I might have carried around the guilt of my parents’ separation like a bad meal in my belly, but it was my aunt whom I considered to be the real villain. It was she who had made me choose between the fox-fur stole and the truth. It was from her, as much as from Mother, that I learned that the truth isn’t always the right way. When, after a couple of years of living in the apartment, the Christmas cards and birthday presents stopped coming, it was my aunt I blamed for making my father abandon me. The wicked stepmother I never saw. And after she died, although I was an adult by then, I waited for my father to return to Mother and me. I waited but he didn’t write, or telephone Mrs Lee downstairs, or call at the door. I didn’t see him again until that day in court.
Now his hair and his moustache were white, his neck scrawny, but with just one look, all the love and anger came rushing back. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. When I should have been concentrating on what the wig-men were saying, making certain I got my story straight, I was staring up at the gallery, while he averted his gaze. You’ve come! I wanted to shout. Too late! Too late! I couldn’t wait for that first day to be over so I could be passed his note, or his request for a private visit. I tried to work on the strength I would need to tear it up in front of him or deny his request. A muscle I exercised while the day dragged on. I asked the officer who took me back to my cell in the breaks to double-check, but there was no note, no request.
My father came every day, sitting in the same place with his eyes downcast or closed. Perhaps he too carried some guilt for the way I had turned out. Or maybe like the rest of them, like me in the end, he was a voyeur.
‘Are these your sleeping tablets, Miss Jellico? Benzodiazepine, commonly known as Valium? Prescribed to you by a Dr Hunter at Dollis Hill Surgery in June 1969,’ wig-man asked.
‘To help me sleep after my mother died.’
My father’s eyes snapped open. I, though, wasn’t surprised that the wig-men wanted to ask me about the Valium I’d been prescribed. The prosecution had been obliged to disclose all relevant evidence before the trial started. I had been able to deal in private with my shock and dismay at what Cara had done.
‘And you took them with you to Lyntons?’
When had I last seen that glass bottle with the wad of cotton wool in its neck? As I had packed my toilet bag before I left Dollis Hill for good? I couldn’t remember unpacking the bottle when I’d put out my toothpaste and talcum powder after I arrived at Lyntons.
‘I suppose.’
‘You suppose. Yes or no?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Did you take any benzodiazepine when you were staying at Lyntons?’
‘No.’
‘Where did you keep the tablets when you were living in the attic rooms?’
‘I don’t remember, I don’t remember having them with me.’
‘Can you explain how they were found in Miss Calace’s and Mr Robertson’s kitchen area?’
‘No.’
‘And can you explain how traces of benzodiazepine and orange juice were found in a glass in their kitchen area?’
‘No.’ I thought about the face at the attic window when I had returned from London, and Cara, the storyteller, denying she’d been up there.
‘And also in Peter Robertson’s stomach?’
‘No.’ There was an ache under my breastbone and a sting in the bridge of my nose when I thought of Peter’s body in the bath and, afterwards, cut open by the pathologist’s knife.
My father was late on the seventh – the final day – and there was shuffling in the gallery before a space could be made for him. I had stopped willing him to look at me. I wondered if he was hoping for a reconciliation on the steps of the courthouse when I was found not guilty. I wasn’t planning on being found not guilty.
I had tried to practise my expression in the cell below the courtroom, but there was no mirror. I decided on a smirk of arrogance during the prosecution’s closing speech. But what does a guilty expression look like?
This wig-man was good, reminding the jury that I had admitted I was in love with Peter and had been rejected by him, that he had given me gifts and led me on, that I had been prescribed the drug used to sedate him, and that I owned the knife that had cut him. This perhaps had been my only surprise from the pre-trial meetings with my solicitor. Whatever Cara had seen Peter and me doing across the lake, it hadn’t tipped her over the edge as I had presumed; instead she must have been planning her actions for days. The wig-man came close in a way. He claimed that I had attempted to make my double murder look like a double suicide. If I couldn’t have Peter then no one would. He told the jury I had drugged Peter and slashed his wrists with my sample knife – the only sharp knife in the house. After a fight with Cara where she attempted to get the key to the bathroom, I had pushed her out of the window, and then gone down with the hammer to finish off the job.
I have never been more nervous than when the jury returned from their deliberations.
‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Peter Robertson?’
I liked that Peter was first.
‘Guilty.’
A gasp from my father.
‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Cara Calace?’
‘Guilty.’
A cry of ‘No!’ from the gallery, and I couldn’t help myself, I looked up to see my father with tears on his cheeks.
I smiled at the verdicts, not because my father was there, that was incidental, but because I hoped it would get me a longer sentence. Life for a life. Penance, that’s what I craved. I wondered if my father remembered the rules he had taught me before he’d left, or at least one of them: payment will be due for any wrongdoing. By the time I heard the judgements, I knew I would be strong enough to veto any demands for a retrial and to turn down any requests my father might make to visit me in prison.
I received a solicitor’s letter five years ago saying my father had died and he had left everything to me: his London house, his belongings, quite a large sum in the bank. Possibly he hoped it would be useful for when I was released, I don’t know; he didn’t provide any further instructions or a note. I, in turn, have left most of it to a niche charity that restores historic bridges. And so I lie here and think of fathers. My own and Cara’s, and Finn’s of course. It no longer matters who his biological father was, whether indeed he even had one. Peter was all the father he needed for his short life. Children need a loving familiar face, a constant.
Perhaps I am a child: a creature of habit who likes routine. No alternative consequences for one action versus another, no what ifs. Prison lunches are served at twelve noon. Before they moved me to the end-of-life unit to die, I queued for the food behind Ali Shaw and in front of Joan Robyns. Mashed potato was served with an ice-cream scoop into the top-left indentation of my compartmentalized tray, baked beans in the middle, two pink sausages bottom right. No squeeze of tomato ketchup, no thank you. I’ve always been polite. I would have had mustard to help take the taste away, but they don’t allow it in here, or pepper. Five years ago, a prison-rights organization decided that serving food to prisoners on trays was demeaning and we should have plastic plates. I broke two chairs and Joan’s nose, and I refused to eat for three days. I was transformed when I put myself in prison.
There’s been a lot of money spent on this place, not like some prisons that the transferred women used to talk about: rats and drugs and fights. Out of control. No, I wouldn’t like that. I want to know where I am. They sent me to see a psychiatrist every month, after I started eating again. I told her how once I had stood on a bridge over a lake and thought about the fact that when I was dead I would soon be forgotten. I didn’t seek notoriety; I had no choice – it came along with the court’s decision. She asked about Mother and my father. I told her some things, but not all of it, of course. I never told all of it. I told her how happy I had been when I was a child; I told her about Mother’s illness and the routines: when I fed her,
when I helped her with the bedpan, when I washed her private parts with the flannels. For the first thirty-nine years of my life I knew what would happen when. The funding for the psychiatrist stopped after a year, but in my twelve sessions I never said all of it. I never told it all.
‘What would you have told, Miss Jellico?’ Victor leans in. Today his breath reminds me of picking berries in the kitchen garden with Cara. She plucked a mint leaf, tore it in two and put one half in her mouth, then held the other up for me and smiled. It smelled perfectly of summer. I opened my mouth and she put it inside. The leaf was rough and hairy, tough and dirty-tasting under the sharpness. When she wasn’t looking I spat the chewed green ball into the brambles.
‘You would have made a wonderful doctor,’ I say to Victor, and hope I have said it out loud.
‘Miss Jellico?’
I like my routine. That summer I was out of control, we all were. I couldn’t wait to be back in a place where I knew what would happen next. A rhythm, that’s what I need. Mother always said that I was a girl who liked order, to know what would happen next. That’s why I was happy when they said ‘guilty’. And because of the penance, of course. I deserved to be locked away: there was a payment to be made for what I did.
‘Miss Jellico?’ Victor whispers. ‘What did you do? We were friends once, remember?’
Now I understand that Victor loved me, but it is too late. It is all too late.
‘If you don’t say,’ he continues, ‘it would be a miscarriage of justice, and that would be wrong. You know it would be wrong.’
I squeeze his hand. A hand in mine. Is that all we need?
‘Not long now, Mrs Jelli-co,’ the Nursing Sister says.
At four o’clock I brought in the tea on a wooden tray. China pot warmed, shop-bought garibaldi biscuits arranged on a plate, with two napkins inside silver rings. If food is worth eating, it’s worth eating properly. I put the tray on the bedcover and got the spare pillow from the top of the wardrobe, where it was kept. I put it behind Mother and helped her sit up. We drank our tea, she ate a biscuit. ‘Not hungry, Frances? That’s not like you.’ ‘Not today, Mother.’ I told her what had been happening outside the window on the street. Who had walked past, who hadn’t.
When she finished her tea, with a shaking hand she offered me the plate of biscuits. ‘You’re putting on weight,’ she said. ‘Around the jaw and around the middle. You want to watch that.’ And all the while she held out the biscuits like a trap, bait to hook me with and reel me in. I tried to be quick with her plate and teacup, but despite her fragility she was faster. She pinched me through my cardigan and blouse, on my waist where no one would see the purple fingerprints. Her grip was still strong. Mother read her book and I took the tray to the kitchen to do the washing-up. I ate the four biscuits on the plate and then the rest of the packet while I cried over the sink. She is an old, ill woman, I told myself, and I love her.
I try to hum a tune, that one about Mrs Wagner’s Pies. How does it go?
‘I think she’s singing.’
‘Shhh, Mrs Jelli-co. Everything is fine. If you’re ready you can go now.’
At five o’clock I went back in. I marked where Mother was in her book, closed it and put it on the bedside table. She was dozing. I turned on the bedside light, went to the window and glanced out. There was no one in the street. I drew the curtains. Mother sighed. There was a particular order; we liked our routine. I went around to the other side of the bed and lifted her shoulders to take the spare pillow from behind her head. I didn’t put it back in the top of the wardrobe where it belonged. Not straight away. She struggled and moaned: she was stronger than I had expected.
Afterwards she looked as though she were sleeping. So peaceful. ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I said.
There is water coming under the door of my prison hospital room. It rises around the legs of Victor’s chair and wets the hem of the duvet. In a corner, the white cow bellows. I have never liked cows. The blackbird sits on the curtain rail, its droppings staining the window. It watches the fox leap on to the bed and run in circles over my covered feet. The hare, though, sits silently on my chest. The water comes, pouring in through the window now, until we are all under the waves. I lie in bed and watch the hare, the bird, the fox and the cow swimming around my prison hospital room, where none of them belong.
24
Victor sits on the bottom lip of the stone tomb, a little to the left, leaving space beside him, and watches Christopher King, the gravedigger, at work. He is a young man, surprisingly young, Victor thinks, for a gravedigger. The sun is high and the graveyard is even more overgrown than when he last saw it, twenty years ago. The inside of the church had brought back more memories, as well as feelings of inadequacy and indecision. He’d gone into the vestry when he arrived – the vicar had said it would be unlocked and that Victor could borrow anything he required. He had paused at the Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer, taking in the old smells of beeswax, musty vestments and flowers past their best, and then he had filled a glass with water and taken it outside into the light.
Christopher lays the boards around the edge of the hole, followed by the sheets of butcher’s grass which he knows don’t fool anyone but he thinks make a grave look neat and tidy. He dug the hole yesterday and normally he’d only return to do the back-filling after the coffin’s in and everyone’s left. This time, though, he’s been asked to hang around for the whole bleeding service. Still, he’s being paid for it.
‘Mr King?’ a voice says, and Christopher jumps. An old man is standing behind him, holding out a hand. Christopher wipes his own down his overalls and then shakes. ‘Victor Wylde,’ the man says, whose skin is flaky and red. ‘I used to be the vicar here, used to be a vicar in fact. I hope you don’t mind staying on – I know it’s a bit of a strange request. It’s all been arranged with the Reverend.’ Christopher nods, although he’s not heard of a funeral being done by a non-vicar before.
They stand side by side, looking into the empty grave, until the man says, ‘She asked to be brought down through the old back gate, along the avenue,’ and when Christopher glances at him he sees the man’s eyes are swimming and he looks away, embarrassed.
After another minute Christopher says, remembering, ‘The yews and limes were felled a couple of years after the house was blown up.’
‘Blown up?’ Victor says, although he knows this, had heard about it from someone or read it in the local paper before he left the area. He takes a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blows his nose. He won’t cry in front of the gravedigger. He’d like some water but realizes the glass is on top of the tomb where he left it.
‘Lyntons was a ruin and no one wanted it, after you know what,’ Christopher says.
‘Yes, well,’ Victor says, so that Christopher is stopped before he is able to say more. They stand silently. Victor thinks that digging graves might be a good job: fresh air, physical exercise, not many people you have to talk to.
‘Pall-bearers will be here soon,’ Christopher says. ‘Better get changed.’ He goes off down the path and through the lychgate to where his van is parked.
As Christopher strips off his overalls beside the passenger seat and puts on his wedding suit – the only suit he owns – he remembers when, as a boy, he and the Savidge twins had climbed over the wire fencing and watched Lyntons being blown up.
The twins already knew the house and the parkland. In the summer they showed him how to dive into the lake from the piers which were all that remained of an old stone bridge that had been dismantled. The three of them lit a small fire in a room with bird wallpaper and fed it pages from the books they collected from the room next door.
A couple of weeks later, Christopher was still hanging around with them, hiding behind the old cedar in the field. There were four or five blasts that sounded like shots from an air rifle ricocheting off the hangers, and the house exploded, brick and rubble thrown into the air, and a plume of smoke shooting straight up, twice as high
as the building. They whooped and cheered as the ground shook, and a cloud of dust spread outwards and the bits of stone, wood and plaster came down and the dust rushed towards them. Even the Savidge twins had been scared then, running back to the fence, but the cloud overtook them before they could start climbing.
They crouched together with their hands covering their heads. When the dust settled, their clothes and exposed skin were grey while their teeth and the whites of their eyes gleamed. They walked home laughing, shoving each other and arguing about who had seen what.
The rubble was used for the foundations of a nearby housing estate.
Victor sees Christopher smoking by the lychgate and wearing a suit that is shiny and too tight for him. When the undertaker’s cars pull up he throws down his cigarette and stubs it out. Victor waits on the path, looking up at the church, anywhere but at the coffin. The feeling of everything being too late, pointless and wasted threatens to overwhelm him. He goes to the edge of the grave and waits, telling himself it isn’t Frances inside the box, Frances, the woman he loved, who might have loved him back if things had been different. She is gone.
When the coffin is lowered into the hole and the pall-bearers have left, Victor stands beside the gravedigger again and tries to remember the things he has thought about saying. None of them come to mind.
Christopher bows his head and clasps his hands like he’s seen mourners do, and waits for Victor to speak. While he waits he remembers the time he went back to Lyntons on his own, the day after it had been blown up. He climbed the pile of rubble and poked through it with a stick, searching for something interesting he could take home. He picked up a smooth flat object, licked the surface and rubbed it on his arm to clean away the dust. A piece of china was revealed: the edge of a dinner plate with a blue and gold rim, and a crest made up of three circular things – they may have been oranges. He thought it might be valuable. It had sat on his shelf in his bedroom for years.
Bitter Orange Page 26
