‘That was later. When he came back.’ Cara took the jar of gooseberry jam from her pocket and set it on the jetty. She looked in the other, and we could both see that the pot had turned over, and the cream, clotted with its yellow crust, filled her pocket. ‘I think we’ll get married when his divorce comes through. And we’ll have lots of blond-haired children and live happily ever after.’
I didn’t say that she’d already told me that. Instead I said, ‘I think you’ll make a marvellous mother.’ But I knew I was saying those words because they were required, not because I thought she would.
‘Yes,’ Cara said, and then immediately, ‘No.’ She picked up a piece of sponge, dipped it in the cream and held it up to my mouth, waiting, until I leaned forward and took it. She selected a fig and used a fingernail to make a slit in the skin long enough to insert the tips of her thumbs and rip it open. ‘There was a child, you see, and I let him go.’
I was surprised, shocked even. I had imagined a simple love story, albeit complicated with a first wife. But now here was a child that Cara had let go. I wasn’t even sure what that meant; adoption, I supposed.
‘It took me a time when we got to Scotland, to recover.’ She didn’t look at me but turned a section of the fig inside out and ate it. ‘Peter thinks I still haven’t. He wants me to see more doctors, specialists. But it isn’t me who has the problem.’
I remembered what Victor had said about her needing a doctor rather than a priest. And as I took in all this information, I tried to make sense of who the father must be. Had I missed this piece of the story or was she coming to it? If it wasn’t Paddy, then Peter, surely. But why give up the child when they were together now? I saw the wedding ring flying off into the lake. Perhaps, like the rest of us, even Cara was bound by convention.
I closed my mouth, tried to compose my expression into one of sympathy rather than shock. ‘Oh, Cara,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ And I was. It was a tragic story and because of it they fascinated me all the more.
‘Would you believe it?’ she said in a perfect Irish accent, hiding her anguish with a joke. ‘I was a mammy for a little while.’ She picked up another piece of cake the size of her thumb, dipped it into the jam, then into the cream and fed me again.
She fumbled with her cigarettes, taking one out and lighting it, and held the packet out to me. I took one, and when she lit it I saw that her bottom lashes had collected some tears. She had forgotten I didn’t smoke.
It was hot on the jetty. Cara took off her blouse and skirt, dropping them on the concrete. Underneath she was wearing a bikini, less fabric in both pieces than in Peter’s swimming trunks. She lay back, making a pillow for her head with the clothes, her hair spreading out over it.
‘After Father Creagh told me I was a sinner and I had imagined the painting of Jesus changing into Peter, I went into one of the outhouses in Killaspy’s backyard and I took off all my clothes and lay on the concrete floor, like this.’ She spread out her arms. ‘And I waited for the rats to come.’
‘Oh no!’ I said, shocked again. The taste of my cigarette was ashy, disgusting.
‘Punishment. It was what I deserved.’ She said it as though it didn’t bother her, and closed her eyes.
Later, I told her that I would wash her skirt for her if she liked.
‘Oh, Fran,’ she said. ‘That would be grand.’
As we were packing up, when she was dressed and was squashing her cigarettes into her pocket with the jam, and I was shaking out the tablecloth, she thanked me for listening, and I saw it was that easy, that was all I had to do to make a friend; she wasn’t looking for answers. It was that afternoon when she told me I was beautiful, and for a summer, for a month, I chose to believe her.
9
In the early evening, I sat with my sketchbook and tin of paints on the low wall which ran along the edge of the terrace. I’d found a jam jar for water in one of the outbuildings, and I was trying to capture the cedars in the parkland beyond the ravaged garden, with the hangers rising up in the distance.
‘Nice,’ Peter said, making me jump. He was gazing over my shoulder. ‘But haven’t you missed something?’
We looked at the landscape. The cows stood on their own or in groups of two and three with their heads lowered, eating. We looked at my work, cow-less. I turned the page, covering the painting, although I knew that later I’d find the leaves stuck together and the picture ruined.
‘I don’t like cows,’ I said.
‘Clearly.’
‘Their rectangular bodies, the way their heads sway. There’s something about how they stare. Vacuous, and yet they lumber about in a terrifying way.’
‘Don’t let Cara hear you. She loves them.’
‘I know.’
He sat beside me and jangled a large metal ring with a dozen old-fashioned keys hanging from it. ‘Would you like to see the house?’
The east elevation, the one that would have faced the Lyntons’ guests as they drove up the avenue by carriage or car, was plain, sombre, sitting in its own shadow except in the early morning. It was as if the architect had been saving the best – the light, the landscape and the portico – for those who dared to enter. The central front door was small and stained where the grouting between the pediment stones overhead had eroded and water from a leaking downpipe had dripped through. The stones seemed loose, like wide-spaced teeth, and I worried about the way Peter was shaking the door to get the key to turn. I followed him into the entrance hall and, with the door wide, a black and white tiled floor was visible, an imposing fireplace, panelled walls and, above them, on three sides, a painted gallery.
Peter flicked a light switch up and down, but the room remained dark. ‘I’ve been trying to get the electricity to work on the ground floor for days. A junction box has gone somewhere in the basement, but I’m damned if I can find it.’
I stood in the middle of the hall, amongst the shrapnel of plaster that littered the floor, and turned slowly, gazing upward.
‘Do you see?’ he said, looking up too, his hand gestures expansive, excited. ‘The gallery is trompe l’oeil on only two sides. Someone boarded up the real gallery on the third.’
High up on the walls were painted handrails, pilasters and scrolled plasterwork arches, but, staring harder, I saw that on the wall facing the front door, the balustrade was real, and the gaps in between had been painted on to board to create shadows and depth, to suggest a hallway beyond.
‘Why would they have done that?’ I said. ‘The gallery would have been opposite your rooms, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, but who knows. Maybe the army boarded it up.’
‘They wouldn’t have bothered with disguising it though, to match the trompe l’oeil.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not. I don’t know then. This way.’ He led me through to another dark room. The hollow sound of the grit under my shoes suggested it was of a considerable size, high-ceilinged, the walls distant. I heard bolts being shot back, and as Peter folded open a pair of shutters, twice my height, the evening sun came in through the French windows that overlooked the terrace and the parterre.
‘The blue drawing room,’ he announced with a flourish. It was empty apart from an enormous mirror, foxed and dirty, propped against one wall. I caught a glimpse of myself and then stood with my back to it and looked at the gap where the fireplace should have been. ‘Ripped it out, the bloody vandals,’ Peter said. He opened the next set of shutters and French windows, and the next. The dusk came inside: the smell of the day ending, the song of a blackbird. ‘Even the servants’ bell has gone.’ Beside the exposed bricks a wire stuck out from a hole in the wall. We turned from it and towards the mirror at the same time, the two of us reflected there, speckled and sepia-coloured, unsmiling. I thought we held each other’s gaze for a second too long before I broke away.
‘It’s rather out of keeping with the rest of the neoclassicism.’ Peter waved towards the wallpaper. ‘I wonder if some Lady Lynton had a thing about peacock
s.’
The walls were covered with chinoiserie, ragged now and bleached where the sun had rested, darker behind the door to the entrance hall and around the fireplace. Pagodas, blossoms and birds hand-painted on silk. The peacocks were surrounded by garlands and dimpled oranges.
‘But who could have done this to them?’ I said, horrified.
‘What do you mean, done what?’
‘Someone’s cut out their eyes.’
‘Good Lord,’ Peter said, looking around. ‘I didn’t notice before. They’ve done it to all of them.’ Every one of the peacocks had been blinded, each circular eye removed with a sharp blade. We went from wall to wall, touching the disfigured birds and exclaiming at who could have been wicked enough to go to the trouble of fetching a ladder in order to cut out the eyes from the birds just below the ceiling. ‘Would you prefer it if we shortened the tour?’ Peter said. ‘We could see the rest another day.’
It was disturbing but I was happy to go on. He led me through an adjoining door into another empty room, and two more, opening the shutters as we went. ‘Music room,’ he said, striding across the bare floorboards. A small door hidden near the back wall opened on to a low corridor that ran under the half-landing of the grand staircase, dark and cobwebby, coming out through a similar door into the dining hall, with the remains of another vaulted ceiling. In a corner he opened a cupboard and revealed the shaft of the dumb waiter.
‘I read that the dining table could seat forty,’ I said. ‘Kings and princesses, film stars, apparently.’
Peter went to the fireplace and gave the marble surround a tug. ‘It would have made my job easier if they’d looked after the place better.’
‘Can you imagine the amount of work needed to keep the food coming, the beds made, the fires lit?’ I said.
He pressed his ear to the wall. ‘I think there might be a deathwatch beetle infestation. Have you heard the blighters clicking in the walls in the night? Sometimes I can’t get to sleep for the noise they make.’
‘I found a census for Lyntons before I came here.’ I went to the window overlooking the drive and rubbed at a patch of glass. ‘Twenty-four maids, butlers and cooks to keep the house going for a family of five. Do you think they were all crammed into the attic rooms? Martha and Edith rising first to clean the grates. Jane in the kitchen, warming the milk on the range for the babies’ bottles, progressing to housemaid in a few years, hoping that Stephen Hipps, Second Butler, would be able to save enough money to ask her to marry him.’
I looked at Peter, but he shrugged, didn’t seem to want to join in. He opened another door and I followed him through to the hallway and then into a study, the desk gone but with shelves still lining one wall and a metal filing cabinet in a corner with the drawers removed and stacked one on the other.
‘When you first came upstairs, to the attic,’ I said, ‘you mentioned an old retainer, a nanny or a butler who had lived up there.’
‘Did I?’ Peter said. He was picking up pieces of yellowing paper from a drawer, looking them over, and dropping them so that they floated to the floor while he took another.
‘The vicar mentioned them too. Do you know who it was?’
He stopped with one hand in the drawer. ‘No idea. It was just a guess because someone had bothered to put in a bathroom. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Just curious about who was in the rooms before me. It doesn’t matter.’
I could see he was trying to work out if I’d found something interesting. I was never going to tell him about the hole in the floor.
He gave up on the filing-cabinet drawers and we went on, sticking our heads into built-in cupboards made for housekeepers and housemaids, their shelves empty apart from dust and spiders; a smoking room, although I couldn’t tell how Peter knew; and a single WC for the whole ground floor. We stopped in the billiards room, where he showed me the graffiti – bombers and bombs, swastikas and busty women carved into the window frames and the plaster. He tried to hurry me past the worst: Kill the cunts; Churchill is a stinkweed; Fuck the huns up their bums. The poor rhyme made me smile and I didn’t tell him that there had been times when I was living with Mother when I’d gone to the public lavatories in King’s Cross in order to have the shock, the spark of life that jolted through me when I read what was written on the walls there. When we left the billiards room we had come almost full circle – to the library.
Here, he opened the shutters and the French windows that led to the portico and the terrace, and I thought about how we had sat just outside in the shade or the sunshine and I’d had no idea that the library was behind these doors.
Outside it was almost dark and the corners of the room were gloomy. Two of the walls were lined to the ceiling with books and more lay about the floor, their spines broken and pages torn out. When a breeze came in through the open doors the pages on the floor lifted and fell with a dry rustle. A little higher than a person might have been able to reach with their arms raised was a narrow ironwork balcony that wrapped around the walls, accessed by a spiral staircase.
‘Welcome to the library,’ Peter said. ‘The architecture section is up there.’ He nodded at the balcony. ‘But it isn’t safe.’ He pointed to a section where the shelves had buckled and the books had swollen and fallen. ‘I think the rain must have got in before they repaired the roof. I’ve been up there but a lot of the screws fixing the metalwork to the walls have rusted. I’ll have to try and shore it up.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
I would have liked to preserve that room as it was on that date, like Satis House, with the dust and the spiders, the mildew, the water damage halted, but nothing improved, the dry rot and deathwatch beetle kept in abeyance. And Peter and I would be paused too in that room before either of us learned too much about the other, before anything happened. Later I craved neatness and order, but not that evening.
‘That’s what Cara thinks too,’ Peter said.
‘What?’
‘I see a room which needs repairing, or ripping out and starting again.’ His hands demonstrated the actions. ‘You and Cara see antiquity and beauty. The more something’s falling down, the more you bloody like it. Both of you are always looking backwards, when you should be looking forwards to the future.’
‘But everything we have, everything we are, is created by the past,’ I said, surprised at his angry tone.
‘You’re both too full of sentimental rubbish. Ghosts and ghouls!’ He lifted his arms above his head and spread his fingers, his eyebrows raised. A joke apparition.
He put his hands on his face and rubbed it as though he were washing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That was uncalled for. I have some things on my mind.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I had some bad news this morning.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Not unless you happen to have a few thousand in the bank.’ His laugh, when it came, was desperate.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I thought of the wife Cara had told me about and the alimony that was eating up his finances. I wondered if he regretted leaving her.
After a moment, to break the silence, I said, ‘Do you really think Cara and I see ghosts?’
‘I think you’d like to.’
‘Has Cara seen ghosts, in the house?’
‘Are you kidding? She sees ghostly apparitions at every turn. People in mirrors who aren’t there, children staring out of windows, Jesus’s face in the clouds.’ He laughed. ‘She’ll see whatever helps her get through.’
We were close together, standing next to the spiral staircase in the dark. I struggled to read the expression on his face.
‘Get her through what?’ I said, believing I already knew the answer, but hoping he would open up to me, where he couldn’t or wouldn’t to Cara. Perhaps he would tell me, still really a stranger, how difficult it had been for him to give up their child. I was ready to li
sten and to help. I almost put out my hand.
‘She’s not everything she seems. You must have worked that out by now.’
I hadn’t worked anything out. I didn’t have anyone in my room at night to discuss the events of the day with, as other people did – as Mother used to do, letting out her resentments about my father while I lay in the bed next to her, trying to fall asleep, and as I knew Peter and Cara must have done about me.
I pulled a book from the shelves, opened it and stared at the words, but didn’t read. ‘Really?’ I wanted him to tell me everything without me having to ask.
‘She grew up in a house a little like this,’ he said. He sat on the spiral staircase and I heard metal grate against metal, one of the poles that supported the balcony shuddering. ‘Not with a library and a billiards room but somewhere sad and broken. Half of the house was completely burned away. She didn’t live above the shop in a little market town in Dorset like me and my parents. She was born to greater things.’
I turned a page of the book. ‘The shop?’ I said. I wanted to know more about him, not Cara.
‘My father owned an antiques shop,’ he said. ‘Sideboards, dining tables, silverware, that sort of thing. He loved meeting customers, selling them something they didn’t know they wanted. I’ve always preferred meeting the owners, working on a little persuasion, a little negotiation. For me, the excitement is in finding some ratty old thing in an attic that turns out to be worth a fortune.’
I remembered the trips out to the country with my father before he left us. The great houses we visited, the landscaped gardens, the antiques shops with a promise of a few interesting books. We would catch an early train from Paddington and alight at the station of some market town. If it was books he was after, I would wait while he went through the boxes the dealer had kept for him in a back room. Sometimes he would buy one book, sometimes a whole box. I didn’t remember the names of the towns, but I wondered if my father and I might have rung the bell above the door to Robertson’s Antiques, or whatever it may have been called. We might have stepped into a shop where everything was polished and warm. My father may have chatted with the owner about provenance, and after a deal was struck, Mr Robertson might have called upstairs for a pot of tea, and his son, a year or two younger than me, blond-haired and concentrating hard so that the cups didn’t rattle on their saucers, may have brought it down to us.
Bitter Orange Page 10
