” in that way he does, as if he really is fifty or sixty, and I said, “It’s rather bruciare though, isn’t it?” I ate the cake but left the icing. I curled it up so it looked like a poisonous caterpillar crawling across my plate. Isabel rolled her eyes and explained that I was teaching myself Italian, but Peter laughed and said, “Yes, it is rather burnt,” and then he said, “Mio padre è il direttore di un’azienda agricola.” And that was when I fell in love with him, because I thought he could speak Italian, and already I was imagining us flying off to Italy and walking down the plane’s steps into sunshine, and thinking about the oranges we’d pick straight from the trees, and the little blond-haired children we would have.

  ‘But then he admitted that his father wasn’t really the director of an agricultural company and he only knew that one sentence in Italian. We must get him to say it to us some time. Then Isabel went through the whole thing about my father having wanted to take us to Italy when I was born and show us all the things he loved, and how he was going to teach me Italian – although Isabel said he couldn’t speak it very well either – and how he’d died before any of that could happen. “And now I’m all alone,” she said in a little voice and she hid her left hand, which had her wedding ring on it, under her leg, and fluttered her eyelashes at him. I was wondering what she would say if I told him that she spat into her mascara to get her eyelashes looking so thick and dark, and while I was thinking that, I realized her plans to get Peter to buy Killaspy had changed into something else.

  ‘She was so blatant, but Peter is hopeless at noticing the effect he has on people, on women. He’s such a careless flirt. He thought he was just being polite by asking Isabel questions. He actually didn’t notice those fluttering eyelashes, but I didn’t know that then. I think she would have kept him there the whole afternoon if she could, but eventually he put his plate down and said he had to be off. I thought he was running away. Suki was whining and Isabel was trying to make Peter stay by calling for Dermod so he could make another pot of tea. While Isabel was shouting, Peter held his hand out, and when our palms touched it was as if he had transferred something to me. I don’t know what, his blood, or an electrical charge, or an inked message. I was sure that if I looked at my own hand when he released it, I’d find something there. He was very friendly to Isabel, saying thank you for the tour of the house and that he’d give his decision some thought and let her know.

  ‘It was raining when he went outside – he had a little green sports car then – and Isabel and I stood in the porch, and I was terribly sad because I knew he would never buy Killaspy now, or take me to Italy. Isabel had messed it all up. And then, to make it even more embarrassing, she draped her coat over her head and ran out to his car, tapped on the window and asked whether he’d like Dermod to make him something for the journey, some sandwiches or a flask of tea. Of course, he just shook his head and she had to run back to the porch. But then that blessed little green sports car wouldn’t start. He tried again and again but nothing happened.

  ‘I went out with an umbrella while he peered under the bonnet and rapped his knuckles on bits of the engine and wriggled a few of the tubes that were in there. I remember he whispered to me, “I don’t know anything about cars.”

  ‘Isabel didn’t like us talking together and she shouted, “Is it broken, do you think?” so that she could join in the conversation without having to come outside and get wet. I told him that Mr Byrne who owned the garage would be having his tea now, but if I telephoned I was sure he’d come over afterwards, and Peter slammed the bonnet closed and we went inside. Dermod had refilled the teapot even though we’d all had enough tea, and then Isabel looked at her watch and said, “Mr Byrne who owns the garage will be having his tea now, and I know that he doesn’t like coming out afterwards.” I caught Peter’s
eye and had to look away or I would have started laughing, she was so obvious. He didn’t laugh, and I realized then that he had no idea what she was up to. And then she said that Dermod was plucking a chicken if Peter would like to stay to dinner, and that I could make up a bed in one of the spare rooms if he would care to stay the night and then Mr Byrne could come out in the morning. It didn’t occur to me until later when I was in my own bed, but I wondered if Isabel had done something to Peter’s car so that it wouldn’t start, because for as long as I could remember we only ate chicken at Easter and Christmas. There you are, that’s how we met.’

  ‘But what happened then?’ I said. ‘What about Killaspy? Did Peter buy it?’ I was tired, but like a child with a bedtime story I didn’t want it to stop.

  Cara looked again around my room. ‘You don’t have a fridge.’ She sat up. ‘Peter and I have been talking,’ she began. ‘And we think you should eat with us all the time. It’s silly for you to be up here in your room without a fridge and only two rings to cook on when it’s no effort for me to shop and cook for one more.’

  ‘That would be far too much work,’ I said, knowing I was going to let her persuade me.

  ‘We insist,’ she said, standing up. ‘Tomorrow, if it’s hot like today, shall we have breakfast on the terrace?’ She wasn’t expecting an answer.

  She bent to hug me, her strings of beads jangling between us, her hair pressed against my cheek. ‘I know we’re going to be the best of friends.’ After she’d gone, her citrus smell lingered in the air and on my skin.

  In the very early morning I was woken by someone flushing the toilet in my bathroom next door. There was the thumping noise of the handle being pumped several times before the cistern released its gush of water around the bowl, and as it refilled, the hollow clanking and rasping, like an old up-and-over garage door being opened. I waited for Cara or Peter to call out that the toilet downstairs was broken, although there must have been others nearer their rooms, and then I remembered Peter had told me that there were only two functioning bathrooms in the house – mine and theirs. I waited for a footstep or the sound of the bathroom door opening, but when the flushing noises stopped there was nothing. A glitch in the plumbing, I told myself, but still I got up to see.