Bitter Orange Read online

  I sat on the terrace wall and sketched the building’s eight arched windows, the Doric columns, and the double glass doors. I should have measured it and noted the number of broken panes, which sections were rusted beyond repair and would need replacing, producing an architectural drawing instead of something that tried to capture the essence of the building, the light and shade, the history. But I had stopped doing any proper work on Mr. Liebermann’s report. I no longer cared or thought much about it. Sometimes I sketched a building for pleasure, but Cara and Peter’s indolence had rubbed off on me, and most of the time I didn’t even bother to do that.

  “Peter’s asleep,” Cara said, coming up behind me. “Did you know he sleeps with the house keys under his pillow? I think he’s worried I’ll escape.”

  I didn’t point out that we were in the garden, all the external doors were unlocked, and there was nothing to stop her cycling off down the avenue. It was three in the afternoon.

  “But look!” She brought the ring of keys from behind her back and jangled them. “I was so quiet. I pulled them out bit by bit and managed not to wake him.” She sat beside me, her legs dangling over the wall like mine, and looked across my arm at my drawing.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  I held the pad away from me and looked from it to the orangery and back again. “Not bad, I suppose.”

  She offered me a cigarette. Mine were always crushed; a running joke between us all.

  “Peter’s thinking about getting a camera so he doesn’t have to do any drawings. But they’re expensive.” She rubbed her fingers and thumb together.

  “And then there’s getting the film developed,” I said. We leaned back, our faces tilted up to the sun, and puffed on our cigarettes.

  “He’s always worrying about money,” she said. “How much this costs, how much that costs.” With each this and that she waved her cigarette in the air. “He’s always complaining about the amount of work he does and how we don’t have any money. He says I spend it all on food. But he likes to eat the dinners.”

  She must have forgotten that she’d already told me this.

  “And here we are squatting at Lyntons rather than staying at the Harrow in town, or renting a nice little cottage.” She inhaled long and deep, gearing up for another argument. Such a short time before, when we’d stood at the top of the meadow, she had said how she never wanted to leave. “But I know what he spends his money on. His wife!” She said the last word with a sneer and kicked her bare heels against the bricks of the retaining wall.

  “I’m sure he spends as much on you as he’s able.”

  She didn’t answer, perhaps hadn’t thought much of my reply, but after a while she said, “I’m worried, Fran, that Peter will go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to her. To Mallory. One day he’ll wake up and realise she can give him things I can’t.”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen.”

  “Do you think he loves me? Would he do anything for me?”

  I waited for a beat, for a moment, and forced myself not to look around and up to their bedroom window. “Of course. And, of course he loves you,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think he does. One day we’ll get married and I’ll have another baby. Two babies! Three!” She laughed. Ahead of us the parkland shimmered. The cows were under the cedar again.

  “It must have been hard giving up a child for adoption, for you and for Peter,” I said, angling for more information. “Was it a girl or a boy?”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it,” I continued, gripping the wall, waiting for an outburst.

  “No, I’ll tell you,” she said. “If you really want to know.” And she threw the rest of her cigarette into the garden below. “I can’t remember what I told you last time. Where did I get to?”

  “You’d just had a row with Peter in his little green car and run away, and he had found you and taken you back to Killaspy.” I was still too coy to mention the undressing.

  “You have been listening hard,” she said, smiling, and then continued with her story.

  “I think it was a little while after Peter left that second time that I spent two or three days in bed feeling sick. Christmas came and went. Isabel never liked to be around people who were ill; she let Dermod look after me like she always had. I suppose when she was a child they would have had a nursery maid or a nanny, before the governess. I don’t blame her, it was how she was raised. Dermod brought me a glass of 7 Up—that’s what we drank when we were ill. He would heat it first to get rid of the gas and bring it upstairs with a boiled egg or a slice of toast. But I couldn’t eat anything. He asked me whether my visitor had arrived and I thought he meant that Peter was downstairs, and I almost jumped out of bed even though I was about to be sick. I must have looked a state. But then I realised he meant my period, and I also realised that it hadn’t arrived, and I was sure it should have. Isabel worked it out too when I looked peaky at breakfast and all I wanted to do was sleep. We didn’t have a conversation. She just pursed her lips and suggested we bring the wedding forward a couple of months, and what could I do? I went along with that plan too.

  “I couldn’t talk to her about it, so I went to see Father Creagh, but he didn’t have any answers. He said it was blasphemous, what I was suggesting, and gave me the usual Hail Marys. When I was feeling better I went back to work for Miss Landers, writing her letters and reading her the magazine, and then I would go home, straight up to my room to cry. I thought about ending it then but I couldn’t have done it to the baby. I thought about running away of course, but in the end I decided all I could do was marry Paddy.

  “One afternoon in January, Peter was waiting for me in his car outside Miss Landers’s cottage. He told me he’d asked Mallory for a divorce. I said he was too late and I was marrying Paddy. He wanted me to get in the passenger seat for us to talk or at least for him to drive me home, but I wouldn’t, and so he drove behind me all the way back to Killaspy as though his car was the hearse and I was the undertaker.

  “He came in when we reached the house, I couldn’t stop him. Isabel had given up on him by then, but she was polite—she asked if he’d like tea and called for Dermod. The three of us stood in the drawing room making conversation. I’d never been so unhappy in my whole life. Isabel mentioned that the wedding had been brought forward. She was grumbling about the expense and why it should be up to the bride’s family to pay for everything. Peter didn’t get it at first, why the wedding was happening sooner, and Isabel was too polite to say, but her eyes kept flicking to my stomach until I just came out and said that I was pregnant, and Isabel sat in her chair as if she hadn’t already realised, and Peter was furious. Do you love him? he said, meaning Paddy. I didn’t want to have the conversation—I didn’t think it was going to get me anywhere. I’d spent weeks going through my options, and it seemed to me there was only one. It wasn’t as simple as saying whether I loved Paddy or not. But Peter took my lack of an answer as a no and he held out his hand and said, Well, come away with me then.”

  Abruptly, Cara picked up the ring of keys she’d placed by her side and stood. “Would you like to see the orangery now?” she asked.

  “Wait,” I said. “I don’t understand. Was Paddy the father?” I stumbled to my feet but Cara was already halfway along the terrace.

  “Oh, Frances!” The annoyance in her voice was clear. “Of course not!” she called over her shoulder, bringing the first act to an end, letting the curtains close and making me wait for the second half.

  Inside the orangery the air was thick and scented—vegetation, soil, and overripe fruit. Leaves pressed around me, a sticky sap catching on my skin and clothes as I ducked under branches to a clearer spot in the middle of the room where Cara was waiting. She wouldn’t look at me and seemed irritated, like a tour guide whose tourists ask pointless questions and won’t keep up.

  Small grey mounds lay o
n the floor in various states of decay, and I saw they were oranges, and I realised that for years the tree must have been fruiting and dropping them on the stone paving, nature hoping some of them would seed. I flapped my hand in front of my face to keep away the tiny flies and wasps which buzzed around the rotting fruit. There were no orange tree saplings in the orangery; the main tree had been taking all the water and light. But other plants were growing: bindweed snaked across the floor, and the whole of the back wall, which must have been built of brick, once whitewashed and covered with trellis, was pasted with the great hairy trunks of ivy, and almost completely obscured. Many of the iron seats around the sides of the room had rusted away, and there were gaps in the stone pavers where an underfloor heating system must have once supplied warmth.

  “Be careful,” I said to Cara. “Your feet!” Under my shoes splinters of glass crunched where several broken windows in the roof had fallen inwards. “Do you think you should get your shoes?”

  “I’m fine,” Cara said, stepping forward as if nothing could hurt her.

  “How did the tree survive without anyone to tend it?” I said, hoping to engage her in ordinary conversation and take her mind off the row that I was sure was brewing.

  She jerked her head up to where the guttering had collapsed and hung inside the building. “It found a way,” she said. “Everything will find a way to survive if it can.”

  “I suppose the rain must come in and water it,” I said. “And look, there are still some ripe oranges on the tree.” I pointed and she followed the line of my finger to three globes, their skins dimpled and almost misshapen. “It’s a bitter orange tree. Citrus aurantium.”

  “I tried one a little while ago,” she said. “They don’t taste very nice.”

  “Old and a bit dried up, I expect. They would have been ready for picking months ago. If you could get any juice out, you’d have to add lots of sugar. I think they’re mostly used for marmalade.”

  “I found something else in here yesterday. Not oranges. Do you want to see?” She still sounded moody.

  “Oh, yes please.” Whereas I sounded as though I were trying to distract a child who threatened a tantrum.

  She took me to a corner of the back wall, farthest from the orange tree. Here the ivy hung in loops and strands from the ceiling. Cara pushed it out of the way.

  “Look,” she said.

  “What?” I saw a section of the back wall where the trunks criss-crossed each other, full of cobwebs and old leaves that had been caught before they fell.

  “Look harder,” she said.

  Behind the ivy, I saw the frame of a wooden door. I plucked at the green leaves and ripped off the softer twigs until more of it was exposed: the metal plate of a keyhole, a bottom hinge. Together we tore at the plant until above the door a hand-painted sign was revealed: The Museum.

  TWELVE

  After Cara and I uncovered the sign and the keyhole, she tried all the keys from the set she had taken from under Peter’s pillow but none of them fitted. I was relieved, although I would have found it hard to articulate exactly why. If something had remained hidden behind that door for enough years for ivy to grow that thick across it, I was uneasy about opening it now. But Cara was excited and she ran off to wake Peter. When she was gone I put my eye to the keyhole, the action as unnerving as putting my eye to the judas hole in my bathroom floor. I braced myself for what I might see, but whatever was on the other side didn’t show itself. There was only darkness.

  Peter and Cara returned with a saw and another set of keys that was kept in the basement kitchen. None of these unlocked the door either, and so he sawed through the stems of the ivy, some as thick as a wrist, and then they ripped them off in a frenzy, laughing while long strings snapped away from the wood and surrounding brick.

  “I’m not sure about this,” I said, but neither of them stopped.

  Peter spent some time poking bits of wire into the keyhole while Cara watched. Of course, I could have gone and done something else, but if they were going to open it I needed to see what was behind it myself and be reassured that my fear, which I couldn’t name, was irrational.

  After ten minutes on his knees Peter stood and kicked the door, and I thought perhaps that was it. But he went off without speaking and returned with a sledgehammer.

  He stood sideways to the Museum’s door and steadied himself, his feet wide, his legs tensed.

  I looked over at Cara. A leaf had fallen onto her shoulder where the neck of her dress gaped open. As I went to brush it off, the leaf opened its serrated wings and the butterfly showed its red and black markings. I watched its jointed legs cling to Cara’s skin, making minute movements for balance, and I became aware of its insect nature: its waving antennae, its hairy thorax, the pulsating abdomen, and its compound eye recording a thousand instances of me. It uncurled its proboscis from its mouthparts and tasted Cara’s skin.

  Peter swung the sledgehammer, and the butterfly, caught in an updraught from the movement, lifted straight off from Cara’s shoulder, legs flailing and abdomen quivering like a pupa.

  “I don’t know about this,” I said as Peter took aim.

  “Frances?” Cara said, her hand on my arm.

  “Keep back,” Peter said, although we hadn’t moved.

  “We could write to Mr. Liebermann about the key,” I said.

  “Frances?” Cara repeated.

  “Or send him a telegram. Cara could go into town on her bicycle. Couldn’t you, Cara?”

  “Will you listen for a second?” Her hand gripped my arm through my blouse, pinching my skin. I tried to shake her off. It was Peter’s attention I wanted.

  “Stop!” I called out.

  “Wait,” Cara said. “You haven’t understood, about my story, the things I was telling you outside on the wall.” Her voice was low. Peter grunted while he swung the sledgehammer behind him and let its own weight carry itself forward. It hit the door just below the lock. Flakes of paint and dead leaves fell around us. In another corner, a tinkle of breaking glass.

  “Please!” I said. “I don’t think we should.” I moved towards him, but I didn’t step between the hammer and the door. I wasn’t brave enough for that.

  “Fran,” Cara said. And I turned, took note of her urgency. “You haven’t been listening properly.” She could see I didn’t know what she meant. “About the baby,” she said. She was whispering although there was no need, Peter wasn’t paying us any attention.

  “What?” I said, trying to take in her words.

  “You asked me if Paddy was the father.”

  It took me a moment to get back to the story she had been telling, and when I did, I glanced at Peter, remembering what she had said about him undressing her in the car after she’d run away in the rain.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t sleep with Peter either. The baby didn’t have a father.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, one eye on the Museum door. “Didn’t have a father?”

  “There wasn’t a father,” she said. “I was a virgin.”

  I laughed, embarrassed, wondering if this was another joke I wasn’t getting.

  “You have to believe me.” She was insistent, making me look at her, focus on her words. “We’re friends, aren’t we? And that’s what friends do, don’t they? Listen and believe?”

  I was going to say that what she was talking about made no sense and she must be mistaken, but Peter swung at the door again with the sledgehammer, and this time it gave way with a crunch of metal and breaking wood.

  “What did you do?” Victor asks.

  I am tired. I want him to go away. I have had enough of them all.

  “We opened the Museum.” I hope it will shut him up.

  “But afterwards, what happened then?”

  He is persistent, I will give him that. And I know he wants what he thinks is right. I should try to be kinder.

  “I read a research paper once about guilt and weight,” I say, and stop. He raises his eyebrows, waiti
ng for me to continue. I relent and fly down from my difficult-old-bird perch. “That guilt is a heavy weight to carry?”

  “A burden?” he says.

  “Exactly.”

  Good man.

  The participants—American and Canadian students—were asked whether they had the sensation of being physically heavier after thinking about their unethical acts. It’s no surprise to me that they did. I am heavier than when I first met Victor, even though if I were put on the scales I would be lighter; these days I have the bones of a sparrow, the beaky face too; all I am missing are the feathers. But I am a different woman from that almost-forty-year-old at Lyntons; she might have been heavyset but she was faint-hearted, easily led. I know now that we do all have the ability to transform ourselves.

  But I can see Victor hasn’t heard me or I haven’t spoken the words aloud because he has picked up his book, and now my eyes fall shut. Best let hidden things remain hidden, I should have said. Sleeping dogs and all that. If I were then the woman I am now, I would have shouted and stood between the sledgehammer and the door that day, when Peter opened the Museum.

  When Peter opened the Museum, Cara let go of my arm.

  “Wait,” I said. “What?” I reached out to hold her back and ask her what she meant, but she shook me off and went forward, and I, so as not to be left behind, followed. At first only the greenish light coming through the orangery door illuminated the room, showing grey and shadowed mountainous shapes, higher than our heads. We stopped and stared. A breath came against my face: a warm gust of air with nothing to blow it, like the strange breezes that surge down the escalators and through the tunnels of the London Underground even when no train is coming. It had a smell of the old days: lavender oil, carbolic soap, furniture polish.

  The odour it left behind was stale, dusty, with a tang of chemical, of things preserved in formaldehyde. Cara was the first to tug off a sheet, dust rising in the dim light, to reveal not mountains of earth and rock or anything created by nature, but furniture: dining tables, side tables, desks, and chairs, stacked one on the other. Whoever had put it there had been in a hurry. Headboards and paintings, sofas and lamps, statues and a chiffonier all pressed together—everything, I realised, the Lynton family had loved and valued and decided was worth hiding when the house was requisitioned. The room and its contents must have lain forgotten and undiscovered for almost thirty years.