Bitter Orange Read online

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “It must only be a couple of hours away.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Talking of jewellery,” he started.

  “How about tomorrow?” I said. “Or the day after?” I imagined an idyllic morning with Peter, poking around an old church, a light lunch, and then two hours back in the car sitting next to him.

  “Cara’s lost her wedding ring. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it?”

  “Her wedding ring?” I said, remembering it skimming the lake.

  “She says she took it off when she was doing the washing-up in the bathroom, but I’ve searched everywhere. I even undid the U-bend, but it’s not there.”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. I haven’t seen it. Was it valuable?”

  “Sentimental value,” he said. “I suppose she’ll want me to buy her another.”

  The following afternoon Cara and Peter invited me for a walk, and the three of us struck out across the estate, past the largest of the cedars where the cows grazed. I was pleased that this time they were gone, in another field or being milked.

  Cara took Peter’s hand and we talked about what we would have for dinner, if the warm weather would continue, the inconsequential things that friends talk of. When Peter let go of Cara’s hand she linked her arm in mine, releasing me as we came to some barbed wire, which Peter held up for us. We went single file along a track through the middle of a meadow, which sloped uphill in the direction of the hangers, and when we got to the gate at the far end the three of us stopped, me puffing a little, still with Mother’s brassiere holding me tight. Without speaking we turned to look back the way we had come. To our right, the top of the mausoleum tower showed above the trees of a small wood, while in front of us the land dipped towards the lake and the grotto, golden and green, clumps of mature trees, grass, and nettles grown tall around fallen limbs. In the distance, the white pillars of Lyntons glowed as if something were alive inside the stone, and behind it the dark wooded sweep of the hangers rose up and arched around the landscape to our backs.

  While we stood catching our breath, four deer came out of the trees. They walked through the meadow just a few feet away, and when they were in front of us they stopped and turned their heads. They tilted their snouts and we were close enough to see their nostrils open and shut as they sniffed the air, but I knew it was Cara they were smelling, Cara they were observing with their dark eyes, Cara they turned their ears towards. None of us moved, and after a moment the deer walked on across the meadow, melting into the grass on the far side.

  “I’d like to stay at Lyntons forever,” Cara said.

  I took a packet of cigarettes from my shorts pocket and knocked one out. It was ripped and the tobacco loose. I tried another but that was the same.

  Peter laughed and took out his own packet. “Last one, sorry,” he said, lighting it. “Even without a proper kitchen, or chairs, or glasses to drink our wine from?” he asked Cara.

  “Yes, even without those things,” she said. “We don’t need them, not when we have all this. This perfect day.”

  We were silent for a time, staring out over the landscape.

  “Do you think Mr. Liebermann would notice if we didn’t leave?” I asked.

  “We could hide under the beds if he came looking.” Peter passed his cigarette to me and I thought about his lips having been on it, before I put it between mine.

  “We could drape sheets over our heads and scare him away,” Cara said.

  “By September he’ll have forgotten he bought a house in Hampshire,” Peter said.

  I passed the cigarette to Cara.

  “Shall we go back that way, through the wood?” Cara nodded in the direction the deer had gone. The cigarette did one more round and we went down, across the meadow.

  It was cooler under the trees, the ground dry and full of ferns and rabbit holes. We were a little way in when we smelled it, something musky, ripe. We wrinkled our noses at each other and carried on walking.

  The fox was caught in a gin trap, its left foreleg mangled. It cowered when it saw us, shrinking and tucking in its tail. There was blood around its mouth, and I didn’t want to think about what it had been doing to try to free itself. The smell was pungent, and I supposed the fox must have released its scent when it was first caught.

  “I thought those traps were illegal now,” I said.

  Cara edged closer and the fox jumped and twisted around the metal teeth and its own leg. It began to bark, a high-pitched and panicked yapping.

  “They are,” Peter said, grimly.

  Cara crouched. “Shhh,” she said to the animal.

  “Keep back,” Peter said. “They have a terrible bite.”

  “Shhh,” she repeated, and the fox lay back on the ground, its nose down and its ears cocked, watching her. The shoulder of the trapped leg was twisted at an obscene angle.

  “It’s too badly injured,” Peter said. “Come away.”

  “Help me get the trap open.” Cara reached her hand to the fox, which was quiet now, its breathing slowing.

  “Even if we could get it open, it wouldn’t survive. I’ve seen it before, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “It’s all right,” Cara crooned, and the amber eyes watched her. She held her hand flat to the muzzle as I’d seen people do with the horses that pulled the tourist carriages in Hyde Park.

  “We can’t just leave it,” I said, and Peter looked at me, his lips pressed tight together. I knew what he was thinking. I handed him the sample knife I still carried in a sheath attached to the belt around my Army & Navy shorts.

  Peter moved in front of her and slit the fox’s throat. It didn’t make a sound.

  But Cara cried out, “No!” She shoved at Peter, who was still crouching, and he toppled into the ferns. I watched in horror as she pressed her hands to the fox’s neck while the blood pumped once, twice between her fingers and then slowed. Her hands were red when she stood up, and for an instant I thought that somehow Peter had cut her too.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Peter sat up, his knees bent, looking up at her. The expression on his face was one of pity.

  “I could have saved him,” she whispered. They stared at each other as if daring the other to look away first.

  “No,” he said. “It was too late.”

  She turned and strode off through the little wood, and then began to run and had disappeared before Peter was even standing.

  “Should we go after her?” I said.

  “No. Let’s leave her for a while. It’ll be better.” He tore off a handful of fern leaves and wiped my knife before handing it back. “Thank you. It’s not every woman who carries a knife around with her, or not the ones I know.”

  I looked at the fox, its eyes already glassy, its muscles soft. I wasn’t surprised that death had changed it so fast. “Should we bury it?” I said.

  “Something will come along and eat it soon.”

  “At least the trap has been sprung. Poor old fox.” I turned away so he wouldn’t see me wipe under my eyes. I wanted to continue to be that knife-carrying woman, someone more robust and capable than Cara.

  We walked in silence, and when we came out from the trees we were nearer the kitchen garden than I had imagined.

  “Have you been inside the model dairy yet?” I asked.

  “I thought it was boarded up,” Peter said.

  “I prised off one of the panels. I’ll show you if you’d like. I think it must have been built as another folly, it’s far too small to be practical but the detail inside is extraordinary. The central room has a vaulted ceiling, it’s a smaller version of the dining hall, and the ribs have clusters of carved oak leaves at the ends. It’s very beautiful.”

  “It sounds it,” he said, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening.

  We were beside one of the garden’s high brick walls, on a track made by the farmer to move his cows in and out of the park. We reached a corner of the wall
where the track divided, the entrance to the kitchen garden and the dairy to our left, the gate into the estate straight ahead. We paused at the junction, and I went to turn left, while Peter shaded his eyes and looked ahead.

  “There she is,” he said.

  In the distance Cara was in with the cattle, which must have been returned by the farmer while we were in the wood attending to the fox, and with an unfamiliar flare of resentment, I realised Peter had been thinking about Cara all the time we had been walking.

  “Do you mind?” he said.

  “No, absolutely.” I kept my voice cheerful. “Go, you should go to her.”

  And without answering or saying goodbye he climbed the gate and jogged away, calling her name. I rested my arms on the top bar and saw Cara spin round when he reached her; even from my distance I could see the angry set of her features. She raised her hand and I wondered if it would leave a bloody print on his cheek, but he caught her by the wrist and then drew her into him. She softened and he lowered his head to kiss her and she kissed him back. Then, almost as if he regretted starting something, it was Peter who pulled away first.

  I cut back the way we had come and then went left and into the mausoleum. On the chests of the women were two bouquets of wilting daisies and Scotch thistles picked from the field. I didn’t know whether it was Peter or Cara who had left them there.

  ELEVEN

  In those evenings at Lyntons I learned about wine. I don’t mean the grapes and the blends, although a little of these stuck too, but how much of it I needed to get a warm buzz in my cheeks, what the right amount was to loosen my joints and allow me to talk, and how many glasses it took for me to believe I was charming and witty. I came to know what my tipping point was, and when to cover my glass with my hand. Cara and Peter would drink until one of them fell asleep at the table. They would be drunk but never raucous or angry. The three of us talked and drank and laughed. I have never laughed as much as during the early days of that August. For the first time, I was no longer looking at a circle of backs; now I was inside the group.

  I had Cara buy me more headache tablets when she cycled into town, and I worked out that if I slept long enough into the afternoon I could outsleep my hangover.

  On the second Sunday in August I dragged myself out of bed and crept off to church; it was a habit I found difficult to break even when I hadn’t had enough sleep. I discovered that in the early part of the morning a mist hovered in the hollows of the estate and the grass was wet with dew. There was a smell in the air of bonfires, the land already preparing for autumn. So much had changed for me since I’d last walked along the avenues of limes and yews that it seemed at least a month must have passed, while in reality, it had been only two weeks. The morning welcomed me and I felt lighter, more confident, walking with my head up, ready for anything. I sat in the same pew as before but didn’t look around to count the congregation or to see whether Cara had come. I think the sermon was supposed to mark the Transfiguration of our Lord, but Victor grew quieter as he spoke and I found myself leaning forward to catch his words about shining light, halos, and how we all have the potential to be changed for the better even when life is at its worst. He didn’t sound convinced or convincing. Afterwards he invited us to confess silently, and I wondered if he’d suggested this because he thought I needed it. I knelt to pray like everyone around me and I confessed my sins to myself, but I was already considering whether anyone was listening.

  After the service, I headed for the back gate.

  “Miss Jellico!” someone called, and I knew before I turned it would be Victor. He was sitting on the bottom lip of the same tomb that we had sat on before, this time with two glasses of water.

  “One fewer person in the pews than last Sunday,” he said.

  “Cara didn’t come,” I said. “But she doesn’t count. Your congregation wouldn’t have let her in, would they? Or else they’d be after her blood.”

  “Not Christ’s this time?”

  We smiled at each other.

  “I have met her properly now, and her . . . her husband, Peter. They’re very nice. You mustn’t get the wrong impression.”

  He made a sound in his throat as if he disagreed but couldn’t bring himself to say so.

  “They’ve been looking after me, cooking and showing me around the house.”

  “Is it as bad as it seems from the outside?”

  “Worse. Fireplaces ripped out, the plaster crumbling; there are holes in the walls and mouldy books in the library. It’s all rather sad.”

  “It sounds it,” he said.

  “And do you know? Somebody cut out every one of the peacocks’ eyes from the wallpaper in the blue drawing room.”

  “Enucleation.” He drank some water.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Surgical removal of the eyeball.”

  I shuddered. “But who would do such a thing?”

  “The soldiers who were stationed there. Bored out of their minds and looking for a distraction.”

  “But surely you weren’t there, during the war?”

  “No, no. I don’t mean I was at Lyntons. No. I was a medical student for most of the war.”

  I sipped my water, waited. A bee moved from one flower to another. I remembered the black-and-white newsreels of British doctors smiling and smoking with bandaged soldiers in hospital tents. I didn’t press him.

  “Can I tell you something, Miss Jellico?” Victor said after we’d been silent for a while. I didn’t know what was coming, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  “About Cara?”

  He turned his head and looked at me, surprised.

  “About me.”

  I tipped my glass but it was empty.

  “I’m not certain about all of this.” His outspread arm took in the graveyard, the church, the lane beyond. “My ministry. I gave up medicine before I’d finished my final year. I just couldn’t . . . I thought I had a calling. I thought joining the clergy might help, I hoped I might be able to help. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “But haven’t you already been a minister for what, twenty years?”

  “Fourteen years, five months, and three days. It takes a long time to become ordained. Nearly as long as it does to train to be a doctor.”

  “Fourteen years is still quite a time to decide it’s not for you.”

  “You think that if someone’s been one thing for so long, they can’t become something else? You weren’t listening to my sermon.” He gave a mirthless laugh.

  “No, I was. Of course we can all change, but I just don’t think you should be hasty.”

  “Really?”

  He made me uncomfortable, looking at me as if he could see right inside. I covered my disquiet with blandness: “But I’m sure you must do a lot for your parishioners. A town needs its priest.”

  “Does it? I keep hoping the congregation numbers will fall so low that the decision will be taken out of my hands.”

  “Wouldn’t you just get moved somewhere else?”

  “I can’t help them,” he said. “I couldn’t help with medicine and I can’t help with faith. And the trouble is they want too much help, too much forgiveness. Sometimes it’s like they’re each taking a little bit of me, inch by inch, cell by cell, until poof!” He lifted a hand, brought his fingers together, and in a gesture of throwing something away spread them wide. “And what’s left will float off. Sometimes, Miss Jellico, I hate them and their neediness. Isn’t that terrible? When the telephone rings or I hear the knocker on the rectory’s front door, my heart sinks and all I want to do is hide. Like this—hiding from my congregation in my own churchyard. They want forgiveness, but who am I to say that all will be well?”

  The shouting woke me. I lay in my bed and listened, Cara’s voice and then Peter’s. I couldn’t make out the words. I tried to get back to sleep but objects were being thrown or knocked off a table, a door crashed, and footsteps thundered through the house. Cara was on the terrace yelling in Italian up at Peter.
I got out of bed, wrapped a blanket around me, and sat on the floor with my back to the wall beside the window. If I could hear them, I may as well listen. I wasn’t certain though that if they went into the bathroom I would have the willpower not to pull up the floorboard and watch them through the judas hole.

  “Please can we not go through all this again,” Peter called from inside the house.

  “You’ve never believed me,” Cara shouted up to him.

  “Come back to bed.” Peter sounded tired.

  “You think it was Paddy, don’t you? You’ve always thought it was Paddy.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “But you understand it’s not possible,” Peter said down to her. I could tell he was trying to hold his patience. “It’s just something your mind made up without you realising it.”

  This seemed to enrage her even more and she roared: “What about Mary? How do you explain that?” I wondered who Mary was.

  “Bloody hell, it’s a story,” Peter shouted, finally driven to anger. “It’s made up. None of it is true.”

  Cara must have stormed off then; there was only Peter calling her name, and after that the closing of the window and his footsteps going through the house. I went back to bed and heard nothing more.

  The orangery, positioned at right angles to the house, was its smaller glass cousin. Its portico’s six columns were thinner and less ornate, and the outside steps down to what had once been a formal garden—a parterre with box hedges gone wild and lost gravel paths—were narrower and shorter. In the library of the British Museum I’d read that the orangery was the first glasshouse to collect rainwater from the roof and channel it down the insides of the internal pillars to water the plants.

  Peter hadn’t included it in his tour, and the door was kept locked, so all I’d managed to do was to peer through the green-stained windows at the broken floor tiles and the rusting iron benches; and I had seen the orange tree. It dominated the orangery; bushy and unkempt, it reached out fifteen feet until its branches pressed against the glass and cracked the panes. Its trunk was six inches in diameter and I guessed it was thirty years old, maybe fifty.